The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  The way I scope it, I have enough juice in this bird brain for one last querulous question and it has to be, ‘Why me?’ Don't get me wrong; I haven't fallen all fateful and I'm not directing this diatribe to a deity with a tremulous timbre to my call. No. I'm serious. I want to pinpoint the reason and right requires a reason because otherwise consciousness is no more than a MacGuffin in a motion flixture (and neither blessing nor wolf at all). Am I illuminating this, clear and correct? I'm trying, I'm trying…

  My tongue is tying but let me beak another bash. ‘Why’ – as in the question ‘Why?’ – is consciousness right there. OK? I'm tired now and I can feel myself slipping and, momentarily, I'll most likely be shitting on a roof or rummaging in rubbish without even knowing it. So go think about it for yourselves.

  It's dark now and I'm swooping tight to the Thames though I don't know what for. Instinct and reason? I can barely peep the difference. Nonetheless I enjoy the uprush from the moonlit white waters that cools my beads and shivers my breast. I wonder if a state of Content allows appreciation of even such simple pleasures. Playful like a squib, I dart beneath the bridges, criss-cross from bank to bank and fly nineties for a bird's-eye view; like I'm mindmapping London's artery for the very first time (though, in fact, I know it's the very last).

  I'm passing Putney when I clock it – though, to be veritas, it's not the ‘it’ that I first clock so much as the black holdstuff, illuminated by a moonbeam, that nestles in a knotted thicket just below the south side towpath. For the sake of the heavens, I don't know what decides me to detour (though I confess I've always – always? What does that now mean? – been an inquisitive geez who's not backwards when it comes to burying his beak where it doesn't belong). Certainly I can hear the pipping of my pigeon heart like it might just pop so I figure there must be some expectation of excitement to explain it.

  I flutter down on to the mucky bank and my toes disappear up to my feathers in the low-tide slurry and slime. I scope the black holdstuff and I swear I've scoped it before (or one just like it) though my meagre memory won't permit me to pinpoint where. Then, no more than a willow canopy distant, I peep it; this unilluminable thing.

  I didn't clock it straight away because it was surrounded by several other species – a starling, three thrushes and a crow – and I hazarded that I'd best not presume on their patch and, besides, what could these backwards birds be beading that would ever interest me? (And aren't I, for all my collapsing consciousness, still the cocky fuckster?) What's more, this unilluminable thing is the same matt mud as the shitty shore and the tide already laps at it and will soon carry it away. Still, now that I've clocked it, I can't contain my curiosity.

  I swagger over to my brother birds with bold beads and a suitable strut to my step and they immediately fly away, fearful of my front (for consciousness is not a patch on confidence when it comes to conjuring charisma). So now it's just me and the unilluminable thing and I tiptoe towards it, clucking like a coochie-momma or a gossiping geez. Then a gentle wave from a passing launch breaks over it and turns its top-piece towards me.

  Sudden like a thunderclap, I'm shock-stilled with a terror so tangible I can taste it on my tongue, a fear so physical it garrottes my gizzard, a panic so purgative it splatters shit straight from my geez's guts. Am I scared by what I scope? Sure. But scared too by the consequent conclusions that draw themselves up in front of me like the last bridge to my ailing aspirations. Can you follow my flight of fancy? You will; trust me on this.

  I'm bead to beadlessness with a savoury's skull (complete with compacted cheek bone) that I can illuminate as surely as it's unilluminable. And as I scope that sagacious socket it gapes like a gate to oblivion where once consciousness comfortably sat in the cerebrum. Do I really need to illuminate the unilluminable? Must I really name that nik? Even if I wished otherwise I cannot stop the two syllables that form on my beak from solidifying into a strangled squawk. ‘Mis-hap.’ I call it again. ‘Mishap!’

  I've no time to reflect on this rotting relic, no time to ponder its putrescent stench or to go agog for its festering flesh that dissolves from its frame like the bark from wet wood because, immediately, I'm imaginatively displaced and devolved a decade, a lost lifetime, to be confronted by all manner of pictures on my mindeye. Let me straight-talk: these are not memories as such, more like the spinning celluloid of a motion flixture, coming from the corpse itself, the sprockets spooled from the socket of this peepnik projector. And suddenly I'm a squib again.

