GRIT LIT: Tara Gould reads short story “Little Birds”

Again, another writer featured from the Brighton Festival fringe night Grit Lit at the Red Roaster.

Here is Tara Gould’s short story “Little Birds”, which is the story of Grace, a woman who’s alcoholic father has just died and she must return home to comfort her mother.

The story explores Grace’s conflicting feelings for the man she despised, yet mourns and sketches out the tragic life he led. Ultimately Grace must confront herself in the face of losing a person who is irevocably flesh and blood – her father.

Little Birds, by Tara Gould

At Euston bodies fell from the crowded tube train like lumpy food from a can. Grace navigated the sweaty tunnels like a fox, sticking to the walls.

The escalator carried her up to the bright, open relief of the huge railway station where she took the 10.33 to Leighton Buzzard, and sat by the window in an empty carriage travelling backwards. She looked out at the diagonal winter rain which solidified the spaces between buildings and thought of her step-dad, who had died two days before. He had fallen down the stairs.

It seemed bizarre to Grace that this large, robust man should be killed by such a minor and ordinary domestic accident. Fergus was a rough, baggy man whose rusty face and broad palms were leathered from years of working outside, as a digger driver in the local sand quarry. His alcoholism and the daily maintenance of his habit had yet to diminish more than a small percentage of his liver. He was lucky – that had been the doctor’s opinion – the booze wouldn’t kill him yet. But surely it had done – indirectly and lucky was never a word that Grace would have used to describe a man whose life had been a progression of misfortunes all leading to this final, fatal calamity.

As the train left London she attached the facts of this life to the passing buildings, in the same way she would peg up historical events on a string stretched across her classroom for the children she taught. Her mother had often spoken of him in this distanced way, even when he was alive, as if he were some museum exhibit. So Grace had inherited much of his story second hand. Now that he was dead it was easy and satisfying to reduce him to a potted biography like this, an interesting character profile.

Fergus Wick: born an only child in a 1930’s council house in a village called Heath and Reach. His father was absent at war, his mother was phobic, domineering and over-protective. She wouldn’t let him play with other children, she bathed with him nightly in water and olive oil to sooth the childhood eczema which plagued his limbs. Grace wondered whether his fixation with shiny women body builders in later years was informed by this early experience, while other men in happy marriages in the 1980’s kept piles of porn magazines under the bed, Fergus kept a stash of well thumbed ‘Iron Ladies’.

At fifteen he joined his father down the quarry. He was clumsy and self conscious, always spilling drinks, breaking things, he got on people’s nerves. At 19 he finally passed his driving test, after 5 attempts, on his third he knocked the grocer’s delivery man from his bike, he was taken to hospital with a broken collar bone. Fergus had once said to Grace what he remembered most was watching all the oranges from the basket rolling down hill like little planets, it was the only detail from his past that she had been given as a primary source.

Then, at 26, he killed a man. Alan Saunders was only 19 years old. It was his third day at the quarry and Fergus was meant to be training him. They had got on well. They had been having a laugh, mucking about in the digger, then Alan fell and Fergus couldn’t take the machine out of reverse in time. Alan died in Fergus’s arms, apparently.

Then when Fergus was acquitted of manslaughter, the shrieking Saunders family were on his back as he left Luton Crown Court, head hanging low, feeling despicable and bare, “Murderer!” they screamed.

By 36, he was still living at home, still grieving Alan’s death at his hands.

His social life consisted of 8 solitary pints, in the Axe and Compass, every night, and there, at 37, he met Grace’s mother. Marion was a civil service accountant in the throws of post-divorce promiscuity. She was hawk like, a fierce 45 year old Yorkshire woman with three angry teenage kids. He lost his virginity, told her he loved her more than life itself and started calling her Pixie, she said he looked like Richard Briars, but not as clever.

Grace had frequently wished the drinking would kill him. It was her fear that he would outlive her mother, re-mortgage their undervalued town house out of existence and, using grief as an excuse, in a tenacious onslaught drink what remained of any inheritance. Marion had given him a house, two cars, thrice yearly holidays, and a constant supply of booze, much of which came involuntarily, from her credit card which he’d steal from her purse – racking up monthly bills of hundreds of pounds. Without my mum he would have had nothing, Grace had told her boyfriend after hearing about Fergus’s death. Sam had criticized Grace’s severity, her lack of grief or compassion.

