The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  On that particular Sunday, Tom was lost in torpor throughout the service, hugging his boredom around his shoulders like a cosy duvet, and he didn't even notice Murray until the recessional hymn. Then Father Callaghan announced the number and, to Tom's astonishment, launched, unaccompanied and unironic, into the opening verse of a dusty old favourite called ‘God Bless Our Pope’. His voice was like a gurgling drain and even the Africans (whose notorious conservatism was stuck somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century) looked at one another, embarrassed. Then, for the chorus, Callaghan's voice was joined by another; a booming baritone behind Tom's left ear that was close enough to make him jump.

  Tom swung round to find Murray giving the hymn his all. His eyes were smiling brightly and his spittle flecked Tom's forehead. Murray nodded, respectful and conspiratorial, at Callaghan as the priest processed down the aisle and out of the back of the chapel and Murray was left singing alone.

  ‘God bless our pope!’ he chorused.

  ‘God bless our pope!’ he enthused.

  ‘God bless our pope!’ he howled.

  ‘For heeeee…’ Enjoying his solo, Murray luxuriated in every word of the last line. ‘Issssss…’ He elongated alternate vowels and consonants like he was stretching toffee. ‘Goooooooood!’

  Murray closed his hymn book and beamed. The Africans muttered to one another and looked at him disapprovingly. They thought he was joking. The suicidal tendency with ginger hair and sideburns hurried for the door, stumbling noisily over the pews. His face looked stricken, like Murray's voice had carried him over the edge. But Tom? He just stared.

  He'd seen Murray before, of course – hanging around the hall, feet up in the TV lounge, relishing six nuggets or a McChicken burger (minus bap and salad) – but he realized he'd never actually looked at him and Murray had certainly never looked back.

  At first glance, Murray was utterly unexceptional. He was averagely tall, averagely slim (though it was difficult to tell in his baggy T-shirt and track pants) and his black hair was cropped to a millimetre or two in a way that spoke more laziness than intent. But the more you considered him, the harder it became to pinpoint his looks.

  After leaving LMT, when Tom told stories about Murray to those who hadn't met him (like Freya or Kwesi or Identikit Ami), they'd often ask about his appearance to build a mental picture. But, to their frustration, Tom would shrug and say: ‘He just looks normal.’ Because that was easier than trying to explain something to them that he couldn't explain to himself. There was something about Murray's face… His features were even and not especially Plasticine but, any time you chose to stare, he always looked completely different from the time before and you couldn't put your finger on why.

  Murray was, of course, a master of expression and occasionally Tom wondered if that had something to do with his curiously shifting looks. Smiles? Where most punters average around five (typically: happy, sad, tolerant, intolerant and indifferent), Murray had as many as the people he met and the circumstances he encountered. But the fact was that the mechanics of Murray's different smiles (or any other expressions, for that matter) appeared identical (and Tom knew because he'd studied them), so the differences had to lie elsewhere. Sometimes Tom hypothesized that the substance of Murray's expressions lay only in the response of their intended. But that couldn't be it. Because when Murray smiled affectionately the next-door room could sunbathe in the warmth and when he looked scornful a whole tube carriage would be chastized. Tom concluded, therefore, that the power and variety of Murray's expressions must be on some different, unknowable level. Like magic.

  He suggested this once to Karen and she shook her head and tutted irritably.

  ‘I only said it's like magic,’ Tom protested.

  ‘It's just a trick,’ she said finally. And Tom was left wondering what could be more like magic than a trick.

  Apart from his command of expressions, Tom otherwise tried to attribute Murray's inconsistent appearance to the ‘whole race thing’ (and hadn't they played some games with that? Especially in the Race Card version of Murray-fun). Because Murray was undoubtedly mixed race… Well… probably.

