Call Me Alastair Read online

  It’s quite the nasty trick that Pete takes such care of the long, grey feathers that peek out from under his baseball cap. I’d admired them for a while. So did Aggie. Until one day he took that cap off.

  Balder than a chick up top.

  There’s nothing worse than a feather picker. They tend to be anxious sorts. They lack confidence, self-control, feathers (obviously), and a good amount of brain cells. Familiar with the term “birdbrain”?

  Feather picker.

  Somebody must have seen some bird with a few tufts left and two blank eyes goggling in two different directions and looking hungry to pick whatever was left and thereby determined all birds were idiots. Hence: birdbrain.

  We cannot all be judged by the dishevelled madness of a few.

  But I digress.

  Mrs Plopky plants herself in front of the door, blocking entry to the store, and begins to do a little shimmy. A forgotten pink curler pinned to her head bounces as she tappity-taps in a circle. Even her eyes dance, the wrinkles around them deepening. “Peter, dear,” she sings. “If you let me borrow a few puppies for my group, one of my fuddy-duddy friends might decide to purchase one…”

  Pete straightens and pulls on his cap. “Fine,” he growls. “You win. Grab some puppies and bring ’em back here. I’ll put ’em in crates.”

  “Oh goody!” the old woman exclaims as she runs back into the shop, the curler bobbing behind her. She returns a few minutes later with an armful of slobbering Labrador pups. As soon as the door closes, one wriggles from her grasp and then another. “Oh! Oh dear!”

  Soon all four puppies are tearing through cartons of dog biscuits and pulling flea powder off shelves. One’s eating kitty litter, and another leaves a warm puddle next to a sack of cedar shavings. The room’s a riot of barking and Pete cursing, but at long last the puppies are wrangled up and locked in carriers.

  “Go on and put them in my car, Peter,” says Mrs Plopky, straightening the feathers around her neck. She reaches up, pinches Pete’s cheek, then gives it a playful pat. “I’ll have them back by Tuesday. And don’t you worry! I’ll tell all my friends about you!”

  Pete grunts, clearly annoyed he’s been duped into the whole business, but obeys.

  “And I’ll make you a pie! I’m a very fine pie baker!” she shouts after him. She tucks her pocketbook in the crook of her arm and, turning to leave, spots our case again, stops, and peers inside. I hide myself under a loose corner of towel, while Aggie flaps her wings and garbles a greeting.

  “Well, would you look at that?” she says to Aggie. “Aren’t you a little darling?”

  She turns her sights on me then, and I try my best to melt into the corner. “And you—”

  Behind a pair of thick glasses, the watery blue of her eyes bores into me. “You,” she says again. The corners of her mouth curl into the beginnings of a smile. “You’re no darling, are you?”

  I swallow. I’m not sure I appreciated that comment.

  Even if it is true.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Mrs Plopky asks.

  As if I’d ever let that happen.

  In a flash of pink skin and spiny feathers, I rush the glass, squawk, and snap my beak, thinking it should scare her off.

  She doesn’t seem to notice. “That’s what I thought. You’re no darling, but you’re feisty. I like feisty,” she says, then points at my feet. “Don’t look now, but you stepped in a little something.”

  She trots out into the shop, and the door swings on its hinges and comes to a groaning stop. I look down at my feet.

  A little something.

  Well.

  That’s a nice way of putting it.

  CHAPTER 3

  “When do you think we’ll eat?” Aggie asks.

  I crane my neck to get a peek at the space under the door, and sure enough, the thread of light’s been snuffed out. I put on a brave face. “Pretty soon, I think,” I answer.

  Aggie flaps her wings and grins. “Oh good, because I’m starving.”

  The barks, squawks, squeaks and purrs of the pet shop quieted long ago. Somewhere on the sales floor, crickets chirp faintly from those $3.99 Styrofoam containers they get themselves stuck inside. A hamster falls out of the wheel he’s been sleeping in. Here and there the snore of a turtle drifts through the dark.

  Across from us, Porky’s fallen asleep in his food dish, mouth agape. A string of drool gleams in the dismal light of the exit sign.

  All right, so I lied about the “pretty soon” part. Crickets, snoring, drooling in the dark – you add it all up and it means only one thing:

  Ol’ Pete will not be returning to feed us.

