The Incredible Flightless Bird Boy

1

They start as welts on his back, but soon morph into wings. Flightless, featherless, but big enough to beat. We house him in the attic, as per his request. I bring him hot milk in the mornings and seed in the evenings. We install bars on the attic windows and one Sunday, padlock the attic door. At night, I hear him screaming.

Once word of the flightless bird boy gets out, we set up an exhibit. We design little caps and t-shirts with cartoons of our son and the phrase The Incredible Flightless Bird Boy! on them in bold red. We charge five pound to tour the attic, attendance is strong. So strong, I book a month off (I have holidays saved up) and my wife, bless her, quits the cafe job. 

The wings grow feathers and brush now against the cross beams. We discuss an extension. Or perhaps an outdoor exhibition. But we hate the idea of letting him fly away. I can almost imagine him, a black dot shrinking in the vast blueness of the sky.

#

2

One night: a crash from the attic. He has removed some roof tiles and is crammed, feet pedalling, in the hole. We drag him back. He bites at us. An incisor comes loose in my wife’s arm. She slaps him and when he screams his mouth is red with blood. We chain him to the radiator with a set of cuffs from my workplace. 

When we’re downstairs, in the kitchen, we hear the cuffs rattling.

‘What do we do?’ she asks.

I don’t know, so I remain silent. 

‘We need him to stay,’ she says.

She looks out into the night sky - four moons are visible this evening.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know.’

In bed, we cleave to one another. I rest my cheek against the curve of her shoulder.

#

3

On my first day back at work, Julia from HR is due to be hanged. She stole stationary and displayed explicit art work in the bathrooms and communal areas. The art depicts Harry, also from HR, in a light that makes him seem both god-like and vulnerable. His member, vast and girthy, looks to be semi-erect. Harry is married with two children. He tells everyone that he would do anything for those two children. 

At the copier: I’d skin a goat. 

In the car park: I’d swim the amazon.

Beside the water cooler: For these two, anything. And he prods a finger at a 6x4 photo. Anything. 

Harry was the one who went to HR with a complaint. Harry, it could be said, is responsible. 

We watch Julia’s hanging beneath the purple sky of noon. There is fanfare - candy floss, blackcurrant crumble, a tombola. She screams when they kick free the stool, but it’s a snap, not a strangulation and the disappointment is palpable. There’s a bottleneck at the stairs, so I get a bonus twenty minutes away from my desk. Everybody is ground down by work and the mournful evenings of middle age. 

When I return, my wife has installed a four foot chain on our son’s foot. I try to pull it free, really go at it, but cannot. She tells me later the professionals tried to feed our son biscuits. 

‘Did he chew?’ I ask.

She opens her palm and shows me the teeth. Six molars and a canine. Our son’s face is distorting beyond measure, it seems caved in. I am worried he is developing a beak. We cannot market a toothless, half-beak bird boy. Sales would decline. I promise to ring the doctor.

#

4

The doctor arrives, sethescoped, and ascends to the attic. He checks the pulses, opens our son’s mouth and shines a torch around the inside. When he prods a yellowed tooth with a latexed finger, it wiggles. He frowns at us in the viewing booth. 

He tells us that we need to do something drastic - and he puts special stress on the word drastic.

‘What do you suggest?’

He tells us that we are at a critical juncture. A most critical juncture. Only the right medical professional will be able to sort it. However, and here he pauses, it will cost.

We wait in the silence, hampered by this grinning man. He holds up a hand, fingers splayed. These three, he says, and indicates his middle, ring and index finger. From: and then he points at me.

‘Me?’

He nods.

‘Me!’

‘Correct.’

‘And will it hurt?’

He frowns. ‘Most definitely. You are not exactly trimming your nails here.’

‘I don’t think I can do that.’

‘The right reaction, I’d be scared if you did. Although it is really very simple. Not as bloody as some might hope but most definitely simple.’

‘And what will happen once you have the fingers?’

‘It will slow his condition, most definitely. He will remain like he is now for another year.’

‘You say “most definitely” a lot.’

He looks at me with disdain.

‘Ring me when you have the fingers.’

He climbs inside his station wagon and removes the stethoscope. It is as if he has cleansed himself once the stethoscope is removed. He looks a new man, fresh and unharried. I can see the couple across the street, watching from the bedroom window. Midges dot the air.

#

5

My wife is on the sofa, her legs beneath a rug, leafing through the catalogue.

In the catalogue, boys, red-faced and sad, look directly into the camera. They have numbers beneath their photos. We circle the ones we like. 566827, we like very much. He has freckles and curly ginger hair. He looks like a nice boy, my wife says. 

With a set of scissors and a pritt stick, she has been testing him in our family photos. He fits. He has the necessary features.

