Chapter Text
When Biddy was younger, he used to think that the animals who died in films were actually killed in real life.
He assumed they used convicts, that the blood was real, and the bullets. The idea of ‘acting’ had never occurred to him. But the notion was fixed in his mind. He wondered how they managed to get it right first time; and why the convicts would cooperate at all. His mind made great leaps to accommodate for what he firmly believed.
But his fox mother didn’t like him watching those sorts of things. She said it was nasty, violent stuff. Far too violent for someone his age. His dog mother was more lenient. They used to get takeaway when his fox mother was working late and sit on the carpet mimicking the gunshots and explosions. They’d eat until they were full to bursting and hide the evidence in the neighbour’s trash. It was sort of like their thing, he guessed.
If it was a Monday, they’d get pizza, because the place down the road always had an offer on. The elk who owned it knew them by name, and he always let Biddy pick from a huge tub of candies, all individually wrapped: red, yellow, and green. He invariably went for red, because he liked strawberry more than lemon or lime, and the guy always said ‘Another great choice!’ in his first-generation accent, like Biddy was a properly discerning customer.
The guy must have been divorced or something, because his dog mother used to sigh and smile sadly every time they left, like she pitied him, and she used to bring him homemade marmalade whenever she got round to making it, which she only ever did for animals she pitied. But Biddy didn’t care so much. He used to pretend that the guys’s wife had died in a storm at sea, swallowed up by some terrifying sea monster; an idea which came mainly from the one occasion he’d seen him standing on the pier by the docks, wearing one of those old-timely hats that folk with antlers or horns need to have specially made, looking out across the water. He thought he must be remembering her. But he’d never found out for sure, because his dog mother had tugged on his arm and told him it was rude to stare. In retrospect, he might have just been out for a walk.
But anyway, the candies. The reds were his favourite. Though he’d never forgotten the betrayal — he’d been maybe ten or eleven at the time — of finding out what was in the other wrappers. His fox mother was in one of her weird moods; high-strung, but, like, happily so. She sometimes got it in her head that they didn’t do enough as a family, which was absurd, because the three of them made a perfectly happy little unit, even if Biddy was sometimes a bit private, but he didn’t think there was anything necessarily wrong with that. He supposed it derived from the fact (and he hoped this wasn’t oversharing on her behalf) that her own mother had been a bit of a character: didn’t like her for being gay, didn’t like her for marrying a dog, didn’t like her for adopting a chick; but she was long dead now so it was basically okay.
So that night she insisted they get pizza, a big one, and since he didn’t want the elk guy to say ‘Another great choice!’, because that would let her know that they went there often, he instead got a green one. But inside was a red sweet. It turned out they were actually all the same. You took off a green wrapping to reveal a red candy.
What’s all that about? he laughed.
(He could feel himself meandering, drifting off on a tangent. What were they talking about again?)
‘But yeah,’ he said, recalling that this had all stemmed from convicts and acting. ‘It was pretty stupid of me.’
The other birds on the video call shuffled about uncomfortably. He must’ve been talking for a minute straight before he caught himself. The one in the centre panel — a swan — cleared his throat. ‘I think season four was the best,’ he said.
Of course, they had been discussing a show on TV before Biddy weighed in. The others went on with it. Biddy shut his beak and nodded vacantly, cursing his motor mouth.
But he just couldn’t help it. These things (this was their third call) were awkward at the best of times. But everyone had to do it apparently. The housemother had told him in her welcome letter that it was important to get to know one’s roommates before one arrived.
Well, thought Biddy, one could stick one’s video call where the sun didn’t shine, for all one cared. This — this forced socialising and ice-breakers and fun facts was a special kind of torture for him. Doubly because hadn’t seen the show. All he could think to say was: ‘I used to think people were actually shot in films.’
And that just made him sound weird.
He tore his eyes away from the panel showing himself nodding vacantly and looked at his other soon-to-be roommates. He thought about their fun facts. He traced them left-to-right on the screen. He likes this, he thought, and he likes that, and he’s good at this, and he was a regional champion at that, and he’s got the most amazing plumage of feathers. Put them together and they seemed like quite a talented bunch.
