Albert's Dreams

By Roger Leon Burnley

The imaginings of a boy lead to confusion in love and relationships in later life. A particular sort of boy, a dreamer by nature perhaps, finds real life difficult to discover; and those around him are caught up in his struggles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465380920

Roger Leon Burnley

The author, born 1939 in Amsterdam, N.Y., lives in Edinburgh.

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Albert’s Dreams

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Roger Leon Burnley

Copyright © 2011 by Roger Leon Burnley.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011918598

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-8091-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-8090-6

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-8092-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

P.P.’S Prologue

Kate’s Diary

Moist Dreams

Wet Ones

Pipe Dreams

Real Life

Real Life Interrupted By A Conversation

Return To Real Life

It Can Happen To Albert

Kate’s Diary

How The Dreams End

For Julian

P.P.’S PROLOGUE

If you’re a parrot whose owner’s name is Polly then you have a problem right at the start. If you are called Louise, as I am, someone on first acquaintance is bound to make the mistake of calling you Polly, and calling Polly, Louise. Even calling me Polly’s parrot, or P.P. for short, which some do, raises a smile when no one is particularly in the mood. From that point of view Polly would have been better off with a hamster.

One advantage in choosing me though is that parrots live a lot longer than hamsters. I am over twenty-five years old. I am not sure just how old I was when Edward bought me for Polly’s sixtieth birthday. She’s eighty-four now. She still lives in the farmhouse. Her daughter looks in every day. But Polly is bright and active and never forgets my seeds, and never neglects to talk to me like I’m one of the family. She has a bright eye and cocks her head to one side when she talks. A funny old bird – if you’ll pardon the expression.

In the family chronology I arrived just before Edmund (not Edward) hanged himself. He was a droll bird (beg pardon again) and I found him amusing despite his melancholy. I like to think that he found me interesting too. He wanted to know how dense the rain forests were in West Africa and did the natives get lost in them very often. He seemed to expect an answer. That impresses a bird.

The other thing about parrots is that we don’t go senile. One day we’re just found lying upside down beneath our perch, stiff with our feet in the air. But we never get confused about which way the mandibles go and we never forget to repeat what we’re told. We never get it wrong. We might be given wrong information, information which we have no way of checking, but we never confuse what we’re told.

The reason parrots can’t check out anything is because we’re not allowed out of doors. The pet shop clips our wings so that we can’t fly properly. If we’re really excited we’re supposed to flap a bit and jump up on things, but that’s as good as it gets for most of us. Boy, do they ever go crazy when I’m out. They’re sure a cat or a fox will get me one day or that I might wind up in someone else’s front room. They don’t understand how loyal we are and that we prefer to concentrate on just one family history.

In my case I have a trick or two up my wing. I pretend that I’m hobbled even though I can fly perfectly. Whenever I slip security and get out and have a healthy fly-about I sneak back and limp around like I’ve just been across the yard raiding the grain store.

Nowadays Albert comes here occasionally, and when he sees me he says how he used to visit out here in the country as a kid, and I say (awk) as a kid, and he looks at me and says my God, it’s almost as if you were here then too, which I wasn’t, but I’ve been around for a long while and what’s more important, he says, I haven’t changed a bit (it’s nice of him to say so but the feathers aren’t so glossy, let’s be honest; but I don’t think he means just physically – I have the same mental attitude I guess) and he says it’s easier for him to believe in me than in almost anything else (does he mean ‘anyone’ else?). The world is always changing he says. He gets tearful then and I think he wants to pet me but he doesn’t because I bit his finger once.

One of my fly-abouts after first coming to Polly’s happened not long after Albert and his family came back the first time to Coopersville to stay. I hadn’t seen him before, so when I flew over to Donna’s and peered in through the kitchen window and saw them billing I assumed he was her mate and was just about to jump on her back and start beating his wings. But he didn’t. They’re cousins I found out later. Of course that wouldn’t stop him from having a good old wing beat but I have since learned that people can do some billing, sometimes quite a lot of it, and not get up to a wing beat (sometimes just called a ‘beat’, or a ‘winger’ – there’s lots of different names for the same thing, like ‘feather-duster’, ‘flea-banger’, etc. – you hear many more aggressive words than you do sensitive words like ‘cooing’). I’ve heard hens say he’s a great feather-duster but he can’t build a nest worth guano. They admire power but they pay for it afterwards. I’ve never been much interested in all that. Perhaps the humidity isn’t right.

