The Bird's Book

Julia found the notebook stuck between two neighbouring branches of the tree at the end of her garden.

One of the pages tore a little at the corner as she ripped it out of its snug groove, as if it had been growing out from underneath the bark.

She considered showing it to her parents straightaway; but she heard their raised voices back in the house and decided against it. Instead, she tucked it into the pouch on the front of her dress and snuck it up to her bedroom. The pocket reminded her of kangaroos, usually, and was a source of great embarrassment when she was around her friends; but today she had to admit that it was useful. Nobody had turned around as she’d walked through the blazing row. They might not even have noticed her, although there was a very brief silence after she closed the kitchen door behind her.

It was always about money. Every sentence her parents hurled across to one another included the words ‘cash,’ ‘debt,’ or sometimes ‘loan.’ At only nine years old, Julia understood some of what was being said, but not all of it.

“There’s no way in hell we’ll pay it off if you keep spending like this!” Her mother’s frantic voice rose up the stairs and tore its way through the gap under Julia’s door.

“We don’t have a choice.” Her father was clearly trying to be quieter, but failing.

“£20,000 is a lot of money, Simon.”

This was the first time Julia had heard her mother put a number on it. She tried to imagine what that amount of money would look like, but she couldn’t. She had a little bowl made out of half a coconut on her desk that contained three ten pence pieces, two twenty pence pieces, and one sacred five pound note. She’d been saving up the pocket money her grandmother gave her every week, spending only a little bit on sweets after school on a Friday, but keeping the rest here.

Julia snatched up the bowl and stuffed it into her sock drawer. She didn’t really want her parents stealing her savings to give to the man at the bank.

She sat on the edge of her bed. She could feel the tough springs, even through her duvet. Out of her dress pocket she grabbed the notebook. Its cover was a little worn and stained but inside the pages were crisp, clear, and white. Nobody had written or drawn inside it and no pages had been ripped out.

Julia rummaged through her school pencil case until she found a blunt pencil, half the length it once was from all the times she’d made excuses to use the electric sharpener on Miss Ridley’s desk. She thought for a moment about what her first drawing in this brand new book might be. Something that might make her parents smile instead of shout? Or something secret that she could enjoy on her own? She thought back to the moments just before she found the book, and the small blue and yellow bird that had drawn her attention to the tree in the first place.

Yes, that was it. She would draw the bird.

Of course, she couldn’t remember exactly what he’d looked like, but she did her best to guess. A small stubby beak, a few stripes across his face, and tiny black eyes. She drew the feathers a bit too round, she later thought, but he was good enough.

When she was done, she leant back to admire her work. It was only a sketchy outline; but Miss Covens, her art teacher, had told her to press a bit lighter with her pencil so she was quite pleased.

The bird on the page stared back at her. The black of its eye made room for a fleck of reflected light. Julia thought she saw him shake his wing. Then, one pointed claw burst out from the page, scrabbling as if trying to find some purchase in the air. Julia leant away from the page in shock, but she couldn’t put it down. Though her reflex was to throw the book across the room, she was kept still by the concern that if she did so the bird would not be able to escape.

The sound of this poor struggling bird was horrible, but as he managed to peel himself off the page, he seemed to calm down, until finally his beak shook itself free.

The bird stood, perfectly formed, assessing its surroundings, on top of his page. Slowly, Julia reached out and put the book down. She shuffled around her unexpected guest and backed off towards the window. Clunk. She opened it wide, letting the cool late afternoon breeze into her room. The bird tipped its head in the direction of this flood of air. His feathers twitched and ruffled. With a quick chirp, he lifted himself off the book and took his leave out the window. Quickly, Julia shut it again.

Her hands were shaking. On the floor, she could see the bird drawing still face-up in the notebook. Its image a little faded, but very much still there.

She stuffed the notebook into the drawer with her coconut bowl of change and promised herself that she would never open its pages again.

Julia spent the whole next day feeling sick and uneasy.

She said very little in her lessons, and when she was called upon to answer a question, no matter how easy, she found herself unable to answer.

When she got home, she tried to distract herself with homework, a ball game in the garden, and by helping her mother cook dinner, but all she could think about was the notebook and the bird. Even her parents' stony silence at the dinner table couldn’t distract her worries.

The following day was much the same; but, when she arrived home to find her mother in tears beside a burnt casserole on the hob and her father bleary-eyed from his seventh beer of the day, she found a new resolution.

