The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  ‘Look,’ Tom said. ‘Right. You know the last time I saw you at college?’

  He was staring at Murray. He could see his eyes reflected in the dark glass. Murray said nothing.

  ‘The last time I saw you…’ Tom continued. ‘Well. What… what I mean to say is… Well… what I said… You know I didn't mean it, right? I mean, that's not why we haven't seen you for…’

  Murray leaned forward and Tom heard him take a sharp breath. ‘Fuck!’ he hissed. ‘Look at that!’

  Instinctively Tom pressed his face to the window. The pane was cold against his forehead. It took his eyes a moment or two to adjust to the sombre outside. Then he saw it. Although he didn't know what ‘it’ was. It looked like a vast black cloak billowing across the purple sky above the rooftops opposite.

  ‘You've got to admire them, china,’ Murray said. ‘I mean, you've got to fucking admire them.’

  ‘What's that?’

  ‘Pigeons,’ Murray whispered. ‘The pigeons.’

  4

  The thing about Murray

  The thing about Murray… Well… how long have you got? He was just someone people talked about and they began their opinions with the words ‘The thing about Murray is…’

  Here are some things about Murray. ‘He's basically a wank-uh,’ said the gargle-voiced Sloane, allowing that final syllable to die beneath his chinless chin. ‘He is a very nice chap,’ said the Indian shopkeeper who sold him vacuum-packed chicken roll at nine every morning. ‘The thing about him?’ said the American tourist. ‘He's fine and he knows it.’ And she touched her friend's elbow and pointed across Kensington High Street. ‘He's attractive in a quirky kind of way,’ said the blushing academic. ‘He's one of them brothers who thinks he's white just because he passes,’ said the president of the London University black caucus. ‘He's a fucking wigger,’ said the pinking DJ in the Stüssy hoodie and he kissed his teeth in disgust. ‘He's not what I expected,’ said Freya, the first time she saw him. ‘He's just too bright for his own good,’ said the nervous boy at the bar and his comrades nodded in agreement. ‘He's just not that interesting,’ said the nervous boy's friend and the comrades nodded again and they kept talking about him anyway. Sometimes, before she'd met him, when Tom or Karen or Tariq related their hilarious stories, Ami would say, ‘The thing is, he just sounds like a bit of an arsehole.’ But she'd never seen him in action and she still listened to the stories because she was intrigued.

  The thing about Murray was there were lots of things about him – passionate things, extreme things, fundamental things, ephemeral things, contradictory things – and, if you heard people refer to him, the only similarity of tone you might spot (and then only if your ears were pinned right back) was a vague suggestion of regret… No. Jealousy… No. Somewhere between the two. And it was a quiet suggestion, like the sound of London in the dead of night when you can close your eyes and take a deep breath and you listen to the silence and you still know exactly where you are.

  When people talked about Murray, especially if they weren't Murray fans (‘The thing about Murray is I don't actually like him’), they often caught themselves in mid-sentence and said, ‘So why are we talking about him, then?’ or something similar. But they couldn't help it. Some people managed to hate him, to despise and dismiss him and delude themselves by saying, ‘The thing about Murray? I see him for what he is.’ But even they couldn't help but care what he thought and what he did and what he would think and do next. Murray was just one of those guys who was in some strange way ubiquitous, monolithic, as unignorable as the Westway. Take Princess Diana or 9/11: when she died or the Twin Towers collapsed everyone ended up having an opinion whether they wanted one or not. Right. Exactly. He was simultaneously as familiar and untold as London itself.

  Say Murray's at a house party thrown by one of Tom's teaching colleagues in a Tulse Hill maisonette that's all flat-pack pine and lurid linoleum. The dimmer-switches are low and there's jazz funk on the stereo and Murray's dancing so outrageously that nobody else can get on to the small living-room dancefloor and Tom is mildly embarrassed.

  Murray meets a girl. She's probably a plain Jane with no more than a dash of slap and a flowing skirt that signals the luggage on her hips. She's a lurker, hiding on the periphery where her prints match the wallpaper, smoking a nervous cigarette and sipping a glass of Bulgarian red. But Murray? He spots her in an instant and whisks her off to a quiet spot – the corner by the fridge, the balcony or the top stair. Even as she looks at him, she knows she's playing with fire but she's a little tipsy and she tells herself she doesn't care. So she opens up to him about her job as an office manager in Elephant and Castle and the studio flat she's just bought off the Kennington High Road.

