She looked in the wardrobe for something to sleep in and found one of her own old T-shirts. She hadn't missed it. She changed and slung her suit over the back of a chair. Even the chill in the air was familiar as she slid herself under the covers. She had the strangest sensation; as if she'd just blinked and a year had passed and nothing was different. This irritated her. It felt like a comfort trap and she wondered if it would irritate her enough to fight it.
Tom poked his head round the door. He just wanted to say goodnight.
She pulled the sheet up around her chin. ‘Goodnight.’
Tom lingered for a moment and ran a hand through his hair. ‘It's like the first time you stayed at my parents'. You remember? After…’ A combination of the next name in this memory and the look she gave him stopped him right there. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’
Karen's popularity with both press and public alike was quite sufficient to ensure that the mayor himself rejected Jared's suggestion that he should take over the management of what had now moved, officially, from ‘situation’ to ‘crisis’. Karen was shocked by Jared's vitriol in defeat but at least it confirmed, as if confirmation were needed, that their relationship was over. She was utterly sanguine about this. She'd seen it coming of course and her only worry (about where she might go) was eased by the fact that Tom was a model of selfless and unoppressive support (as he'd always been, she conceded, in situations like this). Besides, she was simply too busy to think much about it; first with the excitement of her new position and profile and then trying to cope with each new pigeon blood bath and, more pertinently, the city's response.
For various reasons, the reaction to the second great battle of the London Pigeon Wars was almost hysterical. It didn't help that the news networks were ready for it this time and all led with graphic footage of the slaughter over Embankment which they balanced with expert opinion from zoologists, animal behaviourists, and biological anthropologists who took turns to say exactly the same thing in the different languages of their professions. They were mystified.
What's more, while in the first outbreak the public had been able to take cover in shops and offices, there were fewer places to hide on the South Bank and certainly not for the pedestrians who found themselves caught in the middle of the chaos as they crossed Westminster, Waterloo or Hungerford bridges. Consequently, the number of human injuries directly caused by pigeons was far higher.
Nine people suffered serious concussions after being hit by falling or low-flying birds and one child lost an ear to a crazed attack, another a significant chunk of her top lip. Worst of all, an American who tried to take photographs of the battle was hit square-on by three fighters and the angle of their impact and the force of the blow lifted him clean off his feet and bowled him over the railings and unconscious to his death in the Thames below. This prompted concerned transatlantic phone calls at governmental level and the New York Times headline ‘London pigeons call time on tourism’ above pictures retrieved from the victim's camera.
The collateral damage of this second battle was worse, too; certainly more costly. Both Charing Cross and Waterloo stations were forced to shut down for a full day in order to clear their concourses, platforms and tracks of hundreds of the dead and repair numerous minor faults caused by severed wires and the like. At the London Aquarium, a couple of dozen birds somehow found their way inside and, driven to ever greater frenzy by the confined space, killed many fish and then flew, kamikaze-style, into the thick tanks, cracking most and even puncturing a couple. Some of the aquarium's most valuable and exotic residents, presumably used to an altogether more peaceful life in warm waters around Pacific archipelagoes, were put down on veterinary advice, their nerves shot to pieces.
Unsurprisingly, the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall had several hundred windows broken. Their dull grey buildings were also, however, redecorated with buckets of blood, shit and feathers and they appealed for volunteers to help clean up the mess. ‘Our cultural pride and joy on the South Bank now looks like a Croydon car park after a particularly torrid Saturday night,’ wrote one acerbic diarist. ‘No change there, then.’
As for the London Eye, the glass in every capsule was smashed and one pigeon hit a supporting cable with such preternatural momentum that it snapped and whipped loose across the promenade where it connected with an unfortunate arse, breast and head, causing nasty fractures of Japanese coccyx, German sternum and Scandinavian skull. The wheel itself was stopped in its tracks and it took the London fire brigade more than six hours to rescue every passenger. One, a member of a touring Australian netball team who was also a structural engineer, was threatening to sue.
By far the worst impact, however, was on the psyche of the city that quickly lost all semblance of confidence. Those who could, of course, stayed indoors. But those who couldn't moved like shades through the streets. There was no Dunkirk spirit, just a plague of surreal fear (and it is the surreal, after all, with its confrontational difference that often makes us most aware of reality).
It was as if the whole of London had visited the same deranged chiropractor. Where previously the city's eyes had concentrated on the patch of pavement six feet in front of them, they were now permanently fixed on the skies above giving everyone the appearance of rapturous born-agains. There were countless pedestrian collisions.
Buses were empty and tubes (regarded as safe from the pigeons) jammed to a standstill. Internet chat-rooms were loaded both with sick jokes about American tourists and new, ornithic interpretations of Nostradamus. Enterprising umbrella salesmen (generally East African) made a killing flogging brollies that, they claimed, incorporated a reinforced aluminium structure (i.e., the spokes); while enterprising street hawkers (generally Eastern European) sold T-shirts with a picture of a plume and the slogan ‘My — went to London and all I got was this lousy feather’. Schoolkids were learning new, pigeon-referencing hopscotch rhymes that they practised in breaks now spent in gymnasiums, classrooms and corridors.
