MEGA breaking news from Norfolk

The International Journal of Avian Science proudly presents…

A Prisoner of Birds

by Jeffrey Archer

1)

The ceiling fan rotated slowly as a hovering fly lethargically dodged each approaching blade. The air felt thick with malaria in the sticky Rangoon heat, it slowly drew life out of every pore in your skin. Outside the hotel the traffic had come to a complete standstill, there was probably another public protest further down the road: General Kao-Shedd had ordered a curfew, but his citizens were paying no attention. It would only be time before the guns began to fire, and Rangoon felt as though it was ready to erupt like a volcano of hot Campbell’s chicken soup

Buck Everhard sat on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, a well-thumbed copy of the Birds of South East Asia by his side, cursing his editor at The Times back in London for sending him here. Had he really given up a job at the Foreign Office for this?

Paquito – Buck’s deformed Cuban servant – scurried about behind him, grunting through his snout, packing belongings, gathering valuables. It was time to leave Rangoon before the city erupted like a ten-billion megaton H-bomb filled with molten celery.

Buck looked at his watch, it was broken. He took it off and threw it at Paquito. “Mend the fucking thing!” Buck yelled.

“We have to leave immediately, Sir,” yelped Paquito in his thick deformed Cuban accent, “Rangoon is about to erupt like a packed hoover bag filled with iron filings. I don’t have time to get your watch fixed.”

“Then damn you! Damn you to Hell!” Buck walked to the window, peered through the cheap plastic slit blind and muttered to himself, “What in God’s name have we become? Damn you all! Damn every single one of us!”

In the hotel lobby there was panic. General Kao-Shedd had appeared on television to announce that the curfew would be enforced by his fiercely loyal military, and if necessary, the streets would run with blood. Buck Everhard pushed his way through the crowd of foreign journalists and commandeered a telephone – it could possibly be his last chance to speak to his wife.

“Buck? Are you okay?” Molly Everhard asked.

“Molly, I might not make it back this time. General Kao-Shedd wants me dead after the article I wrote about him, in which I insinuated that he was a sexual deviant with an unhealthy interest in tupperware. I’ll never get out of here alive. And I don’t trust anyone, not even my grotesquely deformed Cuban servant Paquito. Tell the kids that I… well, just tell them.”

“Buck, how will we cope? How will I cope?”

“You’ll just have to go on, Molly. Find new love.”

“But there’ll never be anyone like you.”

“I know, I’m fucking mint. Molly, I have to go now. I know it’s futile, but I have to try and get out of here, I just have to try! Do you hear me, Molly? I just have to try! Tell the kids that I… well, just tell them.”

“Buck, there’s something you need to know. It’s serious. There’s a Tufted Puffin in Norfolk.”

“What?” Buck asked with total shock.

“Tufted Puffin, the second ever in Britain. It turned up yesterday. Your weird birding mates Mad Ken and The Badger phoned – they’ve already seen it. In fact 1,338 of Britain’s keenest rare bird enthusiasts have seen it.”

“Then send that rotten Kao-Shedd straight to Hell! Molly, I’m coming home. Tell the kids…”

2)

Heathrow: the grey veil of London cast a shadow of cold bacon fat as far as the eye could see. The contrived murmur of urbanity pierced by Satanic cries from the introduced Ring-necked Parakeets, a flash of moist green against desiccated rhubarb-leaden skies.

“This is where you call home, Sir?” deformed Paquito asked timidly as he carried the luggage, fearing another sadistic thrashing from his master.

“This is indeed my home, you wretched creature,” Buck said with quiet pride, standing tall in his Saville Row tailored suit. He clenched the right side of his rib cage, pushing the hidden gauze into his weeping bullet wound. Yes, they had escaped from Rangoon, but at what cost?

“Sir, shall we get you to a doctor?” grotesque but loyal Paquito asked.

“We don’t have time. I don’t think I have long to live, you vile abomination.” Buck groaned and coughed, the pain in his chest was almost unbearable. “We have to get to Norfolk. There’s no time to lose. Paquito, go and fetch the Vauxhall Nova.”

3)

Twitching is like warfare: it’s 95% boredom and hanging around, 5% absolute mayhem

So said a rather eloquent Irish chap in that documentary on BBC4 last week (sorry if you can’t watch the BBC iPlayer – I guess you all regret complaining about our magnificent British Empire now. If you’d all stuck with us and not demanded independence then you could have watched it, so who’s having the last laugh now?!) The Irish have a fantastic way with words, because you can guarantee that someone from my side of the Irish sea would have mumbled some retarded inanity like, “Twitching’s like mental and stuff. It’s like really mad and like you have to do like loads of stuff and like stand about and stuff.”

Twitching is like warfare: the words galloped unsteadily through Buck’s mind like a horse on plastic stilts, and Paquito drove the vintage 1989 Vauxhall Nova with go-faster green stripes like a horse on plastic stilts that was going really fast and taking corners far too dangerously.

“Faster, Paquito, you revolting scab on the face of humanity!” Buck screamed.

“Sir, I can’t go any faster. It’s a vintage 1989 Vauxhall Nova. It’s had eighteen different owners, six of them boy racers, she’ll only reach a top speed of 60mph, and that’s going downhill.”

“Faster!”

