The morning we left for Wales I helped my dad pack the trailer. We hadn’t needed to take much, as we were only planning on going for a month, but my dad had all his stuff for sculpting, which took up most of the space.
He went out after breakfast to pick up the trailer. He had arranged to borrow it from a friend of a friend, and had left me alone with my mother for the first time since the accident. He gave her a dose of Valium before he left, said she’d be asleep and that I was to leave her alone and just keep an eye on my brother.
After he’d gone I checked on Lorry, who was in the playpen in the living room, watching Rentaghost with the sound turned down. He had his thumb jammed in the corner of his mouth and didn’t even look at me when I walked past.
My mother was lying in bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Her face was white, almost as white as the sheet drawn up around her chest, and there were deep shadows carved into her eye sockets and under her cheekbones. Her dark hair was fanned out on the pillow and the tendons on her neck were taut and stiff. If her eyes had been closed she would have looked like a corpse waiting to be buried, except that the sheet over her chest rose and fell a tiny amount with each breath she took.
I stood there for a while, watching her, thinking about Petra. I tried to match my breathing to hers, timing each inhalation to rise at the same time as hers did, and to exhale when she did, but her breathing was too slow for me, and I found myself struggling for air.
After a while I closed the door and went downstairs again.
It turned out that the man my dad had arranged to borrow the trailer from had forgotten all about it and gone out, so it took my dad ages to track him down and get the trailer back to our house. Finally, he got it onto the drive, and together with the car it took up most of the space. It was backed-up tight against the flower bed, which was devoid of any plants, all of them withered and dead from the drought. The plastic netting which my dad had tied against the wall to train clematis was now a graveyard for dead foliage, the neglected tendrils hanging in limp fingers.
I helped him fit other bits and pieces in the trailer around his potter’s wheel and tubs of clay. We managed to fit in a few boxes of kitchen stuff and big gallon bottles of water. We worked in silence for an hour or so.
It was as we’d finished packing the trailer, and had started to secure the tarpaulin over the top, that my mother’s voice emerged through the open bedroom window. It wasn’t unusual for her to wake up and start shouting, and my dad hardly flinched, although I could see that he was trying hard not to meet my eye. He finished tying down the tarpaulin, then went in through the front door.
I had already noticed the wren that morning, and I watched it as it sat on a low branch of the rosebush. Now it was back again, all puffed up, its feathers fluffed out, stumpy wings with mottled stripes standing out from both sides of its body. There were tiny flashes of white over each eye, and it looked as though it was raising its eyebrows, asking me a question. It was chirruping out a song, its beak opening and closing as it turned left and right. A gobby, cocky little bird.
It hopped down and started scratching at the dust of the flower bed, occasionally flitting in and out of the holes in the plastic netting.
I moved towards it, but it didn’t fly away as I’d expected. It stopped scratching and pecking and looked me straight in the eye. I wondered if it had a nest nearby. I edged closer, my hand out, palm upwards and flattened in a gesture of submission, as I’d seen my dad do with Mrs Akhar’s cat. The wren just kept on looking at me. It didn’t move, didn’t even look away. I moved closer, inch by inch, and wondered if I might actually be able to grab it.
When I was about a foot away from the wren, it suddenly panicked. It hopped backwards a couple of times and then darted to the side, tucking its dumpy brown body through one of the holes in the plastic netting that had been meant to train the clematis.
The holes in the netting were too small for it to squeeze through easily, and it got stuck, one short wing sticking out at the side, trapped by the plastic. I moved closer to it and it tried to move away from me, but its trapped wing prevented it from flying away and it pulled and fluttered. I was so close by now that I could see its eye, the pupil dilating and contracting like the beam from a lighthouse.
As I reached out my hand to pick it up it flapped even more, and I could see that the plastic netting was twisted around its wing. When I knelt down and my fingers closed around the bird, I could feel how small its body was beneath the puffery of its feathers. Its breastbone was sharp and hard, and when I pressed a finger into the space beneath I could feel its heart battering in its chest. With one hand I held it, and with the other I tried to untangle it from the netting. It was no good. I was clumsy, working one-handed, and the netting had got wound tourniquet-tight around the top of the wren’s wing, where it joined its body, and the bird’s struggles had only made it tighter.
I was starting to get annoyed with it. Its beak was open now, its tiny tongue darting in and out as it panted in panic. If it would only stop struggling, I’d be able to get it free.
It was my mother who made me do what I did next. Her scream came bursting through the bedroom window, setting the air fizzing with nervous energy and my heart almost burst in my chest. My arm seemed to move of its own accord, pulling backwards, dragging the stupid wren clear of the netting in one swift movement, without me even thinking about it. I saw that I’d managed to free the tiny bird, that I was clutching it in my hand and that even though it was still panting and its eyes were still flashing, it was free.
Then I saw the feathers, still trapped in the netting, a collection of short, hard feathers about an inch long, joined at one end. But they weren’t just feathers.
They were the bird’s wing.
We left about an hour after that. My mother had calmed down enough to allow herself to be dressed by my dad, and had been put in the passenger seat where she sat nervously rubbing the fabric of her skirt. I’d cleaned the sores on Lorry’s legs and changed his bandages for him, and he was sitting in the back seat, behind my mother, leaning against the window with his eyes half closed, his clown doll jammed between his knees. My dad was doing a final check of the house before we set off, closing windows and double-locking the front door.
He finished locking up and was about to get into the car when he seemed to hesitate. He went to the back, to the trailer, and rummaged around for a bit. Then he opened my door and handed me the hessian-wrapped package.
‘Probably best if she sits on your lap, eh? Safer that way. Less likely to get damaged,’ he said.
I put the treasure bag on the floor, careful to hold it safely in place between my feet, and took the bust of my mother. It was heavy and cold and I thought I could feel the dampness coming off it, even though I knew that under the hessian it would be wrapped in plastic.
My dad got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. Lorry was scratching at his legs.
‘Alright, Linda?’ My mother didn’t say anything, just gave an almost imperceptible nod and stared straight ahead.
The wren’s wing had come away neatly enough, a smear of blood on the sinew and bone the only sign that it had been wrenched from the bird’s body. It sat in the treasure bag with the other relics, wrapped in one of my mother’s silk scarves. The rest of the bird I had thrown into the hedge, a gift for Mrs Akhar’s cat. It occurred to me that it might still be alive, and the thought made me smile, the little bird flying helplessly in circles, one wing flapping, getting nowhere.
The treasure bag sat on the floor between my feet, and in my head I counted off the relics: Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren…I knew that there was only one more to get. One missing relic that would make the incantation perfect.
‘Right’ my dad said. ‘You ready, Jenny Wren?’ His eyes met mine in the rear view mirror. My heart was jabbering in my chest.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, and I was smiling. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ and just like that we left.