Here is the final submitted piece which I have put forward for a competition to win a place on the Arvon Literary Experience. It was originally a piece I wrote in the INK workshop on February 17th, 2016, created by inspiration from the various texts we had been provided with (this being influenced by Richard Jefferies - and, it seems, by Ted Hughes also!)
I wanted them to leave. My call to the council yielded no relief and left me feeling more than a little peeved that they considered it ‘a matter not within their jurisdiction.’ I consulted my neighbours hoping they would be of the same mind as me. Mrs Kavanagh just gave me a funny look and went back to pruning her roses, while Mr. White laughed, saying it was nature at its finest and if I couldn’t stand this then what would I say when I had kids. Now it was my turn to give a funny look. Faced with no support, even from my partner Jacob, I was reduced to stopping my ears with cut-price pharmacy ear-buds and putting up with the rowdy hooligans.
Who, you ask? Crows. In numbers I had never thought possible. From the alighting of the first in mid-March, more had flocked like scraps of bin bag carried on the wind and snagged by a branch, until the boughs were clad in black with their ridiculous multitudes. And there they had stayed. Their nests were constructed within the fortnight from all manner of branches, wires, and plastic in the arms of a solitary elm copse, so you can imagine the unholy level of conversation. On warm nights, their cawing would persist for hours and I only had my crappy ear-buds to thank for what little sleep I got on such occasions.
Sometimes, if I was otherwise unoccupied, I’d sit and watch them wing to and fro, bringing small rodents and the contents of bin bags back with them to feed their nesting mates. Yet even this show of devotion from the most black-hearted of birds couldn’t endear them to me. Admittedly, there was a kind of stateliness to these inky interlopers, something about their pitch silhouette against the waking spring world, however they also reminded me of winter recently departed. I imagined the grass silvering under their feet, snow falling in their shadowy wake, the daffodils withering in their mere presence. Poetry aside, though, they were simply a nuisance.
It seemed to be a never-ending war against their noise and thievery and shit – a nightmare to clean off the car every morning before work – while my simple desire for peace and quiet could be shattered at a moment’s notice as they squalled overhead. Tending the garden, I’d often point a hose at one if it strayed onto the lawn, sending it exploding into flight, and always reminded Jacob to wait until dawn before putting out the rubbish bins to prevent the foxes from liberating the contents for them. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against birds in general. Aside from those disastrous day trips to Southend, which result in the same shit-splatters courtesy of the crows’ coastal relatives, you could almost call me an avid fan of all things avian. I love to watch the blackbirds rifle violently through autumn leaf-litter, hear the steamy sunrise chorus of the robin, marvel at the iridescent flocks of starlings over the city. Yet each of these birds suffers from the same fate: to be under the watchful eye of the corvid parents who would steal away chicks to feed their own. Jacob reminded me that it was no different to us killing pigs and cows to sustain ourselves – he said over our home-cooked Sunday pork roast – but I refused to let that fact alter my opinion of what the world rightfully deemed harbingers of disease, doom, and death. I recognised that nothing short of taking a chainsaw to their community would fix the problem, and resigned myself to suffering their deep-throated caws and funereal strutting until their young had found their wings and buggered off.
In the meantime, there was one amusement to be gained from all of this. Our cat Monty, a young and inquisitive ginger tom, loved to stalk the crows whenever one interrupted his midday snooze on the garden bench. I’d watch him crawl towards his victim, tail flicking eagerly as he snuck ever closer. He never caught one though, no matter how close he got; they’d always give a rough caw and flap out of reach, yet I think I got just as much of a thrill out of hoping he’d get lucky as he did. Then one day, a few weeks into the madness, he padded in through the cat-flap with a small black object in his mouth. I thought at first it was one of Mrs Kavanagh’s gladioli bulbs until I saw the feathers – and the blood. Swiftly, I shooed Monty away from the tiny creature before taking a closer look. It was indeed a crow chick, still in its nestling down, but as expected, there wasn’t a breath of life in it. The smears of blood on the lino were evidence enough.
