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hands.
    With the parrots we kept, there were never – like old lovers – names mentioned, those of former owners or persecutors, but there were the revealing sounds indicating time spent in unsuitable homes, the sounds of smoke alarms suggesting chips being cooked, things on fire, excessive smoking, or the incongruous wolf whistles uttered by the sweet-faced, staid, elderly Icarus. In a long-lasting example of cross-cultural transfer, of the sound dialogue that existed between them, Bardie learnt the wolf-whistle from Icarus and will still, years after Icarus’s death, sound out with Icarus’s voice, ‘ WHEE-WHYOO ,’ repeated loud and often: ‘ WHEE-WHYOO ! ’
    In addition to other aspects of its mysterious past, a parrot may be of indeterminate age. The pet shop will not know, as the previous owner will not know. The bird may, for one reason or another, have been handed on from owner to owner over the course of a long and possibly distressing life. One day last summer, on a Sunday afternoon, Marley was in the rat room as usual, shouting, muttering, squawking as I passed to and fro chatting to him, cleaning, putting things into the washing machine. I was away from him for ten or fifteen minutes and when I went back there he was, as birds are in death, small, shrunken and closed-eyed, lying on the floor of his house, a few minutes dead. I don’t know why he died. Nothing in his environment or food was different from usual. He was probably simply older than we had imagined. By then, he had lived here for seven or eight years.
    Unaware of the convention by which one does not extend a hand towards a bird, the man who delivers coal, a small man of immense and day-enhancing cheer, invariably wiggled his blackened fingers towards Marley as he passed, poking them dangerously into Marley’s house, shouting, ‘Hello, my friend!’, a gesture to which Marley, in violent and uncontrolled fury, responded by screaming loudly and hurling himself towards the fingers with intent to kill. Since Marley’s astonishingly sudden death, the coalman says pensively on every visit, ‘I miss my friend,’ a sentiment which I appreciate deeply but, recalling Marley’s voice, only partly share.

    Birds had an interesting effect on us all. At some point after the purchase of Bardie (‘purchase’! How the word demeans! How can one imagine, nineteen years on, that the vile medium of money could have been involved in this enduring, indissoluble, familial relationship?), Bec began to develop her theories of bird-rearing, the fundamentals being a sort of fusion between the ideals of Kropotkin, Montessori and a Code Napoléon for our time. Among its more notable clauses, a prohibition on the word ‘cage’ (the word ‘house’ being substituted), a de facto granting of full civil rights to all birds, which in practice meant never stopping them from doing anything that did not endanger their own well-being (ours being incidental), and enshrining in law the benefits of universal education, the necessity for perpetual intellectual stimulation and the freedom to avail themselves of anyone else’s possessions.
    When, years later, after she had left home, leaving me to try to maintain a certain mild discipline among the ranks (when a few birds would occasionally, for limited periods, be confined), Bec would arrive back and all would change. Voilà! Le jour de gloire est arrivé! As at the Bastille, closed bird-house doors were opened, all were set free. Everyone took part. Those who could fly, did. Those who could only wander along the sideboard, swearing loud, psittacine swears, did that. Anyone who was able and felt the need or desire flew to perch (uncatchably) on top of the pelmet board, twelve feet up, whence they’d shout remorselessly for hours. There was a tremendous, triumphant avian joy to the endeavours. I saw it. They had felt the air of freedom rushing through their wings.
    We may have been the only people to reverse the usual beliefs