The Burying Beetle (18 page)

A Young Folks Natural History
has this bit about hedgehogs:

Everyone knows that the hedgehog is a sworn enemy of reptiles in general and of the viper in particular; but few, perhaps, are aware in what way he contrives to overcome so recalcitrant and dangerous an enemy and make a meal of it. My keeper was going his round – Ferdinand Coste tells the story – this summer in a wood which is unfortunately infested with vipers, when he espied an enormous one asleep in the sun. He was on the point of killing it with a charge of shot when he perceived a hedgehog coming cautiously over the moss and noiselessly approaching the reptile. He then witnessed a curious sight. As soon as the hedgehog was within reach of his prey, he seized it by the tail with his teeth, and as quick as thought rolled himself into a ball. The viper, awakened by the pain, at once turned, and, perceiving his enemy, made a terrific dart at him. The hedgehog did not wince. The viper, infuriated, extends itself, hisses and twists with fearful contortions. In five minutes it is covered in blood, its mouth one huge wound, and it lies exhausted on the ground. A few more starts, then a last convulsive agony, and it expires. When the hedgehog perceived that it was quite dead he let go his hold and quietly unrolled himself. He was just about to begin his meal and devour the reptile when the sight of my keeper, who had approached during the struggle, alarmed him, and he rolled himself up again until the man had retreated into the wood.

That’s from
A Young Folks Natural History
. Reading these old-fashioned books written by amateur naturalists is as exciting as watching a good wild-
life programme on the telly.

I’m not allowed to say I’m bored. Mum hates it when anyone says they’re bored.

Only unintelligent people are bored
, she says, and I’m so ignorant I have no excuse to be bored. ‘There is So Much More for me to learn.’ But nothing interesting or exciting has happened since our bird-watching outing. Can people die from boredom?

There is a thick impenetrable white mist surrounding us. You’d never know where the house is in relation to anywhere else. It’s like being in the middle of a pearl. There’s no sea or sky or cliff or even garden. We are floating in nothingness, and although it’s rather disconcerting, I like it. It’s like we’re invisible – not of the world, and we can do exactly what we want. It’s like being blind. The mist takes away our hearing and sight. But instead of being handicapped, diminished, disabled by our lack of vision, we are somehow more aware of what life is. It’s inside our heads, our hearts. All there is, is what’s inside of us.

The beautiful terrible world full of earthquakes and murders and miracles out there is obliterated but we remember it vaguely. The mist is a like a wedding veil through which we see whatever we want to see. Our future and our past.

Mum wore a wedding veil. Her hair was long and straight and she wore a sort of tiara of real rosebuds and a long cream silk dress, dreamy and floaty. She looked gorgeous.

I expect she saw her future through the veil and the future was heavenly – life with Daddy. Being loved forever.

And then I arrived on the scene. Mum had some sort of well-paid job in a graphics company, designing book jackets and stuff, but she gave it up before I was born. And since I was born she’s not had a job. She’s had to look after me. She is doing something now though – Saturdays at the estate agents.

I’m usually perfectly happy to stay on my own for a few hours. I mostly enjoy my own company and if I need her in a hurry I know I can always phone the estate agents’ office.

This sea-mist is full of light. I don’t know how that is. It’s not a grim dark gloomy mist like it was on my birthday, the day of the total eclipse. This is a much more cheerful sort of mist. You can see the water particles, tiny dewdrops, and all the cobwebs on the pines are suddenly visible, glowing diamonds strung on the lacy snares.

I remember a brooch of silver and diamonds that Grandma wore sometimes that looked just like those cobwebs.

There are two pigeons huddled damp on a horizontal branch, not cooing or moaning. The branches are heavy with moisture, bent low over the deck.

The house is still full of light. Every window has the sea in it. Except today. Instead, it is as if we are afloat in the sea or sky, lost in space and time. Cloudland, where everything is dimly seen. Hazy and filmy, yet dazzling.

It’s like being under a mosquito net.

Mum and Daddy and I under a mosquito net together in their bed, laughing as thunder crashes and lightning draws closer all around us, and the flood sweeping red crabs past our wooden house on stilts, and the vervet monkeys screeching on the metal roof.

We have no horizon. Yet the mist is bright. And we are concealed in its blur.

Lost.

I have dreams of being lost. I can’t get home. Wherever home might be. There are mountains to climb or broken stairs and ladders, boulders, obstacles on all sides. I miss the last bus/train/plane/boat. The waves are mountainous, the wind furious, the rain torrential. I have lost my clothes, my glasses, my mother and father and grandparents and friends. My cats. Everything. I’ve lost my way.

Mum and I were on a small tropical island somewhere at night. No lights, not even the moon. We sat on the beach in absolute dark listening to the sound of sand being shovelled until our eyes became accustomed to the night and we began to make out the shape of a huge turtle sweeping away the sand with its flippers and gradually forming a deep hollow. The turtle’s eggs were soft white ping-pong balls – a hundred of them dropped into the sand. We were there for hours, it seemed, and I nearly fell asleep in Mum’s arms. And when we walked back along the beach to our room, there was phosphorescence washed in on the beach and I gathered the little balls of strange stuff and wrapped them around my wrist and my fingers like neon jewels – glowing blue opals born in the sea. And then a huge shooting star fell into the sea.

It might sound as if I’ve made it up, or as if it’s a dream, but it was true. It happened. I have a colourful past.

PARADISE
PARK
.
THERE are aviaries with parrots and other exotic birds screeching and climbing and flying around among foreign looking trees with large leaves. They’ve all got loads of room and privacy and look very healthy and well cared for. We watch the penguins being fed. Little children throw fresh mackerel to them and the penguins swim and dive for the fish. There’s one old man of a penguin, very ruffled and fat, who totters around on the rocks in the middle, and doesn’t get anything to eat. Someone throws fish to him, but a herring gull pretending to be a penguin gets there first. I’m sure he’ll get fed properly later –
the elderly penguin.

