When asked about his retirement Keith had said, ‘I’ll be poor, but I’ll have my health and I’ll be free.’ It was an off-the-cuff statement he was pleased with at the time. Now, after a good night’s sleep, he’s slightly unsure. He hooked the lead onto the collar of his dog and headed out of his back gate into the alley.
     Poor. Well, yes. But he had always been poor. Forty years of working at a special educational needs school was never going to make him a rich man, however, the dog was his only dependant these days, he’d paid off his mortgage and he had a meagre pension scheme in place. The basic material needs were amply met, roof, food, his old but beloved leather jacket. Health? He could feel his bones rattling, his left leg was playing up and he’d slept funny on his right shoulder. It was downhill from here on in, his body would slowly but surely fall apart. He noticed an old man being wheeled out of a house by a dutiful relative and put to sit in a sunny patch out of the wind. Presumably that would be him in the not-too-distant future, one of his daughters doing the wheeling. The dog sniffed at the old man making him smile. Keith exchanged pleasantries – the weather, the dog, the world – then moved on toward the beach.
     By the time they made it to the concrete tidal break, the dog was straining on the lead, desperate to run down to the shore. Free? This one was less easy to untangle, as one loop loosened so another seemed to tighten. Once unhooked from the lead, the dog bolted. Keith followed him down onto the soft sand.
     The wind was howling, blowing in off the sea, spray and sand whipping across his face. It was high tide and the waves churned up the messy, brown seaweed. A small flock of black-headed gulls were enjoying the wind, using it to hover above the water, occasionally dipping and diving and then re-finding their stability. Keith removed his binoculars from the small bag he had slung over his shoulder. Focusing in on a particular gull he watched it magnified before him, the black head neatly divided from the rest of the body as if someone had dipped it into a pot of black paint. The bird swung to the left and swooped downwards causing his view to resolve on the slopping surface of the water. Something white caught his attention there. It was spread out, floating amongst the churned-up seaweed. A sturdy beak rolled up out of the water for a moment before sinking back under again. It was a bird. A dead bird washed in from sea by the storm. He took the binoculars away from his eyes and only then did he gain a truer perspective. The bird was massive, the wings metres wide. Unthinkingly, he began to wade out to it, out through the churning seaweed. He was up to his waist by the time he reached it. He took hold of a wing and dragged it back to the shore. It could be only one thing. An albatross. 

*
 

‘What’s that?’ Kathleen questioned.
     Keith was standing on the small stoop that led up to their front door, the dead bird in his hands.
     ‘An albatross.’
     ‘And what you planning to do with it?’
     ‘I’m going to donate it to Horatio down at the museum. I was thinking of plucking and boiling it first, to get the skeleton.’
     ‘Right. And where were you going to do that?’
     ‘Dunno. Kitchen?’
     ‘Well, you can think again. You ain’t coming into my kitchen and boiling up a fucking sea bird, Keith.’
     ‘It’s my kitchen too. I do my fair share of the cooking.’
     ‘You do, but never have I seen you cook up a seagull before.’
     ‘It isn’t a seagull. It’s an albatross. Listen love, I don’t think you quite understand the importance of this. I mean this is a Wandering Albatross. It has the largest wingspan of any bird. The chances of such a creature being washed up on the shores of this town are amazingly slim. This is an event. Possibly even an omen.’
     ‘Wandering Albatross indeed. It can wander itself into the backyard and stay out of my sight thank you very much. And go and change your trousers, you’re all wet, man.’
     He looked down at his trousers and she was right, they were drenched. He pulled out his mobile phone and wallet from his pocket. The phone was dead, the wallet sodden. The dog looked up at him and smiled.  He smiled back. They went round to the side gate and into the backyard.
     ‘Bird,’ said Kev.
     ‘That’s right, Kevin. A bird. A Wandering Albatross to be accurate.’        
     ‘Bird,’ repeated Kev, leaning over the fence.
     Kevin spent his days roaming about the town, keeping an eye on everything that happened. Everyone knew him. Keith remembered him from school. In those days there hadn’t been much provision for people like Kev, they were stuck into the remedial class and forgotten about. He looked up from the plucking of the albatross and saw the ruddy, weatherworn face, the bright blue eyes sparkling in the sun. There was an understanding in those eyes Keith had learned not to underestimate.
     ‘Free,’ said Kevin.
     ‘Free? How do you mean?’
     ‘Birds.’
     ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. Free as a bird, they say.’
He returned to his task and heard Kevin leave, stomping off down the alley. He looked at the phone that was drying in the sun and secretly hoped it wouldn’t come back on.