  It isn’t the first time. Not the first time I’ve thought about taking a nice bite out of him either. Pete says he hates parrots? The feeling’s mutual.

  “I bet Pete’s just feeding the puppies first this time, huh,” Aggie says, shaking her head sadly. “Poor Mama Pete, so many mouths to feed. We’ll just be patient. Right, Alastair?”

  I smile at her and feel a little of my anger fall away.

  If anyone is a different species, it’s my sister. Aggie.

  She came into the world, in a warm beam of incubator sun, a full three days after my own entry. Aggie’s first words to me? Oh, there you are! As if she were the one waiting on me and not the other way around.

  I’d tapped hellos, coaxed, willed her here. And after I helped her chip away at her shell, she arrived like a tiny sunrise and with so much light, I never did ask if she’d heard the voice inside the other egg. The one that never hatched, just disappeared. I didn’t want to ruin it, didn’t want to make her sad. Sadness has claws, I’ve found. And keeping them from my sister is all I’ve determined to do since.

  Above us, the heat lamp pops and flickers out. Aggie gives a startled wail.

  A stab of cold air blows in from the air-conditioning vent in the corner, and Aggie shivers beside me. I grab the edge of the towel with my beak, do my best to wrap it around us, and hold my breath, waiting to see what the lamp will do. A night without heat is certain death for a pair of hatchlings.

  Aggie pats me with a thorny wing, and her beak chatters. “Don’t worry, Alastair. Pete won’t let us down.”

  Out of the quiet depths of the pet shop, the rabbits cackle. A puppy yelps and goes silent. Something hoots in the distance, and Aggie cocks her head, listening. My ears prick too at the sound of one of Aggie’s coughs.

  Another. I’ve lost count today.

  A few fiddle-playing crickets play a mournful dirge. A funeral march.

  We’ll see about that.

  I stalk to the edge of the glass and rap my beak against it. Nothing happens.

  I rap harder. This time the lamp above us flickers, sparks and blazes back to life.

  “There. Light’s back on,” I say, stalking back to our nest. “Don’t worry, Ag. I’ll take care of you.” And I will. I may have slept on the job once, but not again. There’s a reason Aggie stays warm and fed and far from sadness’ grip. There’s a reason she hatched all right.

  I made sure of it.

  I will always make sure of it.

  Aggie bobs her head and smiles. “You and Mama Pete – you never let me down,” she says, and I’m about to tell her that statement is only half-true, when her forehead wrinkles, and she clears her throat. “Um, Alastair? Do you think if Pete feeds the puppies first, then maybe the kittens will be next, and then us?”

  I sigh. I’m not fond of lying to her, but it’s better this way. “That’s probably about right,” I answer. “Puppies first, then the kittens. Should be any minute now.”

  “Oh, but what about the gerbils? They need to eat.”

  “Right. The gerbils—”

  A head pops up across the way in the Infirmary. A bandaged head with bandaged eyes and half a tail. Aggie lowers her voice to a whisper. “I know you don’t think much of them, but they’re not so bad. They’re just troubled!”

  “They’re barbarians, Aggie.”

  She
looks over at the gerbil, who’s now sniffing around blindly and talking to himself, a bit of spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth. Aggie winces. “They’re good at heart, though – just yesterday that one asked me if I wanted a knuckle sandwich!”

  I rest my case.

  See, I’ve learned a few things very early in my young parrot life. I’ll give you the basics.

  One: You come into this world very cold and very naked. Your only job is to grow an armour of feathers and survive.

  And two: Trust no one. Not even your mother. It’s a gerbil-eat-gerbil world, everyone clawing for a spot at the top of the food chain. A bird can’t get caught with his feathers pulled over his eyes.

  He’d better be sharpening his talons.

  “How about I tell you a bedtime story while we wait?” I suggest.

  Aggie sniffles and squeezes in closer. “OK.”

  The sharp spines of her new feathers poke into my side, and she closes her eyes and smiles in that perfect Aggie way: a little lopsided, but sort of precious, you know?

  “Tell the one about the stars,” she says.

