The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  Or what about the Antiques Trade? This was a convoluted scam which began with Murray buying a knackered carriage clock or dusty painting or some other nick-nack from a junk shop for a fiver. Then he'd put on a dark suit and black tie and wander into a quiet, mid-morning pub. He'd order himself a Scotch, lay down the clock, say, on the bar and engage the landlord in conversation. Generally the exchange went something like this.

  ‘Can I get a bit more ice, china?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Ta.’ Pause. Nod. Shake head. Swallow. Sigh. ‘Don't suppose I could ask you a favour, could I?’

  ‘You can ask, mate.’

  ‘Well. Thing is, I'm on my way to a funeral. My granny. St Mark's/Joseph's/John the Divine down the road…’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thanks, china. But it's not like we were close or anything. She was a typical old Jamaican/Italian/Irishwoman, all patois and plantain/memories and moaning/pope and potatoes, and she never forgave my old man for shacking up with a white woman/my mum for marrying a Libyan / me for lapsing, know what I mean? So I hadn't seen her for years. Anyway, point is she left me this tatty old clock. To be honest, I'd like to just bin the stupid thing…’

  ‘You can't do that, my son. She must have wanted you to have it. You'd never forgive yourself…’

  ‘No? No, china. Guess you're right. But I don't really want to take it to the funeral with me, do I? I know it's small but the fucking thing weighs a ton. So what I was going to ask is, any chance I could leave it here for an hour or two? I mean, not for long. I'll just go to the funeral and sandwiches after and I'll be back to pick it up this afternoon.’

  ‘No problem, mate. I'll just stick it behind the bar.’

  ‘You sure? I don't want to put you out.’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘Thanks, china, I owe you one.’

  During the lunchtime rush, a couple of hours later, one of the others went into the pub, smartly dressed and carrying a briefcase. It was usually Karen because the combination of her newly dreadlocked hair and the sombre attire achieved exactly the right mixture of bohemia and business. She sat at one end of the bar and ordered a sandwich and a mineral water. Then, after ten minutes or so, she noticed the clock and called over to the barmaid. She just wondered where it came from, she said.

  The barmaid shrugged. She'd never seen it before. She called out back. ‘Barry? Young lady here wants to know about this clock.’

  Karen then examined it under the landlord's curious eye. She hummed and hahed and asked if he'd consider selling it. He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Why? You think it's worth much?’

  ‘I'm not absolutely certain,’ Karen said. ‘I'll have to get my boss to have a look at it but I'm pretty sure it's a Westphalen.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Westphalen. Swiss, 1920s, hand-made. They only made a couple of dozen.’

  ‘But it looks like junk.’

  ‘I know. Pity that this one's not in great nick. But you must have felt how much it weighs.’

  ‘Yeah, I have as it happens. I know it's small but the fucking thing weighs a ton.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Karen nodded and smiled. ‘You can always tell a good clock by its weight, its… umm… mechanical density.’

  ‘Right.’ The landlord scratched his head, mulling it over. ‘So it's worth a lot?’

  ‘Tell you what. You let me nip out to the cash point and I'll give you 400 quid for it right now.’

  ‘Four hundred?’ He chewed his thumb, lips and gums. ‘I thought you said they only made a couple of dozen?’

  ‘They did. But, as you said yourself, it looks like junk.’

  ‘Right.’ The landlord thought for a minute and then came to a decision. ‘Sorry, love, but I don't think I want to sell it. Been in the family for years, know what I mean?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Karen sighed, took a scrap of paper from her pocket and jotted down the digits. ‘Tell you what, though. If you change your mind, call this number.’

  ‘Yeah? All right, love, I'll have a think about it. You never know, I might just give you a bell.’

  Murray came back into the pub around twenty minutes later. The landlord greeted him with a smile and asked him how the funeral went.

  ‘Depressing,’ Murray said and held his jaw in one hand as if the recollection still troubled him. ‘And now I'm going to stare at that bloody clock for the next five years feeling too guilty to chuck it out.’

  ‘I'll take it off your hands.’