But what was Biddy? He didn’t think he had any particularly special skills to speak of. All that was interesting about him was his background.
‘I’m a shock egg,’ he’d said, near the start of their first call, a handful of weeks back.
The reaction had been immediate.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the pheasant.
‘That’s so brave of you,’ said the rook.
‘I thought you looked a bit downy,’ said the swan.
Biddy shrugged. The downiness was all part and parcel with the rest of the ‘developmental issues’, as the doctor called them. A result of being hatched early and the likely very ad hoc incubation period immediately after. His wispy yellow feathers were right there alongside his softish beak and complete lack of comb.
His dog mother told him not to worry, that he’d grow it eventually. His fox mother snapped that he was beautiful as he was.
So he wore it with pride. He wasn’t quite sure exactly what he had to be proud about, but it was the sort of thing people said.
‘You’re adopted, then?’ asked the starling.
So he told them the story.
There was an old legend, he began grandly, that told of an orphaned child, born to a virgin princess (just to give you an idea of just how old the legend was) on a dark, stormy night in some ancient land where absurd things like virgin births happened supposedly. But her father, an evil king; a tyrannical, jealous sort of man, didn’t for some reason like the child much, and so ordered him killed. Finding this disagreeable, the princess entrusted him to one of her retainers, a fast-flying eagle, who flew from the castle and hid the child in a wicker basket among the bulrushes, there to await rescue by a family of humble, illiterate farmers. And so on, and so forth.
Anyway, his story wasn’t anything like that. His story didn’t have big titles like ‘king’ and ‘princess’. His story was one of animal error; the sort of little error one makes daily, like putting salt in place of sugar into one’s morning coffee and thereby ruining the rest of the day. His story was of a missed memo in some obscure city department. Some poor intern, paid in experience presumably, copied down the note wrong and walked from policy (his place of suffering) down the corridor and down the stairs into the stuffy basement with all its overhead cables and despatch boxes, and dropped it off with the communications department.
The memo concerned a change in guidance for self-employed hens regarding the recommended practises surrounding contraception. At the time, some sixteen years ago, the business of selling one’s eggs for consumption by carnivores was a well-established practise (though has now been superseded by other, less risky means), and it was not uncommon for a single hen to sell half a dozen eggs in a week. So one thing misheard (‘do’ became ‘do not’, or ‘must’, ‘must not’) set into a motion a chain of events that led to the inclusion of a whole battery of fertilised eggs slipping into the system unnoticed.
Biddy was one such egg.
The upshot of all this was that there were suddenly a bunch of orphaned chicks and not enough species-appropriate foster families to take them. The adoption services were absolutely inundated. So, fearing a scandal, they opened out applications to non-avian couples, and that is how Biddy the chick came to be adopted by Lily the fox and Seji the greyhound. But it didn’t raise as many eyebrows as you’d expect. Since chickens are technically omnivores, and so are foxes and dogs, and as both Lily and Seji turned out to be perfectly good mothers, the arrangement was considered broadly acceptable.
He was then, in every sense of the word, an accident.
The other birds looked impressed.
But not the swan, who narrowed his eyes. ‘So, let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You hatched, someone turned you over to the police, then you were adopted. Is that right?’
Biddy shrank back. ‘Yes, that’s the long and short of it,’ he said.
But it seemed cruel to summarise it so briefly.
‘Do you know who found you?’ said the starling.
‘Not a clue,’ said Biddy.
And at the time — the time of their first video call — this had been true. But no more.
Biddy nodded vacantly and chewed his cheek. Then, not being able to stand one more word said about a TV show he knew nothing about, he subtly tabbed out of the video call and opened up his browser. He itched to read it all again. His cursor hovered over his bookmarks.
Then he heard his name called. He tabbed back in.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘internet went bad. What did you say?’
