“Fucking birds,” Dad said, as he did every morning, stubbing out his cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray. “I’m off to work.”
Every so often another arrived, glimmering in the sunsets and screeching in the sunrise. Always peacocks with a vast trail of feathers. Never the more subdued peahens.
Normally I left with Dad, trailing up the street behind on my way to school. That day was different. That day was the start of the school holidays.
I was halfway through some cartoon I was far too old for when Gary knocked on the door. I waited a few moments until the theme tune finished before letting him in. He barged past me, opened the fridge, tutted and slammed down on the sofa.
“What are we going to do, then?” he asked, flicking between channels before returning to the one it was already on.
“I want to know where the peacocks go,” I said, sitting down in the chair opposite.
“Not this again,” Gary said, picking up a magazine from the floor, realizing it was one of Dad’s fishing magazines and throwing it back down on the pile.
The presence of the peacocks had long been a bone of contention on the Willsea, as well as between me and Gary. Some loved the explosion of color randomly encountered on the dull wet streets, and others hated the birds for the way their cries cracked the air.
Gary despised them. I didn’t really have any great feelings either way, apart from curiosity. When I first saw them shimmering against the broken concrete, I thought they were an elegant symbol of the chance to escape to another place. Later, I realized they were just as trapped as we were.
“I don’t care,” Gary said. “I don’t care if they live in some underground bunker, or if they nest in an old car. I don’t care if they live with old Mrs. Seacroft. I just don’t.”
“Fair enough, but it would give us something to do.”
Over the past year everything for kids our age had closed. The Youth Club had been mothballed, the local bowling alley gone bankrupt, and the playground chained shut against us. We were too old for holiday clubs and too young to get served in the local pub (where the heavily tattooed landlord knew all our parents anyway). That left boredom and curiosity. I knew curiosity would win out.
We spent the rest of that first day watching daytime TV transform from cartoons aimed at those younger than us to midday programs aimed at those older. The monotony of the day continued until dark, Gary leaving as my Dad returned. That night the peacocks sounded louder than usual.
It took three days for Gary to break.
“How are we going to follow them?”
• • •
You have to understand, this was in the days before neighborhood apps; the only way to gossip was in-person, and out of school we were cut off from our information sources. Instead, we wandered the streets in the hope of hearing the peacocks, fading as we got tired and hot, clothes sticking to our skin.
“We’re going to have to go out late or early,” I said to Gary. He sat in the angle between wall and pavement, t-shirt scuffed up as he finished the 5p ice pop, letting the stained plastic fall to the ground to be swamped by ants.
“Let’s go out late. I hate early mornings,” he said, shielding his eyes to stare at me.
“You have to get up early when your mum goes to work.”
“But I go back to bed when she’s left,” he said.
The plan was made there on a dusty street, sheltered from the worst of the sun by the parked cars, air scented with oil leaking through rusted metal. We’d wait until after tea, until the worst of the heat was out of the day, then we’d walk around until we found one of the peacocks.
“Then what?” Gary said.
“Then we follow it,” I said. Satisfied with the simplicity of the plan. No moving parts. Nothing to go wrong.
• • •
Gary met me at the corner, hood up despite the heat. The evenings could be dangerous. We all had our enemies that followed us from the school to the streets. We’d known each other since nursery. Though we had no ability to fight off the sharks that circled us in the school corridors, we’d always supported each other through the bruises and the punishments our parents gave us for torn clothing and lost books.
“Where do we start?” He said, words distorted as he tried to catch his breath.
I shrugged.
“Here seems good for now,” I said.
He nodded and we sat down against a hedge, talking about things of no interest to anyone else and barely of interest to us; a collection of in-jokes and impressions joined together with shared memories neither of us really remembered.
The sun started to set, not taking the heat of the day with it. As it fell below the streets of identical houses we heard the first cry. The scream was like a siren for a crisis never arriving. A warning for an emergency affecting a population of two. In the stillness of the summer evening it cleaved through the air, drowning out the sound of drunken fighting and car stereos, and we followed the cries to find the bird.
“Sounds close,” Gary said, standing up. We listened to a second screech, and a third before either of us spoke again. “Weatherstream Avenue.”
We walked down the hill to the end, around the corner into the cul-de-sac, and through the narrow passageway that smelled of privet hedges and dog piss. The cry was louder, just a single hollow shudder in the air with no answering call. We walked into the street, looking up and down the identical houses, trying to spot the bird in the gardens between perfect flowerbeds and abandoned plastic toys.
Gary spotted the shimmer of iridescence before me, and we ran up the street after it.
The peacock flashed through a yard. We stayed on the street. If we followed through the gardens, we would soon find ourselves at the mercy of police, guard dogs, or the fists of the house owners.
“Can peacocks fly?” Gary said, looking at me while we listened.
“Honestly,” I said. “I have absolutely no idea.”
We soon had our answer. A flash of purple and green as the bird took flight briefly to land on a hedge, before a second flight up to the plastic gutter edging a nearby roof. There, with tailfeathers draped down against the brickwork, the peacock cried once more, and a second answered from elsewhere in the housing estate, followed by a third and a fourth. We watched the nearby bird turn its head, crest fluttering as it looked around. It paused mid-turn as if it could see its compatriots through the walls and fences. With a twitch of the neck it stared straight at us and fanned out its tail feathers. Each opalescent iris transfixed us and, despite the warmth of the evening, I shuddered. In those feathers, that artificial gaze, there was something beyond mimicry looking back, something hidden and forgotten and ancient. Then the feathers dropped and the moment was gone, the bird flying the short distance onto a rusted car, and to the disused railway beyond.
