She pushed herself away from the wall to check, surprised at her own recklessness; she always crushed them out, the wall black-spotted with proof. She must’ve been more frustrated with her father today than she thought. Or with herself. She was due on soon. Maybe that was it.
The cigarette smouldered where it lay. She squashed it out beneath her shoe and saw she’d been right to check. There was litter, a whole load of it, gathered in the narrow channel between storage building and the outer wall. Except litter seemed too accidental a term for it.
“What the hell?”
A lot of it was newspaper and magazine pages, polystyrene food cartons, plastic carrier bags, but there were other kinds of street debris too. An old traffic cone, a FOR SALE sign, even a scaffold pole leaning at an angle across it all, resting on the wall. The rubbish had been shaped into something like bedding and Maggie’s first thought was of a homeless person, but then a homeless person who could get into the building would probably tuck up under the stairs somewhere, or in the foyer by the post boxes. There were clothes, though. Mismatched items, some with pegs on them, all of it grubby with bird shit and roof filth. A torn duvet cover was draped over something bulky in the middle of it all. Maggie dragged it aside.
There were eggs underneath.
“What the hell?”
There were four of them, four of the biggest eggs Maggie had ever seen. They had to be fake. Had to be. Each was knee high, about the same size as a barrel for a water cooler. Each was the colour of cement and speckled with dark freckles. She squatted beside them, pressing the back of her hand to her nose and holding her breath against the moist sour odour, the musky wet straw smell of a pet shop. She reached for one of the eggs but withdrew suddenly because she’d read somewhere that touching an unhatched egg meant it would be abandoned. The bird would—
Bird?
Maggie laughed and reached out again. Touched it. And again she snatched her hand back.
It was warm. And something inside had … moved. A vibration of life beneath her skin.
Maggie stood and dug the cigarettes from her pocket, double-tapped one, and popped it in her mouth. She sparked a flame, lit it, puffed a hurried breath, and said for a third time, “What the hell?”
Darker clouds were gathering, and the small light fixed to the outside of the storage building blinked to life prematurely, tricked into thinking it was night. A storm was coming. Maggie could feel it in the sky.
She smoked her third cigarette, staring at the eggs. They shone like small speckled moons beneath the light. If it hadn’t started raining, she probably would have smoked her packet empty watching them, wondering what on earth could have put them there.
Maggie was awake at first light, despite having stayed up late. She smoked the day’s first cigarette out of her bedroom window, enjoying the cool air, and thought about going to the roof earlier than usual. She’d Googled different types of eggs, and she’d browsed various images, but found nothing useful. The largest eggs nowadays came from the ostrich, but they were only a pathetic six inches high. Not even close. The great elephant bird of Madagascar had laid eggs that were a foot or so high but they were extinct now.
Maggie smiled. Egg-stinct. Eggs-stinked. She blew smoke into the morning air.
Anyway, the eggs on the roof were twice the size of the Madagascan ones. Even the largest dinosaur egg she could find online wasn’t much bigger than the elephant bird’s.
Outside, the city was slowly coming to life. An Asian man was pulling at the metal blind of a newsagents, rattling it up, and a street sweeper was doing his or her best to tidy the city. Someone was walking a dog that kept trying to squat, yanking the lead before it could foul the pavement. A jogger, favouring the empty streets over the tiny nearby park, was running a course that would end in the same place it began.
In the park, someone was standing on the climbing frame. The climbing frame was two upright ladders with another leaning at an angle, and connecting all three was a horizontal section of bars to swing across. The figure was balancing in the middle of this, standing on the bars rather than hanging below them. Too big to be a child. Maggie was several storeys up, and a good distance away, but she still had the distinct impression that whoever was down there was staring straight at her.
“Hello,” she said quietly, bringing her cigarette up for another breath, giving a little wave.
The figure shuffled sideways a few steps. Maggie supposed they had to go sideways because of the climbing frame, but wouldn’t they want to see where they were stepping? Once it had shuffled to its new position, the figure opened up a long coat, black with black beneath, and Maggie wondered if she was looking at a flasher down there, or some other kind of pervert.
“Goodbye.”
She scraped her cigarette out on the bricks of her window sill and brought the stub inside, pulling the window closed. She levered it shut and went to make a coffee. Maybe the person down there knew about the eggs. Maybe they’d put them there, and was waiting to see how Maggie would react. Maybe it was some sort of elaborate joke.
She readied a cup for her father, though he wouldn’t be up for some time yet, and she put his morning pills on a saucer. She spooned coffee granules into her own cup and took her own pills waiting for the kettle to boil. Tiny ovoids in her mouth, sitting on her tongue. She thought about the eggs on the roof. She thought about keeping one, bringing it down to the flat stuffed under her jacket, “Oh, I’m pregnant, Dad, didn’t you know?” Like he’d ever believe her. Like she could ever compete with Julie or Jess. Like she would ever had kids. She spat the pills into the sink and washed them away. It didn’t matter. Looking after Dad was more than enough.
She took her coffee up to the roof.
In the early hours of the morning, the air on the roof smelled different. There was a coolness to it, a fresh promise that today was new and anything could happen. She liked the quiet, too. Few cars, no TVs in the flats below, workmen yet to arrive at the site opposite, filling the world with their radio and banter. She didn’t pause to enjoy the air or the peace, though. She went straight to the space behind the storage building, half expecting to find only a clutter of litter, but the nest was still there. The eggs were still there. She raised her cup to them, “Good morning,” and took a sip. It was very hot but good, and the smell of it did something to dispel the rotten odour of the nest. “Sleep well?”
She wondered how long they’d been there before she’d found them. Some eggs, she knew from her research, were actually fossils never to hatch. What were these? One had been warm yesterday, hadn’t it? She crouched to touch it, the same one as before, and yes, there it was. An internal heat. Or maybe a residual warmth. She gave it an experimental tap and though it didn’t yield beneath her knuckles, she could tell that it might, with enough pressure.
There were no feathers in the nest. That was unusual, wasn’t it?
Because four giant eggs was completely normal.
She took another sip of coffee and put the cup on the wall before pressing both hands to the egg. She caressed it, marvelled at how smooth it was, just like a real egg. With one hand on either side, she attempted to lift it. It was heavy, and something inside fidgeted, a confined squirm that made Maggie snatch her hands back. She wiped them on her jeans as she stood then took up her cup again, glancing out to the park.
That same figure was still on the climbing frame. It hunched suddenly as she watched, and with the action came a shrill scream that broke into a sequence of aborted noises. Then it dropped from its perch and its coat opened, opened, opened far too wide on either side and flapped, flapped, because it wasn’t a coat at all; with two hard beats of its wings, the thing was aloft.