Authors: Malcolm D Welshman
Lucy began to giggle. ‘She’s flipped her lid,’ she said.
‘Shh … it’s no laughing matter,’ I said. But I could feel a bubble of laughter welling up in my throat.
Liza spun over three times, hit the metal bars of the cage, gripped, and blindly climbed her way up, the cone crashing wildly from side to side, slamming against food hoppers and bars alike. She reached the top and stopped, her head out of sight, the cone pressed up against the roof of the cage. She suddenly relaxed her grip and shot rapidly down the bars.
By now Lucy was convulsed with giggles, her eyes streaming.
‘Shh … shh …’ I implored, ‘Mrs Smethurst might hear you.’ But the bubble of laughter in my throat was about to burst out. I rammed my knuckles into my mouth as I tried to stop it.
Meanwhile, Liza had clawed her way back up and dropped down again. Only to zoom back up and spiral down yet again. She was like an animated yo-yo. Up, down … up, down.
Ha, ha, ha … out poured the laughter … hee, hee, hee … Oh dear God … please … but no, it was uncontrollable. I was as helpless as a kitten, splitting my sides. Lucy, too, was squirming and writhing, an explosion of giggles. We hopped and skipped round the prep room, bent over, arms wrapped tightly round our chests. Ha, ha, ha … hee, hee, hee … impossible to stop. Oh deary me, what a laugh … what a scream.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
The voice was sharp and crystal clear. Crystal Sharpe’s to be precise. The door had been thrown open and she was standing there looking at us. Unlike us, she was not amused; far from it.
I reeled to a halt.
‘S-s-sorry, Crystal,’ I spluttered. ‘It’s just that …’ my voice rose to squeak, ‘it’s just that …’ my voice rose even higher … tee, hee, hee … I caught sight of Liza now standing on her head, the cone acting as a base, her naked legs pedalling the air above her. It was all too much. Another wave of giggles spilled out – tee, he, he …
‘It’s not funny,’ snapped Crystal, marching over to the cage where she reached in and turned Liza the right way up. ‘There’s a client up in reception wondering what all the commotion is about. I take it this is her bird?’
I nodded, my sides aching, my eyes feeling swollen and bleary.
‘Well, you’d better go and explain yourself,’ continued Crystal. With that, she spun on her heels and stormed out. Whoops. There goes my Julie Andrews.
Mrs Smethurst was dubious when she saw her collared cockatoo. ‘Are you sure she’s not going to harm herself?’ she queried.
‘No … really. I think she’ll get used to it quite soon,’ I replied with more conviction than I felt. ‘But if there are any problems please don’t hesitate to get in contact.’
She did, five hours later, when I’d just got into bed.
Mandy was on night duty and phoned to say Mrs Smethurst thought Liza was dying.
My feet hit the floor with a thud.
‘Not that damned parrot again,’ mumbled Lucy, next to me.
‘Cockatoo,’ I corrected, hopping around as I struggled into my jeans. ‘Mrs Smethurst thinks she’s snuffing it.’
‘Plucked herself to death, shouldn’t wonder,’ yawned Lucy, snuggling back down under the duvet.
By the time I’d driven to Prospect House, Mandy had let Mrs Smethurst in and the cage was on the consulting table.
‘So much for your collar,’ said Mrs Smethurst. ‘It’s done for Liza.’
I peered into the cage. Liza was lying prostrate on the floor, motionless, her claws tucked into the neck of the cone, her chest heaving in small, spasmodic jerks. I unbolted the cage door and dragged the bird out. She lay in the palm of my hand without a struggle, not a murmur, not a squawk. It really seemed she was on her last legs.
‘Legs,’ I exclaimed.
Mrs Smethurst frowned, her rabbit-nose twitched.
‘Liza’s legs,’ I went on. ‘Look.’ I got hold of one and tugged; it wouldn’t budge. ‘That’s why she’s so still … she’s stuck. See?’ I showed Mrs Smethurst how Liza’s sharp claws had pierced the X-ray film and had made her immobile. When I’d extracted her claws, she began to thrash around once more.
