Esther Chilton

Every week, on a Friday, I invite a writer to appear in my Guest Writer Spot. If you’d like your writing to appear on this page, please contact me here or by e-mail: estherchilton@gmail.com. I accept stories, poems, articles – in fact, anything and everything. All you have to do is make sure your prose is no longer than 2000 words and your poems no more than 40 lines.

This week’s Guest Writer is Alyson Faye, a writer who has appeared as a guest on my blog a few times. I always enjoy her writing; she really knows how to think outside the box. You can read more of her work on her own blog: www.alysonfayewordpress.wordpress.com

Budgies and Bingo

                                                                  by Alyson Faye

Pulling up outside Aunty Elsie’s terraced house, we pile out of the bronze Avenger.  Dad sucking grumpily on his pipe, Mum wielding her sunken Victoria sandwich like a shield and me, in long white knees socks and beige jumper. The one Elsie had knitted as last year’s Christmas present.

“It’s a courtesy to her to wear it,” Mum had stated, as we’d endured our usual sartorial stand off in my bedroom.

 I’m forty years old, I think gloomily when I catch sight of my reflection in the car window. I sense movement in the front room even before we touch the knocker.  Elsie and Blue Boy are both watching out for us. We march into the hallway in single file, our heads bowed.

Mum pushes me hard right towards the front room. Reluctantly I shuffle forward. I smell lavender and camphor. Doilies adorn every surface. Blue Boy is waiting in the window. His cage has pride of place. The budgie watches me with its blank, shiny button eyes, beady and spiteful. They remind me of Aunty Elsie’s.

“Blue Boy likes you,” Elsie croons lovingly and with a total disregard for the truth.

The flea infested bird hates me. I know this. It’s pecked me viciously several times when I’ve been instructed to feed it. It’s a power struggle. Bird versus teenager. Blue Boys wins everytime.

Mum brings in the second best china service for us to eat from along with her collapsed Victoria sandwich cake. She is smiling nervously. She knows what’s coming.

Elsie eyes it. “See you’ve still not learnt the knack of getting them to rise, Joyce dear?”

Mum smiles wanly but flinches. She long ago retired from any verbal battles with my Dad’s aunty.

Elsie pokes her long bony index finger through the cage bars to tickle Blue Boy’s breast feathers. The horrid bird lets her. Shuddering at the thought of the feathers, I squirm my hands under my thighs.

Now to my total embarrassment, Elsie sings to him. Blue Boy perches with his head on one side, gazing at her. I’m  reminded of the puppet show Mum and I had gone to at the arts centre. Blue Boy’s pose is a copy of the marionettes. Head lopsided, eyes bulging.

Dad breezes in, “How did it go at the bingo then, Elsie?”

He’s fake jovial. This is his social face. It’s painful to watch. “Win a fortune, did you?”

Elsie smiles, but oddly it doesn’t make her jollier. “That’s for me and Blue Boy to know, Derek. It’s my money and my business.”

Rebuked, Dad falls silent. I turn to gaze out past the sticky lace curtains to the road where I colour count the cars driving along. The grey day turns wetter and more ashen while around me the adults chit chat.

On the dot of five Dad gets up to leave and heaving hidden joint sighs of relief Mum and I do the same.

“See you in a month then, Elsie,” Dad says.

“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.” Elsie’s tart comments are lemon drop bombs in our ears.

Years later, when I was at uni, Elsie died. In her will she bequeathed me Blue Boy’s bird cage in deference to ‘the special bond you had with him’.

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