Flying Under Bridges (21 page)

As Eve
left the paved town behind and wandered up into the woods she could feel her
back relax and spirits lift. A row of diggers and trucks stood idle and groups
of men in hardhats were discussing plans and tactics. The police had been called
several times and now one lone bobby kept an eye on the protesters. Tom the
protester. Tom her son. She saw him sitting cross-legged in front of his tent,
with work spread out around him. His long, knotty hair hung around his
shoulders. He had explained it to her. It was a Rastafarian thing. Apparently
if you stop washing your hair, after a few months it stops getting any dirtier.
Eve still longed to plunge him in the bath and get the scissors out. It wasn’t
the look of it that bothered her, but she was his mother. She was supposed to
keep him clean. It was her job.

Tom was
busy stuffing a duck but not in the Delia Smith sense. He had taken up
taxidermy at the age of twelve after his much-loved hamster had unexpectedly
choked on a carrot top. Unable to bear the pain of his loss, Tom had set about
teaching himself the ancient art of dead animal preservation. First in his
bedroom and later in the loft, which Adam had converted for him. His father had
tried to be supportive at first but it was a tricky subject. The smell of
formaldehyde was appalling and then people heard about Tom’s hobby and took to
dropping cardboard boxes of road-kill or near road-kill on the front doorstep.
In the end, Adam had given him an ultimatum. ‘Tom,’ he had announced to his son
and heir, ‘you are sixteen and this is still my house. You either stop this
disgusting business or you move out.

Tom
moved out and on, until now. Until Bluebell Wood. He seemed happy. He lived the
life he wanted. He would find a battle that needed fighting, quietly turn up
and stay until the matter was settled. It made him content. It gave him
purpose. Eve wished Adam could be pleased for their eldest but she knew Adam
couldn’t get over the disappointment of his son not following him into double
indemnities.

Tom’s
taxidermy was strange but very good. Very good if you like that sort of thing.
A lot of the displays he made were very realistic. Not mice having tea
parties. None of that sort of thing. There was nothing Beatrix Potterish or
cute about any of it. It was all rats digging away at sacks of grain, otters
damming things and lately he had taken to doing more exotic displays.
Everything had to be real, with as many elements of correct vegetation as
possible. It wasn’t just dead animals in poses but entire habitats. Little naturalistic
scenes of wildlife going about their business, surrounded by bits of twig and,
in the case of one small rodent, actual running water. The badger and his
burrow had occupied a major corner of the bathroom until Adam put in the power
shower.

Tom was
pleased to see his mother. He stood and hugged her. He was taller than her now
and she felt the rough cotton of his loose top against her face as she held him
close. A small fire was burning near the tent and a battered old kettle was
just beginning to whistle.

‘Can I
make you some tea?’ he asked, as he might have had he lived in a house on the
estate. He made nettle tea and poured it into a tin mug. Because she was his
mother, Eve had brought Tom some clean pants and socks, which she laid
carefully on top of his sleeping bag in the tent. Then Tom laid out a blanket
for Eve and she sat down. It was summer now and the place was in full bloom. No
one could have decorated their house better.

‘Consider
the lilies of the field, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one
of these.’

Tom’s
friends and fellow protesters were gathering wood or chatting under the trees.
Eve could hear the birds and the crackle of the fire and she wished Adam could
be there. She wished he could be there and enjoying it. A small pack of the
hard-hat men wandered past and stared at Tom with open disgust. Eve’s son was
the enemy of progress. A dangerous, unwashed, possibly unhinged eco-warrior.
Eve waited till they had gone.

‘How’s
the protest?’ she asked.

Tom sat
quietly and stared at the halted construction vehicles in the distance. ‘It’s
okay, but I think they’re getting ready for some kind of move. Two of the guys
have moved into the trees, but I don’t know… Know what this is, Mum?’ Tom
asked, holding out the dead bird he had been working on.

‘It’s a
duck,’ Eve said. No flies on me, she thought, although there were a couple on
the duck.

