now getting on for midnight and I don’t have a lot of time to waste. Dad should soon be taking Mum in his arms for the last mazurka. I clean the dribbles off the teapot spout with a rag I find in the sink and start bunging things on a tray. Some uncouth bugger has helped himself to the sugar with a wet teaspoon so there are unattractive brown lumps and streaks all through the basin. I get cracking with rag and fingers and try and clean things up. In the end I find it easier to bury everything under a fresh avalanche of sugar. The kettle is taking a long time to boil which I find is because I have switched on the wrong ring. Dear oh dear. I hope it isn’t going to be one of those nights. I try and put a gloss on everything by digging out some cakes I find at the back of the cupboard but it occurs to me that the little chocolate flakes may be mouse droppings so I abandon the idea. The yellow icing was going a nasty transparent colour anyway, as I find out when I try and scrape away the mould. Blimey, this bird had better turn up trumps after all the effort I am putting in. In the end, I settle for some soggy biscuits and lug the whole lot back on a tray.
‘I’m afraid we’re out of milk,’ I say.
She looks at me in a funny sort of way. ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ she says. ‘I can’t drink it without milk. Is this what you brought me all the way here for, a cup of black tea?’
I put the tray on top of the telly and sit down beside her on the settee. A straight question deserves a straight answer. ‘No,’ I say. I gaze into her minces and suck in my breath sharply as if her wild animal beauty defies description.
‘What is it?’ she says. ‘Has one of my lashes smudged?’
‘They’re perfect,’ I say. ‘Like — like —’ once again she can feel me struggling for words ‘— like you. You’re just too much.’
‘Do you feel all right?’ she says.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous me talking like this,’ I say. ‘But I can’t help it. It’s the effect you have on me. You draw the words out of me — words I never thought I could utter. It’s some strange kind of magic.’
‘Do you have a proper drink?’ she says. ‘Something alcoholic. The way you go on I should think you must have.’
I cannot help feeling that I am not getting through to her. The old verbal magnetism is dropping a bit short of target.
‘I’ll have a look,’ I say. ‘I know we were running low.’ Understatement of the year. Last Christmas we must have been the only family in the land toasting the Queen in Stone’s Ginger Wine. Ever since I was a kiddy I have looked at a bottle of scotch like it was inside a glass case. I open the lower door of the sideboard and glance inside. There are a number of cork table mats which have been attacked by mice, a paper streamer and a pile of yellowing Christmas cards going back to the early fifties. Mum says she keeps the cards because she likes the pictures but it is really because it is the only way we can get a mantlepiecefull. When we get a Christmas card it is like another family getting a present. Everybody gathers round and it is passed from hand to hand and turned over to see how much it cost and if it came from the 2p section at Woolworths. The best card we had last year was addressed to somebody else and came to us by mistake. First of all we opened it to look at it and then we kept it. It showed a lot of geezers in top hats blowing trumpets from the back of a coach drawn by six black horses which are approaching an inn called ‘Ye Swanne’ practically buried in a snow drift. Inside, it said ‘May all your Christmases be white, and future prospects mighty bright. Thinking of you this happy Yuletide, Harry, Doris and family — not forgetting Cuddles’. We thought about them a lot, especially Cuddles. I wonder what he was — or she, maybe. It was funny how the infrequent visitors to the house all picked up the card and nodded like they had known Harry and Doris all their lives. I hope we get something from them next year.
‘Oh dear,’ I say. ‘That’s amazing. You have to come at the one time when we’re out of everything. Isn’t there something else I can get you? We’ve got some cocoa.’
‘I like cocoa without milk even less than tea without milk,’ says my dusky dreamboat sulkily.
‘Anything good on the telly?’ I say. ‘I see you’ve got it going.’
‘Just an old movie,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where they dig them up from.’
‘It’s probably black and white anyway,’ I say, trying to cheer her up.
‘Ronald Coleman,’ she says. ‘I can’t see what anyone ever saw in him. That moustache.’
‘The bird’s all right,’ I say, sliding on to the settee again. ‘Her clothes look quite modern, don’t they?’ I advance my hand along the back of the settee and let my fingers brush against her shoulders. Neither of us is getting any younger and my brooding, passionate nature demands an outlet.
‘Uum.’ She doesn’t tell me to piss off so I move my sensuous lips to her shell-like lobes and blow gently. She flicks her head like a disturbed cat. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘How long have you been over here?’ I ask.
‘Eighteen years.’
‘Eighteen years!’ The scent of bougainvillea blossom is obviously long dead in this bird’s nostrils.
‘I came over when I was a baby.’ She stifles a yawn. ‘Have you got a record player or anything?’
‘It’s at the menders,’ I say. In fact we do have a gramophone but it looks like the picture on an old HMV sleeve and was ‘rescued’ by Dad. I can’t see Pearl’s sophisticated tastes responding to it. Especially the selection of old Maurice Chevalier records that came with it. ‘Lets make love,’ I say. I suppose I could have built up to it a bit more but there is not a lot of time to waste and I need to know where I stand. It is also a fact that birds can sometimes respond well to the frank, straightforward approach. After all, they all know what it’s about and they must get bored waiting for you to wring out the words.
‘You don’t waste a lot of time, do you?’ she says.
‘When you feel the way I do, there’s not a lot of point.’ I say. It doesn’t mean anything but I put a lot of sincerity into it.
‘Nobody could accuse you of trying to buy me, could they?’ she says.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ I say. ‘I’m no saint but I do have a few scruples.’
This is another effective ploy. Just as birds are always prepared to believe you when you say something nice about them, they are also prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt when you say something nasty about number one. This way, you come out as being honest, in need of help, and slightly exciting. You can appeal to a number of their cravings with one simple approach. Frank Sinatra was a master of this gambit as a study of some of his old movies on the telly will reveal: ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from me, kid. I’m poison to dames. I just foul them up, see? Stick with me and you’ll earn yourself a groin-full of groans.’ Of course, once he’d said that, knocked back a couple of fingers of Jack Daniels and flipped his snap-brimmed hat on to the back of his head they had to plane the birds off him in layers.
‘It’s not very romantic down here.’
Note the use of words carefully. She does not say ‘in’ here but ‘down’ here. This clearly indicates that the possibility of being ‘up’ somewhere has clearly entered her mind — as indeed it has entered mine. In her case I think
