Call Me Alastair Read online

  Sure I know.

  Fritz serves us our dinner. “There’s some peppers there and courgette. I had some cherries in my lunch. I put those in too,” he says before going back to his seat at the glowing box.

  That box? It was right about one thing.

  I’m instantly very grateful there’s more to life than mush…

  Round and ripe, a supple bubble … fleshy globe affixed in couple … ruby cordial … garnet orb … mind the pit, that iron core … blazoned sun and scarlet berry … fruit of gods – behold:

  The cherry.

  Huh. I don’t know what that was.

  The cherries. I got caught up in the moment and was kind of talking to myself (and possibly my food) and, that kind of happened. I really don’t know what that was.

  Indigestion’s a possibility.

  With her mouth stuffed with courgette, Aggie tells me this box has said we should’ve been eating vegetables by now (fine), and fruits (I’ve already decided my diet should consist of cherries and ONLY cherries). In addition, we are extremely intelligent (clearly), and we can live up to sixty years (excellent news).

  However…

  The glowing box has told Fritz that African greys can be vain, suspicious and opinionated; greys can have irrational phobias; we hold grudges; and when raised apart from our bird parents, we tend to think of ourselves as human instead of embracing our identity as birds.

  “It’s part of our biology,” Aggie says plainly. “It’s science.”

  I’d say it’s pretty clear we can’t trust this thing.

  Finally Fritz pushes back his chair, stands, and stretches. “I think that computer screen burned my retinas to a crisp,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He carries us back to our glass box across the room. “It’s almost closing time. I’ve got to get you two settled. Stay here a second – I’ll be right back.”

  Aggie yawns. “It was a long day, wasn’t it, Alastair?” she asks.

  Long isn’t quite the word for it. I thought it was bad starting out the day hungry. Now I’m damaged. It’s embarrassing, frankly. What’s a guy without the use of his wing?

  Plus, the thing’s throbbing like a cricket fiddle.

  Aggie falls asleep quickly, but while shut-eye should come easy with a full belly, my wing seems to think otherwise. I watch as Fritz grabs an empty aquarium and takes it into the shop. He comes back for a few handfuls of cedar shavings, a food bowl, a towel and an array of brightly coloured toys. “That should do it,” he says to himself. “Next up: dinner for the other patients in the Infirmary.”

  Fritz distributes food bowls – one to Babs, one to an ancient tortoise with a cracked shell, and another he tosses into the gerbil case and quickly slams the top shut. He stops at Porky’s case. “Hey, Porky. I thought you were feeling better, but you don’t look so good.” He places a dish next to him. “Better stay in the Infirmary another night.”

  Soon as Fritz moves on, Porky grins his two yellow teeth at me and winks. “Don’t be alarmed, kid,” he whispers. “Courgette calls for another night at the spa.”

  Beside me, Aggie sighs contentedly in her sleep, and I give her a reassuring pat and smooth a few feathers that are out of place. One at the top of her head springs back, and I gently push it down again. And again.

  Fritz snaps off the glowing box and grabs his bag from the desk chair. “I think that’s it. I’ll be back bright and early, OK, guys?” He makes his way towards us, then reaches in and plucks Aggie from our box. “Good night, Alastair. Say goodbye to your sister.”

  Wait—

  I freeze. By the time I realize he’s stealing Aggie, I make a hasty attempt to bite Fritz’s hand off, but my beak catches air.

  And then…

  She’s gone. Just like that, Aggie’s gone.

  The door to the back room swings closed behind them, and I’m left staring into the beady eyes of the gerbil pressed up against the glass across the way. He’d perked up at the prospect of blood. He scowls and stalks back to his food dish.

  Pain races through my wing and into my chest.

  “Hey there, fella,” Porky says softly. “It’ll be OK. Fritz there – he’s a good kid. Wherever he took Aggie, she’ll be all right.” He puts up two of four fingers. “Pig’s honour.”

  “Yeah, hon,” Babs pipes up. “She’s probably just out there in the shop. The rabbits will look after her. They’re used to a few extra kids. Gloria’s looking after sixteen of mine right now.”