  He was probably mixed race but which races in what measures was anyone's guess. He was, say, certainly dark-skinned for a white man and light-skinned for an Asian. So what, then? Mediterranean? Sometimes. But not always. His nose was broad and his lips were thick but would you say he was African? Sure. When he chose to be. His eyes were like almonds with a hint of Siam. So there was a dash of Sri Lankan, perhaps? Maybe. If he wanted you to see it. Among numerous other backgrounds, Murray could carry off run-of-the-mill Anglo-Saxon, light-skinned Jamaican, high-caste Indian, Cape coloured, swarthy Mediterranean, even Aboriginal Australian. And just because Tom had never seen him pass as a Scandinavian? Fuck it, he was sure it could be done.

  But Murray never changed his accent or body language when assuming a role and somehow that made him all the more plausible. Hanging with posh boys in blazers? Perhaps they assumed his estuary accent and scruffy clothes were an affectation (no different from the pipes they smoked or the cravats at their necks) and they could forgive him that. Or what about closing-time drinks with the South African bar staff? They were impressed by the ease of his London mannerisms but never questioned for a second his upbringing in the Rainbow Nation. So, when Tom considered it, the uncertainty of Murray's racial background was a symptom of his un-pinnable looks rather than any explanation. And a decade of thinking about that hadn't illuminated Murray one bit.

  ‘He's good, isn't he, china?’

  Those were the first words Murray ever spoke to him.

  ‘What's that?’ Tom blinked. His eyes were dry.

  ‘The pope, I mean. He's good. “God bless our pope for he is good.” You can't argue with that.’ Murray patted his hymn book approvingly, like it contained all the truth in the world.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tom said dryly. ‘He's great.’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘Fantabulous!’

  ‘Perfect!’

  ‘Perfect?’ Murray frowned. ‘Nobody's perfect.’ He held out his hand and Tom accepted. It was warm and dry and unusually small. ‘I'm Murray.’

  ‘Tom,’ Tom said. ‘Tom Dare.’

  ‘Tom Dare? Great name, china! That's a “don't fuck with me” kind of name, huh? A superhero kind of name.’

  Murray was still holding his hand and, when Tom tried to take it back, he squeezed it a little before letting go. Tom was embarrassed. ‘It's only a name,’ he said.

  Murray smiled. ‘Sure. But it's a start.’

  It was exactly twelve years to the day after their first meeting, the day of Freya's launch party, that Tom ran into Murray in Trafalgar Square. Of course Tom didn't notice the symmetry and, if he had, he'd have thought nothing of it. If Murray noticed… Well… he certainly didn't say anything and you suspect he would have done. Because Murray didn't believe in coincidence.

  Tom had taken lunch hour and the first two periods of afternoon school to head into town and see his therapist, a bizarre and wealthy Buddhist called Tejananda (Tom wasn't sure he'd take the recommendation of one of Ami's TV mates again). Afterwards, he dawdled back because he wanted to think and he meandered south of Soho, heading vaguely towards Charing Cross and the Bakerloo Line. He was thinking about Murray and, whatever destiny he tried to attribute to this later, it wasn't a coincidence. Tejananda liked to discuss what he called ‘Moments of Truth’. So Tom had been talking about Karen (of course) and this had led, inevitably, to Murray.

  Tom was striding across the square, excuse-me-ing his way past the map readers, snackers and smokers who loitered in his path. He ducked behind a gang of Nikon brandishers who were shooting pictures of Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth. Only the plinth wasn't empty any more; the enormous lions at each corner were now complemented by a clear cast of an inverted plinth at the square's apex. Tom was briefly confused until he remembered reading about some kind of competition to fill this st
atue gap. So this one-gag wonder must have been the winner. It seemed utterly appropriate. What with the aftershock of an hour's therapy, Tom was in a reflective (if muddled) state of mind and he thought that the perceived need to fill every gap (even with the representation of a gap) was somehow typical. But typical of what, he wasn't sure.

  ‘Hey! China! Tom Dare! Superhero!’

  Someone was shouting at him and Tom lowered his gaze from the plinth to a figure sitting on the step below. Despite the familiarities and his recent thoughts about Murray, he didn't recognize him; not at first. It was only when he came striding over, scattering pigeons, and Tom saw the fried chicken he was munching from a red and white carton that he made the connection. ‘Murray?’

