HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, in the run-up to the release of The Green Issue…
Robert Stone
Animals
I heard that 110 wood sandpipers had appeared at Cley. A bird I like to see. The largest group I had ever seen, I am reluctant to call it a flock, was 6. So, 110 was a draw. Was this climate change? Dunno. It is possible to write it off as just one of those things. Eleven million painted lady butterflies visited the UK this summer, but that does happen about once a decade. I had never heard of anything like this many wood sandpipers in one place in Britain at any one time. An unprecedented fall of this dainty little wader. An annus mirabilis. I had to get a train to the North and that is where my hopes went immediately and irreparably south. All trains north cancelled because of a cow on the line in the Stowmarket area. Quite funny if you didn’t have 110 wood sandpipers to see. Could the cow not be persuaded to get off the line? They are docile creatures, surely; easily led. I was not given to understand that the train had collided with the cow. That, I could see, would be problematic.
I think of the cow as a nineteenth century animal, in these vegetarian, lactose intolerant times. Not modern at all. A wooden toy in a nursery farmyard, smudges of black and white in an over-varnished oil. There was a landscape painter before the War called Arnesby Brown, known as Cow Brown. That was a nickname he acquired because he always put cows in his pictures. A nickname he resented and deserved. He didn’t seem to be able to stop himself, as though it just didn’t look like England to him unless there were cows. There is Damien Hirst I suppose. He would have known what to do with that cow in the Stowmarket area. I know that several people are killed in England every year by cows usually on account of their uppity dogs. But that is cows plural. You shouldn’t need Damien and his chainsaw to deal with one cow. There was no one to say any of this to. Zero wood sandpipers for me.
When I got home, she said her friend Jenny was having problems with a eucalyptus tree in her garden. Jenny cut it back regularly but it grew at 100mph and she was afraid it was going to get blown over and hit her house. Should she cut it down altogether? It seemed a shame to cut down a beautiful tree just to save a house. Then she said that Jenny could release a troop of koala bears into the eucalyptus and they would control it by natural means. My son said koalas get pretty high on eucalyptus leaves which is why they always look so chilled. I told him I wasn’t sure their expressions were that changeable (their eyes, maybe?) and I told her that releasing non-native animals into an alien environment was more complicated than she seemed to realise. Unforeseen consequences. Neither of them looked convinced, but the boy’s expression is not that changeable either. She said you can buy a troop of koalas on Amazon. An assertion which I have yet to verify.
We sat in the garden for a bit not saying anything until she said there were ants all over the mint she had planted. I said there was a bloke at work who claimed he had not seen an ant since the 1970s. Not even in his pants? she asked. There were a lot of gulls flying very high in circles above us. I think they were eating ants, flying ants, but I am not sure. They seemed to be eating something invisible to us. The papers have a story about a herring gull that has allegedly eaten someone’s chihuahua, which I doubt is true. They are asking how long we will have to wait before a gull eats a baby. Forever, is the answer. This occasioned some discussion of chihuahuas and I ventured that they must have originated in Mexico, that breed. Everything seems to be in the wrong place and getting punished for it.
We feed the birds, as you might imagine. There’s a wood pigeon that always sits on the arm of the chair, like a pet. Once the top blew off a vertical tube of seeds when it was almost empty and a young starling was so keen to get at the few seeds at the bottom of the tube that it reached right down and fell in. Now it was a starling in a tube. Unable to open its wings. Head down. Balanced on the very tip of its beak. I could see something weird was going on from my seat in the living room. I went out and tipped up the tube and the bird flew away with some vigour. Embarrassed, probably.
The house is full of flies at the moment, but they are called house flies. I can’t bring myself to swat let alone spray them. Let’s hope the house spiders get them. Tegenaria domestica. I do kill mosquitoes though when I hear them at my ear whirring like a dentist’s drill. I reason that they are trying to kill me. They don’t know that they don’t carry malaria. I have also had to pull a few ticks out of my legs after walking in Wolves Wood. They can be poisonous. Worse than mosquitoes. But can you say that a tick buried up to its midriff in your calf is in the wrong place? It’s a question of point of view.
We do have the back door open a lot in the summer. We went away for a weekend and by mistake left it open the whole time. I was relieved a family of foxes hadn’t moved into the kitchen during our absence. You would never get them out. Stubborn as ticks, at least. The papers used to say, last year or the year before, that it wouldn’t be long before a fox ate a baby. That hasn’t happened either. Sometimes a bird will come in through that open door, especially in wet weather. There is some comedy in sitting in the armchair and looking up to see a blackbird hopping impudently over the carpet, scouting for crumbs, where, I am slightly ashamed to say, it has a good chance of finding plenty. It was a robin I had to deal with. It got into a bit of a panic and kept flying into the french windows, having come in through the regular (English) door, and these french windows, ironically, do not open. The key’s broken in the lock. It settled soon enough and sat quietly, its red breast pressed against the skirting board and I stood over it with thoughts of picking it up. Now I love birds, but the thought of picking one up gives me the creeps a little bit. Touching their brittle selves. You notice how grey a robin really is, as if it might be made of dust. I did touch it and it flew across the room, which was as well because the transit window at least does open and I got it out of that. It had occurred to me to not even attempt to persuade the bird to leave the house; just open all of the doors and windows and then let them come and go as they pleased. They would get used to it. We all would. I don’t know what the robin made of suddenly living in front of the house. It’s not obvious how it would get into the back garden again, not being the sort of bird that likes to fly over houses. Maybe it started a completely new life.
I remember when I lived in Cambridge, in one of my other lives; I used to walk through King’s to the University Library, the UL. I was walking alongside this stream and I noticed a wall brown butterfly which must have landed on the surface of the water for some reason and was now stuck there. It was pulsing its wings as though it were swimming or flying (actually drowning) but in the wrong medium, neither one thing nor the other. That brave and hopeless pulse. I would very much have liked to have rescued that wall brown but I was somewhat out of my element at Cambridge University myself and in enough trouble already without diving into a river to save a butterfly. So I just carried on to the UL. A magnificent institution certainly but quite tremendously ugly. It looks like one of the buildings the Morlocks mess around in in The Time Machine, surrounded by artefacts they have no hope of understanding. I wouldn’t say I resembled a Morlock exactly, among Cambridge’s beautiful people, but I was definitely wasting my time there.
I decided to have another go at the wood sandpipers the next day. More nonsense at the railway station, not that it stopped me from getting on the train this time. Today the booking office was closed and in darkness. Technical difficulties, they said. They were very apologetic. I don’t know what was really going on. The booking office clerks were milling around the concourse, having abandoned their gloomy cells. I think having been herded out of there, their natural habitat, from behind their protective screens. They looked very anxious under the dazzling lights. Jaws clenched, unsmiling, many a glance over the shoulder. I stopped and stared into the darkened space myself. I’m not sure, hard to make it out, a place usually so bright, if not cheerful, now made sombre by unlikely failure. They said technical difficulties, but could there have been a cow in there?
Robert Stone was born in 1961 in Wolverhampton in the UK. He was educated at the University of East Anglia, Norwich and at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has worked as a press analyst in London for more than twenty-five years. Before that he was a teacher and the foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. He has had stories published in Stand, Panurge, The Write Launch, Eclectica and Wraparound South. He has had a story accepted for Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar chapbook series. That will come out this year. Micro stories have been published by Palm-Sized Press, Star 82 and Clover & White. Another will soon be published by 5×5. A longer story will soon come out in Confingo and another in The Wisconsin Review. When not at work, he spends his time reading, writing and mooching about.