11. A Dead Parrot

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN THINGS (11)

I was beginning to feel emotionally drained. Maybe, I thought, we forget things because that’s the best thing to happen to some of the things that could clutter our minds with unresolved emotions. I must have known what the chair had just revealed to me, the fact that the fumble in the cloakroom was probably no more than that, a fumble, a moment of heightened excitement, and in reality nothing more than that. But somehow, along the line, my memory had smoothed the whole affair out. Katie had been pregnant but not with my child. I had always known that, hadn’t I?

“I’m not sure that I want to be reminded of much more,” I said to the Professor after a long pause in which I succeeded in increasing my own confusion. “Maybe our memories are designed the way they are to protect us from recollections may prove too painful if they keep impinging on our lives all the time.”

“Was it my mentioning of Amanda?” he asked, blithely turning away from me.

“No. Not at all. She’s just a shadow from so long ago...” I told him, wondering if he might be right anyway. A momentary flicker of memory had her sitting behind me, calling me brave, a little girl with pretty eyes and hair she could sit on.

“Your schooldays,” he sighed. “How important do you think they are?”

“What? Our schooldays?” I asked, then frowned. “I guess it’s when we’re at school that we slowly discover who we are,” I said slowly.

“You mean, we find out what we like to learn? The things we like to think about? The friends we like to make?”

“Sort of,” I acknowledged, “but truth to tell I can’t remember much about any of them, and no, before you suggest it I’m not taking another turn in that chair of yours just to be reminded of what nature says I should have forgotten!”

“That’s okay,” he grinned, “because neither am I.”

“You’re not?” That surprised me because, well, it was his invention and I fully expected him to value it more highly than it seemed he did.

“Well, as you say, our memories work the way they do to protect us, and take away that protection and we might become … more vulnerable.” he replied, then added, “and there are a few things that are best forgotten.”

“That’s how I was beginning to see it,” I grunted.

“Yet you did rediscover something about your past,” he pointed out, “the way that live-in lover of yours duped you into thinking you’d fathered her child. That must be useful to you.”

“You mean, how I’ve spent the last half century wondering if the child might have been born if Katie hadn’t gone for that ride but had stayed back and discussed the future with me like maybe she should have, and the timing of the birth giving her secret away? After all, the car roaring past her, the horse throwing her, all no more than a moment’s coincidence might never have happened. But no: she left for her ride and I was firmly of the opinion that our fumble in the cloakroom at the wedding reception had put her with child! My child, one that for good or bad it transpired would never be born.”

“I had a moment of angst too,” he confessed, “but not to do with girls, believe it or not.”

“I grinned. “I believe it,” I said, “if you’re anything like me you’ve forgotten more than you’ve remembered and when you get reminded of a delicate bit of it you wish it could have stayed buried with all the other detritus in your mind!”

“Mine was a murder I committed,” he said, hollowly.

That gave me pause to think. “Murder?” I asked, “not the real McCoy, surely?”

He nodded. “On the face of it I remembered absolutely nothing, but set the chair the job of collecting together a veritable jigsaw puzzle of fragmented memories and putting them back together again and I seem to have quite forgotten that I’m a foul murderer with blood on my hands!”

“Who did you murder?” I asked, “and why?”

“Not who, but what,” he said, rather sadly. “You see, when I was knee high to the mythical grasshopper my mum, bless her, bought me a pet. A cockatiel, actually. A lovely grey bird with its bright markings. Now, it would be quite wrong for me to suggest that I instantly fell in love with it because I didn’t, seeing as I’d really wanted a puppy, and a cockatiel had to do.”

“Not quite the same thing,” I agreed.

“Anyway, that bird was quite a clever little tyke. My folks had one of those old fashioned gramophones with a handle that you wind the motor with. Remember, I was little and it was a long time ago and they still sold things like that. At least, I think they did. Anyway, I got quite used to letting the bird out of its cage and watching it fly around the room, landing on the picture rail that ran around the walls of the room, about a foot from the ceiling. And I got to playing records on the gramophone, old seventy-eights with scratchy surfaces and songs that meant very little to me.”

“I guess I’d have done the same,” I nodded, “anything mechanical like that would have amused me.”

“Exactly,” he grinned, “and I was a little boy and curious too! So I put a record on the turn table after winding the beast up, and sat back to listen to a bloke warbling about a nightingale singing in Berkeley Square. My cockatiel was no nightingale and it squawked rather than sang, but that didn’t matter. I was playing, entertaining myself and my pet bird, as happy as a child can be, and there was nothing wrong with that.”

“A perfect game, by the sound of it,” I agreed.

“It was. Until the wretched bird decided to land on the record,” he sighed, “and it must have noticed it was rotating at one heck of a rate! The darned creature wasn’t blind, surely? Or daft? Maybe that was it: my cockatiel was daft! Anyway, I leapt to stop the turntable and grabbed hold of the heavy pick-up that had a cruelly sharp steel needle in it, but I fumbled and instead of rescuing my pet bird I managed to kill it! There, I’ve told you my darkest secret. The bird, far from being a bright and imaginative little friend that entertained me by flying back and forth across the room was suddenly stationary. Immobile. Dead. It had been pierced by the needle, which must have perforated something vital to life.”

“But you did try to save it,” I told him, “it’s not as if you deliberately slaughtered the creature!”

“Oh, I know, and for me to call it murder at this stage of my story is me just being melodramatic. But a moment’s thought on my part and that bird would have been perfectly safe.”

“What did your folks say?” I asked. “I’ll bet there was trouble there!”

He smiled at me. “Not at all,” he admitted, “I lied. I said it had flown to freedom out of the window, a small quarter light that was usually left open because my dad was obsessed by fresh air. Strange for a man who invariably had a cigarette between his lips, but he always wanted one window opened, even if only by a crack, in every room. So I said the bird must have squeezed out when I wasn’t looking, and then Isecretly buried it in the garden, being his potting shed where he never went. I stuck two lollipop sticks together with glue, making a cross, and marked the poor creature’s last resting place with that!”

“And that memory has been dormant until you sat in the chair?” I asked.

“Not quite,” he said sadly, “the bit I’d forgotten had to do with the thing waking up and shaking its head as I was burying it.”

“So it was safe after all?” I asked, feeling absurdly relieved at the outcome of his story.

“No,” he said, “I was an evil child. A really evil child. I’d said it had flown away, so fly away it must, if only to a birdie Heaven way above the clouds.

“I used a house brick on its head. That did the trick.”

I looked at him, shocked. “You’re right,” I said.

“I am?”

“You must have been a truly evil child.” I muttered sadly.

© Peter Rogerson 19.06.20