A Shock

by Keith Ridgway

  — A reputation is a gathered thing. You cannot throw it off easy.

  Pigeon asked Ronnie when there’d last been snow because he couldn’t remember. He thought maybe it was years ago. But Ronnie insisted that there’d been snow last winter. Late snow. He said he remembered because he’d slid all the way down Camberwell Grove in the van, his nephew Gary screaming like a girl in the passenger seat, Ronnie pumping the brakes and just praying that whatever he ended up hitting it wasn’t a Jaguar or a Telsa or a Rolls fucking Royce.

  — Tesla, Pigeon corrected him.

  — I know I know. I misspeak out of defiance.

  — Yeah?

  — Not rich people going to save the planet Pigeon. Dead people will save the planet.

  — How?

  — By dying.

  Ronnie was a pessimist. The van hadn’t hit anything in the end, it had just come to a sideways halt outside the pub, and he and Gary hadn’t stopped laughing for an hour. Pigeon had heard the story before. But he thought it had been two years ago. At least. But Ronnie insisted.

  — Took us half day to get to Elephant and then we give up. Went for a fry. Left the van off Walworth Road and went home on the bus. Great day. Lovely day. Late February. This year.

  — Ok. I don’t remember that.

  — You sleep in till June.

  He had been late once for Ronnie. But that had been enough. Ronnie hated it more than any other thing. He’d blown the horn until people were shouting out windows at him, Pigeon having to come out in his socks, his boots in his hand, his face not even splashed, his mouth like a compost box. And Ronnie just stared at him, a slow shake of the head and his eyes narrowed with contempt as if Pigeon was contemptible, was nothing, was just more human scum. It had been five minutes. But Ronnie had hung it on Pigeon like a name tag. You must be awake Pigeon. You must be awake in the world or you are not in the world at all. Lazy youth no prosper.

  His dream had faded. Only snow and trees remained, and the memory of being cold. He ate the last of the sandwiches and thought of cold places. The north. Scandinavia. Russia. He could just walk, and it would get colder. Take a boat up into the ice. Deckhand. Trawler man. Something like that. Dirty at first, the ice, then clear clean white. He’d never been further north than Leeds.

  He tidied things away and Ronnie went upstairs to the bathroom and organised what they were doing. Lady wanted the whole thing the other way around. She wanted a pedestal bath. She wanted a bidet. She wanted a toilet like the captain’s chair on Star Trek with all the buttons. She wanted the door in a different place. So they had stripped out what was there and Pigeon had carted it all out to the skip, and now they were playing Twister with the pipes and Ronnie would shout STOP STOP every half hour or so and look at his diagrams. Pigeon had long since given up trying to have an opinion about what Ronnie had been doing for twenty damn years before Pigeon was drama in your mother house. Pigeon was twenty-three and his parents’ second child. So. But he just stayed quiet now and Ronnie would kneel on the floor and redraw his diagrams while Pigeon swept up around him, and they would undo about fifteen minutes out of every thirty, rolling the time back like stripping a wire. Pigeon hated this work. Or maybe he didn’t mind it. He didn’t pay attention to either the work or what he thought of it. He went off in his head, and he had lots of time for that, and that was good, and he had stopped worrying about it because the last thing Ronnie wanted from him was thinking.

  It was hot. He thought his dream was simply that. It was memorable because of that. He thought of the swimming pool in Camberwell and how he liked it, in theory, while in practise it was always full of kids and in the water you had to keep moving or you’d just see plasters or clumps of hair floating past. He thought of being on his back on the grass in Burgess Park, shirt off, music on, couple of beers. Boring. Useless. He wanted to be away. Swimming in a sea, like he had in Ibiza. But somewhere else. Sober. Dawn. His skin in the low sun. Off the coast of Senegal. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Or walking through some low hills in, what, in the northern parts of India, Kashmir, or sailing in the blue Sea of . . . Marmara. Turkey. He wanted to be wandering through the fog of Patagonia though, really, down in the cold south, naked in the glow of the earthworm, unloved on his own terms in a place he could not imagine.

