Flamingo Boy. Michael Morpurgo

other, and it sometimes provoked in him an extraordinary metamorphosis. “Flam flam,” he would say, and, on the spur of the moment, he would become a flamingo, a living, breathing flamingo, stepping out in long, slow, stiff strides across the room, leaning forward, his neck stretched out, bending to feed, scooping through the shallows, just as I had seen them out on the lakes in the marshes. Then his arms would suddenly open up and become wings, and he would be flying, soaring around the room. Whenever he did this, I would marvel at how such a large man, often so awkward in his mannerisms and movements, could glide about the room with such balletic grace, honking happily, a complete flamingo.

      But there were so many other words he kept saying that I could not yet understand at all. He seemed to think that by repeating them louder, his face closer to mine, it might help me understand. I could sense his frustration and disappointment when I did not. So sometimes I would resort to pretending that I knew what he was talking about. But I don’t think I ever fooled him. And anyway I sensed that he did not like me pretending. When she was there, Kezia would often see my difficulty and come to my rescue, interpreting for me. But she was not always around. So the meaning of many of his words remained a mystery to me.

      “Rousel”, “grette”, “Capo”, “Val”, “Lot Lot” – these were just some of the words that he used, many of them quite often, words he clearly longed for me to understand. I could see he liked it when I repeated the words back to him. That was what made him happy. So that’s what I did. He liked me to be an echo. And I also learned early on with Lorenzo that he liked truth, that for him pretending between people, unless it was for fun, was not truthful, and that upset him.

      It took a while for me to begin to understand this strange, awkward man, who seemed to live so much of every day in a world of his own. He was like no one I had ever encountered before. He joined our world – the real world as we like to think of it – and left it as and when he felt like it. Everything he did was both spontaneous and meant. His words and his ways were his own. I was getting used to his language, his moaning, or groaning, or humming, to his sudden shrieks and shouts of exuberance, his bursts of laughter and clapping. I noticed that Ami, if he could, would follow Lorenzo everywhere he went, walking at his heels. Unlike me, he seemed to understand every word Lorenzo spoke, every gesture and grunt. Kezia too, I could see, understood him instinctively. I envied the closeness between the three of them, the complete understanding and trust. I felt an outsider sometimes, but they never treated me as such.

      Lorenzo had his own way of ending the day. He would be gone for an hour or so out on the farm, saying goodnight to the animals in his hospital, I presumed, or patrolling the marshes, looking for waifs and strays. When he came in, he rarely sat down at all, even to eat, but liked to stay in the room with us while we did. He would stand, watching the fire in silence, usually nibbling on a piece of sausage – he ate almost nothing else but sausage. When the moment came that he decided to go to bed, it always took me by surprise, even though I was expecting it. He would turn away from us, stop to crouch down for a while over Ami, touch him on his head, give him the last of his sausage, then, with a wave of his hand, walk very deliberately towards the stairs. As he went, he would lift his arms, make wide beating wings of them, and make his way upstairs, honking his farewell.

      Kezia and I would sit and talk by the fire, or sit together for a while in comfortable silence. I was by now much less tired than I had been.

      There was so much I wanted to ask her, about Lorenzo especially, but also about the photographs on the walls too, who everyone in them was, how the two of them had come to be living here together. I had asked her once about how she had learned to speak English, but still she had not told me. I was longing to find out. I was intrigued about everything, and I knew that time was short. Now I was up and about a bit more – though I was not yet allowed outside in that wind – I would soon have to think about leaving. I did not want to have to say goodbye before finding answers to all the whys and wherefores in my head.

      I had asked her more than once as well about the photographs on the walls, who everyone was, but Kezia simply said they were family, and would say nothing else. I felt that to ask again might be to intrude and upset her, and, after all she and Lorenzo had done for me, I did not want to do that.

      

       CHAPTER 6

       How it Was, How We Were

      As it turned out, I never had to ask her at all. One evening, as we were sitting there by the fire, just after Lorenzo had gone up to bed, Kezia started asking me questions. “Alors, Vincent. You must tell me something about yourself,” she said suddenly, quite unexpectedly. “In England, en Angleterre, where do you live? Have you any brothers or sisters at home? I know nothing about you. What have you been studying, Vincent? And what were you doing, by the way, wandering through the Camargue in the middle of the night? This I have always wanted to know.”

      I kept it short, told her only the essentials. I told her about home, about the boat picture on the wall in my bedroom, about how it had fallen off and nearly killed me, and the letter from my grandparents I had discovered on the back, about Vincent van Gogh and the Camargue, about my horrible exams, about how, once they were over, I had said goodbye to my mother, walked out of the door, rucksack on my back, free as a bird, and found my way down to the Camargue.

      Her eyes, I noticed, lit up when I told her that. “Bravo! I see you have the Roma spirit in you,” she said. “You are a wanderer, a traveller. I like that. And now that you have answered my questions, and I feel I know you a little better, maybe it is time for me to answer your question.”

      I did not know which question she meant. There were so many I wanted to ask by now. I must have looked rather blank.

      “Vincent, you do not remember? You asked me how I learned to speak English so well. Maybe you do not wish to know?”

      “No, no, please, I want to hear,” I told her.

      She sat back in her chair, hitched her shawl up around her shoulders, and looked across at me. “So much of everything that happens to us, Vincent, that makes our lives what they are, is just pure chance – le hasard, as we say in French. The families and times we are born into, the places we live. All chance. Think of it. Think of what happened to you. Because a picture falls off a wall, you find yourself wandering down a dark road to nowhere through the marshes of the Camargue, and you get sick, and Lorenzo happens to be out there with Ami on one of his evening patrols, looking for any abandoned fledgling flamingos, and they find you half dead on the road, and bring you here. So here you are, and here I am, with Ami, and Lorenzo. C’est le hasard, Vincent, just chance.

      “You know what they called Lorenzo when he was little, when I was little too, when I first knew him? Flamingo Boy. En fait, some people still do. You can understand why, I think. Lorenzo and me, we grew up here on this farm, together. We have known each other for almost all our lives. We were best friends from the day we met. And there was a very good reason for that. Lorenzo was different. I was different. It is not easy growing up different, not then, not now.”

      “I was wondering about that,” I said. “I mean about Lorenzo’s … well, about Lorenzo’s difference.”

      “Listen, Vincent.” She was reprimanding me now, with a frown and a wagging finger. “If you go on interrupting, I shall never even begin my story, let alone finish it, or I shall fall asleep telling it. You want to know everything, about Lorenzo, about us, about this farm. I understand that. You told me your story, which was quite short, but very interesting. So I shall tell you ours – that is only fair. But we are much older than you, both of us, and therefore it will take longer. I know from your passport you are just eighteen. Lorenzo and I, as I told you, we are the wrong side of fifty. So mine will be a longer story. Alors, Vincent, no more questions. Let me just tell you how