Corvus by Esther Woolfson Read Free Book Online Page B

great man’s work. (A theory developed at length by animal behaviourists who have studied the amazing intricacies of the starling’s ability to both mimic and sing, is that Mozart’s later piece, K522, ‘A Musical Joke’, was based on the starling’s song, an enduring tribute perhaps to the musical genius of one small bird.)
    The American lady phoned. We discussed the starling, Max, when would be the best time to bring him, what he ate and what he liked. Towards the end of the conversation, the lady hesitated.
    ‘There’s just one thing I want you to know,’ she said. Her voice was low, confiding. This was clearly a woman-to-woman thing. ‘I thought you should know,’ she said, ‘he says the F-word.’
    Not Greek and Latin? Had I had a moment’s hesitation in agreeing to take him, that would have resolved me in his favour. I told David and the girls. We all waited breathlessly for the arrival of the swearing starling. Sturnus vulgaris . Suitable.

    Max was brought, a glossy, gilded, bright-eyed bird. His house, though, had been grievously neglected. It smelt, a smell which I can still summon, sickening, sweetish with an undertone of mild putrefaction, emanating from the substance Superglued, if not for all time then for most of it, to the bars, the perches, the floor, the food dishes. We carried the house, and Max, to the bathroom, took the top, wire portion off the plastic base and let Max free. He darted enthusiastically round the bathroom, flapping his lovely angel’s wings, alternately perching and flying while we immersed the noxious object in the bath to dissolve some of the noisome patina of staling shit.
    The cleaned, respectable house, with its inhabitant, was placed next to Icarus on the sideboard, behind the dining table, in a row, Bardie next to the window, then Icarus, then Max. It was not unknown for the person sitting in front of his house to be the target of the well-directed projectile defecation at which starlings are proficient. Since it was Bec’s habitual seat, and she was a well-known bird liberal, the useful notion of accepting the consequences of one’s ideals was invoked.
    Max was a bird of sparky charm, of enthusiasms and delights, his small, pointed green and gold feathers looking as if they’d been knitted by a craftsman’s hand into a glistening, shining outfit of plain and purl. The prospect of cucumber enlivened Max’s day, engaged his heart and, who knows, perhaps even his expansive starling’s soul. He would hop, flap, beg and scream when a cucumber was producedfrom the fridge to be prepared, in a state of febrile anxiety until his portion was presented to him and jammed between the bars of his house, when he would set about it with meticulous care, spending a long time scooping out the centre, leaving a perfect tube, a translucent, jade-green tunnel of seedless flesh.
    Max, it turned out, said lots of things, most of them unintelligible, but since one was listening for it, there it was. The F-word. It suited him, small, short-tempered, sassy Scottish street boy that he was. At dusk he would sing the complex, multi-layered, sweet evening song of the starling, bringing to me my Glasgow childhood of dark afternoons, twilight in a Scottish city, when phone wires were strung between poles, each, like a necklace, richly decorated with bead-like rows of glittering starlings. That was before the hand of sanitising bureaucracy skimmed the birds from wires, roofs, steeples, windowsills, removing the element of danger, the glorious, giggling frisson that enlived the progress of schoolgirls down Sauchiehall Street, a test of nimbleness as, in some complicated, recondite Highland reel, you skipped and side-stepped and pas-de-based round lampposts, through gutters, into doorways to dodge the steady but unpredictable precipitation from the massed starlings above. (Even now, I wonder how many Scottish city-centre buildings are held together by little more than an indestructible layer of