  ‘What's that, china?’

  ‘I said I'll hold on to it. I mean, if you really don't want it.’

  Murray pondered for a moment before shaking his head. ‘Nah. I can't do that. It's like you said, I'd never forgive myself. I mean, the old girl must have wanted me to have it. Like you said.’

  ‘So let me buy it off you.’

  ‘Buy it?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I quite like the look of it. I buy it off you and then you can buy something nice to remember the old lady by. She'd like that. I'll give you a hundred quid for it.’

  ‘A hundred?’ Murray laughed. ‘It's not worth more than a fiver.’

  ‘But I like the look of it and with a hundred notes you can buy something really nice, know what I mean? I don't want to rip you off, now do I?’

  Murray shrugged. ‘OK.’

  Presumably, later that day, the landlord called the number on the scrap of paper and got straight through to Sotheby's. Presumably, for a heady second or two, he really thought his luck was in. Karen always gave Sotheby's number. For some reason it tickled her. If Tariq was playing the expert, he gave the number for Scotland Yard. With Tom it was always Westminster Council's refuse department. Although none of them ever actually heard the phone call being made, there was definitely something pleasing about personalizing Murray's gag a little.

  At first they worked this scheme in two or three pubs near the LMT campus around Farringdon. But in their third year Tariq moved to student digs in Archway and Karen chose a college room in Southwark Hall on the South Bank; so they spread their net wider, north and south.

  On one occasion when Tom posed as the expert buying, in this instance, an amateurish watercolour of Lymington harbour, he swaggered into the pub to find a community policeman discussing alarm systems with the landlord. He turned straight round. Murray, who was waiting outside, was livid and insisted he go through with the plan. According to Murray, the presence of the law only improved the whole situation. ‘It'll make it seem more legit,’ he said. ‘You think some copper's going to know shit about paintings?’ Eventually Tom agreed to go back in and he pulled off, though he said so himself (and to everybody else), the performance of his life.

  Later, while Tariq was counting the money, Tom said, ‘Of course, I would never have done it if it hadn't been for Muz.’

  Murray raised one eyebrow. ‘It's a game. You don't just stop playing when you don't like it. Games have to be finished. That's the point of them. They're self-contained.’

  ‘I was just saying…’ Tom began but Murray was shaking his head.

  ‘You are what you do, china. So if you don't do it? You're… Well… I don't know what you are.’

  In fact the Antiques Trade was a rare manifestation of Murray-fun that might be described as explicitly criminal. But, the way Tom told the story to his therapist, when Murray first set out its mechanics for his friends, this actually seemed to bother him more than the rest of them. Usually nerveless and single-minded, he was clearly uneasy and it was the others who talked him round.

  For her part, Karen was apparently unbothered. ‘It's a scam,’ she said. ‘It works on the greed and dishonesty of the landlord and if they're greedy and dishonest enough to give us a hundred quid then that's their problem.’

  Murray smiled. ‘I never had you fingered for such a crook, Kazza,’ he said.

  Tom logged Murray's expression as number fifteen and commented, unthinking, ‘She went out with Kush for years. She's used to breakin
g the law.’ Then, without even needing to look at her, he dropped his head and said ‘Sorry’ because he knew that she hated any mention of her ex. Especially from him. Karen tutted and shook her head irritably. In a way, of course, Tom was right. Because her morals were of the overreaching variety, big issues that needed demonstrations and placards rather than the trivia of interactions that, in her experience, always required pragmatism and a little manipulation.

  Tom was the complete opposite. He made no outward complaint about the plan but, at some hidden level, the prospect of such a brazen con filled him with doubts to match the thrills. So he justified it aloud, to himself as much as the others. ‘We're not telling any lies,’ he said. ‘We only say the junk might be worth a lot of cash. We never say it is.’

  As for Tariq, his enthusiasm for the Antiques Trade was altogether simpler. As far as he could tell, Murray's scams were his only source of income and, if this stopped him scabbing a tenner every Friday night, then that was good enough for him.

