red breast

Home, and at the front door the cats scattered before us. Mr Pickles, still kittenish, quivering hello before running into the hallway tumbling into Minerva, my fat mackerel tabby, and Ginger, skittish nervous ginger. The two girl cats growl and swipe then catching his excitement, follow. 

“Too many cats”, I say. 

“You can’t have too many cats”, my boy says “unless they’re piled to the sky”.

“Ha, that would be too many”.

My November poppy is still splashed red on the breast of my coat. All day at work, fragments of the weekend’s Remembrance Sunday singing, half tunes and phrases babble back into my head  – not faded to silence yet: not even after a hundred years. 

‘Ev-er-y-one suddenly burst out singing: 

And I was filled with such delight 

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,’

Remembrance Sunday – 100 years after the end of the first World War. My boy, L sat smiling at me from the audience as I sang. His flame-haired friend A, sat with him and they swung their legs.

He sat and watched and listened in the chapel. So serious and happy aged 8 nearly 9 and I glimpsed the man in him, sharpening features, his soft soft pale cheeks. I wince to think he will shave one day. And him fresh from his own on-line battle games where the dead re-spawn. ‘bang, bang, bang…’ “Please turn it down a bit”, the noise the constant noise of skirmishes and bravado. It is wonderful and terrifying to be the mother of a boy.

He had sat still and patiently, as well-spoken women read Siegfried Sassoon, of “the choirs. The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells”. I wondered what he made of it all.

After school the next day, as I took off my coat, the air picked up a layer something dark and rolled it along the hallway until it settled in the gap behind a mirror which I had propped up for the time being against the wall. 

The tune flurried and whirled still.

‘Drifted away…O, but Everyone’…

Bending to unlace my boots, I realised it was not dust, but a drift of downy feathers, curling dark and light as smoke on breath. More feathers further along. The song caught in my throat. “O, but”,

…“wait here a minute”, I said, walking quickly ahead of my boy and following the cats to the kitchen. “How about you watch Cartoon Network”.

But my boy was still following right behind me. My three cats were circling around dark-eyed with excitement. Mr Pickles’ tail all fluffy and his ears pricked up. Always something comical to me about black and white cats. They walk about our ordinary lives fussily overdressed in ill-fitting evening-wear: black coats, white bibs, un-buttoned spats. Suburban Felix-the-cats dancing to Jazz between the wars and into my childhood. 

My very own jazz-time cat was now growling and worrying something in the corner. 

“No, No, get off, Pickles, go’way”. I banged on the table but the thing he had was too exciting for me to scare him off. I pushed his thin strong body away, until I could see what the fuss was about.

The tune still loud in my head, I looked down at rust orange breast feathers. Poppies in the mud. Finely carved beak, and legs and clawed feet curved and as fine as the twining stems of clematis in the garden where he sang this summer.

Little dead star eyes. No breath left. He looked immaculate untouched. 

I thanked Death for being so clean and tidy in my kitchen. 

“Oh Pickles, you horrid cat”, I said putting myself between him and poor dead Robin. The girl cats looked on , sitting back and letting Mr Pickles take the blame. “Away, away”, and I scattered them out, my boy helping me shut them out.

Our heads nearly touched and my boy’s eyes were wide, and serious, as we looked down at the poor dead bird, “Isn’t he beautiful,”, I said, looking at the coloured feathers, his vibrant yellow beak.  “I’m sorry, Mr Robin, I am sorry”.

“Poor bird. But it’s not Pickles’ fault is it. You can’t stop instinct, said my son, who builds homes for insects in the garden. 

“Can you keep the cats away, and I’ll take him outside?”.

“Mum, can we dig a grave for him?”

But I remembering the time I tried to dig a grave in the garden for a fox who had inconsiderately curled up in my flower-bed to die, and even though, robin would take a lot less digging, said, maybe, let me see. I carried the quieted bird outside, wrapped him in a brown paper bag from the recycling box and put him gently and guiltily in the bin, from where the cats could not drag him back out to play again.

Back in the warm, I asked, “Do you know the story of the Robin? How he got his red feathers?”, L shook his head. “He felt sorry for Christ. Tried to pull off his crown of thorns. One pricked his breast and made him bleed.”  

Soon poppies will turn to holly berries. Red splashes.

I had vacuumed the feathers, they were everywhere.

And still the song in my head, on a high cadence rising, throbbing into the air …

’Was a bird: and the song was wordless; The singing will never be done.’

(c) e.antoniou 2018

poem – everyone sang – siegfried sassoon musical setting by raymond warren.