She charged up to her bedroom, feeling flush with determination and nerves. She opened her window to cool herself down and took a few deep breaths of cold air. Across the street, perched on a the brick wall of her neighbour’s garden, she saw the bird that had crawled its way out of her book.

She snatched up her pencil and flung her schoolbag into a corner, before seeking out the notebook from her drawer. Breathlessly, she thumbed through the pages. The bird was still there on the first, but the second was blank. How many pages were there in this book? She wasn’t sure. She thought two hundred at most, but she was never very good at guessing.

Slowly, she smoothed out the second page of the notebook and picked up her pencil. She pondered what might be the best way to tackle her plan, and then begun to draw.

The highest note that Julia had ever seen was a £20 note, but, she reasoned, it was likely there was one much bigger. So, she drew a £200 note. She knew roughly what one would look like, but she was bad at drawing her pound signs. They came out a bit too squiggly. Like the letter S with a line through.

When she was done, she sat back, just as she had done two days before and watched the page. A sliver of wind brushed through the opening in the window and across the book in her hand. She saw the corner of the drawn note flicker and then rise up, responding to the moving air. Impatiently, Julia pinched it between her fingers and pulled out the money. She stared at it. Crisp and green. But, instead of being worth £200, the note was worth $100. She frowned, unfamiliar with other currencies. Was there a value limit to what she could create?

In her urgency to solve her family’s financial problems, Julia turned to the next page and begun drawing the same note again, once again trying to write £200 at the top. But, as the breeze caught the corner of this new note and she pulled it out of the page, the same thing had happened. $100.

Julia knew she had two options. Go and ask for her parents’ advice on what the problem was, or continue drawing these notes in the understanding that some money was better than no money.

A wail of frustration from her mother worked its way up the stairs, and Julia chose option two.

Over the next two days, Julia stole whatever moments she could to draw out her notes.

She got quicker over time, until she could draw them out without thinking. She even began simply writing $100 at the top of them, rather than trying to force the notebook to give her something it clearly did not want to give. Instead than waiting for the breeze to ruffle the corner of the notes, she blew on the page, hard.

Finally, she came to the last page in the book. She’d counted 199 pages so far, so this would make 200. If it hadn’t been for the bird on the first page, which had taken to watching her from the outside windowsill while she drew, Julia would have made it to 20,000. But being only 100 off was not bad going, she decided.

She stuffed all the notes into her pillowcase and ran downstairs.

Her parents, for the first time in days, were sat quietly in what seemed to be amicable silence. Her father was even smiling at something he was reading in the newspaper.

They turned to look at her as she walked towards them, pillowcase grasped in a white-knuckled hand.

“What have you got there, darling?” Her father frowned.

Julia wasn’t sure how to phrase what she had to say, so instead stuck out her hand and offered the pillowcase up to them.

Her father stood up, accepted the gift from her and looked inside. His eyes narrowed at first and he pursed his lips together, but then his gaze widened, his mouth hung open, and he looked back and forth between the money and his daughter.

“What is it?” Her mother asked, standing up to have a look. She dove her hand into the cash and pulled out a handful of notes.

Julia smiled, as if that was all the explanation that was required.

Looking at one note in particular, her mother smiled, bewildered, and said “but Julia, these are dollars?”

After a few weeks of thinking long and hard about what to do with the notebook, Julia decided it was best to return it to where she had found it. Perhaps someone else might get to use it in the future.

Julia’s mother and father were lost in the process of taking their new money to the laundry, which Julia didn’t understand but trusted that it must need to be very clean before it could be given to the bank. All she cared about was that their moods had improved. They were happier. She’d even caught them hugging one evening after dinner, which was a rare sight indeed.

She thanked the notebook for arriving at just the right time by tying it up with a red ribbon and doing her best to paint over the stains on its cover with some of her father’s shoe polish. Then, it was ready to be returned.

The small blue bird was perched on the branch next to her, ready to see it off. He chirped when she laid it down, out of sight of her house.

“It was lovely to meet you too,” she smiled at him, before turning and heading back towards the kitchen, where dinner was being dished up.

The bird leapt into the air just as the bark of the tree curled open, out, and around the notebook, pulling it back into the trunk.

If you enjoyed my story, please hit the like button at the bottom of the page!

Please note that all spelling and grammar is in line with English (UK) guidelines.