KATY AND FEZ

No. 9 in my 'Story a Day for a Year' challenge

KATY AND FEZ

‘Like nothing I ever saw. All splash and colour. Like Lizzie when she puts too much make-up on. And wearing poppy or flame for a mask, and the blue-black bruise of a storm wrapped as a scarf around its neck, and rainbows in the right light, and its feathers all the colours of honey and well-fired toast. And it struts in staccato bobs and bows, and I saw it in the long grass at the side of the road.’

The teacher reads out what Katy wrote. He likes that she used the word ‘staccato’; it is a word he has just taught them. When he has finished he asks if anyone knows what Katy saw in the long grass. The boys make rude comments up their sleeves. Mr Carson tells the class it is a cock pheasant. That ‘cock’ makes the boys laugh even more, and some of the girls laugh, too, and by break-time it is half way round the school that a girl called Katy saw a cock in the long grass.

‘I shall call it Fez,’ says Katy, and her friends all think that a good choice of name, and Katy invents magical stories of Fez in his princely plumage, and in art she tries to draw a picture of what it looked like, but the picture looks silly and wrong.

At the end of the day, Katy walks back home by the same road, and all the way she struts in staccato bobs and bows, for she is looking again for Fez in the long grass. Then there it is. Not skittery skip-dancing from her like before, but sitting still, panting like it has run a long distance. Katy calls it by the invented name she has given the bird, calls it ‘Fez’, and makes soft gurgling and cooing noises in the back of her mouth. The pheasant does not move. Nearer and nearer, crouched down like she could be bird-sized, till she is close enough she can touch it.

Katy puts a hand to her mouth and there are sudden hot tears in her eyes. There’s blood on the feathers of Fez, one wing hanging oddly, and the bird is having trouble holding its head straight. Katy picks up Fez, cradles it in her arms, and carries the heavy ball of it home, slower and more slow. Blood on her school blouse then and Fez slips into breathless sleep, or something like sleep.

And when Katy is home and her mother opens the door to her, there are gasps and cries and more tears. And Katy says its name is Fez and maybe they could fix it. And her mother shakes her head and looks as though she carries a hurt in her own heart.

‘Like nothing I ever saw,’ says Katy, ‘the colours, do you see? And I found it in the long grass at the side of the road.’