The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day
my mother I needed to go in to school early to help with the completion of a class project. She dropped me off at the bus stop an hour before my usual time. The school was dark, apart from one light coming from the headmistress’s office. The front door was on the latch. I walked in, taking care to tread lightly so that my plimsolls did not squeak against the floor.
To one side of the hallway were the cloakroom stalls, their pegs empty apart from a single, discarded art-class overall. Beyond, I could make out the receding outline of Doris, the cleaner, who was pushing an industrial hoover along the corridor, swinging the flex from side to side as she went. She was listening to her Walkman, as I had known she would be, humming along to the indistinct tune piping through her headphones and swaying her arthritic hips as best she could in time with the silent beat.
I left my coat and my bag in the cloakroom, not by my normal peg but in a corner, stuffed behind one of the benches, where I could retrieve it later. I slid off my shoes, nudging them into the same cubby-hole. Then I tiptoed back into the corridor and up the stairs, carrying under my arm two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica borrowed from the local library for just this purpose (you couldn’t check out reference books, I seem to recall, so I must have temporarily stolen them). I took the steps slowly, one by one, clutching the weight of the encyclopaedias to my waist, feeling reassurance in their solid bulk.
I gazed up at the ledge, allowing my eyes to acclimatise to the early-morning gloom and then to focus on the blurry outline of the bird’s man-made nest. Pipe-cleaners and twigs and strands of mismatched wool and cotton-wool. When I got to the top step, I placed the two encyclopaedias on the floor and climbed on top. I wasn’t a very tall boy and I had known I wouldn’t be able to reach the ledge without some help. Looking back, I can’t help but feel a bit proud of my foresight. I think it shows a degree of maturity to be able to make such a plan and enact it under my own steam.
I stood on sock-covered tiptoe, leaning forwards with one hand placed flat against the wall to keep my balance but I still couldn’t quite reach the nest. It was agonisingly close. I could brush the tips of my fingers against a protruding bit of twig, but I couldn’t get the purchase I needed to remove it. I didn’t dare use two hands in case I lost my balance and fell with a clatter down the stairs.
I stretched, pushing at the single millimetre of twig I could reach until I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back, the moisture attaching itself to my school shirt so that the material stuck to my skin and made me even hotter. A bead of sweat fell from my forehead onto the grey stone floor and left a dark circle there. I began to get frustrated and then panicked and then angry and I knew I was running out of time and that the other children would soon start arriving in dribs and drabs and then in a stream of maroon and blue before the first bell sounded at 8.50 a.m. I tried one final lunge, jumping as high as I could, both feet springing off the encyclopaedias, and as I leaped, I took my balancing arm away from the wall and grabbed at the nest with both hands.
I crumpled back to the ground, the books skittering to one side, my leg twisting under my weight. There was a thudding pain in my left ankle. But when I looked at the bounty in my hands, all this was forgotten. There it was: the nest and, inside, a startled, twitching Sammy.
The rest of it happened quickly. I put the encyclopaedias back under my arm, balanced the nest in my free hand, and crept back downstairs. I knew Sammy couldn’t fly because of his broken wing. No escape. The bird’s eye pulsated blackly: a squelching dot of terror. I stared at it, cupped in the nest in my hands, and although I had a vague instinct to talk to it in order to make it feel better, although I knew that’s what other, more normal children would do, I remained silent. And I remember thinking: let it suffer. Let it learn what life is like. And that in thinking this, I felt less alone. Because there was something else, some other living thing, that was enduring an experience worse than my own.
I went back to the cloakroom, put the nest on the bench, deposited the books on the floor by my peg, slipped on my shoes and, picking up Sammy again (‘Sammy’ in my mind now: a thing worthy of a name), walked swiftly outside. I made my way towards the playground, but instead of going through the gates as usual, I tacked to the right and followed the fence around the perimeter. I could see the swings. The looming, inverted ‘v’ of the slide. In the distance, a lone car, its engine puttering as the passenger door opened and disgorged a child.
The school had been built in the middle of what must once have been rather a nice patch of greenery. Behind the playground was a copse of trees. We weren’t allowed to wander here, but the naughtier children always did in order to experiment with cigarettes and kissing, so I knew it existed. By the time I reached the field in question, I was panting. I walked towards the central grouping of trees. The grass was wet from overnight rainfall and my plimsolls became stained with claggy brown mud. I would have to clean them later, I thought, before my mother got home.
At the centre of the trees was a small clearing, lined with discarded fag butts and empty crisp packets. At one edge were the ashy remnants of a fire, scraps of newsprint stuck to the underside of stones. I put Sammy in his nest on the ground. The bird was shivering now, straining to move its useless wing to no avail. Stupid thing, I thought.
I picked up a medium-sized rock from the undergrowth. I played with it in my hand, feeling the heft of it. And then, I slammed the sharp end of the rock down into the nest. The bird made no sound but when I withdrew my hand, I saw that its eye was still flickering, still sentient. Again, I punched it with the rock, throwing all my might into that single action. Again. Again. And again, this time emitting a scream for what I knew would be the final blow. I felt the crack of slender bones beneath my fist. A noise like the slow release of air from a flattening tyre. When I removed my hand, one knuckle was bleeding. The bird lay there, cracked and lifeless, the tremble of its eye finally stilled.
I told myself it had been a mercy, that only I, out of my cohort of classmates, could see the bird was suffering and needed to be put out of its misery as swiftly as possible. How frustrating it must have been for that creature, sitting on a ledge in a concrete building, gazing out of a window at the sky it could no longer fly through, beholden to these lumpen schoolchildren for scraps of birdseed. How undignified, I thought. How unfair.
As a child, I remember so very fiercely wanting to be grown up: to earn the privilege of being in control of my own existence, not by doing anything, but simply by existing for longer. I chafed against the arbitrary restrictions placed on my life. Lights out. Homework hour. Tidy your bedroom. Finish your vegetables. Stop reading. Stop fidgeting. Stop staring. Is that why I felt such a thrill when I killed the bird? We’re not meant to admit to this kind of feeling, but let me tell you honestly: I felt its death with a visceral intent – the violent pleasure of having finally done something. It was the ultimate satisfaction.
There is no need to dwell too much on what happened next. You can guess most of it. There was a predictable flurry of activity when the bird was discovered to be missing. It was Doris who raised the alarm; Doris, the cleaner, to whom I had never paid much notice, who had always seemed a bit of a dullard with her vacant expression, her yellow dusting cloths tucked into the elasticated waistband of her jeans. Well, Doris told a teacher, who then told the headmistress, who then informed the entire school at assembly that the bird had disappeared to a general commotion of disbelief. Jennifer, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the row in front of me, started crying. Alan Munro patted her arm with his podgy fingers, fat knuckles blotted with dirt. Next to me, Susan Rankin gasped and pulled the cuff of her school jumper over her hand. I was still, head lowered, eyes fixed at a point just to the right of one of my maroon socks. There was, I reasoned, no point feigning emotion. I was not known for being an expressive child. Besides, I don’t think I really cared about being found out. I think I already knew the game was up. I think I wanted it to be. I was so sick of them all, you see.
As the assembly continued, and we shuffled to our feet to sing ‘Morning Has Broken’, I could feel someone looking at me. When I glanced round, my eyes met the heated gaze of Mrs Love, her small features contracting.
She waited until the end of assembly to take me aside, grabbing hold of my arm with surprising force, her thin fingers pressing through my jumper.
‘So, Martin,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Do