The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  She remembered too that he'd been oddly interested in Tom. He said, ‘So you still with that geezer, then?’

  ‘What geezer?’

  ‘That geezer you met at your college.’

  ‘What? Tom?’ she laughed. ‘No. Not any more.’

  ‘This Tom bloke. He never said anything to you, then?’ Kush's tone quietened with gravity and Karen was curious.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘About what, Kush?’ she pressed.

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ He looked momentarily uncomfortable. ‘I just ran into him one time, that's all.’

  Karen stared at him. She'd never seen him look so awkward; almost nervous, almost guilty (and not just the meaningless hangdogging he used to adopt after he hit her, either). ‘Really? He never mentioned it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Kush said quickly. ‘Just wondered, that's all. Trying to catch up with your life, aren't I?’

  When they left the restaurant (he insisted on paying, which tickled her), they ran into Jared, hurrying back to the office with his lunch in a neat, New York-style paper bag that contained, no doubt, a roasted-vegetable wrap, an individual pasta salad with black olives and pesto, and a bottle of mineral water. Jared kissed her on both cheeks and shook Kush by the hand and either didn't engage in or, more likely, didn't notice the territorial games Kush played with those minimal twitches of his eyebrows and jaw. She introduced him only as ‘someone I work with’.

  Karen said goodbye to Kush with a single peck. Momentarily he held her by the shoulders, his hands exerting a little too much pressure, and he said very quietly, ‘Anything you need, Kaz. Anything at all, know what I mean?’

  Then he jumped into a pristine Beamer that must have been parked, unpenalized, on a double yellow for almost an hour and a half. Karen smiled. There were those street smarts again, the kind she'd forgotten all about, that told her London was a place of countless different codes and etiquettes and it was nigh impossible to learn them all. These days, she did asparagus while Kush did double yellows and that was that. She laughed as the engine roared and the bass bins began to boom some nondescript UK garage and Kush nosed into the heavy traffic before ducking back into the bus lane and speeding away.

  She walked back to work with Jared. He slung a casual arm around her shoulder and asked, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Kush? My ex. A long time ago.’

  ‘Right. He looks…’

  ‘He looks what?’

  Jared chuckled apologetically. ‘Well. I was about to say he looks like a lout.’

  ‘A lout?’ Karen said. ‘Yeah, he is.’

  And, while it was the perfect description, she was nonetheless surprised that she now went out with a guy who not only used the word ‘lout’ but accompanied it with a slight nose wrinkle of distaste. She'd changed, all right.

  Karen checks her watch for the twentieth time in twenty minutes. She's beginning to wonder if Tom's stood her up but she can't believe he would. Of course, she'd call him but he must be the only person in the city who doesn't own a mobile. Even as he thinks this lends a certain Luddite radicalism, it reveals itself as nothing but affectation. That's Tom all over.

  She's finished her coffee and she considers getting another. Trouble is, the place is packed and she'll probably lose her seat. Of course, she could leave her phone on the table and most people will recognize this marks her spot. But someone who isn't most people will nick it. Alternatively she could leave her newspaper but she isn't sure if that constitutes a staked claim. In a pub, maybe, but in a coffeeshop? Maybe not. It's all a question of etiquette again and she resolves to stay put and give Tom a little longer.

  There are two things, two worries, that she wants to talk to Tom about and they both have a name. One is called Jared and the other Murray. In some ways these worries, these problems, are connected and in some ways they aren't. Maybe she'll mention what Kush said as well; if she remembers.

  Of course, Karen knows it's unwise and probably unfair to talk to her ex-boyfriend (Tom) about the new model (Jared) but, by now, she's been over and over this in her head and she knows she'll do it if she wants to so there's not a whole lot of point in fretting. Besides, who else is she going to talk to? She's already tried Tariq so her only real alternative is Murray and he's a problem in his own right.

  Her essential difficulty with Jared is that she's beginning to suspect he's a bit of a dick. God. Tom'll love that.

  She's not quite sure how this – this dickness – has happened. After all, she's been seeing the guy for some time, been living with him for three months; and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she's been confronted by the unignorable notion that he's a dick. What's more, it isn't even as if Jared's been hiding something that he's only now begun to reveal. If anything, it's more like she's simply seeing it for the first time, like someone just switched on the light. She hasn't stopped thinking he's basically a good guy – intelligent and motivated and still, even, kind of attractive for a posh boy. But right now, his goodness comes across mostly like piety, his intelligence as pomposity, his motivations are suspiciously ambitious and what once looked louche now seems increasingly like awkwardness.

  She spoke to Tariq about it because, besides Tom and Murray, he's her oldest friend. She said: ‘I mean, how does that work? Surely you don't just wake up one morning, look over at the next pillow and decide your partner's actually an idiot.’

  At the other end of the phone Tariq, who was, she figured, most likely drunk again, burst out laughing. ‘Kaz!’ he exclaimed. ‘That's exactly how it works! That's how it's been with every girlfriend I've ever had. You're attracted by a great pair of tits or whatever and then, one day, you take your eyes off their chest for a minute and think, “Blimey! You know what? You're a right arsehole.”’

