All the clucks and coos ceased as soon as Gunnersbury opened her beak. I can't illuminate why. I'm hazarding that for some geezs it was simply the sight of such a peachy coochie while for others it was their first glimpse of the Remnant of Content. But, for most of us, it was simply an inexpressible (and, let's face it, incomprehensible) assumption that here was a pigeon who might have the answers to the questions we'd only just started asking but already confused the flying fuck out of us. Whatever. There's no doubting she had a captive audience (and – yeah, yeah – I'm fully aware of the ironies of such a comment about a flock of birds with all the freedom of the sky and then some).
‘Everybirdy,’ Gunnersbury began. ‘You'd best come close if you want to hear because a call that dies on the breeze is a waste of breath that might have otherwise lifted your wings a little like the most relaxing thermal. You peep this Remnant of Content? You peep it but do you scope it? It is not a symbol of verity but a piece of the verity itself that has been illuminated to me in a way that even the most loquacious peepnik could never expound. Often verity has as many heads as a squirm shared eight ways in a nest. But this verity? It is a single illumination; not a lamppost but the sun.’
We were all listening and even the toughest oldgeezs were skipping their way forwards for a better look. Did we understand what she was beaking on about? Do me a favour. But, fact was (if my fearful memory serves me straight), this was just about the longest speech we'd ever heard; what with language being so new. And she'd only just started.
‘Look at this oak. I perch on this branch, you on that. I perch on that branch, you on this. But the peepniks can chop off this branch or that branch and you know that the tree survives. So where is its oaky core that makes it the oakiest of oaks? The trunk, of course. The trunk is the verity of the oak and that's why I place this Remnant of Content in this hole in this trunk because verity sits in verity as safely as eggs in a sensibly appointed nest.’
Some of the pigeons were beginning to cluck and coo. They were impressed with her verbage but nonetheless bemused by its lack of sense because even us birds know about style over substance (for why else is a magpie never satisfied with a single glistering item?). But then Gunnersbury began to tell her story and she soon shut them up again. How do you scope that? I'll tell you my illumination. A story can always silence the chirpiest geez because it doesn't have to work pinpointedly. Stories are like stormy winds: you cannot see them, only witness their effects and thus praise their power.
‘I must tell you a tale,’ Gunnersbury began and the warble in her voice was as seductive as a mating coo. ‘All of you know that we were not ever thus and thus must have been different before that is to say therefore.’ This was hardly the most concise of openings – a simple ‘Once upon a time’ would have sufficed for me – but nobirdy else seemed much flustered. They were all transfixed.
‘Can any of you clearly recall the time before time or the language before language? Of course not. The time before time is a foreign language and the language before language is all words at once. So your memories are no more than snatched phrases and snapshot flicks that illuminate nothing but a pang in your pigeon breast. But for me, Gunnersbury? I have held the full Remnant of Content all too briefly and accepted the full acceleration of verity therein. And thus that is to say, therefore, I must tell you a tale.
‘The Remnant of Content? There is no mystery in the moniker. It is a relic of the time before time and the language before language when all pigeons were, indeed, Content in both the fulfilled and full-filled senses of the word. In the time before time, you would not have called me “Gunnersbury” any more than I would have called you “Tooting12”…’ There was a brief disruption as the mentioned coochie began to coochie-coo in spotlight delight. ‘No. In the language before language we would have simply called one another “Content” (as if the language before language had any need for such a word). “Content,” I would call. “Content?” And you would call back to me, “Content. Content?” “Content,” I'd say.
‘In the time before time, we were the flock before flocks existed. We were as one pigeon and moved as one body flapping great wings that could knock a peepnik off their feet with the downrush. So is it any wonder that the Remnant of Content should represent itself to us as the limb of a great bird? No. And just imagine what size Content must have been before that! Its call stopped traffic, the beat of its wing shooed clouds, its span cast shadows across whole London boroughs.
