The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  Emma's stumbling over her words. ‘Because… you know… Tariq says… you can make it happen, Murray. You're the one who can make it happen.’

  ‘And Tariq wants to, does he?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, he will.’

  ‘What about the others? What about Tom and Karen? What about Kwesi, Freya and Ami?’

  ‘They'll do it.’ She's nodding with a certainty she doesn't feel. ‘I mean, you know, with a little persuasion.’

  He shrugs. ‘So we'll do it, then.’

  They are standing opposite each other, no more than a foot apart. Tommy is wailing in the background; fearful for where his mum might have got to. Murray rotates his left shoulder a couple of times and raises his eyebrows at Emma. She feels suddenly uneasy, like she knows what's coming next but she can't quite believe it.

  Murray says, ‘Same time tomorrow, then?’ and Emma's stomach twists and she thinks she might throw up.

  ‘I'm sorry?’

  He shakes his head and smiles. ‘Only joking, china. Know what I mean?’

  13

  Murray-fun

  From the mid-sixties to the late seventies, the UK saw a brief rush of liberal, quasi-Christian publishing (described in the industry variously as the ‘Bach effect’ or the ‘Narnia lag’). Deep in this forgotten forest of good intentions lies a slim volume called The Spiritual Self by the Very Reverend Desmond Payne. It was published in 1974 by the now-defunct Church-Temple Press with an initial and, as it transpired, sole print run of 250.

  Outside the copyright libraries, there are only four copies still existent. The author's sits in a bookcase in a bedroom in the residential wing of the Highgate Buddhist Centre. This room is rented to the sixty-three-year-old who is now known (personally and professionally) as Tejananda and runs a lucrative psychotherapy practice out of the West End. But, despite the success of both his business and the last five years' meditative contemplation, Tejananda cannot look at the title without feeling a profound if imprecise melancholy.

  Of the other three, one props up the till in a Forest Hill junk shop, its spine long since torn off and its contents unknown, and another lies on a table in a café in Playa Del Carmen on Mexico's Caribbean coast where tourists can swap reading material over frijoles and guacamole. The third, however, is unique for three reasons: it is the only copy to have changed location in the last five years (having been pilfered from the LMT library by an ex-student less than two months ago), the only one that is ever opened (including, in fact, those in the copyright libraries and the author's own) and the only one that periodically sings ‘The Red Flag’ (by virtue of a small piece of a greetings card that once prophesied a 1987 Labour election victory).

  This piece of card is lodged firmly between pages twenty-two and twenty-three at the end of the former Reverend Payne's introduction (pompously titled ‘Self and Other’). If you were to pick up this copy from its place on the mantelpiece in the living-room of the flat above the Indian minimarket in the homogeneous London neighbourhood, you might think that someone had purposefully marked out this section for your attention (especially, perhaps, when you triggered the card's mechanism and heard the opening bars). You would be wrong. This is not to say, however, that you wouldn't find something useful therein that could offer tip-of-the-tongue explanations of issues that have been puzzling you.

  The former Reverend Payne concludes his introduction as follows:

  There is little doubt that modern Western society regards faith and its implied leap beyond logic with arrogant scepticism. It seems that faith, in its traditional understanding, is as deeply unfashionable as it is contemporaneously ubiquitous. Because it is my contention that we all still believe in something; whether it be the miracle of the atonement, the rights of the trade unions or that a new motorcar will ensure our happiness. Indeed, some reputable commentators with whom I largely concur have suggested that it is faith itself that is significant, rather than its object (the ‘Faith as Identity’ model).

  It is the current trend, however, to dismiss faith with whatever blunt philosophical instrument comes easiest to hand and the most common accusation is that faith is in some way ‘selfish’. There is little doubt that such an accusation raises the ire of Christians everywhere but it is my belief that any new spirituality must take account of such criticism. In this humble work (mostly derived from my own essays, sermons and workshops and personal study of Eastern religious traditions), I propose a new understanding which may be summarized in the following ten-point thesis:

  Faith, especially in its infancy, may indeed be ‘selfish’ but this adjective rarely offers a complete description.