The pheasant ruffled his feathers. ‘I asked if you were thinking of joining any clubs,’ he said.
Suddenly he felt back in the spotlight again. A curious shiver ran through him.
‘Drama,’ he said, deciding for once to not embellish.
But still a change came over the others. The shrike and the starling Ooh’d. Biddy blushed.
Predictably, the swan only scoffed. ‘Sounds up your street,’ he said, testily.
But before Biddy had the chance to respond with something equally sharp, the pheasant jumped in. ‘That’s invite-only, isn’t it?’ he said nervously, obviously trying to distract him. It seemed clear to everyone that him and the swan were not going to be the best of friends.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I got a letter the week before last.’
Absurd, given he’d never acted a day in his life. Absurder, that he used to think animals were literally shot and killed in films.
The others nodded and Biddy felt something approaching pride. But it was killed by the swan adopting a saccharine smile. ‘Just hope no one shoots you for real, eh?’
A quicker wit might’ve had something to say back. As it was, Biddy couldn’t think of anything.
‘They tend to do older plays,’ he muttered. ‘So swords. Not guns.’
The swan shrugged. Biddy bristled. How, he wondered, had he managed to make his first nemesis before his first friend?
‘Anyway,’ said the rook, barging in before it escalated, ‘I guess we’ll be seeing each other in, what, two days?’
They all agreed. The rook said how much he was looking forward to it. The starling said he couldn’t wait. Then there was a silence. Taking this as a timely cue to be done with it, they said their goodbyes and left the call.
Biddy stared at the screen until it went black. Then he stared some more at his reflection. He felt his wispy feathers quiver in the soft breeze blowing in from the open window. He supposed he’d look like a chick forever.
‘Let’s hope no one shoots you for real,’ he mimicked, acidly. Then he stuck his neck out and swept back his crest with the flat of a wing, imitating what he considered one of the swan’s laughably vain affectations. He snorted derisively. But still he had to admit that the guy looked magnificent. Swans always did, even if they were vicious bastards.
‘But, you know,’ he said out loud again, this time adopting a posh accent, ‘I’ve found he improves immeasurably on closer acquaintance,’ mimicking someone else now; a character from an old story. He couldn’t remember what. Hopefully this guy would too. But he wasn’t counting on it. He shut his laptop and drummed on the lid.
Two days. Two days until he’d be sleeping in the same room as them for three years straight. He sighed. How long was a year? The thought made him anxious. He looked about his room, at his desk, his shelves, his books. He didn’t want to leave it all behind. He didn’t feel ready in the slightest.
Outside, the wind was blowing through the tall grass and wild flowers, making them like waves. Buttercups and dandelions. Thrift and lavender. And the poplar leaves, whistling, hissing. To move away from all this to a boarding school in the city centre, from quiet suburban streets to bustling, incessant traffic ...
Would he survive it? Or would he be swallowed up?
In lieu of an answer he reached under his bed and pulled out an open box of cereal. He grasped a great handful and shoved it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. The room seemed smaller than usual somehow. Like he was outgrowing it right before his eyes. He picked a few stray crumbs off his bed and swept the rest off from the flat of his laptop.
But perhaps he shouldn’t be so apprehensive. Maybe it would be better to view it as an opportunity. After all, he thought, with new pastures come new adventures, necessarily so.
Instinctively he glanced at the map on the wall, drawn by him, of a place thought up by him. He thought how the kingdom in the north was beset by storms on their way through the eye of two peninsulas, and how the southern kingdom was waiting for them, with flaming tar and ballistae, and how none of them survived except one, a young recruit, who had a sweetheart back home and kept a feather on a chain around his neck, and was washed up onto a thickly-forested island, which was named...
He paused.