  I'm a squib again (ten years or maybe, by my feather-brained calculations, even ten centuries ago) and I'm winging it over Waterloo with all the innocence of youth and a numb and nostalgic sensation that must, I suppose, be Content. I'm soaring over Southwark Hall where the student niks strut and shuffle and there's always the choice chance to scope the sweets and savouries dancing around each other like birds around a bird-bath – to be veritas, there's nut all I like better. But today the walkways are deserted and I deduce I'm due a disappointment. Then I clock somebirdy bursting from one of the buildings, striding doubletime. I swoop lazily towards him; more in hope than anticipation of any action. Must I name this nik again? Let's just illuminate him as unilluminable.

  Striding towards him is a second savoury you'll ideally identify yourselves; a strapping cue-ball pinxen whose pinxen features I peep as plum purple with some kind of scarcely suppressed rage. Scoping the unilluminable nik's phyzog, I recognize it's all recognition while the hulkster's knows nothing of the kind. For a held heartbeat he holds his position as though ruminating upon a rapid return to the block from which he bounded. But he doesn't; only heaves a hefty breath.

  They are just criss-crossing as I position myself on a perch above their heads; a ledge on the first floor. I catch part of what they say but some sentences get gulped by the gusts or the evident emotions of the moment.

  ‘Karen Miller?’ throws out the thugalicious pinxen.

  Mishap catches that and throws it right back, ‘Sorry, china?’

  ‘I'm looking for Karen Miller.’

  Several sentences are then buried beneath a breeze and it's some seconds before there's a snatch I can catch. It's the unilluminable nik. ‘I'm her boyfriend, china,’ he says. ‘So what's that to you?’ Though his tone's tough like a Tomcat and his voice formally frosty, there's the noisome notion of nefarious violence in the air, no doubt.

  It starts to rain and the spit-spots deafen me again. You can fathom how frustrated I am! But beneath the pitter-patter I can still figure what's unfolding before my beads. The cue-ball pinxen's shifty and shirty, all vexed and flexing. Mishap is more motionless but his manner is mocking and his very demeanour a diss. Then the pinxen pushes him hard in the chest and Mishap stumbles a step or two; his arms outstretched somewhere between placation and piss-take.

  The unilluminable nik is track-backing fast now. But there's no escape that way, just the tall wall that runs by the river. Whatever Tomcat cockiness was fizzing his phyzog is truly turned out by terror as the enormous pinxen bears down on him. And you can best believe I can hear the thugalicious nik's verbage and it's veritably vicious: ‘You think something's funny, you cunt? You think something's funny?’ And plenty more besides.

  From nowhere, or rather fast and hard from the hip, the pinxen sends a flying fist that connects flush to his foe's phyzog with a gizzard-twisting crunch and crack. Mishap tumbles to terra firma with all the grace of a toppling tree and the pinxen stands over him, jabbing a digit in his direction and burying his boot in his belly again and again. I can hear the unilluminable nik's breath whine and whistle as it's kicked out of him.

  ‘Where is she?’ The pinxen has pulled him up and pins him to the wall with a fat forearm against his Adam's apple. The unilluminable nik's thrashing like a sorry squib in a pussy's punishing teeth but he can't loose the lock. ‘Where the fuck's Karen?’

  ‘I don't know,’ Mishap mumbles. ‘I don't know.’

  The hulkster hits him hard in the guts and he doubles up ju
st in time to meet a lifting leg that judders his jaw. The pinxen's laughing and it's a sound as cruel as a November northeasterly and loaded with the frenzied fury that displaces a misplaced temper. ‘No?’ he sniffs. ‘You want to go for a swim, you fucker?’

  With a single swift shift of his bulging biceps he lifts Mishap clean off his feet and holds him high against the wall so that one hearty heave will deliver him a decent drop to the other side. Now the pinxen's positioned between his thighs with only a massive mitt under each knee holding Mishap fast from free-fall. This is, I scope, not your everyday savoury squabble; not your everyday nik bickering, and I'm attacked with adrenalin and my blood is chilly-chilled.

