WE WERE IN an aeroplane and the doors had suddenly blown off. The pilot came on the PA screaming,’ Everybody brace! We’re going down!’ All the air was being sucked out. I closed my eyes. Freddy had killed the bird.
Not flapping any more, Bertie was limp in his hands. Dead.
I took a step backwards and opened my mouth. Not because I was being dramatic, but because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. I was sort of totally horrified by what was happening. That poor bird.
But then Freddy realized that I had seen what he had done. His face went blank and his whole body became incredibly still. There was a deep, deep silence.
‘I think he’s dead,’ he whispered. ‘I think I killed him.’
‘Yeah,’ I said timidly. I didn’t want to give away that I knew he had done it deliberately. I was scared of what he might do to me.
‘You don’t think I did it on purpose?’ He looked like he was about to burst into tears.
‘What?’ I said.
He was biting his lip now and the blood had drained from his face.
‘Hey.’ Clare was calling us, sort of whispering, sort of shouting. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing,’ I called. ‘It’s fine.’
‘What are we going to do?’ said Freddy. He looked really upset now, like he was about to flip out.
I didn’t know what to do. We had just killed one of the school falcons. No, Freddy had just killed the falcon. But I had helped him. I had tried to grab the bird when it was getting away. If I hadn’t got in the way it would have escaped and it would still be alive. I was equally responsible. I swallowed hard.
‘We’ll put him back,’ I said a little too coolly for my liking. My mind wasn’t tumbling any more. I was calm and it was awful. I didn’t want to react to such horror with such placidity.
‘Put him back?’ He was whispering fast. ‘How can you be so cool about this? The poor fucker’s dead.’
Yeah, I thought, you killed it.
‘Well, what do you suggest, Frederick?’
He nodded quickly.
‘OK, let’s get it back in the cage.’
We turned away from the others so they couldn’t see.
‘Hey, what’s happening?’ Clare scowled.
Turning my head to face them I saw Craig looking blankly at us. He didn’t care what was going on. But, and there was no mistaking it, he was looking at the dead bird.
I am suddenly at the school gates, eleven years old, my first day at school. My new uniform feels heavy, my blazer a little too big for me. A beautiful day. Nerves tingling in my belly. A white flash.
I’m in the paddock, leather glove on my hand. Mr Thatcher, the man who looks after the falcons, his hand on my shoulder. The smell of grass. The sudden explosion of wings beating. A silhouette of a figure in flight against the sun. My arm suddenly heavy, I’m readjusting my weight to stop from falling over. Serenity. The falcon on my arm; still, proud. A white flash.
I stared at Bertie’s corpse. Freddy placed it heavy-handedly back in the cage and closed the door. Burlington hopped over to Bertie and prodded him with his beak but Bertie’s body didn’t move.
Freddy looked me in the eye.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
My calmness was leaving me again and a different feeling impacted my chest hard. It was heavy and evil. It was guilt. I felt a little better because I was reacting in a more human way but it didn’t help much.
‘Let’s get away from here,’ I said.
We weren’t trying to be clever or dramatic or ironic any more. All that was stripped away and we were left exposed, our emotions naked.
We sprinted across the paddock and vaulted the fence.
‘Run,’ Freddy said to the others.
I didn’t even look at them; I was going home. My lungs were on fire as I ran, eating up the grass and the roads with my legs as they rolled beneath me, the light of a new day coming over the edge of the curved earth, catching up with me all the way, screaming at me that I was a bad person, evil. The guilt was consuming me like a worm in an apple but by the time I was halfway home it was taken over by yet another feeling: fear. Fear that, by the time I got to my front door, had ballooned into terror.
Terror of what would happen to me if I got caught, of course, but more than that, terror of the act in which I had been involved – terror at what I had done and who I was. Oh God, the monster was coming.
The vision of the murder replayed in my head. The way Freddy had done it was so cold. It was like he wasn’t even human any more, just a fleshy machine going through the motions. He was looking straight at the bird as he wrung its neck, no expression on his face whatsoever. The expression you have when you do your shoelaces up? That’s what Freddy looked like when he killed the bird. In fact, it was even weirder than that, it was like another face’s skin had been pulled taut over his own and you simply didn’t know what was happening underneath it. That was the very first time I saw that nothing expression on his face and it stays with me even now.
How could he have done that? I had felt like I knew him, but I can’t have. I was being torn up inside because I thought I had met someone who could show me the direction in which I had to go in my life. He had murdered a helpless animal. That’s kind of what psychopaths do.
But then, after he had done it, it looked as if he was going to cry. The enormity of the situation, his blurred emotions, my blurred emotions were too much for me to comprehend. I had done some bad things in my life, my Bad Thing, but I would never have done something like that. Perhaps he wasn’t so much like me after all. Perhaps I was wrong.
I got my keys from my pocket and ran inside my house. The grandfather clock in our hallway said it was just gone seven. I snuck up the stairs with as much stealth as I could manage and got to my bedroom. Shutting the door quietly I slid the lock across and lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling just like Craig Bartlett-Taylor had been doing when I called for him. I think I started to know how he felt – what it was like to be trapped with no way out. My chest heaved up and down like a wave out at sea.
I didn’t feel like throwing up and I didn’t feel like crying – the two feelings I would have said somebody would have if I was writing a book about somebody who wasn’t real. In truth, now that I was home and lying on my bed, locked away from the world, all I felt was tired. I crawled over my bed, reached my CD player, put on Damien Rice, and clambered under my sheets, still fully clothed, the bottoms of my jeans still cold and wet from the grass over which I had run so fast.