  ‘Right,’ Murray nods. ‘Really? Great!’

  From anyone else's mouth, these are just platitudes, conversational staples. But, somehow, Murray imbues them with another quality. You could call it enthusiasm but such a definite term doesn't quite suffice. Because this quality is less tangible; a vibrancy, say, apparently innocent and unironic. Because to look at Murray's expression you'd have thought office management was the eye of the next revolution and a Kennington box quite the most desirable address in the city.

  With such a vibe at her back, Plain Jane will tell him everything: her dreams, her fears, her history (potted and re-potted like her cheese plant). If her dad died of bowel cancer at the age of forty-six? Murray finds out in minutes and he nods or shakes his head as appropriate and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and holds the movement for one second as though time has to stop still in the presence of such a unique tragedy. Maybe she's a recovering anorexic? She lets that slip too and Murray says he'd never have guessed and he tells her how good she looks and he offers her a sausage roll. Perhaps she's fucking her boss? Murray tuts and rolls his eyes and ticks her off with such sympathy that she thinks she could be talking to her mum (as if she could have ever told her mum such a thing!).

  Murray makes her feel like a princess and she goes home on a high and, for once, she doesn't fight the minicab driver over the odd pound. She hasn't noticed that Murray said nothing about himself and she knows nothing about him (because she never asked). She remembers pressing her number into his hand and his enthusiastic acceptance. And she successfully ignores the indisputable certainty that he will never call (because why burst that bubble?).

  Some people said that the thing about Murray was he used those he met and then spat them out like hour-old gum. But ask Plain Jane? She wouldn't hear a word against the guy who made her feel like a princess for an hour. Just an hour. One whole hour. Because she knows that in this city you take your heroes wherever you can find them.

  Murray is in a Soho nightclub. He's lounging at the bar making easy small talk to the statuesque blonde with a Lycra body and ten-quid-a-pop incandescent orange tan. She feigns little interest at first because she's used to guys trying their luck, even if this charming chancer with the curious complexion (or is it just the light?) is a cut above the average. But watch a little closer. Do you see the way she adjusts her body position, bit by bit, almost imperceptibly opening herself up to this stranger one proud breast at a time?

  ‘I'm with my boyfriend,’ she says and Murray nods because he's known all along.

  ‘Which one is he?’

  She points him out, probably some body-built strapper with more mirrors than books, and Murray is uncertain and squints as if short-sighted: ‘Which one? The bow-legged guy?’

  A couple of minutes later, Murray makes his excuses and backs off just as the boyfriend comes over. As the hunk approaches, she notices the slight roll in his gait and his ten-to-two knees for the first time. And no amount of hours in the gym are going to address a flaw like that.

  Once, more than ten years ago, Tariq witnessed a comparable scenario play out in the Crown and Two Chairmen. ‘The thing about Murray,’ he said shaking his head, ‘is he's, like, a sprite or a goblin. Something like that.’

 
; Karen didn't agree. She didn't like it when others invested Murray with magical qualities. It scared her. ‘He's just having Murray-fun,’ she said and that was the phrase they all used after that. ‘He's a social terrorist.’

  Picture this. Murray joins a gang of blokes around a bar. They could be anyone: South London geezers with expensive designer shirts and a taste for bottled beer, round-the-way Peckham guys with wary manners and gold-toothed smiles, earnest Muswell Hill graduates supping real ale, City slickers with shot veins around their noses and cushion-chewing buttocks, Soho bohos in capacious pants made from technologically crafted parachutes. And Murray can talk and he can listen. He shouts down the loudest big-mouth, he catches group attention with his mumbling tone, he listens, sage and interested, he snipes, he ironizes and he never fails to take centre stage even if he has to move it to the conversational suburbs. Cars? He knows the tread on a factory-fresh Cosworth tyre, the wattage of every JBL bass bin, the economy of a Volvo engine, the acceleration of an MX5, the satirical statement of a Ford Capri. Music? You name it he's got it: the latest white label or import on Greensleeves, Van Morrison's lost album, the Pink Floyd boxed set, DJ Shadow on his iPod. Women? He's fucked them: chip-shop chic, bootie-bouncing garage chicks, wives, mistresses, born-again virgins.

