Budgies for sale.

Budgies For Sale


On Saturday there was a bird cage on the counter in the pet-food shop. Inside was a budgerigar. A blue one. There was a handwritten sign. It said; Budgies For Sale £10.

I owned a budgie years ago. It was a yellow and green one. It belonged to my aunty. She died and I had it. It screeched like you wouldn’t believe.

The sign implied that there was more than one budgie for sale but there was only one in the cage. The shop is small and full of pet food smells. The walls are crowded with shelves filled with anything and everything to do with pets but they don’t ordinarily sell the actual pets. Sometimes it’s interesting to look at all the products while you wait to be served but today the blue budgerigar was something new to look at.

It was a good-sized cage. The budgie was chirping softly. It looked content. It had everything it needed inside the cage.
“I was hoping it would go by today,” the woman said.
My wife and I were admiring the budgerigar. We were buying wild bird seed to put in the garden for the sparrows.

This woman in the pet shop never smiles or says hello to us. She doesn’t usually have much to say about anything. I don’t know if this is how she is with everyone. I wasn’t listening at first and then I realised she was still talking and it was the most I’d ever heard her say.
I think another customer had asked if she planned to take the bird home with her for the weekend. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shop was closed.

“I can’t be bothered to carry it all the way round to the car park,” she said to us. “Then take it home and bring it back on Monday.”
She said she planned to put some extra water and seed in the cage and stand it by the small back window so the bird would have some sunshine. She would have to take the calendar down from the window first. The small window was set deep in the wall and guarded with thick bars. It looked out on the bare brick wall of the next property only a few feet away. I think she might have been hoping we’d feel sorry for the bird and buy it and take it off her hands. But it’s hard to know what people are thinking when they tell you things and she might not have intended that at all.

She was looking at the bird as she talked. We’d paid for the wild bird seed by then.
I said the bird would be all right as long as it had plenty of food. My wife agreed and the woman nodded.
“I might leave the radio on for company for it,” she said.
It was a nice looking bird. Looking at it made you wish you could buy it and take it home and give it a name but we couldn’t afford ten pounds for a budgie and if we hadn’t seen it there we would never have thought about buying one.

It would probably cost about fifty pounds altogether by the time you bought a cage and a water bottle to clip to the bars. You’d have to buy seed and sand sheets for the floor of the cage. I know from experience that wherever we decided to put it at home there would soon be seeds and feathers on the floor. Also, the novelty of owning a pet soon wears off. These were all things to be taken into consideration when buying a budgerigar and I considered them and mentioned them to my wife when we had left the shop.

I have a picture now in my mind of a blue budgerigar in a cage in the small window at the back of the pet-food shop. It’s Sunday and the shop is closed and still and the lights are turned off. There’s no one there. The budgie is looking out of the window but there’s nothing to see.