The Croft and the Bird
By Rebecca Burns
The croft is a small honeycomb squatting on the horizon, crumbling brick and green vines webbed over every gap and space. A family of rabbits have made their home near the front door so the entrance is a savage pockmark, the scurry of their life leaving a scar. The earth claims and releases, salt washes in from the sea like the purge of a wound. A hundred, two hundred, how many years old the building is doesn’t matter, for it is slowly being folded back into soil.
She steps carefully on her approach to the croft, testing where her weight can go – a thought in her head like a flapping ribbon... despite everything, I’m heavy enough to break my bloody neck if this earth doesn’t hold.
She doesn’t break her neck or her ankle, though there is a heart-pulping moment where she over-balances and grabs the croft’s disintegrating doorframe. She steadies herself and leans against the wooden door. A sicky burp in her mouth. She tastes breakfast.
The door is locked. This surprises her. The woman at the tourist centre had said the place had been abandoned for years, only transgressed by teenagers who went up there for illicit drinking and fumbling. Maybe they got into the building a different way.
Gingerly she moves away from the door to a window. The answer about teenage access faces her – the glass is broken and jagged shards glint in the morning sun like diamonds. There’s a smear of brown on one and she thinks it might be blood. An injury received on the way in or the way out? She closes her eyes and tries not to imagine a fresh white limb scuffing the glass. So, instead, she remembers George on that last morning, hurrying into his clothes, soft belly bound within his shirt. He hadn’t looked at her but scampered for the bedroom door, banging his shoulder on the frame in his bid to escape.
She takes her scarf and wraps it round her hand, and lifts herself onto the sill. Part of her can’t believe she’s doing this, but it’s just one more thing she’s found herself doing in recent weeks that disrupts the snow-globe of who she is, shaking up the flakes of things she does and things she does not. She hesitates and then scrabbles her legs up, expecting the rotten frame to collapse beneath her, but it does not. It holds and then she’s inside the croft.
She smells decay. A vinegary stench like wet lettuce and month-old parsnips abandoned in the vegetable rack. Oddly it’s a smell she’s familiar with, for she is a rubbish cook, and often gives up and buys a ready-meal from the Co-op. She slowly unwinds the scarf and puts it back around her neck. She ruffles it up slightly so it covers her nose and throat. George’s aftershave has left a trace. She breathes it in and then decides she prefers the whiff of rot.
Beer cans scatter the earth. She lifts her feet and realises she’s standing on a carpet, but it’s so spongy and wet it feels like moss. Near the far wall, the space most protected from the elements, the carpet still holds a pattern – a yellow fleur-de-lys. A granny carpet. There’s a used condom on the curve of the flower.
She’s been on the island for three days. She could see the croft from the hotel, the movement of clouds around it, the way rain lassoed brickwork. It’s grey and stubborn and hasn’t given in yet. But, inside, it’s empty, stripped bare of whatever had made it a home. She’d held a faint hope as she pushed through Hebridean gales and rain that bruised her skin that she’d find remnants, tokens of the crofters who once lived there. Online last night she’d read about genealogists visiting disintegrating buildings where ancestors lived a century before, weeping over abandoned dresser drawers full to the brim of sepia photographs. Standing in the wasteland of the old croft she scoffs. Bollocks. There’s nothing of that kind in this particular place. The stories online are made-up tosh for tourists. Which, of course she is.
She’d read the genealogy site while eating tea. She’d ordered an egg and a square sausage – she’d never had a square one before, and the shape of it on the plate had shocked her, for sausages weren’t supposed to be lie that – and ate more than half. She’d noted that down in her food diary. Good progress. Maybe the cold and the frigid vastness of the island was helping her. She’d been...stocky, as George called her, and was now thin. The doctor said she had to be careful, that she needed to put weight back on. But then breakfast this morning had been coffee and a pickled onion from the jar in her suitcase, which was a step backwards.
George hated pickled onions. Or, maybe, she thinks as she moves towards the far side of the room – what he actually hated was how much she loved them. Always a pickled onion at a party, he’d say, when friends came over and she’d serve a plate of cheese and silverskins. On good days he’d call her his pickled onion. She bought more after he left. She’s started to fill her cupboards with them.