  ‘He's not an arsehole.’

  Tariq found this so funny he could barely speak. ‘Arsehole, prat, whatever. Why do you think you don't stay friends with most of your exes? It's nothing to do with awkwardness or history or any of that bollocks. It's because you don't actually like them much.’

  ‘I've only really got Tom,’ Karen protested. ‘I don't think like that about him.’

  ‘Well. There you go. The basis for any decent relationship: not thinking your partner's an idiot.’

  ‘You can't think like that, Riq. Does Emma know you think like that?’

  ‘Em's never really had any tits.’

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘I am being serious.’

  ‘It's not very romantic.’

  There was a pause and what sounded like a sigh. Then again, Tariq drank and smoked so much these days that his every breath was heavy like a sigh. ‘I don't know, you know?’ he said. ‘I think it is kind of romantic. To wake up next to the same person every single day and not find them irritating; to basically, fundamentally, intrinsically still like them. To be honest, I think that's about as good as it gets. And you can let that lift or depress. Up to you.’

  ‘So,’ Karen said slowly. She'd had enough of this conversation. ‘How are you two, anyway?’

  ‘We're all right, you know. We're good.’ Tariq spoke with certainty, finality. Clearly he'd had enough of this conversation too.

  Karen's problem with Jared started, she thinks, when they met up with Murray. Of course, that can't have really been when it started because she reckons it's been there all along. But it was the first time she noticed, anyway. Murray had rung her up – when was this? Last week some time – and they met for a drink after she finished work. Their conversation, incidentally, was the source of the other problem she wanted to talk to Tom about.

  She took him to the Oxo Tower and they sat at the wrong side of the bar looking out over the wrong view of London: i.e., not the Thames, Temple and Embankment but the half-hearted, grubby towers of Southwark. But it was a beautiful evening and they spent some time just staring out of the window and even the wro
ng view looked right enough.

  They'd only been there about half an hour when Jared rang and suggested he come to join them. Since they were deep in serious and disconcerting conversation, Karen raised her eyebrows at Murray but he shrugged, so she said, ‘Sure.’ Because what else was she supposed to do? Nonetheless she was nervous. Although Murray and Jared had met before, the night of Freya's launch, they'd hardly exchanged two words. At the time she thought she was nervous at the prospect of Jared meeting Murray because you never quite knew which Murray you were going to get. But in retrospect she reckons she was actually intuitively nervous about Murray meeting Jared because at some level she must have known that her boyfriend was a dick.

  Jared behaved like a fool from the moment he arrived, ordering himself a Martini and ostentatiously leaving his platinum card behind the bar – anybody can have a platinum card these days – before awkwardly folding his long body into a seat like a letter into an envelope and combing his fingers through the thick weight of his blond fringe.

  He then turned to Murray and said, ‘So you're the chap I've been hearing so much about’, and smiled this peculiar lopsided smile; the kind of strained expression one might pull when finally brushing your fingertip against a ballpoint dropped under the sofa. For some reason, Jared clearly regarded Murray as a threat and his response to this was to bray loudly about himself, his job and just how important, successful and all-round fucking fabulous he was.

  It didn't help that Murray was at his most modestly charming, something that threw Jared's boorishness into, for Karen, ever more embarrassing relief. Murray laughed dutifully at each anecdote, nodded noncommittally at every bumptious assertion and made all the most polite noises of encouragement when called upon. Despite this, Jared seemed determined to be patronizing, dull and generally disagreeable.

  At one point, for example, he asked: ‘So, Murray, do you know this part of town, this neck of the woods, do you?’

  Murray said, ‘I do as it goes, china.’ He pointed a finger out through the opposite wall. ‘Because Kazza had a room just down there when we were at LMT; Southwark Halls.’

  Jared turned to her and his expression flickered ‘I didn't know that’. Karen felt obliged to say something but before she could get a word out, he'd already looked away and embarked on another story about himself.

  ‘After Oxford, when I moved down here for post-grad,’ he announced, ‘I used to scull this part of the Thames every day of the week. Of course the boat clubs are west of here; Putney, Hammersmith, Barnes, places like that. But I found there's nothing quite like rowing through the heart of a city. It's the looming buildings and the wash of river traffic combined with the exhilaration of hard exercise. Sometimes a police launch would pull alongside because you're not supposed to row this stretch. But you know what? While I was on the river, I didn't care about anything.’

  ‘I've never really understood rowing,’ Murray observed mildly.

  ‘It's very scientific. An almost trance-like state combining intense concentration, mechanics, physiology – because you have to be very fit and strong – and an understanding of… No… a oneness with the ebb and flow of the currents.’

  ‘That's cool, china,’ Murray smiled. ‘I just always thought it looked like a seriously knackering way of going backwards slowly. I mean, you don't even notice what's going on around you, do you?’

  Karen suppressed a giggle but if Murray was taking the piss, Jared certainly hadn't registered. ‘Of course you do!’ he protested. ‘I saw all sorts on the banks: schoolkids having sex, tramps scavenging the sludge, wrecked cars. Once I even saw a body.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I swear it. Right near here. Some poor fucker laid out on the bank. But I wouldn't expect you to understand rowing, Murray. You can't understand something until you've done it.’

