Magpie 1: Sorrow

Merle wakes before the alarm. She always does. The house is quiet; the kind of quiet that feels two-dimensional. She lies still for a moment, listening to the faint hum of the fridge and the distant rumble of a bus turning at the end of the crescent. She realises she has fallen asleep in the armchair again.

The air is already warm. July has been unusually dry. Everything smells of dust, of motes suspended in sunlight.

She struggles to get up and hears her knees clicking as she straightens her legs. She shuffles to the kitchen, where she fills the kettle and opens the back door. The garden is still partly in shadow as the pale dawn brightens toward morning. A single magpie sits on the fence, flicking its tail and cocking its head. It taps the wood once, sharp as a knuckle rapping on a door.

Merle pauses with the kettle in her hand. “Morning,” she says, quietly. The bird doesn’t move.

She steps out onto the patio. The slabs radiate the previous day’s captured heat. The lawn is patchy, worn thin and yellow in places. At the far end, the fence leans slightly where the posts have shifted over the years. Beyond it, she can hear the alley: the scrape of a bicycle wheel, the murmur of voices drifting through the gaps. Too early for children on their way to school. She can’t see passers-by unless she goes right up to the fence, but she knows the routine sounds of the neighbourhood.

She fills the bird feeder. The magpie hops along the fence, watching her. She doesn’t look at it again.

She checks the back gate latch before returning to the kitchen. Inside, she folds the tea towel she dried her plate with last night, smoothing its edges with her thumb. She sorts the recycling. Loads the washing machine. Small tasks; familiar ones. She keeps her hands busy. It’s easier that way.

The voices in the alley rise and fall. Merle hears the bright, sudden sound of a girl’s laughter and her breath catches in her throat. She sits frozen, with a spoonful of muesli half raised to her mouth, waiting for the feeling to pass. It does, eventually. She puts the cereal bowl in the sink.

By mid-morning the sun is high enough to bleach the tops of the hedges. Merle steps out again, this time with an invented sense of purpose. She tells herself she needs to check the fence line. Foxes get in sometimes. Or teenagers up to mischief. Or no one at all. She just feels the need to patrol the boundaries.

At the far end of the garden, the air changes. It’s cooler here, in the shade of the old plum tree. The fence is weathered, its slats warped. Through the gaps she can see the alley: a cracked tarmac path lined with brambles, bordered by a chain-link fence on the other side. Beyond that, a patch of scrub. A thin strip of land that used to be a field. Now it’s a tangle of nettles and hawthorn. The kind of place people tend not to notice and forget it exists.

She unlatches the back gate and steps into the alley. The ground is uneven and softened by the heat. A crisp packet lies flattened against the fence. A plastic bottle cap glints in the dirt. She walks a few metres, then slips through a rusted break in the chain-link into the scrubland beyond.

The air smells of dry earth and elderflower. A blackbird darts out from under a bush. Merle moves slowly, picking her way through the bramble. She hasn’t ventured here in months. Maybe years. It feels smaller than she remembers. Or maybe she feels larger. But of course, it is a bit of both. When she played here as a child, before the new estate was built, it was a wildflower meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon.

Near the base of a hawthorn, something catches the light. A small glint of metal, half-buried in the soil and leaf mulch. She crouches, though her spine protests.

Brushing away the dirt with her fingertips, she uncovers a badge. Small and round, with a chipped background of yellow enamel. A black-and-white songbird depicted in the centre. The words around the edge are faded but still legible when she holds the badge close to her face and squints: WAGTAILS CHILDREN’S CLUB. She turns it over. The pin fastening is bent.

She sits back on her heels and ignores the strain on her ankles. She knows this badge. She knows it absolutely. Warner’s holiday camp, Dovercourt Bay. Summer of ’76. Robin pinning it to his shirt, proud as anything. He wore it every day. She remembers the way he’d tap it with his finger when he talked, as if it were a medal.

Her throat tightens. She closes her fist around the badge. The heat behind her eyes is sudden and unwelcome.

A magpie rattles from somewhere behind her, disturbing the moment. Somehow, she is back in her garden. She shuts the gate carefully, as if its squeaky hinge might waken something. She walks the length of the lawn, steps into the kitchen and places the badge on the table. It looks tiny there. Insignificant. Smaller than when it was clutched in her hand.

She makes tea but doesn’t drink it. Opens the back door, then closes it again. The house feels different, as if she has admitted a presence that fills its empty corners.

In the afternoon, she hears the children returning from school. A girl’s voice, then a boy’s. They pass along the alley, unseen. Their footsteps fade.

Merle stands at the window, watching the empty garden. The magpie is flown. The badge lies on the table behind her. She doesn’t know why it should surface now. She doesn’t know why she feels afraid. She doesn’t know why she also feels relieved.

 

 

Magpie 2: Joy

Corin cuts through the alley on his way home, kicking a stone ahead of him. The afternoon is hot; the kind of heat that makes the sticky pathway smell of melting tar. He drags his hand along the chain-link fence as he walks, listening to the metallic rasp. The scrubland beyond the fence is bright and tangled with nettles swaying in the light and hawthorn casting small pockets of shade.