  Porky agrees. “Sure, sure! And then there’s my missus! Honey of a pig, she is! Loves throwing welcome parties. She’s pretty good with scared birds.”

  “Stop.” I spit the word out. The pain, the talking, it’s suddenly too much. Everything’s wrong. Even my feathers feel out of place, and I feel an immediate urge to fix them. “I’m – I’m trying to hear Aggie.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure,” says Porky.

  The three of us strain to listen for any sign of my sister beyond the door.

  Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

  “Hamster wheel,” notes Porky.

  There’s a series of crashes and scratches and bloodcurdling screams.

  “Gerbils,” adds Babs.

  Something rumbles low and loud. “Sorry,” says Porky, looking sheepish. “My stomach knows there’s courgette around.”

  I try calling out to Aggie to see if she answers, but the effort stokes the fire in my wing, and I have to sit in silence as the pain subsides.

  Interesting thing, though.

  As that fire in my wing cools to embers, thoughts of escape come blazing to life.

  Medical Log, June 17

  •Age: 11 years 11 months

  •Weight: 55.3 kg

  •Height: 135 cm

  •Current status: 1 ingrown toenail, probable necrotizing fasciitis, elevated heart rate, clammy palms, pimple – or possible tumour???

  I have news. I have two birds!

  Rara avis. Or rarae aves, I guess I should say. Rare birds. The African greys I was telling you about!

  They’re not exactly mine. Pete’s selling them in the shop – or he will be once they’re old enough, and once Alastair gets better. Pete accidentally broke Alastair’s wing today. But I think I fixed it. I made a nice sling and thought Pete would be impressed, but all he said was to keep Alastair in the back for the next couple of weeks. He doesn’t want customers thinking he’s selling damaged goods.

  Here’s the great part, though. Pete says from now on, Alastair and Aggie are my responsibility. It’s up to me to raise them. I get to come to the store three times a day for feedings, which isn’t a problem now that school’s out and Mom’s agreed I don’t have to go to basketball camp again. (When I told her that last year Ryan and Tanner Bigler made me the ball at camp, she was pretty OK with it.)

  I’m finding out parrots are a lot of work. Some of the stuff I read even said they can be as smart and needy as human toddlers, and I believe it. I’ve had to do a bunch of research on how to hold them and get them to trust me, how to make their food and give them showers and clip their wings so they can’t fly away, and how to give them enough attention and everything so they behave. And like I said, Alastair’s wing is broken, so I have to keep an eye on that.

  Oh, and he has a biting problem.

  I guess birds that bite (Alastair, for example) like to be in control. Or they’re bored, or scared. It’s not his fault. Parrots who never know their parents can have all sorts of problems. I read that, too. It really makes you think.

  I’ve only seen Dad once in the past two years – last summer when Fiona and I flew out to California for a month. (I probably forgot to tell you my dad doesn’t live with us. He and my mom got divorced when I was three.) It was a really great trip, though. Dad even took me to the hospital once, so I could see his office. I got to see a real live operating room too! But I miss him a lot. So I bet it’s really hard never meeting your parents.

  I’m not sure if I can help Alastair’s biting, but I’m going to try. And I’m
definitely going to try to get Aggie healthier. I’m going to watch for things like allergies or infections or changes in their eating or behaviour. I even need to track their poop, which is gross, but it tells you a lot. I thought about making a medical chart like the one I made for Grandpa.

  But then I thought it probably wasn’t a good idea.

  Signed: Dr Fritz Feldman, MD ← maybe this name’s better

  PS. I should have told you more about Aggie! She’s so, so sweet. She sat with me and listened to everything I said. I think she’s already attached to me. My research said that could happen.

  But it didn’t tell me that I’d be so attached to her already too.

  CHAPTER 5

  “You just made me remember a joke, Alastair!” Aggie says, giggling already. “Tell me if you’ve heard this one. The puppies told it to me, and it’s hilarious.”

  So, Porky and Babs were right. My sister’s living roughly five metres away at the front of the store. It might as well be a mile except for the three times a day Fritz brings her to the back room so he can feed us and let us walk around to get some exercise. Aggie thinks this means I should forgive Fritz.

  I wholeheartedly disagree.