  Some hours after one session with Tom, Tejananda the therapist flicked idly through his case notes. In the margin of an early page he found he'd scrawled the following: ‘moral compass with behaviour as magnetic north rather than vice versa? another example of fin de siècle (or, perhaps, naissance?) malaise. possible magazine article.’

  Despite the cryptic nature of this scribble, Tejananda knew precisely what he'd meant and he suddenly felt quite deeply moved; so much so that he felt compelled to take a break from his work to drink a cup of green tea and write a postcard to the orphan he sponsored in Tanzania.

  Generally, Murray-fun was naughty at worst. Walking along the street with Tariq, he saw two beat coppers coming the other way and he caught Tariq by the arm, pointed at the policemen and shouted ‘Run for it!’ at the top of his voice before scarpering in the opposite direction. Tariq, utterly bemused, ran after him because… Well… because he did. Murray kept to the main road until he was sure the cops were following and then he ducked down a sidestreet and immediately stopped.

  When the police caught up, Murray seemed surprised by their attention. ‘We're just playing It,’ he said. ‘I saw my kid brother and I thought he'd spotted us.’

  ‘Are you having a laugh, sunshine?’

  ‘Yeah, china,’ Murray said. ‘You?’

  He was only arrested once, by a heavy-handed scumbag who figured he might be able to do him for some or other misdemeanour. And didn't Murray love that? Especially when a uniformed inspector forced the PC to apologize through gritted teeth. ‘I am sincerely sorry for my mistake.’

  ‘What mistake was that?’ Murray asked.

  ‘For assuming you were fleeing a crime scene.’

  ‘When, in fact, as I explained to you, china…’

  ‘When, in fact, you were playing a game of tag.’

  ‘It,’ Murray said. ‘It was It. No problem.’

  He loved that.

  Once Murray headed to the Wandsworth Arndale Centre armed with a dog lead and a pair of dark glasses. Within minutes, he had twenty people searching vainly for his guide dog and shouting ‘Behemoth! Here boy!’ at the tops of their voices. He persuaded the mall's manager to make an announcement over the tannoy: ‘If Behemoth is anywhere in the precinct could he please meet his master at the information point.’

  Even Tejananda, spiritually centred as he was, graciously admitted the comedy in the set-up.

  Once, Murray challenged Karen as she was coming out of the Our Price on the Charing Cross Road and he asked for her autograph so ostentatiously that a small crowd soon gathered. Laughing, she signed for him and, as Murray backed away, he was accosted by a chubby couple with Brummie accents and turquoise shellsuits. ‘Who's that?’ they asked.

  ‘Karen Miller.’ Murray brandished his autograph proudly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Karen Miller!’ he enthused. ‘The Karen Miller.’

  ‘Karen Miller?’ the man said. ‘Right.’

  ‘She looks smaller in real life,’ Murray said. ‘Doesn't she?’

  The woman agreed, nodding her head. ‘Not as pretty, either.’

  But Murray's favourite games were rarely one-offs and some – the Antiques Trade, Cop It, The Race Card and Knock Down Ginger (a bizarre bar piece involving vituperative rants against a supposed illuminati of redheads, left-handers, albinos and the like) – were tweaked, repackaged and re-enacted on numerous occasions. One, Strangers on a Train (Murray's undoubted favourite) must have gone through at least fifty versions.

  Strangers on a Train was, in Tom's opinion, the very archetype of Murray-fun, conjuring amusement from a simple premise (in this case, the captive audience of a tube carriage). It worked like this: Murray and whichever henchmen he chose would get on different carriages of the same train. Then, a couple of stations later, they would meet up as strangers and, with Murray as ringmaster, play out a scenario (sometimes rehearsed, sometimes improvised, sometimes a one-liner and sometimes a devilishly complicated vignette). In one situation where Tom, with Murray as the nudging friend, chatted up Karen, you could almost feel the carriage's collective heartbeat swell with the innocent charm. Three stops later, Tariq joined the carriage carrying a bunch of flowers that Tom apparently bought off him for fifty quid and, offering them to Karen, he seemingly broke her shy and flattered resistance.

