Pretty Boy

 

 “I don’t want to see you or hear from you again.”  His words were a punch in the stomach.  I doubled over to stop from being sick and the floor receded away from my feet.  As I closed my eyes, I  was cut loose from the ground and drifted away on the thinnest of strings, dangling from a helium balloon. I’m not good at heights, so that gave an extra, heart-stopping kick to my situation. I leaned back in my office chair, opened my eyes, and said quietly, "Deep breaths. Deep breaths"  Just as I thought I might lose the battle and was on the verge of going into terrifying orbit, Dieter shouted, "Let me out!"  and that brought me back to my senses.  I had almost forgotten he was in his cage behind me except for the background noise of him gnawing his perches and scuffling with his claws around the bottom of the cage, muttering when things got in his way.

Dieter wasn't my idea.  He'd been living with us since dad brought him home from his last tour of duty with the Navy.  At first Dieter only spoke German and shouted orders at us like "Halt deinen Schnabel" or "Was machst du?" until we taught him a few words of English.  Sometimes he forgets himself and launches into a word-salad of languages that is his own. Mum hated him because he is noisy and messy.  When dad let him out of his cage in the house, which was only right, she was the one who had to clean up after him.  They'd spend hours talking sweetly to each other, a part of dad that mum didn't see much of.  Given how much attention he paid to Deiter and how much to us, you'd think he was still out at sea.

    When dad got lung cancer and couldn't get out of bed, mum brought Dieter into the bedroom to keep him company and made a bed for herself downstairs on the sofa.  That's when Dieter learned to cough.  Though he had never smoked, dad's lung cancer was stronger than him, so when he passed away, mum wanted to get rid of Dieter, but I wouldn't let her because I knew how much the bird meant to dad.  So Dieter was moved back into the front room and mum reoccupied the bedroom. I was school age by then, but my first few years were a nightmare of bullying that made me feel ugly and stupid.  It seemed to be my timid manner and bone china prettiness that I tried to hide by wearing my long straight black hair over my eyes that bothered them.  After coming home crying once too often my mum took me out of school and started me on home education.  There were no howls of protest from me because not only was I free of the daily torture of school but it gave her something to do.

"Let me out!  Aus aus aus!" Dieter shouted.

"You're such a pest." I  sighed, and got up to do his bidding.  "Just don't go shitting everywhere."  He tilted his head to see me better but then gave such a loud screech and flapped his wings as he went to his cage door, that it made me jump, and I bang my shin on the garbage can beside my desk and knock it over.

"F**k!" I said.

"F**k!" Dieter squawked back.  He had learned that word since mum and dad died because neither of them used that kind of language.

It reminded me of how sometimes the F-word would slip out of my mouth and my mother would say, ."Don't be crude, darling," and carry on daintily filling her mouth with chunks of meat.  Though she was my mother I couldn't help thinking she was ashamed of me and tried not to show it.  I've always been clumsy and tall for my age, shaped more like a loaf of French bread than a well built young man. People say I slouch and it's probably true because when I forget to stand up straight, my head leads the way when I walk.   I don't know how many times my mum told me I looked like a goose.  Walking has always been a trial because I’m a pigeon-toed on one foot.  My spine isn’t very flexible and my tree trunk legs don’t always bend the way I want them to. When I stand up straight, my kneecaps bend back in a reflex angle.  Mum tied my shoes for me when I was young, but things got easier for her when Velcro came along.  Sports were out of the question for me.  Mum was always on at me to keep up with my schoolwork so I could be independent, but studying wasn’t difficult because I had no other distractions.  I didn’t know anyone I could play with.  When I was a teenager I was obsessed with black and white musicals that had dancing in them, even though I was as graceful as a duck on dry land.  I studied and got good marks, but there was no graduation ceremony.  My diploma was sent in the mail, which is how it got bent.   