*

Horatio nursed a pint in his hands. The feathers that stuck up out of the side of his hat made him look shamanistic. Mad Donna was setting up her karaoke disco in the corner and her coloured lights occasionally made his features glow red and green and blue, adding to the effect, the lights glimmering off the many badges that adorned his crusty old coat. He was excited. The albatross had pleased him immensely.
     ‘Widely known as a good luck omen amongst the seafaring community, although it can symbolise many different things. In this instance it must surely mark a turning point, a stretching out of the wings. It’s a pivotal moment this is. I mean, you don’t just have an albatross blown onto your beach every day. There’s a cosmic significance at play here, Keith, I’m telling you.’
     ‘Does it matter that it was dead? I mean within the context of it being a good omen?’
     ‘Dead? Dead? What does that even mean? The albatross is alive. More alive than it’s ever been.’
     ‘Looked pretty dead when I was boiling it up.’
     ‘Ah yes, you play the part very well, sir.’
     ‘What part?’
     ‘The part of the Finder. Unaware of your deeds. You acted under a guidance that it was impossible for you to perceive, let alone understand.’
     ‘What are you on about?’
     ‘What I’m on about is that, that morning down on the beach you came under the control of forces way, way, way, way, waaaaaaay beyond anything you could ever really ken. You were guided out into the slopping waves to retrieve the carcass against your own volition, then you were put to work plucking and boiling the bird. The act of cleansing. You have played your part well in the all-important second phase.’
     ‘Second phase?’
     ‘The purification of the flesh following its complete destruction. It was your job to wash it and to reorder the chaos. Through your exemplary reconstruction, your meticulous gluing together of all the bits back into the whole, you have prepared the way for the real life of the albatross to begin. For it to return to us in its true form.’
     ‘Really?’
     ‘Oh yes. You should be proud of your achievements young one.’
     ‘I am actually older than you, you know that Horatio?’
     ‘Sorry, it’s the voice of the bird. It’s inside me. Speaking through me. You’ve unleashed it.’
     ‘Speak to me bird.’
     Horatio’s eyes became beady, his head twitching from side to side.
     ‘The knot has been loosened. Certain freedoms that have been curtailed within the spirit of humankind shall be rekindled and presented anew. The process of sublimation has begun. You may never witness this in your lifetime, Youngling, but the moment has happened. The gate has opened and it was you that opened it. You have opened a door onto a new world.’
     Horatio, returned to his normal state, slightly shaken by his recent possession, took a deep swig of his pint. ‘This town will never be the same again, I tell you that for nothing.’
     Mad Donna’s microphone whined into life and the rest of the drinkers at the Druids Social Club gave her a cheer. She then proceeded to do her rendition of Like a Virgin. She always started with this and it had become a hilarious act enjoyed by all. She swung and danced herself about the room in a particularly un-virgin-like fashion, something that as a mother of five with a tough history written upon her sixty-year-old body was not particularly difficult. She sat herself down on Horatio’s lap, kicking out a leg, her feather bower tickling his nose.

*

Keith watched the dog run full belt out onto the sand. An abandoned shopping trolley, hairy with seaweed, stood knee-deep in a low-tide rock pool. Another person was on the beach, dressed in black with a large black Alsatian dog, only her pink woollen hat preventing them from slipping into the abstraction of a silhouette. This was Karen, someone Keith knew. She communicated only through nods and smiles these days. He had sometimes sat quietly next to her on the broken concrete tidal break, unspeaking, watching the dogs play, the waves lap. She neared and nodded to him, he nodded back and they passed on.
     The albatross was now hung in all its massive glory in the museum. Horatio gave it pride of place in the entrance hall. There were two ceremonies. One in which the mayor and other dignitaries attended an unveiling and then, much later that evening, Horatio’s Rite-of-the-Great-Bird, a more ritualistic affair in which he urged the spiritual power of the albatross to fly free amongst the good people of the town. Keith was happy to believe in Horatio’s mythos, although he did question exactly how freely anyone could ever fly and if this was even a desirable outcome. His mind returned to the statement he had made the other day. It had been a falsehood of course, how could it not be. He was not poor, he was not healthy and he was most certainly not free. He reformulated it and felt happier with the outcome.
     ‘I will be rich, mildly unhealthy and utterly entangled!’ he shouted aloud, making Karen look back over her shoulder and smile. A zesty gust of wind caused his nostrils to flare and he began to run across the shore, his flapping arms held out like wings, a lightness in his body as he gradually lifted off the ground.

<freedom

Paul Barritt is an artist, animator and writer. He is one of the artistic directors of the theatre company 1927. Over the years he has made many different things, from cabaret shows to grand opera, from avant-garde new music events to rock ‘n’ roll videos. He has had his animation work shown in film festivals around the world including Sundance and it has appeared on BBC. He lives with his family in Margate.

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Of the work featured here, Paul says:

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'The starting point for this story was when a teacher who works at my son’s school made a comment about his retirement. He said: "I’ll be poor but I’ll have my health and I’ll be free.” I went from there and developed a story that hopefully thinks about freedom in general, the extent to which freedom is desirable, the possibility that everything is interconnected...'

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