Two years ago, Thomas developed gills. He spent a summer at the institute, very happy, until he grew too big for the cage. We transferred him, but the bills have made it difficult for us. 

This bird thing is a real boon. We’ve been able to save up enough to afford Thomas a surrogate. We dial in - hold for twenty - and speak with a woman named Sandra. Sandra is most happy to accommodate us and wants us to visit in order to trail our son’s surrogate. We beam with happiness.

#

6

Just like the doctor said. The finger thing is not hard to do. We tourniquet my arm, and my wife sharpens the knives. 

Once done, we bag the fingers with ice and return them to the doctor. He works the necessary science, then returns to the attic. The serum makes our son scream, but over the next few weeks, we see teeth returning to his gums. White peaks, piercing through the pink. 

#

7

On his birthday, we take our son outside. The sun makes him squint, and his taloned feet catch in the fabrics of the carpet. He folds his wings tight against him to get through the patio doors. We keep him collared. 

He caresses the fabrics on our washing line. For the first time in a long time, he smiles. Then, realising he is no longer constricted, he flexes his wings. They unfurl and our breath is taken away. A light breeze ruffles his feathers and they seem to glisten. Thick musculature twists and ripples beneath the skin. He flaps, once, and the wind knocks against us like waves. He smiles. He says something, but we can’t hear what. Then he beats his wings again. Giggling. He beats them again, and again, and again, until he lifts, just slightly, from the ground.

We panic. My wife yanks on the leash and our son crashes against the patio table. He shrieks and tries to stand, wings thrashing. But now I have gathered up the collar with my good hand and am pulling him closer. 

The neighbours’ voices ring out in the street. I hear their feet running, a woman squeal. I turn and the minister Rev Chardonnay stands in the gate with a hand covering his mouth. I hold up a hand as if to say, nothing to worry about, usual Tuesday. But there is much to worry about and I am sweating feverently. With our feet slipping on patio tiles and my wife straining against the doorframe, we finally haul our son inside.

He tries, again, to unfurl his wings, but they smash against the corridor walls. My wife clambers astride him and covers his eyes with her hands. Shush, she says, shush. But his wings still beat, tearing ugly, gash-like marks in the wallpaper, knocking aside a vase, ripping plugs from sockets. I’m in the kitchen, tearing through the drawers. The sleeping pills are in the bottom drawer, I bark my shin, wrench the top free with my teeth and head out into the corridor. They’re both howling, my wife sprawled atop her son. I force a dozen pills into his mouth. He tries to spit, but I clamp a hand over his lips. We hold his nose till he swallows.

#

8

For a fortnight, Joseph refuses to eat. Afterwards, his skin seems to be draped upon him, his wings lie limp, lice dot his feathers. 

Customers complain, as they are wont to. Occasionally, they bring vegetables to throw. This does little for his self-esteem.

My left hand is still not accustomed to the lack of fingers. I go to pick up glasses only for them to slip from my hand. I miss letters while touch-typing. Sometimes, at night, I will touch my wife and she will shiver. 

‘You’re like my little crab man now,’ she says.

I make crab noises to make her laugh.

#

9

In the room where we reunite with Thomas, there is only a bed, a desk and a mirror. Thomas is drawing when we arrive. My wife squeezes my hand.

We sit, side by side, on the bed. 

The nurse says: ‘Thomas, why don’t you speak?’ 

He looks at her, and shakes his head.

‘Thomas,’ she says, ‘this is a special moment for your mother and father.’

He shakes his head and frowns. 

‘Thomas,’ my wife says, ‘Thomas please. We’ve worked so hard for this.’

But Thomas doesn’t care, Thomas is drawing again.

I crane to see but can’t.

‘Thomas,’ my wife says. ‘Please.’

She goes to touch him, but the nurse stops her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you touch until after the purchase.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay.’ 

The pencil sounds heavy upon the paper. It snaps and he reaches for the sharpener. My wife gets there first and offers it to him. Instead he picks up the pencil nub and begins to draw with that. 

My wife wipes the tears from her eyes and comes back to the bed. 

‘We should go,’ she says.

She doesn’t take her eyes from the boy. I reach for her hand, but it’s limp. We move to the doorway. I say: ‘It was nice to see you again Thomas.’ 

He is sharpening the pencil, furiously. He does not look up.

#

10

When we get back, Joseph’s chain is snapped in two and the padlock has been removed. It lies smashed on the landing’s carpet. Talon marks scar the lawn. I climb into the treehouse and scan the patchwork of gardens and white suburban houses for my son.

When I come down, a detective’s kicking at my lawn. He has a notepad and a cream overcoat. He has a stubby moustache and thinning hair. He looks at the garden as if it could, but has not yet, comitted murder.

