The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  You know something? Despite my pinpointed positiveness of the pointlessness of it all, I would have lent my beak to the cause – veritably I would – but for a couple of considerations. First, I scoped with incontrovertible conviction that this was no Remnant of Content but a scrap of the unilluminable stuff that was dropped into the rubbish bin by the unilluminable nik named Mishap. In itself, this wouldn't have been enough to stop me but I found myself floating on a sensation of hopelessness and, contrarily, hilarity that swelled in my breast like a bubble. Has war ever been so worthless? Second, before I could collect my consciousness, I peeped the thugalicious peepniks, holding sticks and bats, and surrounding the transparent upturned nothingness with a thick nik net that they cast over the two geezs and two coochies who still scrimmaged even as they were dragged from the slippery surface.

  In my mindear, I can hear their calls as they thrashed about with no hope of escape. ‘Fuck off!’ they squawked. ‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ And I figure that if these are the first words of any tongue, they're most likely the last too.

  23

  Half-lifes

  In the days after Murray shot Kush dead in the Sainsbury's car park, the others reacted in various different ways though with one common consequence.

  Tariq and Emma, for example, threw themselves into their marriage with almost autistic enthusiasm. Emma began to cook for her husband every night, a wide variety of recipes made only from the organic supermarket's freshest ingredients, while Tariq rushed home without even stopping for a swift sharpener let alone anything to chase it. Over these dinners, they talked rapidly – about their financial situation, Tommy's latest gurgle, the pigeons, the state of their relationship (which, they agreed, had been through a rocky patch but was now stronger than ever). And when the words petered out, Tariq stubbed his roll-up and led his wife to bed where they had uncomplicated and mostly satisfying sex. Afterwards, if either of them were awake long enough to find uncomfortable thoughts come knocking, they'd shake the other and insist on round two until Emma's thighs ached and Tariq's back began to spasm.

  Freya, on the other hand, dismissed the events surrounding her first and last attempt at criminality with what looked, in her mind's eye, like a vindicated shrug. Although in what way she was vindicated is anybody's guess. Freya didn't much care. She had a business to run. Anything Kwesi thought or felt was expressed through poetry which, though abstract, evolved a new and uncompromising viscerality which reassured him in something he'd been thinking for a while: thirty was both too young to retire and too old to change your ambitions. As for Tom and Karen? They deliberately avoided the subject. But that was easy enough. It wasn't as if they were unused to carefully negotiating paths around uncomfortable and unexpressed mutual knowledge.

  The one common consequence, therefore, was that they hardly talked about what had happened, let alone about Murray, the guy at the centre of it all. And so their plans to rob the bank were dismissed by silence. In fact, the only person who really wanted to discuss any of it was Identikit Ami. When Tariq, Emma, Freya and Kwesi got back to the Lavender Hill house that night, Ami had elicited only the briefest explanation of events and subsequently had the vague and shameful but nonetheless undeniable feeling that she'd somehow missed out. And so with the very thinnest material of vicarious experience, she conjured in her imagination a televisual narrative somewhere between cop drama and a live feed from the CNN chopper. Indeed the others' refusal to talk about it only seemed to sharpen both images and plot.

  One strange attribute of all stories (and most memories too) is that their truth lives only in their telling. After all, both are social constructions and, if they remain unexpressed, soon begin to decompose. This is not to say that they die or disappear altogether and elements may be recalled with the trigger of a specific smell or flashing image. But, untold, they have a half-life and quickly degrade. There remains every clue to what they once were but they are now arcane and require a considerable commitment of time and effort for their reconstruction. While, therefore, it might seem extraordinary that this group of twirtysomethings could step over memories of Kush's bloody corpse without breaking stride, it was in fact anything but.

  In humanity's brochure there's always been a paragraph or two of marketing puff about the power of memory; the capacity of individuals and groups to learn from experience. Only in recent editions, however, has this been marked with a footnote addressing the contrary potency. And even now, the ability of people to forget what's best forgotten (and the strength that can be found therein) is granted far from equal footing.