But what was it named? He looked carefully. No; it didn’t have one. He’d quite forgotten to name it. He squinted at the map. Yes; there was a blank space where the name should have been. Really now, he thought, rebuking himself sharply, How could he forget something so simple? It must be rectified immediately. He scratched the underside of his beak. What does one call an island which has no name? An island which has no name yet must be explored …
But before he could rouse himself to make up something suitable, there was a knock on his door. One, two, three; one, two, three, four, five. His dog mother’s secret knock. He barked twice, customarily, as accurately as he could, but softly; so as not to be heard by his fox mother who was working nights and needed the rest. And anyway she was still in a mood with him.
His mother peeked round the door, her long greyhound nose making her solemn in the fading evening light.
‘How’d it go?’ she asked, meaning the video call.
Biddy drew his wings down his face and groaned. Emotions of that sort were easier to communicate without words.
She smiled sympathetically. ‘I’m sure it’ll be better when you meet them in person,’ she said. ‘Meeting people online for the first time is always weird.’
But Biddy wasn’t convinced. ‘The swan’s awful,’ he whined. Then he moved his laptop off his lap and swung his legs round to dangle an inch or two from the floor.
Taking this as an invitation, his mother edged her way in and shut the door. She paused to pick up the box of cereal. Biddy went on.
‘He’s so full of himself,’ he said. ‘I swear the next time he talks about one of his summer diving camps I’ll wring his neck.’
His mother snorted. ‘Careful,’ she said, ‘he might break your arm.’
Biddy folded his wings across his chest. ‘I thought that was a myth.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, myths are often grounded in reality. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about him. Your mother and I were like that back in the day. Always at—’
‘Each other’s throats. I know.’ Biddy finished.
She smiled and sat down next to him, causing the bed to dip a little.
‘Well, dear, I’m just saying that you can never know. Who’s to say? Maybe you’ll grow to like him.’
Then she had a thought. She grinned evilly. ‘Maybe you’ll grow to like each other as much as we did.’
Biddy shuddered. ‘No, mum. Please.’
She laughed and nudged him with her shoulder. They were quiet for a moment.
‘I told them about the film thing,’ Biddy said.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I didn’t mean to. It just sort of slipped out.’
‘What about the letter?’
‘Only that I’d received it. I didn’t tell them the rest.’
They lapsed into silence again. They watched the trees shudder in the breeze outside. Biddy looked at her hands fidgeting with the cereal packet. He felt like she was waiting for something from him. He had a sense what.
As expected, she turned to face him.
‘Show me again,’ she said, eagerly.
Biddy grinned and shuffled so that he was sat back at the headboard. He adjusted the pillow to give them both a backrest and waited until she was settled shoulder-to-shoulder with him before placing the laptop between them and opening up his browser.
He hovered the cursor over the bookmarks. ‘Which one first?’ he asked.
His mother considered through a mouthful of sugary cereal. ‘The tiger,’ she swallowed. ‘Bill.’
Biddy nodded and clicked. They were presented with the social media profile of Bill the Bengal tiger: thirty-four, in a relationship, works at Leopard & Leopard Venture Capital. They scrolled down to the recent posts.
His mother hummed. ‘Another wedding,’ she said, sounding impressed. ‘Must’ve been the weekend just gone. Whose was it, a colleague?’
‘Looks like it,’ Biddy agreed. ‘That’s his third in six months.’
They flicked through the album, which showed the progression from chapel to reception. Everyone was rich, everyone was dressed impeccably, and everyone was drinking champagne. The photos Bill was tagged in were mostly of him and several co-workers he recognised from older posts. A handful showed Bill with his arm thrown round a white hare with coal-tipped ears. The guy was a new junior colleague who had joined the company in the past few months. They seemed to have become fast friends.
‘How the other side live, huh?’ his mother chimed, not bitterly. ‘You’d think they’d get bored doing this every weekend.’
‘It’s not every weekend,’ Biddy scoffed, feeling some strange need to defend Bill on this account. He scrolled down some more. ‘Look, last week he went to an exhibition.’
These were from an album of professionally-taken event photographs. Someone had obviously been hired especially. But that was only to be expected. He paused on a photo of Bill, a glass of wine in one hand, and his other arm wrapped around his girlfriend’s waist, a tigress.