4)

And so they arrived in Norfolk, Nelson’s county. Nelson as in the Battle of Trafalgar, not Mandela. Not sure if Nelson Mandela has even been to Norfolk. Probably not, unless he went to King’s Lynn on a school trip to see the gargoyles on the cathedral as an example of acid rain in action, like I did. Doubtful though.

Paquito screeched to a carbon-starched halt, skidding like a dead dog being thrown across a frozen lake. Buck lifted his dying body from the Nova – if twitching was indeed war, so let the final battle commence, I mean commenceth.

Before him was the bleak saltmarsh of Cley-next-the-Sea. The iconic Cley Windmill rose like a Blue Whale’s cock from within a pubic wig of phragmites. Buck hobbled over to the assembled crowd of twitchers with telescopes pointing out into the North Sea, where the Tufted Puffin had now been residing for four days.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Buck Everhard,” said Rik Coxswain, Buck’s arch twitching enemy. “The last I heard of you you were tied up reporting for The Times in some backwater in South-East Asia. So what went wrong? Were you too chicken, McFly?”

“Out of my way, Coxswain. I’ve a rare bird to see.”

“Oh dear, I’m afraid it’s gone,” Coxswain said, as a serpent’s smile of cheap lust formed on his glutinous barbed waxy face.

“Gone?” Buck’s heart dropped into the pit of his stomach, falling like a shot Hen Harrier over Sandringham (don’t think we’ve forgotten, you murdering upper-class inbred twat!).

“That’s right, it hasn’t been seen all day. But thankfully I was here yesterday as well… when it showed absolutely fantastically! Ha ha ha! Do want to see my photos?” A deflated Buck could barely shake his head in disgust. “See you around, Buck Not-so-ever-hard!” Coxswain’s laughter reverberated along the shingle sea defence long after he had left.

5)

Two hours later, and Buck and Paquito had been deserted by the other twitchers, light began to fall, and the Tufted Puffin was nowhere to be seen.

“Sir, it’s gone, we have to get you to the doctor,” revolting Paquito insisted.

Buck dropped to his knees and punched the scorched sky. “Why me? Why was I chosen to be interested in vagrant birds turning up in Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man but not the Channel Islands? Why couldn’t I have had a more normal hobby like cricket, or football hooliganism, or figging? Why twitching?” Buck stood up and grabbed the potato sack which Paquito was wearing to cloak his hideous deformities, and began to shake his servant violently: “Why, Paquito? Why!”

Paquito’s glass eye fell out from the shaking and shattered on the shingle. The servant fell to the floor in debased shame: “Please don’t look at me, Sir! Do not gaze upon my hideousness,” Paquito squealed, as he stuffed a rounded pebble into his left eye socket.

Buck felt his life slowly slipping away. There was no energy to even lift his binoculars for one final scan of the sea.

“Paquito, oh loyal Paquito, lift mine dual-ocular magnifying tool made by Leica to mine eyes.”

Paquito raised his master’s binoculars to his eyes for one final gaze out to sea.

Poetry, sorcery, witchcraft and magic: a Tufted Puffin was sitting on the sea just off Cley beach car park. Forty-five seconds of sublime wonder, before the bird took off and flew east.

6)

Darkest night descended with great haste, like a shroud of venemous mascara. Master and servant were sheltering from the fierce wind. The end was nigh.

“Paquito, my ever faithful deformed cretinous companion, you must go to my wife, tell Molly that my last thoughts were only of her and our children, even though that’s a total fucking lie because I can’t stop thinking about how amazing that Puffin was. Oh, and give her this, my most prized possession.” Buck, his hands shaking and weak with exhaustion, gave deformed Paquito his signed copy of the Collins Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe.

“This?” Paquito asked with astonishment. “You want me to give her this? A bird book? Sir, may I politely suggest that she probably doesn’t want this. It’s not even the second edition.”

“Well I haven’t fucking got anything else. I’ve only just got back from Rangoon. I don’t even know where Rangoon is. What do you want me to give her? A signed photo of Genghis Khan? For Christ’s sake, Paquito, this bit is supposed to be really moving, like the end of Titanic. Talk about pissing all over the atmosphere!”

“Sir, I shall do thy bidding. Free me of my servitudinal bonds, so that I may go to your wife Molly and give her this battered signed first edition copy of Collins.”

“That is thy charge: then to the elements be free, and fare thou well!” Buck said, which, to be honest, was a pretty fucking weird thing to say.

Loyal hideous Paquito left with the message and the book, limping on his wooden leg as he bade his master a final farewell, a tear spilling from his triangular deformed right eye as the pebble wobbled about in his left eye socket.

Alone in the diminishing light, Buck leaned back against the brick beach shelter. In the distance a Mistle Thrush sang the lachrymae pavane, it was Buck’s own requiem. Buck slipped in and out of consciousness, though entirely at peace with having Tufted Puffin on his British and Irish combined BOURC/IRBC list – there was no point in living after seeing a bird like that, life could never offer such splendours again.

Buck Everhard’s eyes closed for the final time, whilst in a distant land Rangoon cracked open like a bloated goose egg filled with boiled barley.

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Tagged as: jeffrey archer, Norfolk, tom mckinney, Tufted Puffin, twitching-megas