The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  The rest of us pigeons were there in a flash but I was the very first. I heard other voices saying ‘Who are you calling a fuckster?’ and ‘Go back where you came from!’ but I didn't say anything. Maybe I didn't trust my beak to produce such raw meaning because I just butted my head into Regent's breast. Like I knew how to fight! Like any of us did!

  I don't know why I automatically sided with Gunnersbury but that's what happened. Perhaps it was because she's such a peachy coochie (and even an old bird like me can't fail to see it) or perhaps it was just because a fight has two sides and I peeped I'd better join one or the other. Gunnersbury figures that I instinctively knew she was one of my own, a fellow Surb, and maybe that's the verity. But the fact is that, since us pigeons factionalized, you'll find honest Surb troopers who hail from the eaves of Westminster and the occasional RPF who once roosted on Mitcham Common. So how do you explain that?

  The scrimmage can't have lasted more than a minute (although, like I explained, a minute can bean hour to a pigeon) but I remember clocking the agog phyzogs of the surrounding niks; the quick-fire snapping of the bemused yellowsens and the head-scratching greysens who said things like, ‘You don't see that every day.’ Then Gunnersbury and Regent both wheeled away at exactly the same instant, each with a trophy in their beak, two scraps of the unilluminable stuff from the red and white box that looked to me like bones from the hulkingest pigeons you ever saw.

  Gunnersbury took a vertical and I was on her tail just like that, as though I believed she knew what had just happened and where she was heading. My old wings couldn't keep up but I squawked to her at the top of my call: ‘What's that? What's that you've got there?’

  I could hear her breathing, thick and fast, and her answer came muffled by the trophy in her beak. ‘It's the Remnant of Content,’ she called significantly (like that meant anything). And then she was gone, high over Leicester Square to Piccadilly and beyond.

  I was spooked and I don't mind admitting it. I headed west towards my roost because for the first time it felt like ‘home’ (with all the emotional frippery attached to that word). I was sure I was being chased although I didn't know who by; perhaps Regent and his cronies or maybe that hulkingest pigeon who'd lost his Remnant of Content. Don't ask me because I'm not suggesting it makes sense. But you can bet I chose to fly low, zigzagging down backstreets parallel to the Bayswater Road. And I wasn't the only one. Oh no! I scoped all kinds of other coochies, geezs and squibs with similar intentions and I realized that, whether they'd actually been in Trafalgar Square or not, the word had already got round (in every sense). They spotted me too but we avoided each other's beady eyes as though we each figured we might chance to look upon the phyzog of our fear. Let me illuminate it like this: I was scared and I was confused and my blood was piston pumping. So obviously that was a cocktail for anger and that's the verity.

  By the time I reached Notting Hill, my imagination was running unchecked and I was too anxious to wing another block so I caught my breath beneath the overhang slates of a low terrace. It was cold and damp and miserable under there and I didn't even have a clear view of the sky. But I figured it was the kind of place that no self-respecting geez would stop and, if a squib tried to join me, they'd have felt the point of my beak, no doubt.

  I must have perched in that one spot for hours (which felt like years) but it didn't calm my pipping pigeon heart one jot. I was all fired up with madness and fear and hatred and the fact that I couldn't say who I was angry with or scared of or hating only made those sensations run hotter. The old birds (me included) always warn that a pigeon who doesn't clock the sky for too long becomes a moonatic and perhaps that's the acorn of it. Because from my perch, I couldn't scope nut all and my bird brain ran riot with all kinds of imaginings as the daylight goldened and greyed and faded to black and the lampposts began to half-heartedly hum. I could have sat there all night. But I'd have gone crazy, no question.

  It was dark when I spotted a sweet below. Come to think of it, I might have seen her since (the night of the Declaration of War, perhaps) with the unilluminable savoury I call Mishap. But I can't be sure because most peepniks look alike to me. She was talking to two streetnik desperadoes (the kind who protect the best bins like they were their own preserve – a thought that would have once seemed ironic, if I'd known the word back then) and she had four feathers on her head that were the colour of a summer-evening sky over a roam-free Surb common. How can I illuminate? Those feathers captivated me and my racing pigeon heart quickened to impossible speeds.