“He accidentally killed a man. How would you ever get over that? No wonder he turned to drink” Sam said, he was convincing but unoriginal. Did he think this thought hadn’t occurred to her after twenty years of knowing the man.

“If it hadn’t been that he would have found something else to destroy himself with. Some people are just like that. He has been a parasite” Grace argued “financially and emotionally, if he had never met my mum, he would still be living in a council house with his simple headed father”

“Maybe he would have been happier?” Sam had said, irritatingly insightful as ever, and Grace knew what he meant. Her mother was possibly not the best match for a man like Fergus.

But she had shrugged at Sam, because now it didn’t matter, because now at last he was gone, wiped out by a prodigious fall down a flight of stairs and Grace was glad. It had come about ten years earlier than she had expected. Yes, she was grateful and glad. It was a clean word, glad, so neat and straight forward and it felt fine in the mouth and in the head. It was uncompromising, especially in the face of something as murky and ambivalent as death.

But there it was, quietly repeating inside her, like a word doing cartwheels. It made her feel good that word. It was authoritative, contentious and surprisingly guilt free. It was gladness dizzy with self possession and potential, and it made her feel so alive.

Now there would be a clear channel to her mother. She had felt exiled from her mother’s house for nearly 20 years. Now she could visit unhindered, now she could build the relationship with her that she’d always craved. Without Fergus around her mother would be different. Surely it was his presence that had made Marion so unmaternal.

“Do you know he once dragged me from the sofa by my hair because I wouldn’t wash up! Sometimes he drank so much he smelled of pickled onions. He was disgusting. How can my mother have put up with that! No, good fucking riddance to him the old piss head” she had said as she scrubbed the dried, burnt lasagna cheese from the side of the casserole dish. Sam didn’t reply, he wiped the plates slowly, carefully, his silent judgment only fueled her vitriol.

But today the vitriol had passed and as the train continued its monotonous three four rhythm she looked out to the open landscape. It had stopped raining, and her gratitude for the recent change in circumstances spread over the wide, thick fields of Buckinghamshire. A rusty canal went by, a rusty bike frame by a hedge, a stone bridge, a walker with a black dog, a magpie flew from a tree, another dropped into a meadow – not close enough to make a pair, but almost.

The train bounced gently to a halt at Leighton Buzzard. She hurried through the familiar station. Outside the December air was chilling, the sky was thin, pebble grey. Marion pulled up in her Maroon Nissan, forcing the puddle next to the pavement out in a perfect arc and wetting the tips of Grace’s shiny black shoes.

They embraced, quick and dry.

“I’m so sorry Mum” Grace said trying to sound convincing and Marion nodded shakily.

Grace suppressed her shock at her mother’s appearance, she had lost at least a stone in weight, and was now so thin there was a wide space between her thighs which were bound in strange tight purple jeans, her hair had gone almost completely white, and her face was all sucked in on itself, there was drudgery in the folds of flesh. But contrary to her lifeless face her body was full of vitality, the compressed, anxious vitality of a tiny bird, but less wholesome, like a jerky, clock work bird with sand stuck in its machinery.

In the car she rubbed her mother’s shoulder, there was no flesh on it. Marion was not an easy person to touch. She did not yield. It was hard to tell whether she liked it or not. Grace removed her hand and prepared for the effort of speech.

“How are you? ….Shit…. probably?”

“Yes, shit.” Marion said contorting her features into a clown like frown. Grace still struggled with her mother’s total lack of physical dignity.

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet, it doesn’t feel real.” Marion said “ I keep having to tell myself he’s dead and it feels just….really weird for a second, and then it goes unreal again…. You can’t…grasp it …it’s…” She stopped mid-flow and manoeuvred the little car around the roundabout and into the small market town.

“It’s shock. You’ll be in shock. It’s so recent, ” Grace said watching her mother’s confused expression. The tiny silver eyes darted about, a thousand feelings seemed to pass over it like clouds or ripples, she seemed to be preparing to speak, she licked her lips and looked at Grace and then away.

“In a way…” Marion said finally “and I couldn’t say this to Andrew or Francis….but actually, in a way it’s a relief. I feel terribly guilty for that. ”

“Don’t feel guilty…” Grace jumped in, a bit too quickly and proceeded with caution in case some unconstrained malevolence came out “he didn’t…you weren’t…it’s not as if..”

“Am I a terrible person?”

“No!”

