Only the Animals (25 page)

Humans might be conscious thinkers; we are conscious breathers. It is very easy to choose to die if every breath is a matter of choice. I am not the first dolphin to suicide, nor will I be the last. We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.

And in return, for thousands of years, when we have found a human drowning, we have held him or her up to the surface of the water as we hold our newborns, waiting for them to take their first breath. We have put our own bodies between you and the lurking shapes of sharks. We have swum very gently with your young, with your impaired. We have greeted you with leaps. You should not have forgotten what your own wise ancestors used to know.

*   *   *

Enough of this death talk. My tale should end with life, and it does, in a sense. Before I was released into the water on my final mission, my scan of Officer Mishin revealed to me that she was pregnant with a baby girl, still unbeknown to herself and her husband.

I haven't yet managed to find your soul out here, Ms Plath, though not for want of looking. There are things about you I would still like to know. Lately I have found myself wondering: After Ted Hughes abandoned you, did you still love his poetry? ‘Who am I?'
the mythical creature, the wodwo, asks in one of his poems, and like many men, the wodwo decides, ‘I am what I want.' You believed in his genius so fervently when you first fell in love, and all through your remarkable – until it unremarkably fell apart – creative partnership of a marriage. So fervently, in fact, that I began to feel I owed it to you to return to his work, to give it a third chance, to see it through your eyes and hear it through your ears.

I went back to his animal poems and fables for children, and this time I noticed – as much as I wanted to ignore it – that there is something he does with language that makes my brain tingle. A reverse act of scanning, human to dolphin. It happened especially when I was reading my favourite, the one about the moon-whale. I would have liked to read it to my daughter. I imagine you reading it to yours, her little elbows resting against your knee. There is nothing quite like a child's gorgeous listening energy, ravenous for her mother's voice.

 

PSITTACOPHILE

Soul of Parrot

DIED 2006, LEBANON

 

In her isolation, the parrot was almost a son, a love. He climbed upon her fingers, pecked at her lips, clung to her shawl, and when she rocked her head to and fro like a nurse, the big wings of her cap and the wings of the bird flapped in unison.

Gustave Flaubert,
A SIMPLE HEART

It's called being a citizen, not just of the world, but of all time. It's what Flaubert described as being ‘brother in God to everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man.' It's called being a writer.

Julian Barnes,
FLAUBERT'S PARROT

 

 

A long time ago, thirty years to be precise, when my owner asked her ex-husband, before he was even her husband, how he felt about their impending nuptials, he said, ‘Great. Excited.'

No, no, she insisted, she wanted to know how he
really
felt about getting married.

So then, she told me, he cocked his head, just like I sometimes did when I was about to do something she wouldn't like, and said, ‘Before we decided to get married, if I walked past a beautiful woman on the street, I felt a little bit happy.'

‘And now, when you pass a beautiful woman?' she prompted him.

‘And now,' he said, ‘I feel a bit sad.'

‘Okay. Thank you for that. Now ask me.'

He seemed surprised that she wanted him to reciprocate. That was the trouble with them from the beginning.

‘How do you feel about getting married?' he asked dutifully.

‘I think you commit to marriage with both eyes open, then you shut one eye for ever after.'

He smiled, lifted the morning paper and disappeared behind its folds.

‘I think marriage is going to be similar to being whipped and pickled,' she continued, knowing she was about to overstep lines. ‘Like they used to do to mutinying sailors in the old days. Whipped as punishment, then pickled with salt to prevent infection. Wonderfully cruel, terribly kind.'

Her fiancé had already lost himself in the exigencies of current events.

She pushed on. ‘I think marriage is probably going to feel like George Shaw's platypus – first one he ever saw, brought back from some expedition or another to Van Diemen's Land. Thought it was a hoax – half a duck sewn to half an otter.'

To her surprise, he'd still been listening. ‘So which are you?' he said, letting the paper float down to the kitchen table, its edge sucking up the spilt milk. ‘Duck or otter?'

He'd missed the point: that she was neither fully, that marriage would force her to metamorphose so that she was half-duck, half-otter, always partly a stranger to herself. She didn't try to explain. She was pregnant with their daughter then and had discovered that in that state she could get away with bad behaviour.

‘Whichever was the bottom half, getting the shit end of the deal,' she said, lifting herself heavily from the chair to wash the breakfast dishes.

If nothing else, you could at least say she'd been perspicacious.

*   *   *

It was a year after she saw the Twin Towers falling that my owner delivered the divorce papers, put her goods in storage and came east. Her initial instinct had been to head for Damascus. She wanted her friends in New York to admire her courage. She wanted her ex-husband to be grudgingly impressed. Her daughter, who had always kept her at arm's length, sarcastically suggested Goa was a more suitable destination for a midlife crisis.

The compromise turned out to be Beirut, where she got a job teaching English at the American School. Disappointing at first because, to her untutored appetites, Lebanon didn't seem to count as the real oriental deal. Would there be any souks? In photographs, Beirut looked to her like a dirtier version of Marseille, more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern.

Four years later, when the Israelis started shelling parts of the city, there was no longer any doubt in her mind: she was living in the Middle East. It seemed like a vindication. Until I started plucking out my own feathers so aggressively I drew blood.