I opened Dieter's cage and put my hand in for him to step onto. As I lifted him up, he stared into a string of "Pretty boy, pretty boy pretty boy," which he says when he wants attention.  I lifted him up to my face and stroked his head.  "Kiss?" I asked.  He bobbed his head, so I moved in and kissed him on the beak but got back more of a peck than anything tender.  I held him to my cheek and nuzzled against his breast. The warmth I could feel from beneath his insulating feathers, made tears start up in my eyes. When Dieter nudged my face and got his beak wet, he let out a deafening squawk.

"Say goodbye, say goodbye. Auf wiedersehen," he said. "Wiedersehn."

I put him down on the back of the desk chair.  "I need a drink," I said.  

Dieter isn't an expert flyer, probably because he has been in a cage for most of his life, so he uses rest-stop perches to get from one end of the house to the other.  He followed me into the kitchen.  I should have been eating dinner instead of drinking, but the harsh brush-off from Freddie, telling me he never wanted to see me again, had made me lose my appetite.  Before mum passed on, I ended up cooking for both of us because it was that or starve.  I had no intention of learning to cook but she refused to eat anything prepared outside the home so I had to be her personal chef. She was picky and a hypochondriac, something she must have passed on to me, always chasing after magic solutions and crazy remedies.  Her doctor said she should exercise and eat a healthy diet but she didn’t do either.  I couldn’t criticize her for it because I’m not much better.  Her last years were spent entirely in bed, which meant I did a lot of huffing and puffing up and down the stairs.  A few years after I got my diploma, she finally succumbed to cancer.  I had learned to cook better by then though she couldn't eat my most elaborate concoctions.  I can't say I enjoy cooking when there's nobody to appreciate it.  The same is true for my education.  Mum never saw it put to good use, so most of it was a waste of time.

Shopping for food was always a horror movie for me.  I’d get short tempered with people who blocked supermarket aisles, shoved their groceries onto the belt when I’d only just started mine, and looked at me like I was a freak. When the pandemic put us in lockdown, my life didn’t change much as I was already on every delivery company's map.  If I don’t feel like cooking, I’ll order something like deep-fried chicken.  The tomato sauce and salami on pizza doesn’t agree with me so I can only eat chicken or fish and chips.  With Chinese and Indian I’m never sure I'm never sure what exactly it is I’m eating.  They put salt and spices on the food and mum’s doctor has said we should all take it easy on the salt.  Even ordering groceries can be a minefield because I have to remember what's already in the fridge and what I might feel like eating at any given moment the next day.  If I have a craving for brussels sprouts when I do the ordering, I might get caught up in tracking down Freddie and eat all of the cookies and licorice allsorts in the house.  My appetite for savoury food disappears and the brussels sprouts rot in the fridge.  It's not only vegetables that trip me up.  Leftover chicken can be just as bad because I lose track of how old it is.  I feel guilty when I have to throw it away because Dieter likes the odd nibble of chicken.  I don't know how to tell him it is cannibalism but I don't think he cares.

My computer started pinging in the front room, which meant that somebody had logged into a site I knew Freddie often went to.  Maybe he was looking for sympathy from someone now he had told me off.  I hurriedly mixed my drink, and headed back to the front room, Dieter squawking and flying behind me.  He landed on my keyboard the moment I sat down, and when I tried to brush him away, he knocked over my drink.

"Goddam wanker!" I said.

"Anker! Akner gelichtet!" he shouted back once he had flapped over to the back of a chair. "Akner gelichtet!" he repeated like he was still on board a ship. I could have told him to shut up but he would only throw it back at me and I didn't need any more aggravation at that moment.  Freddie was enough.  