  Other pigeons are pestering my perch for better angles on the action and I'm concerned their coos will drown out the drama below so I take wing and hover high above Mishap's crown. I can hear him whining and whingeing like a swooning sweet, not nearly so frosty as frozen with fear. ‘No!’ he weeps. ‘Oh god! No! Please!’ I scope that such a pallid plea for mercy must be lovely to the lugs of this thoughtless thug.

  From my lofty position, I can peep both sides of the wall as though they were two frames at the distressing denouement of a morose motion flixture. I scope the tide is just turning low to high and there's maybe two hops of sludge between the brickwork and the washing water. And right beneath where Mishap dangerously dangles, my bead now fixes on a prosaic plank – no tragic timber this – with a big bolt, dark and dangerous, growing from its grain.

  Then it happens and I'm watching as if in slowtion. ‘Motherfucker!’ exclaims the execrable nik as he thrusts Mishap over the edge. He doesn't even stay to scope the fall but shouts and spouts stuff like ‘Yeah! Fucker! Fuck you!’ – like there's anybirdy to hear him – and then straight away scarpers east; to Waterloo, I hazard. Perhaps he doesn't care to clock what he's done. Probably he doesn't care.

  Meanwhile, I peep the body fall and see Murray – ‘Murray’; there! With the benefit of hindsight and the fatalism of foresight (perhaps I've no reason left to care. Probably I've no reason left), I've said it – plummet on to the prosaic plank that now plies a poetry of its own. Poetry? Sure. For how else do you wish to illuminate an individual impaled and impassive upon a big black bolt? Way I peep it, you've got to give it some culture, vulture.

  I scope the life leave Murray like a sixtysomething savoury catching the last commuter carriage out of this supine city. I hear his wail that only whispers in the wind. I smell the vagaries and vicissitudes of dull destiny that can only dream of death as artifice more than precipice. But you really think I'm thinking more than banal birdshit? Think again and then twice more to be certain. Because this drama's a decade drained, remember, so this is veritably the time before time and thus before language and I can't frame further than instinct and intuition allow.

  Us pigeons? Nonetheless we're transfixed and we take to the Thames wall and scope the situation; all cluck-cluck-cluck and coo-coo-coo. It's not like we're jumping to judgements of the peep show we've just peeped. We're not up to such sophisticated suppositions. Clock the scoop and you'll scope, we're no more than an animated audience in the cheep-cheep-cheep seats.

  Our patience with this perishing plot is just beginning to evaporate when Murray finally stirs and struggles on his skewer. His phyzog's a gory horror and pink froth foams at his pale peepnik lips. He's making sounds somewhere between groans and giggles – ‘uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh’ – and he's definitely dazed and disorientated; doesn't know what's happened or where he is (sprawled and spreadeagled and kebabed on a bolt at the turning Thames tide). The fingertips of his left hand are lying in the lapping water and he turns his top-piece to clock them and there's that noise again – ‘uh-huh-uh-huh’.

  Our clamouring crowd of pigeons settle down next to him and circle above him like vultures to be veritas. But there's no insult in our interest any more than there's belief it's our business. No. We're just true London birds who find best success scavenging for scraps, smug in our simplicity and living our lives vicariously and that's the verity.

  Being the courageous kind, however, I cannot contain my curiosity – you see? ‘Always’ is apposite after all – and I flutter down to land on his leg. Ha! I've never been so proximate to a peepnik before and I just rest there a tick, relishing the position of my perch. Now, I clock the longest and fattest and squirmiest squirm my squib's beads have ever scoped and it's wriggling out of the mud and over Murray's right mitt. I have to have that squirm! I have to haste to taste its fulsome flesh! Don't diss me. For the sake of the heavens, I'm only a pigeon.

  I hop over to Murray's mitt and I peckchop that squirm just as quick as I can, dead down the middle. Trouble is, high on haste, I cut clean through its blubbery body and my beak digs deep into the soft skin of peepnik palm. Murray bawls like a babchick: ‘Eeyee!’ Imagine! Down on death's doorstep and he still notices a nip from yours truly. But, to give a veritable version, I should illuminate that the heat of his blood is a thrill (as it is ten years on when I chance to taste the same from a sweet's ear one Notting Hill nighttime).

