Our Budgie Stopped Singing Three Days Before My Nan Went Into Hospital

Pip was my nan's budgie, a blue one, and he was the loudest, happiest bird you ever heard. He sang from the moment the cover came off in the morning until it went back on at night. Six years of it. You could not have a quiet phone call in that house. My nan adored him and he adored her, and he would sit on her finger and mutter budgie nonsense into her ear for hours.

I was staying with her that spring because she was getting on and did not like being alone in the house at night, though she would never have said so in those words. She was eighty-three but sharp, still did her own crossword, still told me my skirts were too short.

The thing with Pip started on a Sunday. I took the cover off in the morning and there was no song. He was sitting on the perch nearest my nan's armchair, on the side of the cage closest to where she sat, pressed right up against the bars, and he was silent. I thought he was ill. I checked his food, his water, the bottom of the cage, the things you check. He seemed physically fine, bright-eyed, but he would not sing and he would not really eat, and he would not move from that spot near her chair.

He stayed like that for three days. My nan was worried sick about him. She talked to him, offered him millet from her hand, which he always came running for, and he would not take it. He just stayed pressed to the bars on her side of the cage, watching her, quiet as the grave. She said, more than once, he knows something, that bird, and I told her not to be daft, he's just under the weather.

On the third evening she stood up from her chair to put the kettle on and went down. Just went down, on the kitchen floor, without a sound. A bleed, they told us later, on the brain, that had probably been building for days, a slow leak that would have been giving her headaches she had not mentioned because she never mentioned anything. I got her to hospital and there was surgery and there were some very bad days, and then, slowly, there were better ones. She came home to us six weeks later, smaller and slower but still herself, still telling me about my skirts.

And here is the thing I have never got over. The morning after she came home, I took the cover off Pip's cage and he sang. Full voice, the whole racket, as if nothing had ever happened. He had been silent every single day she was in that hospital, a silent, sulking, worried little bird pressed to the bars, and the moment she was back under the same roof he sang his heart out. My nan wept when she heard it. So did I, if I am honest.

People say budgies are sensitive to routine, to the mood of a house, and that once I got frightened and the household went tense he would have picked up on that and gone quiet. But he went quiet three days before she collapsed, before any of us was frightened, before there was anything to pick up on except whatever was already going wrong inside her head. He knew before we did. He sat as close to her as the bars would let him and he kept watch, and he would not sing while she was in danger, and he would not sing while she was away.

My nan is ninety now and Pip is long gone, but she still says he was the best doctor she ever had, and that he charged less than the rest of them. I think she is only half joking. I think she believes, as I have come to, that the little blue bird knew she was slipping days before her own body admitted it, and did the only thing he could, which was to go quiet and stay close and wait.