It was Cassie’s day off and that afternoon she sat in the cabin drinking tea and stroking Macavity who was stretched out beside her on the bench seat like a discarded black fur stole. She couldn’t stop thinking about her recent exchanges with Flyte, which had been at best businesslike; at worst, chilly since Cassie had tried to persuade her that Sean and Zeke had been lovers. Regardless of the fact she’d been right, she knew that she’d overstepped the mark. Remembering her insinuation that Flyte, like Sean, was a cop in the closet made her cringe. She should have apologised right there and then, and now it felt too late, too loaded.
Feeling the boat rock, she turned to see her grandmother climbing on board.
‘Babcia. This is a nice surprise.’
‘Since you couldn’t come to dinner tonight I thought I’d drop by on my way home from Sainsbury’s.’
Guiltily aware that she’d been ducking dinner with her dad, she made some fresh tea – with lemon, the Polish way – while Weronika took something out of a carrier bag. ‘I got you some twaróg ice creams from the Polish shop – you used to love these when you were little.’
‘Aww, Babcia, that’s so kind.’ She remembered adoring these bars of chocolate-covered ice creams. They looked like a small version of the standard choc ice but being made from sweetened curd cheese they were far less sickly.
Before Cassie could stop her, Babcia had opened the door to the freezer compartment.
To her credit, Babcia didn’t flinch at the sight of a deep-frozen magpie, simply picking up the stiffened corpse in its clear plastic shroud and putting it on the side before stowing the ice creams. Closing the fridge door, she regarded it with a sad smile. ‘It is beautiful. Just like that one you brought home the first time. You must have been four, just after your mama passed. God rest her soul,’ crossing herself.
Without thinking, Cassie found herself repeating the words in a murmur.
Her grandmother met her eyes. ‘Why don’t we give this little birdie a burial at sea? Hmm? Like we did with your very first one.’
During the ‘animal undertaker’ phase of Cassie’s childhood it had been the only way she could be persuaded to part with her decomposing charges; she and her grandmother would launch them with some ceremony in the canal, sometimes in a shoebox that passed for a Viking-style boat, the bodies surrounded by fresh or dried flowers rather than pyrotechnics.
‘OK,’ said Cassie, finding the idea oddly appealing. ‘No coffin though. The last thing the canal needs is more junk.’
A few minutes later, they stood twenty yards upstream where the towpath dipped briefly closer to the surface of the water. Cassie opened the ziplock bag and coaxed the magpie head first into the water, its blue plumage turning briefly green then purple as it caught the final rays of the sun breaking through strands of pink cloud. Behind her, she heard Babcia start to sing, in a surprisingly strong voice.
‘Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing . . .’
It was a song Cassie had learned to play on her Dziadek’s piano during a brief early teenage enthusiasm – before she’d discovered boys and girls, weed, and goth bands.
They stood watching as he floated out, beak up, one wing still pointing up at the sky like an Old Testament prophet in a painting. He travelled lazily across the gilded water drifting only slightly downstream with the current. Near the middle of the canal, he finally rolled over and sank, his cocked wing the last thing to disappear from view.
Her grandmother said, ‘Pożegnanie, ptaszku,’ – farewell, little bird – and they both crossed themselves.
Walking back to the boat, Cassie felt lighter than she had for a long time.
Her grandmother took her hand and said, ‘Come to dinner with your father soon? He’s looking much better now. Good as new.’
Picturing his crooked smile made her chest hurt, and she realised she’d been missing him.
‘Yes, all right.’
She glanced back at the spot where the magpie had sunk, and a dimly remembered religious phrase popped into her head from nowhere.
Let the dead bury the dead.