Freddie and I had started out slowly.  He had been sending me messages for almost a year, asking me how I was doing, but I had too much going on to pay attention to him. After mum died and the dust settled on the home-front, the deeds were signed over to me, but I needed time to think about what I would do next.  One day when I was bored I wrote back to Freddie to thank him for his constancy in my difficult time.  From there it went from wishing each other good morning and goodnight, to regular daily messages.  His compliments and enthusiasm for my personal quirks, or those I told him about, made me take him more seriously.  For someone who came out of nowhere and was willing to listen to me, I cautiously allowed that he might genuinely care about me. He lives in another city but we’ve talked so much about everything, that I know he understands me better than my own mother. Every once in a while a small voice tells me to be careful because he might be one of those people who lose interest as soon as they get what they want, but I wasn’t interested in anything serious. A friend or a buddy would be fine, and if it led to sex, that was alright with me, but I needed to get to know him first.

I asked around about him and a few people told me he had issues, but nobody would say anything concrete, so I figured his problems couldn’t be that bad.  We all have problems. He probably needed someone like me who understood him.  A few weeks after we started chatting regularly, he asked if he could come and visit me.  I told him no, because the house was still a mess after mum’s passing and I would be embarrassed to show it to him. I had big plans to make the place my own, but I hadn’t started yet.  Freddie told me he didn’t care if there was flowered wallpaper in the living room or pink curtains in the bathroom.   His own mother was still alive so he couldn’t have guests at home, and he was counting on me to take our relationship to the next level.

Although I could have invited him over, the house had ended up in such a state that I didn’t want Freddie to think it reflected anything about me.  Mum hadn’t touched anything since dad left because they had chosen it together. Then the pandemic hit so travelling wasn’t allowed and that put any talk of Freddie visiting out of the question.  I made a start on the house by painting over the wallpaper and ripping up the carpet.

When the lockdown eased a bit, Freddie went back to his work as a cleaning product salesman. Sometimes his sales trips brought him close to where I live but I wasn’t ready to have him for a visit. My inherited virus phobia was still fully engaged and I was determined to keep my distance from others as instructed. I left all of my deliveries on the veranda for 24 hours to be sure they weren’t contaminated. Freddie told me I was inventing excuses but I wanted things to be right for him.  My next house renovations were the walls and floors in the master bedroom because Freddie had joked about it being where we would spend the most time.  His comments about the bedroom made me nervous because I still wasn’t sure what he saw in me.  I was not at all sexually experienced and would need a gentle patient teacher.  It was possible he could be that person.

The next time he was travelling nearby he sent a message to ask if I wanted to meet him for a drink. Some of the pubs had kept their outdoor patios open, but it was too cold to sit out, and I don’t like beer at the best of times. I wondered how often he went out to bars in the evening, because sometimes I would send him a message and he wouldn’t get back to me for hours.  If I asked him where he was, he’d launch into a tirade about minding my own business.  His denials made me suspect that he regularly met up with other people and maybe sneaked them home past his mother, if he had a mother.  If I made a joke about where he’d been on any particular evening, he’d get angry and tell me that if I grilled him again on his private life, he’d cut off contact with me. I wanted to believe him.  He was a kind man under his gruffness, I had seen it, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, apologized and said it was my paranoia taking over.  He reminded me that if I didn’t trust him, there was no sense in our relationship.

I tried not to show him how horrified and jealous I was when he told me that even though we were still under restrictions at home, he was going on a Mediterranean cruise.  To be fair, he asked if I wanted to go with him, but being restricted to a ship would have triggered my claustrophobia, and I have no interest in visiting a country where I don’t understand a word and nobody understands me.  It’s bad enough here at home.  I imagined other singles on the ship pouncing on him because he was a good catch, but I had to block out the thought of him rubbing himself up against anyone. Instead of exciting me, the very idea of it made me nauseous with jealousy.  When he got back from the cruise he didn’t mention anyone in particular so I didn’t ask too much in case he barked at me again for being nosy.  I was often confused about what he saw in me.  He’d be sweet and flirtatious one minute and the next he’d be nasty.  