His mother pointed at her. ‘And she’s definitely his girlfriend, right? Not a fiancé?’
Biddy rolled his eyes. He’d always thought his mother put too much stock in that kind of thing. He glazed over the question with a shrug and leaned in to look more critically. The attendees were broadly more herbivorous than his colleagues from the wedding; the hare excepted. ‘I reckon he’s the plus one here, right?’ he said. ‘Probably her firm sponsoring it, or something?’
The tigress ran an architecture firm. Looking her up, Biddy had realised with a certain giddiness that he regularly passed some of the buildings she’d designed whenever they visited the city centre. It was only a few stops away on the train, but they still went infrequently enough for it to be exciting every time. He’d often thought, without knowing anything about it, what it would be like to live in one of those penthouses. He thought there must be nothing better in the world than to live so high up, silent behind the thick glass, simply watching the chaos of daily life unfold below. But his fox mother used to say the sorts of people who lived in places like that were to a one snobs and bullies.
Suddenly, Biddy felt a pang of guilt. He fell silent.
‘What’s wrong?’ His mother nudged him.
He looked down at his lap and considered his words. ‘You really don’t mind that I’m doing this?’ he asked, timidly.
Which meant: you really don’t mind that I want to meet this tiger, my saviour, whom I didn’t even know anything about until a few weeks ago; and despite that I’ve been raised by you and loved by you for all sixteen years of my life, and that I discovered the deception of the red and green candies with you, and should by rights want for nothing more, still I want to meet this tiger who is of no relation to me, who presumably wants nothing to do with me since he hasn’t checked up on me once, has made no effort to be a part of my life, yet still for reasons that I can’t explain, and though I am terrified he will not care for me even now, not that there’s any reason he should — still I want to meet him.
His mother sighed and put her arms around him. She rested her long nose on his shoulder. ‘She really does love you,’ she said.
Biddy felt a sharp welling up of tears behind his eyes. It wasn’t really what he was getting at, but he understood what she meant. He’d been so excited when he’d received the letter from the scout saying he’d been selected to join the drama club, and learning that it was in those very halls, some sixteen years earlier, that he’d been saved from certain death among boiled vegetables and noodles by an unlikely trio, all members of the same drama club he was now about to join. There was a certain completeness to it, the scout had written, cryptically, Biddy thought, as if they knew far more than they were letting on.
In fact, he almost felt like he was being challenged to find them.
So he’d taken the list of three names and passed them along to his old adoption agency, asking them if they might check their records. It didn’t take long for them to get back to him. Frankly, they seemed surprised only that he’d waited so long to ask.
Such is how he’d come to learn the identities of Bill, the Bengal tiger; Pina, the Bighorn Dall sheep; and Aoba, the eagle.
His mother adjusted her grip. ‘It’s only because of her own mother. You know that, right? She just doesn’t want to see you hurt.’
Biddy nodded. ‘I know.’
He thought back to the week before when he’d revealed it all over dinner.
‘And what do you even want from them?’ his fox mother had asked, scornfully, gripping her knife and fork hard enough to bend them. ‘What do you think they can give you?’
Biddy had shrunk back, knowing full well that he couldn’t answer her. He didn’t know. Partly it was the scout, partly he felt like he ought to want to, though he’d never much thought about it before; he felt like he should want to know.
But his fox mother didn’t get it.
‘Are we not enough for you?’ she’d snapped, glaring round at her wife clearing her throat pointedly. They’d shared a tense look; twenty years of marriage summarised. Meanwhile Biddy had put down his own fork, feeling suddenly sick to his stomach, like he was a terrible, ungrateful son, like he’d just driven an immovable wedge between them. Dinner had ended with his fox mother storming out and him scurrying back up to his room. They hadn’t had a proper conversation since.
Now his dog mother sat back up and ruffled his feathers affectionately. ‘Anyway,’ she said ‘let’s do the other one: the sheep.’
So Biddy opened a new tab and searched up the catastrophe that was Pina the Dall sheep’s social media.
