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NOTES:

WRITERS' CHALLENGE: SPRING 2008 - HIGHLY COMMENDED

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"The Herring Gull"

by Christine Genovese - St.Léger, France

HIGHLY COMMENDED: "WRITERS' CHALLENGE" CATEGORY, SPRING 2008

The day hadn’t started well and my mood dropped another couple of notches when Kenny appeared in the doorway of the barn cradling a filthy, newspaper wrapped object with trouble written all over it.  I was on the phone, feeling mutinous but saying nothing, while Roger, the editor of the South Dorset Herald, fired off his endless tirade.  I’d got his drift ages ago.  My weekly animal welfare column was to have its wings clipped.  In future I was to stick to stories about kittens rescued from treetops and emaciated dogs finding happy homes.  Of course he knew how strongly I felt about certain issues, but he couldn’t afford to lose the advertising and – as he pointed out to me – I had a planning permission application to consider.

“Be realistic, Valerie,” he said in his most infuriating, condescending voice.  “ It’s in your own interest to stay off one or two subjects that might offend in certain farming quarters.”

  “Don’t worry, Roger,” I said.  “You’re the boss.  My freedom of expression is entirely in your capable hands.”  I slammed the receiver down.

 I went to give Celia a kiss on her cheek.  Thursday was her carer’s day off, so she came with me to the animal rescue centre.  Her pale, pinched face was shut firmly against the outside world, and a harness prevented her slack form from slumping.  Only her unruly coppery curls seemed endowed with some sort of life.  She’d been like this for nearly two years now, ever since that ill-fated day when she survived the car crash that killed our parents.  Post-traumatic shock, they called it, quite normal under the circumstances for a sixteen-year-old girl.  At the time I understood.  But I don’t understand any longer and I can’t help wondering if her spirit will ever be freed from its cage.

Kenny was still standing in the doorway, clutching his parcel.  He was a nice chap, supposedly studying geography at Exeter University.  But he spent a lot of time down here by the coast and often turned up at the barn, willing to lend a hand – or bringing in a problem.  He was good at that. 

Last spring he brought in a hedgehog, which was still alive despite its squashed hindquarters.  A cloud of fleas hopped madly around it like rats trying to leave a sinking ship. 

“What on earth do you expect me to do with this?” I asked, thinking he’d sunk down to the level of the eight-year-old girl who once rang me in tears over a wasp dying in a beer bottle.

“It’s not just the hedgehogs,” Kenny said. “ There are frogs as well.”  From the pocket of his anorak he produced an old envelope containing a cardboard thin, dried-out, flattened frog.

“All they need is a passage under the road.  A sewage pipe would do.  Couldn’t you photograph these and write about the idea?”

Well, I did, and the story appealed to the readers and stirred up enough public interest for the tunnel to be constructed, saving the lives of an untold number of forever grateful little creatures.

  From then on Kenny became part of our team, so to speak.  We, that’s Derek and myself, were happy to let him join in, whenever he turned up.

Derek is my handyman.  A retired jockey whose life had become rather complicated the day an eccentric race horse owner bequeathed him Rising Star, by then more of a falling star, in his will.  At the time Derek was living in rented accommodation, albeit with a small garden, and Rising Star was used to a grander style.  One day Derek had walked into the barn leading a limping Rising Star and the two of them stayed on.  Rising Star occupies a box in the barn, and Derek moved into the ‘den’ above the stables.  I had hoped to live in the ‘den’ myself, but that was before the car crash.  Obviously I couldn’t look after Celia there, and in any case I’ve no idea how I managed before Derek came along.

Kenny was at the examination table with his parcel, peeling away the layers of newspaper to reveal a sticky, black mess that used to be a proud herring gull flying gracefully and effortlessly above the waves.  With Kenny’s help it was just able to stand on its legs, motionless, trapped in a thick coating of oil.

I’d heard about an oil slick, but the reports said it was over a hundred miles to the west and well off land.  Now this.  How many more would there be?

“I think the best thing …”  but Kenny didn’t let me finish.

“At least this is something you can write about, don’t you see?  You can make people feel strongly about this, you can make them so angry that they’ll yell for positive action.  And the first step is to save this one.”

“Where’s Derek?”  I asked, not wanting to start anything without him.  But he was already there – one of the motherless kittens nestling in the crook of his right elbow.