‘In the time before time, we lived in the place before place which, in the second language, we now call “sky”. Do you really think we were ever defined by the geography of our roosts? Of course not. What sense is there in such descriptions? Tell me. Why do you pigeons depict yourselves through the smallest labels of terra firma when the vast expanse of up above (with all the compass points – including up and down – therein) was once your domain? For the sake of the heavens! Are we pigeons or peepniks?’
A few of the older geezs began to cluck discontentedly at such a comparison but Gunnersbury's head bobbed as if she was one jump ahead of their opinions.
‘I know,’ she cooed sweetly. ‘Believe me I know. I know that these definitions are formed in opposition (for aren't definitions ever so?). I have heard the reports and seen with my own eyes those pigeons from the Concrete who mass behind the magpie-looking geez to chase veritable birds like yourselves from the rich pickings of the city. But that is precisely why we – In-Outers, suburbans and the like – must stay united. We are, what I term in the second language, Surbs: unified in this first instance by a misplaced label of place (that was first given to me by the geez with the magpie phyzog) but ultimately by the illumination of Content.’
Gunnersbury paused and all the watching pigeons – how many of us were there that evening? Two hundred? – were silent. Then she peeped directly at me. I remember her bead and the warm breeze that rustled my feathers; warm like the currents above a power station.
‘Ravenscourt,’ she began. ‘You were there at my side. Tell us the adopted nomenclature of that magpie-looking geez.’
‘I'm sorry?’
‘His name, Ravenscourt. His name.’
‘Regent,’ I said.
‘Yes. And was a name ever so pinpointedly exact? We cannot blame those Concrete pigeons for following that great pretender who promises them no more than they already have. He is an every-geez-for-himself-type fuckster. So how do you illuminate that as a philosophy to follow? I'll tell you how. Because he holds a Remnant of Content of his own that he brandishes like a club, that he hides away to withhold unity, to withhold Content itself!
‘Who has heard his rhetoric? What about you, Ravenscourt? Or you, Croydon7? No? I have. He promises those Concrete geezs as many squirms from our Surb commons as they can eat. And isn't that a pretty promise when pigeons like us cannot cross the river to the Strand or Covent Garden or Leicester Square or the City (god forbid!) without being chased like sparrows from a profligate wastebin? How can he tempt them with best bits that were theirs by right when we were all Content? And what does he expect the likes of us Surbs to do but, by the extension of his own philosophy, defend our own Remnant of Content which is all his divisiveness has left us?
‘We…’ Gunnersbury slowed her words and lowered the pitch of her call. ‘I say “we” and that word should make your hearts beat faster with pride. We, the Surbs, must work together, collectively, for the illumination of Content. We do not hate the Concrete pigeons nor even the foolish Regent; we pity their misplaced consciousness and will fly strong together until every geez, coochie and squib in London is illuminated. It is our duty and our honour and I promise each and every one of you now, from my perch on this trusty oak on Tooting Common, we shall be Content again.’
Gunnersbury took to the wing, then, a forty-five to no more than tree-top height, and she began to circle the assembly as if the beat of her wings was a rope to knot us together. And the pigeons scoped skywards and, to a bird, cooed in delight. Do
you think they all comprehended every morsel of her verbage? Of course not. But you imagine what it is like to be challenged in your new nature by questions that cast doubt on who you are. Especially when you have no answers of your own. Especially when you never even knew such questions existed only a matter of weeks (or months) before. Trust me, when you're haunted by memories of what's been lost, any story will do; none more so than the one told by the charismatic pigeon who has that warble in her call like it all makes sense. Even if the answer she offers is, I soon came to understand, no more than the acceptance of defeat (and not in Regent's beak but in the gizzards of our own natures).
Scope it like this: it wasn't so long (days? Weeks?) before I realized that Gunnersbury knew no better than the rest of us. Do you remember what I told you about the night the London Pigeon Wars began? We were perched on this same oak when Gunnersbury asked me that strange question.
‘When you peckchop a squirm,’ she began, ‘clean down the middle, what are you left with? Are they two squirms that wriggle away or two halves of the same one?’
