‘Shut up, Queenie!” was something you would have regularly heard me bellow, had you happened to be in the vicinity of my living room in the late 1980s. It’s not that our pet budgerigar’s uncanny imitations of household sounds weren’t utterly delightful: the trill of our rotary dial telephone, the dog barking, my sister and I calling our mum in moany, demanding tones. It’s just that Queenie neither knew, nor cared, that you were trying to watch Neighbours or concentrate on a crucial Monopoly tactic.
Queenie was a girl, we were told when we bought her, because the nostril area above the beak, called the cere, was pale pink. But after a year or so, this went blue, which meant she was a boy. This only added to her magic.
What was even more magical about Queenie was just how keen this tiny, exotic being seemed to be to interact with us big, clumsy humans. We once spent weeks teaching her to say “Merry Christmas”, but she didn’t quite get the hang of it until it was time to take the decorations down. She (I mean he) got really excited when we stood by her cage and made circles with our fingers while chirruping “Queenie beanie beanie …” She would fluff herself up, join in the chorus and circle her head in a birdie dance. Sometimes, when we were going about our business, she’d do it to herself in the mirror, too. Did she think it was another bird? It was all part of the beguiling mystery of having a pet budgie.
We always holidayed in the UK and we would take her with us – she wasn’t fazed by the travel. I would comb beaches for cuttlefish bones for her to nibble and scrape at, and scour the countryside for chickweed, which is a budgie’s dream salad. But it was only at home that we would let her out to fly around. I always felt privileged to open her cage door and proffer a finger for her to hop on to. Between flights she would land on our heads and shoulders. She was obsessed with Mum’s ears – as soon as she heard her voice she would land on her and start cleaning them with her stone-like tongue.
I loved looking after Queenie, polishing the toys in her cage – the coloured plastic hoops, the mirror and bell. I even found the dried millet sprays we fed to her aesthetically pleasing and I didn’t mind cleaning out the bottom of her cage.
And then one day she died. One minute she was wittering away while I was vacuuming, the next she was, to adapt the Monty Python sketch, an ex-budgie. I started to worry my vacuuming had somehow given her a heart attack. We buried her at the end of the garden and made a wooden cross to mark the site, but we didn’t get closure until years later when my dad admitted that the dog had “scragged” her. Had the cage door not been shut properly? Had one of our parents let her out unsupervised by my sister and me? It’s all too long ago now to put the pieces together. But if you’re out there somewhere, Queenie, I’m sorry we failed you. And I’m sorry I ever told you: “Shut up!”
