Chapter 1

'Lot number 206, ladies and gentlemen. A job lot of assorted items. Who would like to start the bidding?

Two pounds it is sir. This lot is on sale at two pounds, any advance on two pounds? Come along ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you've all admired the contents of the box. There are so many attractive items inside that are worth a great deal more than two pounds'. He smiles a knowing smile that says, I know there's nothing in there that anyone could possibly want, but let's play the game shall we. And right on queue, the bidding begins in ernest.

Three pounds. Three pounds it is, to the lady to my left.

Four pounds. With you sir. Madam? No?

Five pounds, we have a new bidder at the back of the hall.

Six pounds.

Seven.

Eight'.

The auctioneer waits, watching.

'Are we all done at eight pounds'

He pauses again.

'Going'.

Pause, peering over the top of his half glasses at the gathering climax.

'Going'.

Simultaneously inhaling and raising the gavel, he looks, laboriously around the room. Pauses and then,

'Gone'.

The gavel hits home with a crack and the room exhales as one.

John Watkins has just bought himself a tatty old book about the birds of India. It is a hard back and still has remnants of a once glorious fly cover clinging on for dear life. He is happy with his purchase, but wonders how he'll explain this addition to his 'collection'. His daughter has been pretty clear about the amount of 'stuff' he has managed to 'stuff' into his minuscule flat at the retirement village. There is too much of it. A cull is called for. Over his dead body. Of course, he smiles to himself, it will be over his dead body, or at least in a few days, knowing that girl of his. She's always been far too practical. Too sensible. Hard. Too hard for any man to warm to, that's for sure. But she has been a loyal daughter and an old fella like John needs someone on his side.

He stays at the auction, bidding on a couple of other items and drinking tea. He knows that he should not drink so much with his prostate trouble. The tablets have worked wonders, of course, but his water works are easily overwhelmed if he guzzles with abandon, leaving him with a lingering desperation for a pee that can go on for hours. If he does not pace himself, he will spend the last half of the auction in the toilet waiting, waiting, waiting, with little result other than a rapidly filling bladder. He orders another cup of tea and a biscuit to soak up the liquid and maybe, delay the inevitable.

At last the auction ends and John and his bursting bladder complete the paperwork, part with money and attempt to find the box. It is back in the spot where he had first seen it, tucked neatly beneath a trestle table that had been groaning under the weight of china and bric-a-brac. He had to bend down to pick up the box. He should not drink so much. He knows that. Fool. He makes that old man groan on the way down to the box, and again on the way back up. Once upright, John steadies himself, altering his stance to allow for the extra weight of the box and sets off for his fifteen year old, beaten up, grey Citroen car.

She'll never notice this box, he thinks to himself, as he drifts slowly home, narrowly missing obstacles and barely able to see other road users. I'll tuck it behind some of the other boxes and sort it out later. Yes, that's what I'll do. My little secret.

*

Johns flat is a mess. His daughter calls in every day on her way home from work, but simply cannot make any headway. She feels that he is a hopeless case. To her mind, he has always been hopeless on the domestic side of things. Her mother found him impossible to live with, although, naturally, she never divorced him. People did not do that sort of thing in those days. It would have caused a scandal. There was no simpler way to social suicide than divorce. Once one stepped over that Rubicon, there was no going back – to friends for supper, to parties, to the theatre with other couples – because you were no longer a couple. You were single and as such you were a danger to the safe and ordered lives of others. What ever had jiggered up your marriage might be catching, and no sane person wants a disease, do they? So they stayed tethered to each other. Him, happy as a pig in shit, she desperate to live another life, preferably on another planet. When her mother had died, in her early seventies, worn out from years of chasing around after the hapless John, Clara had become his harrier. For all his grief stricken tears at the time, he barely noticed the transition.

John parked his old banger in its' allotted space, and walked around to the boot. He lifted the lid and assumed the sumo posture in readiness to lift his precious cargo high into his arms. He walked the short, level safe distance to his own front door, with his name beside the bell. Struggling, John rummaged in his trouser pockets for his keys, he had the box pressed against the door frame and resting on his upper thigh. Not bad for a man with two false hips, he thought smugly as he forced the key into the lock and tottered into his world of stuff.

Looking around his living room, John hoped to spot an accessible space that was big enough to accommodate the box and yet well away from Claras' xray vision. She would be around in half an hour and he needed to have himself and the flat looking 'normal'. In that way, she would be thrown off the scent. That and the fact he would have to lie about his day. If she knew he had been anywhere near an auction he would be done for. Today, he decided, as he popped the box in a space on the floor between a complete twelve volume edition of an encyclopedia and a model of the Cutty Sark; both boxed, he would tell her that he had been in the local library. First, though, he would double check its' opening hours. He did not want to be caught out on a lie that easily.

*

The moment Clara had left his flat, having first made his bed, put away his laundry, and cooked him a quick evening meal, John went to the box, dragging it out of its' hiding place. He took out the book on birds, pity about the dust cover, he mused as he turned it over in his hands to look at the back. He was sitting in his high, wing back chair, the type that has the wooden, Queen Ann legs that used to make him wonder if Queen Ann was actually bandy, poor woman, and the wooden arms with a bandage of padding on each to remind him of how luxury might feel. He did not notice these things. The fact that the chair was thread bare did not concern him in the least, nor did the ancient grease smudge on the chair back where he rested his head. What interested John was birds and history. Not a lot else mattered to him these days. He flicked through his new book, lingering on some pages, ignoring others. Getting a feel for it. Weighing carefully. Will he derive eight pounds worth of pleasure from it? Only time would tell. He paid no attention to the other things in the box, focussed as he was on Leafbirds, Tropicbirds, Pratincoles, Chats, Laughingthrushes and dozens more birds, all unheard of on our shores, all new acquisitions for his imagined bird collection.

At this moment in time John was a contented man, living a predictable life. Everything was exactly the way he liked it.