‘I’m sorry but I can’t go through all that again,’ protested Mrs Smethurst.
‘No, of course not,’ I agreed and snipped through the knots and removed the collar.
Liza strutted up and down her perch triumphantly. Then she stopped, twisted her head over her back, yanked out a broken tail feather and held it in her claws, waving it to and fro like a banner at a victory parade.
Mrs Smethurst sighed. ‘She really is the limit. I don’t how much longer I can put up with her.’
It turned out to be a month. One blustery Autumn day I was presented with the moth-eaten bird and asked if I could find a new home for her.
‘It’s a long story,’ said Mrs Smethurst, taking a deep breath, her bosoms expanding against her cashmere sweater.
‘No hurry,’ I murmured, my eyes drawn to the sweater like two flies to a pear. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
Mrs Smethurst took another nice, deep breath and began. It seems she had started to let Liza out of her cage each day in the hope it would be an extra distraction for her. Yesterday evening, she had walked in, her hair in curlers. Liza, perhaps thinking the curlers were some sort of new toy, flew across and landed on her head. There followed, by all accounts, an agonising tussle as Liza got caught up in a curler, started flapping and scrabbling, her claws digging into the poor woman’s scalp. Here, Mrs Smethurst’s face contorted at the memory. She paused and drew a hand over her sweater. ‘Sorry … if you could just bear with me a moment,’ she said with a little quiver.
‘No problem,’ I replied with a bigger quiver.
Once more composed, she continued. She had staggered about, both she and Liza screaming, getting in an absolute tizz. Her husband had rushed to the rescue with a towel, smothering the bird and his wife’s head. He had finally managed to prise Liza off along with a clump of hair.
‘Can you imagine how it felt?’ enquired Mrs Smethurst, taking another deep breath.
Oh yes … yes … yes. Indeed I could.
The bird had to go, concluded Mrs Smethurst. Would I take her?
Oh yes … yes … yes. Indeed I would.
‘You did what?’ screeched Lucy that evening.
Before I could explain, there was a loud squawk from the hall. Liza, pleased to hear a kindred spirit, had screeched in reply.
We soon learnt what that screech meant – don’t you dare leave me. If you do, I’ll screech the house down until you return. It was the sort of screech that went right through the wall; the sort that screeched through the ceiling and screeched through your cranium, setting your nerves on edge like nails raking down a blackboard. Even Joan and Doug next door heard it and phoned to enquire whether all was well and was it some sort of sick chicken that we were treating.
Liza didn’t squawk so much if let out; so for the sake of our eardrums, she was allowed more and more freedom.
Having given the room the once-over to make sure Nelson or Queenie and her friends weren’t around to upset her, she’d fix her beady eye on me, give a ‘Here I come’ squawk and soar across to land on the back of the settee. Here, she’d bob up and down, her three remaining crest feathers raised, her naked neck stretched out. Her crop often bulged, the white gleam of lumps of peanut showing through the thin grey skin like a nodular abscess about to burst.
With scarcely any plumage left to savage, she decided to have a go at the three remaining crest feathers on the top of her head. To achieve this required considerable dexterity. She would balance on one leg, raise the other foot and tilt her head down to grab a crest feather in her claws. Then she’d tug and tug, pulling her head lower and lower as she tried to wrench the feather out. More often than not, she’d yank so hard that she’d lose her balance and topple forward, cartwheeling down the side of the settee only to scramble back up with an indignant squawk and try again.
‘She needs more distractions,’ stated Lucy.
‘I’ve been through all that with Mrs Smethurst,’ I said. ‘Short of another bird as a companion … hey, maybe that’s the answer.’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ warned Lucy.
I shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t worry. It’s highly unlikely, as cockatoos don’t come cheap.’
‘No, they come bloody squawking,’ complained Lucy, stuffing her fingers in her ears as Liza let rip again – this time alarmed by the sight of a lion stalking across the TV screen.