‘Blimey!’ his mother exclaimed, clapping her paws over her mouth, ‘does he have no shame?’
Biddy jolted then laughed. The pinned post was a morning-after shot, carefully composed to hide the identities of the two lumps in the white sheets of the bed, one on either side of him. It was dated about a month back.
His mother was mortified. ‘It’s absolutely absurd that all this is online for the world to see. I hope you’re not going to be like that when you grow up.’
Biddy snorted. ‘Count on it,’ he said.
The comments were like wildfire. He seemed to be loved and loathed in equal measure. Such was his impression of Pina. Where Bill seemed to exude a comfortable stability, Pina’s trajectory through life seemed haphazard, helter-skelter. He worked for an advertising agency, running campaigns for fashion lines, makeup, and the like. But where Bill had stayed more or less in the same company since graduating university, Pina seemed to have skipped through jobs as briskly as he did partners. Bill dressed finer, as his obviously much greater salary afforded, but Pina dressed better. There were hundreds of photos of him with his dates at bars and clubs. He was astonishingly pretty, dressed well, and knew how to pose for a camera.
He scrolled down a little way until his mother pointed out a full body mirror shot, showing off a vintage looking paring of paisley and white denim. He looked like he was on his way to a night out.
‘Goodness, he’s gorgeous,’ she gasped. ‘I’d’ve killed to have looked that good when I was twenty, for crying out loud. What’s he: thirty, thirty-three?’
Biddy supposed he must’ve been. But he didn’t have his age on his profile. ‘How do you reckon he affords it all?’ he mused. It was nothing on Bill’s tailored suits, but it still looked expensive.
‘Gets his dates to buy it for him, I’d expect,’ his mother replied.
Biddy looked horrified. ‘People really do that?’
His mother shrugged. ‘Some people,’ she said.
Biddy frowned. The thought didn’t sit well with him. He went back to scrolling.
Weeks and months flew past with the flick of a finger, nights out and fancy restaurants skimmed over, painting a picture of a character both flirtatious and provocative. Biddy found himself slightly intimidated by this male who didn’t seem like had a care in the world.
But it was odd: for all he documented his escapades and conquests, Pina rarely posted anything truly personal. Where Bill regularly made sickening and effusive affirmations of love for his girlfriend, all Pina’s musings seemed to be sharp quips and one-liners. In no photo did he ever look anything less than perfectly put together; like a character in a show rather than a living, breathing adult.
The only exception perhaps was the occasional photo taken in a small bakery, the location never tagged, like he was trying to maintain its privacy. In these photos, when he was in shot, Pina was often dressed much more domestically, in joggers and hoodie, and for once the main star was not him but whatever he was eating: pastries and cakes, obviously professionally prepared. In the background was sometimes a bear in an apron, the proprietor presumably, always slightly out of frame and out of focus, like he didn’t want to be seen. But Biddy didn’t think it a surprise that someone as much of a socialite as Pina needed a quiet little place like that to relax. Intrigued by the mystery of it, he’d found himself focussing on these pictures far more than any of the others.
He refreshed the page and scrolled to the most recent posts. The last was dated five days back; Saturday evening. For someone who posted three or four times a day this struck Biddy as highly unusual. His most recent date had been a jackal. The picture showed them sat next to each other in a plush bar. The jackal looked slightly younger, late twenties perhaps, and wore a well-pressed shirt with crested cufflinks at his wrists. He looked like he ought to have been more in Bill’s circle than Pina’s. He also had a curious little tear on one of his ears. In the shot, Pina was pressing his lips to his neck.
‘He’s definitely shifted, hasn’t he?’ his mother mused.
Biddy looked at her. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean, his dates are getting more and more,’ she gestured vaguely: ‘Carnivorous, I guess.’
Biddy tilted his head.
‘Look,’ his mother went on, wresting control of the laptop and scrolling down, ‘A couple of months back it’s all sheep, deer and the like. But here’s a fox,’ she pointed, ‘and I’m sure I saw a mountain lion somewhere, or a panther — I can never tell the difference — and she looks like a she-wolf, and now this jackal.’