  I fluttered out from my hiding place as silent as a breeze and I landed right on that sweet's head. At first she didn't notice but then the confused phyzogs of the streetniks alerted her and she began to shake her head from side to side to throw me off. But I recollect she didn't scream. Riding her movements, I tried to catch her hair in my beak for balance but nipped down on her ear instead. I hadn't meant to do that but the heat of her blood was a thrill. I dug my talons into her headgear and lifted it clean off and I took a forty-five awkwardly away. The hat was so heavy that I had to land on a shop awning just across the street. I don't know what came over me but the sensations of madness and fear and hatred suddenly overwhelmed me and I began to tear and pluck and shred those feathers as though they were the adornments of my most veritably vanitarious foe. I clocked the confused phyzogs of the three peepniks on the pavement below but I only stopped when another bird fluttered down next to me. I had been so consumed in my frenzy that I didn't even hear that pigeon's approach and I was as startled as a starling and I flapped my wings in fright.

  It was Gunnersbury. ‘For the sake of the heavens,’ she said. ‘I don't know what the fuck you're doing.’ She still held the Remnant of Content in her beak and there was something of the eagle in her eyes.

  Later, when we discussed it, Gunnersbury postulated that, in my confusion, I mistook that sweet's headgear for an RPF geez and no wonder I attacked. Maybe. But I'm hazarding that even the mooniest moonatic could tell the difference between a pigeon and four pink feathers on a hat. As for me, I illuminated it to Gunnersbury that I'd thought the feathers could be other trophies of Content (yeah, yeah… whatever). So she asked me why I was shredding them and I claimed that I was distraught when I realized my error. But the verity? Honestly, those feathers captivated me like the niks are captivated by a glamorous shop window and I wanted to possess such fine, delicate objects with their subtle colour and touch like duck down. But, when I had them to myself on that awning, I was disarmed by a thought so obvious it drove me to frenzy: what was I, Ravenscourt, a pigeon, to do with four pink feathers; other trophies of Content or not?

  Since the ‘battle of Trafalgar’ (as Gunnersbury likes to call it), the conflict has been illuminated, in reverse chronological order, in terms of personality, hatred, principle, territory, and the Remnants of Content (as snatched by Gunnersbury and Regent). But do our bird brains acknowledge that our reinventions of heroism and villainy and causes to champion and idols to worship have overlaid the verity of a scrimmage over unilluminable stuff dropped into the rubbish by Mishap. As we pigeons squabble over the contents of a dustbin, is there no triumph for the consciousness of consciousness?

  6

  Because poetry's disappointing

  The café in the Clapham Community Centre was packed. Indistinct beats pumped through the sound system and made black coffees shimmer in their cups. Acquaintances parted curtains of cigarette smoke to kiss each other on either cheek. Busy-bee, thirtysomething women with snoods beneath haystack hair fiddled with the microphone, speakers and the building blocks of the stage. Paintings by children from the next-door primary school hung precariously from the walls by peeling inches of masking tape. The linoleum floor was tacky underfoot.

  The café was a community facility and, as such, strained to be all things to all people. Signs on the wall read ‘No Smoking Before 8 p.m.’ in thick red capitals to ensure a clean-air environment for the local kids. But nobody took any notice and
the local kids figured it was the best place to stop for a clandestine cigarette on their way home from school. ‘I was gasping!’ they'd gasp as they sparked their first of the day and lounged on the plastic chairs. Then somebody or other's mother would storm in and drag somebody or other out by the ear and consign ten JPS to the dustbin from where they'd be retrieved by a laughing classmate.

  The café sold subsidized tea to the homeless and expensive bottled beer to jobless arty types with furrowed brows; it accepted Luncheon Vouchers for focaccia sandwiches with salad garnish at five quid a throw; it hosted meetings for women's groups and men's groups, mothers and toddlers, pensioners, alcoholics, wine tasters, cheese tasters, the local Magic Circle, the local church, the local junkies. There was once a double-booking by Male Awareness and Women's Refuge which led to three fights and, worse, two couplings.