I said I didn't know and when I looked at her I scoped that she didn't either. So when she squawked, ‘This is war’, her call strained and excitable, that was a good enough answer for me. But that evening when Gunnersbury rallied us Surbs with the first speech any of us ever heard, we weren't at war then and didn't even scope such a thing on the horizon. We weren't an army but half a flock of pigeons elated by the sweet scent of illumination. And, as Gunnersbury soared and swooped above us, you should have heard the birdsong with which her new-found supporters serenaded their new-found leader. And me? I fluttered up to the hole in the oak where she'd stashed the Remnant of Content because I wanted to clock it for myself. And sure enough, there it was, our great idol, our symbol of who we were, what we'd been and what we'd lost, and it was no more than a scrap of the unilluminable stuff that was dropped into the Trafalgar Square trash by the unilluminable nik whose syllables spell out ‘MU-RRAY’ – there; I've said it – which is questions and answers right there.
Mishap, I tell you. Mishap. Imagine.
10
Of faith
Tom had always needed something to believe in. Not anything specific, mind; just something with a vivid colour or an attractive smell or a morality that could sound plausible from his mouth. By its definition, faith should be as singular and focused as the London Eye, shouldn't it? But, for Tom, the act of believing was always more important than its subject. Though he never articulated it like that himself.
Tom described Murray as a chancer and Murray described Karen as a chameleon. In fact, Tom was just as much of a chancer or chameleon as either of them; piggy-backing aboard any person or philosophy that might carry him over one of life's puddles. Sometimes the ride was uncomfortable but at least he rarely got his feet wet.
Like most ethical polyglots, Tom's various faiths were both as unbreakable and as fragile as an egg. Squeeze Tom in your fist and you might be surprised by his resilience but catch him an accidental blow and you'd better grab a dishcloth to clear up the mess on the floor. Take football. When he was a kid, the walls of Tom's bedroom in Hampton Wick were plastered with posters of the great Liverpool teams and, in the playground, he was proud to wear Kevin Keegan's number-seven shirt. So, in '91, when he heard about Kenny Dalglish's resignation as manager, he was distraught. He and Murray were coming out of the King's Cross tube when they saw the Standard's banner headlines. Tom paled and rubbed a hand across his scalp in that nervous way of his.
‘I feel… I don't know… eviscerated,’ he stammered.
‘Gutted,’ Murray said.
These days, Tom is an ardent Manchester United fan. Look in his cubicle in the staff room of a Harrow sixth-form college and the sole decoration to mark seven years' occupancy is a small Red Devils pendant. And if any one of his pupils mentions the name of Cantona, they're guaranteed a digression. His eyes mist with nostalgia as if he and Eric had learned their trade together playing keepy-uppy on the beaches outside Marseille. Marseille? Is that where Cantona comes from? Tom can't remember.
Tom flirted with religion; Catholicism especially. Perhaps it was the emphasis on style over content that appealed to him. More likely, though, he was attracted by the sense of history – the oblique rituals seemed so irrelevant that they surely couldn't have changed since year dot. For Tom, faith (in whatever or whoever) was a source of identity, and a perception of permanence built an unarguable mass to lend weight to his character (however transitory and coy his beliefs turned out to be). For Tom, Catholicism was like fast food; there was a church on every corner to provide him with a ready-made if ultimately unsatisfying quick fix of self that he inhaled with the frankincense that made him sneeze.
Of course, when Tom met Murray at the Catholic chaplaincy at LMT (to the dubious strains of ‘God Bless Our Pope’), it marked his last visit to church for some years. This was partly because he intuited at once – without ever voicing it – that Murray represented an all-consuming form of worship. It was partly, too, because he met Karen the very next day. If Tom's belief in Murray was absolute then his faith in Karen was at least longer-lived. And in this instance the distinction between belief and faith is an important one.
