I woke up one morning expecting a familiar presence but it had disappeared. It was nowhere to be found, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how hard I strived to recover it... it just wasn't there anymore.
It had gone.
There is an argument that one should just accept this kind of thing. It happens, you know? Happens to everyone sooner or later. Or if not everyone then at least most.
But you get habituated, you get seasoned. You get used to having something there for you when you wake up in the morning. A reassurance that all is normal, all is well with the world. A rousing presence that seems almost as sentient as you are even though it is separate.
I was only aware that one of my neighbours was keeping chickens when the cock started crowing a couple of months ago.
At first, when I heard those first tentative rooster calls, I thought maybe I was imagining it. I don't live in the middle of the countryside after all. I live in a residential area of central Leamington Spa. It used to be farmland a hundred years ago but now it has semis, terraces, garages, corner shops and caravans that have become sculptures in honour of holidays that were never quite realized.
But each day the cock crowing got louder. Almost as if Foghorn Leghorn was finding himself. Finding his strength. Coming out of his shell (ahem). Learning to be a real cock rather than just a nervous chicken. There must have been chickens too I suppose. I mean one doesn't entertain a cock by itself unless one is really sad and lonely. But we never heard the chicks. They were ethereal in comparison to the volumed glory of the cock.
Between 6 and 8 every morning he'd offer his defiance to the sky. Greet the new day. Welcome the world.
I feared for him even then. People do not like to be woken up early in the morning by livestock in middle class residential areas of spa water towns. It didn't bother me and my wife - we have livestock of our own: two little monkeys who are wont to get up early and play in their bedrooms from 6am onwards. We were used to the early starts.
But the other neighbours?
Students. Labourers. Workmen. Dole-ites. Even a halfway house around the far corner of the block.
There was only going to be so much cock these people could take early in the morning.
And then, sometime this week, the mornings fell silent. No crowing. No calling. No cock a-doodle-doing.
I don't know what has happened to Mr Chook Rooster. There is no one I know well enough to ask and enqiry of the whereabouts of a stranger's cock is frowned upon in polite society. I hope Mr Rooster was found a home elsewhere where he can range free and wild in some immense morning wood. I hope his neck was not tugged by over-excited hands or disrupted by some cruel human's harsh chopper so that he came to a sticky end.
The mornings seem colder now. Duller. Adrenalin free. Devoid of natural pleasure.
I wish I could have done more for him but... I just feel so damned impotent.