*   *   *

Her job at the American School had come with a furnished apartment and a friendly group of ex-pats fond of rooftop barbeques, and she soon established a routine. She didn't find this depressing, as she had during her last year in New York. Going to the fruit shop on the corner, or putting the trash bags outside the door of her apartment to be collected, it was all an exercise in heightened living. A ride in a Beirut taxi spent mostly on the wrong side of the road would leave her exhilarated. Even placing her used toilet paper in the rubbish bin instead of flushing it was interesting.

She powerwalked among the French speakers along the Corniche in the early morning cool and learned where to buy blackberry juice from a street vendor on the way home. On weekends she lay on the sofa on the balcony drinking Lebanese beer, watching the Filipino maid in the apartment opposite ironing with great care her employer's silk bras and panties. When she was hungry she stood barefoot in front of the open fridge and ate pickles and labne direct from their containers. She bought a hookah
and blew rings of apple tobacco smoke at the pigeons outside her bedroom window.

When it came to the past, the selective amnesia of the general population suited her just fine. Their powers of willful overlooking were something to which she aspired. She marvelled at their ability to ignore palm trees stunted by shrapnel, sandbags still stacked on windowsills in abandoned houses, or the large chunk missing from the side of the Holiday Inn. Denial, she thought one evening, passing a dead horse inexplicably decomposing in the shallows on the public beach, is underrated.

*   *   *

She decided, rather irresponsibly, to get a pet. Not a dog or a cat, but something exotic to match her own transformation. The pet shop stocked pig-snouted turtles, Rottweiler puppies, baby crocodiles, squirrels, monkeys with gammy eyes. But the moment she walked into the store, she knew what she wanted. I was sitting on the storeowner's shoulder, grooming the hair around his ear with my beak, strand by strand. She hadn't believed in love at first sight until that moment – it had taken her a while to warm up even to her own child.

‘Does the parrot talk?' she asked.

‘I've tried to teach it,' he said. ‘No luck. But it can squawk.'

She watched me launch into a string of somersaults along the counter-top and offered to buy me on the spot. He was reluctant to sell. He had owned me since my birth many years before, the same year the Syrians re-invaded
Lebanon and the long civil war fizzled out. She liked the idea of a peacetime parrot that couldn't speak. She increased her offer. He agreed, and included my cage and perch for the price. In her haste to whisk me away before he changed his mind, she forgot to ask him my name.

‘If you are lucky,' he said, as she was leaving the store with a towel draped over my cage, ‘he will live for another fifty years. Maybe more.'

She emailed her daughter as soon as she could get to an internet café. Her daughter wrote back immediately:
He sure as hell better not live longer than you.

She called me Barnes, because she had just finished reading
Flaubert's Parrot
and was a little bit in love with the author, whose photograph took up most of the book's back cover. She didn't yet know the standard pet store joke about parrots: You don't own us, we own you.

*   *   *

Her Googling revealed that she had inadvertently adopted a toddler. As the online exhortations from fellow parrot owners accumulated, her joy became feverish. What delight to be needed so acutely! Her ex-husband had tolerated her neediness but not cultivated it in himself; her daughter had been determined to establish her independence from the moment she learned to walk. But there I was with my feathers scattering the light to create an illusion of brilliant green, my fat tongue, my perfect toes. I, Barnes, who would – if she cared for me attentively – grow to love and depend on her as my parent, partner, mate.

She sat and gazed at me, smiling at the black feathers on my head which looked like a toupée and made me seem oddly formal. My body colouring gave the impression that I was wearing a multi-coloured tuxedo, with green wings, a white tummy and stumpy orange legs. She used to say that whenever I opened one clipped wing, she half expected me to launch into the can-can, or the opening song of a piece of musical theatre.

*   *   *

Her routine began to revolve around me. She created a play area for me in her bedroom, with no more than six toys at any time, rotated daily so that I would get neither overwhelmed nor bored. She gave me corn on the cob, pitted plums and peaches, seeds, lemons, beets, quartered cucumbers, knowing I would eat better if I could hold my food myself, and – as a treat – two peanuts a day. She scrubbed kale leaves to rid them of insecticide and draped them on top of my cage. Each day she cleaned my perch, my play area, my dishes, and washed the floor of my cage with disinfectant.

She changed the water in my bath after every dip, misted my feathers using a spray bottle on particularly hot days, blowdried my feathers on unseasonably chilly evenings. She refused visitors because I found them stressful, and turned down invitations from the ex-pats to come along on weekend roadtrips to various Roman or Crusader ruins around the country, not liking to leave me on my own. She let me perch on her forearm and stroked my back feathers, even when I bit her repeatedly. When I ripped into shreds the pages of every book on her shelf and flung bits of food onto the walls and floor, where they became as intransigent as cement, she forgave me.

In the mornings she left for work reluctantly, hearing me squawking from my cage on the balcony even from the street, but gradually I learned to let her go without a noise. She would return in the early afternoon to find me intently watching the seagulls, trying to communicate with them in ungainly, earnest sounds.

*   *   *

Over many months we became inseparable. I sat on the toilet seat while she brushed her teeth, and hung from her loofah while she was in the shower. Each night she prepared two plates of food and we'd sit on the balcony to eat, her on a chair, me on the table. If she sang while she was making her bed, I made sympathetic noises; if she swore at something on the television, I would screech my support of her position. I learned to open her beer bottles with my beak. I stopped biting.