  “It’s like someone took a handful of light, threw it up in the air, and it broke apart in a million tiny sparks.”

  “And the sky?”

  “The sky’s blue – periwinkle-powder-bright, to be exact.”

  “Ooh, I like that colour,” Aggie says.

  I tell Aggie about things I’ve never seen, places I’ve never been. I know them, though, somewhere deep in my bones. Like some kind of instinct.

  Like some long-ago bird whispered stars to my heart, made clouds scuttle through my veins. I know trees: pine and palm, the cola nut and the wandering mangrove. I’m sure of things called flocks and family, and that good, foraging, attentive mothers have to exist.

  I know what it is to fly.

  “The sky is a brilliant blue,” I tell Aggie. “And the bluer it gets, the closer you are.”

  “To where?” Aggie asks.

  “To home.”

  If there’s another thing I know, it’s that there’s a place called home. Some nest high in a tree, where you can watch clouds and count stars. A place with no Petes. A place where they don’t forget to feed you. A place where I’ll never have to listen to Aggie’s belly growl again.

  Whatever it takes, I’m going to find that home for me and Aggie. I will.

  Like most things, it takes more than a dream and a couple of thumbs to get what you want. It takes determination, strength.

  It’s not just wings you need to fly.

  Pete barrels into the storeroom the next morning, half-moons of sweat staining the space under his arms. “Sorry ’bout that!” he says briskly. “Had to pick up my takeout at Tasty Panda before it closed last night! Didn’t want my wontons getting cold!”

  “Yeah. Hate it when my wontons get cold,” I hear Porky grunt from his darkened case opposite us.

  Pete flips on the light.

  “Hey!” Porky yells. (By the way, if you thought most guinea pigs had high, squealy voices, you’d be wrong. Porky sounds like he’s swallowed a bucket or two of the gravel Pete keeps in the back for the fish tanks.) “Can a pig get some fresh lettuce or something over here? Cripes! Thought this place was supposed to be the spa!”

  From out of the corner of my eye, I see him turn to me and hold up a slimy piece of green between two tiny claws. “Must be a health spa, right, fella? Yech.” He flings the lettuce aside, where it slaps on the incubator window and sticks. “You waiting on breakfast too?”

  “Late-night snack, actually,” I answer.

  “Eh, sorry, kid. I can share some pellets if you like. They taste like cedar shavings, but they work in a pinch.”

  “Thanks, but no.”

  “It’s coming, it’s coming,” grumbles Pete, grabbing water, food and the little plastic tubes that spit meals into our gullets. “Dang birds better be worth all the trouble. Ol’ Pete could use a few thousand to tide him over until the Christmas rush,” he mutters. “Got other things to do ’sides feed birds all day.”

  “What about guinea pigs?” shouts Porky. “I’m gonna turn into a pellet over here if I don’t get some greens!”

  Aggie, still asleep, lets out a whimper. I nudge her awake.

  “Is the story over?” she asks with a yawn. Even with a full night’s sleep, her head droops. She looks like a stuffed cat toy that’s lost a bit too much of its stuffing. Being careful not to catch a claw in the terry cloth, she stumbles trying to inch out of the corner we slept in. I offer her my wing, and she leans on it heavily. “Oh, I am hungry,” she whispers.

  “I know you are, Ag. Don’t worry – Pete’s here,” I say, first guiding her, then pushing her to the middle of our glass box, where Pete will see her straightaway. Back in the corner, I hide myself under a towel. If Pete runs out of food, as he’s done twice already this week, he’ll run out of my breakfast instead of hers.

  And I can handle it.

  “Here we go, little moneybags,” I hear Pete say. “Not sure which one you are, but eat up!”

  With each of Aggie’s gulps, I swallow a sigh of relief. When it’s my turn to eat, I keep one eye on the food bowl and one on Pete’s hand.

  “You sure eat a lot,” says Pete. “You’d think I needed to whip up a whole extra bowl! Jeez, I feel like that Tortelloni lady from TV.”

  Pete says this every time he feeds us. You’d think he’d whip up that extra bowl already. He never does. The bowl of mush gets low, and Pete’s patience gives out.

  Mine gave out overnight.

  While I fed Aggie stories into the wee hours of morning, I fed myself with thoughts of revenge.

