Stories of a Surreal Nature by Graeme Winton - HTML preview

Cardigans

I was painting the outside of local council housing one day when a woman in one particular house asked me if I would like a cup of tea. As it was the middle of the afternoon, I said yes and was invited along the side of the house to sit in the back garden.

After she served the tea we sat down and discussed the weather and the economy when suddenly the phone rang inside her house. It was a distinct shrill noise accentuated by the rear door being open, and I assumed she would head indoors and answer, but she carried on talking as if there was no noise.

The phone ringing stopped for a moment and then started again after a brief period. The woman, however, just carried on talking and drinking her tea. I had to interrupt her as it was beginning to bother me, and said: “Excuse me, but your phones ringing.”

“Oh, that’s not the phone. It’s my daft parrot! It imitates the phone when it wants me to go back into the house.”

“An intelligent bird,” I said.

“Oh, you’ve no idea, son,” she replied, “come inside and see him.”

I followed her into her living room where there was no sign of a parrot. There was a perch and, bizarrely, three small, woollen cardigans sitting on the settee.

“Come out, Colonel!” shouted the woman.

“No... I don’t like strangers,” was the high-pitched reply.

“Come on out, and I’ll give you a biscuit,” the woman said in a tempting tone.

Suddenly this thing like a live plucked turkey with a red cardigan on jumped out from behind the settee. I jumped back as the bird was making pecking movements toward my legs.

“Ah, there you are Colonel,” she said, and then turning to me she said: “My late husband brought him back with him from a trip to North Africa with the Merchant Navy twenty years ago. He gets so terribly cold with losing all his feathers that I have knitted him some cosy cardigans.”