Malone’s has a noisy UFO in the garden

Owlidgeon is half pigeon, half owl. In the eve of my four-walled patio is where he lives. Little light filters down to the basement patio where my bedroom is, but it is from here I hear him hoot. His hoot is loud and laboured like an angry asthmatic walking up stairs that never end. In the sanctuary of my bedroom, lying in my lover’s arms, away from the world, we stare into each other’s eyes, stroking arms with finger print strokes. “I love you so much” “No, I love you so much!” Then it starts: “HUU HUU HOOHOUMPH.” The strange hooting. The strangest noise you will ever hear.

Absorbed in our mutual found adoration for each other, days pass and still we are lolling in our magic. (Until my daughter is delivered back to me on the Sunday and I remember I am a 37-year-old mother of a small child and not the 26 year old lying next to me.) There is magic diving into the pool of his eyes, watching him dive into mine, see his eyes lock, and know in my heart he has thrown away the key to his. There is beauty lying in his arms in a timeless bliss of love magic; nothing can break the spell. Nothing… except the loud laboured hooting of an owlidgeon! Is it an owl? Is it a pigeon? Is it a bloody yak? Where/what the hell is it?

“Alas, the noise stops. No mammal or bird of any kind can be seen”

Image: Dan Evans

Maybe it’s sitting at my bedroom window celebrating new found love, or perhaps clawed onto the window ledge shouting: “This is sickening! No one can be that in love!” Sometimes Owlidgeon wakes us up from our magical love slumber. (Very annoying when Toddler is at her dad’s, and I am actually allowed to sleep in! I want to wring its mysterious neck.) Finally, my daughter is not waking me for toast, but an unidentified flying object is! It’s not a seagull. I have lived among their kind. They squawk. This does not squawk. This is a loud and deep breathy hoot. The old man who lives above me has a long beard. I wonder if it is him… Sometimes in-between hoots I hear wings flapping so it can’t be…

“Right, what the hell is that?” Jumping up, my beloved runs outside to find this creature. Is it a six-foot owl sitting up on the ledge, filing its claws? Alas, the noise stops. No mammal or bird of any kind can be seen. When the hooting starts again my beloved runs outside, and, finally, there it sits, in front of an old mirror I’d bunged outside to die a slow, damp, rotting-wood death in the rain. Staring into the mirror, whooping hooting and making love to its own reflection, is… it! It is doing all it can to woo the gorgeous suitor in front of him. (His own reflection in the mirror!) One pigeon. Wooing. One little in love pigeon making all that noise. I wasn’t disappointed.