  ‘Selfish faith’ often expresses one or more ‘Core Personality Flaw’ (for example, arrogance or fear; ambition or self-absorption; conflicted identity or a tendency towards self-destruction).

  Selfishness must be distinguished from ‘true faith’ which we may better term ‘devotion’.

  Selfish faith is inherently immature and, in time, usually leads to devotion.

  Generally, however, faith is cyclical. As selfishness usually extends to devotion, so devotion usually returns to selfishness.

  These changes in the nature of faith are often (but not always) triggered by a specific event (positive or negative) in a person's life (‘Moments of Truth’, as I term them, from the subject's perspective).

  Unfortunately, selfishness may appear devotional and devotion, selfish.

  The duration of these cycles expands like ripples across a pond before one or other (i.e., ‘selfishness’ or ‘devotion’) eventually becomes, in the subject's subconscious, immutable (‘The Die is Cast’ theory).

  This immutability is, of course, illusory. Change is always possible.

  Unfortunately, the subjective nature of faith itself ensures that the faithful rarely attain the perspective to recognize their own nature (or, indeed, exactly what it is they believe in).

  Judging by the impact The Spiritual Self made on the contemporary religious debate (none) and the author's later conversion to Buddhism, it would be tempting to write off the book as adding nothing to understandings of the human experience. It was intended, as is expressed on page one, paragraph one, as a ‘treatise for contemporary Christianity’. But one person who might have found more personal resonance in the Reverend Payne's hypothesis – not least because it correlated with patterns he'd been discussing with his therapist, Tejananda – was Tom. Unfortunately Tom had never read The Spiritual Self (although he had once heard it sing, while he was cramming in the LMT library five minutes before the first of his finals). What's more, though he explicitly concurred with most of Tejananda's behavioural modelling, his faith in the therapist was still in its selfish stage and, therefore, he didn't really listen.

  An objective reflection upon Tom's relationship with Karen, however, might usefully point to these cycles of selfishness and devotion, identify several Moments of Truth and note the expanding ripples of the cycles through time. If, for example, you attempted to piece together the first fifth of their decade-spanning relationship – the time at LMT – from the information in his therapist's notebook, your story might go something like this…

  After the incident with Kush, Karen spent most of the following summer holiday living with Tom and his parents at the house in Hampton Wick and it didn't take long for their nascent friendship to blossom into something more. This was partly for the prosaic reason of proximity and partly due to other, less obvious stimuli. In the first place, Tom's parents took to Karen immediately. They asked no questions about why she might need to stay with them, welcomed her hospitably and actively encouraged the relationship (particularly Tom's dad, who saw a girlfriend as altogether preferable to his son's occasional and, to him, bizarre bouts of Catholicism). For her part, Karen had never lived among a nuclear family and she found it enormously appealing. She liked Tom's parents by return but, more than that, she enjoyed their easy manner with each other, their unspoken affections, their cosy routines. Every evening,
Mrs Dare would produce a meal (with fresh meat and vegetables as opposed to the cellophane packaging and microwave instructions Karen was used to) and, when he sat down, Mr Dare would sigh in satisfaction and say something like, ‘Look at this! You're fantastic, my love. You're a fantastic woman.’

  Karen felt there was something magically idyllic about such a situation. She felt like Michael J. Fox walking back into the McFly household at the end of Back To The Future and she basked in vicarious suburban comfort.

  As for Tom, he thrived in his perceived role as Karen's protector. Initially this meant listening to a lot of stories about her ex.

  Kush was a small-time dealer, Karen said, had been for as long as she'd known him. It had never bothered her but, in the last year or so, he'd changed. He'd become short-tempered, aggressive and occasionally and increasingly violent. She reminisced he was getting high on his own supply. She reminisced about their plans together – her and Kush – how she was going to get a degree and a good job and he'd jack in the dealing and they'd settle down. She talked about this matter-of-factly and Tom listened in silence, nodding his head and prompting with the occasional question. He pretended to be unsurprised and he said ‘Right’ and ‘Of course’ and he rather liked his involvement in this other world he knew nothing about, one step removed. And isn't this the very essence of the modern city? When empathy is often less life skill than second-hand (and mostly egotistical?) recreation.