  Tom and Karen got off at the next station, hand in hand. But Murray liked to stay on the train to watch the middle-aged women fold their arms, unconsciously holding themselves, and the businessmen who looked suddenly distracted and the couples who leaned intimately against one another.

  Other scenarios included the one where Murray posed as an itinerant preacher-cum-healer. This worked particularly well during his beard-growing phase. He restored Tom (wearing the Arndale Centre shades) his sight in front of a public that, depending on how Tariq and Karen geed them up, could be astonished, incredulous or spiteful.

  Then there was the deaf argument, in which Murray and Tariq silently confronted each other across the carriage in ever more ostentatious and aggressive sign language that the other passengers couldn't ignore. Tom got on a couple of stops later and, after a minute or two's thought, he started signing in an apparent attempt to mediate the disagreement. At first Murray and Tariq would watch him, mollified. But then, just as the train entered a station, he threw some outrageous gesture and they turned their anger on to him and began pushing and then slapping him around. By the time the doors opened a three-way brawl had erupted and they bundled out on to the platform, kicking and punching and wrestling until the train pulled away and they could lie on their backs, out of breath and bursting with laughter.

  They loved the way this little narrative was played out in complete silence, the way any background chatter was quickly suppressed by the volume of their movements, the expressions of the other passengers who could only communicate their confusion in sign language of their own – raised eyebrows and shrugs and darting glances.

  Murray's enthusiasm for Strangers on a Train seemed limitless and he could surely have conjured endless scenarios if the others had shared his verve. But the game required such exhausting showmanship that, by the second term of their final year, it had petered out. Besides, by now, they had other things on their minds.

  Tariq was running the student ents pretty much full-time; booking bands, organizing club nights and setting up all kinds of bar promotions. It wasn't that he was particularly into it but it allowed him, he said, to develop his ‘entrepreneurial skills’ with a view to the future. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to get an MBA place for the following autumn so he had signed up instead for a graduate training scheme with Phillips (‘Just for a couple of years, to learn the ins and outs of business’). His ents work also allowed him to drink pretty much full-time and he was beginning to develop what Tom later christened ‘the twirtysomething London body’; round shoulders, concave chest and a ballooning paunch.

  Karen was kept busy both by her conscientious attitude to her studies and her gro
wing involvement in all kinds of student pressure groups. After the previous year's marches during the Gulf War, she now chaired APT (Anti-Poll Tax) Action, SAL (Students Against Loans) and DRA (Date Rape Awareness) and she orchestrated the protests against visiting lecturers. Initially, this last exercise was intended only to scupper the planned visit of Norman Tebbit but she soon found that the majority of invited speakers could be regarded as politically unsuitable for one reason or another. This was democratic liberalism at its least democratic and least liberal.

  Generally Tom accompanied her to these demonstrations and meetings. He wasn't all that bothered by these ‘issues’ himself but he liked to be at her side and watch her passion and, especially, to see the awe with which she was regarded by her fellow students. Karen was very much the leader, the firebrand, and he couldn't help but take vicarious pleasure in her status.

  Tejananda's notebook is mostly filled with précises of Tom's stories but there is the occasional direct quote. One is from their last session; from the same day, in fact, that Tom ran into Murray in Trafalgar Square. ‘When I met her, she had, like, a boyfriend who beat her up and… a fucking perm and pixie-boots, know what I mean? But by the time we left college she was, like, on this committee and that committee. And she had, like, dreadlocks and a nosering. And that was down to me. It was. It was down to me.’ Beneath this outburst, the therapist has written, ‘TEARS. RECRIMINATIONS AND GUILT? FAITH AS DEBT? NB replace tissue box.’

  Of course, when he wasn't so angry, Tom did acknowledge Karen's converse influence over him. After all, if it hadn't been for her and her colourful umbrella of a social conscience, would he really have applied for a PGCE? At the time this had seemed like something to be grateful for. In retrospect, when he bent over the coffeetable in the flat he couldn't afford, filling in all the new paperwork he couldn't fathom, it sounded more like an accusation.