She would never hit me, but she would nitpick and carp until I felt physically assaulted. Only once did she pinch the tender flesh on my forearm, twisting it anti-clockwise between her fingers until I yelped with the burning pain of it. There was a mark there for days.
You might have thought school was my refuge. My mother, the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy after my father’s death, had decided to send me to a fee-paying preparatory and it was true that, for a time, I enjoyed the rough and tumble of playtime, the rambunctious whoops of the other children as they scampered around the sandpit. But, fairly quickly, I began to stand out. I was never sure why. Perhaps it was something to do with my face. I have been told I have a tendency to look disapproving or unhappy when I think my features are simply expressionless and relaxed.
Perhaps it was that I ran out of patience fairly quickly with the other children. I began to feel detached from them, older somehow. I’ve always felt older. After a few weeks of watching them sift sand through a red plastic square with holes in the bottom and shriek with displeasure when said red plastic square was removed so that someone else could play with it, I found that I couldn’t understand what it was about the red plastic square that was so appealing.
I tried to evaluate it logically. Was it the physical sensation of the sand siphoned through the small apertures? Was it the idea of having achieved something, of having transmuted a seemingly solid substance into a liquid river of grains? And, even assuming it was either of these fundamentally trivial motivations, why was that so completely absorbing? Why did the red plastic square assume such proportions in these children’s heads, the idea of it expanding to fill all available space, all their angsty desire, their desperate need to play and experiment … how could all of it be subsumed into a single unexceptional item with ‘Made in Taiwan’ stamped on its underside?
The red plastic square tormented me for weeks. I felt there must be a piece of me lacking, a talent for childishness that I didn’t possess. I just didn’t get it. It annoyed me that I didn’t. Believe me, I wanted more than anything to be an unthinking, easy child. I wanted to belong. And at the same time, I knew that I didn’t.
So maybe that goes some way towards explaining what happened next. It was the incident that was to change the course of my life although, naturally, I didn’t realise it at the time. It was to do with the bird.
A sparrow. A defenceless sparrow who had fallen from the sky onto the bricked surface of the playground. Wing broken. Mewling from its beak. Flapping senselessly. Heart pitter-pattering frantically inside its feathered chest.
A girl called Jennifer was the first to find it. Jennifer was blonde and tall, with ungainly limbs and a clumsy way of running which, she confessed to me once in an unguarded moment, was modelled on the way Bobbie ran in the film of The Railway Children. She was one of those children forever destined to be mildly despised for her inelegance and, indeed, when I looked her up on Facebook a few years ago, she still had those unfortunate broad shoulders and a pitifully small number of online friends despite her emoticon-strewn status updates.
Jennifer found the bird as she was playing tag. She stopped, almost tripping over her own shoes, and tears sprung to her eyes. It just so happened that I was sitting on a nearby bench with a book in my hand, and when I saw her standing there, whimpering, I got up to see what was going on.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Jennifer was breathing heavily, a half-asthmatic wheeze in the back of her throat.
‘It’s … it’s …’ She pointed at the bird’s prone form. ‘I think it’s dying.’
I knelt down and peered closer at the sparrow. It looked at me, moist eye swivelling in its socket. I extended one finger and prodded it, feeling the silky feathers part with the pressure.
‘Don’t touch it, Martin!’ Jennifer was saying. ‘We need to tell the teacher.’
The teacher was duly told and the bird was scooped up by adult hands and placed in a makeshift nest of cotton-wool and pipe-cleaners. This was then put on a high ledge in the hallway, just above a radiator and next to a window overlooking the street outside. The ledge ran parallel to a flight of stairs which led up to our classroom.
For the next few days, when the bell went for morning lessons, an excitable gaggle of schoolchildren would file up the staircase and peer into the cotton-wool nest to see how the sparrow was faring. The teachers seized upon this set of circumstances as a way of educating us about ‘nature’. (They were a bovine lot, those primary school teachers, with barely an original thought between them.)
So it was that some time after that, there was a competition to come up with a name for the ‘school sparrow’. I forget who won it now or what the eventual name was – let’s say it was ‘Sammy’ – but by christening the bird, I noticed everyone felt closer to it, as though it were a form of mascot. Then, we were encouraged to draw pictures of the blessed thing – coloured pencil doodles which were Blu Tacked on the walls like sacrificial offerings. More than once, our homework consisted of finding out ‘facts’ about Sammy. This being the pre-internet era, I had to waste more time than I would have liked poring over The Observer Book of Birds in the local library.
We had been told not to touch the sparrow and not to disturb it with our gawping. But each time I passed Sammy while walking up the stairs, I wanted to reach out and squeeze him in my cupped hands. He was such a small, insignificant thing – barely bigger than a tennis ball. The more the other children stared and whispered, the more they monitored every tiny movement of Sammy’s body for signs of recovery, the more angry I became. It was so stupid to attach such importance to a brainless creature.
But what really made me snap was overhearing Jennifer one morning. Ever since the discovery of the sparrow, she had assumed a possessiveness over it. She appeared to think that her self-appointed guardianship gave her an insight into what the bird was feeling and how long its recovery might be expected to take and she would treat us all to smug reports on its progress. Her father was a vet, as I recall – a fact she took every opportunity to mention.
On this particular morning, she had been invited to the front of the class by the teacher to tell us how the sparrow was faring.
‘I think Sammy might be flying again soon. His wing is almost healed.’
Jennifer looked pleased with herself. The teacher, a woman appropriately called Mrs Love, was smiling benignly, nodding her head in agreement. I think it was this that finally sent me over the edge. Because it was all so bogus. The sparrow hadn’t shown any signs of recovery. Its wing was still as uselessly snapped as ever. Its eyes had acquired a dull patina. The kindest thing would have been to break its neck in the playground.
‘It’s probably going to die,’ I said. I spoke without putting my hand up first and when the words tripped out of my mouth they were louder than I had anticipated. Jennifer took a surprised step backwards. Her lower lip wobbled. The teacher glared at me.
‘Martin. What a terrible thing to say.’
‘It’s not,’ I protested. ‘It’s true.’
‘That’s enough, Martin.’
I felt a hot bullet of anger lodge itself in my throat. I think it might have been the first time I’d ever been told off by a teacher and I felt it keenly. I vowed to myself I would never, ever forget this moment, the indignity of it, the unfairness and the dumb, unquestioning way in which the teacher sided with ignorance over truth simply because it was easier. Who cared about imparting actual knowledge when you could keep everyone quiet by making them draw pictures of a bloody bird?
(I’ve never liked animals. I find it sickening how we fetishise them with tartan dog coats and velvet cat collars and special tins of food with jellied rabbit chunks and how we invite them into our homes, these wild, unthinking things, and expect them to reflect all the human characteristics we most wish to see in ourselves.)
The morning after