It was barely a week later when Major flew into our lives. A client from another practice heard I was a ‘bird man’ and phoned to ask if I’d be interested in taking on her cockatoo. I went round to see the bird.
‘Does Major … er … squawk?’ I asked, standing in front of the cage. He had been suspiciously quiet since my arrival.
‘Very rarely,’ said the lady and went on to explain that Major had been her son’s but now that he’d left home there was no one to devote time to the bird.’
‘Doesn’t feather pluck I see.’ Major had a full compliment of smart, white feathers and a fine sweep of a yellow-tipped crest.
‘No, he’s got no vices,’ said the lady vaguely. ‘Nothing to speak of that is.’
Well, there was a vice … a vice not mentioned … a vice only discovered when I got Major home.
We were in the kitchen when a commotion erupted from the sitting room. It sounded like someone beating the hell out of a tin kettle.
‘What on earth’s that racket?’ said Lucy almost dropping the eggs she’d been taking out of the fridge. I ran in to investigate.
For once, Liza was actually quiet, watching Major, her two remaining crest feathers raised in bewilderment. He, on the other hand, was creating the noise, ramming his beak into his food hopper, beating it against the sides like some demented pop group’s drummer.
‘Perhaps that’s why he’s called Major,’ said Lucy, when she came through.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Drum Major,’ she explained as the cockatoo beat another tattoo in his hopper, scattering sunflower seed in all directions.
But Major hadn’t finished yet. He looked up as if to make sure we were watching and then launched himself forward from his perch while still hanging on. The momentum in his dive allowed him to flip under the perch and haul himself back up the other side using his beak. He was like a Catherine wheel. A spinning blur of white; a real comic turn. Quite amazing.
It was a trick that subsequently never failed to make us smile, especially on those occasions when it didn’t quite come off and he was left swinging backwards and forwards, clinging to his perch upside down.
Liza chose to ignore this new joker and, after that initial silence, returned to her daily torrent of screeches directed solely at us.
Still, I put their cages side by side for a week and then decided to put the birds together, but in a new cage.
‘Why a new one?’ queried Lucy.
‘Bit of psychology,’ I explained. ‘Meeting on new territory should help to lessen any aggression between them. There, look at that.’
Having been put in with Major, Liza had now run up to him, her remaining crest feather raised, her beak giving a friendly click-click. ‘They’re making friends already.’
But Major wasn’t having any of it; he huddled up against the side of the cage, his strident hiss making it clear he had no wish for flirtations from his Antipodean sister, already undressed, flaunting her naked flesh at him.
That night, each bird roosted at opposite ends of the perch. We were woken at 5.00am by our own dawn chorus of screeches emanating from the sitting room.
‘Now what?’ moaned Lucy, burying her head under the pillow while her heel, planted firmly in the small of my back, ensured I was ejected to investigate.
Liza ran along the perch to give me a bob, her right wing dripping blood. Huddled at the other end sat Major, the picture of innocence, except his beak was smeared with red.
The wound wasn’t serious – a nick in the skin – so I decided to risk leaving the birds together – a foolish move. Another commotion in the early hours of the following morning, combined with Lucy’s heel in my back again, forced me to change my mind. Liza was getting beaten up and my back was getting sore. The birds were separated.
From that moment on, they totally ignored each other. We would come into the room and they would each vie for our attention, screeches from Liza, hopper bashing and perch somersaults from Major. Each seemed to spur the other on to new heights of frenzy.
Lucy and I were finally driven to distraction when both birds added the other’s repertoire to its own so that we ended up with two bobbing, somersaulting, hopper-bashing, screeching cockatoos. Major, having the more powerful lungs, left us feeling as if Big Ben had been striking on our mantelpiece – we were totally tolled off and wrung out. All too much.
In desperation, I phoned a local garden centre that I knew had an aviary in its greenhouse section – designed to give a tropical ambience to the purchase of trays of pansies and petunias. The owner was more than willing to take on two cockatoos.
‘For free you say?’
For free, he was assured.
‘What’s wrong with them then?”
‘Well they do screech a bit.’
‘That’s not a problem.’