  There. In his mind the world was a tumble of words that he loved.

  He’d never been further south than Ibiza. Never been further west than . . . Dublin. East . . . Amsterdam? Probably Ibiza again. A small narrow patch of the world. Twenty-three. Useless.

  He was in a room, a big bare room, waiting while Ronnie tried to figure out how to carry a rich woman’s waste away from her. A bathroom bigger than his family living room. Bigger than the bathroom Rajit’s family had. Bigger than the bathroom of the expensive Marylebone Hotel where he’d once spent a night with an Italian. That place. This was a bathroom with nothing in it, where he could crouch and half-close his eyes and look out over the dust and the bare wood like he was looking out over the plains of Patagonia, where a giant slow-moving monster called Ronnie scratched strange lines in the desert sand.

  — Aaaaah. I know where it wrong. Take that board back up.

  Ants came out of him in this other dream, close to a nightmare. Saturday morning, so he lay on top of his duvet for a long half hour thinking it through. A forest. On a slope. Him walking downhill, the sun on his left warming him, and he’s happy but he’s being careful where he steps because he’s barefoot. He puts his hands on tree trunks as he passes. There are patches of grass, bushes, little clearings full of sunlight. And then he feels a tickling on his chest and scratches it. It’s morning. A big forest morning and he’s walking downhill and there is a lake at the bottom, he knows. More tickling on his chest and he looks down and it’s an ant walking on him, and he stares at it and picks it off as if he doesn’t want to hurt it. A small ant. Half-sized. He doesn’t know why it’s half-sized. He doesn’t know how he knows that. And then there’s another. On his bare chest. He’s naked. He sleeps naked and he pushes his duvet off so in his dreams he’s always naked and outdoors. And if he’s cold he’s cold. And if the sun is up and on him then it’s the weekend and he’s somewhere warm. And now there are ants, all over him. And he’s not taking care now, he’s brushing them off, knocking them off, slapping at them, specks of their blood on his palms. And he feels them in his arse. And his cock. And he looks down at his cock and lifts it up to look at the opening and the ants are climbing out of there and he goes to shout or scream and they’re in his mouth and he wakes up, slap, he slaps his stomach once, and then he just freezes, because he knows immediately that it was a dream and there are no ants. But he gives himself a once over, just to be sure. He gives himself a once over twice. And then gets up to pee and he looks in his mouth in the mirror and it’s just dry, and he needed to pee so that was what that was. A dry mouth and a full bladder and his body finding a way to get him up and sort it out. At eight on a Saturday morning.

  He went back to bed and thought about it. His body. Not just body. But the thing that is his, as if he is something else. He never got as far as the lake. Even when he fell back asleep the forest was gone and the ants were gone and he was instead in an impossible weightless place without border where he rolled his naked body amongst other naked bodies and the whispers that he heard were as prayers, wordless but solemn, a murmur of touches, mouths on his, hands on him, until a clear low voice like Ronnie’s said close to his ear you want to come now don’t ya? and he woke up and rolled on his back and came, and then dozed with a wet belly like a man who’d been shot.

  Eventually his belly dried out and rumbled and sent him to find food.

  His brother had told him to read books. As in, the specific books. Read this. Did you read that? Read this one. He just told him to read them. Didn’t say oh this is really good I think you’d like this. Never asked him what he thought of any of them. Just read this. Give it back when
you’re finished. Started when he was about twelve. He still did it sometimes, and they’d laugh. But now they talked about them too, lightly. Came back from Manchester every few weeks for a couple of days. What did you get out of that? What do you think of that? It was mostly history, politics, both of which Pigeon liked, but he couldn’t follow his brother very far into theory, and that’s where his brother lived. He was all French guys, 1950s guys, Italian guys.

  Pigeon has the looks. Daniel has the brains, his mother said. Her own children. One of you ugly, one of you dumb. Effectively. Both of them furious. She was right though, except that it was Daniel who had a girlfriend. Proper girlfriend, together for years. She was a union organiser, and it was all politics for them, all the time. They’d joined the Labour Party when Corbyn had been elected. And after he got his PhD maybe Daniel would teach, or maybe he’d be a politician. Pigeon laughed in his face about it. But truthfully, he would love it. He would. Seeing his brother on the television, giving people shit. He wasn’t ugly.