He stops where the fence sags inward. Someone (probably himself, last year) bent it enough to make a gap. He slips through and trudges across the hillocks of dry grass. It’s cooler here, under the elder and sycamore. The air smells of earth and crushed leaves.

He isn’t here for any purpose. He’s just killing time before dinner. He pokes at the ground with a stick, turns over a stone, nudges a bit of broken brick. A startled blackbird flies out of a bush, the sharp edge of its dark wings cutting the silence.

He moves deeper into the scrubland, where the ground dips slightly towards a hawthorn. The soil is pale and cracked. Something catches his eye: a dull glint of metal, half-hidden under a mat of dried grass. He crouches and pushes the undergrowth aside to reveal a small tin, rectangular and battered.

He picks it up. It’s heavier than he expects. The navy and yellow design is scuffed, the printed words barely visible: OLD HOLBORN. The lid is dented at one corner. Rust freckles the hinge.

He shakes it gently. It rattles. Corin grins. Treasure. Or so he hopes.

He tries the lid. It barely shifts a millimetre. He presses his thumb against the edge. Nothing. Inserts his fingernails in the seam and nearly breaks them. Still nothing. He taps the tin against a tree root. Flecks of paint and rust flake off. The hinge bends but doesn’t open.

He wedges a stick under the rim of the lid and attempts to lever it. The stick snaps. He finds another, stronger looking one. Works it along the edge. The hinge gives way with a gritty snap. The lid lifts, albeit stiff and reluctant.

The exposed contents release a smell of metal and old paper. A feather lies on top, small and greyish-brown. Beneath it, a random collection of coins: six or seven, all tarnished green with corrosion. He picks through them with his index finger. Two big pennies, a halfpenny with a ship on it, a chunky brass thruppeny bit, something foreign with a hole in the middle. Plus a tiny copper coin, lighter than the rest. He rubs it until the design on the reverse is clear: a bird, perched on a branch. A wren?

He pockets that one without thinking. Finders keepers.

Under the coins is a folded piece of paper. He unfolds it carefully. The paper is yellowed, creased and brittle, but intact. The writing is childish and uneven, penned in purple biro.

MERLE H. — KEEP OUT

He reads it twice. Merle. That must be the bird-feeding lady. The one who lives two doors down from Ava.

He folds the note again and puts it back in the tin, closing the lid as best he can. It doesn’t shut properly, but it holds well enough.

He stands, brushing soil and grass seeds from his knees. He feels the eyes of two magpies watching him as he slips back through the fence into the alley. Ava is coming towards him, her schoolbag looped over one shoulder and her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. She stops when she sees the tin in his hand.

“What’s that?”

“Found it,” Corin says. He shakes it and makes it rattle. “Look.”

She steps closer. He wiggles the lid open to show her the feather, the coins and the folded note. She touches one of the pennies, tracing the profile of Queen Victoria, which is almost worn smooth.

“That’s old,” she says.

“Yeah.”

She picks up the note and reads it. “Merle?”

Corin shrugs. “Guess it was hers.”

Ava looks toward Merle’s house, just visible along the alley through the gap between fences. The back garden is quiet. The bird table casts a long shadow across the lawn.

“We should show her,” Ava says.

Corin hesitates. “Why?”

“It’s hers.”

He nods, because that makes sense in a way that can’t be argued with.

They walk along the alley until they reach Merle’s back gate. Ava knocks loudly. The sound carries through the slats and into the house. After a moment, Merle shuffles up the path, wiping her hands on a tea towel. She opens the gate and looks at them, then at the tin in Corin’s hand.

“We found this,” Ava says. “In the scrubland.”

Corin holds it out. Merle takes it cautiously, as if it might break. Her swollen fingers struggle with the lid. The rusted hinge sticks, then relents. She sees the feather, the coins, the folded note.

Her face doesn’t change much. Just a small tightening around the eyes. She lifts the note and unfolds it. The writing is unmistakably hers: the looping, uneven letters of a girl who was still learning to write in neat cursive

She folds it again and places it back in the tin. “Thank you,” she says. Her voice is steady. “I’d forgotten about this.”

Ava watches her. Corin shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

Merle closes the tin. The lid doesn’t shut properly. She doesn’t try to force it. “You found it near the hawthorn?” she asks.

Corin nods. “Yeah. It was buried. Not deep.”

Merle looks past them, toward the scrubland. The light is fading, turning the brambles gold at their edges.

“Well,” she says, “it’s been there a long time.” She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t invite them in. She doesn’t explain. She just nods once, a small gesture of dismissal as much as thanks.

She closes the gate gently. The tin’s rattle seems to echo all around, faint and irregular, as she carries it into her house.

Ava and Corin walk back along the alley. Corin turns the farthing in his pocket between his fingers as he looks for another stone to kick. Ava glances up at two magpies flying into the sun.