For somebody as impractical and uncoordinated as me, it was hard work to put my house in order. I sat down and cried in frustration a few times, but I finally managed it.  The more clutter I took out to the garage or up to the attic, the more spilled out of drawers, off bookcases, and out of closets.  For months, the bare living and dining room floors were stacked with boxes of stuff ready to be taken away, and the furniture was piled with other things I hadn’t decided on yet.  I couldn’t invite Freddie over when there wasn’t even a place to sit down.  There was so much clobber on the living room sofa we wouldn't even be able to watch television.

"I'm not crazy about Hollywood musicals anyway," he wrote in one of his messages. "Maybe we could watch some porn."

"Not yet," I told him.  "I don't have one of those smart televisions."

"It doesn't need to be smart to watch porn," he wrote.  "What do you watch your musicals on?"

"VHS," I told him.  "I have about two hundred in my collection."

"Christ," he wrote and put a bunch of open mouth emojis after it. "I doubt there's any VHS porn still around."

 "I'll get a proper television when I've finished the living room."

"You'd better step on it," he wrote back, "or it'll be the next century before we get together."

As I worked on the house, Freddie would sometimes tell me that I was the best that had happened to him, that only I could help him, and he hoped we could live together one day.  Other times he was so touchy I couldn’t say anything without him accusing me of being too bossy and full of plans that weren't his.  I painted over the flowered wallpaper, sanded and varnished the floors, and though I'm no electrician, I managed to remove the frilly cloth coverings from the ceiling lights.  I had to leave them as bare bulbs because I don’t know how to attach new shades.  I could use someone like Freddie to get up on a ladder to fix these things, because I don’t know how electricity works and the heights put me off.  The house is not a very romantic scene in the daytime because I tossed out all of the old velvet curtains that reminded me of a funeral home.  At night the bare bulbs don’t do anything to hide the mess.  Most days the place looks like a bomb went off inside and it gets me down when I think about everything I still have to do.

Dieter hates all of the disruption and has let me know that with his screeches and squawks.  He didn't seem as bothered by the disappearance of mum and dad as he was by the changes to the house.  His language got saltier, probably because he heard me cursing at the carpet, the walls, and the floorboards.  He coughed whenever I swept the floor, but if I started up the vacuum cleaner, he'd screech so loud I could hardly hear.  If he was out of his cage he'd flap around the room until he shit himself. Most evenings it was a relief to put the cover over his cage so I could have some chat with Freddie without Dieter interrupting.  Although he added an extra complication to my life, he was the last connection to my dad as he had been the one to adopt Dieter.

"Night night," I would say to Dieter as the cover went on and his world went dark.  

"Night night," he would squawk back, and then try one more "Pretty boy," in case I changed my mind.

I was never sure whether to believe what Freddie told me, but one day I found out how to track him on an app he uses. He had always insisted he was a salesman for cleaning products, but when I managed to track him, his travel and behaviour were as wild as a playground carousel.   His GPS put him not only in his home location, but also in Florida, California, and Glasgow.  If I asked about any of his trips he would get angry with me, tell me to stop following him around, and demand to know who told me. Other times, when he was in a better mood, he would tell me how much he hated all the travelling and couldn’t wait to be with me.  I didn’t understand his mood swings because I consider myself a stable person as long as I can stick to my routines.  Maybe I represented stability to him, though he had never seen me in my worst moments.

After a while, I began to wonder if he was doing drugs but I didn't know enough about them to be sure.  He seemed to have money to go on cruises and travel trans-Atlantic, which seemed extravagant for the salary of a soap salesman.   Every time he came back from one of his trips, the ones he didn’t tell me about, he was nastier and more insulting to me than ever. This would wear off after a few days, like he had come home in a drugged state and was slowly waking up.  He’d start with the compliments again.  He loved how I wore my hair, my beautiful face, my pale skin, and he was always on at me to show him more of myself.  I wasn’t sure about exposing too much, not only because I wasn’t comfortable with my body, but if he was a Jekyll and Hyde character, he might turn my wish to be liked and admired against me. He'd said he'd be thrilled by the sight of some skin but I was worried he might call me a lot of vulgar names if I showed him more..  His mood swings convinced me that he was using whatever drugs he trafficked in.  I didn’t dare mention my suspicions to him, because the one time I joked about getting high on cannabis, something I have never done, he went off on me like I was some freaked-out crackhead.