  That said, of course it is easy to imagine scenarios in which this bunch would have been unable to ignore what had happened. If, for example, any one of them had chosen to break the unspoken vow of silence, it would surely have forced all of them to confront it. Therefore, in fear of precisely this, they now spoke rarely with any of their friends they considered likely to crack. Tom and Karen felt safe with each other; Emma and Tariq the same; Freya and Kwesi too. None of them were particularly sure about Ami but that was OK because she was working nine-to-fives in the bank and spending most evenings in an editing suite with the guys from TVX who professed themselves ‘pumped’ by the potential of her reality show.

  Similarly, if they'd seen Murray then of course the memories would have come flooding back. But they didn't see him or hear from him and they told themselves, relieved, that this was just typical of Muz. Except Tom. Because Murray rang Tom once, a couple of days after the shooting.

  ‘All right, china?’ There was something weird about his voice; a stiltedness like he was slightly out of breath.

  ‘Murray? You OK?’

  ‘Fine.’ Tom heard what sounded like a gulp.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘This and that,’ Murray said. ‘This and that.’

  ‘You sure you're all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ He was suddenly impatient. ‘Are we going to do this, then?’

  Tom heard the question but didn't know what to say. ‘Do what?’

  ‘The bank, china. The bank.’

  Tom sighed: ‘Muz…’

  But Murray immediately cut him off. ‘Right. Right. And the others? Emma? Riq?’ There was a pause and Tom said nothing. ‘Right.’

  ‘Come on, Muz. It went wrong, didn't it? It wasn't, like, Murray-fun any more. I just want to forget all about it.’

  ‘It's a game,’ Murray said. ‘You don't just stop playing when you don't like it. Games have to be finished. That's the point of them. Self-contained. You don't stop playing football when it starts raining. Because then you forfeit, china, know what I mean?’

  Murray sounded urgent, almost pleading, and Tom felt peculiarly exasperated. ‘I don't care, Murray,’ he snapped. ‘It's time to grow up, you know?’

  ‘Exactly. You are what you do.’

  ‘And what you don't do. Look…’

  ‘Tom.’ Murray was suddenly very distant and very desperate. ‘This is for me, china. I just want to finish it.’

  ‘I'm sorry, Muz, but…’

  The phone clicked and there was the dial tone; though Tom kept it to his ear for a moment as if expecting something more. He felt empty and briefly very sad. Murray had never asked him for something in that way before; never sounded so imploring. Then again, it was probably just a tactic. Because nobody knew how to get what they wanted quite like Muz. Was he letting him down? Maybe. But it was no betrayal compared to Murray's with Karen a decade ago. He shook his head and smiled as though someone were watching. He didn't tell anybody about the conversation – who would he tell? – and he made a conscious, if unadmitted, decision not to think about it. It was difficult at first but then there were the pigeons and Karen came to stay with him that evening and he had other things on his mind.

  Of course, another situation that could have compelled the former would-be bank-robbers to talk about what they had and hadn't done might have been a degree of media coverage. If Kush's murder had taken place in a slo
w news week and prompted the leader-writers to proffer opinions about gangland, say, or the growth of gun crime, it's a fair bet that Tom would have been poring over the papers, Kwesi garrotted by guilt and even Tariq and Emma's lovemaking unable to forestall the inevitable conversation for long. It was fortunate, therefore, that the news was instead chock-full of another story that held London in its appalling thrall and enveloped every one of them to varying degrees.

  While Karen's new role as ‘Pigeon Czar’ had sounded to her (and indeed to her boss and boyfriend, Jared) like a career cul-de-sac masquerading as a poor gag, it soon placed her at the eye of the most extraordinary and unexpected storm.

  At first the reporting from West London was sketchy, even joked about by the DJs on local radio. But, within an hour, amateur footage began to make it on to the TV channels along with live broadcasts from the scene and suddenly the whole city was paralysed in shock.

