Jenny Downham Before I Die

Nineteen

There’s a dead bird on the lawn, its legs thin as cocktail sticks. I’m sitting in the deck chair under the apple tree watching it.

‘It definitely moved,’ I tell Cal.

He stops juggling and comes over to look. ‘Maggots,’ he says. ‘It can get so hot inside a dead body that the ones in the middle have to move to the edges to cool down.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

He shrugs. ‘Internet.’

He nudges the bird with his shoe until its stomach splits. Hundreds of maggots spill onto the grass and writhe there, stunned by sunlight.

‘See?’ Cal says, and he squats down and pokes at them with a stick. ‘A dead body is its own eco-system. Under certain conditions it only takes nine days for a human to rot down to the bones.’ He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘That won’t happen to you though.’

‘No?’

‘It’s more when people are murdered and left outside.’

‘What will happen to me, Cal?’

I have a feeling that whatever he says will be right, like he’s some grand magician touched by cosmic truth. But he only shrugs and says, ‘I’ll find out and let you know.’

He goes off to the shed to get a spade. ‘Guard the bird,’ he says.

Its feathers ruffle in the breeze. It’s very beautiful, black with a sheen of blue, like oil on the sea. The maggots are rather beautiful too. They panic on the grass; searching for the bird, for each other.

And that’s when Adam walks across the lawn.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘How are you?’

I sit up in my deckchair. ‘Did you just climb over the fence?’

He shakes his head. ‘It’s broken down the bottom.’

He’s wearing jeans, boots, a leather jacket. He’s got something behind his back. ‘Here,’ he says. He holds out a bunch of wild green leaves to me. Amongst them are bright orange flowers. They look like lanterns or baby pumpkins.

‘For me?’

‘For you.’

My heart hurts. ‘I’m trying not to acquire new things.’

He frowns. ‘Perhaps living things don’t count.’

‘I think they might count more.’

He sits down on the grass next to my chair and puts the flowers between us. The ground is wet. It will seep into him. It will make him cold. I don’t tell him this. I don’t tell him about the maggots either. I want them to creep into his pockets.

Cal comes back with a gardening trowel.

‘You planting something?’ Adam asks him.

‘Dead bird,’ he says, and he points to the place where it lies.

Adam leans over. ‘That’s a rook. Did your cat get it?’

‘Don’t know. I’m going to bury it though.’

Cal walks over to the back fence, finds a spot in the flowerbed and starts to dig. The earth is wet as cake mix. Where the spade meets little stones, it sounds like shoes on gravel.

Adam plucks bits of grass and sieves them between his fingers. ‘I’m sorry about what I said the other day.’

‘It’s OK.’