  The crowd in the café tonight was suitably diverse. Kwesi had described it as a ‘black night’ but, typical for London, that meant no more than a bizarre mixture of ages, races and classes, archetypes and stereotypes. There was a social worker with a bad marriage and a mistress who used to be a client and had persuaded him of his undiscovered talent. There was a student who'd found a new outlet for his creative juices (other than Internet porn), a music teacher who wore his greying hair in a ponytail and still saw a rock star in the mirror and a genius on the page, a cab driver who'd named his kids after the Arsenal back four, a journalist who felt a cut above the rest – because she wrote for a living, didn't she? – and wished the rest would notice. There was a gaggle of ageing wholemeal hippies with opinions by the pound, a pack of Jamaicans with sharp clothes and sharp attitudes, a brood of ethnocentrics (of all races; a state of mind rather than culture) with pouting lips and perfect posture, and a flock of god knows who (well… a hat maker, a teacher, an identikit bottle blonde and a tech-stock victim).

  This crowd in the café? You wouldn't have thought they had anything in common. But they did. They were all poets. Or wannabe poets. Or friends of poets. Or friends of wannabe poets. Because tonight was Per-Verse, the café's monthly celebration of spoken word.

  ‘These people are united,’ said one nose-pierced hippy solemnly. ‘By the love of verse.’

  But she was wrong and she probably knew as much. Because poetry was merely the banner they sat beneath, the rallying call that had them scurrying from all parts of London. Poetry was the flag run up the mast of the good ship Disappointment but it was disappointment that brought them all here; disappointment with themselves or each other, with their fate or fortune. And they expressed this various, shadowy, ineffable but nonetheless undeniable sensation through poetics; in the words themselves or the performance or merely the fact of being there.

  Performance poetry is not a meritocracy. Generally the stars of this scene were those who'd hung around it the longest. Sometimes their poetry improved and sometimes it got worse but it didn't much matter since the main thing was that they were the most perennially disappointed. And it was this that had led Kwesi to top the bill at Per-Verse at the CCC and he was revelling in the limelight, moving from group to group, hugging hippies, touching skin, shaking hands and kiss-kissing.

  Tom, Tariq, Freya and Ami had taken a table close to the door. None of them had been to Per-Verse before (Kwesi had never topped the bill before) but that wasn't the reason they weren't talking. They were each stuck in the traffic of their own disappointments, eyes straight ahead, brains chugging, like the buses in the jams on the Holloway Road. They fitted right in.

  Tom was wondering where Murray and Karen were. And then he wondered why he wondered because Murray was always late (always used to be, anyway) and Karen was probably with him. He didn't know why this thought bothered him so much (because he was past that, wasn't he? At least that's what he told Tejananda) but it did. He glanced at Freya and he felt himself bristle. There was something about the way Freya sipped her juice that wound him up, that nervous look like she was scared she was being watched. Tom twiddled his thumbs beneath the table and chewed on his bottom lip. These days he was irritated by everything Freya did and he knew it wasn't her fault.

  Tariq drained the last of his beer and smacked the empty back on the table. It was one of a line of three. He was drinking for England because he'd been fighting with Emma again and had left her at home with the baby. He knew that getting drunk would only make it worse but that, in some unadmitted way, was kind of the point. Freya was smiling at nobody. She felt guilty about her juice that Tariq had bought because she couldn't really afford to buy a round herself and she knew that Tariq, for all his carefree magnanimity, couldn't really afford it either. Two weeks of Freya Franklin Hats and she'd spent more on cappuccino than she'd taken in sales (twelve pounds to eight; four coffees to three hat-pins and a scarf for a fiver). And what was Tom so moody about? It wasn't her fault (whatever it was).

  Freya turned to Identikit Ami and immediately felt worse. Because Ami always looked so beautiful (albeit in that telly way which meant that, if you stared at her for too long, you might be almost spooked by the symmetry of her features). Feeling Freya's eyes upon her, Ami quickly looked elsewhere and tucked her hair behind her ear. She didn't want any attention because she'd already been stopped three times that day, mistaken first for a VJ from MTV, then that Brit-in-Hollywood actress and finally the girl from the cereal ad with the chimps in pyjamas.