  Some of the material was certainly disconcerting. Though it had claimed no lives, the pile-up on the A40 gave up distressing pictures of twisted metal and bewildered talking heads bandaged above bloody T-shirts. There was also a van that had spun across the hard shoulder and broken the crash barrier to hang by its front wheels from the very edge of the flyover; a nod to just how much worse it might have been. Similarly, the shattered windows, the shop floors strewn with glass and bird blood and the numerous washed-out faces of schoolkids, bus drivers and the first policemen to the scene, these all made for extraordinary television.

  Nonetheless, it wasn't the visible horror that stunned the city nearly so much as its cause. After all, broken shop windows and car crashes far worse than this were hardly unusual. But pigeon battles raging in the skies and pigeon corpses raining from them were an altogether different matter. The fear, therefore, was in the loss for an explanation. It was as if the city were pitched into a bad dream with all the crazed internal rationality such fantasies are built upon. The atmosphere was as though London were being punished for some awful but unknown crime. It felt like its very fabric was pulling itself apart at the seams which you could now see had been frayed for a long time. Was this another quirk of nightmare logic or a byproduct of the inevitably knowing press coverage?

  The population began to panic, albeit in a restrained and rather orderly way. They didn't take to the streets, let alone cut loose in spats of rioting and looting. Rather, the vast majority retired to their living-rooms and drew the curtains and watched the television reports.

  In one newspaper, a columnist suggested this reaction was symptomatic of the post-historical view of Western society; that it (society) was no longer regarded as something to be shaped, changed or even overturned but rather as little more than an elaborate myth whose exposure was simply too scary to contemplate. The journalist wrote: ‘We retreat into our single cells, the very nuclei of our comfort zone, for fear that any action might further undermine our elaborate deceit. We batten down the hatches, stock up on baked beans and pray that when we finally open our front doors the myth will have somehow survived.’

  Despite the abstruse argument and mixed (indeed, contrary) metaphors, this article led the journalist to be invited on panel discussions on both television and radio. On one of these she sat side by side with the former clergyman turned Buddhist therapist Tejananda, who supported her hypothesis with his own. ‘Without faith we have nothing to believe in,’ he said. This line was unkindly picked up by several Sunday supplements in their sneering weekly round-up of notable quotables.

  In the evening of the first great battle of the London Pigeon Wars (as they were soon dubbed by some smart hack), Karen accompanied the mayor to the scene of the chaos and was introduced to the media in her new role. Everyone agreed that, considering her lack of experience, she handled herself with some distinction.

  She ran down the list of casualties and stressed that, while this bizarre occurrence was not to be taken lightly, shock and superficial destruction actually far outweighed serious injury. The driver of the Transit who'd lost control on the Westway was in a critical but stable condition and among the other motorists there were several broken limbs and numerous cuts and bruises. But it wasn't, thank god, nearly as bad as it looked. Otherwise, a few pedestrians and shop workers had required minor stitching for injuries sustained from flying glass. Nothing more. She praised the emergency services for their impeccable conduct.

  By far the most serious incident, therefore, had seen an elderly man – Karen checked her notes: Learie Benson – who'd suffered terrible head trauma when hit by a falling corpse as he slept on the pavement. He had passed away soon afterwards in St Mary's A & E, though the attending consultant pointed out that the level of alcohol in his blood stream had hindered treatment and undoubtedly contributed to his demise. This story briefly sparked press attention; especially when they discovered that Benson's best friend was telling anybody who'd listen that the deceased had been haunted by premonitions for some weeks (in particular, this friend with a Knightsbridge drawl said, of a ‘PR PR duppy’). But then they found out that both men were notorious local winos and their interest quickly evaporated.

  Karen fielded questions with aplomb. No, of course the mayor's office hadn't been prepared for something like this but an investigation was already under way. Yes, they had been fully aware of the strange behaviour of the city's pigeons before now and that was precisely why she was in place as Pigeon Czar. Yes. That's right: ‘Pigeon Czar’. No, they had no explanations as yet. Yes, people should remain calm and continue to go about their daily business as they had no reason to suspect this was other than an isolated occurrence.

