The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  ‘Look at that!’

  It was Ami who spotted the pigeon beneath an exhausted and unhealthy-looking sapling and they stopped to investigate. The bird, a tatty-looking creature with uneven feathers and what could only be described as a limp, was repeatedly circling the slim trunk. But it wasn't the bird's movements, odd as they were, that caught the attention so much as the bizarre, palsied twitches of its head and the low grumbling sound that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep within its breast. And it continued its narrow circles, again and again, as though this road to nowhere was its only hope.

  It really seemed to bother Ami. ‘What's it doing?’ she exclaimed. ‘It looks demented. It looks so weird; so, like, human. I mean, what's going on with the pigeons in this city?’

  Murray was shaking his head. ‘It's lost its mind,’ he said quietly.

  They watched it for a while, fascinated in spite of themselves. God knows how long it had been beating this path and god knows how long it could stay at it. People jogged, hurried or strolled past. Some threw the three of them a curious sidewise glance but none stopped.

  Emma said, ‘Have you noticed how many people are carrying umbrellas at the moment? Even though it's OK weather.’

  Ami looked around and saw she was right. ‘Yeah. I saw that earlier. There was even a jogger holding one. What's that about?’

  ‘I don't know. Tariq reckons they're worried about the pigeons and want to have something to beat them off with. It's like when everyone's freaked by terrorism and all those people buy gas masks. I mean, it makes sense really. The pigeons are being really weird.’

  ‘Fucking weird,’ Ami said and then she giggled. ‘But carrying a brolly? As a weapon? Shit! When did that happen? London's gone crazy.’

  ‘It's amazing what people can get used to,’ Murray observed. ‘Even think is a good idea.’

  They stared at it a little longer; like they expected the pigeon to do something else, add a little quirk to its already quirky performance. But it just continued its deranged patrol around the tree trunk; grumbling to itself like an old tramp or bag lady.

  Eventually Murray said, ‘Let's go.’

  But Ami protested, ‘But what are we going to do? I mean, we can't just leave it.’

  ‘Do? What do you want to do?’

  ‘Maybe we should tell someone. Aren't there park keepers or something?’

  ‘Tell them what? “Excuse me, china, one of your pigeons has gone mental.” Like he'd give a flying fuck.’

  Emma said, ‘He's right, Ames. There's nothing we can do. Come on. Let's go.’

  ‘But it's suffering! Look. You can see it. It's suffering.’

  Murray made a strange grunting noise. ‘Join the club. We're all suffering. It's only a pigeon.’

  ‘I just think it should be put down or something.’

  Murray took out a cigarette and lit it quickly. Emma was watching him. He suddenly seemed fidgety, shifting from foot to foot. He took a sharp drag on his cigarette and twisted an arm back over his head like he was trying to reach an impossible itch. She wondered what he was thinking.

  He walked over to the tree and squatted down by the pigeon. The bird didn't fly away or even appear to notice him; it just carried on circling. Murray said, ‘Do you want me to?’ the cigarette dangling from his lips.

  ‘Want you to what?’

  ‘Wring its neck. Only take a second.’

  Emma made a yuk noise but Ami thought about it and said, ‘We ought to do something.’

  ‘Do you want me to or not?’

  ‘I think so,’ Ami said and then, ‘Yeah. Go on. It's for the best.’

  When Murray picked up the bird in his left hand, it suddenly squawked into life and began to thrash against his grip. Ami exclaimed, ‘Shit!’ and Emma unconsciously stepped forward, in front of Tommy's pram. Murray tried to grab the pigeon's head in his right hand but it was twisting this way and that, pecking and sniping. Eventually he caught it, wrapped his fist around the head and gave it a sharp yank. Its body fell limp.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Yeah. Just it bit me.’ He scrunched his face and his eyes tight shut. ‘Poor fucking thing.’

  He tried to take his right hand away, to open his palm to show her. But when he did, the pigeon's head came with it, snapped right off the body and hung by its beak from a small wound in his hand. Emma gasped and Ami said, ‘Jesus!’ Even Murray looked a little disturbed, dropping the body at the foot of the tree. He carefully unpicked the beak from his flesh and Emma gave him a tissue, which he pressed into his hand. He shrouded the head in another tissue and then lobbed it into the nearest bin.