Monty gave an indignant meow as he sat staring at the little corpse from the other side of the kitchen.
“Did you do this?” I asked him, as I tore off a sheet of kitchen roll. He merely scowled and licked his stained paws. When I gingerly picked the bird up with the paper, however, he started forward, ears raised, and glared at me with his peculiar green eyes. “No, Monty, you can’t eat this – and I’m not eating it either,” I remarked, remembering what I had read about cats treating us like their larger, but equally incompetent offspring. Instead, I locked him in the house, fetched a spade, and buried it in the pregnant potato garden.
“It was most likely dead when he found it,” I said, pushing the dirt back in. “Baby birds die after falling from the nest all the time.” But that doesn’t explain the blood. I stopped myself. Why was I getting so worked up over a dead bird? I shoved the spade back into its bucket in the garage and returned to making lasagne, all the while trying not to think how the mushrooms reminded me of the corpse in its little paper coffin.
I soon forgot about the incident – or rather prayed that Monty wouldn’t ‘find’ anymore presents for me – while continuing my tirade against the raucous parents. I discovered a nest belonging to a blackbird in a bushy climber on our fence the following afternoon. This only further justified me charging through the garden wielding a hose or a peeler (whatever I had to hand) and screaming like a lunatic if a crow so much as looked at our garden. Mrs Kavanagh would scold me for frightening her on such occasions, while Mr White’s grandchildren would laugh and copy me (I was never sure which was worse), but at least Jacob never stopped me. His amused smile made me forget how childish I was being. It seemed to me that he was finally accepting my hostility towards our new ‘neighbours’. So much so that that weekend, I found a new motion-activated sprinkler installed in the garden, which he sheepishly admitted to buying.
“It takes forever to water the lawn with a hose anyway,” he’d said.
Although it wasn’t of much use when the feathery bastards interrupted our sex with some animalistic noises of their own.
“Spawning more loathsome offspring, no doubt,” I muttered, only appreciating the symmetry later on and wondering if that’s how crows felt about us.
Jacob ignored them, instead putting in the effort to help us drown them out.
In time, Jacob’s acceptance of my behaviour began to have a knock-on effect. Where before I had scorned the ground on which the birds walked, now I felt only simmering resentment every time one flew over. A few fledglings, all dull feathers and blue eyes, found their way into the garden as Spring matured, causing me to lock Monty in the kitchen – though that may have been as much for his own safety as theirs because they were almost as big as him. I even switched off the sprinkler once the young blackbirds had left the nest and were hopping among the daffodils after their parents. Yet still the intermittent drone of their calls persisted, the shit fell on our car, and the nesting season was far from over, which led me to ponder how this had never bothered me before.
Jacob and I had been living together for the past three years, the youngest people on our street until another couple took up residence nearby with their 4-year old daughter. I recalled that in all that time the elm copse had stood tenantless and silent. So why had they decided to make an apartment complex out of it now? During one of my sunny afternoons in the garden, tending my marigolds, I spotted Mrs Kavanagh’s floral-printed backside amongst her gladioli, and decided to ask her if she knew anything.
“Erm, Mrs Kavanagh?” I called to the backside.
There was a flustered sound and the backside wobbled a little before its owner straightened up and pushed her sunglasses down her thin nose. “Oh, it’s you, Rosanna dear. I do wish you wouldn’t keep startling me like that.”
I was tempted to say ‘Who else could it be?’, but as I wasn’t her favourite neighbour at the moment, I held my tongue. “Sorry, Mrs Kavanagh, but I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”
“Are you pregnant?” was her immediate response.
“What? No, it’s nothing like that.” I pulled my sunhat a little lower, “I was wondering if you knew anything about the crows, why they’ve only appeared now.”
“I thought you hated them, dear.”
