Art Pact 37 - Gunther and the Bird (part 3)

(continued from Art Pact 36...)

"Be quiet!" hissed the Myna. "Be quiet! Be quiet!"

"Shush! Shut up!"

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

Not content with mimicry, the bird began to flap against the bars of the cage. Not as well-made as it looked, the cage bars had a little rattle in them, and the impact of the Myna's wings against them sounded to Gunther like some incredibly poorly-tuned bicycle travelling over cobblestones. There was no way, he thought, that the irate shopkeeper could fail to find him now. He weighed his options - carefully, according to him, but I can say with some certainty that up until the last moment he was probably simply panicking. Gunther was never a well-balanced thinker, the whole plan to steal the bird-cage to impress a girl that he had no chance with was testament to that. He tended to approach problems with an off-the-cuff manner which stemmed from a central egotistical confidence in his own intellectual superiority. This is nothing unique to Gunther, of course - I was a teenager myself, and despite the overwhelming pressure at the time (and, sadly, now) for girls to accept that what a man told them was more likely to be right than anything they could reason for themselves, I managed to maintain a healthy belief in my own infallibility in all subjects. My own conviction was, like so many others, sadly punctured within a week of my arrival at university, but as the astute reader might perhaps have realised, it was made of stern enough stuff not to deflate completely.

Whatever the reason for Gunther's decision - whether it was thought up rationally or just the first thing that jumped into his head in a state of terror - he could not leave the cage. Scooping it up by the hanging handle on top, so as to avoid the pecking he was sure he would receive now that the previously sleeping tenant was alert to his existence, he ran up the garden. The house, fortunately, was a semi: a tight passageway, lined on either side by pebble-dashed walls, led from the back garden into the front one. Gunther made a break for it, hoping that once he had a couple of houses between him and the shop-keeper he might be able to find a new hiding-spot in which to silence the bird somehow.

It was not to be. The Myna, agitated and thrown around in its cage, kept up a constant rattle of loud chirps, interspersed at various intervals by hissed admonitions to "Be quiet!" or "Shut up!" As Gunther emerged into the front garden he saw to his right the shop-keeper appearing from a similar passageway three doors up. He jumped back into the passageway between the houses, pressing his back against the wall so hard that when he got home he discovered that his school jumper had been torn in dozens of places by the sharp points of tiny pebbles.

"I know you're there!" The shop-keeper called out. "You're just making it worse for yourself, you little bugger!"

"Be quiet!" hissed the bird, and Gunther obeyed.

It was at this point that the idea occurred to him. In between the two houses the timbre of the bird's voice changed - the echo caused by the opposing walls - making the bird sound strangely human. Gunther knew that there was only one way to silence the animal - that was, to kill it - but he also knew that he did not the stomach to murder it simply for the crime of being loud-mouthed. Perhaps it reminded him too much of himself. But, he realised, perhaps it was the opposite of silence that he needed to make his escape.

Holding the cage up so that the Myna, on the top perch, was at the level of his face, he stared it straight in its right eye. The bird stared back. For a few seconds neither of them moved. When he thought that he had the bird's full attention (and indeed, he claimed, it did seem as though the bird were considering him somehow), he spoke to it.

"I'm over here, idiot!"

"I'm over here, idiot!" repeated the bird. It sounded just like him. A few gardens away he heard a gate slam shut, and the sound of running feet coming closer. He undid the clasp on the cage door, opened it up, and then banged on the opposite bars. The bird, too long confined, did not need any more encouragement. With a flutter of drab brown and surprising white feathers it shot out of its prison and onto the ground. "I'm over here, idiot!" it repeated.

-

I suppose it is impossible to know whether Gunther's plan worked as he conceived it. It may be that the shop-keeper wasn't fooled at all, and simply decided that it would be better if he tried to catch the Myna bird before it flew too far, leaving catching the thief for later. The result was the same, though: Gunther escaped, and two days later I discovered the ruins of the cage in the playground bin nearest to the chemistry hut. The filigree trim was twisted and broken, the fine gold-painted bars crushed by the heavy boots of Philip Wright's older brother. Gunther himself claimed that the black eye he sported for the next week was the result of a fight with a rival school in which he had taken down two of their sixth-formers, and I (in an uncharacteristically virtuous but thoughtless moment) told Sally Williams that she could have just turned down the present and not told her psychopath boyfriend instead of acting like a complete bitch - a telling-off I regretted for the next three months, the time it took everyone to get bored of insinuating that Gunther and I were boyfriend and girlfriend.

One other thing. Several of my parent's friends owned dogs, which they walked in the park on the south-side of the high-street. At a tedious dinner party some years later I heard one of them (a boring accountant colleague of my father's who would go on to make a clumsy and unwelcome pass at me on my twenty-first birthday) complain that he had been walking his dog late one night when someone had called out to him: "I'm over here, idiot!"

"That happened to you too?" asked my mother, and when the table as a whole was canvassed, it seemed as though the only person who hadn't been called at was me (I rarely went in the park). The words were always the same, and the speaker had never been spotted.

"Bloody kids," muttered the accountant, sipping his glass of red.

-

Fin