  I bounce up to his ribcage that rises and falls with a weird wheezing sound. His phyzog is turned left and scopes the surface of the river that from this troubled trajectory looks like a shrunken horizon that begins at his very bead before stretching to infinity. I'm a geez that follows a gaze and I too scope the savoury skimming the Thames tide in his rangy rowboat. That peepnik peeps us, I swear it, but he doesn't deign to detour. Why's that? Maybe he mistakes Murray for no more than a sack of shit with this pigeon perched upon it, ready to rummage for best bits and the like. Or maybe he mistakes Murray for a streetnik desperado, drunk and despicable, who's done nut all to deserve his duty. Or maybe – maybe – he's no better than us birds with care secondary to the essential selfishness of success (or, indeed, the paralysing perspicacity of disappointment).

  For some reason – sympathy or sentiment, audacity or arrogance, or, let's be veritas, for no reason at all – I skip on to Murray's forehead and my pigeon toes are soft on his skull, I swear. He looks up at me and we're bead to bead as simultaneously, a lifetime later, we're bead to beadlessness. In that moment I scope so many emotions fluttering his phyzog but fear festers beneath them all and now (as in right now, as in right this second as words still wait my command) I wish that then (as in back then, as in long ago) I was able to emphasize my empathy to somehow soothe his suffering. But here (as in here in this half-state where nostalgia and narrative collide) I find I can't and instead I scope a drop of Murray's own blood forming on the tip of my beak that still grips the squirming squirm.

  What do you figure? To me such symbolism surely seems absolutely apotropaic and I shake my head so that it falls with the pattering rain to land amid the pink bubbles on his lips. What else was I to do? I scope that, when the feathers fly, peepniks and pigeons alike revert to rituals (invoked or invented) and – you know what? – his features flicker with what's not far from a smile. Just for an instant, I'm granted a glimpse of the wolf in sheep's clothing and the blessing in disguise that do drive me to distraction a decade later. But then he's gone and only the idea remains.

  Consciousness: it's the construct that concerns me and mine is connected to Murray's as surely as both are now on their last legs; as surely as the unilluminable nik's nature is the purity of peepnik perfection; as surely as empathy is embraced and discarded by peepniks and pigeons alike; as surely as the London Pigeon Wars were a fuss over nothing; as surely as I'm sure it's a capacity that most do their utmost to avoid. Consciousness: now the narrative's played out and I'm trying to treasure the final few moments of my bird's-eye view, I scope it as a concept that's neither one thing nor the other: neither wolf nor sheep, neither blessing nor curse, neither life nor death. But it's all that there is nonetheless.

  To be veritably veritas, I feel cheated. You bet I do. But do you figure I'd swap Content for the brief exhilaration of consciousness, the consciousness thereof and the contemplation therefore? Figure a
gain, my friends.

  So yours truly finds himself back on the bank of London's great river in the unforgiving pip of the present, with nothing for company but a carcass that will soon be carried off on the timeless tide as the words slip away with a certainty that soothes and stings in equal measure. The wind is rising and I scope the black holdstuff and it's open and the eddies cast cash into the air (blue, brown and purple queens) and over the corpse of consciousness – illuminated for me, at last, as possibility's ghost – – like a tickertape parade, all upside down. I don't expect your pity. I'm just a feather-brained pigeon with ideas above my station (out of the weather, in the warmth of Waterloo). I know that now. I don't expect your pity for Murray, either. He was a slick nik skating on this city's surface so smoothly that he barely left a mark. And when the ice broke beneath him, nobody looked for him. How do you illuminate it? Mishap, I tell you. But I do wonder if you peepniks have pity enough for yourselves. Because this could happen to you yet and pity predicates perspective and couldn't we all do with a dose of that?

  My last thought is an absurd one: the realization that the corpse of consciousness took a decade to move upstream, against the tide. Figure that as you feel it. Uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh. My call comes quick, eager even as it ebbs: ‘Consciousness. Content. Consciousness. Content. Content. Content. Content.’ And, finally, words fail me.