“Jacob has been teaching me to ignore them. I just thought, as this is the first time they’ve nested in the copse over the fence, and you’ve lived here longer, you might know more.”
Mrs Kavanagh stuck her pruning scissors into her apron. “Four years before you moved here, the council made plans to level that ground and build an extra car park for Tesco. Before the announcement was made public, flocks of crows began nesting in the copse just like they are now. Nature lovers objected to the proposal, forcing the council to postpone it; this carried on for the next two years until the council dropped the plans altogether. After that, the crows didn’t reappear until now.”
I was briefly stunned before saying, “What do you think it means then? The crows’ reappearance? Do you think the council are going to try again?”
She shook her head, “They already expanded the existing car park. No, I think this means exactly what it should. That the crows have come home for good.”
“You mean they’re going to return every year?” I groaned.
“Rosanna dear, you’ve already said you’re learning to ignore them. The next step is accepting them. Who knows, by the time you have kids of your own, maybe you’ll even come to love them.”
“Do you love them?”
“Love is a strong word, dear,” she said, and went back to her gladioli, leaving me smiling at the thought that this finicky old woman and I actually had something in common.
Three more weeks went by, the mercury slowly rising into the high twenties, and the activity in the elm copse began to dwindle. I didn’t want to admit it, but Mrs Kavanagh had been right. I had started out hating their little guts for being so noisy and inconsiderate, only accepting their presence because I knew they’d be gone soon, yet as I watched the full-grown young flying away for the last time, it was with ambiguous levels of sorrow and relief. Jacob caught me gazing out of the window on one such occasion and jokingly asked if I was going to cry – I had been chopping onions at the time – but I just threw a spoon at him.
It was around this time that I realised something every girl in a sexual relationship dreads: my period was late; the difference was that I embraced the possibility it implied. Jacob and I had given children a lot of thought, especially after the arrival of the couple over the road. We’d seen their daughter chasing butterflies on her front lawn and jumping from their car in a pink tutu, and it’d made us feel incomplete. We weren’t married, though neither were they, but in the early days of our relationship, we’d planned our dream wedding just for fun, never conceiving of it becoming a reality. I mused on this while I popped to the pharmacy for a pregnancy test, and even began humming the wedding march in the toilet, but all thoughts of champagne and a coastal reception left my head in the tense few minutes that followed. A lone crow outside was the only sound, until I saw those two little pink lines, after which I was struggling to stop myself yelling the news aloud in case Mrs Kavanagh heard me through the wall.
It was tough to keep such news to myself for the rest of the day, particularly when Jacob returned from work and insisted on taking me out to dinner. I wasn’t too sure I had the courage to tell him in public.
“Rose,” he said, proffering a forkful of his black forest gateau as we sat on the outdoor patio of the restaurant, “do you remember where you put that old scrapbook of photos from when we first met?”
“Yes, it’s in a box in my wardrobe.” I ate the piece of gateau, “Why, were you thinking about reminiscing with a bottle of wine tonight?”
“More like getting ideas.” He picked up another piece and held it out again, “You like this cake right? Or was it a more traditional fruit cake you preferred?”
“What are you talking about, Jake?” I ate the second piece, still oblivious.
“Our wedding, of course. That is if you will do me the honour of accepting this ring, so I can stuff cake in your face after you officially become Mrs Lowell.” I realised he had been distracting me with the cake so he could pull the tiny velvet box from his pocket which now sat open in his palm. Then everyone was cheering, a champagne bottle popped, and he was there on one knee, asking me to marry him. In the confusion, I managed to say yes and pretty much fell into his arms, but the elation disappeared when I felt I was being watched. I opened my eyes to see a crow on a nearby railing over his shoulder.
Cocking its head, it seemed to say ‘Forgetting something?’
My hand went unconsciously to my stomach and I drew back from Jacob’s embrace.
“I have a surprise for you too, Jake, but you’d better eat your cake first.”