By the time of the third great battle of the London Pigeon Wars, Karen found herself increasingly strained. Nobody held her personally to account but there were ever more generalized questions about the mayor's ability to deal with the situation.
The human death toll had risen to six. Aside from Learie Benson and the American tourist, there was now the Transit driver from the Westway (whose condition had suddenly deteriorated). Then, a teenage girl was set upon by two birds as she walked on the Mile End Road and suffered numerous cuts to her face and hands. Though she in fact died of secondary infections (after refusing to go to hospital), she was the only confirmed victim of wilful pigeon attack. Finally a young couple driving home from a South London pub swerved to avoid an oncoming flock (that ‘looked like they were playing chicken’, according to one passerby) and both were killed instantly in the collision with a tree. Ironically, it was the same Gypsy Lane tree which had accounted for Marc Bolan twenty-five years earlier and aged T-Rex fans held candlelit vigil nearby; some drawn by the fateful coincidence and others distressed by the destruction of the small memorial stone.
The advice at Karen's official briefings now changed. Londoners, she said, should probably stay indoors and avoid all non-essential journeys until the crisis was brought under control. In retrospect, this change of tack was a mistake since it only fuelled the sense of vulnerability and surreality.
Of course, it didn't help that the third great battle took place over Wapping; something that fuelled press paranoia no end. There were calls for more policemen on the streets and, on the letters pages, for the deployment of the army or a mass poisoning programme. Karen pointed out that you couldn't really have soldiers taking pot shots at every passing pigeon while laying poison all over the city was hardly a responsible reaction. She pleaded with London to stay calm and leave the problem with the proper authorities. But this didn't stop several vigilante groups taking to the streets armed with nets, capturing any birds they could and beating them to death with cricket
bats and squash rackets and a strong if somewhat ill-defined sense of moral outrage.
Then there were rumours – at first ridiculed but soon taken more seriously – that this was some kind of terrorist attack. Exasperated, Karen pointed out there was no evidence to suggest as much but the rumours persisted and the newspapers that dismissed them still reported the gossip. After all, if you could train pigeons to home, was there any reason you couldn't train them to fight? There was talk of cloning, genetic tampering and, even, robotics.
It was within a fortnight, therefore, that the pigeons were the only business at hand and London was at a standstill. Many people took Karen's advice about non-essential journeys to include their commute to work and business suffered. The stock market lost confidence, fell, and then plummeted with the perception of lost confidence. Foreign airlines were threatening to suspend service to Heathrow, Gatwick and City for fear of pigeons flying into the engines at take off or landing, though there had been no suggestion of such incidents thus far.
Every section of every newspaper covered nothing else: news, editorial, travel, science, financial… and all others too. The sports pages, for example, were full of the cancellation of major fixtures across the capital while senior health writers offered worrying predictions of the pestilence that could follow if thousands of undiscovered pigeon remains on London's parks and commons were left rotting for the vermin. Even the style sections reported, variously, that the latest accessory for clubland was a catapult hanging from your back pocket, that extreme fashionistas had taken to wearing polyurethane masks, that dinner parties were the new restaurants.
It was at the height of this hype that two papers and a magazine decided to profile Freya Franklin Hats. Looking for an appropriate angle for the zeitgeist, they were quite taken with two hooks in particular. First, by Kwesi, whose poetry now brimmed with references to the pigeons. And second, by Freya's favourite design that, up to now, no one had bought: the chainmail-encased rubber cap that covered the wearer's ears with two licks. Perfect pigeon wear, the journalists thought.
All three publications, therefore, came up with near identical illustrations for their features: a picture of a ranting Kwesi addressing Freya in the chainmail hat. In one, this image overlaid a montage of pigeon photographs. In another, Kwesi was asked to wear a bright yellow beak on a piece of elastic. In the last, the studio was designed to look like the set of Hitchcock's The Birds and Freya was styled after Tippi Hedren (excepting the hat of course). But the straplines were always printed in Freya Franklin's colours (orange on blue) and the principle was always the same.
The day after the first of these features hit the streets, Freya's stock of her favourite hat sold out in ten minutes (she'd only made five) and she rushed the pattern back to her Indonesian manufacturers for a substantial reorder. In fact, though, the very exclusivity of the design only heightened her contemporary cultural cachet and secured her place among the elite of London's milliners. Big-In-Property Jackson dropped by to congratulate her on her success. His nose was almost healed but the slight scarring combined with his inevitable appreciation of the Pigeon Wars seemed to have granted him, in Freya's eyes anyway, a charming and almost otherworldly humility. He hung around until closing and then accompanied her back to her studio flat where she just about managed to rustle up a pot of spaghetti Bolognese on the two-ring hob. She told him she was hoping to move soon. He said he might be able to help.
