BIRDS ON A CLOTHESLINE

Oh dear. Did I write this?

It was 1950 and Karen was Karen.

Although her eyes were closed. Karen could see the birds quite clearly. Wings were flapping, beaks were squawking and the air was filled with the tweeting rabble as they quarrelled on the clothes line, dodging around between wooden and very rustic clothes pegs and dropping little clumps of their faeces onto her favourite underwear as it dried under the sun.

Her eyes were fast shut, but she could see them twittering and laughing, could hear the raucous way one c**k argued with another weaker c**k. A hen looked on and shook her head. But lads would be lads, and that made it alright.

But it wasn’t alright to Karen. She lay back in the deckchair she had bought from a second-hand shop before the war and wept. She didn’t weep very often, but the array of argumentative birds so close to where she was trying to rest was getting to her.

“Auntie Karen…” Was that a voice calling from the mouth of her darling son, young William in his soggy nappy, the darling who she had… no, she hadn’t, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t… But it was William..., or had the birds finally caught on to who she was and learned to mimic the lad in order to tease her? She knew they could do things like that. She’d heard one robin giving gruff orders to the old man next door and he’d actually had the nerve to tell it to shut up, or else he’d shoot it.

Shall I open my eyes and see who’s calling me? She let her head roll to one side so that she might see who was calling her, and squinted. The day took on a different hue. Gone was the rustic scene, the washing line, the pegs, the birds in joyous dance, everything she loved about the world of darkness when she closed her eyes. The twittering stopped, and she knew why.

She wasn’t in her garden after all. She was in a prison cell and the twittering was the endless rattle of her insane cell-mate, Josephine. Why was she always like this, rattling on about how hard it was to be a mother when the child is a tomcat and wanted do no more than to die. She knew that’s what it has wanted and she never tired of rattling out how she knew. So she had killed the cat only to find it wasn’t a cat at all.

“Do shut up, Josephine,” she shrilled, and she closed her eyes again so that the deckchair and its luxury could return and the birds resume their intoxicating battle of squeaks. But it wasn’t the same because a chaffinch decided to use the voice of Josephine in order to further torment Karen.

“They’ll come for you dear Karen, when the clock strikes nine,” the chaffinch croaked, and somewhere at the other end of the clothes line a bell tolled sonorously.

Karen squeezed her eyes shut ever more tightly. They hurt as she pushed her balled fists into them and a blackbird scowled before bellowing how wrong it was to let red blood flow in rivers, like the Nile through Egypt. But I know it’s wrong and that’s why I didn’t do it, she whispered, “They said I did, but I didn’t.”

The blackbird merely gazed at her. She was certain that it looked quite sceptical as she saw it through her own tightly clenched eyes.

“Help me,” she begged it.

And it might have done just that. Might have pulled a pistol from under one wing and shot her though the heart. Or on the other hand it might have laughed a lullaby and helped her to a quiet, living sleep until it became a dying sleep. But instead it cocked its head on one side and told her that tomorrow was only another day in the world.

The day they said they would come for her and take her to the condemned cell, where she would hang.

From the neck until she was dead, they said. For infanticide. For taking the life of her angel child and squeezing every morsel of love out of it. Because that had happened and they said it was she who had done it. To William.

“Nine o’clock on the morrow,” chirruped the chaffinch using Josephine’s voice. “They were talking about you, sweet Karen. I heard them, the sadistic screws on death row…”

So Karen closed her eyes again and tried to relax. Two sparrows were giggling together on the clothes line.

“All the soldiers murdered in the war that ended,” one said to the other,

“And all the other soldiers doing the murdering,” agreed the other, and praised for it.

“And they don’t face the judge,” sighed the first sparrow, “for taking scores of lives. Men and women and, yes, children who they didn’t know… medals, yes, but no noose.”

“But she knew her son,” tweeted a nearby starling, “which is why she’s got to hang.”

“Tomorrow, when the clock strikes nine,” grunted the robin in his birdhouse.

“Stop it!” she screeched, “for goodness sake, give me some peace! I didn’t do it! You all know that I didn’t!”

That night was the worst of Karen’s life. A bullfinch saw to that, he and his bitter foe, a blind black crow. They enacted the horrors of the following day when justice was supposed to be done. When Karen would be rewarded for suffocating her wretched son. At nine o'clock. Just after breakfast and accompanied by a mongoloid priest chanting from his good book.

And so saith the eagle, so singest the albatross, so mourns the owl in his wisdom… he droned, and the dirge rattled round Karen’s head until she knew that finally she was mad. She had to be because the cell door opened and a rook told her she was free, she could go, get out of that deckchair, go and taste the purity of free air.

And when she opened her insane eyes to see there were dozens of tweittering birds on te clothes line, and her little son ran up to her, his nappy round his ankles, and told her he loved her, of course he did, he always would, she was the perfect mother, everyone knew that…

And she dropped like a stone until the rope caught her neck.

And the world was nothing but shadows before it flickered out altogether.

© Peter Rogerson 19.03.23

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