  They were quiet as they began to walk away then Ami said, ‘Do you think we did the right thing?’ And Murray started to laugh. Emma and Ami soon joined in. It was kind of funny when you thought about it.

  16

  Pyaa-pyaa duppy

  Freya Franklin Hats was tucked into the backstreets between Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove that estate agents had begun to call Westbourne Village. Freya had chosen her location well since the neighbourhood was up and coming and beginning to teem with small businesses bursting ambition. A graphic-design studio with glass-blocked front was cheek by jowl with an exclusive lingerie shop, all clean lines and somewhat clinical décor; an organic delicatessen that appeared to have been entirely furnished in hessian sat snugly next to an ethnic outlet selling cheap exotica from the four corners at phenomenal mark-ups. Freya had been lucky to sign her lease when she did because even her tiny space, broadened with mirrors, would now have easily exceeded her budget. Certainly, many of the area's longer-serving residents – generally immigrants of all creeds, colours and exotic tendencies – were already being squeezed out by the rising prices. Such is the nature of London, where bohemia is chased, even in its celebration, leaving only the most pallid ghosts of multiculture in its wake.

  Freya Franklin Hats was busy. Or, at least, just about as busy as a boutique hat shop should get. Probably busier. Because it's not like we're a supermarket, Freya thought.

  The ‘we’ was royal as she was still running the shop on her own and she was almost beginning to miss the empty days when she could take her time over coffee, ensure her bookkeeping was just so, practise her latest mantra and fantasize about the glamorous customer who was sure to come in at any moment. Because now there was a steady stream through the door.

  Some of them were indeed glamorous, or rich anyway (same difference; like the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea) but a lot were just browsing. There were dark-skinned Italian women, elegantly dressed with elegant friends, who pored over the quality of Freya's beadwork and stitching. There were Japanese women who were super-polite and spoke no English and could have been any age between fifteen and fifty. There were Americans with college T-shirts, blonde highlights and hockey players' thighs who asked, ‘Can I get your stuff online? I can't? That's, like, so retro.’ And there were English roses who bloomed in front of the mirror only to wilt as soon as they left the shop to be confronted by Jasper's breath and then Jasper – ‘How are you, my dear?’ – who, perhaps enjoying the new prosperity, seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the kerb opposite. Freya made a mental note to ask him to move on. Again.

  Although the shop was busy, this busyness probably constituted no more than fifty customers a day. But the trouble with hats was that they, and those who tried them on, required individual attention. The way Freya saw it, a hat was the highest species on the evolutionary scale of apparel. A T-shirt was just a T-shirt. A top was a top, not a shirt. A pair of jeans, however fashionably labelled and personally styled, was still only a pair of jeans. Even a suit, bespoke tailored and lovingly individual, was nonetheless a suit. But a hat? Apart from shoes, whose function left little room for manoeuvre, and socks, whose every attempt at flamboyance led nowhere but embarrassment, hat was the only item of clothing that referenced just the part of the body it covered and nothing of its own nature or design.
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br />   What's more, for Freya, a hat's success or failure was always discovered in its wearing. Some designers seemed to view hats as works of art – sculptures of velvet and net, reed and plastic – that found their best expression in shop windows, alone. But Freya knew a hat could be measured only in its symbiosis with its owner; something which depended not just on the shape of skull or style of dress but also upon the confidence of bearing, the quality of smile, the tendons of neck in turning, even the bob of shy head. Consequently, before a sale, Freya felt compelled to elicit her customers' true nature right there and then on the shop floor. For how else would she know if her creation really suited? And she surely owed them that; both hats and heads alike.

  A self-possessed, bright young thing, for example, could try on an effervescent marvel that bubbled berries and beads and look every inch the It Girl as she preened in front of the mirror. But what use would that be if she flailed in the breezes on the downs or flushed with her second glass of champagne or flopped beneath the gaze of a dozen men? So Freya would gently tease out her customers' insecurities as she teased the hat to its perfect angle. ‘Because what's the use of a hat that only looks good in the bedroom?’ she said and smiled reassuringly. Another sale.