“In the end, all he ever did was sit in that chair in his bedroom looking at the birds in the garden,” Marion said “We had breakfast and tea together. He watched Dad’s army sometimes. He’d spent months you know, drinking, and watching the birds out the window…it’s funny cos he were always terrified I’d go before him.”

Grace remembered visiting Marion in hospital the year before. She had suffered a minor heart attack. For weeks afterwards Fergus had complained of pains down his arm and in his chest, no one had believed him, he was being shamelessly self-centred.

“He made my life fucking hell!” Marion suddenly said like she was arguing with someone.
They arrived at the Cul-du sac of three storey town houses and Marion parked the car in front of the yellow garage.

Marion opened the door to the hall where there was a chair and a piano. It was the same as it had been eight years ago when Grace had last visited, except for empty space at the bottom of the stairs, which was now occupied by the knowledge of a death.

“This is where I found him” Marion pointed to where Grace’s gaze was already fixed, “his head was up against the skirting board here. You see, I’m not sure it was the fall that did it at all” she said and started to check the stairs and the skirting board that ran alongside them, “I haven’t been able to find any blood or dents or anything and he was a big man”

Grace watched Marion searching for clues, she was animated and mundane. There was a sense of macabre delight in all this. Did Marion feel it? Or was it just Grace? She found herself sitting on the second step, morbidly compelled to be close to the place of death.

She imagined the large body turning heavily and landing with a slump at the bottom, the head at an awkward angle up against the wall, a tortured look on the ruddy face, the bloodshot, terrified eyes wide open.

“They said he’d probably been dead for an hour when I found him, maybe more. He looked peaceful.” Marion said and sat on the stairs next to her daughter.

She became wistful, “I haven’t seen his face looking like that for twenty odd years, not since our honeymoon, completely relaxed he seemed, he was smiling, “ she looked at Grace “Ask Andrew, he saw him, he said it too, he was really smiling….Oh look! ” she picked up a circular plastic thing the size of a nipple from the floor next to the piano leg, “I keep finding these, they must have tried to get him going again.” She put the disc in her pocket and pointed to a pale stain on the carpet, “this is the stuff that came out of his mouth, I’m not washing that off, I think I’ll leave that there”.

Marion sat down again next to Grace and they both looked into the place where the man had died, and the silence of the unfamiliar settled on them.

“I gave him a kiss to say goodbye. I did love him.” Marion said finally and her eyes trickled up and down the keys on the piano, then she began to sob. Grace thought it was a mild, unconvincing sob, like an actor in a soap opera. Had she got it wrong all those times before? When she had had no sympathy, when she had criticized her of falseness? This was the same cry. She put her arm firmly around her and for a moment Marion received it. She leant on her daughter’s shoulder and cried, like a bad actor.

The crying stopped as quickly as it started and Marion said, “I was a bitch to him….And now he’s gone” she waved her arms angrily, bizarrely in the air and looked at the ceiling,

“ Completely bloody gone! He’s just not here at all – not in this world.” Her arms dropped down to her sides and she looked at Grace and said “Isn’t that a funny thing?”
Grace stood up suddenly, she had an urge to walk out of the door and go back home.

“Let’s go upstairs and have a cup of tea” she said against all compulsion.

After a light meal, Marion went to have a nap. Grace was hot and nauseous. She went to the bathroom to wash her face in cold water. She looked in the mirror. Her cheeks were red and blotchy.

She looked in the wicker bin and found four empty cans of Tenants Super. She picked them out, and ran downstairs and she threw them away in a black bin liner in the kitchen, then she returned to the bathroom and she scrubbed away the shit she sensed was Fergus’s from the side of the toilet with the bog brush. She squirted it with bleach and flushed hard.

She went into Fergus’s bedroom. Marion and Fergus had slept in separate beds for years, and Marion had made up the bed in Fergus’s room for Grace to sleep in. There was a single bedroom next door, but Marion had said she thought Grace might like the double bed. Grace could see that Marion wanted her to sleep in there for some reason, but was surprised that she had not been more direct.

What person would volunteer to sleep in a dead man’s bed? An alcoholic dead man’s bed come to that. She wanted to ask if the mattress was clean, she wanted to check the room for odours and she knew that if she had asked for the single room Marion would not have refused her, but she found that she didn’t ask. She found herself accepting the room she was being given.