  Pigeon did have the looks though. Tall, good skin, big clear eyes, natural muscles, a smiling face that people just loved. And he wasn’t dumb.

  When his father died he’d been dressed up in a suit, eight years old, and they’d made him bring flowers up on the stage. Not the stage. The altar. And when he had, the crowd had lost it. Not the crowd. The congregation. Such a cute kid. Little angel. They’d all of them, every single one, burst into tears. Quite a thing to turn around and have a hundred people bawling at you. He’d stood stock still, terrified, until Daniel came up and got him, which just made everyone cry more. Whole building filling with tears. Pigeon floating to the rafters and swimming there, looking down at his sunken dad in his sunken boat.

  His mother said he’d been raised by pigeons. They’d lived on the top floor of a block in Peckham that was gone now and that Pigeon had no memory of, and there were pigeon coops on the roof of this place, and his mother said that he’d spent all day talking with the pigeons who came down to the windowsill to talk to him. She said he had all the knowledge of pigeon London in him. All their schemes and shortcuts. Their plans and dramas. All their getting under people’s feet. He’d liked the idea that he had a special knowledge, but he could not retrieve it.

  But the story was all wrong. The sound he’d made as a baby was not the sound that pigeons make. Pigeons and doves make a deep trilling sort of noise, a lot like the purring of a cat, but louder. The sound he’d made had instead been a literal coo, coo. He knew this because he still made it. If anything, it was more like the sound of a cuckoo. From what he could tell from YouTube anyway. It had taken him ages to figure this out, but he had, while he was still very young. He may have liked the pigeons at the window when he was a baby. He may have talked to them, but he didn’t make their sound. The sound he made was much more likely, he’d realised, to have come from his mother as she leaned over him, held him, rocked him to sleep, fed him. Coo coo.

  So he was called Pigeon for no good reason at all.

  At some point in the process of working this out he had sat in the playground at school and waited for a couple of pigeons to come over to him, and he had tried to talk to them.

  Coo?

  They came closer, and he thought that maybe . . . but they pecked around his feet and looked at him expectantly, hustling for bread, for lunch box crumbs.

  Coo coo coo?

  And of course some other boy had spotted him, heard him, and everyone had had a good laugh. The weird Pigeon, talking to the pigeons. The name stuck harder. But it was a mistake. It was a stupid mistake.

  If it weren’t for his mother, for Daniel, he would leave. Just disappear out of London, out of England. What were these things? He would rather vanish.

  How did she not know that pigeons made a different sound? Could she not hear them? How had no one corrected her? All those aunts and uncles cooing at him. Laughing when he cooed back. What sort of nonsense was that?

  Pigeons coo. But that word doesn’t match the sound. It is not, he decided, onomatopoeic. Pigeon looked this word up when he was maybe eleven or twelve, and to his astonishment, to his rage, the word coo was listed in the definition as an example of onomatopoeia. Dictionary was wrong. Just bare wrong. He wanted his brother to do something about it.

  Daniel laughed at him. Pigeons do coo, Daniel said. They make all sorts of noises, and of course coo was onomatopoeic. It was, he said, exactly like moo. Was moo onomatopoeic? Pigeon didn’t know. Yes it was, said Daniel. Cows don’t make the actual sound that we make when we say moo. They don’t have the lips. But moo is our approximation of that sound. Given our lips. It was the same, he said, with coo. Pigeons coo. They don’t make the sound of the word coo, but they coo.

  Approximation.

  But, Pigeon had said. But but but. It’s a crap approximation. It’s nothing like the sound that pigeons make. It’s not the trilling in the throat, the warbling, the floppy watery sound of it. Daniel didn’t care. Take it up with history he said. Which was something he said a lot.

  But maybe Pigeon had got it all backwards.