I had just finished fixing up the last room in the house when the lockdown restrictions ended.  Although I was still nervous about catching the virus, I figured it was alright for Freddie to visit, but I had no sooner made my proposal when he told me he didn’t want to see or hear from me again. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong to deserve such a sudden and blunt rejection. He could have been in one of his drug-induced hazes but his words were clear.  When I asked him for an explanation, he didn’t answer.  I didn’t hear from him at all that day, or the next.  Every day without a word from him left me dangling from that helium balloon in mid air.  Any word from him, even a nasty one, would help bring me back to earth.  His silence was like he had turned a weapon on me and forbid me to take a step toward him.    

I had no experience with drugs and didn’t know what he was on, so I had no idea about where to look for help. Some street drugs cause personality changes, but without a hint from Freddie I didn’t know anything for sure.  I did as he said and held back from contacting him but it was almost impossible for me.  I wrote messages to him that I never sent, and I thought about tracking down his home phone number to call him, but I was sure he would hang up when he found out it was me.  I would have been worried about the state of his health, but I could see by his app tracking that he was still hopping around the country. I composed a considered and calm message to him, offering to help with his problem if he was too embarrassed to ask on his own account.  He didn’t answer back, but the morning after I sent it, he blocked me on the site where I had messaged him.  I was sure he was on something and he was avoiding the truth, so I let things ride for another few days and went over everything I had said, trying to pinpoint what had pushed him away.  I regretted not meeting up with him in spite of the state of my house.  The inconvenient pandemic had kept us apart when we should have been together.  It was my fault things had gone wrong but I couldn’t have behaved differently because I had learned to take my anxieties seriously, otherwise panic took over. My next message to him was carefully worded to avoid mention of drugs, though I suspected they were the cause of our problems. I offered him a place to stay the next time he passed by.  There would be no commitments.  I was sure I could clear up any misunderstanding between us when we met.  We could start fresh from that day.  He didn’t answer that message either and blocked me on that site as well.  

I had read about catfishing as a technique to discover hidden truths about people, so decided to try it.  If I set up a fake profile and pretended to be more like his other friends, I could make contact with him and he wouldn’t know it was me. He accepted my friendship requests on a few sites and we exchanged compliments, the same way our first connection had started.  I strategized for ways to ask him what he thought about the real me, the one he had blocked, but I was too worried about giving myself away, so I never found a way to slide the suggestion into our conversations.  After the initial back and forth, we had by chance, a wonderful day together, almost an eight hour session.  He couldn't wait to meet me in person.  It shocked me he was so ready to hook up with my fake self.  He was no more than a flighty butterfly who could abandon the real me in a minute.  In my growing resentment I must have slipped up and used a phrase that the real me would have, because when he ended the session, he said he knew it was me all along.  I doubted that. He was a liar. He didn’t want to admit that he had been fooled for an entire day because it made him look stupid.  What he didn't know was that I had other fake profiles he had accepted as friends, so I could still watch what he was up to without giving myself away.

I told myself that his erratic behaviour was from the drugs, or maybe he took drugs because he was stressed by job. On some apps I could see his side of chat sessions with others, and he often used names for things I didn't understand but presumed were drugs.  At times his spelling and language was so sloppy it was like he was slobbering and incoherent.  There was nothing I could do to help him because he had forbidden me.  I couldn’t tell if it was the real Freddie or the drugged up one who wanted to block me out of his life.  I wrote another message to let him know that if he had a drug problem, I wouldn’t judge him, and perhaps I could help.  He must have reported me for the drug reference because my account on that site was suspended for a week due to inappropriate content.  It was a cruel thing to do when I was only trying to help.