  “Aggie, you were telling me about the lock on the shop’s door, remember?”

  We’re perched on the desk. Distracted, Aggie’s on tiptoe, trying to see what Fritz is doing over by the small refrigerator wedged into the corner. “… About how I could probably twist it with my beak and we could sneak out that way?” I continue hopefully.

  She turns to look at me. “Yeah, but then I remembered this joke.”

  I sigh. “Fine. What’s your joke?”

  “OK, here goes. Which animal in the pet shop has more lives than a cat?” Aggie claps a wing over her beak to keep the answer from bubbling out.

  “I don’t know, Ag. Which one?”

  “A frog!” she shouts. “Get it?”

  She hasn’t quite figured out how to deliver a good joke, so I help her out. “A frog, why?”

  “Oh, yeah! Because frogs croak all the time! Get it? Frogs croak. Cats die, but they have nine lives. Do you get it, Alastair?”

  “I get it.”

  “Gosh, I thought that was a good one! When you were talking about escaping again, it made me think of it.”

  “I’m not sure why,” I answer.

  “Well, because we can’t fly…”

  I cringe.

  “You especially, Alastair. Your wing still hurts, remember?”

  “A minor detail,” I grumble, feeling the colour bloom in my cheeks as I try to pretend what she said doesn’t bother me.

  “Yeah…” Aggie waddles over to a set of plastic cups Fritz has given her to play with and begins tossing them off the desk. “But whenever you talk about escaping, it makes me think of, you know – death.”

  Fabulous.

  It’s a quiet afternoon a few weeks into my “rehabilitation” as Fritz calls it. Except, the wing still hurts, and my chest hasn’t felt much better. Somewhere around the heart area there’s a twinge that kicks in every time Fritz scoots Aggie off to her new case behind the front register. And this conversation with her? It’s doing a real number on it.

  Must have a pellet stuck in there somewhere.

  Across the room, Fritz, who’s been chopping vegetables all the while, piles the last chunks of potato into our bowls. “Wait till you guys see what I got,” he says as he snatches us up and settles our picnic on the worn floorboards next to him.

  I immediately stalk to a dark corner under the desk, a piece of property I’ve lately claimed whenever Fritz lets me out. I get a good amount of sulking done under there. I expect Aggie to follow like she usually does, but she toddles over to Fritz and digs in to her food bowl. The pellet in my chest digs in deeper.

  “You should’ve seen all the neat stuff they had there! There were cages bigger than this room and a million toys!” Fritz chatters, unloading his backpack into a large heap in the middle of the floor. He’d scurried into the room earlier, pack stuffed and spilling its colourful papers and pamphlets like a rainbow behind him. Reminded me of last week’s visitor in the Infirmary, actually.

  Some kid had fed crayons to one of the puppies.

  “And I got to meet a whole bunch of parrots that actually talk. One’s name was Charlie Brown, and he kept saying ‘Good grief! Good grief!’ It was awesome. Oh, that reminds me…” Fritz drops a handful of pages, skips over to the shelves, and selects a cricket from a Styrofoam container. He lifts the lid on a small aquarium in the Infirmary and drops the cricket inside, where a fat newt sits awkwardly on a fake rock. The newt left his tail behind yesterday when a customer tried to grab him.

  “Eat up, newt,” says Fritz. “My newt Charles lost his tail once. You’ll need to eat well if you want to regrow it.”

  I watch as the creature stalks his prey, captures it and gobbles it down. I look over to see if Aggie is as repulsed as I am, but far from being horrified, she seems quite at peace about it.

  As if it’s normal for humans and newts to go around murdering insects.

  “Yech,” I hear Porky say. “I’ll take a pellet any day.”

  “De-licious,” says Fritz, taking his place on the floor again. “You know what they say, right, Aggie? A cricket a day keeps the doctor away!”

  Aggie answers him with a bob of her head and a squawk and totters over, climbs up his trouser leg and shirt, and settles herself in the space beneath his chin. I watch as Fritz cups one hand around her body and rubs his cheek against her spotty feathers. “Good bird, Aggie. You’re a good bird, you are.”

