Page 23 - Mobile Magic

23
It took ages to get to sleep. Her waking nightmares held images of bulldozers, birds and radios. She was usually quite willing to accept the evidence of her own eyes and ears, which in fact, was the only sort of evidence in which Saffron did believe. She didn’t believe in religion, astrology, magic, statistics or other fantasies.
It wasn’t that she thought she knew everything, but people have so many hidden motives for getting you to believe what they want you to believe. Saffron was a hard-headed, practical girl and didn’t like being conned.
The bird worried her because she wanted to believe what she had heard and seen, but it just seemed impossible and, well ... unscientific.
A friend of hers had
a corrella-cockatoo that used to repeat the family arguments to anyone who came to visit. When people knocked on the front door the corrella would yell, ‘Get lost!’ and swear like a trooper; so their unit was the only one in the whole block of flats which had never been
burgled.
That bird out at Green Mountain hadn’t just been repeating
something it had overheard. It had really been talking to her; and the radio broadcast hadn’t just been a repeat either. She had asked her mother about that news item.