I followed Frazzle towards him, and he raised his head, clocked me and hastily flipped the pad closed. Frazz jumped up on his lap and started to purr.
‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to spy on you,’ I said.
‘I didn’t think you were. I just didn’t want to spoil anything for our next game. I’ve got the day off work and I thought I’d come and do some planning here – it feels like I’m in the zone. How’s Frazzle?’
‘He’s a cold-blooded murderer. Do you know anything about birds?’
I blurted out an explanation of the situation, and Adam got up, scooping Frazzle back onto his chair.
‘You keep that chair warm,’ he instructed the cat. ‘And stay here until you’re called. Understand?’
Frazzle looked at him and blinked, like whatever Adam wanted was fine with him.
‘Thanks so much. I honestly don’t know what to do. It’s up on top of a door and I can’t reach it and I don’t know if it’s hurt.’
‘Come on then,’ Adam said. ‘Rescue mission under way.’
We hurried up the stairs to my flat, and I opened the door cautiously, half expecting the bird to fly out into the stairwell and create a whole new set of problems. But it was still huddled where I had left it.
‘Right.’ Adam glanced around and picked up a T-shirt from the floor. ‘Okay if I use this?’
I nodded and stammered out an apology for the mess, which Adam ignored.
He approached the bird slowly, reached up and lifted it down, wrapped safely in the soft cotton.
‘Wow,’ I said, ‘you just picked it up.’
‘It doesn’t know yet to be afraid of people,’ Adam said. ‘It’s just a baby. Now, have you got a box with a lid?’
I passed him the cardboard crate Jude’s LP records had come in, and he carefully lowered the bird into it.
‘Hot-water bottle?’
‘I’ve got one of those microwave wheat-bag things. I use it after the gym sometimes.’
‘That’ll do, if we wrap it up in something.’
Another T-shirt was pressed into service.
‘He looks okay, doesn’t he?’ I peered into the box, but the baby bird didn’t look back at me; it was hunched down, its newly grown feathers looking ruffled and unkempt. ‘I mean, not like its wing is broken or anything? It seemed to be flying okay.’
‘Yeah, but I think it’s more worrying if Frazzle clawed it.’ Adam’s head leaned over the box, close to mine. He smelled of coffee and shampoo. ‘It’s got no immune resistance to that, and it could get infected and… well…’
‘Die.’
He nodded. ‘There’s a local wildlife rescue place. Want me to call them?’
I nodded. Suddenly I felt like I wouldn’t be able to explain the situation to anyone without starting to cry. It was just a bird – just a blackbird, not even something rare or endangered (other than by my cat), but I was flooded with awareness, all at once, of the fragility of life. How easily that little bird’s first flight could be its last; how everywhere, all the time, lives were being snuffed out like candles on a birthday cake.
I waited as Adam called, talked and listened.
‘Right,’ he said, tucking his phone back in his pocket. ‘We’ve done the right thing, keeping him warm. They say to bring him in and they’ll check him out, and if he seems okay there’s a chance we can bring him back here and the mum and dad might carry on feeding him.’
‘You can hear them now,’ I said. ‘I’ve got so used to the noise outside my window I hardly notice it. But listen.’
We stood there together in my messy flat. I could hear the traffic on the street outside, the rattle of a delivery of beer to Archie’s shop next door, a child crying. But above it all, closer, were the urgent cheeps of the blackbird parents, trying in vain to summon their little one back to safety.
‘They’re worried about their baby,’ I said, my voice going a bit hoarse.
‘Just as well he’s in good hands, then.’
‘He won’t die, will he?’
Adam looked down at the box cradled against his chest. ‘I don’t know. But I hope not.’
‘It’s just… if he does, it’ll be my fault.’ I felt a tear inching down my cheek and brushed it away.
‘Hey, Zoë. It won’t be your fault. Or Frazzle’s even. You did everything you could. And Frazzle – well, you can’t expect a cat to appreciate the sanctity of life, can you?’
I managed a laugh. ‘I guess not.’
Adam unwrapped one arm from around the box, and for a second I wondered if he was going to reach out to put his hand on my shoulder. I could have totally done with a hug right then. But there was a rustle from inside the box as the baby bird lurched from one side to the other, no doubt beginning to wonder why it was trapped in this dark, weird-smelling space, and Adam hastily steadied it in both arms.
‘I guess we should get him looked at,’ I said.
‘Shall we go together?’ Adam agreed. ‘We can get an Uber.’
‘Yes. Let’s go together.’
Twenty
What you want to feel is a bit different from what you’re actually feeling, isn’t it, Aquarius?
‘So it was fine in the end,’ I said. ‘We took the little bird to the wildlife place and a vet looked at him – actually, it turned out he was a her, so that told me with my male-centred view of wildlife – and he gave her antibiotics even though he couldn’t see any puncture wounds or anything. And he said we did the right thing by keeping her warm, and the trip in the Uber was actually a good thing because it gave her a chance to recover from the shock.’
Jude looked up from his phone and took a gulp of beer. ‘That’s good.’
Then his eyes returned to the screen.
We were – at least in theory – on a date. But the location of the date was my flat, and the meal and booze had both been liberated by me from the pub downstairs. I’d paid, of course, using my staff discount, and it made sense for us not to go out, out, given that neither of us could really afford to eat anywhere other than the Ginger Cat – certainly not anywhere that would do food and drink of the same quality.
But still, it did feel a bit discouraging, somehow, to be eating food on my night off that I’d cooked for the customers the night before, and which was destined for the staff dinner that evening. Not that there was anything wrong with it – it was my special bean chilli, made with no less than four different sorts of hot peppers and loads of other secret spices, and there were flatbreads and rice and guacamole and cashew cream on the side. Thanks to my delayed housework, the flat was clean and tidy and there were candles glowing on the coffee table. Jude had even written on the bathroom mirror in soap, ‘D8 NITE’, with a massive heart underneath.
Frazzle, however, was still sulking over the removal of his prey and had taken himself off downstairs to the bar like a stroppy husband to scrounge bits of Robbie’s lamb tagine off anyone who’d indulge him.
I drank some of my red wine. ‘And we brought her back and put her back in the garden like the vet said, and I definitely saw the parents feeding her. Apparently it’s a myth that birds will abandon their chicks if they’ve been handled by humans. They don’t even know, because they hardly have any sense of smell. Which makes sense, doesn’t it?’