Owlé! I’m moon bound!
I tell you it hurt!
All these feathers were pricking out of my shoulders and down my arms and while you’d think feathers would tickle, they did not! Each one of the blighters has a bony stem to start with, a stem which you could sharpen into a nib, what you’d call a quill back in the olden days before fountain pens, but fountain pens are olden days now so what am I gabbing on about?
This! This is what I’m telling you, that with one of these feathers you could, if you felt like it, write yourself a letter.
Except since you feel like you’re turning into a pin cushion you don’t fancy writing a letter to anyone.
But then along each stem the feathers emerged.
‘I’m turning into a bloody angel!’ I said. ‘That’s a laugh!’
‘More an owl than an angel ,’ she said. ‘I’d quite fancy an angel; and you’re no angel because they don’t wear stupid, round, trendy glasses.’
Nor do owls.
But I didn’t say that. What I did say was: ‘Girls don’t make passes at angels with glasses.’
She wasn’t listening; she was looking at the feathers knitting along my arm, thickening, zipping into place.
‘You got wings, Mikey!’
Wings! Me! Who’d have thought. Not me. …
Now I touch church spires and towers, flit tree tops, skim hedge rows, beetle cliffs, the sea mirroring sky and me between, moon bound.