  ‘Who else?’ Murray said, broad-beaming. He offered Tom the carton. ‘Want a piece?’

  Tom shook his head and Murray dumped the remainders of his chicken in a bin. Tom wanted to say something but he was smiling too, wide and happy, and then his smiles turned into a laugh. So Murray beat him to it and Tom remembered that the thing about Murray was he always beat you to it and this made him laugh all the harder.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Murray asked.

  5

  Of consciousness

  Us birds are confused fucksters for sure. While the peepniks divide up their world into there-and-backs, then-and-nows and Tom-Dick-and-Harrys, us birds see everything as a sweep. Or used to, at least. Typically, albeit without the banes and benefits of language, we always called a tree a tree and a foodchit a foodchit; things like that. And, if the last few weeks (or months) have taught me anything it's that more definitions don't necessarily make you understand no better (and they sure make it tricky to know where to take a shit). So don't blame me if this story comes out as wriggly as a squirm that doesn't know its anus from its head.

  Ironic that the niks talk of ‘pigeonholing’, don't you accord? I tell you, that's something to make geezs laugh like the wind in plastic bags. Because peepniks with their penchant for exactitude still don't have no talent for a precise metaphor; not even to describe something that describes them so pinpointedly! Of course I only figure this now because I know that us pigeons live in the instant while the befores and the afters are as various as compass points in the vast expanse of the sky (that triumphs six to four over terra firma for starters). And that's precisely my meaning (if you've got eyes in the back of your head enough to see it).

  So what I'm trying to say is an apology. Because I started with the Declaration of War as if it were the start even if I admitted at the very start that it wasn't. But you need to understand that just because it wasn't the start doesn't mean it wasn't the best place to. Peepniks? They tell their stories in terms of beginnings and middles and ends, which is all well and good for babchicks at bedtime but will never illuminate nut all of a narrative tangle (with all the intrigues therein). Look at it this way, stories are like a glance at the London skyline from suburbia. Like it or not, you can't help seeing over the low-slung homogeny of terraces and semis to the clear silhouettes of skyscrapers that stand up like niks' middle-finger fuck-yous to the heavens. So your focus is on the view from those peaks in the aspiration that such might illuminate the sprawl below. And a story is just the same; begin from a point that makes sense and maybe the rest will take shape too. It doesn't always work but we'll fly with it for the second; only don't let Gunnersbury hear me beak on like this because all this talk of skyscrapers in the Concrete is not what you might call a respectable Surb perspective.

  Check me out! Aren't I quite the peacock (who, for all his fine attire, is still a bird brain nonetheless) ? Because, for all my hypothesizing, I'm not sure I understand Trafalgar now any better than the day it happened. Let me put it like this; a consideration about consciousness from somebirdy who's still new to its rigours: ‘Consciousness is a blessing in disguise.’ And it's such a good disguise that most of you never even see it for what it is. And that's the verity as sure as my name is Ravenscourt (when, a few weeks – or months – ago, I wasn't conscious of my own self).

  I don't recall much about the morning. I was flying in from the west – did I tell you that I'm an In-Outer too? – and I was in the company of all sorts of geezs and coochies. Don't ask me who because I can't remember and that's a fact but I'm hazarding that Gunnersbury must have been among them because we hail from nearby roosts and she was certainly in Trafalgar Square by afternoon.

  My recollections are hazy, disjointed, jerking and silent; like those home flixtures that stir up sounds and smells and tastes but little in the way of lucidity. We were perched on Nelson, clocking foodchits among the peepniks below and swooping down occasionally to peck up niblets like a best bit or a bisquit or a crust.

  Some recollections nip me like a loving coochie's beak. I know it was windy because I can still feel the breeze beneath my wings and the simple joy of gliding on a current as if it was your friend; your fate even. I know there was food in the air (as well as in the bins) because I can taste the thickness of the atmosphere above all manner of stands and stalls. I know the Square was busy because I can still scope the chaotic movements of the crowds, swirling like paisley with the surges of strong-willed niks, the shuffles of bemused yellowsens and the dawdling of old knackereds or, conversely, babchicks. I know too that I felt foreboding. Although, of course, I didn't have the word for it at the time, its sweet stench still clings to my feathers no matter how often I bird bath.

