I liked the severed heads. I thought they were grisly, as in, brothers Grimm.
I found them in shop in Islington, which incidentally is where I was born. The house I lived in then had a blue door and I passed it once and saw that the door is still blue. In the shop I found a row of fat little singing little birds heads mounted on great gold rings. There were enough there that you could have one head on each finger of both hands, all singing their heads off and dead as dodo’s. I could not afford all ten, and should not have bought the one that I did. I was very careful with my money those days. But I bought the little head from this shop, took it away from its pretty backdrop of lace nighties and nice leather shoulder bags and mirrors with mirrored frames in all curling shapes. I took it from beneath the glass chandeliers, at which its glass eyes had upturned been staring for so long. I took it home, in my pocket.
I wore the ring with the severed head once, as an experiment, out for a drink with friends. I had thought that it would go down very well with these particular people but it turned out that this was not the case. ‘There’s literally nothing attractive about it’ said one of them. ‘At least not for me. It’s putting me off’.
‘What’s it putting you off of?’ I asked’.
‘Everything, I’m afraid. I think I want you to take it off’. So I took it off, and had it in my pocket again, and then took it out and put it on a piece of ribbon, and hung it over the corner of a shelf, and there it stayed, and I let it get dusty.
Taxidermy had a little resurgence a while after that, but I didn’t dare bring the ring out again. It was cumbersome for a start, completely impractical. And the thing did have a baleful glance. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this before. I thought perhaps I now associated the bird negatively with its negative reception in that bar. I felt guilty for using it only for display, having bought it to wear, although of course that was probably not what it was meant for. I began to feel that it was not moral to have the thing at all, not moral to stuff things at all. I began to think that stuffing was a bit vulgar. I had never liked the heads of deer, stuck on walls. I thought it was pretentious, and morbid to boot. I did not know what to do with the grisly little bird, so in the end; sickened by its persistence as a source of guilt and pain to me I took it and its little ribbon and hung it from a tree in the park. This was for me a particularly mad thing to do, as I had no time at all for gestures but I did it because, frankly, the sight of the birds head, pinioned by mechanisms and a system of grip that I didn’t understand (but, I horribly suspected, involved a nail) to that heavy roundel of yellow brass was beginning, daily, if I’m honest, to frighten me to tears. The feeling that I had once loved something so terribly ugly and malevolent, loved it so much as to treat myself to it and to make myself the owner of it seemed to me unbearable and so I took it and I hung it on a tree. I took care to hang it up high, above the gaze especially of children. I climbed up a tree in what seemed to be a reasonably isolated spot and hung it almost further than I could reach, and nearly killed myself doing it- I am not a natural tree climber and in addition had chosen a tree that was not natural to climb so as to make it less likely that the thing should be discovered. I sincerely hoped that nothing would eat it.
I went home and I told everybody I knew about what I had done so that it would seem hilarious which it was. After that though I’m afraid to say I came back to visit the bird’s head ring often, and it was never gone and there seemed no animal that wanted it. There was something, it seemed to me, very wrong in me liking to look at it as I did. It began to seem to me that I had never thought that it was a beautiful object at all, that I had never wanted it for that purpose. But then at other times it seemed to me that I was making excuses for myself and my bad taste because I could not stand that I was attracted to such an ugly thing.
And then one day I came to the tree and there was a monkey in it. A real, living monkey with a ruff that stood around its face and white that stood around its eyes. And the monkey had in its little paw, its paw like a glove of leather, furred in the back of it like vanity, the monkey had in its hand the head of this bird, on this ring. And for a moment, a long moment it came into my head that the monkey planned to eat the bird, or wrench the head off the ring, both of which would have been unbearable.
What the monkey was doing was turning the ring over and over, pressing on the beak with the padded tip of a grey finger and flipping the heavy yellow brass with a claw, looking at it all the time, and barely moving its head at all. And it seemed to me that I had never seen anything so intolerable as the fascination of this monkey.
I stood and watched it turn the ring over in this way until I became, though shaken also bored, and then I turned and went home. I told Chris about what it was I had seen. Chris said:
‘Do you think that what you just told me about might really be a projection of some of the anxieties you are currently experiencing in your life?’
