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perches, unlike the old cage with its well-worn lone roost. Also, you
could open it right up. Even the roof folded outwards in two halves so
that the budgie could take straight off into the air and fly if it wanted to.
The front panel of the cage could be unlatched so that it swung
completely open, removing all visual barriers in front of the perch. The
food and water trays were big enough for a family of small pigs, let
alone a single bird. There were mirrors and bells everywhere. In the
corner, a huge branch of gum leaves hung down, alongside a massive
slab of compressed seed and honey. The perch potato would be in
heaven.
At least he would be eventually. To get to a heaven, I guess the budgie
first had to believe in a god. And that god was me. A god that had just
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been to a birthday dinner with his father and his father s verging-on-
illegally-young girlfriend. A god that had got drunk to the point of
telling his father to stick his life-after-thirty advice up his cancer-
ridden colon, and her to stick her life-in-general advice wherever she
stuck old men s cocks. A god that had broken two bottles as he struggled
to grab the rest of the beer from their fridge. That had held his bleeding
finger hard against his earlobe so he could hear the cab phone operator
over the wailing and the shouting. That had given up trying to hear
anything and just walked home.
I suppose it didn t help that I tripped over with the cage in the dark
when I got back to my room. The noise of me sprawling across the floor
and my bottle smashing in the corner was more than enough to put the
budgie on the alert. After that, it took me about two hours of slurred
coaxing to realise that the six years of trust I thought I had built up with
the budgie amounted to squat. Apparently I wasn t even his friend, let
alone his master, let alone his god. I was bloodshot eyes and dried-blood
ear stuck to a sweaty pale face swaying on a chair. I was endless
cigarettes and coughing up of lungs.
The budgie sat cautiously, a little defiantly, at the opposite end of his
tiny white cage, while I leered through tobacco smoke like a cat at a
mouse hole. My initial tender attitude soon gave way to drunken
apathy. I decided to simply reach in and pull the little bugger out. It s
the best thing for him, I told myself. I had never tried it before, though I
suspected, and I believe the budgie did too, that it would be a simple
enough task to grab him. I deliberately tried not to use too much force. I
didn t want to scare him shitless. I had grown quite close to the ball of
feathers over the years and I didn t want him dying of a panic-related
heart attack.
I should have been more firm. Each half-hearted grab only resulted in a
panicked flurry of feathers and a shrill scared click of the throat. The
only things I managed to hold on to were his beautiful tail feathers. The
sight of them caught in my own bloody fingers made me stop. After all,
the whole idea was to not freak the budgie out. I wrapped a strip of my
shirt around the bleeding and sat down to think of another less tail-
feathers-caught-in-bloody-fingers way. Then it struck me like a dull,
throbbing pulse.
I placed the budgie s old cage on top of the new one, both with doors
open. Then I gradually began removing all of his landmarks. First, the
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food and water trays which I put on the floor of the new cage. Then I cut
the wires that held his little loft bed of three sticks which I then
individually dragged out of the cage or snapped as required. Next went
his red mirror with its tiny bell. Last of all, I gently reached in and
removed the perch he was sitting on. He hopped away as I dragged it
slowly through the door, until he got to the end and simply dropped
down to the cage floor. I backed off and let him stand there in the
empty cage, among the sand and his own shit. Perhaps out of
resignation, or simply out of curiosity, he almost immediately poked his
little head out of the front door and started climbing to the top of his
cage. As soon as he was out, I shut the door and held the cage with him
perched on top, in front of his new home. Quick as a flash he jumped
inside. I shut his door, locked my door and stumbled to bed.
After much tossing and turning it was the next day. My drawn curtains
would have rendered the room dark, except that I had fallen asleep with
the TV on again. I still couldn t get used to sleeping alone in total
darkness. Through a flickering haze I awoke to see the budgie sitting
quietly on the perch. Usually by this time he would be singing me
awake, or at least fluttering around a bit. There was nothing. He just
perched there and stared at me like I d stolen his home.
Over the last two weeks he has made feeble, pathetic attempts to access
his new food bin. He used to be able to slide down his vertical bars to
the food below. It isn t possible with the horizontal ones. He has to step
cautiously, weighing up every move for a few seconds before he
continues his descent. Now and then he slips and plunges to the cage
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