Free as a Bird

David Hill

Except for a few sawing and nail-banging noises three or four fences away, the rest of the baches were empty. The boy Darrin liked the emptiness. At least today his mother wouldn’t be at him to go and make friends with the other boys. On this glittering winter morning, the other boys were back in their home towns, at school.

He went down to the bank of springy kikuyu at the end of the bach’s lawn in four jumps. Another two took him across the frontier of thinning grass where bank curved into beach. Three more, and he was over the creaking belt of driftwood and seaweed, bleached plastic bottles and orange twine that lay along the high-tide mark. He stopped to tug at one long stick where it poked out from a tangle of old fishing net, pushed it away when it refused to come, and went on across the grinding pebbles towards the rock pools.

Something was happening between his mother and his father. That was why they had all come to spend these four days at the McIntyres’ bach; why he’d got nearly a week off school.

He’d heard his Auntie Diane talking to his mother about it. “At least see if a different environment makes you feel different. Try and get Lance to look at it from a different perspective.” He didn’t understand all she said; he knew he wasn’t meant to, but it knocked displeasingly in his mind.

He’d gone down to the rock pools yesterday, on his first day at the bach. He didn’t think much of them at first – the scoops and sink-sized hollows with their pitted rims seemed ordinary and unpromising. But they made him bend to look into them, then crouch to see past the surface glitter of sunlight. There were stones and glossy seaweed underwater; winkings of tiny claws beside the stones. A flicker of transparent tail as a cockabully betrayed itself above the matching bottom of sand. Only when he stood up and felt the cramp in his knees and the fronts of his thighs did he realise how much time had passed.

So, he came down eagerly to the pools this morning. More eagerly because he could feel the drag and crackle starting to build up, back inside the kitchen of the bach.

It was cold in the bach, too. He’d heard Mr McIntyre talking to his father. “Now there’s no excuse for not being warm. You’ve got extra blankets in the wardrobe, and that little heater throws out a real glow.” But his parents hadn’t used the heater. They knew the McIntyres wouldn’t accept any payment for the electricity, and they didn’t believe in being in people’s debt. He knew that before they went, his mother would make his father take the hand-mower out of the shed and do the lawns. She would sweep out both rooms, and wash the floors and windows. Even though nobody would be using the bach for another four months – he’d heard Mr McIntyre say so – they would leave it tidier than they’d found it.

Down at the pools, Darrin stood and blinked in the blue-and-yellow day. The winter sun was on his back. The sea breathed beyond the rocks. Gulls lifted up as he approached, and circled with their long cries above him.

He began making his picture come back, the picture he’d started on while he was down at the rock pools yesterday. In the picture, he was standing before his mother in some unspecified place and speaking to her. The words he was speaking weren’t specified either, but his mother had her head lowered. Sentences were stepping from him which somehow raised his father to the status of wronged victim. Sometimes in the picture, his father came and stood beside him while he spoke and put a hand on his shoulder. But he didn’t feel comfortable with that part.

Now he was looking at a seagull. The bits of his other picture went thin and slid away. One seagull, floating silent and tidy in a pool quite close to him. It hadn’t flown up with the others. It just sat in the water; its head was still while its body trembled a little on the surface of the pool.

He began to move closer. Slowly, one step at a time. How near could he get before it took off? Near enough so it could see he was friendly? Near enough to touch it, even?

It was one of the small gulls. Grey feathers on its wings, a few black-tipped ones on its tail. He took another pace closer. The red beak ended in a little hook at the tip, where the top half fitted over. He’d never noticed that before. Another step. The eye was like little rubber rings, red on the outside, then white, red again, and black into the centre. Another step and another. The sun behind him.

The seagull was hurt. Along its breast and side, just above the water, exposed pinky-grey flesh glistened in the sunlight. It’s torn its guts open on a rock or something, the boy told himself. He edged forward with one hand outstretched, making little noises of reassurance.

Then he was lurching backwards, away from the pool. The wound of pink-grey flesh had crawled and twisted along the seagull’s side. The bird’s body dipped in the water, then rose again. The beak opened, but made no sound. The eye stared. He saw the line of white suckers along the edge of the tentacle, where it gripped the bird.

One of his heels was dripping blood where he’d jarred it against the rock rim. He made himself go forward again, staring. Once more, as his shadow touched the water, the tentacle tightened and gleamed. Down under the big rock in the middle of the pool, the octopus braced itself against a new presence. The gull dipped with the movement. It might have been floating on a carefree swell. The dazzle of sun made it impossible to see down into the pool.

He knew straightaway that there was one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t put his hands on the tentacle, and try to pull it free. What if he touched the clinging limb? If the pink-grey flesh shifted sideways and came sliding over his fingers and wrists? His lips drew back at the thought.

A picture caught at him, and he was off across the rims of the pools, to the high-tide line of driftwood where the stick poked from its tangle of fishing-net. This time he didn’t tug at the stick. He wrenched and tore till it came splintering away into his hands. He panted back towards the pool.

The bird was motionless again on the water. He knelt on the rock and stretched the stick’s broken end out slowly till it touched the flesh of the tentacle. The white suckers wrinkled.

Next moment, he was lunging into the water beneath the bird. Jabbing and threshing and hauling the stick from side to side in the pool. His own body and head were turned away, his eyes closed against what might come writhing up the stick at him.

