Cheam

By Stephanie Shields

Reader news

25 June 2010 09:34

When I was nine I had a budgerigar called Cheam.  It was powder blue with white blotches and black markings – a common pattern of feature.  Cheam was a talker; at least, it sort of seemed so.  If I am honest, the bird had just one word – ‘Cheam’.  We’d wanted to call it Buster because he was quite assertive – set about his cuttlefish bone with a vengeance.  He couldn’t do Buster.  I tried Jim, because Jim was getting closer to Cheam, and still an acceptable name.  He wasn’t having it – so Cheam it was.

My mother loathed pets.  It was a hygiene issue for her.  She referred to the budgie’s droppings as ‘bull’s eyes’.  She was nervous when I let him out of the cage – a fear of flying bull’s eyes. 

Aunty Avis’s Joey, over the road, had free rein in their dining room.  Joey circled the room in a green flurry of freedom, gliding to rest in Avis’s tightly permed hair.  She retrieved him, adroitly, with a ‘Mary Maxim’ knitting needle, presented before his claws as an impromptu perch.  He stepped on slickly, well used to this landing routine.  She lowered him gently onto the table.  Off he waddled. 

Mum was appalled by the bull’s eyes accumulating on Avis’s floral oilcloth table cover; they nestled by the milk jug in a monochrome pyramid:  ‘Don’t you go eating biscuits over there, my girl, even if she presses you.  It’s not clean.  That dirty little budgie has done it everywhere.  Disgusting!’

One day I was surprised to note that my mother had a bull’s eye down her stocking – positioned beside her seam.  It seemed prudent to keep this nougat of information to myself.  My two Flemish Giant rabbits, my tortoise and my white mouse had all disappeared in mysterious circumstances.  Cheam’s indiscretion needed to go unnoticed.  Mum liked to whip off her stockings to watch TV.  She usually left them in a ball under the crushed velvet cushion. She loved to rub her toes on the rug.  I waited my opportunity, and when the telephone rang, I rescued the bull’s eye and flicked it into the fire. 

Cheam died of old age.