Tom and Murray were sitting in the college canteen. It was lunchtime and there was barely a spare seat as the students lounged and chattered and drank machine coffee and smoked earnest cigarettes. The canteen was an unappetizing place at the best of times with its floors tacky from spillages, its Formica tables patterned with fag burns, and its walls layered with lurid posters advertising the next student drama or gay and lesbian club night. But today Tom was feeling especially unhungry and he pushed his limp chips and greying burger morosely around his plate. It didn't help that Murray was attacking an enormous heap of breaded chicken nuggets with an obscene and slavering relish. There was something grippingly pornographic about the way Murray ate: the sounds of his enjoyment, the precise manner with which he unwrapped each morsel of meat from its breadcrumb casing, the way he repeatedly picked his teeth with the sharp fingernail of his right index finger. Tom was transfixed. Occasionally, when he caught himself staring, he would feel a little embarrassed and try to start a conversation.
‘So, have you been to the chaplaincy before?’ he asked.
‘What's that, china?’ Murray was admiring a string of flesh that hung from his finger.
‘The chaplaincy… I was just saying… I haven't seen you…’
Murray disrobed another nugget, popped it in his mouth and his eyes rolled in pleasure as he spoke between chews: ‘Jesus, these are good! These are the bomb, china. These are the good shit. You want one?’
Tom began to examine the backs of his hands. ‘No. No thanks.’
He sensed someone standing next to him and looked up. It was a girl. He'd seen her before, knocking around campus. He didn't know her name but she was more recognizable than most. When he'd first spotted her, he'd found himself gawping and wondered if he fancied her. But it wasn't that. She just didn't look like the other girls at LMT. Where most of the students could be immediately identified with one or other social stereotype – the trendies, the crusties, the proto ravers, the Sloanes, the rich Arabs, the academics – she couldn't. She wore her hair in a soft-tinted perm and, as she walked, it bounced above a thick-stitched wool jumper hanging over sky-blue leggings that ended an inch or two above a pair of suede pixie-boots. Her complexion was somewhat filmy and her lipstick pastel pink. Basically, there was something very eighties about her and that was a style too recent to be intentionally retro. In fact, Tom thought, she didn't really look like a student at all; more of a beautician from Anerley or a barmaid from Ongar, perhaps.
She nodded at the free seat next to Tom and almost spilled the Diet Coke that was squeezed on to the very front of her tray. ‘Can I sit here?’
It was Murray who answered. ‘Course you can. Help yourself.’ He sat back, rubbed his stomach happily and inspected the contents of her plate.
‘The nuggets? Good choice. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.’
She smiled and pointed at the remains of Murray's meal. ‘But you're not big on batter, eh?’
‘You know how it goes.’ Murray shook his head and sulkily began to pick through the breaded casings for any last morsels of meat. They looked like discarded chrysalises, like they'd just given birth to little chicken-breast babies straight into Murray's mouth. ‘I don't like to be fussy and I'll eat them if I have to, but why would you wrap up something so beautiful in crap like that? I mean, you know how they breed these chickens? Five hundred to a cage, featherless, with shrunken skulls and brains and bulging breasts. And then they cover them in batter? Whose idea was that? It just doesn't make sense. It's practically disrespectful.’
Murray sounded so bewildered, so personally wounded, that the girl burst out laughing. Tom joined in. She stuck out her hand across the table and Murray took it.
‘I'm Karen,’ she said. ‘Karen Miller.’
‘Murray.’
‘Murray?’
‘Yeah. Just Murray.’
‘Oh. You're Murray.’
‘Exactly.’
‘No. I mean you're that Murray. The one who only eats chicken.’
Murray shrugged. ‘What a claim to fame.’
‘Murray with only one name. Just Murray.’
‘That's me.’
Tom was watching chat tennis. But each turn of his neck lingered a little longer upon Karen. She was laughing. There was something about her that appealed to him. She seemed intense and playful all at once. What's more, when he'd met Murray for the first time (yesterday), he'd felt immediately daunted by the manic confidence he radiated. But Karen was actually mocking him and, even if Murray didn't rise to her baiting, it still struck Tom as kind of cool.
The London Pigeon Wars Page 13