‘What were you doing in the treehouse?’ he says, chewing.

‘Searching.’

He bites his bottom lip and nods.

‘You weren’t masturbating?’

‘No.’

‘It’s important to keep sexually active during a crisis. If I had a treehouse, I would masturbate in it. Especially,’ he says and points to my claw hand, ‘if I had a hand like that.’ 

I place the hand behind my back.

‘You’re strange for a detective.’

He shrugs.

Inside, they ask questions of my wife at the breakfast table. They are not complex: where did you last see him? What did he like to do with his spare time? She is coddling an empty coffee cup. When the detectives leave, one (not the treehouse one) stops at the door, and takes hold of my wife’s hand. 

‘We will find your son,’ he says. We nod. We understand.

For the next week, we receive updates on their progress via telephone. There are, of course, many sightings of the bird boy, but nothing conclusive. After asking a number of forensic experts, they determine he will nest in a belfry within a seven mile radius. They begin their search in earnest.

#

11

My wife calls in sick and spends the day in bed. She refuses food. 

I can’t take it. I drink two bottles of wine at a restaurant and throw up behind an alleyway. When I return, we make hasty, quiet love with her hands pressed hard against the headboard. I find her in the morning, on the sofa.

It goes like this for a few days. We orbit one another in an empty and cold house. My wife visits side-rooms to cry. I often find her curled up, with an item of his pressed against her face. She takes to driving around in the evening, hoping, I think, to find him wandering the side streets, his wings dragging on the pavement.

Things - silly things - make me angry. Empty staplers clunking mockingly beneath my palm, unclear signage in the car park near work, elderly people shuffling in path-disrupting packs through crowded shopping centres. At work, I forget to boil the kettle when making tea and have to spend a half hour in the toilet trying to calm down. 

My eyes and chin have grown dark. My hair seems to lack gloss and body. My breath stinks. Everything tastes like ash. I look at myself in the mirror, and feel an ounce of exasperation that this here, this man, this body, this face, is me - a shambolic semi-corpse assembled from vague ambitions and lusts. I cry more often than not.

#

12

I receive the call at work. 

‘He’s in a bad way,’ they say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s fallen,’ they say.

#

13

The cathedral’s dome is huge and perplexing. Police lines ring the outside, and a dozen cars, the sirens silently rotating, park across the pavement. Within the drafty silence, my son is splayed across the cold stone. Halogen lamps illuminate his huge corpse. Five pews lay smashed in twine. Forensics take pictures, moving about in creased blue suits.

Later, the priest tells me Joseph lived in the dome, perched on his taloned feet. Every morning they fed him bread and milk, dipping the bread till it was soft. He thought the boy was an angel, a divine messenger. Did you tell anyone? I ask. He shakes his head. My secret, he says. He looks at the boy and a sadness heaves it way up through his body and onto his shoulders.

I drive for hours and smoke for the first time in ten years. Finally, I head to the house. I lock the car door, pocket my keys, head up the path and stand there. I stand there for longer than I’m supposed too - it is as if I sense passing through this moment will mark the partition between one portion of my life and another. Finally, I ring the doorbell. No answer. I ring it again. She’s in her dressing gown when she opens up. I don’t know what to do. 

I tell her in the kitchen beneath our pricey LED display unit and we sit, just with one another, resting our backs against the refrigerator. 

#

14

We have the funeral in the summer. We serve tacos at the wake.

#

15

The drive takes place on a rainy Sunday, but we are beaming with happiness. 

At the institute, the boy is in a suit with grey shorts and a red tie and a straw hat. He has a suitcase, filled, we understand, with drawings. I tell him we will display them on the fridge when he is settled. The boy does not nod; he does not frown. But I know this is temporary. This is a situation which can be fixed.

In the car home, I glance insistently in the rearview mirror. The boy is strapped in (two seatbelts, set to maximum tautness) and keeps his suitcase on his lap. When he doesn’t think I’m looking, the blankness falls from his face and is replaced by a sad, mournful expression. I know that Thomas is in there, but can’t quite see how.

He refuses our help with the suitcase, and my wife and I think how very much that is just like Thomas. Thomas, we say, would not want help with his suitcase. Thomas would want no one to help him with anything. He bumps it up the staircase and heads towards the room which used to be his. 

My wife busies herself by making copies of the boy’s face and sticking them onto all of the family portraits. We agree that we are stronger and turning over a new leaf. We are having good sex and better conversation. We cook, daily, and take turns caring for one another.

At bedtime, we curl up in a sleeping bag at the foot of his bed. My wife presses her whole body against me. We will make great love this evening. In the reflection of the windowpane, I see the boy’s eyes are open.

END