I soon found him under another name on a hookup site with a location tracker so I could see his comings and goings.  I wondered if he left it active for the real me, hoping I cared enough to follow him.  Instead of touring the country selling his soap products he kept showing up in odd locations like golf courses and cemeteries at night, strange places to conduct business or pleasure.  A couple of new photos appeared on a site where I could see him, and I thought he was looking better, that he had straightened himself out.  Based on that perception, I used the clandestine connection I had to send him a message.  It meant giving away one of my catfishing accounts in the process, but I wanted to let him know that the invitation to visit me was still open.  The flowered wallpaper was gone and the house now looked like mine instead of my parent's and I was sure our misunderstandings could be worked out in person.

He didn’t answer so I didn’t know if he got the message.  After a few days, I noticed that the tracking on his phone was turned off, and he hadn’t appeared under any of his usernames in the usual places.  After more agonizing days and sleepless nights with no word from him, I asked mutual contacts about him and they confirmed they hadn’t heard from him recently.  They suggested he might have gone on another trip.  If I called the police in his area to check on him and there was no problem, I would get it in the neck for making a false missing person report.  

By the time it got to ten days of silence I was desperate for news. I had done some snooping after we first connected so I knew his full name and address, but I had no way to get there.  Mum and I never had a car, and it had been years since I was on a bus or a train.  The more days went by, the more I was convinced something was wrong. The logical part of my brain told me that If Freddie did have a mother, he was her worry.  I had no business showing up at his door.

I was in a bad way.  I couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night and had never taken naps in the daytime because it’s too hard to wake up again.  All of my worry was centered on Freddie, and how stupid I had been to put off meeting him when I had the chance.  Worse than the silence was the fact that I didn’t know why any of this had happened.  Why had he chased after me only to shoot me down?  I thought we were getting on so well when he suddenly slammed the door in my face.  I needed to know why.

The two hour train trip south was agony.  I hadn’t been out of the house to walk any distance for so long that I was winded by the time I made it to our local station.  I had chosen midweek and midmorning to travel, hoping to avoid the crowds.  It worked as I had planned because if someone sat too close to me, there were enough empty seats for me to move away. The conductor gave me a suspicious squint every time he saw that I had changed seats. When people got on at stops on the way, I lowered my head so they couldn't see my face and turned my protective energy on and went into a nervous mumble of “Don’t sit here. Don’t sit here. Don’t sit here.” while gritting my teeth and clenching my hands on my lap.  I didn’t want to appear like a friendly welcoming person, because I wasn’t.  This uncomfortable trip was an emergency and I was not happy about having to do it, at all, let alone be friendly with fellow travellers.  It was Freddie’s fault anyway because if he had written to me, or let me see him this last while, none of this would have been necessary.  We didn’t have to be lovers or partners; we could just be friends.

It was half an hour's to walk from the train station to his house. I already knew it was a row-housing estate because I had walked by it on Google Street View.  Rather than go straight up and knock on the door and risk being shouted at, I wandered over to a park that was diagonal from Freddie’s house and sat on one of the playground swings.  From there I could see comings and goings without being easily spotted myself.  I wore the hood of my jacket up so Freddie wouldn't recognize me if he happened to look my way.  There wasn't a car in front of the house so maybe he was away at work.  The ground floor blinds were closed, the upstairs curtains were drawn, and there was no sign of light from inside.  I had assumed I might have to wait a while if there was nobody home when I arrived, but eventually I'd have to summon up the courage to walk up to the door and knock.  If he had gone to Florida or on another cruise I would be there a long time.

On the playground swing as I waited, I used one foot to push myself back and forth in an absent rocking motion that helped calm my underlying panic about coming face to face with Freddie. After a while I noticed a woman had come out of the house next door to Freddie’s to take out rubbish that she deposited in a bin by the low front wall.  Then she came out again to sweep the path to the gate.  Both times she dawdled and gawked up and down the quiet street, checking to see if there was anything new since the last time she was out.  She was a woman my mother’s age, with her hair hidden under a makeshift turban.  I couldn't stay on the swing forever, and this woman looked like she wanted to talk.  With my hands deep in my pockets and my head bowed, I watched everything through the hair that fell across my eyes as I sauntered closer to Freddie’s house.  I didn’t know how to engage the woman directly but I was standing in front of Freddie’s front gate looking for signs of life, when she called out to me.