  Gradually, these conversations progressed from late night around the kitchen table to small hours between the sheets and gradually Tom started to offer opinions and gradually Karen began to listen to them until they weighed more than any others.

  Sometimes Tom drove Karen in his dad's Mazda to the council flat in Peckham; to pick up an item of clothing or a book or for a cup of tea with her sister, Danielle. Then Tom would sit on the threadbare velveteen sofa while Danielle eyed him (suspiciously, he thought) and said things like, ‘He's been round again, Kaz’, and Karen shook her head and muttered, ‘So? What do you want me to do?’

  With every reference to Kush, Tom half-expected him to come banging on the door at that very moment and he'd square his shoulders and convince himself he was prepared for confrontation. But Kush never did come round; not while they were there.

  Aside from Kush, Karen and Tom's other conversations focused mostly upon Murray. At the end of term, he'd taken their numbers and promised to call and somehow, what with his apparent enthusiasm to see them, they hadn't thought to ask for his. In fact, throughout their time at college, they never saw Murray during the holidays and they eventually got used to it and stopped asking why. This is not as surprising as it may sound; universities are frequently hermetic places where many relationships don't stray beyond the last day of term. But that first summer, it struck them as strange and they tried to imagine the reasons and they had ever more fantastical conversations about his possible family background, where he might come from and what he might be up to.

  Later, when Tom reflected on how he and Karen got together, he concluded that Murray's absence was probably instrumental. In fact, considering his friend's obvious care for the two of them, he even suspected it was a deliberate ploy on Murray's part since it both provided a connection and left a space which they had to fill together. Certainly when they returned to LMT for their second year, Murray didn't seem surprised to see them hand in hand and Tom felt comfortable in his role as Karen's protector and the protection that this, conversely, afforded him.

  For the next two years, Tom's sense of the relationship – the comfort – was largely, in his own mind, unchanged. He was devoted to Karen and, indeed, devoted to Murray, too (at the top of an early page in Tejananda's patient notes the word ‘BILATERAL’ is written in screaming red capitals).

  In fact, though Tom has chosen to forget them, there were spells when he lapsed into indisputable selfishness. Two in particular stand out.

  When Kush was finally banged up for pushing rocks, Karen insisted upon visiting him and Tom couldn't understand why. Karen shrugged and said, ‘We went out for years, Tom. I've got to go and see him.’

  ‘After everything he did?’

  ‘I've just got to.’

  ‘I'll come with you.’

  ‘No,’ Karen said. ‘No, Tom. I'll go on my own.’

  Tom was so angry that, afterwards, he didn't ask how the visit had gone. He thought she was being selfish (a common assumption of selfishness) and so she could cope on her own. And when she burst into tears and told him about Kush's anger and threats (threats against her and, indeed, against himself, too), he hugged her half-heartedly and couldn't resist saying, ‘What did you expect?’

  Or what about the time, not long after, when Tom was walking past the Curzon on Panton Street? He was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Murray and Karen emerging from the cinema amid the crowds. They were nudging each other and laughing and swigging Coke from the same bottle. It wasn't, of course, seeing them together that caught him off guard but the oblivious and, to Tom's eye, undeniable intimacy of their interaction. What's more, when Karen spotted him, she looked embarrassed. Definitely. And Tom was speechless with jealousy.

  ‘It's The Breakfast Club,’ Karen said by way of explanation. ‘We were passing and you know how I've always wanted to see it on the big screen again.’

  Tom wanted to be cool but he couldn't help himself and he turned on his heels and stormed off into Soho. It was a few days before he ran into Murray in the canteen but he was still so angry that he could barely articulate anything.

  ‘You and Karen, you know…’ he began. ‘What… I mean… you know… What… it's just…’

  Murray didn't look up. He was irritably trying to squeeze all the garlic butter out of a chicken Kiev. ‘Don't worry, china,’ Murray muttered. ‘It was just sex. I wanted to fuck your girlfriend and she was, like, “OK, then. Just so long as I've got something to take my mind off it.” So I took her to her favourite movie.’ He glanced at Tom. ‘You do know I'm joking, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Tom said. ‘Right.’