  Picture this: two niks converging from two sides of the Square. At ground level, of course, they're nothing but two more phyzogs in the sea and their trajectories as random as the foolish sparrows who don't know where to spot the next foodchit. But now fly with me to Nelson's feet and enjoy a bird's-eye view and scope the way those two niks cut through the paisley swells like two motor boats on a collision course and you know there's something up.

  I peeped it, of course, but I wasn't much into contemplation at the time (none of us pigeons were). Instead the home flixture is freeze-framed in my mind like a picture postcard of my first sight of that unspectacular greysen and the unilluminable nik I like to call Mishap (for fear of the syllables of his proper name). The greysen was deep in thought and he paused for one instant as though track-stopped by a memory. Seeing this, Mishap took a detour and perched beneath the transparent, upturned nothingness where a lion should stand (that's confused a reckless blackbird or two, I can tell you). Then the unilluminable nik stood up and was walking towards the greysen. He was devouring unilluminable stuff on the move with all the voracious relish of a rat with a carcass.

  What followed? I couldn't tell you with any exactitude because we were gone, diving towards the Square in a pack. I couldn't tell you who was at our apex either so it's the history of events that informs me it must have been Gunnersbury. But, trust me on this, it's not important because in those days, when a pigeon dived, you dived with them with no more sense of why or who than a babchick accepting a bottle. Gunnersbury? Well… the way I scope it these days, I realize that she was not defined by the random choice to dive but by its consequences and how that fact impacts upon your consciousness, consciousness thereof and, indeed, contemplation therefore, is up to you.

  Next thing I knew, I was hovering above a rubbish bin as two birds tucked in at exactly the same time. Again, it is only retrospect that names them as Gunnersbury and Regent, the magpie-looking geez who went on to form the Pigeon Front.

  For some reason – I don't know why – I scoped for the two niks and spotted them disappearing into the paisley. I have a vague recollection that I wondered how their path might plot from above. I didn't contemplate it but, nonetheless, I figure that still might have been my first tug of consciousness. But I was quickly brought back to the rubbish bin by the sound of a warning coo which, I should explain, was about as fowl-mouthed as us pigeons got at the time.

  Gunnersbury and Regent were teetering on the bin rim and fighting over the unilluminable nik's unilluminable stuff, tugging at either side and squawking
like two squibs trying out their calls for the first time. This might not sound remarkable to you (especially if you're one of those pretentious ‘you are what you eat’ fellows who cannot enjoy a meal without the proper manners and accoutrements). But look at it like this: that bin was overflowing with all kinds of delicacies like baps and bisquits and best bits (there was probably even a squirm or two if you had a taste for soul food and were prepared to dig deep). And here were Gunnersbury and Regent scrimmaging over that stuff that comes in a red and white carton. We'd all seen the stuff a thousand times before but none of us ever went near it with its slippery texture and stink like death, so god knows how you illuminate those two pigeons' behaviour. A ‘mishap’, and that's the verity.

  I can still hear their calls as if it were now, the way they seemed to crystallize into words like I was watching the very instant when a stream freezes. Because what was an amorphous flow of communication (despite its indubitable current) suddenly pulled itself apart and reassembled into a distinct structure of indisputable meanings.

  ‘Fuck off! It's mine!’ Gunnersbury was squawking. ‘Get off me, you ugly fuckster! You want me to peckchop your magpie phyzog?’

  And Regent just kept repeating the same phrase, again and again: ‘You fucking Surban coochie! You fucking Surban coochie!’

  Imagine that! Your first moment with a language (if it was indeed the first) and this is what you hear! When I think of the infinite subtleties of complication and contemplation in what has followed, I am still astonished by the gutter slime of those first words. You might suspect that language derives from the intricacies of cooperation and compromise but I illuminate it like this: cooperation and compromise always have to follow disagreement so maybe the first words of any tongue are always likely to be ‘fuck off’.