‘It’s a
female duck,’ he corrected. ‘Very female.’

‘Well,
it had to be one or the other,’ Eve said. She did try to take an interest but
her knowledge was limited. Tom shook his head.

‘Oh no,
the animal and vegetable world is not universally divided into two sexes. No,
some creatures are male and female by turns; some fungi and protozoa have more
than two sexes and more than one way of coupling with them. There are lots of
all-female species — gall-making wasps, sawflies, at least nineteen species of
lizards and there is an all-female variety of fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Did
you know that Amazon mollies pirate sperm from other species to fertilise their
eggs but produce only females?’ Eve didn’t even know what an Amazon mollie was.
‘Beehives and ant communities are full of sisters working side by side but
there are no all-male species at all.’

Eve
tried to be light-hearted. ‘I’m not surprised. They can’t manage on their own.’
It was meant to be a joke but Tom just agreed.

‘Sorry,
Tom, I guess I don’t know much about it.’

‘But
that’s the secret, Mum. We must all admit our ignorance and set out to learn,
rather than pretend we already understand the mysteries of the universe.
Actually, what we really know about the world is very limited. There is nothing
that closes our minds to new information and new insights more than the feeling
that we already understand. You get sucked into seeing things the way you’ve
always seen them. Then you start making assumptions about things because of
what you knew before. You generalise and soon you have some prejudice about how
things ought to be.’

‘I don’t
know if I’m with you.’

‘Well,
have you ever seen a crow without black feathers?’

‘No.
No, I haven’t.’

‘Does
that mean there isn’t one?’

‘I don’t
know.’ And Eve didn’t. She didn’t even know what all-female Amazon mollies
were. ‘Is there such a thing?’

Tom
shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen one but I don’t think that means that there couldn’t
be, somewhere. I don’t think that we should assume that a crow has to have
black feathers. We shouldn’t presume that we know how things are going to be.’

Eve
watched him working on his duck. Trying to learn about life from the inside of
things. Digging away under the skin. He held the dead bird with great reverence
and they both stared at the deceased creature. Eve tried to think of another
question.

‘How
did it die?’

‘She’s
from the lake here in the wood. It happens every year. The females get pregnant
and they lay four or five eggs. By the time the ducklings are born the mothers
are very weak. And when they’re weak the males come and rape them. They rape
them and they hold them under the water till lots of the females drown. They
drown and there’s no one to look after the ducklings.’

‘Where
are the babies?’ Eve asked.

Tom
smiled. He lifted up the flap of his tent and pulled out an old cardboard shoe
box. There, nestled on a jumper Eve had knitted many years ago, were four
mottled brown baby ducks. They were asleep, cuddled and curled into each other.

‘Oh,
Tom!’

‘I
know.’ Tom took his mother’s hand and guided it to gently caress one of the
motherless birds. Then he grinned. ‘I did try to find them another mum. I spent
six hours in the rain wandering about. I thought maybe some relative or other.
Do you have any idea how many ducks look exactly alike?’

Eve
roared with laughter. It was just the sort of thing her Tom would do. It was
kind and a bit silly. Tom carefully put the box back in the tent.

‘I don’t
think they’ll make it but I’ll try,’ he said.

‘I
know.’ Eve was proud of him. She sipped her tea as Tom went back to his work.
After a few comfortable minutes’ silence, Tom looked up at his mother.

‘I don’t
understand about the ducks. About the rape. It doesn’t feel right. It makes you
doubt what you know about the world. Don’t you think?’

Tom
went back to his work and Eve thought about his questions. He had always had a
thousand questions to which she and Adam had had no answers. They were
questions that had never occurred to them. Tom had taught himself taxidermy
from second-hand books gathered anywhere he could find them. They were the only
possessions that travelled with him. Works from the Maison Verreaux in Paris
and Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Gripping
summer reads like
The Manner of Collecting and Preparing Fishes and Reptiles
by W. Shilling,
Practical Taxidermy
by J. H. Batty and his personal
favourite,
Death Becomes Them
—
A Complete Guide for the Amateur
Taxidermist.

