I ran past the table and pushed open the door that led to the living room where Billy Boy lived in his cage. First of all I opened the window that looked out over the garden. Then I lifted the grey blanket off the cage. Billy Boy opened his little brown eyes. They were the same colour as my father’s eyes. I counted his toes. Yes he had all ten of them so he didn’t have mites. Then I listened to him breathe to make sure I didn’t hear a click. Last of all I peered at his beak, checking to see the holes weren’t clogged up. I wiggled the latch and opened the cage door.
Billy Boy lifted up his wings. And then he closed them tight against his little blue body. He lifted one foot in the air, paused, and put it down on his perch. Birds everywhere were singing. It seemed to me that all over Natal, birds trilled into the first light of day, encouraging the blue bird to break free and join them.
If I had poured all my childhood anxieties in to Billy Boy’s tiny carcass, he had a lot to carry. He was very heavy. I had given him a soul, but he didn’t seem to care. I had imagined all kinds of things for Billy Boy, breathed in to him all my secret wishes. I had given him another life to live, but he did not want to be free. He was supposed to be a bird, a flying machine, but he seemed to like his cage more than he liked his liberty. Everything I had imagined for Billy Boy was dead. I didn’t know what to do. Betrayed and desolate, I began to walk away from the bird who wanted to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Something happened. A flutter of wings. The silver cup falling from the mantel shelf. A small dot of blue. A circle of blue. The sweet pea smell coming from the garden. Billy Boy flew out of the window just as the ginger cat padded into the living room, its tail held high in the air.
I pretended everything was normal at breakfast when I sat at the table with my new family. I had been pretending that everything was ‘normal’ for quite a few years now and had become quite good at it. Edward Charles William crunched his toast and English marmalade while Godmother Dory poured tea from a teapot that was smaller than her bosoms. Today was the day Melissa sat her secretarial exams and she had styled her beehive three inches higher than usual for luck. She was reading her Pitman’s textbook while she sipped from a glass of cream soda, which she said would give her energy for the exam. Billy Boy was probably sleeping on a leaf high up in a tree in the morning sunshine.
He was free. Billy Boy was free.
It was only when I was buckling my school regulation shoes that I heard Godmother Dory screaming. I spent more time than usual on the third hole of the buckle, testing it a few times before deciding the second hole was probably a better fit and starting all over again. By the time I made my way towards Godmother Dory, her little hands were flung up in the air and she was calling BILLY BOY over and over again. There were things she wanted to know. How come the cage door was wide open? How can a budgie open its own cage? Melissa who was late for her exam ran to get her mother tissues while trying to put on her white cardigan.
‘Don’t shout at her.’
‘But my little budgie’s not going to survive. He’s probably dead.’
‘You gotta understand Ma,’ Melissa was looking for her pad with all the shorthand notes written on it.
‘What do I have to understand?’
‘She thinks the budgie is her Pa.’
‘How can Billy Boy be anything but a budgie?’
If that question was something human beings had been grappling with ever since they started painting animals with mineral pigments on the walls of caves, Melissa’s mother had not yet caught up. When Melissa saw me listening outside the living room door she lunged at my school tie and pulled me towards her made up face.
‘FUCK YOU. Why did you go and let Ma’s bird out?’
Before I could answer she ran off and I heard the engine of the spaceship revving up and the tyres squealing on the drive. Edward Charles William had obviously let Melissa fly the spaceship again because of her exam. After a while I walked into the garden. Joseph was coughing inside his shed. He ate his breakfast there every morning, a thick porridge called mealy meal which the maid called Caroline, who had another name, Nkosiphendule, prepared for him in a tin bowl. I still hadn’t managed to buckle my shoe. It was slipping off so I bent down to try again. It was so hard to thread the little silver thing through the hole. After a while, Joseph opened the door of his shed and told me to come in. My shoe was still half on and half off so I had to slide rather than walk. The shed smelt of mould and paraffin. Joseph slept on a mattress on the floor. Two green blankets lay neatly folded on a chair. His jacket hung on a hook in the corner.
‘Madam told me you’ve lost her budgie.’
Madam was Godmother Dory. Master was Edward Charles William. Sometimes Joseph called him Baas as well as Master. Master and Baas and Madam were the white race and they ate kippers and marmalade for breakfast like the King and Queen of Ingerland.
‘Look.’ Joseph pointed to a wooden crate that he had turned upside down to make a table. On the box was his tin bowl. Billy Boy was hopping up and down on the rim of the bowl, pecking at the porridge inside it.
‘I found him on the roof and gave him lodgings.’ Joseph started to laugh. ‘But he hasn’t laid a blue egg yet so we won’t be sharing a little meal. I’m going to put a lid on the bowl and you are going to take him back to Madam.’
When I brought Billy Boy back into the house, Madam was lying on the sofa reading a book called Love Is A Word You Whisper. The maid who pretended she was Caroline so Madam could say her name carried in a tray with a pot of tea and two strawberry jam biscuits arranged on a saucer. Madam’s pudgy fingers moved across the tray and grasped one of the biscuits. I heard her bite in to it and then crunch it with her porcelain teeth. At that moment Billy Boy chirped. Madam sat up and wailed. She had jam all over her little lips and I could see the biscuit crumbs on her tongue. After she had put Billy Boy back into the cage and slammed it shut she walked past me towards the telephone without saying a word. I could hear her asking in a loud royal voice to be put through to South African Airlines.
That afternoon, while I sat on a bench under the cloisters watching the nuns hit the hands of the girls who were being punished for various crimes, I knew that something in my life was about to change. Meanwhile, I observed the choreography of sin and punishment that was happening in front of me because whatever was going to change was going to take me somewhere else. The sinful girl was holding her palm facing upwards, towards heaven. Then the nun took a metre ruler and swiped it across her palm, two whacks, no, three whacks. Sister Joan was busy smelting the hand of an extra sinful girl called Laverne when I saw Godmother Dory waddling through the cloisters. Yesterday, Laverne had shown me a red mark on her neck where her boyfriend had left a love bite. Yes, he had actually bitten her out of love. Sister Joan was talking to my Godmother and she was beckoning to me. Now that she knew all about me letting Billy Boy out of his cage, she was going to purify my hand by beating it.
‘Come here.’
To my astonishment, instead of punishing me, Sister Joan bent down and buckled my shoe. She had been teaching me French, the most distinguished thing that had happened in my life so far. She had told me all about the visions of Jeanne d’Arc, and she had taught me the word for shoe. So now she asked me how to say shoe in French. When I said, ‘Une chaussure’, she stood up and placed her cool clean palm on my forehead.
‘Your Godmother says you’re homesick so she’s sending you back to your mother. This will be your last day at school.’