A Bunch of Fives - Stories by James Roderick Burns (56)

Squirrel City

SQUIRREL CITY

WHEN HE WAS a kid, Eddie lived near the seafront. He woke to the noise of seagulls, the smell of brine and seaweed seeping through the curtains. When his dad had the time they’d walk the sands. It wasn’t much of a beach, stuck between the harbour wall and the back of the amusements, but still; you could hear the squelch of damp sand, feel razor-clams crunching beneath your feet as you made your way along. The gulls still called, high and mad; the tide washed up old Tizer cans and bits of discarded netting.

Now his mother lived near the town centre and he’d moved back in. Not quite thirty, with a fresh divorce and a kid of his own (who he rarely saw) and no prospects whatsoever. His mate Dave, though, didn’t see it that way.

‘It’s a mitzvah, Eddie. Jean’s bound to be lonely. Room’s too big, Geoff everywhere she looks. You were meant to move back in, mate.’

Eddie gave him a look, but in the end reluctantly agreed. He knew all this homespun Jewish stuff was so much hot air: Dave’s dad had a long-established fruit-and-veg shop, and was practically a communist, but it felt good to hear a positive view, all the same. Dave helped him lug his stuff back into his mam’s, then cracked open a couple of cans on the garden wall.

This end of the terrace was separated from the next by a little park. Down the far side was a row of skinny saplings, and on the near side three mature trees, spaced apart and dropping leaves into his mother’s garden. She’d fixed a line of trellises onto the wall, hung bird-feeders from the top. As they drank, a squirrel barrelled down an overhanging branch and dropped onto the narrow wooden platform of the nearest feeder. Dave hummed the Mission: Impossible tune and clanged his can against Eddie’s. Beer slopped over the edge onto his trousers.

It should have felt good to be home.

*

Eventually he got a job sorting bottles at the recycling plant.

‘Well done, son!’ his mother said. She had tears on her cheeks, fag-ash inching down to the knuckles in her distraction.

‘Thanks.’

‘You can help out with me new garden stuff, then. You know – to celebrate, like.’

She pointed at an enormous Amazon box in the hall. Eddie walked around it for a moment, amazed, before bending his back and hefting it onto a bench in the garden. The recycling centre manager had asked him to do a test-session, so his muscles were still warm, but nonetheless the crate floored him.

‘What the hell have you got in here, mam?’

Jean smiled. ‘You’ll see.’

He noticed a few garden stalwarts had reappeared: rusty spike-lamps, the stone frogs, a miniature wheelbarrow propelled by a disgruntled gnome. His pipe was cracked, one eye was caked in birdshit and he had a wrinkly onion draped over the handles.

In a gusher of packing-peanuts, a parade of new figures appeared: Jeremy Fisher, a Dutch girl wearing a stiff porcelain bulb-print apron, coils of fence-stakes, then miniature feeding tables, a string of lamps, paint-pots for the wall, trellises. He looked on, goggle-eyed, as a final pair of terracotta squirrels emerged clutching their nuts. Eddie laughed. To his surprise, his mother’s rang out, too, long and high. A breeze blew foam peanuts everywhere and they chased them round to the chattering of squirrels.

*

A few weeks later, Jean was vacuuming the upstairs hall. Eddie came home knackered and pantomimed going for a nap through the racket. She smiled and nodded. He closed the door firmly behind him.

He’d settled into the job, spent some wages on clothes and the occasional night out, but still had an odd, hollow feeling. Just manky and off, like the whiff of the sewer-pipe behind the amusements. Eddie opened his laptop then paused, busty grannies waiting on the click of the cursor. Now the hoover was downstairs, the squirrels launching another offensive outside. One hung upside down, sliding down the branch like a wedge of loose snow on a rooftop, then righted himself and dropped onto the ledge.

Eddie went down to the living room and told her to look.

‘Got yerself a regular squirrel city out there, mam,’ he said.

*

Anniversaries were hard. The first couple of years, as his own marriage fell apart, Jean would call Eddie in tears. Now Geoff’s had rolled around and he found her sitting in an immaculate front room, watching the garden. The window was streak-free, the carpet tracked in perfect regimented stripes. She’d even lifted up his dad’s pouffe to do underneath. There the tracks wobbled a bit, like the waves in a Mr Whippy, where she’d apparently listed over to one side.

‘Mam.’

She looked round, dry-eyed. ‘You ave a good mornin?’

‘Okay for a Saturday, I s’ppose.’

Jean looked away. He watched the smoke from her fag trail upwards for a moment, its greyish swirls joining the thin layer on the ceiling. He racked his brains for something to say, but all that came to mind was the raucous echo of bottles rolling through the sorting gate, then more unhelpful silence.

‘Alright, then.’

In his room he sat behind the laptop, heard the hoover starting up again and beginning to climb the stairs. The volume swelled and receded as she cleared each step in turn. Soon it whined away down the corridor towards her bedroom.

He felt less guilty about relaxing, now. His fingers stroked the box, hit return without even looking at the keyboard. Tossing his boots into a corner, he spread out in pleasant anticipation. Each to his own, all that.

The doorbell rang. No response; just the faraway vacuum’s drone. It rang again, hard and twice more, and he heard her turn around. Eddie sighed and went out into the hall leaving his door open.

‘I’ll get it,’ he said. As he went downstairs she arrived in his doorway, clicking the rumbling hoover into place.

He opened the door, looking about. That a delivery van disappearing round the corner? He turned around then stopped cold as he clocked the bench. A new Amazon box, broad as a boxer’s coffin, lay across the slats of the bench.

Upstairs, the hoover went off. Behind his window a shadow crossed over to the desk, stopped.

‘Mam!’ yelled Eddie.

From an overhanging branch two squirrels leapt for the same feeder, their tails curly as question marks, tiny hands clenching and unclenching in the air.

First published in To Say Nothing of the Dog: Flash Fiction (Cyberwit, 2023)

Next: The Fox on the Stair