Now that she pointed it out, Biddy saw that it was true. But he wasn’t sure there was anything particularly significant about that fact. For someone who went through males and females as quickly as he did, the species composition would probably average out in the end.
‘Maybe he goes in phases,’ he suggested. ‘Like the moon …’ and here he paused. He’d reached a group photo showing Pina and a bunch of friends or colleagues at a nightclub. It was one of those horrible pictures where everyone looks sweaty and stark white, except for Pina, who looked perfect as ever. He’d seen it before, but now he noticed something off about it.
Then he realised: ‘They’ve all de-tagged themselves,’ he said.
His mother looked at him blankly. ‘You’re going to have to explain that one to me, I’m afraid.’
Biddy rolled his eyes and explained the system as simply as he could to his mother whose technical mastery didn’t extend much further than email. He told her that people on social media sometimes choose to un-associate themselves with a photo, usually because it’s embarrassing or inappropriate somehow. The sort of thing you wouldn’t want your future employer to see.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Has he had a falling out?’
‘That’s an awful lot of people to fall out with.’
‘Maybe he slept with the wrong person.’
‘Maybe.’
But something still felt off, especially combined with the sudden radio silence. He looked back at the photo of the jackal, his dark eyes glistening and his grin threatening to rend his face. He looked positively overjoyed to be sat next to Pina. Then Biddy opened the comments. In addition to the ones he’d already scanned though, all from the week just gone, several more had been added as recently as that very morning. His eyes caught on a single word that made his stomach sink.
‘Monster.’
There was a sharp sound from elsewhere in the house that jolted him back to the moment. His fox mother was up. Instinctively he slapped the laptop screen down, a nervous habit, even though his dog mother was sat right beside him. She meanwhile chewed her lip and stared at the closed door, the bar of light beneath breaking back and forth and his other mother careened to and fro on the landing, stumbling, stomping like some great leviathan drawn up out of the depths, out of sleep. They heard the bathroom light click on and the shower start running. She was getting ready for work.
His dog mother turned back to him. ‘She’ll come around,’ she promised. ‘I’ll make sure of it.’
Biddy attempted a smile. But even he wasn’t convinced by it. His mother sighed.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘of course you should go looking for them if you want to. It was bound to happen some day, and we were kidding ourselves if we ever thought otherwise. It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to find out who hatched you.’
Biddy looked at his hands. ‘Still makes me feel shit, though,’ he mumbled.
She gave him her sad, marmalade-y smile and put her paw on his head again. Involuntarily, he made a soft cheep in the back of his throat.
‘Guess we’re getting old ...’ she said, a little cryptically. Then she looked out of the window again. The sun was dipping below the horizon, silhouetting the trees and lengthening the shadows of the cars and telegraph poles across the road. She became solemn once more.
‘Still nothing about the eagle?’ she asked.
Biddy shook his head. This was perhaps the most curious thing of all.
For while the adoption agency had very easily gathered information on Bill and Pina — both of whom seemed to lead what amounted to normal, public lives — gathering the equivalent information on Aoba had proved nigh impossible; like blood from a stone. After Cherryton, judging by the matriculation photos, it seems he’d gone to a prestigious medical school. But beyond that, they couldn’t find anything. They checked the university records for the year he ought to have graduated but found no trace of his name there or anywhere else. He didn’t seem to have gone into practise either. Nor did he have any social media accounts. It was like he’d dropped off the face of the earth. The obituaries didn’t turn up anything, so he was presumably still alive, but as to where he might be found?
There was simply nothing.
Biddy hadn’t quite known how to feel about it. Since in some way — and maybe it was just because he was a bird, or perhaps because Aoba was the most shrouded in mystery and therefore Biddy could guess at his personality and imagine someone more like himself than Bill or Pina — but he felt something like kinship with Aoba. It was in Biddy’s nature to dramatise, so he couldn’t help but feel like he was bound on a great journey, a sentiment not a little encouraged by the scout, whose letter had made it sound like there was something to be done that only Biddy could do. In some ways he felt like someone had dropped a real, bond fide adventure into his lap, and perhaps it was silly, or selfish, but he wanted it nonetheless.