  I can see I’ve timed my plan just right.

  Pete tips the plastic tube towards my mouth, and I wait for what he’s about to say next…

  “If you two weren’t worth so much, I’d probably feed you to the snakes.”

  It’s then that I bite.

  And strangely enough, though I haven’t learned to fly yet …

  I find myself soaring – no – hurtling through the air.

  CHAPTER 4

  I did not become snake bait.

  I did, however, get myself pitched against the wall like a limp piece of lettuce.

  “He’s waking up! He’s waking up!”

  Pete doesn’t let him hang around our box often, but I’d know this chirp anywhere. Fritz reaches down to grab me. “Come here, little fella,” he says.

  A single finger brushes against me, and a fire ignites in my left wing and burns through my shoulder. My stomach lurches. I look over to see pinned to my side the bandaged mummy of my wing, heavy – and dead.

  “Poor little guy,” says Fritz, slowly lifting me from the glass box and setting me in a nest of towels on the desk. His forehead creases, and a pink tongue peeks out of the side of his mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. I was sitting in Grandpa’s old food truck in the backyard once, and a robin crashed right into the window.”

  “Alastair!”

  Aggie. She flutters her wings and bobs her head beside me, eyes bright with excitement. “Oh, Alastair! I was so worried! When Pete threw you against that wall, I thought – well, I don’t even want to say it. But you’re well! You’re awake, anyway. I’m so relieved. But Fritz says you’ve broken your wing—” Her face crumples into a look of utter despair. “How terrible – a bird with a broken wing.”

  Great. I’ve become a cliché.

  “It’s OK, though,” Aggie adds quickly. “You’re not broken broken, not like ruined or anything – not wrecked … oh dear.” She looks flustered. “Only – only—”

  I force a smile. “Ruined, huh?”

  Aggie blushes, and the corners of her beak curl into her trademark smile. “Fritz fixed it,” she says softly, then fills me in on everything that’s happened while I’ve been “out” (a careless lack of consciousness I’ll be sure to avoid in the future). After Pete nearly killed me, he was sorry, she tells me. Said something like If this
here bird doesn’t shake a leg, my wallet’s gonna turn to dust. Aggie thought that sounded very touching.

  “And you wouldn’t believe it, Alastair – it’s the first day of summer vacation, and Fritz came in early, and he was able to fix your wing, and Pete said he could work extra to take care of us so Pete doesn’t throw any more birds.” Aggie says this is very lucky on our part. Fritz has informed her that he will only be absent when Pete gets sick of him and kicks him out, but because we need so many meals, we can rightly assume Fritz will rarely leave our sides. Aggie’s grin’s as wide as a guinea pig’s gut. “Isn’t that great?”

  “That’s great, Aggie.”

  “He’s very happy to help, you know. Normally, he’s only got his newt Charles to take care of, and raising us is good practice anyway – for his career. Fritz wants to study medicine when he grows up, and he’s pretty sure he’s correctly diagnosed the rash on the back of his knee as, um, necrotizing fasciitis. He’s almost certain he came into contact with a flesh-eating bacteria in the pet shop last week. You’re going to love him, I just know it!” Aggie’s barely breathed between sentences. “He loves the Fourth of July and cheese curls. And he absolutely loves baloney sandwiches dipped in grape jelly. They’re his favourite because he says they taste like a Swedish meatball. I think I’d like a Swedish meatball. It sounds so fancy.”

  Across the room, Fritz bangs and chops and mixes mush. “Just getting your dinner ready,” he calls over his shoulder. “You two are gonna love this. Your first taste of real food!”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Aggie. “Also, he has a magic glowing box.”

  “A what?” I ask.

  “That glowing box – behind you.”

  I turn my head to see a thin box on the corner of the desk. Never really noticed it before. It’s always been sorta not-glow-y. But now, it indeed glows.

  “It’s very magical,” Aggie says in a serious whisper. “Fritz sat there a lot, looking into it. I think it must tell him things, because every so often he points at it and tells me something new. That’s what happened when he said your wing would heal in two to four weeks. Two to four weeks! Isn’t that great news? And did you know we can learn to talk – like humans, I mean?”