The birds dropped like stones from the trees, blanketing the streets and gardens and gutters, the faint little peeps of distress replaced by throaty gasps, and then nothing.
We placed them in cardboard boxes lined with towels and tried to force a few drops of water into their open beaks, but of course, nothing worked. They all died, all of them in the space of a month, and when the last one, a wood pigeon in a vet’s clinic, gasped its last breath, they showed it on the TV, and the presenters cried and cried.
When the birdsong was gone, the skitter and scutter of insects replaced it, humming and buzzing, shifting and rustling, a grotesque accompaniment to any outdoor activity. Cicada season was going to be dire, the experts said, and recommended ear plugs and mindful meditation for those likely to be driven mad by their relentless sawing, the cry that said, ‘Here I am, come and fuck me so we can make more and more and more, to saw and saw.’
Sales of fly spray boomed.
I was pregnant then, with my first baby. Everyone said she’d be late, that first babies always took their time. My mother told me I was three weeks overdue, and she cried and raged, loping back and forth along the street, one foot in the gutter, the other on the pavement, trying to dislodge me.
Not me. I loved having my baby inside me. I loved how my body looked, how effortlessly it did the job it was supposed to do without me having to tell it what to do. It felt like I was always telling people what to do. I was a manager in my office and my husband, Alex, was useless. Obedient, but useless. I organised everything: holidays, Christmas presents, groceries, even what we’d watch on the telly. He went along with everything I said and did the household chores I asked him to do, but the mere act of having to instruct, to suggest, to encourage, to remind, was exhausting. My pregnant body was the one thing that I didn’t have to tell what to do. It just did it, like a routine programmed into Alexa.
The fashion then was bird names, of course. Charlotte and Elsie were replaced by Swan and Kererū, Joshua and Mark swapped for Sparrow and Hawk. It was a tribute, a wreath of flowers placed on a grave, a monument to the tremendous fuck-up we had all contributed to with our factories and microplastics and smog and clearing of forests to make ugly houses and ugly things for ugly people. We had no birds and so we made more.
We decided (I decided) to name our little one Kōtare after the kingfisher. I’d always liked them, with their brilliant blue feathers and beaks that looked too long for their bodies. There was one that used to come and sit on our clothesline. It doesn’t anymore, of course. A woman in my antenatal class was going to name her baby girl Birdy, after that old song Bye Bye Birdy, which I thought was a bit on the nose. In fact, now I think about it, every single woman in that class gave their child a bird’s name. Except for one who had to give her baby an old family name—every firstborn son had been named Anthony for some horrific reason—but she’d decided his middle name was going to be Roo. For Rooster. I know, I know, but she was a country girl, and she’d always liked the noise. Anthony Roo Peterson. It didn’t sound too bad, actually.
My baby wasn’t three weeks late. She was right on time to the day, nine months after all the birds died. Contractions started at a reasonable time, 9:30 am, just after the morning work commute was done and the roads were relatively clear, and the nurses whisked me into the labour room with a minimum of fuss, and helped me into a warm bath.
Let’s make things clear. I’m not a hippie, but I do feel that a water birth is easiest for both mother and baby. Imagine being in a nice warm belly for nine months and then forcibly ejected into a dry, blinding white room. You’d feel a little discombobulated, I’m sure. No wonder they scream their little heads off. And as far as births go, this one was relatively easy, so I’m told. A little over four hours, and then she emerged, my little Kōtare, with a mop of dark hair all over her head which extended down all over her wrinkly little body. I thought it was blood or birthing fluid at first, but the look on the midwife’s face told me otherwise.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
Alex attempted to wipe my sweaty forehead with a towel, but I pushed him away and demanded to know what the fuck was going on with my baby. The nurses and my midwife were all in the corner, huddled around her on a table, and one nurse ran out to get the specialist. She didn’t even look at me. Alex went over there and backed away, his hand over his mouth. I struggled out of that bath by myself, dripping and naked and covered with the tide of birth scum, and waddled bowlegged over to them.
There she lay, naked under the lamps, my little Kōtare, with her perfect little face, a tiny button nose and lips carved into a perfect bow. And all over her, a layer of wet down, veined in blue. She opened those sweet, rosy lips and there was no scream, no indignant yowl, just a tiny little coo, like a pigeon.
‘Is she… alright? Apart from that?’
They struggled to be professional and wiped her down and did that test, the newborn test, to see if she was responding in the way she should, and she did. Ten fingers, ten toes, all present and correct. While they did that, I squatted and dropped my afterbirth on the floor, as though I was a toddler doing an enormous, uncaring shit, but it didn’t hurt and I didn’t care. And then they finally brought her to me, and I cuddled her.
Fucking Alex didn’t hold her. He couldn’t even look at her. He muttered something about work and left. I unwrapped the baby blanket and looked, really looked, at the fluffy blue down covering her. Tiny fuzzy feathers, each one poking out of her skin as though someone, someone who loved the birds more than us, had sewn each one into place. I stroked them smooth, breathed in her delicious baby smell and felt blessed. She nuzzled my breast, and I nursed her, delighting in the strange pulling that seemed to reach right down to my pelvis.
‘How long until her real feathers come in?’ I asked. ‘Do you think she’ll be able to fly?’
Nobody answered. Through the open window, I could hear the sawing of the cicadas, a relentless hum that went on and on and on.