On one side of the Willsea was the rest of the town; old, crumbling, faded, and better (or so those who lived there thought) than the much younger housing estate. On the other side was Rushy Glen, the abandoned rail tracks that ran from the viaduct over the river valley to the pedestrian bridge that crossed the active train lines. A trail for cycling, family walks, school cross country, and all sorts of illicit activity; some known to us at that age and some yet to be discovered.
We watched the feathers disappear from sight, looked at each other, and ran the short distance to a familiar gap in the hedge, barely large enough for us to fit but often too tight for those who might hurt us. My hometown was a series of escape routes in those days, until I found a more permanent one.
On the other side, the disused track ran straight, all the rails long-since removed and replaced with a rough cinder surface as if the last train to run through had dumped its fuel. In front, the bird we had been tracking walked away from us, leading us toward the distant woods.
The streetlights barely reached the Rushy Glen, and I glanced back to the comforting glow from the nearby streets. We’d all heard the stolen motorbikes running off stolen petrol, and seen the shimmer of blue lights, police and ambulances coming to pick up the pieces. The thought of running into either did not appeal. And yet the way the feathers glimmered in the dark made the option of turning back and leaving the old diesel path a shrinking possibility. I turned to Gary, hoping his earlier reluctance was still there, that I could use it to abandon our mission without losing face. When he turned to me, there was an iridescence in his pupils like oil in rain.
“They must be nesting in the trees near the viaduct,” he said, the stillness leveling his voice. “Makes sense really.” He started walking. “Keep up.”
That was the moment. The final moment when I could have turned back. Not the only one, there had been plenty before, but the precise point in time I could have ducked back through the hedge and walked home, with Gary following, and we could have spent the night watching films we shouldn’t have been watching, and left the peacocks alone. I followed Gary as he walked after the muster of birds.
• • •
I was so focused on the peacocks I did not notice we had reached the viaduct until the metal shutters rose out of the darkness. The birds sat before it, tails spread in the dust. Then, one by one, they lifted the long feathers into the air and let loose their cry.
Gary left my side before I could stop him, not that I would have known what to say. He was always better with words, better at arguing his point. That’s why I would find myself at the arcade when I’d rather be at the swimming pool or climbing through an abandoned house when I wanted to be at home eating crisps and watching cartoons. Probably part of the reason why I was so surprised he went along with my plan. I stood still watching Gary walk toward the birds, toward the corrugated iron gates, and wondered how much choice we’d really had.
He passed between the birds, and their feathers lifted as he did so. From behind them he turned back a moment, his eyes glittering greens and purples in the dark, before he went to the gate.
The padlock was missing. With both hands Gary wrenched the barrier open just wide enough, blood dripping from his palms into the dirt. He entered through the narrow gap, clothes and skin tearing on the metal; followed by the birds, one after another, the gate closing behind the last one.
The screeching started once more, louder, and far more intense, I smelled the dirt from nearby fields and beneath my feet, and somewhere amongst it all, the copper tang of Gary’s blood slowly drying on the sharp rusted metal. The nausea was like heatstroke.
Once more I felt the preciseness of the decision hidden in the moment, though at the time I had no words to express it. I knew Gary was okay. He was on the viaduct with a bunch of harmless birds. Elaborate? Yes. Garish? Yes. Violent? Of course not. The screaming did not stop, and only as my nausea faded a little did I realize that the sound was not coming from the peacocks.
Staying low, I crept the last few meters along the track, hardcore and cinders cutting my bare knees as I moved forward. First I tried to open the gate, but it would not shift against the ridge of dirt. I slumped against the metal, still hot from the day, still sticky from Gary’s blood. The sound of the screams battered against the barrier until I had to look.
About halfway up someone had cut a rectangle to secure the now missing padlock. I pulled myself up and stared through the gap.
A saturated miasma hung over the center of the bridge, swirling and cloying with opalesque colors of green and blue and purple and several which I cannot describe even now. The peacocks perched around the edge of the cloud, their tails raised. Deep wide eyes embedded in the feathers turned to the dancing haze. And in the middle was Gary. What was left of Gary.
The living mist coated him, obscured him, but I saw within it claws and blades that sliced into him, peeling back layer upon layer. First skin, then muscle and tendons, and gristle, until every inch of his body was flayed, still attached and swaying in the cloud of colors. A screaming choral of pain. Creeping over his forehead, the gas thickened, seeping into his eyelids, shredding them, compressing until they ruptured, deflated eyes hung down his cheeks.
I tried to look away. Truly I did, but I thought mine were the only eyes that would see what happened there, and I had to remember, no matter how horrific.
As I watched, the color adhered to the ribbons of meat, discoloring the flesh until each strip became prismatic, and from the swirling cloud other eyes began to distil, embedding in the torn glittering skin. Gary’s screaming never stopped, but there was no way for him to halt the cloud’s reshaping of him. Over the next few hours Gary was compressed and deformed, and rebuilt until there was nothing of him left, and five peacocks standing on that deserted bridge, the newest one still screaming in agony throughout the night.
The police found me two days later after my dad reported me missing. The story they decided on was that Gary and I had decided to run away, despite neither of us having any problems at home, and the problems at school being the same as those of anyone of our age. I didn’t argue. Let them believe what they want. After a while they stopped looking for Gary. Thought he fell in the river and washed away or, in their hopeful days, that he successfully escaped Willsea estate.
I never knew which peacock was him, no matter how much I examined the patterns of their feather eyes or watched for familiar mannerisms. Even after moving away I still hear those iridescent screams early in the morning and late at night, and I can’t shake the image of the cloud embedding one eye after another in Gary’s torn and ribboned skin.
Thanks to Tilly whose artwork inspired me to write this story. —ST
