Adam Guillain

Writer | Storyteller | Consultant

Mystery Bird

“I can’t run any faster,” Bella panted, as she frantically dragged herself up Oxleas Mount. Her only hope was to get to the brow of the hill and find shelter at the café. She shot a terrified look over her shoulder. To her horror they were catching her up.

“Damn that Mrs. Sticklan!” she yelled, as yet again her shoes failed to grip on the tarmac when she tried to accelerate, causing her to stumble. Bella would have been able to run much faster in tracksuit bottoms and trainers but Mrs. Sticklan, the newly-appointed headteacher at Hawksmore Primary, had introduced very strict rules regarding school uniform. All the girls had to wear these hideous brown and orange A-line skirts and slippery leather shoes. These weren’t the only rules that Bella found hard to swallow.

The thud of stone missiles all around her alerted Bella to a new danger. Eugene Briggs in particular was an excellent shot with a catapult; it wouldn’t be long before one of his gang made a direct hit. She decided to get off the main path and wade her way through the dead leaves and winter-worn woodland towards the old watch tower.

Bella had tried to leave school at the end of the day without getting into another fight, but when Eugene started stuffing his grubby hands through Charlie’s red hair and calling her a ‘ginger nut’, Bella had flown off the handle as usual.

“Leave her alone, you big fat oaf,” she’d shouted, squirting apple juice into Eugene’s face. A fight was inevitable. But Bella Balistica needed to work on her insults. Eugene was anything but fat. He was lean as he was mean and he prided himself on finding the cruellest thing to say to anyone.

Initially, everything had been going according to Eugene’s plan. Bella had taken the bait, then Connor Mitchell had snatched Charlie’s school bag and started running off with it down Jackson Road. As expected, Charlie had chased after him while the rest of the gang closed in on Bella.

“Guess what I saw this morning?” Eugene mocked, taking a step closer to Bella.

“What’s that then, Briggsy?” sneered Roland Richardson, as he swung his bulbous belly and wobbly thighs right up to Eugene’s side. Roland knew perfectly well that Connor and Eugene had caught Bella singing to the birds in Oxleas Wood. It was time to hammer the embarrassment home. Eugene relished moments like this. He loved toying with his victim before he pounced. Bella Balistica was the bane of his life. No one came back for more in the way she did. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she just stuck up for herself, but she had to stick her oar into everyone else’s business too, including his dad’s. It was getting boring. He grabbed her scruffy black hair.

“On your knees, pig-face,” he snarled, pulling her down towards the kerb. Bella dropped her school bag.

Bella had once turned her nose up and flared her nostrils at Eugene in a gesture of defiance. Since then, he’d teased her that she had a nose like a pig. “You have the nose of a princess,” her mum would reassure her. But Bella wasn’t so sure. Refusing to buckle, she tried to push Eugene away, but his arms were too long.

“No wonder your mother gave you away,” Eugene hissed. “I’m surprised anyone adopted you.”

Bella was furious. She threw a fist towards Eugene’s face, but it was no use – his arms were simply too long. Then, in a moment’s inspiration, she flung herself onto the ground, causing Eugene to lose his balance and stumble forwards.

“Stop her!” Eugene howled.

Bella rolled to the kerb and pulled herself up. Grabbing her school bag, she swivelled round to make her escape but ran straight into Prakash Malik. She was surrounded. Luckily for Bella, Prakash was so caught out by the ferocity of the collision, he toppled back just enough to let her slip through and sprint away.

“Prakash, you idiot!” Eugene shouted as he pulled himself up and glared at the stunned faces around him. Prakash went red and looked down to his boots.

“Sorry, Briggsy,” he muttered, worried in case Eugene should decide to turn on him too.

Eugene quickly turned to Winston Geoffrey, the fastest runner in his five-boy gang. “What are you waiting for, lanky legs?” he snarled. “After her!”

And that’s how Bella Balistica found herself running up Oxleas Mount at dusk pursued by a gang of the meanest boys at Hawksmore Primary.

“Ouch!” Bella yelped as the first stone stung the back of her right leg. “I hate school uniform!”

If she’d been allowed to wear thick socks and trousers instead of this horrible skirt, the sharp stone wouldn’t have cut her so badly. She wanted to stop and throw something back, but she was outnumbered. With the cold, easterly wind lashing against her face and causing her eyes to water, Bella gritted her teeth and picked up speed. If Winston Geoffrey caught her up and saw her watery eyes, he would be sure tell the gang. “Sissy,” they would call her. “Cry baby.”