  Anyway. The point was that, after those first struggling weeks of sell-a-hat-pin, buy-a-latté, Freya Franklin Hats had undoubtedly picked up. But Freya was just too hectic to consider exactly how this might have happened, let alone the implications.

  Of course, it had helped that the beret-wearing ethnocentric woman Murray charmed at Per-Verse had turned out to be a minor aristocrat in disguise. When not slumming it with slam poets, she was a Home Counties girl with a double-barrelled surname and plastic on Daddy's account and, the following week, she'd come into the shop with a wedding emergency.

  Freya had done her proud with a creation of understated elegance with an unusual, irregular brim that granted a certain nobility to the woman's otherwise unfortunate nose. And Ms Home Counties was so thrilled that she recommended the shop to her friends and Freya became the marriage's main milliner, with no less than three hats featured on the pages of Tatler's ‘Party Scene’. As Kwesi put it: ‘Good job you came to my gig. And thank god Murray spotted the toff muff in mufti.’

  Lately Kwesi had taken to hanging around the shop a lot and, oddly, that had helped too. His triumph at the CCC seemed to have done wonders for his confidence, though it was hard to tell how brittle this new shell might be or whether, as Freya considered it, it was largely a bedroom hat. But he'd certainly learned that manner was everything and self-possession was nine tenths of that law so he'd taken to leaning on Freya's counter with a street scowl on his face that he counterpointed by throwing warm, complimentary remarks and even the odd couplet of verse in the direction of the exclusively female clientele.

  He'd been there when the ethnocentric toff muff came in and her evident delight at meeting Kwesi – the K-ster, K the poet – had encouraged him further; especially when she'd asked him in that champagne-and-oyster voice to ‘drop some lyrical bombs’. He was only too happy to oblige and, following the visits of her friends, this became a regular feature of Freya Franklin Hats and countless wealthy women were utterly charmed by this cool black dude who offered them personal poetic praise at those daunting moments of heightened, hat-buying vanity. Truth be told, Kwesi generally trotted out the same lines again and again – stuff about ‘porcelain skin and summer wind’ and the hat as ‘The soul's cap, the soul clap / Pause; applause’ – but since the purchase of a hat, even for the recklessly rich, was a biannual activity at most, it didn't much matter.

  At first Freya had been dubious about the benefits of Kwesi's soul claptrap but the response had been so unanimously positive that she'd bitten her tongue as customers bought her creations while buying into a perceived urban chic. Kwesi had even begun to talk about delaying his fast-approaching thirtieth-birthday retirement and both ES Magazine and Time Out had been on the phone suggesting they might feature Freya Franklin Hats in their shopping pages.

  Freya remembered what Murray had said to her at Kwesi's gig. He'd been right, all she'd needed was a bit of word-of-mouth publicity to achieve the success that now seemed so rightfully – fatefully, even – hers. Where, very recently, London had been a fortified castle surrounded by a deep moat and guarded by elves and goblins who pissed on your head from the battlements, she now found herself standing on those same ramparts, looking down at all manner of peasants as, behind her, fine ladies in Freya Franklin Hats called her down to eat from the hog on a spit.

  So the only trouble with this new position was that she was so damn busy. Her stock was selling as fast as she could make it and the nine-to-six flow of customers (ten to four on Sundays) left her no time to even glance at her business plan, let alone figure out how she might reschedule her loan or find a shop assistant with the necessary mixture of innocent candour and knowing bullshit. What's more, it didn't help that, apart from Kwesi, several other acquaintances had taken to regular visits as if she had time to burn.

  There was Jasper, of course, and he proved a tricky tramp to shift, standing outside for hours at a time, quaffing Special Brew and attempting to engage every customer and passerby in convivial conversation. He would move on with a humble bow any time Freya asked but he would always reappear within ten minutes or so; a cigarette butt between his fingers and that toothless smile curling his face like an autumn leaf.

  In fact, Jasper wasn't too much of a problem since his manners were at least as unfailing as his stench. But Jasper's presence on the pavement often attracted Learie, the Jamaican with reputed voodoo skills, who had recently developed a new aggressive streak and begun to harangue all-comers in indecipherable patois.

