It was she who knew the Latin names, but sure everything was dead now anyway. Her big bed of hydrangeas was gone and you may forget about anything else. Two baby birds with beaks still soft were the only things left in this garden. Alone and nestled amongst holly, jagged near the ground but smooth near the top. They didn’t care about forgotten leeks or beans. They paid no mind to the trees, empty, all around them. They just screamed, silent, for hunger and mother - a wren who’d been shot dead early that morning.
It’s not an easy thing to shoot a wren, mind you. They are so small and hard to find. Only, if you listen, they are louder than many other birds and sing even in the cold winter wind. Phelim knew very well where they stayed, and he listened to their loud, complex song every morning. It brought him up out of his bed and set him off on his day. Until the morning, that is, when he raised up his rifle and snuffed out the birdsong completely.
‘Comhghairdeas men, tá bronntanas béag ansin now daoibh’, the old farmer chirped, while
placing a fun-sized chocolate bar into the hands of his grandchildren.
placing a fun-sized chocolate bar into the hands of his grandchildren.
‘Ah thanks very much Phelim’.
‘You’re very good Phelim’.
The two boys pushed their Twixes into their pockets. Phelim’s congratulations seemed random and vague, but they didn’t ask questions. They knew better than to agitate the autocrat. ‘IF YE DON’T WANT IT I’LL GIVE YE SOMETHING ELSE FAIRLY LIVELY’ - he might say. Beat slowly until you form a soft dough. Their mother had warned them about her dad’s wooden spoon. Eager to avoid it, the boys dutifully followed their grandfather into the good room.
There they all waited, in front of the telly, for Dobson the newsman to say it was teatime. The clock was fucked but couldn’t be replaced on account of its touching depiction of Christ. ‘Proper craftsmanship’, the old man called the piece of cheap Chinese plastic - so the broken clock stayed and the telly told time. This was their first Christmas with just men in the house and Phelim spat and cursed his way through it. The only plausible tactic under their Grandad’s regime was quiet appeasement - so Frank, the eldest, humoured their tyrannical ruler. It was the only way they’d survive.
An insurgence on the equator meant the news went on longer that evening. As Dobson droned on, Phelim’s stomach joined in a guttural and moaning duet.
‘A stop must be put to that fucker!’, he barked with a face now as red as his nose. ‘Look at him there with his crew of aul yes-men, and a big stupid smile on their faces’ - he pointed his sharp little nail at the telly.
Without moving a muscle, the boys quickly answered,
‘You’re right, Grandad’.
‘Deadright Grandad, you’re deadright’.
He stared at them both with a quivering lip. They knew well what was coming. The dictator delaying his dinner had to be stopped. It wasn’t a week since he called the youngest a pretty young girl, kissed his cheek and stroked his blonde hair. Nearly sick, the boy was calmed down by his brother,
‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s gone out of his mind’.
They were used now to Phelim’s delusions. They could see the late dinner had upset the man’s mind.
‘Well then lads’, he huffed like a three-legged dog, ‘ye might get off your arses and do something about it! Might that be a good idea, hah?!'
They sighed and began to call their legs home. It was easier, Frank said, to just play along. He was too sick to be told - too old to be housebroke. If anyone cared for the fucker they’dve taken him in long ago. They’dve not left their mother stuck with her horrible father. Scattered words about ‘duty’ still knocked around the house when everybody else was asleep. Frank promised his brother he'd never leave him alone. He’d play along until Cormac could leave the house too. So with a salute they left the warmth of the fire for the abandoned backgarden - to fight a pretend warlord for their lunatic grandad.
The boys stood outside, rubbing their hands for the cold. A small porcelain boy holding Christ’s heart in a bucket sat looking at them from the window. In front of their feet, in the flower-bed/grave, was a ceramic village co-opted by a mischief of rats. Over the wall down the end was another small village full of shops and people with families. The two boys were stood stone silent - with only lonely thoughts of war in their heads.
Inside, Phelim rocked back and forth. ‘Ritzy biscuits won’t help you now’, he said to an invisible tyrant as he sat through an ad for salted crackers. Above him was a bright Sacred Heart, whose red bulb flickered over his liverish skull, like some sinister halo or hat. On the days he remembered, Phelim missed Eibhlín greatly. His daughter had looked after him well. He remembered her more as a child than a woman - with her funny blonde hair, long and curly. He didn’t know the children who lived with him now. He hoped Eibhlín would be home soon with dinner. ‘Ritzy biscuits won’t help you now’, he repeated to himself, mindlessly, holding his clenched fist in his palm.
The boys stared at two bulging foetuses who’d only lately become proper birds.
‘Can we feed them Frank?’, Cormac asked his big brother.
‘There’s no point’, said the eldest, ‘their mother is dead. Baby birds can’t survive on their
own.
own.
Two baby birds, frozen in the dark, all for the sake of an old man’s confusion. It was him that killed the wren in the morning. He left the body stiff by the door so the boys would both see it. A deranged old man showing off to his captives/captors. Cormac remembered a time when there wasn’t such hassle. Their mother didn’t indulge him the way they did now. Best of all she had pity, because she remembered him normal. All Cormac knew was a demented old despot. An unstable moron who’d knocked their mother down the stairs dead that October.
‘Until then, have a good evening’, and with a flash of a smile Dobson ended the news, ringing the bell for their dinner. The war had been won so Phelim rushed to welcome his soldiers. He delved into the fridge and fetched them some beer. ‘They might have a stout and a biscuit bar each’, the old farmer proclaimed. Reaching into the cupboard, Phelim retrieved the treat tin - but he heard no loose rattle inside. The old man looked out and saw the youngest bothering a nest. ‘I’ll teach you thieving fuckers!’, he howled, hurtling a bottle at the Cormac’s blonde head.
Although it missed, he was showered in glass and black stout. A dull thud saw the nestlings fall dead in the dirt. Phelim roared for his dinner and retreated inside while Frank cleaned up his brother. He put his hands on Cormac’s wet shoulders and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, bud, they were already dead’. Picking them up with brown-rusty shovel, Frank dropped the miniature corpses inside the small village, knowing the rats would dispose of them quickly. Walking his brother inside he philosophised vaguely, ‘They were gone before they even knew they were here’.
Frank drank the remaining bottle of stout and then left for the pub, leaving the youngest to mourn his fresh loss. Ignoring the groans coming from the front room, Cormac took his time making Phelim his dinner. With some scraps of green meat in his hands, he opened the door and fed the stray cats. He sighed when he saw his mother’s dead garden submerged in beer and covered with glass. He turned the oven on high and scrolled through his phone.
Roasting ortolan bunting, he read to himself, is a French culinary practice in which the small and delicate bird is drowned in Armagnac, roasted, and then eaten whole. Traditionally, diners cover their heads with a large napkin or towel, to shield God’s eyes from such a decadent and disgraceful act.
He stared at the plump red-brown body the cats were inspecting. The dead mother wren on the doorstep. The old man shouted in for his dinner. ‘It’ll just be two minutes’, Cormac responded, grabbing a tea towel and looking in at some bright orange-lit chips - still raw and hard in the middle. The boy pulled them out and carried them into the room. The miserable bastard can eat them like this, he’d decided, before the Sacred Heart’s glow reminded him that there’s no hiding from God in this house.
Outside in the garden, the hydrangeas were dead. The hydrangeas were dead and the soil was gone rotten. Even the nettles looked rotten and last year’s veg had gone foul. Bark stripped itself off rotten-rooted trees.
Nothing was growing, nothing at all.