But Bella never cried. Not in front of boys. For an eleven-year-old girl of average height, Bella Balistica was tough.

 

Very few people walked their dogs on this side of Oxleas Woods, partly because of the steep climb, but mostly because of the foreboding reputation of the old watchtower. Tucked away in a small clearing, the medieval ruins were a well-known sanctuary for wild birds and rodents as well as the odd local tramp. It was a creepy place at the best of times, but on a dark December afternoon with the bitter wind wailing through the trees and biting into your legs and ears, it was chilling. People said that the old oak tree by the tower had once been used for public executions. According to local legend, on certain days of the year, ghosts would return to re-enact these hideous events, haunting all those who set eyes on them. There was even supposed to be a mad phantom who appeared on the balcony every night at dawn. It was no wonder then that Bella’s mum didn’t allow her to walk to school this way. But Bella loved these stories. They were the very reason she played here.

The oncoming wind was getting too strong to fight. Bella knew that she had to hide – and fast. With the strength of a gibbon, she yanked herself up into the old oak tree just in time to see Eugene and his gang dart into the clearing. Surely they would see her.

Bella was used to standing out. She was from Guatemala, a small country in Central America just south of Mexico. She wore colourful Guatemalan headbands, with which she irritably attempted to sweep away her unruly hair and then complained to high heaven when they got confiscated because she fiddled with them in class. The fiery passion evident in her dark, sparkling eyes during these outbursts alluded to a wildness of spirit that was even more striking than her Mayan features. Quite simply, Bella Balistica was unlike any child Hawksmore Primary School had ever seen before.

“Can you see her?” gasped Eugene Briggs, panting as he trailed Winston Geoffrey into the clearing. Bella was nowhere to be seen.

“We’ll wait for the others to catch up,” he told Winston. “Search the whole area. The little witch must be around here somewhere.”

The bare branches of the old oak offered Bella little camouflage, and if it hadn’t been for the autumnal colours of her uniform, she would have had little chance.

“She’s too fast,” moaned Prakash, stumbling onto the scene totally exhausted. He bent over and rested his hands on his thighs while he attempted to catch his breath.

“Prakash, you’re pathetic,” Eugene lamented. “And where’s Ratty?” Eugene had nicknamed Roland ‘The Rat’ because of his crabby moods and mean-spirited behaviour – attributes well suited to his role in the gang.

“Coming,” Roland wheezed, finally making it into the clearing only to flop to the ground in a heap.

“Get your fat arse into gear and start looking!” Eugene ordered, picking up a stone and throwing it directly at him. Reluctantly, Roland and Prakash followed Winston’s lead and started to explore the clearing. Through the windswept branches, Bella watched as Eugene picked up a fallen stick and began thrusting it into the undergrowth. Sometimes when Eugene furrowed his brow, his eyelids would narrow until they looked as slitty as a snake’s. She shook with anger to think how he would make friends with new children just so he could torture and reject them later. He was like a boa constrictor who slowly coiled around his prey before he suffocated and devoured it.

Like his father, Ted Briggs, Eugene was skinny and pale-skinned with an unkempt mop of shaggy blond hair. He was easily the tallest Year 6 boy in the school, which meant he always made the football and basketball team and stuck out in class assemblies. He wore trainers most days, even though this wasn’t allowed, and tied his school tie with a huge knot, which allowed him to defy the rule about top buttons being done up. Every day he wore the same brown crew-neck jumper, which he never seemed to take off, even for PE. It drove Bella mad that while Mrs. Sticklan would make all the other boys wear V-necks in class and green short-sleeved T-shirts for PE, Eugene appeared to be exempt. In fact, as the son of Ted Briggs, the chair of the school of governors, Eugene got away with murder.

The Briggs family ran a pet shop at 48 Eltham Gardens, just off the Well Hall Road, where they sold exotic pets. At the back of the house there was a large private aviary which could only be viewed by making an appointment. There had been a school trip to visit it last term but Bella had refused to go on principle. “I don’t think it’s right to lock up animals,” she’d told her teacher, Mr. Alder. “Especially birds.”

