Parrot

The Parrot is remembered not as a developed animal character but as the victim of a brief act of violence that profoundly alters how Anthea Bradbury-Scott is perceived. Its death supplies one of the few concrete memories behind the family’s fear that Anthea is “not quite normal,” linking an apparently domestic incident to the larger question of whether her rages could have escalated into serious violence.

The Incident and Its Witness

The Parrot belonged to the Bradbury-Scott household. According to the recollection given about Anthea Bradbury-Scott’s youth, it repeated the “silly things” that parrots say, and Anthea suddenly wrung its neck. The account is presented as a remembered family episode rather than as an independently witnessed scene, so the bird’s own experience remains inaccessible; what the narrative preserves is the act and its effect on the person who recalls it.

The memory is especially powerful because it interrupts the ordinary image of a household pet. The Parrot is associated with repetitive domestic speech and familiar animal presence, while Anthea Bradbury-Scott’s response is abrupt and lethal. The contrast makes the killing appear less like a considered act than an eruption of rage, consistent with the recollection that she had previously suffered “storms of rage.”

Effect on the Family’s Judgment of Anthea

The Parrot’s death becomes a foundation for distrust. The speaker says that, after the incident, it was impossible to feel the same and impossible to feel sure that Anthea Bradbury-Scott could be trusted. The bird therefore functions as a remembered threshold: before it, Anthea could still be treated as a sister whose behavior was troubling; after it, her family began to regard her capacity for violence as an unresolved danger.

That judgment is not presented with confidence. The speaker hesitates, withdraws, and asks that the implication be forgotten, while simultaneously admitting that Anthea Bradbury-Scott is not entirely normal. The Parrot’s death thus carries two kinds of significance: it is evidence invoked to support suspicion, but it is also part of an emotionally unstable testimony marked by guilt, fear, and reluctance to accuse one’s own sister.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Parrot has no independent narrative voice and receives no life beyond the family’s recollection. Its role is consequently instrumental in the strict narrative sense: the bird’s death is used as a concrete image through which the story makes Anthea Bradbury-Scott’s disturbing behavior legible. Yet the incident also exposes the limits of a purely human account, because the Parrot is reduced to the object of a household memory and the measure of a human character’s alleged abnormality.

The remembered killing foreshadows the possibility that Anthea Bradbury-Scott’s violence is not merely verbal or temperamental. It helps explain why the speaker, while refusing to state a direct accusation, cannot dismiss the fear that Anthea Bradbury-Scott may once have attacked someone. The Parrot’s death therefore stands at the boundary between disturbing anecdote and implied criminal evidence: small in scale, but decisive in the family’s emotional history.