The Loneliness Birds

Goodbye, Chicken

When Granpa Chook is killed, Peekay feels a grief that is unlike any he's felt before. He describes it in a particular metaphor that will continue throughout the novel:

After a long, long while, when the crying was all out of me and the loneliness bird had entered to build a nest of stones in the hollow place inside of me, I carried Granpa Chook to the orchard and laid him in the place I had made for him to keep him from the rain. (3.150)

Have you ever felt that sad, terrible feeling, where your chest feels so heavy and hard that it could be made of stone? That's just what Peekay's talking about.

Laying the Eggs

The loneliness birds and their eggs stay with Peekay, tormenting him as he loses his friends one by one. When he arrives at home and finds his mother changed, the loneliness birds merge into one:

It felt strange to be speaking in English. I climbed into the backseat of the car next to my mother. All the loneliness birds had become one big loneliness bird on a big stone nest, and I could feel the heaviness of the stone egg as it hatched inside me. (8.18)

Now that Peekay's home, he doesn't really feel all that comfortable. Rather than feeling like he's gone back to Mama, he finds a mother that he barely recognizes, which is the opposite of comforting. Similarly, when he finds out that Nanny has been sent away, the birds are back:

I tried very hard not to cry. Inside me the loneliness birds were laying eggs thirteen to the dozen. (8.95)

Before the birds used to lay about one egg apiece, but now it seems like they're working overtime. They must be getting better birdseed or something. Before the eggs came because of the loss of Granpa Chook, but now that Peekay has lost someone even more important to him, the loneliness is that much worse.

Angry Birds

Peekay does have a very important epiphany at one point, after learning of Nanny's loss. He gets rid of the loneliness birds by taking charge of his life:

As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bushveld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.

I knew they would be back but that, for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords that bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness, a free kind of loneliness. Not the kind that laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled up with heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant. (8.98-99)

For Peekay, learning how to deal with the sadness and loneliness is the same thing as growing up. However, things aren't all rosy. Just because he loses the birds, doesn't mean he's happy. He still feels empty inside, and is going to have to learn how to fill up the hole in his heart.

Bye Bye, Birdie

Peekay has escaped the loneliness for a good while, and fills his life with boxing and studying with Doc and Mrs. Boxall. However, when he finds Geel Piet dead in the boxing ring the loneliness bird comes back with a vengeance:

Inside me the loneliness bird cackled, "He's dead...he's dead! He'll never be alive again!" (14.51)

It had been a while since the bird had made his dreaded visit, but Geel Piet's death is just another turn of the knife for Peekay.

The birds fly off again when Peekay takes revenge on the Judge for Granpa Chook's death—and this time they're banished permanently. All it took was a nice heaping of some long overdue revenge:

I felt clean, all the bone-beaked loneliness birds banished, their rocky nests turned to river stones. Cool, clear water bubbled over them, streams in the desert. (24.104)

The last line of the novel brings it all home. The loneliness birds have been exiled from Peekay's life and he has found a way to feel life, rather than emptiness.