I could have told Ed that probably not many natives do get lost in the rain forest. The men who hunt there are pretty professional and the rest of the villagers seldom leave except to go by paths to visit relatives in nearby villages. They don’t have the same urge as folk do here to get away from each other, certainly not a strong enough one to brave an impenetrable bush full of nasties. They know better.

But about Albert and Donna: they were quite serious about one another. If Albert hadn’t already been mated you might have been forgiven the assumption that that was what it was all about – about mating. But I’m sure they didn’t want any more children. I’ve heard Donna say to Polly that more children were out of the question. I’m sure that she never intended to mate again after Dan died. And Albert didn’t look the type. So what were they after? All that seriousness: which, by the way, is very becoming to Donna; handsome women look their best when serious. If you don’t qualify as pretty you are better not to use exaggerated expressions.

They seemed to need mutual recognition of each other’s significance – but not as mates. Selecting a mate for breeding entails a profound examination of each other’s importance but this was something different. When they came to sit in the chairs by the garden window to drink their tea she listened so intently to his words. And what were those words about? Why, they concerned the very working of the world. Can you believe that! Funny: it was the first such talk I’d heard, not counting a few wry comments of Ed’s. And I wondered what difference it could possibly make because Albert couldn’t do anything about what they discussed. Like a game. Now a parrot will strut around and make you believe that with him you’ll lay the best eggs in the world. That might be nonsense of course but at least it’s a possibility. But the game Albert was playing was this: supposing I were suddenly God, here’s how I’d remake the world. And Donna sits there with this beautiful, meditative look on her face as if he were promising her good eggs.

It seems to me that once you’ve got to the stage of having fledged your young you should pretty much know where you are and why. You might say this is the sort of facile statement you’d expect from a bird who doesn’t live a very interesting life, one who hasn’t much more to do while she lives other than to fledge her young. But that’s not true of me. And why shouldn’t wisdom come from out of the beaks of birds? We’ve endured a lot of speculation from humans. Now let’s have it another way for a change.

Where was Albert going that day he gravitated towards Donna and they kissed so tenderly? Oh, I know, she gravitated towards him too. So where was she going? She already had two young (although not young in bird terms) still in the nest who were at that moment working in her greenhouses out back amidst all those lovely flowers; a place which, by the way, reminds me of the old country. Hot, moist: decay in the air. Maybe it’s the fronds. I love sneaking in there. What a jolt coming out though. And how dry Polly’s parlour seems afterwards.

Where was I? Albert and Donna. She listened well. So do I, come to that. Humans appreciate listening more than almost anything. Mental listening, not physical. They don’t hear very well. A mouse can stomp into the room and they never hear it. But if they think that someone is going to listen to them. Wow. Get out of the way. They’ll figure that one out across a room full of raucous people.

They’re looking for the chance of letting themselves go. In the flock they’re braced up to each other, their shoulders hunched up, for all the world like they’re going to peck each other’s eyes out. They know they’re not but the strain of it fills the air with a nasty smell, strong, like martinis or perfume.

But get two people together (it’s usually two) who are able to let everything down and it’s better than being in a glade by the river. Maybe that’s why they want to take their clothes off too – if it’s not too cold.

That’s what I saw Albert do. Not with Donna. With a pretty little thing, as pretty as Donna’s flowers, and as fragrant. They had pulled off the old mill road and had lain down on a blanket in a little copse there on a very warm afternoon in springtime.

Albert has turned into a sad person Polly says. She says this to Donna and then it looks for a moment as if Donna could say a few words on that subject herself. But she doesn’t. And Polly doesn’t spot the look and goes on to say that his condition is almost certainly due to heredity, and that there’s a vigorous strain of depression in the family especially manifest in Albert’s mother Mabel, her sister. Then Donna asks her, Well, what about me – we’re from the same family aren’t we? And Polly says that on a farm there isn’t much time for depression. That’s so ridiculous that Donna just looks away and starts having thoughts of her own. It’s not difficult to guess that some of these must have to do with her Uncle Ed. She’ll often come to talk to me in such moments.

Some parrots do a silly shuffle back and forth on their perch, bobbing up and down and