I looked hard at him.
‘No’ I said ‘I don’t think so’.
The problem of the origin of the monkey occupied me for some time and in fact went some way towards distracting me from the horribly absorbing nature of the ring. The only likely explanations were that the monkey had come from some zoo or was privately owned by an eccentric (I inferred that they were eccentric from the fact that they kept a monkey), but these seemed to me to be in some way so logical and probable as to be implausible. That creature, with all its intensity and dexterity, not to mention its presence in the tree of the bird’s head ring, with its fringe of hair like white chalk blown on black card, was simply not from a zoo, and nor was it a pet. It was not an owned thing. It was a monkey of eerie self-possession and yet even a wild monkey is in thrall to its present needs and desires. I was certain that I had caught this monkey in an act of contemplation, understanding this object in terms, however vague, of a past or a future or both at once. To question the origins of what it was examining did not, I must admit, occur to me, I had bought it in a shop after all. Although it’s a shop I had not and never did return to. I never dreamed about the monkey or the ring- I suspect that this is because they occupied my daytime thoughts so vividly and explicitly. However whenever shadows began to lengthen or I found myself in a dark corner of a building or street I found that I would do whatever I could to be back in the light again, away from what I always imagined was the gaze of this monkey, glittering and expectant, or of this murdered bird, flat and lifeless.
This went on for some time, but it was not my nature to exist in a state of paranoia for long, and while I did not entirely forget what I had seen I began not to be so afraid of it. I went to other shops and bought other things. I abandoned the tree and all thought of the tree. I avoided looking at necks, and speculating about the joining of the head to the body, the point where the skull met the spine.
Then, one day, I received a package in the post. Chris had left it propped up against a vase of flowers before leaving for work in the morning. I came downstairs some time after he had left and drank a pot of coffee before I noticed the package. It was only a little bulkier than a letter but longer and wider. I felt that excitement which always comes with parcels. I was not concerned with who it was from: I knew that this was something which could only be established after the parcel had been opened.
There was no note, only the ring, threaded in a piece of black ribbon, and a little, but not very, worn from its time exposed to the elements. Nothing had detached from it. The feathers were a little ruffled but the eyes and the beak were still in place, firm and unwobbling. I turned the now empty envelope over: it was the kind which was lined with bubble wrap. I examined the handwriting, which was scrawling, but only like handwriting is unless it is particularly neat. I speculated about whether it looked like it might have been set down by a little grey leathery paw. I thought, for a long time, about what the handwriting of a monkey might look like. I could not tell. If a monkey was to write my address on the back of an envelope it might just as well look like this as like anything else, I thought.
As I sat, lost in dark imaginings of monkeys and biros, I turned the ring speculatively over and over. When I realised that this was what I was doing I stopped. I felt nauseas. I wrapped my palm as snugly as the bones of it would allow, around the delicate little head, and felt the feathers of it. Its lacquered beak was sticking through my fingers. I hooked two fingers of my other hand through the yellow brass of the other side. In the back of one of the fingers I could feel something on the inside, on the back of the head. The blunt head of a bolt or nail, or a button, or the nub of a tiny ossified spine. I began to pull, from the wrists, and then from the elbows and then, finally, from the shoulders. There was a muffled scraping and then the ring and the head were apart. And not only that but the beak and the head were apart, and the eyes and the head, and the top half of the head from the bottom. And something was clattering out from the hole at the base of the head onto the table, which was shining and sticking with hastily smear wiped marmalade. Gears. Cogs and gears and shreds of shining iron. The inside of the beak, where it was not protected by the yellow gloss paint, was tarnished and flaky. The glass eyes, smaller than apple pips, trailed tiny wires which were fused to minute batteries.
I sat and observed the wreckage. Then I swept all the pieces of the mechanical amputation back into the envelope with the palm of my hand. I put the ribbon and the ring back too, although there was nothing menacing now about the ring, and the ribbon had played barely any part at all in proceedings. I took the envelope and put it in the bin and then I took the rubbish out and washed my hands. And I sat there, waiting for what I felt sure must come, knew it, the rap on the door, tap tap.
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