Inchworm (8 page)

I’m rereading
Jennie
by Paul Gallico, one of my all-time favourite novels. It’s about a little boy who has an accident and wakes up to find he has turned into a cat. A stray cat, Jennie, has to teach him how to survive in London and how to behave like a cat, as he still thinks like a boy. It’s the book that made me realise that I hadn’t been seeing our cats properly. It taught me how to watch them, notice their habits and the way they live. In fact, it taught me to observe not only my cats but also other animals, including birds, insects and humans.

Alistair put up two birdfeeders in Daddy’s garden. He’s hung them from the skeletal branches of a copper beech, and Mum fills them with peanuts and sunflower seeds. It still hurts me to lift my arms above my head.

There weren’t many birds around when we first arrived here, but now there are lots – sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, greenfinch, tits, and a robin. I have decided to try to tame the robin. You have to have mealworms though, so we’ll have to find a pet shop.

I find one in the
Yellow Pages
and nag Mum until she drives me there.

‘Can’t we get Daddy some tropical fish? These blue and yellow ones would look so cool in his flat.’ She ignores me; it’s a tactic she’s developed for not arguing. It usually works. ‘Oh Mum, what about a terrapin?’

‘A piranha would be good. With a Bit of Luck it Might Bite Him.’ She’s still bitter, I’m afraid.

We go home with a carton full of mealworms in a bed of bran. It says in the leaflet they are the larval form of the mealworm beetle, of the order of Coleoptera. They are about
2
.
5
cm, like the inchworm, and are mostly sold as bait to fishermen or for caged birds. Commercial mealworm growers incorporate a juvenile hormone into the feeding process, which keeps the mealworm in a larval stage and makes them bigger. We humans can’t leave anything alone.

This is how the mealworm beetle mates: first the male chases the female until she gives up. The male then mounts her and curls his
aedagus
underneath him and inserts it into her genital tract. (I used to think genitals were called gentles.) Once the male has inserted himself, he injects her with semen. In a matter of days the female will burrow into soft ground and lay between
70
and
100
eggs. After
4
–
11
days tiny mealworms start writhing around. During the larval stage the mealworms repeatedly shed their skin – about
10
–
14
times altogether. On its last shedding the mealworm loses its skin and then curls up into its pupal form, where it remains for between
6
–
30
days, depending on the temperature. It starts off creamy white and changes slowly to brown. (Another colour for my colour chart – Mealworm Pupa White.) Then they hatch as beetles, starting off as white and gradually turning brown, at which time they become sexually active and find a mate. And it all begins again.

I
am at the pupa stage, waiting for my real life to begin, between a grub and a butterfly or moth, or maybe a mealworm beetle. Except that I mustn’t think that way. Life is now, and I must live it.

One day someone will rename the inchworm the
2
.
5
cm worm.

I start off my robin-taming programme by putting a few mealworms in a shallow yoghurt pot lid on the ground near the back door, where Mr Robin often finds our leftover breadcrumbs. I put soggy breadcrumbs out there as well.

The first day, it rains hard and the worms are washed out onto the patio and I don’t know what becomes of them. I think a thrush or blackbird might have found them when I wasn’t looking. Today it’s dry. I try again, standing by the door where the birds can see me. Mr Robin can’t believe his luck and sings beautifully from the copper beech. I think he is saying thank you. I go out and crouch, having refilled the lid. After a few minutes the robin appears a few feet from me and nips quickly onto the lid where he picks up a worm or two and flies off. He’s soon back, but this time I have put the worm-filled lid on the palm of my hand, the back of my hand flat on the ground. It’s a rather uncomfortable position for me to hold, but he soon hops across to my hand, stands on my fingertips and eats from the lid. I hold my breath and gaze at his brick red breast feathers, his black beak and bead-like eyes. I cannot feel him on my fingers, he is so light.