We watch the free-flying exhibition. A golden eagle, a snowy white owl, an eagle
owl and a bald eagle all fly around and land on various posts or on the handlers gloved hands. It’s brilliant. When the birds fly high they are bombed by herring gulls.

There are goats and pigs and ponies and other domestic animals. The goats are from another planet. They have these weird eyes with horizontal rectangular slits as irises. They sort of look at you but they don’t have any earthly intelligence. Also, they eat anything, absolutely anything – the paper bag with their food in, and my sleeve, for example. I love the way they kneel on their front knees when they are eating something on the ground.

There’s this little girl near me watching the goats.

She turns to me and says, ‘Its bottom hole got bigger and bigger and then it did a plop.’

And I say to her, ‘That’s what your bottom does when you do a plop.’ And her eyes get rounder and rounder.

And her mum drags her away to look at the miniature ponies.

My favourite bird in Paradise is a kea. It looks like it’s wearing armour. Its beak is long, curved and very sharp. It has an almost human walk, a kind of swagger. The kea stops suddenly and looks over its shoulder at me through the wire. It has a raucous and hilarious cry. I could watch it for hours but we move on as it’s lunchtime and Mum’s hungry.

‘Come on, Gussie, I’m dying for a beer.’

After she’s had a beer we go back into the park and have a picnic of egg sandwiches and I feel guilty that we are eating eggs. Stupid, I know. They are organic, free-range, so it’s OK.

There’s an adventure playground with Tarzan ropes and stuff, which I don’t bother with, but it does look fun.

There are even flamingos. It would be great to work here. I love it.

One of the men who had come to our garden actually took us to see the macaws and went inside another aviary to pick up a deep blue feather for me. The macaws look perfectly happy in their leafy home and Harry shows no signs of recognising us. I expect they are pleased to have found each other again, though, Harry and Mavis.

And we feed nectar to the rainbow birds. They perch on your sleeve and sip the nectar from a little yoghurt pot.

A lovely day but tiring.

We watched
Bringing Up Baby
last night. It’s another of my favourite films of all time. Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. She is positively anorexic but wears lovely clothes and never stops talking. George, the dog, is a very good actor. He runs off with a precious prehistoric bone and hides it. The best line in the film is spoken by Cary Grant. He says: ‘When a man is in the middle of a pond wrestling with a swan he’s in no position to run.’

For some reason I thought this was hilariously funny and couldn’t stop giggling, and that started Mum off and we nearly wet ourselves, we laughed so much.

‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.’ That’s the song they have to keep on singing to Baby – that’s the leopard. Except there’s another leopard – an escaped-from-the-circus man-eater, and things get complicated after that.

We sat in front of the telly eating our supper – fish soup – which was so delicious I’ve got the recipe from Mum. I think I ought to get all her interesting recipes. She’s ace with leftovers. I’ll write them for posterity.

CURRIED GURNARD SOUP

Ingredients:

Sliced raw potatoes

Sliced raw carrots

Rocket

Coriander

3 large tomatoes, quartered

A handful of crabmeat

Leftover curried gurnard from last night (cooked in green curry paste and coconut milk).

Gurnard is a very cheap local fish, which Mum bought, filleted, in St Ives. She says it is Underrated, Luckily.

Method:

Cook vegetables in stock with tomatoes.

Add rocket and coriander, curried fish, with sauce, and crabmeat.

Serve with croutons – small slices of bread toasted in the oven – and freshly grated Parmesan or Gruyere cheese.

Mum usually makes
rouille
, which is a fiery thick sauce, to put on top of the bread, but the curried fish was hot enough. I suddenly have an appetite for fishy things.

I
FOUND
THIS in WH Hudson’s
The Land’s End
:

On yet another morning I was awakened before daylight, but this was a happy occasion, the boats having come in during the small hours laden with the biggest catch of the season. The noise of the birds made me get up and dress in a hurry to go and find out what it was all about. For an hour and a half I stood at the end of the little stone pier watching the cloud and whirlwind o
f vociferous birds, and should have remained longer but for a singular accident – a little gull tragedy – which brought a sudden end to the feast. The men in fifty boats while occupied in disengaging the fish from the nets were continually throwing the small useless fish away, and these, falling all round in the water, brought down a perpetual rush and rain of gulls from overhead; everywhere they were frantically struggling on the water, while every bird rising with a fish in his beak was instantly swooped down upon and chased by others.
Now one of the excited birds while rushing down by chance struck a rope or spar and fell into the water at the side of a boat, about forty yards from where I was standing. It was a herring gull in mature plumage, and its wing was broken. The bird could not understand this; it made frantic efforts to rise, but the whole force exerted being in one wing merely caused it to spin rapidly round and round. These struggles eventually caused the shattered bone to break through the skin; the blood began to flow and redden the plumage
on one side. This was again and again washed off in the succeeding struggle to rise, but every time a pause came the feathers were reddened afresh. At length the poor thing became convinced that it could no longer fly, that it could only swim, and at once ceasing to struggle it swam away from the boats and out towards the open bay. Hardly had it gone a dozen yards from the boat-side where it had fallen before some of the gulls flying near observed it for the first time, and dropping to within three or four yards of the surface hovered over it. Then a strange thing happened. Instantly, as if a shot had been fired to silence them, the uproar in the harbour ceased; the hundreds of gulls fighting on the water rose up simultaneously to join the cloud of birds above, and the whole concourse moved silently away in one direction, forming a dense crowd above the wounded bird. In this formation, suspended at a height of about thirty yards over and moving with him, they travelled slo
wly out into the middle of the bay.