Maggie fumbled the cup she’d hardly taken hold of and it spilled, dropped, smashed, “Shit!” She glanced down as she stepped away from it and when she looked up again, the sky was clear. She peered over the wall and saw nothing coming. Still, she left the broken pieces of her cup where they lay. She headed for the stairs, not running but certainly hurrying. Dad would be wanting his morning cuppa and she had to take her pills.
She didn’t look up and she didn’t look back.
She was supposed to be watching an old movie with her father but her mind wasn’t on the plot. At least she didn’t have to follow any conversation though; he was wearing the full breathing mask today rather than the nostril tubes. It fitted around his nose and mouth and it prevented him from talking. He had to look his question at her when she got up during the adverts.
“Toilet,” Maggie said. She checked his oxygen, adjusting it on her way out. “Cuppa tea, Dad?”
He nodded, returning to the black-and-white world of the TV.
Maggie had a packet of cigarettes hidden in a box of tampons in the bathroom. She grabbed them and flicked the kettle on in the kitchen before letting herself out into the corridor. She closed the door quietly and lit the cigarette early; she needed the nicotine before getting to the roof this time. She was confident there wouldn’t be enough smoke to set off the alarms. Confident, too, that they probably didn’t work anyway.
It had been a few days since her last visit to the roof. Since then, she’d enjoyed her cigarettes in the bathroom, extractor fan on, her hand and face at the tiny open window because she was too worried about what she might see from her own. The one in the bathroom had glass that was opaque even though they were so high up, and more importantly it didn’t face the park. She’d had nightmares about the park, dreams in which the thing she’d seen there had flown right at her, crashing into her bedroom in an explosion of glass and brick only to drag her out screaming, both of them screaming, and then she was falling until she was suddenly awake. One night she’d woken from this to find her father shuffling in the hallway. He’d opened his dressing gown and released a flock of dark birds at her and she’d woke a second time, smothered beneath her blankets. She was ready to check the roof again now if only because it might put an end to the dreams.
At the door to outside, cigarette somehow half gone already, Maggie paused. She listened. Nothing. She opened the door.
As soon as it was open, she heard shrieking, an endless series of short, sharp, stuttered cries, shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie, and she knew what had happened.
The eggs had hatched.
Cigarette in her mouth, Maggie put both hands to her ears as she nudged the door wider. The things weren’t loud, exactly, but shrill and constant, overlapping. Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!
She stepped out onto the roof with her eyes to the sky. She checked the park. A woman with a pram was walking through, that was all.
Eventually Maggie was able to look away and lower her hands, wincing at the din but knowing she’d get used to it. She could get used to anything. She dropped her cigarette, stepped it out, and approached the nest, careful to keep her distance. She only wanted to see them.
They were ugly little things. A shuffling mass of black, puffy with erratic plumage, they held their beaks up to shriek-shriek-shriek! at the sky. Pale grey eyelids clenched closed against what little sun there was; they beat at each other blindly with stubby wings as they fidgeted into new positions.
When a dark shape blurred into her peripheral vision, Maggie screamed and crouched and covered her head with her arms. The thing dropped from a high position behind her, landing at the nest. It settled on the scaffold pole as Maggie scurried backwards towards the stairs in a crab position, hands and shoes slipping on the wet roof.
The bird was huge, even hunched over. As tall as her but more broad. Wings the size of ironing boards folded against its body. It was entirely black, so black that it gleamed, and the one glassy eye Maggie could see was so dark it absorbed all other colours. A hole’s shadow, dark as ink not written. In its beak, in its terrible split black beak, it held a giant snail.
The young in the nest jumped, jumped, knocked against each other, and beat their stumpy wings. They snapped at the air and set up a discordant chorus of shrill calling so intense it forced Maggie to stop fleeing just so she could cover her ears again. She still heard the crack, though, when the mother slammed its catch down against the roof wall. Crack! Crack-crack! A couple of those, then the bird held its catch on the wall, talons spread to grip it steady. The beak came down. Hard, quick, darting stabs. Crack! Crack-crack-crack! And Maggie realised at last that what she saw was not a snail. Of course it wasn’t a snail.
“Oh, Christ.”
Its beak withdrew from the motorcycle helmet with a string of something red and meaty. It tossed this to its nest. As the young fought over the flesh, it pecked again at the hole it had made in the visor, scooping more from inside, nodding to throw more strips to its children. Maggie saw blood spill from the opening, a single thick line of it running down the helmet to drip into the nest where the three snapped at thrown morsels until the helmet was dropped for them to peck at. They rammed their beaks into whatever gap they could find, nudging and shrieking at each other in between.
Beyond them, visible now as they fed themselves, was the last egg. The one she’d touched had not hatched.
The young were quickly done. They craned their necks upwards, tipped their heads back, and held their beaks open for short pauses between squawks. The mother dipped to each in turn, opening its beak in theirs to regurgitate a previous meal. Perhaps the rest of the motorcyclist. Perhaps something else. Maggie tried not to think of the woman she’d seen in the park. The one with the pram.
“Oh fucking Christ.”
The bird looked up. It turned its head one way then the other, locking one dark eye at a time on Maggie. It shuffled sideways on its perch, as she’d seen it do on the climbing frame, then arched its body forwards with its beak open wide. A long bloody tongue uncurled from inside with a scream of vowels, accompanied by the spreading of wings. They unfolded like vast blankets.
Maggie scrambled in retreat until she felt the closed door press against her back. She slapped around for the handle.
The bird’s long call became a sharp sequence of noises like nails being wrenched from wood. It flapped its wings, leapt, and swooped at her.
Maggie yanked herself to her feet and the door open at the same time. She rolled around the frame, slammed the door shut behind her. Holding it closed, she braced herself for an impact that never came. When the automatic light in the stairwell finally registered her existence, it blinked and flickered a rhythm as quick as her breathing.
Another cry resounded off the walls, deafening in the confined space of the stairwell.
Maggie shoved herself away from the door and took the stairs down two at a time, chased by a long dark echo.
Maggie’s father had died while she was on the roof. All those years she’d spent with him and she hadn’t been there when it happened. It didn’t seem fair.
At the cremation, people gave Maggie their condolences and platitudes, spoke of a tough man she didn’t recognise, spoke of mods and rockers but never explained how her father fit in. The man they knew had died long ago. The man in the photographs her sisters provided for the wake — Dad on his motorbike, Dad with his wife and girls — was a stranger to Maggie. The man she knew wore a faded grey dressing gown and had died with his eyes bulging and his hands twisted into claws that couldn’t get the mask from his face, couldn’t turn the oxygen dial. He’d wet himself, too. The small living room had been ripe with his odour.