The Elusive Language of Ducks Read Online Free PDF Page A

yawned and stretched and scratched his ear. She chatted to each of them a little, and once they had both calmed down, she wrapped the duckling in the towel again and passed him over to the man. This time, both duck and man were resigned to each other.
    The duck was outgrowing the carry-bag, so Hannah had bought a large plastic storage box which he slept in at night in the bathroom. But he needed to have more of a free run in the daytime. And it was Simon who, under some pressure from her, had built the makeshift hutch for the bottom of the garden. A third of it was a wooden covered shelter, and the rest was a run enclosed above and around with chicken-wire. It was makeshift because one day the duck would have to go.
    At first the new hutch, about two metres long, seemed enormous, but already with his water dish and mash bowl and the towelling cloth in the shielded corner for nestling into when the wind was cold, it felt cramped. Hannah was thinking they should extend it. She’d imagined he would love his new abode, but once the duck realised that this was the place of confinement when she went away during the day, he would squeak unhappily every time she brought him near it. Now he threw himself insanely against the netting, over and over, trying to force his beak through the wire holes along the rows. This one and this one and this one. He was a persistent gambler, clinging to the vain hope that one of the wire holes was the magic one that would let him through.
    While Hannah was there, he ate, or sat looking at her. But as soon as she turned her back, the cheeping started. He was like her fridge door, reminding her that she had left it open. He was the smoke alarm needing a new battery. He was the drier saying that the clothes were ready. The microwave saying the food was done. The phone calling for an answer. He was an electronic beeper, reminding her to be anxious, that she was leaving him alone and motherless, and that she was mean mean mean.
    She thought of her mother in the Primrose Hill Rest Home. How, in the beginning, she would shuffle along the corridors — her handbag, now almost empty, over her arm — until the staff found her again. Sometimes she would set out with a wobbly friend, the two of them supporting each other, out for an adventure along the pastel-hued corridors that all looked the same. In the end, to stop her escaping, they’d crammed her bones into a bucket chair from which she couldn’t get up. In the end she couldn’t get up from anywhere. In the end she couldn’t stand. In the end the only exercise she had was to bat with her right hand at a balloon thrown directly to her from the centre of the room.

TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVE
    The duck was about a month old when the woman placed him in his cage and went out to a long meeting about a book on adoption and its association with mental illness. All day she had to consider people who were isolated or depressed or manic around issues of adoption.
    She couldn’t help thinking of the duck in relation to all this. At the meeting she mentioned him to people she hadn’t met before. She was told that ducklings didn’t have a defined gender until later, according to how they fitted in with the dynamics of the rest of the flock. Hannah found this difficult to believe, but even so, wondered whether she was actually influencing the final gender of her duckling. Somewhere, quite early along the way, she had started assuming that he was a male, and for no other reason except that she
felt
that he was. Almost without doubt. But when she was also told that drakes in general were rapacious and aggressive, she just
knew
this wouldn’t be the case with her gentle little duck, whatever gender he turned out to be.
    As soon as she arrived home from the meeting, the duckling jumped up and ran at the wire netting.
    The woman picked him up from the cage, her hands slipping under his belly to calm his clockwork legs. He was like a