“That’s a nasty mess,” he said, eyeing the seagull.  “I wonder how long it’ll take the powers that be to fail to keep that stuff off our coasts?”

He put the kitten down on Celia’s lap and wrapped her lifeless hands round the warm, furry flanks of Lady Grey whose loud, contented purr was heard almost instantly.  There was no reaction from Celia, but Derek was convinced that the vibes of animal happiness touched a chord somewhere deep down in Celia’s dormant spirit. 

I started working on the seagull with Derek and Kenny standing by, ready to help, Kenny already busy with the camera.  The bird remained inert while I soaked, wiped and rinsed endlessly, making so little progress to begin with that I began to have doubts about the solvent.  I was also afraid of being rough with the bird.  It was only a flimsy bone structure held together with a few muscles and some skin, and covered in soft down with some fragile feathers in strategic places.  What if I broke or damaged any of that?

I wondered why it didn’t try to resist.  Its beak with the round tipped upper part was still awesome – could inflict a lot of damage, if it tried. 

The three of us exchanged conspiratorial glances of delight when the oily muck thinned enough to show the blurred markings on the wings.  But there was still a long way to go.  I had to clean under the wings, round the roots of the feathers.

I stood the bird up on the table to view the progress I’d made.  It stood there briefly, then it keeled over.  We all gasped, fearing the worst.  My hands shot out and scooped it up, but its eyes were alert and it seemed unharmed.  It must have been petrified with fear.  Perhaps it had seen death coming, when it plunged into that lethal layer of black gunge, and was still calmly waiting to die.  I wanted it to accept life again.

Hours later the bird was clean.  My heart was thumping as I spread the wings to their full span of over one and a half metres, displaying the distinctive white, silver and black markings.  We avoided noise that might frighten the gull, but our excitement was so vibrant that even Lady Grey lifted her head.

The seagull’s wings folded up tightly the moment I let go of them, its legs bent till its chest touched the table, its beak hung down.

We tried giving it water and titbits from our sandwiches.  It wasn’t interested.  We tried lifting its wings, we tried leaving it alone.  The herring gull remained indifferent to its newly restored glory, either because it was unaware of it, or because of the fear that still numbed it. At one stage its legs stretched and it lifted its head.  All our pooled willpower surged towards it, the air was electric with our wordless cries of, “Come, on!  Come on!  You can do it!”

But it sank back into its subdued position, and our hopes collapsed with it.

By this time the sun had moved round and was coming in through the big windows behind Celia’s chair.  It reached the table, bathing the gull in its strong, revitalising light.  The bird reacted imperceptibly; it seemed bigger.  Had it puffed its feathers up?  Was that a slight stirring at the top of the wings?  Yes … surely?  We stared intensely as it began to happen –  wings spreading in hesitant, slow motion.  “Yes, go on!  Do it!” we shouted in a silent chorus while our shoulders jerked up in encouragement and our elbows began to flap.

It was Kenny who noticed that Celia’s eyes were focused on the herring gull.  By the time it had spread its wings fully, Celia’s shoulders were hunched and her hands held in the air above Lady Grey.  When the gull took off and majestically circled round the barn, nobody took any notice.  My arms were round Celia’s neck and my cheek against hers, while Kenny and Derek had each grabbed a hand.

But Celia’s eyes sought the seagull. Without a word I undid the harness and swung her wheelchair round to face the windows which Kenny and Derek were opening wide. A breeze wound its way round the barn and the herring gull caught its flow. With Celia sitting upright the four of us watched as the gull soared upwards towards the sky.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Christine Genovese - do not reproduce
without the author's written permission!
 

COMMENTS FROM OUR COMMISSIONING EDITOR, Jo Holloway:
A lovely story of the re-birth of two spirits. We're told just enough to know that this is the start of recovery for Celia; the rest we have surety of in our own hearts. Well written, descriptive, draws the reader into all their lives and imbues hope.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christine Genovese has been an avid reader from earliest childhood. She channelled her passion for literature and language into a teaching career and gradually developed an intermittent sideline in writing. She’s an eclectic writer (and reader) and enjoys experimenting with a variety of genres and disciplines. Some of her short stories have appeared in small press magazines, and she has also had a number of articles published on subjects as diverse as dogs, spinning and auxiliary verbs. Christine has been living in rural Normandy for the last sixteen years, teaching and writing on and off.

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