The Night Rainbow A Novel - By Claire King Page 0,35

for him to see.

Don’t reach out too far, says Claude, and he stretches up his arm. I let the photo flutter down into his fingers.

I watch Claude, looking at the photograph. His thinking makes his face move – his lips pout and twist, his eyebrows frown and lift up. After a long time he breathes a big breath and lets it come out of his nose.

It’s a lonely photo, isn’t it? I say. Did it make you feel sad?

It does look lonely, says Claude. Your maman looks beautiful, though, don’t you think?

Maman is very beautiful, I say. She is the most beautiful person in the world. She is probably a queen.

Maybe this was England, says Claude.

But then what about the baby?

Well that must be . . . Claude’s face stops moving in the middle of his sentence, like it was frozen. Then it makes a kind smile. I don’t know, he says, but I bet they have babies in England too.

Come on, he says, we’d better tidy up the wrappers.

Claude helps us back over the stepping stones, first me, slowly, then Margot, all quick and bouncy.

Now, he says, see how fast you two can run home. I bet your maman has had a nice rest by now and she’ll be looking forward to seeing you.

We’re flying now, not running, says Margot.

We always fly on Thursday afternoons, I say.

OK, Claude smiles. Fly home, little birds, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Chapter 9

A row of dark blue swallows sit on the telephone wire that goes between the house and the barn, under the blue, blue sky. These are the summer babies, all thin and wobbly and not as polished as the grownups. The mother bird is with them. She keeps leaving the wire and flies in big circles, whizzing past the blue shutters of our house, past the cherry tree and the eaves of the barn where they were born. Their nests are right by the big scar where the earthquake shook the stones apart in the olden days.

I am watching them lying on my belly, looking into a puddle, where upside-down trees drop into a deep well of blue. At the bottom of the well a fat dappled morning-moon has just a small sliver shaved off one side. When the mother bird gets to the point of the barn roof, with the witch-catcher tile, she keeps going up, high into the space between the two buildings, and comes back down to sit on the wire again. Margot, I say, if there are no witches then why have we got the witch-catcher tile?

Those birds don’t want to fly, says Margot. They want to be back in their nest.

You don’t know, do you? I say, rolling over and looking up at the realness of the reflection, at the red tile that sits on the point of the roof like a crown. The tile is for catching witches, I say, and it was put there by grownups. So grownups must think there are witches.

Well, Maman says there are not.

Maybe Maman is wrong, I say.

The mother swallow is twittering at her children. Come on, I think she is saying, flying is easy. But her children edge from side to side on the wire, cocking their heads and looking nervous. They’re not sure they can do it, so I start to feel scared that they can’t too. I remember them as tiny baby birds when they just hatched. From my window I could just see their small fluffy grey heads and yellow beaks poking out of the mud nest. They yelled for their food. As they grew bigger there was less room, but they still huddled up, a nest full of shiny feathers and bright eyes, and their mother still put food in their open mouths. She doesn’t do that any more. They have to do it for themselves.

You should be able to choose when you want to fly, I say.

Yes, Margot agrees.

Fly, fly, sings the mother bird, edging up beside them and chittering. She is helping them. If they had fingers instead of wings I imagine them all holding hands.

It’s sad that birds can’t hold hands, I say.

They can’t even hug, says Margot.

What do you think they do instead?

They just snuggle up together in their nest.

That sounds nice too, I say.

Then something seems to scare them, and they all lift off the wire together, flashes of white and blue. The mother leads them on the tour of our courtyard, and they follow her. They have remembered that