Blackbird

“It’s dead.”

We’re both looking down at it. He wants to hold my hand, he’s that frightened of it. Only young. He’s blinking back tears and the sunlight is making his hair seem golden. I won’t take his hand. He has to learn. You stand on your own two feet in this world. Only young, but he needs to know it.

He sniffs away his running nose. One tear escapes; rolls slowly down his cheek, all surface tension, glistening in the sunlight. It almost seems magnified, I can see it that clearly. It’s a fat one, rolling slowly over the sand dune curve of his cheek and down; breaking when it meets the corner of his mouth. His tongue flicks out instinctively and laps up the salt water of his sorrow.

“Are you sure it’s dead?” he whispers.

“I’m sure. It’s dead.” The perfect beauty of that tear falling is forgotten in the snap of irritation.

He wants to stand there staring at it forever. I half expect him to ask if we can conduct a funeral for it. I don’t know if he understands what a funeral is, though. He’s paying homage, though, in his own way. What’s that if it’s not a funeral?

I move away. There’s only so long you can spend looking at something like that before you start to feel that there’s nothing left to learn. He’ll get used to it. He’ll absorb everything about this one, then the next one will seem less important, and the next, until he’ll get to a point where all he needs to do is look and say, “It’s dead,” then walk away.

He’ll be a man then.

After I’ve gone a few steps, I turn to look at him. Still standing there, head bowed, short blonde hair slightly ruffled. If I were still standing close next to him, and he were to look up now, he’d look like his mother.

I shout of him, and he starts; awakens from whatever reverie he was lost in.

I think of that solitary escaping tear, and the way his tongue flicked out to catch it, flicked back in to take it back inside him again. He walks towards me, his head turned back to keep it in sight. It must have been imprinted on his retina a thousand times by now.

“Come on,” I say. “Time to go. Got to get back.”

“Grandma?” He makes a question of my name, my title, whatever it is. “Where fo things go when they’re dead?”

He’s walking beside me now, twice as many of his steps to keep up with mine. Every so often a skip, or a hop, or a short necessary run. His hand flies up every so often, as though it’s going to seek out mine.

“I don’t know,” I say. I’m not going to lie to him any more than that. It’s a sufficient lie for now.

Nothing prepares you for death. Nothing except death. The more you know of it, the more you know what to expect. Or you think you do. Sometimes it still manages to shock.

There’s always at least one in this park. Older lads with their air rifles, taking pot shots, getting lucky. They usually bring one down, and it lies in the grass somewhere for a day or two, until a cat or a fox or some other feral creature takes it. If the grass is long enough, sometimes one of them can lie there for weeks, until it grows maggoty and you can smell it faintly on the air.

Blackbird this time. More often a pigeon. This one had glossy feathers, lying there.

He’s caught hold of my hand at last, and he’s happy now, swinging my arm as we walk out of the park, passing the spot where, nearly six years ago, she was bending over the pushchair, tucking him in more closely to protect him from the chill. It was only her body falling onto his that saved him from anything more than a bit of bruising when that car smashed into her.

I remember the phone call. The boy’s frantic dad making her dad frantic too, and then the rush to the hospital where she was already laid out.

Somebody needed to say it to him, then. “She’s dead.” Him, the husband, the father, the man no older in that moment than this boy beside me is now.

He hadn’t got used to it. He wasn’t a man yet.

We cross the road, and I grip his hand tighter. Only young, and needs to know, but not like that. He doesn’t need to learn it that way. So I grip his hand tightly while we cross over the road, and I keep it gripped until we’re safely on our street.

“Grandma?” Turning me into a question again. “Will that bird be there again tomorrow, do you think?”

© J R Hargreaves 2006