  The whole monkey thing had been the most trying. She'd been hanging morosely from a strap in the rush-hour tube on her way to yet another meeting (with fortyish TV producers in outfits at least a decade too young) when she'd felt an arm snake around her shoulder. Spinning round, she'd found herself confronted by a leering, florid businessman with no neck and breath that smelled of milky coffee. She'd been about to knee him in the bollocks when he'd said: ‘So what do your little monkeys eat for breakfast?’ She'd looked helplessly around the carriage and found that all the other passengers were smiling too.

  Now, sitting in the CCC, she considered the accessibility of fame; that the businessman should have felt comfortable hugging her like a favoured goddaughter. And she wasn't even the right woman.

  She knew that he must have vaguely recognized her and she felt a little sick as she wondered which cable channels he watched. Perhaps it was her spell anchoring Surf 'n' Turf (the ill-fated Internet-gambling show on Tech Television), or her time fronting OBs on the Weather Channel or, worst of all, her stint as the ‘croupier in a bustier’ on late-night TVX. She'd only agreed to the latter because the company claimed they were trying to move into mainstream programming. She knew that fame was getting cheaper and so was she.

  Freya was feeling uncomfortable so she decided to make conversation. She couldn't think of an opening gambit so she turned to Tariq and asked perkily, ‘So how's business?’ Because that seemed safe enough.

  Tom looked up and flashed a glance at her. She didn't get it. Typical.

  ‘Great,’ Tariq said. ‘Just great.’ And he accentuated the final ‘t’ to make sure she understood it was anything but.

  Freya frowned. She realized she'd plunged head first into sticky shit. Why hadn't Tom warned her? She knew that Tariq's business was in trouble but she hadn't known how much; largely because she hadn't the first idea what his business was. She cleared her throat: ‘That bad?’

  Tariq forced out a you-gotta-laugh laugh. ‘I sacked my secretary today. I had to explain to her that we were losing six grand a week. She said if we were losing that much then what difference did it make to keep her on. She kind of had a point.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tom was empathizing. ‘I mean, shit.’

  ‘Oh,’ Freya said.

  Ami looked blank. ‘What exactly do you do?’ she asked and Freya was pleased.

  Tariq tried another of those laughs. ‘What do we do? It's a good question, Ames. Are you sure you want to know?’

  Ami shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Basically, we've patented a predictive technology that enables pattern modelling of apparently chaoti
c behaviours, random events and the like via an extremely user-friendly, wysiwyg interface. Sorry. That's “What You See Is What You Get”. To be honest, the algorithms involved are nothing special. But what's unique is the interface, the flexibility of the technology and, therefore, the potential business applications.’

  Ami looked blank. ‘I have no idea what you're talking about.’

  ‘OK. Think of a trend. Say people start buying a particular brand or style of jeans and before you know it those jeans are everywhere. The makers and their competitors will want to understand how those jeans are so successful, right? Generally this involves analysis of advertising and marketing and the collation of material from things like focus groups; but, frankly, that kind of information is always guesswork at best. Our technology, on the other hand, takes as a fundamental premise that there's no such thing as random choice and, through processing countless variables, produces a precise statistical analysis of both the history of the trend to this point and its likely future development. What that means is that if you see some kid buying the jeans in a shop in Croydon, you'll be able to examine his previous behaviours and, what's more, what he's going to buy next. It's like playing god, you know?’

  ‘But that's amazing!’ Freya said. She sounded genuinely enthusiastic.

  ‘Oh yeah. It's great.’ There was that ‘t’ again. ‘Trouble is, I didn't want to go down the venture-capital route and I didn't want a loan; so I fronted thirty per cent and got into bed with one of the dot-com success stories for the rest of the cash. Trouble is, they've just gone tits up and now we're brassic. I lock myself away for a year doing R and D and I look up to find everyone's buggered off. Shall I tell you what it's like? You ever play hide-and-seek at a kids' party? You hide in some cupboard for hours and then, when you think you've won, you come out to find all your little friends have left. And you know what else? They've eaten all the birthday cake.’