  Despite the genuinely distressing scenes of carnage – a square mile of London that looked like a bomb had hit it; shattered windows everywhere; and policemen in fluorescent jackets and rubber gloves collecting the limp avian corpses in dustbin bags – Karen enjoyed herself. She knew she'd done a good job and later, in a taxi, she rearranged some ideas that had been troubling her. She realized that, finally, she wasn't doing something she'd chosen in the futile pursuit of happiness but rather something she'd fallen into, however reluctantly. She recalled Jared's epithet – ‘happiness is a by-product of what you do’ – and she figured that she was now certain he had it right and that gave her two reasons to be grateful to him.

  Since Karen's appointment to her new role and her furious reaction to it, the couple had been treating each other with arm's–length civility. This hadn't been difficult with Jared always working late and plenty of space between them in his kingsize bed. Indeed, Karen had begun to wonder if this was how relationships now ended; not with any deliberate decision but with a gradual waning instead.

  Tonight, however, as her cab crawled through the streets of South Kensington and Chelsea towards the Pimlico flat, she felt a rush of warmth for him. It wasn't that she thought their situation reparable; nothing so specific. Rather, with the events of the day, she had the vague notion that he was somehow good for her. This lasted about half an hour from the time she walked through the door.

  Jared was eating a stir-fry and drinking red wine. He hadn't made her any food and the wine bottle stood empty on the side. When he said that he hadn't known what time she'd be home, she nodded.

  He'd watched her on the news and thought she handled the whole situation very well. ‘Top job,’ he said. ‘Good girl.’

  She made herself some toast. They were out of butter. She looked in the bin and there was a butter carton. She saw he'd thrown it away unscraped. She hated that kind of waste.

  Jared joined her at the kitchen counter and dropped the substantial remains of his dinner into the rubbish bin, which, as far as Karen was concerned, added insult to injury. He then stood in the doorway and, reaching up his hands, hung from the frame; stretching his back. He said he'd been thinking. He said he hadn't expected the whole pigeon situation to be quite so serious. Nobody had. He'd been thinking that it might need a more senior hand on the tiller. ‘Just thought I'd throw that out there,’ he said. His back ma
de a clicking sound.

  Karen chewed her dry toast and swallowed. She shook her head. This wasn't going to happen. She pushed past him and, when he caught up with her, she was putting her toothbrush and a clean pair of knickers in her handbag. He said: ‘What on earth's the matter with you?’

  ‘Dick,’ she muttered. ‘Fucking dick.’

  Karen headed for Tom's. She considered Riq and Emma's but no, Tom's was better. She didn't call him, just turned up on his doorstep. He didn't seem surprised to see her.

  The first thing he said was, ‘So you're quite the media star now?’ he smiled. ‘Ami will be jealous.’

  ‘You said I could come and stay.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She briefly worried that he'd get the wrong idea. But, beyond the boundaries of right now, she wasn't sure what ‘the wrong idea’ was. Besides, she should surely have known Tom better than that. Because he was never better than when looking in on someone else's crisis.

  He asked her if she was hungry and ordered pizza. She ate and watched herself on the late night news while he busied himself in the bedroom and then dumped a duvet and pillow on the sofa.

  ‘I should get some sleep,’ she said.

  ‘I made up the bed for you.’

  ‘The bed? I'll take the sofa. No problem.’

  ‘Don't worry.’ He shook his head. ‘I'll take the sofa. I often sleep here anyway. These days.’

  ‘Thanks. And sorry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don't know.’ She shrugged. ‘Just sorry to put you out, that's all.’

  ‘You're not putting me out. I said you could come and stay, didn't I? Stay as long as you like. If you need anything, there's still a few bits of yours in the wardrobe.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. A few things.’

  When she went into the bedroom she immediately remembered the last time she'd been there; the day she left almost a year ago. The recollection confused her and sat her down on the bed… his bed that was once their bed and, tonight, was her bed. That confused her too. Tom didn't seem to have changed anything. There was the same linen, the same books piled on the floor (books that, in fact, belonged to both of them) and the same happy photos on the cork board. She wondered if this lack of change said anything about Tom's desire to hang on. Probably not. It probably said more about his lack of care for his environment. She noticed the pair of boxer shorts scrunched up and discarded in a corner. They'd probably been there a year too.