Read Online Come and Tell Me Some Lies by Raffaella Barker - Free Book Online

was a coward. Camouflaged, he hid in the flower-beds awaiting his victims, the amber bead of his eye glowing malevolently from the foliage. He watched me toiling in my garden and, when my back was turned, sprang, neck extended and wings akimbo. His hooked beak jabbed my ear, his horny spurs scrabbled against my spine and I screamed and ran for the back door. Cedric let go and vanished, a ball of fire tumbling into a distant clump of nettles where he knew he was safe.
    Brodie came out with a stick to chase him but Cedric crouched invisible until Brodie turned his back and then he repeated the ambush. He was Brodie’s bird, but he ignored the rules of fealtyand attacked his master as much as anyone else. He deserved a gruesome punishment, but the massacre effected by the dogs was too great a price to pay.
    Returning from a family outing we bumped up the drive, opening the doors of the car before it had stopped. I ran to greet Honey and my puppy, Miriam. They were newly back from the muck heap. ‘Ugh, you dogs stink.’ I edged past them towards the field. Looking back at the house, I noticed dark bundles littered across the grass, inert heaps which from a distance looked like stones. I approached one and gasped. It was Cilla Black, the mother of the Pop Stars, one of our bantam families. Cilla Black’s beady yellow eyes were closed, her beak was half open and her little pink tongue protruded pathetically. She lay, her neck twisted awkwardly on the glistening black bulk of her body, dead but still warm. A few yards away, Gary Glitter and Rod Stewart, a pair of young roosters who had been inseparable in life, were heaped together in death, their long tail-feathers trailing like a widow’s weeds.
    I stood appalled, my mouth a screaming square. No one came. No one came. From all over the garden I heard the shrilling yells and bellows of my brothers as they discovered more corpses. Mummy was crouched over something by the washing line. Leaning over, I saw what she was looking at. Emerald the tame hen, who laid her eggs on the doormat for our convenience and ate from our hands, gently, not with the darting movements which frightened small children, lay panting and trembling at Mummy’s feet. Relief washed over me. At least one of them was alive.
    Mummy was crying. ‘Those bloody dogs. Those
bloody
dogs.’ Miriam loped up, kissed Mummy with her soft tongue and whisked off again.
    â€˜I think she was saying sorry,’ I said.
    â€˜Don’t you believe it.’ Mummy’s tone was grim. ‘She’s deranged. Honey would never have done this. It’s all that puppy’s doing.’
    We took Emerald into the coal shed and made her a bed on Flook’s anorak. We gave her bread and milk and she fluffed up her feathers and regained her low crooning voice. Daddy appeared in the door of the shed with a spade. ‘I’m going to shoot those goddam dogs,’ he muttered, ‘but first we must bury the dead.’ He stomped off to dig a grave. Brodie and Flook, a drooping hen under each arm, trailed after him to the Wilderness. Twenty-five hens died. Only Emerald and Cedric, whose cowardice had protected him, survived. Cedric was roosting high up in the lime tree squawking hoarsely every two minutes as though he had been hypnotized. He did not come down until the next day. The hens had been frightened to death by Miriam’s game. She pranced and barked around each one, whipped into further hysteria by the flying feathers and squawks as the poor foolish hens ran round in circles trying to escape.
    Mummy said we had to give Miriam away, and sadly I agreed. She could not go on living in a house with hens, even dead hens. Miriam was taken. Mummy felt a twinge of conscience as she was driven off by her proud new owners, a pair of pigeon-fanciers from Wisbech whom we had told nothing of her crime.
    Emerald recovered but the shock had affected her hormones.Hearing a strangled cry a few