One of the feature writers of the Freya Franklin story suggested there was irony in Kwesi reciting his freeform poetry to the wearer of this particular hat since the rubber licks over the ears ensured they wouldn't hear a single word. The K-ster read this comment with interest but decided, in his state of ever-burgeoning confidence, that this was really more feature than flaw. He posted this cutting to his mother back in Ghana.
With Freya's support (and, importantly, her new-found ‘name’), he began to plan a show around the pigeons, the hats and this very idea; a show he launched a couple of months later in a subterranean Soho gallery. Pitched as the ‘bridge between installation art and spoken word’, ‘The London Pigeon Wars’ was an interactive experience which allowed the audience to wear various Freya Franklin creations (all of which had this particular auditory design quirk) while Kwesi performed several poems from a bird's eye perspective. ‘I think many people believe the pigeons were trying to tell us something,’ he explained to a late night BBC magazine show. ‘This is my attempt to address what that might be.’ The piece won several prizes and secured Kwesi a sizable grant from the Arts Council that came through the day before his birthday.
24
Anecdotal evidence
With the media frenzy heightening as public confidence fell, Karen was under growing pressure from within the mayor's office to come up with an answer, though nobody had a useful suggestion as to what that might be. They'd employed numerous experts from numerous different fields but, to a man, they'd been as baffled as their TV counterparts. Now the mayor himself, with Jared's prompting, was threatening to take personal control of the crisis.
But at exactly the same time as Freya was splashed all over the papers, Karen remembered what Jared had said when appointing her to this job: ‘We need to be seen to do something.’ And she made a connection, had an idea and called Tariq.
Tariq understood her proposition immediately and was in her office at eight the next morning. She told him it didn't matter exactly what he produced just so long as it had a story they could sell to press and public alike. ‘Do you know what I mean, Riq?’ she said. ‘It's no disaster if you can't come up with a solution; we can blag our way around that. But what I have to show is a new way of talking about the problem.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Tariq said. ‘Of course.’
She hadn't seen Tariq this enthusiastic for years; not since his days running student ents at LMT. In fact, she'd forgotten he had it in him.
She assigned him an office on her corridor and he got to work straight away. He brought in his chief computer monkey and requested every scrap of information they had on the pigeons' behaviour and movements: photographs, maps, eye-witness accounts, reports from all the relevant experts and so on. The next day, when she knocked on his door, he looked up beaming and clearly chuffed with himself.
‘I haven't finished,’ he said. ‘But you'll be pleased to know that so far I'm pretty sure it's ending.’
‘What is?’
‘The London Pigeon Wars.’
Karen burst out laughing. ‘Really?’
‘The algorithms never lie, Kazza.’
‘So why?’
‘Why what?’
‘So why's it ending?’
‘No idea,’ Tariq shook his head. ‘My programme only tells you what's happened, what's happening and what will happen. It doesn't give reasons.’
As soon as Tariq had finished his calculations and was certain of his findings, Karen called a press conference for the next day. They planned what they would say precisely, weighing every word and its potential impact, so that she was guaranteed to take the credit and he to gain maximum commercial exposure.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ Karen began. ‘I'd like to introduce you to Tariq Khan, managing director of TEK Systems, a computer software company at the very cutting edge of predictive technology. We have been working side by side throughout this crisis and have now made a significant breakthrough. I'll allow Tariq to run through TEK's findings and then we'll take some questions.’
Tariq's performance was exemplary. He gave the assembled journalists just enough technical explanation to ensure they felt smart and, importantly, important before cutting directly to what, he and Karen had agreed, was the heart of the story.
Whichever journalist, Tariq began with a smile, had coined the phrase ‘London Pigeon Wars’ was unwittingly very accurate. Because what appeared, from ground level, to be little more than random violence was in fact highly structured combat between two well-organized armies (or, if
you like, air forces).
With a map of London projected on a screen behind him and a pointer in his hand, he carefully explained and illustrated the way the conflict had unfolded; the major battles, minor skirmishes, incursions, retreats and what he supposed to be the two main areas of control. By the time he finished and Karen joined him on the platform, the press room was a cartoon of bewildered silence.
The first question was, ‘Are you serious?’
Absolutely. The journalists could find all the data in their press packs. Because of the nature of the discoveries, the mayor's office had decided upon a policy of full disclosure. So they were free to check the findings with any experts they chose. Although, as Tariq pointed out, he and his team were the leaders in this particular field.
‘What exactly is this technology for?’
Good question. It was a predictive technology that enabled pattern modelling of apparent chaos. It was designed primarily as a business tool with obvious potential in the areas of market research and analysis but it could be used to establish a system for any seemingly random series of events.
‘If you're right, Mr Khan, how come these systems weren't spotted by the authorities in animal behaviour?’
Tariq laughed. He couldn't answer that since he wasn't one himself. He guessed, however, that those guys had probably (and reasonably) only looked for patterns previously recognized in birds or, perhaps, the wider animal kingdom. He couldn't say for sure, of course, but he assumed this particular situation – this London situation – was unprecedented.
The London Pigeon Wars Page 34
