‘You have a parrot?’ Cooper tried to remember the last time he’d seen a parrot in a cage in someone’s house. There had been one a while ago, but he couldn’t recall where. And somehow David Royce didn’t seem the type to keep a cage bird at all. A large dog, perhaps. A Rottweiler called Tyson or Satan. But a parrot?
‘My sister asked me to have it,’ said Royce, his voice muffled by the interior of the cupboard. ‘It belonged to Jack. But after he died, she couldn’t bear to have it in the house. He taught the thing to speak, you see. And it copied his voice perfectly. It has the sound of him off pat, believe me.’
‘They’re very good mimics.’
‘Good? It’s bloody frightening. Well, Joan couldn’t stand hearing the old man’s voice in the house when she knew he was dead. It was tearing her up, poor lass. Every time she came home, she heard his voice. I didn’t really want the thing myself, but I couldn’t refuse, could I?’
‘What does it say?’
‘I wouldn’t claim it has a wide vocabulary exactly,’ said Royce.
He came back into the room and pulled the cover off the cage. The parrot opened its eyes and looked at Cooper.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’
Then it switched its attention to scratching under its feathers with the claws of one foot, and Royce went back to his search.
‘Is that it?’
‘Well, I haven’t tried to engage it in conversation,’ said Royce. ‘But sometimes it says “crap” if it doesn’t like what’s on the telly.’
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‘And is that often?’
‘Yes.’
‘They live a lot longer than people, don’t they?’ said Cooper.
‘Do they?’ Royce sounded surprised. ‘Bloody hell. I was hoping it’d die a natural death before too long, like my kids’ hamsters do.’
‘Not parrots. They can live to over a hundred. Winston Churchill had one, and it died only last year. It was a hundred and five.’
‘I bet Churchill didn’t teach his parrot to say crap.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’
Cooper went out into the hall to see what progress David Royce was making. All kinds of stuff had been pulled out of the cupboard: toys, boxes of shoes, a spare TV set, the ironing board.
‘I think it might be upstairs,’ Royce said.
‘Can I help you to look?’
‘Yes, take a wardrobe.’
After another ten minutes, Royce decided they must have scattered the ashes in the garden and thrown the urn away.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Cooper walked back into the sitting room. At least the parrot remembered its owner, even if it had survived him. In fact, if it was a young bird, it might outlast everyone now living in Derbyshire. Winston Churchill’s parrot had seen out not only its owner but nine other prime ministers, right up to Tony Blair. To a parrot, people must seem to come and go like flies in summer.
As he passed the cage, the parrot stopped scratching and fixed Cooper with a sharp eye.
‘Crap,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’
In the next house, a row of unmatching straight-backed chairs stood in the bay window, as if set out for an audience at a
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performance. Then Cooper noticed that other incongruous furniture had been crammed into the room between the sofa and the armchairs - a wrought-iron seat from the conservatory, an office-style swivel chair, and a low, squishy object that his mother would have called a pouffe. A long table had been pushed against the far wall and was loaded with plates and dishes covered with cling film or draped in tea towels.
‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ he said. ‘Is it a bad moment?’
‘It’s my mum’s funeral today. But it’s OK, we’ve got everything ready early,’ said Susan Dakin.
‘People are coming back here after the funeral?’
‘Of course. We don’t know who’s going to turn up exactly. I don’t suppose there’ll be many.’
It felt as though the Dakins were preparing for a party. At one time, a death would have meant a silent house and hushed voices. Not here, though. Susan Dakin seemed entirely content that her mother should be joining her father, wherever he’d gone.
Later, Cooper visited a bungalow at Southwoods where two old women with tight perms sat eating Belgian chocolates shaped like sea horses. He called on a Hucklow couple who had lost their child in a road accident and had never spoken about it since scattering her ashes in the paddock where her pony still grazed.
‘My grandma used to say we should draw the curtains and cover the mirrors, as a sign of respect,’ said one of the old women, licking a coating of chocolate from her finger. ‘But I say that’s just daft. Life goes on, doesn’t it?’
‘She still lives in my heart,’ said the child’s mother. ‘Every day.’
In a house on Manchester Road he met a mother and daughter who both wore cropped jeans and ankle chains,
