‘That’s why she’s running, Gordon. She wants to get him in here quick and put him under a cold tap.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. ‘In fact I know you’re right. Just listen to that noise.’
‘If it isn’t a fit, you can bet your life it’s something like it.’
‘I quite agree.’
Claud shifted his feet uneasily on the gravel of the driveway. ‘There’s a thousand and one different things keep happening every day to little babies like that,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘I knew a baby once who caught his fingers in the spokes of the pram wheel. He lost the lot. It cut them clean off.’
‘Yes.’
‘Whatever it is,’ Claud said, ‘I wish to Christ she’d stop running.’
A long truck loaded with bricks came up behind Bessie and the driver slowed down and poked his head out the window to stare. Bessie ignored him and flew on, and she was so close now I could see her big red face with the mouth wide open, panting for breath. I noticed she was wearing white gloves on her hands, very prim and dainty, and there was a funny little white hat to match perched right on the top of her head, like a mushroom.
Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an enormous pheasant!
Claud let out a cry of horror.
The fool in the truck going along beside Bessie started roaring with laughter.
The pheasant flapped around drunkenly for a few seconds, then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the road.
A grocer’s van came up behind the truck and began hooting to get by. Bessie kept on running.
Then – whoosh – a second pheasant flew up out of the pram.
Then a third, and a fourth. Then a fifth.
‘My God!’ I said. ‘It’s the pills! They’re wearing off!’
Claud didn’t say anything.
Bessie covered the last fifty yards at a tremendous pace, and she came swinging into the driveway of the filling-station with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she cried.
‘Go round the back!’ I shouted. ‘Go round the back!’ But she pulled up sharp against the first pump in the line and before we could reach her she had seized the screaming infant in her arms and dragged him clear.
‘No! No!’ Claud cried, racing toward her. ‘Don’t lift the baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!’ But she wasn’t even listening, and with the weight of the child suddenly lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the pram, fifty or sixty of them, at least, and the whole sky above us was filled with huge brown birds clapping their wings furiously to gain height.
Claud and I started running up and down the driveway waving our arms to frighten them off the premises. ‘Go away!’ we shouted. ‘Shoo! Go away!’ But they were too dopey still to take any notice of us and within half a minute down they came again and settled themselves like a swarm of locusts all over the front of my filling-station. The place was covered with them. They sat wing
to wing along the edges of the roof and on the concrete canopy that came out over the pumps, and a dozen at least were clinging to the sill of the office window. Some had flown down on to the rack that held the bottles of lubricating-oil, and others were sliding about on the
bonnets of my second-hand cars. One cockbird with a fine tail was perched superbly on top of a petrol pump, and quite a number, those that were too drunk to stay aloft, simply squatted in the driveway at our feet, fluffing their feathers and blinking their small eyes.
Across the road, a line of cars had already started forming behind the brick-lorry and the grocery-van, and people were opening their doors and getting out and beginning to cross over to have a closer look. I glanced at my watch. It was twenty to nine. Any moment now, I thought, a large black car is going to come streaking along the road from the direction of the village, and the car will be a Rolls, and the face behind the wheel will be the great glistening butcher’s face of Mr Victor Hazel, maker of sausages and pies.
‘They near pecked him to pieces!’ Bessie was shouting, clasping the screaming baby to her bosom.
‘You go on home, Bessie,’ Claud said, white in the face.
‘Lock up,’ I said. ‘Put out the sign. We’ve gone for the day.’