The Ercol dining chair he had sat in for hours each day, month after month was by the window, facing outwards diagonally, and there was a square cushion in a William Morris style fabric, its corner was pressed over the side of the wooden seat and it was flattened into the shape of his backside.

For a moment Grace saw him clearly, as if he was made of glass, sitting there, those hopeless, bloodshot, worried eyes, watching the little garden birds hopping from branch to branch. She closed the curtains, moved the chair to another corner, and removed the cushion which she threw across the room.

Then she stood at the end of his bed for five minutes with one hand on her hip and one hand over her mouth, and she thought to herself “Am I ruthless? Am I hard? When did that happen?” and the phone started ringing from another room somewhere.

She ran down the stairs to the kitchen and retrieved the empty cans from the black bin liner, the ringing had stopped and she could hear her mother talking to someone, she ran upstairs and put the cans back into the wicker bin in the bathroom. She looked into the toilet hopelessly but the shit was gone forever.

She returned to Fergus’s bedroom and opened the curtains, then dragged the chair back to its original spot by the window. She replaced the cushion, but it wasn’t right, it was puffed-up, so she sat on it.

Then she stopped and looked out at the tops of the shrubs and trees in the small garden, they were waving gently. The drizzle had started up again. A robin perched on the bird feeder, bright orange in the grey, two blue tits chirped and hopped about within the small branches of a large bush, a thrush appeared on the lawn and pulled a worm from the wet grass.

She looked around the bedroom, at Fergus’s collection of die cast, scaled down replicas of cars and vans from the 1930’s and ’40’s. They covered an entire wall from floor to ceiling. They queued neatly, patiently on slim balsa wood shelves. Right in the middle was a vehicle that didn’t quite fit, a bright yellow Sitemaster Excavator, a copy of the digger that Fergus drove for years in the quarry. Grace was taken back to a time before, when she was a teenager still living at home, and she had watched him through the crack in his bedroom door. He was lying on the bed, pushing the tiny toy digger backwards and forwards in a valley between peaks in the duvet.

Grace had not had time to move before Marion came running up the stairs and pushed open the door to the room, she faltered when she saw Grace in Fergus’s chair,

“Well they just phoned and told me the results of the post- mortem, it were heart failure….I thought it was…” Grace nodded “Poor Fergus” she said and found that this time she meant it.

“You know you were always his favourite” Marion said. Grace feigned a smile, but felt her face contort in the same way her mother’s had earlier in the car. She experienced a strange hollowness, a sense of disappointed, it was an intensification of the feeling she got when she threw a ball of screwed up paper at the waste bin, expecting it to go in, and it missed.

She watched her tiny, round shouldered mother go into the bathroom, pull up her dress and sit on the loo and pee heavily, she didn’t even bother to shut the door, it was a habit that Grace had always hated, and watched her wipe herself and stand and linger over the empty cans in the bin. Finally she picked them out and took them downstairs.

The funeral was a week later. Grace had gone home in between and spent very little time thinking about her step-father’s death, it had been a busy week at work, life had gone back to normal. Given the opportunity, she found she was reluctant to go and spend anymore time with her mother than was absolutely necessary.

Grace’s brother Andrew made a speech. He spoke about how much Fergus had loved their mother, how he been a good man, a good step father. Yeah right…and what about the rest? Grace thought. But it wasn’t so much the false presentation of his role as a husband or parent that bothered her, it was deceit in the face of death, it was so ultimately cynical.

So, while her brother delivered his well meaning words, she tried hard to salvage something. She gave her attention to the ambiguity and irresolution of his life, she thought of the terrors he fought against, of the boy he killed, the boy who died in his arms, the addiction, the inability to ever enjoy – and all of those unsolved problems, blunt, cruel, dumb, and forever unsettled.

She remembered the birds on the tree in the garden, going about their business with such clear, simple purpose, and discovered there for a moment the relief of transparency, but it was private, idealistic.
Then she saw her own life, like the tree cut right through its middle, and on the inside it too was dense, complicated and ugly, and that clear, tidy feeling of gladness was overwhelmed, and so remote that she could no longer even grasp what it had been, or what had been the point of it.

During the requisite dirge, ‘ Abide with Me’ her weeping began and intensified, by the final verse she was paroxysmal. She was so ashamed, but she could not stop.

Tara Gould is the founder of Brighton’s seminal short fiction night, “Short Fuse” at Komedia. Currently working on her first novel, she is the winner of two short story awards and has had plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4.