He’s away. Flown. I try again, on and off for an hour, but he hasn’t returned. Maybe he’s full and has other things on his mind, like finding a mate and defending his territory – Dad’s back garden and the next one or two. I can hear him singing a long way off – a lilting sweet melody, like a woodland waterfall. I’ll try again tomorrow. The wind chills me and I go inside and curl up on the sofa with a duvet, a hot water bottle and my book. I still sleep lots. It’s an after-effect of the anaesthetic but I don’t like sleeping in the daytime as I usually have bad dreams.

The next part of robin-taming means I have to put the mealworms directly into my palm, flatten my hand on the tiles and wait for the bird to be tempted. He actually lands on my fingertips after about five excruciatingly uncomfortable, freezing minutes and takes the mealworms from my palm. I can’t believe it. I’ll have to continue doing this each day so he becomes completely tame. We need more mealworms. Mum is not pleased. We are already spending a fortune in the pet shop, what with the peanuts and sunflower seeds. She is doing sketches of me with the bird. I think she misses her art classes.

I miss my cats. I remember silly things about them – like when I found a brave harvest mouse leaping up to attack Charlie’s nose. She must have just brought it into the house and had dropped it, like they do, to play with the poor thing before the kill. I got to her just as she had dropped it and instead of running to hide he actually tried to bite her. I managed to rescue the courageous little beastie and release him before the
coup de grâce.
(I am picking up various foreign phrases that might come in useful sometime.)

One day before my operation I heard a tiny rattle behind the desk. I pulled out the desk and found that there was a mouse trying to chew its way into a walnut shell, which I had thrown for the cats to chase. I couldn’t get the mouse, though I opened the door in the hope that it might find its way out and I put a little heap of birdseed for it behind the chest. No cat in sight, of course.

That same night Flo brought me a lovely, live harvest mouse. I picked it up and managed to drop it again before I could open the door. So then we had two mice in the house. Hopefully they were both males or there’ll be a whole army of them when we get home.

My cats always know what to do on a rainy day. Flo goes hunting – she always catches something when it rains, carries it inside and mews loudly. I have to rescue the creature and put it out, then dry Flo with a towel, which she loves. I hate it when I find half a mouse, or a whole dead one squashed flat. (Why do cats roll on their victims?) The other two cats find their favourite warm spots – a high shelf, a cushion on a stool, a blanket on my bed – curl up and go to sleep to dream of killing and cream. Then they’ll suddenly decide they want a new place to make their nest and they’ll settle there for a week or two, before they’re off again on a search for the perfect bed. They are like nomads.

I think I’d like to be a nomad. I’d buy a campervan and drive it all over the world looking for a perfect beach facing the sunset, or a lakeside meadow where geese come in their thousands every year at the same time. It might get lonely, although I expect you’d meet lots of interesting people. I could travel to all the places in the world where people are cruel to cats and I could rescue them and set up a travelling hospital for cats in my van. Or birds, of course. I could do what the sisters who started the Mousehole Bird Sanctuary did and look after injured birds. Little children would bring them to me and I would feed them and care for them until they were well and then I’d set them free. Except, of course, that now I have to watch out for cryptococcal or something or other. But that’s okay: I’ll wear rubber gloves and a face-mask like a surgeon.

We are going out the main front door of the building for our walk today, and meet an elderly German gentleman. He’s the tenant of the first floor flat. I’ve seen his name on the door and seen him walking down the road.

‘
Guten Abend,
Herr Weinberger,’ I say.

‘Guten Abend, Liebchen
.’ He smiles and nods and goes off down the street towards the village tapping his long white stick while we go up the hill towards the Heath. He looks rather down-at-heel (another foot expression). I expect it’s because he can’t see very well. It must be a consolation if you have poor eyesight, not to bother with your appearance, not care if your socks don’t match or your collar is frayed, or your buttons aren’t done up right.

‘Very impressive, Gussie. Where did you learn German?’

‘A book.’

‘Say something else.’

‘
Es regnete ununterbrochen
– it rained uninterruptedly.’

Her mouth stays open for several seconds. Then she starts laughing and can’t stop. I laugh too but it hurts and I have to hold my chest.

