Our neighbour’s peacock.

Our neighbourhood is a little unusual. Immediately next-door a party-hearty passell of twentytwo-year-olds collect Holden Kingswoods in various states of repair that they restore and display in their front yard and nature strip; on their other side is an actual squat which caught fire last weekend and was attended by not one but two firetrucks in addition to the police. There are two bona fide mansions- not McMansions, but a proper stately-home National Trust-worthy Victorian pile housing a family and their chemical stock-control business at one end; the other is a decaying sixties eyesore inhabited by our landlady, who is never seen except for when she backs her Rolls out of the driveway, her blue curls quivering over the steering wheel. Everyone seems to buy a new television, printer, microwave, dining table and queen mattress on a quarterly basis, leaving the old appliances and furniture piled on their nature strips, only occasionally setting fire to them. Racehorses are exercised at a facility a hundred meters east of our home, and each morning we wake to the sound of their hooves beating a tattoo on rubber equine treadmills. Folks whom I suspect to be dealing in illicit substances skulk about in that furtive manner they love.

I’m not complaining. The Kingswood collectors are a jolly lot but are always careful to turn down the Chisel after just one Khe Sahn and a Working Class Man, and in any case confine this to weekends. I’ve even ridden in one of the Kingswoods- was grateful for the lift from the train station on a forty-degree day and touched that they cared to stop and offer. The squatters could actually be said to have improved the condition of ‘their’ property (which is owned and ignored by our landlady), having built an entirely new structure on ‘their’ grounds to house several of their number and approximately twenty shopping-trolleys which suffered only minimal fire damage. The mansion-dwellers are seldom seen, the appliances sometimes come in handy, and the skulkers cross the road when they see us coming.

No. We like our burg. What really annoys us, however, is our neighbour’s peacock.

The Saturday afternoon that I first heard its plaintive cry, I was perched on the couch bingeing on Granny Smiths and a Sopranos DVD. In a particularly tense scene, Adriana LaCerva was being driven to an undisclosed location and certain death by Silvio, just after being strangled nearly to death by her lover Chrustafuh when she confessed that she’d assisted undercover Feds. I was roused from my absorption by a loud, high wail unlike any I had ever heard before. The screeches communicated accusation, the threat of imminent violence, but also nagging.

I ran to Simon, who was mowing in the backyard, beseeching him to investigate who or what was either being assaulted or getting ready to assault someone else. Turning off the mower and cocking his head, Simon’s face broke into a grin as he hurriedly advised me that the wails filling the air were not coming from a victim of crime or local psycho, but from the peacock which last week had sat in the middle of the road, preventing him from being able to drive his work’s fleet-car into our driveway. “I can’t believe I forgot to mention it to you!” he chuckled. He had put on the brakes and stared at the bird for five minutes, waiting for it to move. When it didn’t, he considered whether he should make as if to run it over, so that it would be scared off much as one scares pigeons off the road, but as a friend to wildlife he didn’t want to risk harming it, and certainly not in a borrowed vehicle. “I ended up having to drive around the block and come in the other way, and when I got back, the thing had got up and flown onto the roof of the house opposite! I think he lives there!” He shook his head. “Can’t believe I forgot all about it!”

It did seem like a detail worthy of mention, but I let the matter rest for the moment and went into the street to view the bird, with Simon following. The whingeing shrieks persisted but the bird was nowhere to be seen, until we caught a glimpse of its crest feathers quivering just above the roofline of the house opposite ours.

That was around four years ago. The peacock does not schedule its outcries with such regularity that one can get used to them enough to ignore as we have done with the horse-drumming. We’ll hear nothing from it for months, and then for an entire morning it’ll reproachfully squawk and caterwaul. Sometimes we don’t get the shrieks, but the honks. That’s what we woke up to this morning actually.

Advertisement