Free Heading Inland by Nicola Barker

happy here?’ she’d ask. ‘Don’t you love me?’
    He did quite like her, actually.
    ‘Do you resent me being pregnant?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Will we ring your mother yet and tell her about it?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? Why not ?’ It had started to gall Iris, his inability to celebrate anything .
    One owl especially. He’d stare and stare. It was as big as a spaniel. Grey feathered. Pop-eyed, crazy-looking. Like an emu. Like something unimaginable.
    Wesley wondered what would happen if he set the bird free. When he was younger he’d dreamed about freedom, but now he was resigned to a life of drudgery. Free, he’d whisper, and then, die. Free. Die. Free. Die. Free. Die.
    Derek had told him, you see, that if the owls were released they would starve to death or some of them would freeze. They were too bloody conspicuous, Wesley thought, for their own safety.
    ‘Why don’t you want me to meet your family? Are you ashamed of me? Am I too young?’
    Wesley stood up, picked up his coat, as if to leave the room.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Outside.’
    ‘Where? To look at those bloody owls again? I swear you spend more time looking at those owls than at me.’
    He left her. She followed him, in her slippers, barely dressed. It was dark out. He ignored her. He went to the owl pens.
    In the dark he could hardly see them, only the white ones. He made his way to the pen of his favourite. If he stared and he stared he could make out the pale moon-slip of her beak.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Iris whispered.
    Wesley tried to see the owl more clearly but his eyes weren’t yet adapted. He could hear the others, though. Ghostly trills. Occasional squeals.
    ‘It’s worse at night, don’t you think?’ he asked. ‘To keep them here?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘People watch them during the day and they don’t seem too bad, but at night, that’s their time. That’s when they wake and want to fly.’
    Iris crossed her arms over her chest. It was cold out here.
    ‘I’m haunted,’ Wesley said, eventually, ‘by things that happened in the past.’
    ‘What things?’ Iris asked. ‘Why won’t you tell me, Wes?’
    ‘I lost my right hand,’ Wesley said.
    ‘What?’ Iris was confused now.
    ‘People kept leaving me. When I was a boy.’
    ‘Your dad?’ she said, trying to follow him.
    ‘And all the time,’ he said, ‘I wanted to try and find the thing I’d lost. Searching. Searching. Punishing everyone.’
    ‘What?’ She was shivering now. It was cold. It was cold.
    ‘But I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve finally realized something. All the time I thought I was punishing others I was actually only punishing myself, but not properly .’
    He was trying to see the owl in the darkness. He could make out her shape now.
    ‘Let’s go in,’ Iris said. ‘Let’s talk inside.’
    He turned to face her. ‘I must do something,’ he said, ‘to show you how much I love you.’
    ‘What?’ He had lost her, completely.
    ‘For the baby,’ he said.
    He stretched open his right hand in front of her face. For a moment she was frightened that he might try to hurt her. He might hit her or smother her with that hand. But then he turned from her and slowly, deliberately, finger by finger, he pushed his hand into the wire mesh of that giant and wakeful emu-owl’s cage.
    He could see his white fingers in the darkness, and finally, too, he could see her. She could see him. She was still. She was silent. He heard one of the other birds calling and then she was on him. Ripping and tearing with her beak like a blade.
    Iris screamed.
    She couldn’t forgive him. On his right hand was left only a thumb. She griped that she’d almost lost their child with the shock of it. He apologized. Over the following months he kept apologizing. He stopped pouting. He couldn’t stop smiling now. Sometimes she’d catch him touching his spoiled hand with his good one, talking to himself, but so softly, like it was a child’s face he was