  When Karen labelled Murray in the Crown and Two Chairmen, Tom was there too and he joined in the laughter because he liked the idea of ‘Murray-fun’. But he couldn't really agree with ‘social terrorist’. As a phrase, it sounded like just the thing you'd been looking for but it didn't actually work. Because surely a terrorist has a cause (however ill-conceived).

  As far as Tom was concerned, Murray was more of a spur-of-the-moment joiner, a passerby who spots the riot-in-waiting and, seeing the opportunity for good looting, chucks the first rubbish bin through the electrical store's window. The way Tom saw it, Murray was a chancer, first and last. And Tom had known Murray longer than anyone.

  They met at London Media Tech, a recently upgraded polytechnic in the urban armpit between Farringdon and Barbican. It had started life in the late sixties as a small graduate journalism college on the back of a bequest from Lord Such-and-Such but had gradually expanded its curricula until it achieved full university status, had campuses dotted around the city and taught all subjects to equivalent levels of mediocrity. LMT appealed to all sorts; local kids with ambitions unmatched by their grades, earnest hopefuls from former colonies attracted by the cheap fees and numerous bursaries and provincial public schoolboys who cared about nothing beyond a spell in the big smoke. Mostly it handed out poor-quality degrees to poor-quality students for little more than three years' persistence.

  Tom and Murray lived in the same hall of residence throughout their first year but didn't speak until the final term. Before that? Tom doubts Murray even knew who he was. But everyone knew Murray, at least by sight or reputation. By then, there were already all kinds of rumours doing the rounds (about his racial background especially) but the facts were only three. Everyone knew Murray partly because he never pitched up to seminars (which granted him both cachet and, bizarrely, increased recognition), partly because he had only one name, but mostly because he only ate chicken.

  He was famous for it. In his first week at LMT, Murray complained to the senior tutor's office that the canteen didn't serve chicken for breakfast. At first they thought he was joking. People often thought Murray was joking. At first.

  He made an appointment to see the senior tutor; a liberal anthropologist called Daffyd Jones whose creases were stronger than his backbone. Jones should have seen it coming. After all, it was him who'd let Murray in despite his lack of A levels.

  In his admissions interview, Murray had employed an unusual technique. Ignoring the senior tutor's run-of-the-mill questioning, Murray chose instead to launch into a passionate polemic against his reputation, arguing that all the anthropologist's work thus far was blatantly racist in conception. Unsurprisingly, Jones was somewhat taken aback and, further bewildered by this would-be student's uncertain racial status, he found himself glancing at Murray's application form for the tick boxes beneath the heading ‘Ethnicity’ (because he needed to know what he was dealing with, didn't he?). When he discovered that Murray had ignored the twelve definite alternatives in favour of the thirteenth (‘other’), Jones suddenly felt profoundly guilty and convinced of his own prejudice. And it was a slippery slope from there.

  Much of Murray's argument seemed to be based on the opening passage of the introduction to Jones's Africa: A Biography, which began with the line, ‘Africa has long been perceived as the most mysterious of continents.’ But he reasoned so cogently, responded with such quick wit and identified the professor's moral funny-bones with such easy precision that, by the end, Jones felt like his entire academic career had been turned on its head.

  ‘You leave me on a sticky wicket, Murray,’ Jones had said. ‘You cannot expect that I should admit you to LMT only because a failure to do so would further reinforce your allegations in your position as a student of… umm… “other” ethnicity.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Murray replied.

  And his acceptance was confirmed the following day.

  At the ‘chicken appointment’, it took Murray less than ten minutes to bamboozle the senior tutor once again. Jones mumbled vaguely about making allowances for Jews or Moslems and the pragmatic need to look after the interests of the many. But Murray questioned the professor's definitions of religion and utilitarianism and espoused powerful arguments in support of the individual and against the tyranny of the majority. He rubbished numerous nutritionist reports with countless historical examples of flawed scientific advice and he quoted the college's constitution, ‘…to endeavour to provide acceptable food in the canteen for all sections of the college community.’