The water frothed and slapped over the rock rim, and the gull lurched on sudden waves. Sand and mud rose from the bottom. The stick met a resistance like a wet sack. He snatched his hand away, and clutched it to him. Bird and stick floated side by side on the surface of the pool. A second tentacle had joined the first, glistening along the gull’s white side.

He turned his back on the pool and ran for his father. Across the pebbles and up the bank of kikuyu grass to the bach. When he flung in through the back door, his mother and father were sitting silent at opposite ends of the kitchen table. In the darkness after the sun outside, he couldn’t tell them apart at first.

His mother’s voice began to say something about dirty feet, but he went straight over the top of her. It was like the picture he’d been making for himself earlier.

“Dad! Dad! There’s a seagull down in the rock pools, and it’s caught by an octopus! You’ve got to get it out. The octopus is gonna drown it! Please, Dad, you’ve got to come now!” Then he was off again, running before demands for explanation could snare and delay him.

When his father joined him at the pool, he was crouched again on the rim, trying to look down into the water. The man, who’d come striding jerkily down from the bach, said nothing to his son. Instead, he picked up the stick that was floating at the pool’s edge and pointed uncertainly at the gull. And Darrin had another picture.

This one was from a month ago. Their cat had started choking on a fishbone. His father, who was nearest, had grabbed the animal and tried to pat its back. The cat twisted and squalled. His mother had said, “Give it here! God, you’re useless!” With the animal tucked under her arm, she’d reached deftly with finger and thumb for the fishbone. His father had walked out of the room.

Now his father was jabbing with the stick in the water, just as the boy had done, only harder with his man’s strength. The boy saw the same thing happen: the water lash and slop, the bird toss from side to side, the tentacles contract around it. But this time it was pulled deeper into the water, till its sides and folded wings were half-submerged. “Don’t!” yelled the boy. “Don’t! It’s drowning!”

He knew instantly that they were the wrong words. His father’s face went red and helpless. He slung the stick away so that it clattered and somersaulted across the rocks. Then he stooped and wrenched with both hands at a stone the boy couldn’t even have moved. He rose, straddled above the pool, and lifted the stone high over his head.

“No, Dad! Don’t kill it! No!”

The man stared at his son. He opened his mouth and his eyes as the seagull had done. Then he dropped the stone back on to the pool rim, and was striding, running back up towards the bach.

The boy stared after him, hands pressed against his ears where they’d jerked when his father scooped the stone high. He was heaving to breathe. His eyes felt tight and bulgy.

Then – “Dad! Dad! I know!” He too was off towards the bach once more. Blundering up through the kikuyu, reaching the top of the bank just in time to glimpse his father vanish inside the door.

He didn’t go for the bach. Instead he snatched open the door of the shed where the lawnmower was stored. His hands scrabbled along the shelf for what he’d seen there yesterday – the pruning saw with its curve of rusty teeth.

He held the saw in front of him as he slid and stumbled back down to the pools. Both his feet were bleeding now from the pitted rocks. The seagull still floated silent on the surface of the water. The black centre of its eye stared at him.

Darrin stopped at the pool’s edge. Then he drew back his lips again and stepped in.

The winter water gripped him up to his thighs. But it was only two steps into the middle of the pool. He did what he’d known he could never do, and seized the seagull with one hand. He reached beneath it with the pruning saw, and began hacking backwards and forwards with the hooked blade. He yelled as he sawed, and he felt the rusty teeth jag and tear. The tentacles gripping the bird contorted, then whipped away. The seagull was free in his hands.

He still whimpered and shrieked till he was out of the pool and headed towards the bach, the pruning saw dropped somewhere in the water. The gull held against his body with both hands. But he was silent except for the heave of his breathing by the time he reached the lawn at the top of the bank.

The seagull had lain unmoving against him all the way up from the rock pool. He would get it bread and a dish of water from the kitchen. Maybe there would be a tin of sardines his mother would let him open. But first the bird could rest where it was safe. He knelt down, and placed it gently on the soft grass of the lawn.

For a second, it sat as it had on the surface of the rock pool, body and eyes still. Then its beak opened for the second time, and stayed open. It shivered once along its length. A white membrane slid down over the eye nearest to him.

When Darrin finally stood up, his knees and thighs were stiff with cramp, the way they’d been yesterday after he’d knelt and stared into the life of the pools. He reached out with one foot, and gave the seagull a push. The bird sagged over on to its side. For the first time he could see its breast where the tentacles had gripped and crushed. The white feathers there looked just as unruffled as they did everywhere else.

He moved towards the bach in the glittering sunlight. His feet were covered with sand and blood. His jeans were soaked, and he’d ripped one of the cuffs of his jersey. He supposed he should wash his hands and feet under the outside tap, but he couldn’t be bothered.

This time when he opened the back door, it seemed even darker inside than it had before. Once more his parents were sitting at opposite ends of the table, and he still couldn’t make out at first who was which. They weren’t looking at anything, and they weren’t saying anything. As he looked at their faces staring past each other, he saw again the eyes of the seagull.

Photo Credit: Robert Cross,
Victoria University of Wellington

‘Free as a Bird’ was most recently published in Hillsides - the best of David Hill (Mallinson Rendel Publishers Limited, 2006).

David Hill lives in Taranaki, and has been a fulltime author for 40 years. He writes fiction and non-fiction for most age groups. His novels and stories for YA and younger readers have won various awards, and are published in some 15 countries and almost as many languages. His latest books are Coast Watcher (Penguin Random House NZ, 2021) and Three Scoops (One Tree House, 2021).