Tom’s
work tools lay spread out on a large waterproof sheet beside him. There were
shears lying open next to an old penknife, tweezers, a vice fitted to a sawn
log, a small brush, a spool of nylon cord, some modelling clay, linseed oil,
plaster of Paris, forceps, needles, what Eve knew to be a skin holder with a
locked handle, a bone saw and what seemed like hundreds of artificial eyes
staring up from small plastic boxes. Everywhere a sprinkling of powdered borax
covered the surface, as if the police had been in for fingerprinting.

‘I
wanted to ask you, darling…’ Eve began cautiously. She didn’t want to seem
prejudiced in any way. ‘About the budgie in the freezer at home.’

‘Oh
yes,’ said Tom, laying his project duck out before him. ‘Sorry about that. I’ll
collect it. It wasn’t quite dead but if you just press the thorax with your
fingers for a few seconds it stops the circulation. It was Mrs Pard’s. I tried
to save it but I think it was in a lot of pain.

For a
brief moment Eve wondered where her cat Claudette’s thorax was, but she didn’t
want to ask. She felt she should be going home. There were a million things to
do and no matter how many times she saw him working with moribund animals Eve
never got used to it. Tom pulled a piece of wadding from a pile and began
stuffing it up the duck’s arse.

‘Got to
stop any blood or excrement running out,’ he said.

‘Yes,’
Eve managed. Tom opened the bird’s beak and began filling it with padding as
well. Then he closed it firmly and wrapped a small piece of thread around it to
keep it shut. The bird lay on its back with its head lolling to the right. Tom
began separating the feathers from the hollow of the breast down to its packed
anus and then made the first incision.

‘Mustn’t
pierce the flesh,’ he explained.

‘No, I
know,’ Eve said, although she didn’t. Tom gently sewed a piece of tissue to
each side of the incision to stop the feathers getting soiled. Then he took a
small saw and cut the end of the spine leaving the tail feathers attached. He
hung the bird on three fish-hooks suspended from a chain attached to a pulley
on a small wooden stand and proceeded to cut the wings with some sharp
scissors. From the bird’s feet he began to lift the skin up off the body
towards the beak without detaching it completely. Eve knew what was next. He
would cut the neck at the base of the skull. Remove the brain and draw out the
tongue and palate. He would pull out the eyes and replace them with modelling
clay before removing the flesh from the top of the skull with a scalpel. Eve
couldn’t watch. She couldn’t wait for him to wipe it all over with a dry cloth
sprinkled with borax.

Tom
stopped and examined the duck’s innards. ‘See, Mum? The ovaries are all
developed on the left side of the body.’ Tom pointed to a series of minute egg
yolks gathered in a granulated cream-coloured mass. All those baby ducks come
to nothing.

Eve
looked away from the stuffing to Tom’s neck. His head was bent over his work
and she could see the fine hairs on his neck. She remembered a holiday when he
was about five. They were at a small lake near Windermere. Tom was naked and
running through the shallows in the late afternoon sun. He had his arms raised
to the sky and he was singing, ‘I love my lake and I love my mum, I love my
lake and I love my mum 

He’d
stopped splashing and looked at Eve. ‘Mum, can we keep today just as it is? For
always?’

Eve
wanted to kiss him then. She still wanted to. Hold him close for ever and have
nothing change. She was overwhelmed with love for her son. He caught her
looking at him and she covered up.

‘Tom, I
was just checking you haven’t forgotten about dinner tonight. Shirley’s got
some news for us.

‘Vegetarian?’

‘Well,
yes, but I’m going to make rabbit for your father.’

Tom
nodded, and as usual Eve didn’t know if that meant yes or no. Adam minded
terribly about Tom, but as she sat there Eve thought that at least her son was
getting on with his own life. At least he was devoted to something. At least he
was leading the life he wanted. She just wished he had someone to share it. She
wished he had some passion for another human being. She kissed him as she left.