  There was another sound that he heard sometimes in the evening, or in the morning, and it was much more like the sound of the word coo. He’d thought it was owls. For years he’d assumed that there were owls hidden everywhere. In the trees where he walked to school, in the parks where he hung around in the evenings. In the gardens of the houses coming up the hill. In the big trees that stood beside their block, on the roof, in the eaves. But he’d never seen them because they kept themselves hidden. They were night birds. They were in their nests, they couldn’t be seen. At some point in his teens he’d told someone that he liked the sounds of the owls in the evenings. A girl. They’d been walking through a park. Owls? she asked. What owls? And he’d waited and picked out the sound the next time he heard it and said there, that sound. And she had liked him quite a lot he thought, but even still she laughed. Not a mean laugh. She’d laughed and shouldered him gently, playfully, and told him

  — That’s pigeons you daft git. There’s no owls in London.

  He laughed, shouldered her in return.

  — I know, he said, I know. I just like to imagine that they’re owls.

  And she’d thought that was cute or whatever, and they’d kissed by the playground for a while. But when he got home he spent the whole evening on the web trying to find out what the hell was going on with birds.

  So, maybe. Maybe they do coo. But they didn’t coo like him. And he didn’t coo like them. He was not what people said he was, and the sounds he made were his own.

  And he kept on making them. For a while as a teenager he’d tried to stop. Tried to train himself out of them. But they just came. Little coos. Quiet little coos. Sometimes not so quiet. People usually thought he was saying cool. But he was saying coo. Sometimes he was more confident with it. Coo.

  People liked it. They’d smile at him.

  But most of the time it just came out of him. His lips didn’t even move. The noise just came. Coo. When he thought of something, worked something out. When he saw something that he liked or didn’t like. When he read something and understood it or didn’t understand it. When he got home and Daniel was there. When he woke up and it was the weekend. When he got paid. Not loud. But people heard it. People heard it and he didn’t know what they thought, but he had stopped worrying about it.

  He couldn’t vanish. Vanishing was what other people experienced when you went somewhere else. When you left no word. You created a vanishing that only other people knew. But you were wherever you were, un-vanished.

  Vanishing is not a gift you can give yourself. Unless in falling asleep. Unless in waking up.

  He had seen Ronnie’s cock. This had been an error. It wasn’t his fault. Ronnie had taken a piss in the back garden of a house in Deptford where they were putting in a shed. Pigeon had swung around at the sound of running water, looking for the sou
rce, half afraid that he’d hit a pipe, and there was Ronnie’s cock. Just an ordinary cock. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing exceptional about it. Just a cock. But Pigeon had cooed. Coo. And he’d swung away again and cursed himself silently and felt the blood rush around him in confusion.

  Ronnie didn’t say anything, but the whole rest of the day he was in a mood. As if, Pigeon thought, he’d taken the coo as an insult. Some men get very weird about it, they get defensive, they all think they should be bigger or whatever. And Pigeon didn’t care, he really did not care, but he wondered if Ronnie had thought that he’d been making fun of him. Because he hadn’t. It had been a coo of surprise. But how do you walk that back? That sort of misunderstanding? Wait until the drive home and tell him he had a nice cock?

  — Lovely penis, Ronnie, by the way.

  — Thank you Pigeon.

  That was not a thing that could happen. It should. It should be a thing that could happen, he thought. He didn’t want anyone to feel bad about their body. Amount of grief guys had about that stuff. That was just . . . that should be the thing that couldn’t happen.

  And in all this chatting with himself was hidden — badly — the terrible notion that maybe Ronnie had taken it as something worse than an insult, something more like a sigh, something with desire in it. It was only days afterwards, quiet, that Pigeon allowed himself to think fully that maybe that’s what Ronnie had thought. Pigeon didn’t fancy Ronnie. Not even vaguely, not ever. He couldn’t even conceive of him as a sexual being at all. He was like a child or a relation or a Labrador. His legs just walked, his chest just breathed, his head just sat on top of him. The fact that he had a cock at all had never previously been something that Pigeon had considered.

  He found all of this embarrassing and distracting. He made himself stop thinking about it.