‘It’s my birthday.’ Sam sucks the scratch on her hand. ‘This isn’t supposed to happen.’
But Lisa has eyes for no one but herself, mirrored in the scattered pieces of glass that make up a jigsaw on the floor. ‘Ever look into a mirror at night? After I mend it, you can put this in your room and see what animal you are.’
Sam Lamb knows already. She leaves the bedroom, unnoticed, as downstairs Dad logs on to the computer and finds pub/mirrors.com offering ‘Reduced Gothic Mirrors at a Fraction of their Former Price’, over the search he makes for a book.
‘Lisa! That dot com company’s got those mirrors again!’ Dad yells up the stairs as a range of extraordinary mirrors appear when he clicks on them without meaning to. ‘Like that weird mirror you just got!’
His voice washes over Lisa, guarding her broken mirror upstairs, seeing her fragmented face in it.
Me and not me. Who am I?
For a moment, I can see a reflection of myself as I might be. The girl in the mirror is me. Me, and not me, at the same time. I’m not sure I wanted to know, but I did what I knew I shouldn’t…
I can hear Dad downstairs, ordering a mirror. I want to stop him, but I can’t. He will release his inner self. What animal will he be? A pig, a rat, a rabbit?
Dad’s voice comes up the stairs. ‘You know, these mirrors aren’t bad – ‘Gothic Mirror in Gilt’ – I think I might – oh, I have clicked on it, what a stupid donkey I am, I think I might have just ordered it…’
Jeremy Strong NEVER TRUST A PARROT
Dear Pet Problem Page,
You are my last chance of hope. I pray that you can help me. I have a problem with my parrot. I had better start at the beginning – there is so much that needs explaining…
Jamie had never actually met a parrot that could talk before, but this parrot could not only talk but it had a lisp and couldn’t say its ‘r’s properly. ‘I am your fwend,’ it said, and fixed Jamie with a beady eye. Jamie gazed back into the black obsidian-like eye, almost hypnotised.
‘I like you too,’ he replied.
The parrot walked up the inside of its cage, the way parrots do, and hung from the roof. It stared at Jamie with its other eye, clicked its tongue, stretched its wings and then said, ‘My name is Nemethith.’
‘Nemesis,’ repeated Jamie.
The parrot began screeching furiously, clattering its wings against the bars of the cage. ‘Nemethith!’ squawked the enraged bird. ‘Nemethith!’
‘Keep your feathers on,’ muttered Jamie crossly.
The parrot lunged forward, grabbing one of Jamie’s fingers in its beak.
‘Ow! Let go, you monster!’
‘I am your fwend,’ hissed Nemesis through his clenched beak.
‘No you’re not. Let go!’ At last Jamie managed to wrench his hand away from the cage. He examined his finger. There were two purple welts, clear marks of the parrot’s powerful beak. Jamie shook his hand in pain and rubbed the finger. At least there was no blood. He shot an angry glance at the bird. Parrots cannot smile, but Nemesis was doing a pretty good impression. Maybe it was the peculiar shape of the beak. Both the upper and lower mandibles had a single raised point on each side. Strange, thought Jamie.
At first I thought it would be fun to have a pet parrot, especially one that could talk. Nemesis is a South American Paradise Parrot. He bit me on the very first day I got him. He bit Mum and Dad too. I suppose I should have started worrying at that point, but how was I to know that horror was just around the corner? If it hadn’t been for that little mirror I might never have known, but I’d better fill in a bit more detail first…
The parrot had come from Jamie’s aunt, who had seen him in a pet shop. Aunt Cleo was immediately seduced by the parrot’s fabulous colouring, the black glitter of his eyes and the wonderful way in which he greeted Cleo’s entrance into the shop. ‘Hail to Her Majethty, Empweth of the Fowetht!’
Aunt Cleo bought the parrot on the spot, despite the fact that she was always going away on business and so couldn’t be around to look after it much. She gave it to Jamie’s family to care for instead. Aunt Cleo was like that. She was always buying animals and then giving them to Jamie’s family. So far they had a giant lop-eared rabbit (Cleo: ‘It’s got ears like blankets!’), a chameleon (Cleo: You’ll never have another fly in the house!), a llama they kept in the garden (Cleo: A llama is the best burglar deterrent you can have, in fact it’s a burglar allarma!), and now a parrot.
But Nemesis was different. For a start he could speak, and then there were those dark eyes, as dark as the depths of a tropical rain forest by night; a darkness haunted by the soft footfall of the passing jaguar, and the silent slither of the anaconda. There was something of the night in Nemesis, especially the way he skulked in his cage, cracking open sunflower seeds and spitting the shells at Jamie while he slept. Then he’d whisper, ‘I am your fwend.’
Jamie tried to teach Nemesis some new words. In revenge for the bite on his finger Jamie began with, ‘Around the ragged rocks the ragged rascal ran.’ This of course came out as, ‘Awound the wagged wocks,’ which was as far as Nemesis got, before clicking his tongue in disapproval and hanging upside down. Jamie had already learnt that this was usually a warning that the bird was about to have a temper tantrum. Sometimes the parrot seemed more human than bird.
Three days after the arrival of Nemesis, Jamie felt his injured finger itching and scratched it. That was when he first noticed the tiny fluff that had gathered round the edge of the bruising. He showed it to his mother.
‘When your skin itches like that, it’s a good sign. It shows that the cut is healing,’ she said.
‘My finger wasn’t cut. It was just sort of – squeezed, very hard,’ Jamie pointed out. ‘By a parrot.’
His mother smiled brightly. ‘I’m sure it’s on the mend,’ she insisted, and clicked her tongue, as if to underline everything.
It was not long after Nemesis bit me that other things began to happen.
The apple tree in the garden suddenly put on a growing spurt. It was early summer and I put it down to all the rain we’d been having, but then the leaves began to enlarge. They fattened and lengthened and grew darker and denser. Day by day we watched the apple tree grow until it was three times the size of our other trees. It dwarfed everything around it. Mum and Dad thought it was wonderful, but I thought it was weird, and then Dad actually climbed it until he was sitting amongst the high branches. I was just boggling at this when Mum suddenly whizzed up the tree and joined him.
As for Nemesis, he spent all his time staring out through the bars of his cage. He would make little clucking noises and sometimes let out a long, growly sigh. I thought that maybe he was bored…
One day Jamie was passing a pet shop and on a sudden impulse he went in. He wondered what little toys he might take home for the parrot to play with. Nemesis must be getting pretty fed up, shut in a cage most of the time. Jamie bought a bell and a mirror. They were really meant for budgerigars but, as the pet shop man said, parrots are