There’s a biting wind on the Heath and we only stop long enough by the pond for me to make a few photographs of the fluffed up ducks and swans on the lake. I stride out like I used to do when I was little, before I became really ill. It’s so good to be able to do things other twelve year olds can do. Before, I was breathless even if I only walked across the room.

I wonder if I can teach Daddy to feed my robin? He might really like to do that. It would be almost like having a pet.

There’s a group of science students and their tutors doing an ecological study of part of the Heath, taking notes of every living thing, including plants. Not that there seems to be much living at the moment. They look cold even their hoodies and parkas, woolly hats and gloves. I would love to do something like that. Perhaps I could do a study of our little garden in St Ives. I’ll do it in the summer holidays when everything is alive. It shouldn’t take long: the garden measures about
4
by
5
metres. Maybe Brett would like to help? It would mean dividing the garden into small squares, which I could do with string and pegs. I’ll have to keep the cats out of the way somehow. I bet there are dozens of insect species. Coleoptera (beetles), and Lepidoptera
(butterflies and moths) and spiders – what is their scientific name? Have we any inchworms, I wonder? Perhaps I could suggest it as a project at school, when I go back – after Easter, I hope.

We get back to the flat just as Mr Weinberger arrives.

‘Would you like to come and have a cup of tea with me,
Liebchen,
with your
Mutti
?’ And to Mum he says, ‘I have some rather good single malt whisky if you would prefer, my dear, to warm you?’

‘Sorry, Herr Weinberger,
Ich müss nach Hause gehen.’

‘Another time, thank you, Mr Weinberger, Gussie needs to rest now.’

I like the name
Mutti
. It’s a prettier word than mother or mum.

The willows on the Heath greening up. Keats Grove is decorated with blossom in all the front gardens. It has been sunny and warm in Daddy’s patio and Mr Robin has come to my hand twice today. He looks at me with his beady black eye, takes the mealworms and flies to the next garden. He’s warbling. It sounds like a trickling stream of water or tiny bells. I wonder if I could tame any other birds?

I’ve found a second-hand book called
Birds as Individuals
by Len Howard – Len was a woman who allowed wild birds into her home to roost and they trusted her. (I thought Len was a man’s name. Perhaps she wanted to be a man.) She was a sort of female Saint Sebastian. She recognised individual birds and even their facial expressions, and noted bird behaviour.

Sep
26
th:
Yet another couple of robins are pressing on west Robin and trying to get near the cottage via macrocarpus-tree and surrounding lawn. Four robins are now disputing this tree. From
3.30
until
5
p.m. a chase goes on, round and round the tree and its neighbouring apple-tree on the south-west. Dobs is furious; he sings incessantly with loud emphasis, often flying to the top of the bird-table to display, red-hot anger gleaming from his eyes. His head is enlarged, his body seems shrunken and his figure deformed. He is too agitated by this influx of Robins to take food offered him, he fears to stop singing or displaying for one moment, even to feed… For many hours the flutter of Robin wings is heard, hitting against the leaves as they dash headlong in and out, round and through the leaves. Dobs does not enter the chase but sings continuously from the bird-table, with flashing eyes and alarming contortions of his usually attractive form; also, he now resorts to the splutter-note, which had not hitherto demeaned his song.

In the book are photographs of a blue tit sitting on her finger as she draws, great tits perched on her shoulders and on her desk as she works at a typewriter. I wish I had known her. What was her secret? How did she get birds to accept her? She often mentions the facial expressions of birds. I know my cats’ expressions well. I can tell if Flo is contented or mad. Charlie’s always happy. She’s a smiler. If she comes to me in the night, her eyes are black and round and she tiptoes. In the morning she’s more likely to leap onto the bed, tail up high, mouth curved in a smile of pleasure. Rambo is the easiest cat to read. His tabby face is very expressive. He frowns, smiles, is worried, anxious, terrified – that more than anything else, he’s such a wuss. Flo’s emotions are complex. She shows disapproval very obviously: she glares mostly. If she’s suddenly in need of affection she’ll drool and look cross-eyed and stupid. I do miss my cats.