  Of course, these two Moments of Truth that triggered him to selfishness can, in Tejananda's model, be counter-pointed by two others with the reverse effect. It wasn't more than a month after Karen visited Kush in prison that Tom took ecstasy for the first time. The tensions between the couple had already thawed a little by then but it was sharing an E that finally reverted Tom to devotional clarity. Karen said that she'd never taken drugs with Kush, never even smoked a little puff, because it had always seemed so sordid. And Tom, basking on his ecstasy cloud, felt confident in this intimacy which seemed like purity itself compared to alley deals with Peckham crackheads.

  As for Tom's brief spell of jealousy, that was turned on its head by an external stimulus. He was superficially reassured by Murray's denials – he never even confronted Karen – but it was the outbreak of the Gulf War that actually triggered the change. He'd been drinking with Tariq and, on their way home, they stopped in a kebab shop on the Edgware Road. Next to the illuminated menu, a small black-and-white TV broadcast the first fireworks of Desert Storm in real time – American pilots throwing victory signs on a Gulf airstrip; flash, darkness, flash, darkness; a mob torching the stars-and-stripes; flash, darkness – and, around the counter, a group of men with Saddam Hussein moustaches shook their heads and muttered in what sounded like Arabic to Tom. Despite Tariq's reassurance that they were probably Turks, Tom didn't want to hang around.

  That night he dreamed beerily of chemical warfare and a ravaged London (that looked little different but for the lack of people) and he woke up with a screaming hangover and a poignant sense of lonely mortality. He resolved to find Karen immediately and eventually tracked her down to the Students' Union where she was painting placards for a planned demonstration outside the American embassy. He accompanied her on the march and held the other side of her banner that, on that first day, bore an obtuse slogan – ‘It's oil or nothing for Bush!!!’ – given weight only by the t
hree exclamation marks. But Tom, in his fragile state, believed that Karen knew what she was doing and his world was safe in her hands. Maybe even vice versa.

  Tom himself felt this was a story of significance so he told it to Tejananda in minute and excruciating detail and, between yawns, the therapist wrote, ‘DECREASING CIRCLES OF SELF? Soya milk PROTECTOR VS PROTECTED? onions, cracked wheat EFFECTING – pilates six p.m. Don't forget breathing exercises! – VS AFFECTING.’

  Despite these occasional hiccups, a speed-reading of the therapist's notebook makes it difficult to disagree with Tom's assertion that the two years of the relationship at LMT were the most… the most what? Tom inserts the word ‘comfortable’ at this point but an objective observer might find a simpler word like ‘successful’ more useful. And, if you believe the weight of evidence from the case notes, the main reason for this was Murray.

  Murray was Tom and Karen's spice, the piquancy, the zest, the consciousness, the added value. All successful couples have it; a shared passion of philosophy, activity or sex (even all three, if some show-offs are to be believed). Tom and Karen had Murray. That is not to say that they didn't share the other things too but, in the aftermath of their split, almost a decade down the line, Karen couldn't help but notice how those passions had faded in Murray's absence.

  Such transference may sound implausible but, for his part, Tom must have agreed because look how your story of the relationship (third-hand via Tejananda's scribbles from Tom's reminiscences) concentrates on anecdotes about Murray.

  Murray was entertainment and, for their last two years at LMT, Tom and Karen indulged in Murray-fun – individually, as a couple and with Tariq too. Murray-fun? It came in all sorts of different forms; planned and spontaneous, momentary and drawn out, safe and dangerous, pointless and pointed, kind and vicious and utterly delicious.

  Tom told Tejananda about the confidence tricks. Like games of Find the Lady on Holborn street corners where Murray would deal the cards and he or Tariq played the stooge. Murray's fingers were deft and his timing immaculate and he took cocky American exchange students for up to a ton. But sometimes he liked a mark's style, especially if they were a made-to-measure sucker, and he'd deliberately lose all his winnings and more besides and he seemed to get off on the expression of bemused pleasure on the mark's face as he or she tucked away a fat roll of tenners.