Unfortunately for Bella, she’d made her opinion known to Ted Briggs by standing up in the middle of one of his boring assemblies and shouting him down about his abuse of animal rights. “I want you to make her life hell!” Briggs had roared after the assembly, prowling around Mrs. Sticklan’s office like a demented werewolf. “Then, when she’s as miserable as she can be – I want her out!”

Bella’s mum was so upset about the abusive phone call she received from Ted Briggs following the incident that she’d complained to the local education authority. To Briggs, this impertinence was a declaration of war.

 

Right now, Ted’s son, Eugene, was pulling back bushes and probing them with the thorny stick in his hunt for Bella Balistica. “If she’s made it through to the café, we won’t be able to touch her,” he snarled, bitterly. “There’ll be too many people around.”

“But it’s December, Briggsy,” exclaimed Connor Mitchell, rejoining the group after burying Charlie’s school bag in a tall wheelie-bin at the end of Jackson Road. “The café is closed and boarded up until March.”

Eugene and the other gang members grinned with pleasure as all around them a clammy smog of condensing breath and sweaty jumpers polluted the freshness of the dusk. “Then she must be here,” mused Eugene slyly, taking a packet of chewing gum from the inside pocket of his bomber jacket. “We’ll find her.”

In the tree, Bella shivered as she watched Eugene thoughtfully draw himself a stick of gum before passing the packet on to Connor Mitchell. Seeing Connor was a double-edged sword for Bella. The good news was that Charlie had probably got away. The bad news was that Eugene and Connor had the tracking instincts of wild cats. “They catch rabbits and cut off their tails just for something to do,” Charlie had told Bella only the other day. “Hunting me down in the woods is going to be a positive pleasure to them,” Bella trembled as she tried to manoeuvre herself higher into the tree without giving herself away. Bella knew that Connor Mitchell could be particularly brutal. Rumour had it that he once put a large rat into a box with his pet guinea pig. At school he was always in trouble, partly because his short spiky hair and bony features made him stick out like a porcupine on stilts, but mostly because he was so cruel. From the uncertainty of her hiding place, Bella felt scared.

 

It gets dark in the woods long before it does on the street. Bella could hear the flapping wings of the returning sparrows and starlings as they started to gather around their nests in the rafters of the watchtower. She looked up from her high position in the tree and saw a glorious red and green bird, rather like a parrot, disappearing through a small crack just below the gutter.

The dusky-red sunset was already fading when Eugene ordered his gang to spread out and encircle the tower. “She must be hiding inside,” he announced, striding up to the wooden doors and rattling the handle as hard as he could. The doors and windows to the old watchtower were always locked and boarded up, but it never seemed to stop people getting in. Angrily spitting out his gum, Eugene started to kick violently at the door while Connor and Winston forced open the shutters of a downstairs window with a chunky branch and scrambled in. Seconds later there was a bone-chilling scream. Bella felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Amidst a flurry of flapping wings and terrifying squawks, Connor and Winston jumped from the window and bolted like demented chickens.

“Run!” yelled Connor at a blood-curdling pitch.

There must have been a hundred pigeons in the first wave of the assault alone, followed by a flock of starlings and sparrows. And chasing them out with an ear-piercing shriek, Bella was amazed to see the strange, colourful bird she had just glimpsed slipping into the tower. Seeing the bird at close quarters allowed Bella to appreciate the iridescent blues and greens of its exceptionally long tail. It reminded her of a bird she had seen in a glossy holiday magazine about Guatemala. “No,” she said to herself. “It can’t be.”

From her viewpoint in the tree, Bella watched as Eugene and the boys all turned and legged it over the brow of the hill, past the café and down through the meadows, chased by the mysterious bird and the harassing flock. “I wish I was a bird,” Bella mumbled to herself as she carefully made her way down through the branches of the tree.

She had always felt drawn to birds. Even before she learnt to talk, Bella would call out to them from her buggy. The fact that she’d been born with legs and arms and not claws and wings was often a source of disappointment to her as young child. Even now, she loved to lie in the garden and gaze at the local bird life.

“You’ll grow your own wings and fly away one day,” her mum would say. “All children do.”

“Don’t talk rubbish,” Bella would retort. “I’m not flying anywhere.”

The idea was ridiculous.

Or so she thought.

(For more information, contact adamguillain@btinternet.com)