They were spookily clever birds – you could see in their eyes they were thinking it through. There was a smaller one, who seemed to be the ring leader. A brief Google search told me the smaller ones were usually females. She seemed to stare at me, assessing my threat level. The way she looked at you, you could see she was working things out.
Interrupting my suspicious train of thought, the sliding door hissed behind me, and I turned to watch my dad step through. Even that quiet sound shot through the stillness of the early morning. The sun had barely crested over the trees
From the now-open kitchen door, I could hear the faint whir of the coffee machine. It had been a birthday present from my dad to my mum. At first, she’d resisted, defending the long-suffering kettle, and the merits of instant coffee, but had switched to the ‘fancy’ beans almost immediately after Dad made her a coffee using it.
“Morning, love.” His voice was quiet. The words sounded muffled by the slightly hazy morning air, like marbles dropped on carpet. Fog clung to the edges of the garden, not yet beaten back by the oncoming sun.
“Morning Dad. Where’s Mum?”
Dad leaned against the door frame, looking out over the quiet garden.
“In the bath.”
“She couldn’t sleep?”
“Never can at this stage.”
The lines around his mouth tightened, the only indication that his words bothered him.
At least it had become almost predictable. Today was the third day of her chemo cycle, and it was always the worst, not least of all because she couldn’t sleep. She said it was a combination ofa pounding headache and a fluttering feeling of anxiety with no discernible root cause.
That she was already in the bath told me she was feeling the full-body ache from the white blood cell booster medication.
In some ways it was a benefit, because she was so photosensitive at the moment that the only way she could continue her morning ritual of sitting outside with a cup of coffee, was to be up early enough that they sun wasn’t high in the sky. It was the extreme silver lining of such a horrible side-effect, and if Dad and I didn’t look at the silver linings, we’d only ever see the despair.
“Why are you up so early?” Dad asked, bringing my attention back to him.
I hadn’t meant to get up so early, but the thoughts in my head were so deafening, I couldn’t sleep through them. It had reminded me of all the times Jihoon had complained that my thoughts were so loud they’d woken him up. Once my mind had drifted to Jihoon, to the life we’d so briefly shared, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.
But it had also been because of-
My shoulders jerked up, the sudden, deafening chorus of the crows finding their courage as they jumped off the fence and began having a noisy scrap, feathers flying as wings collided.
Dad sighed, and in unintentional unison, we chorused-
“Those bastard crows.”
It was a phrase we muttered, or bemoaned, several times a day now that we’d amassed such a large following. It had to be every crow from miles around that flocked to our garden each morning.
“Noisy blighters,” my dad grumbled.
“It’s mum’s fault,” I concurred, “she won’t stop putting the suet balls out. The little birds don’t get a look in anymore.”
We both winced as the metal bird feeder fell to the ground. Again.
“Every sodding morning,” he groaned, rubbing a hand over his forehead.
“I keep telling her not to put suet out, but will she listen?” I suppressed a wry grin, watching in begrudging admiration as the big birds went at the now grounded feeder. It hadn’t taken them long to figure out how to knock it to the ground to make raiding it easier. We were going through five suet balls a day, it was costing a fortune.
Dad moved to sit beside me.
“It makes her laugh watching them go at it. She likes thinking she’s saving the local rabbit population from hungry crows. It brings her joy.”
Dad and I both thought this was a little ridiculous, but it went without saying that no matter how ridiculous, how annoying, if it brought her any measure of joy, we would go along with it.
We were both silent for a while, until-
“I’ve never really thought about that too much,” he said, “joy, I mean. It always seemed like a natural thing. Something that just happened. I never realised how lucky we were, because I always had it with your mum. With you.” He nudged me gently with his shoulder.
