Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough Page B

realize I’d started drumming on the kitchen table until Auntie told me to stop it. With a big sigh, she went into the pantry and brought out a cardboard box full of plums from the garden. Many of them were overripe and speckled with dots of white mould, but Auntie said if I helped her pick them over and take out the stones, we could make a pie. She gave me a big pinny and sat me down with a bowl and a knife, but I’d never been one for fiddly things like that, and after a short while, I was fed up with blinking plums and had two plasters on my fingers.
    The water streamed down the windows in long shining strings.
    “Weather for ducks,” Auntie said, getting up and looking out. “I’ll have to take some pails up to the rooms upstairs. There are always leaks when it rains like this. Mimi, you come and help me. Cora, leave those for a minute and wash your hands. You can go and feed the parrot.”
    She reached behind the tattered curtain under the sink and brought out a brown paper bag full of long black-and-white-striped seeds.
    “Just unhook the feed box and pour some of these in,” she said. “They’re sunflower seeds. The old bird won’t peck you.”
    I took the bag and went down the gloomy passage, past the locked doors, and into the sitting room at the end with its great stone fireplace stacked up on one side with logs. The panelled walls and low beamed ceiling made the room seem very dark, probably more so than usual with the heavy sky outside. I thought how cosy it could be if only Auntie would light the fire so we might be warm.
    Near the fireplace was an old red settee, so worn that tufts of hairy brown stuffing hung out of the holes. A broken spring was sticking up right in the middle. I told myself that if ever I had to sit down there, I mustn’t forget to check the place first so as not to do myself an injury.
    “Hello,”
came a funny voice like an old door creaking. It was the parrot, sitting on his perch in a huge metal cage behind the settee, the stand resting on sheets of yellowing newspaper.
    He eyed me up and down as I took out his feed box and filled it with fresh seeds. Some spilled out onto the threadbare carpet, and I quickly picked up every last one in case Auntie Ida came in and told me off.
    “Hello.”
His voice had something of Auntie’s in it.
    “Don’t you say nothing else?” I said, then thought I might try teaching him to copy some words from me. It would be a good way to pass the hours.
    I put my hand through the door of the cage, and taking his time, the parrot climbed down off his perch and walked up and down on my finger, carefully curling and uncurling his claws as he went. He stretched out his wings one by one, as if he were showing me the pretty green and red of his feathers. I moved him close to his feed box and watched how clever he was at taking a seed with his beak and rolling it around with his funny fat tongue, which looked just like a piece of smooth grey rubber. The bits of shell fell to the sand at the bottom of his cage, and he ate the nice soft centre. Really nippy, what he could do with no teeth.
    A piano stood beside the window. On the wall above it hung a large mirror in a carved wooden frame pocked with wormholes.
    I lifted the parrot back on his perch, saying “Cheerio!” three times. That’s what I was going to do every day till he learned it. Then I hooked up his wire door and went across to the piano. I looked up and gazed at myself in the old mirror.
    Its misty surface was speckled with black dots. In places, especially in the corners, the glass was so cloudy that it hardly reflected the room back at all. Towards the top there was a hole with dark cracks radiating out from it, as if somebody had thrown something small and heavy at the mirror, not shattering it, but leaving this long crooked spider of a mark. One of the cracks ran almost the full length of the glass. It cut across my face diagonally like a scar.
    I peered at my horrid plaits, longing