  ‘True enough. True enough.’

  Later, in another of Jared's prolonged monologues, Karen noticed Murray staring out of the window again and she interrupted her boyfriend to say, ‘What are you thinking, Muz?’

  Murray turned to her and she was somehow shocked by his face. He'd always been racially indistinct, of course, but now, in this bar gloom, it was as though all colour had drained out and left him with the complexion of veal. What's more, his eyes were glistening like dark puddles under a lamppost and his expression seemed unbearably sad. He gestured towards the outside world. It was a beautiful dusk and the sky was a palate of red and orange that washed even the drabbest nearby buildings a gentle shade of pink. His lips twitched with the vaguest sort of smile – one Karen didn't recognize; one to be added to Tom's compendium. It was such a minimal expression and yet she thought, just for an instant, that it conveyed the most profound heartbreak. Then it was gone. ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘You know me, china. I'm not one for a lot of thinking.’

  Karen tutted at him until he continued.

  ‘I don't know. I suppose I was just wondering about the light in London. All day every day, whether it's bright and clear or driving rain, this town looks as grey as a Pathé newsreel. Then, sometimes, you get a sunset like this one and it's like a postcard. You've got to ask yourself if somebody's taking the piss, know what I mean? It's like that line: “The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.” I'm not so sure about that, you know?’

  Karen said nothing. Even Jared had briefly shut up. Murray suddenly looked very puzzled.

  ‘You remember when we were at college? In the summer, people would go to exotic parts of the world and when they came back they'd always talk about the light; how it made everything look so colourful. I wonder, if I'd gone somewhere like that, whether it could have made me happy.’

  Karen said, ‘But you've been to loads of exotic places.’

  Murray blinked. ‘Sure. But when you describe those places, you ever wonder whether you're actually saying what you think you're supposed to; like you're actually describing something secondhand from TV or the travel pages or whatever?’

  Jared jumped in. ‘Nothing makes you happy,’ he declared. ‘Happiness is a by-product of what you do.’

  Suddenly Murray's face flashed with a familiar animation and his voice hummed with laughter. ‘But you're happy, right?’

  ‘You know, Murray, I am. Because I'm happy with what I do.’

  Karen and Jared left Murray on the South Bank and caught a cab on Blackfriars Bridge. As they rode home Jared said, ‘Murray seems like a decent chap.’ It was the first time Karen had ever heard anyone describe Murray as ‘decent’ but she didn't say anything because her mind was elsewhere.

  Karen doesn't believe in happiness. Or, rather, she doesn't believe in happiness for herself. But, if she did, she'd probably have to admit that she subscribed most closely to Jared's view since her every decision, for as long as she can remember, has been taken with an appreciation of exactly this in mind. Simply, she has studied people who seem happy and tried to do as they do. That's the only reason Murray can call her a chameleon.

  As a kid, she saw the girls who smoked countless cigarettes and laughed as they jumped into their boyfriends' cars. Ironically, this was how she ended up with Kush. As a sixth former, she was taught by a young graduate with flopping hair, attractive earnestness and a pretty, fashionable girlfriend who sometimes collected him from the gates in a convertible Escort. So she decided that she should get a degree too. When she first went to stay with Tom at the house in Hampton Wick (while on the run from her own life), she loved to watch his parents' relationship – even their bickering couldn't disguise affection and intimacy – and she resolved to build the same with their son. Back at college, she watched the young women in the cafeteria who endlessly discussed the ills of the world. She envied their certainty (of course) as much as she admired their values and it wasn't long before she joined them.

  In her final year, when talk turned to careers, she noticed that the most sorted students were already interviewing for City jobs, graduate-training schemes and the like. So t
hat's what she did, too. By virtue of what had gone before, however, her applications had a political consistency and she landed a job with a small firm of green lobbyists. She was later headhunted by the party, who convinced her that her passions would be better served assisting one of the junior members of the Shadow Cabinet.

  In the interview, it was hard to say who told more lies (prospective employer or prospective employee). At least, at a fundamental level, Karen only wanted a job (to earn more money, pay the bills, get on), while her would-be boss seemed desperate to convince her of a cause where they both knew there was none. Nonetheless Karen was still soon dispirited by the pragmatism and lack of certainty in her new work even as she was aware that it suited her perfectly. She was dispirited by the lack of faith even as she came to understand that was a kind of faith in itself; that politics was now a one-trick pony in which success was the only measure of success (and that wasn't just party politics, either).

  Sometimes Karen wondered if she'd simply been born in the wrong time, growing up only against the background of Thatcherism. If she'd been born in a different era, perhaps she'd have found a plausible cause by virtue of class or gender, say. But now? Such an idea was barely imaginable. She didn't despise the party for any specific policy; but their lack of principle, the breadth of their church, gave them a bagginess that could only ever be tightened in tricks of light or language. There was, in fact, nothing to believe in. Sometimes Karen wondered if she'd only been hired for the working-class South London kinks to her accent – something which her job, ironically, ironed out within three months. Such homogeny, she thought, perfectly encapsulated the death of meaningful politics. And, what's more, she didn't care.