17 FEBRUARY 1996, Page 34

A Starling in the Top Room

I haven't been up here for days. There's bird-shit on the typewriter: dried mud and white spat all over my papers. On the carpet between the chair-legs it's laid out like an offering: the speckled breast tail-feathers a shut black fan spindly claws limp as a snapped wrist.

There's green on the wing when it rolls in the dustpan.

Christ knows how it got here. I won't let the kids touch in case it wakes up and pecks out their eyes.

What am I scared of? That panicky screech round my room, the skull hitting glass when it flies as if it's inside an egg held up to the light, about to be born, and it can't smash through.

Robert Hamberger