Ten months after Samantha left I was still trying to find her, still trying to regain what I had lost. Although at nineteen, if you’d have asked me exactly what that was, I probably would have bored you with some banal statement about my feelings and my love and the unfairness of it all. I know now that whatever I felt back then was guided by only two things — my dick and my stomach.

My relationship with Samantha was never simple. In fact, it was closer to some grasping, sadistic thing that seemed to satisfy and delight both of us on one the hand and send me into severe bouts of depression and her into raging tantrums on the other. Her leaving was probably the only sane thing that happened over the almost two and a half years we were together.

It was sometime during the eleventh month after she left that I decided to cut my wrists with a shiny new Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s. I found a packet of them at the back of the medicine cabinet, took one to my room and then tossed a coin to see if I was going to live or die.

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When I look at a forest I see living things — leaves, flowers, birds, trees. My sister Gail sees colours — greens, yellows, browns. She called me yesterday to ask if I’d meet her at Morococo for an afternoon coffee. We hadn’t spoken in months — said she had some big news she wanted to share. I arrived on the dot. She was fifteen minutes late.

“So, what’s the big news?” I asked, as a lanky waiter wearing a black t-shirt and a fez led us to a corner table next to a pile of hand-woven rugs. We both ordered coffee and I ordered a Moroccan coconut cake to share.

Gail wanted to tell me about her latest boyfriend, Jason. “He manages this really cool, newly renovated two and three dimensional fine art gallery out in the burbs.”

Then, halfway through the cake, she says, “But the big news is — I’ve started to paint.”

“Paint! Paint what?” I said.

“Paint! You know, paint things — people, flowers, trees, streets — anything really.”

“I didn’t know you’d been studying art.”

“Well, I’ve only just started — but Jason says my paintings are really good. He thinks my abstracts will speak to people.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic, Gail, you really must show me.”

A few minutes later we left Morococo and caught a taxi to Gail’s apartment. There, in her living room, were eight oil paintings propped against a wall. All of them were coloured white. We’re not talking white and red or mainly white, we’re talking shades of the same white colour — nothing else, just white on white on white on white.

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When your only true-blue friend is a cockatiel named Bird, your life cannot be lived the same as everyone else’s. On Tuesdays, when you visit the local library, your best friend is perched patiently on your shoulder, whistling a happy but obscure tune. And, as you approach the library door you notice for the umpteenth time the printed sign saying, ‘No Animals or Food Allowed’.

How do you feel?

How do you feel knowing your best friend is supposed to wait, perched on a railing in a draughty hallway, while you enjoy yourself hunting for this weeks’ read?

Maybe a more practical cockatiel owner would have left his bird at home, but not Tony! Tony and Bird were inseparable. Which meant, wherever Tony went, Bird went as well.

I’ll warn you now that you may end up thinking this story a little far fetched, a little too hard to believe. Yet I can assure you there have been many witnesses to Bird’s uncanny ability — including myself.

At first, Tony says, even he didn’t believe it. But in the end he couldn’t deny it either.

One day Bird just started: “What’s a Dacha? What’s a Dacha?” And he carried on like that until in frustration Tony said, “BIRD! For Christ-sake shut-up! A bloody Dacha is a Russian weekender, a holiday home for the rich and the bloody famous.”

That’s how Tony says it all began. How it finished was Tony realising that Bird had been reading over his shoulder.

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