There’s a cardboard box against one of the walls, or what had once been a cardboard box. Now it’s a pulped mess of brown slop. She thinks of George’s dog. That bloody thing left korma-coloured shit all over the kitchen as it neared its final trip to the vet’s, and she was supposed to be sympathetic. The box in the croft seemed to have once held magazines. She nudges one with her toe and sees a bare breast and a pair of pouty lips. She smiles. Teenagers never change, whether they’re loping about parks in Hampstead or sitting out the rain on a Hebridean island. It was something, a wet pile of life in the croft.
There’s a sudden flapping and she almost screams. It’s a raw, violent sound against the constant thrum of the sea. When she first arrived on the island the ebbing of water outside the hotel was an irritant. The relentlessness of it bothered her. The sound seemed to bury deep within her ears, making her unbalanced. Now it’s seeped into the chamber and churn of her heart and she doesn’t hear it.
She swings round to see where the splintering noise comes from. A blur of black and white. It’s a bird. Bigger than a magpie but not a gull – at least, not one she’s seen before on the beach at Brighton. She went there with George for her birthday last year. He didn’t want her to have an icecream. She blinks. She should have had a double cone, with a big fat Flake in the top.
The bird lumbers in the devastated room and she sees the evil bead of its eye, black coral, and an awkward tilt to its wing. She now understands. It hasn’t come into the croft out of choice. It’s injured. She feels sympathy. Of course, poor bugger.
But she’s frightened of birds – it's why she’s never owned a cat, though everyone at work suspects she has dozens crawling around her flat. Cats bring you presents. Her sister’s monthly letters usually refer to her cat’s latest offering. Betty thought I’d like a half-eaten blue tit. Betty dropped a blackbird on my pillow this morning. She thinks she’d vomit if she was woken that way. She can’t approach the not-a-gull-but-like-a-gull, so she presses herself against a damp wall and makes her breathing soft and small. She wants the bird to know she’s not a threat.
After George was mugged they talked about this response of hers. He’d fought back, because of course he had, and received a mighty beating for his trouble. Why didn’t you just hand over your wallet, she’d asked, and he’d managed to sneer amidst his bandages. That’s just you, isn’t it? So fucking compliant, God you make me sick. She’d been pleased his cheekbone had been broken.
There isn’t much she can do for the bird. She sees a trace of thin blood on the glass where the broken wing has brushed. It will die soon. It lumbers into the corner furthest from her and turns round, so it is facing her. If it could grimace, she thinks it would. She wonders what it’s done to itself. Maybe it had been exploring too, shoved out of its nest by a younger, shinier model, and had thrashed through the weather, looking for a new perch. Poor bugger, she thinks again.
Her belly rumbles. Must be lunchtime. The croft, shattered and broken, somehow still stands, and the walk over is enough. Enough for today.
But then, the bird. It squarks and moves its wing. Head moves erratically. Maybe it won’t die soon.
It would be cruel to leave it. Better to put a thing out of its misery, when all meaningful life has gone, and then start over. She sighs, the last few months beating through her, and she feels the fragile sense that she’s getting better threaten to slip away. Her fists clench. No, she won’t let it go. She looks around for something heavy. Broken bricks in what was once a fireplace.
Her stomach groans again and she thinks she might be sick, but she takes a step closer to the bird and raises the brick. Throwing this brick would be just like bowls at the pub, she thinks, and latches onto the memory of being at her Dad’s local, salt-and-vinegar crisps, throwing heavy spheres of bright colours while his pub mates cheered. She had been fearless then.
She closes her eyes and throws. A shriek and flutter, and then silence. She opens her eyes and sees the bird, wounded, not quite dead. Her heart seems to spill from her chest but she picks up another brick and throws again. She hits the target. It’s done.
Then she longs, with all her underweight being, to be out of this place. She scrapes her hands on the broken glass in her hurry to climb out of the window but doesn’t immediately feel it. She stands on the earth, skittled with sea-spray and sand, and looks out at the boiling water. Rain comes again. Her skin opens up to it. Her palms start to sing, but she doesn’t mind. The bird isn’t in pain anymore and that’s the main thing. She realises she’s really hungry. Folding George’s scarf around her hands, she turns into the wind and sets off.
THE END