Such were the circumstances under which Biddy had written a letter of introduction to be passed on via his old adoption agency to Bill the Bengal tiger and Pina the Bighorn Dall sheep.
All he had to do now was wait for a response.
‘Maybe they’ll be able to tell you something when you meet them,’ said his mother.
Biddy frowned. ‘Assuming they even want to.’
His mother smiled again. ‘If they don’t …’ she began. ‘Well, all I can say is that they won’t know what they’re missing.’
She passed him back the box of cereal and drew herself up with renewed energy. ‘Anyway, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to go to school, make a mountain of new friends, find a way to get along with that swan, join the drama club, meet the tiger and the sheep, and, if you’re not quite exhausted by then: find this eagle chap.’ She punctuated her last words with a gentle jab to his ribs.
‘How’s that?’ she finished.
Biddy giggled despite himself. ‘Yeah, easy as that.’
Grinning now, his dog mother got up from the bed and stretched her back. ‘Right, I better see to the kraken,’ she said, meaning his fox mother. She gestured with her head to the door. ‘Two of her co-workers called in sick this afternoon and she doesn’t know yet. I’ve got to break the news to her.’ Then she turned around. ‘And you,’ she pointed to the open suitcases on the floor. ‘You need to think about packing.’
Biddy sighed profoundly and moved his laptop onto the bedside table. ‘I’ll get round to it,’ he sighed.
His mother narrowed her eyes at him. ‘See that you do,’ she said, and then was gone; her footsteps retreating down the hall.
The door clicked shut. The silence he was left with settled heavily on his shoulders. He felt himself sag under its weight. He stared blankly at the wooden door, his dressing gown still swinging from its hook. It swung back and forth and finally came to rest.
Biddy got up off his bed and paced to his closet. Inside he found his new uniform. He rubbed the coarse fabric of the waistcoat between his fingers and ran his wing along the length of the pinstriped trousers. Then he let it fall and walked to the open window. Outside, the wind whipped softly through the trees and beat against the sides of their house. He took a deep breath, savouring the fresh smell of grass before rain. Storm clouds were beginning to brew in the distance.
In less than forty-eight hours, he thought, he’d be looking instead out of a high-up dorm room window onto old, cobbled courts, dripping with the history of a thousand students gone before, among them a Bengal tiger, a Dall sheep, and an eagle. His saviours. His parents.
It hardly felt real. It was like something someone had made up.
He looked again at the map on the wall. The island — the one which had no name — sat plumb between two warring kingdoms. It seemed suddenly very significant to him. He imagined its rocky beaches, the waves in the distance swelling where the ships had sunk, and the countless bodies whirling round and round and at last finding rest on the floor of the sea. Only one survived.
So now he explored that island, a shivering young recruit, his only certainty a feather on a string around his neck, searching he knew not what for, feeing himself like a bird trapped in a cage, or strung up in some high tower, waiting …
But how long must he wait? A month, a year, a decade?
A lifetime, perhaps?
For there was a lifetime again between his life and theirs. He tried to put it into perspective. He was sixteen now. How much did he remember from when he was eight? Pizza and colourful candies was all. Useless things. So they, thirty-three or thirty-four, once sixteen or seventeen: how much from that time had made its way to where they were now?
The stretch of time was unfathomable to him.
But there was something else too, something he hadn’t told his mother — quite apart from the universities they’d been to and the companies they now worked for — that made some strange feeling open up a pit in his stomach and lodge itself there like a spined sea urchin. The thought that, despite their comprehensive social medias, and despite the fact that they went to high school together and raised a dying chick together:
Pina and Bill didn’t share a single mutual friend.
So, far from seeing him again after all these years …
Would they even want to see each other?