“Nobody home!” she shouted.  

I looked at her with my best annoyed face as I hadn’t indicated I was looking for anyone.

“They’re gone,” she said, coming over to the corner of her garden nearest Freddie’s gate.  I could tell by her enthusiasm that she was someone who lived to know other people’s business.

“Who’s gone?” I asked, unwilling to state my purpose.

“Them,” she said, waving at the house.  “Things weren’t the same after Gladys died from the virus last year.”

“Gladys?” I asked, as I had never heard the name.

“His mother,” she said.  “She went and the rest is history.”

“Do you know he’ll be back?” I asked, finally admitting I was there to find someone.

“Oh, he won’t be coming back, young woman.”  

I don’t know what hit me harder, the information that Freddie had left home and wasn’t coming back, or that this lady had called me a woman. I was torn between being insulted and flattered.

“Do you know where he went?” I asked.  “There must be a forwarding address.”

“There ain’t no post where he is,” she said.

I imagined Freddie being stressed about working during the pandemic, and frustrated with always being put off by me, and retreating to somewhere that had no contact with the outside world.  He was probably putting his feet up on a palm-tree tropical beach in the Philippines.

“When he left, did he give you any idea when he might be back?” I asked.

“Oh he ain’t coming back dear,” she said.  “He’s gone for good, bless ‘em”

“Where to?” I asked, knowing that these days it was impossible to disappear forever.  It was a small world.

“Come come come ye silly goose,” she said.  “He’s dead.  Don’t ya get it?”

In the silence my heart stopped.  My face went cold and I reached for the gatepost because my legs had started to shake.

“Overdose,” the woman said.  “Lay there for a couple of days, he did.”

My mouth was as dry as cotton and I wouldn’t have been able to speak if there were words to say.  I turned away from her in case tears started rolling down my face. My tears had been close to the surface for almost a month and they were about to burst out.  I didn’t want it to be in front of her when the fountain turned on.

“I hope it's a nice family who move in and that their kids are all right.”  She went on talking even though I had my back to her. “There’s a lot of young ‘uns in need of a strong hand but with all the namby pamby men out there,  it’s not a surprise nothing’s turned out right.”

As I walked away from her, she shouted after me, “A little politeness goes a long way young lady!” as if I was the one who had spoken out of turn. I don’t remember going home or what happened on the way.  It didn’t matter if anyone sat beside me on the train because I wasn’t really there.  

Like running for the toilet after a long trip away from home, I raced up the garden path, barely getting the key in the door before I burst out sobbing.  Two steps into the hallway and having kicked the door closed behind me, the tears streamed down my face.  I couldn't breathe as I slid down my new white walls, buried my face in my arms and cried about the unfairness of life.  

I hadn't realized how quiet the house was until I heard Dieter's claws on the wooden floor.  When I looked up he was walking out of the front room like he was my mother coming to ask me where I had been.  I must have forgotten to close his cage properly or he had found a way to pick the lock.  As he waddled toward me I put my hand on the floor for him to hop onto but he was reluctant because it was wet.  Only when I dried it on my trousers would he let me lift him up to my shoulder.  He avoided getting close to my face but paced up and down my shoulder, sizing me up with one of his curious mobile eyes.

"Pretty boy," he said.  "Pretty boy."

"Who's a pretty boy?" I asked, though my voice was raspy and choked.

"Night night," he said and flapped his wings as getting ready to fly. "Night night pretty boy."  

The last of the evening light caught the stained glass panels on the front door, and I looked up at the rainbow hoping for help from above, but all I saw was a small white feather dancing in a beam of light.  This was my world, my place of comfort, and I would never leave it again.