  Aggie closes her eyes and tucks in closer as I cough and try to dislodge this increasingly uncomfortable pellet in my chest.

  What’s the saying? Sly as a fox? Slippery as a serpent? Fritz is both of those.

  I make it a point to lecture Aggie later on the unpredictable nature of the human hand and glare at Fritz.

  He selects three pamphlets from the top of the pile. “Look at this one: How to Get Your Grey to Talk in Thirty Days. Or how about this one: Parrot Power: Understanding the Grey Way? Ooh, African Greys: The Final Frontier.” He sets Aggie down on the floor, slips a hand under the mess of papers, and roots around for a second. “Wait, look at this!”

  Fritz proceeds to unroll a large piece of paper and tack it to an empty space on the wall. “It’s a poster,” he explains. “I got one for home, too.”

  “Bet you a back scratch it’s dumb,” I call over to Aggie.

  “Shhh,” she replies. “Just look.”

  Fritz finishes taping and steps back to reveal a picture of a small boy, sitting high … in a tree.

  I find myself creeping out from under the desk to get a closer look.

  It is. It’s a tree. A cola nut. I know it in my bones.

  Off in the distance, a cluster of straw homes squats in the dirt, the smoke of their fires snaking its way into … a sky, dotted … with clouds. I pin my eyes on the blue of it and swallow hard.

  The bluer it gets, the closer you are to home.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” whispers Aggie. “And that sky’s just like I told you, Alastair – just like the sky outside the shop’s windows.”

  “It can’t be,” I answer. “That’s – that’s a bluer sky.” I swallow again, but the lump in my throat remains a stone.

  “Well, I thought it looked the same,” Aggie mumbles.

  I take another step closer. That sky. It’s everything I’ve wanted, everything Aggie and I need. I memorize the colour, feel it begin to thump into my veins like a drumbeat.

  “I like that boy in the picture,” Aggie says. “He reminds me of Fritz.” The boy in the poster dangles in the tree, wearing little more than the large cowboy hat tipped on his head and a broad smile. Next to the boy perches a bird like Aggie and me, only the bird’s wearing a miniature red bandanna around her neck. The way the bird opens her beak just so makes it look as if she’s smiling too.

  Along the bottom of
the poster Fritz reads, “Amicus verus est rara avis,” and steps back to survey the addition to the dreary walls. “I’ll figure out what the rest of it means, but as soon as I saw the ‘rara avis,’ I knew I had to buy it.” He feels around in the pile once more and this time produces a red bandanna printed with feathers. “Well, that and the fact it looks exactly like Aggie sitting there in that tree. Grandp—I mean Fiona’s gonna like it, I think. Mom, too.”

  He ties the bandanna around his neck. “I wonder if Fiona’s got a cowboy hat I can borrow,” he says to himself as he steps back to show us his getup against the poster. “Like it?”

  Nope.

  Up on his hind legs and pressed against the glass, Porky shakes his head. “I don’t know what it is with humans and costumes.”

  He nods at a calendar taped to the wall and curling at the edges. It features twelve potbellied pigs in motley attire. There’s a pirate pig, a pumpkin pig, a pig dressed like a pilgrim. “Just look at what they did to my ancestors there,” Porky says. “I’m just glad my great-granddaddy Bacon McPorkster didn’t see those pictures before he died.”

  I think Porky’s a little confused about his ancestry. He’s a guinea pig.

  “C’mere, partner,” Fritz says, picking up Aggie and putting her on his shoulder. She takes a lock of his feathers in her beak and nibbles at it. Fritz smiles. “Hey, silly, quit eating my hair!”

  Hair?

  I thought those were feathers.

  Doesn’t matter. I’m still part-human.

  And Pete’s still a feather picker.

  The two of them stand in front of the poster then, facing me. “What do you think, Alastair? It’s us, right? Me and Aggie, Aggie and me?”

  Aggie flaps her wings and squawks her approval.

  “Hey, yeah!” agrees Porky. “Don’t it look like them?”

  I’m fairly certain the bottom of my beak is somewhere around my knees.

  Fritz sets Aggie on the floor next to me. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Aggie asks, unable to tear her eyes away from the poster. “It looks just like me and Fritz!”