  On one occasion, Learie had got quite out of hand and well out of order with a smart woman of Arab appearance and Kwesi had taken it upon himself to try and sort it out. Unfortunately Kwesi's greeting – ‘What's up, my brother? You cool?’ – had only provoked Learie further.

  ‘Brudda?’ he'd exclaimed and advanced upon Kwesi brandishing a bottle. ‘Ku pan bag-o-wire yout' come een like 'im stoosh bakra. Cho! If I still hef the bucky me hefe shot teeth in yuh, son, fe real.’ And Kwesi had been forced to beat a hasty and uncomprehending retreat.

  Aside from Jasper and Learie, there was also Big-In-Property Jackson. He'd come in a couple of days after the shop had opened. There was a church in the area that he was thinking about converting into studios, he said. He was passing and he decided to, you know, see for himself.

  Jackson looked around the shop with what seemed like genuine interest: ‘What's this? Felt? And you stitched the sequins?’ But Freya couldn't take her eyes off the dressing on the end of his nose that sang absurdity above his button-down collar, double-breasted lapel and lilac silk tie. ‘It's not as bad as it looks,’ he muttered. ‘They said it won't scar but there's always plastic surgery. At the end of the day, Nick Jackson'll do what's right for Nick Jackson.’

  He took to dropping in every once in a while and, though she was busy, Freya decided she liked him a lot better since he'd lost a chunk of nose to a pigeon. Disliked him a lot less, anyway.

  After one visit, Kwesi said, ‘What's that guy want?’

  Freya shrugged. ‘Apparently he's working round here.’

  ‘You reckon he's trying it on?’

  ‘Trying it on?’

  ‘With you I mean.’

  ‘What? No way.’

  ‘I hope not, Freya. I mean, the guy's scum. He's a no-holds-barred, self-important wanker. Definitely.’

  ‘You don't like him?’ Freya laughed. ‘He's not that bad, K.’

  The next time Jackson came in, he stood in the very middle of the shop and nodded approvingly while Freya was sat behind the counter, snipping a few loose ends off a new design. He said, ‘You've got a good set-up here. You should let Nick Jackson introduce you to a few people some time, make a few connections.’

  Freya said, ‘Sure. Why not?’ without looking up but
she did wonder if Kwesi was right and maybe Jackson was trying it on after all. She dismissed the idea quickly because she was somewhat off men at the moment and wasn't up for a relationship. And besides, she didn't really have the time. But she couldn't help feeling flattered nonetheless.

  Part but by no means all of the reason Freya was ‘off men’ and part but by no means all of the reason she had little time was that Bast was still pursuing her with thick-skinned vigour. He came by at least once a day, flopped into the one armchair (brown leather, distressed) and lounged like a lord; feet on the coffeetable, legs spread and groin to the fore. Absentmindedly, and occasionally chuckling, he flicked through the back issues of Vogue and Glamour that sat on the coffeetable. The armchair was meant for bored boyfriends but that's exactly what Bast considered himself to be.

  He'd wait for a lull in trade and then leer at Freya over the top of his magazine until she felt compelled to speak first. ‘What are you doing here, Bast?’

  ‘Oh. Hey!’ he'd exclaim, as if surprised to be interrupted in the midst of a fascinating article about clitoral versus vaginal. ‘Just wanted to check you were all right, darling, that's all.’

  ‘I'm fine. You working yet?’

  ‘Me? Working? Just checking out some opportunities, you know how it is. Doing a few bits and bobs for Lucky.’

  ‘You're dealing?’

  ‘Bits and bobs, bits and bobs. Nothing permanent. So. Look. When are we going out again anyway? What's the plan?’

  Gradually, Freya's dismissals of Bast's clumsy advances became ever more blunt. It went against her nature to be brutal, that's what Freya thought. But she told herself that she had a lot of stuff on her plate and he had to get the message, didn't he? So in the end, when the time came, she was as unarguable as a car horn. ‘Look, Bast,’ she spat. ‘I don't want to go out with you today and I won't want to go out with you tomorrow and I'll never want to go out with you again. Do you get that?’