  ‘But, Murray,’ Jones complained, as soothingly as possible, ‘what section of the college community do you represent?’

  ‘Professor,’ Murray chided. ‘Don't you remember my LMT application? “Ethnicity”, it said. And I said, “other”.’

  ‘But other people eat food apart from chicken!’

  ‘Other people? Or other people?’

  ‘I'm sorry, Murray. I don't follow.’

  ‘Which other people?’

  ‘Other people.’

  ‘Which other?’

  ‘Well! I don't know I'm sure but…’

  ‘Precisely. For the purposes of this college I am other people. And I only eat chicken.’

  Thereafter Murray ate chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Grilled, fried, boiled, casserolled, roasted, glazed, braised, barbecued and souped. Shredded, wings, skinned breasts, à l'orange (or any other fruit you'd care to mention), Sunday traditional, sweet and sour, Thai-style, thighs, drumsticks and broth. The head chef didn't mind because he liked Murray and he liked the idea that he was helping put one over on the establishment.

  Sometimes, in the years after they left LMT when they were still together, Tom and Karen argued about who had introduced Murray to the other. When they had these arguments they both pretended the subject was actually something else.

  ‘It's not about who met Murray first,’ Karen would sneer (as if that were quite the most ridiculous suggestion). ‘It's about the fact you always have to be right. What does that say?’

  Or Tom spat: ‘It doesn't matter who knew Murray when. What matters is the way you want to squabble.’

  But they both knew they were lying. Because it was about who met Murray first and it did matter. For some reason, they both felt proprietorial of their relationships with Murray, even as those relationships faded into the past.

  In the decade after leaving LMT, when Murray was gone from his life, Tom realized that his memories – of his childhood, adolescence and student days – changed. Some dissolved while others were accentuated and his perception of his own character (who he was) dissolved and was accentuated accordingly. But his memories of Murray? They remained as crystal clear as a Hyde Park morni
ng (or so he thought). Their meeting, the things they'd done, that final argument; they were like lampposts that illuminated his past and made it somehow comprehensible. Tom knew that Murray's essence (as a chancer) was liquid and changeable but at least the jelly-moulds of Tom's recollection retained their definite and immutable shape. For some reason Tom never explained it to Karen like that (why it was about Murray, why it mattered). If he had, she'd have understood.

  For the record, Tom met Murray the day before Karen but, for all their arguments and personal significances, this tells you little about them as a couple. More intriguing is that neither of them actually introduced Murray to the other because it was, in fact, Murray who introduced them. If Tom had remembered this when their relationship was evaporating before their eyes in Hanger Lanes of hot air and bad feeling, he'd have felt his stomach yo-yo and cold sweat clam between his shoulderblades. If Karen had remembered this, her eyes would have fired as if this confirmed her every suspicion and she'd have commented: ‘What does that say?’ But they didn't remember.

  Tom met Murray in the small Catholic chaplaincy at LMT. A Catholic chapel in one of London's new universities is an incongruous cubby-hole at the best of times but the stand-in priest (while the resident was under investigation) made it seem downright ridiculous. Father Callaghan, despite the clues of his name, was an ancient cockney with a taste for fire and brimstone. His services were carried out in a fug of incense, confused (and inappropriate) ideas and turgid slabs of Latin that he delivered with the intonation of a bingo caller and the twang of rhyming slang. The way Callaghan saw it, his predecessor (Father Joe, currently under investigation) had surely been corrupted by the devil-may-care (and he does) atmosphere of university life. So Callaghan determined to drive out the standards of modern Catholicism: pretty Irish girls with their dwindling consciences, and three-chord, unmusical guitarists with arhythmical tambourines. He was so successful that within a month even the happy clappies (with those bright sweatshirts and spooky fixed smiles) had jumped ship and Sunday mass was attended only by earnest Africans, nervous virgins and the occasional suicidal tendency. And Tom, of course, who was coming towards the end of one of his spells of desperate, panicked Christian faith.