The London Pigeon Wars

by Patrick Neate

  Scope it like this: once again, I'm reeling with the recollection of the night Brixton23 was murdered above the Brixton Tarmac. I recall that honest Surb geez's querulous calls, Regent with his magpie phyzog and Gunnersbury's desperate declaration of war. Most of all, however, I pinpoint the memory of Mishap's shooter shot that laid out the thugalicious pinxen in the car park below. Specifically, I remember peeping the scene in the consequent chaos and the way Mishap glanced up and looked me straight in the bead.

  Suddenly, even as I pitter patter in nervous circles as the winsome wind soughs through the boughs of this beech, I recognize I may as well be beating my wings from between that bow-wow's teeth. Am I the most vanitariest pigeon to suddenly wonder whether yours truly, a nobirdy oldgeez from the most random suburban roost, could be the very acorn of it all? Is it my consciousness that clutters my bird brain with these inane imaginings? Or, in fact – let me frame this query correctly – is this sorry situation maybe less a measure of our bird bosses, less about the time before time, less about consciousness, the consciousness thereof and, indeed, contemplation therefore and more about Mishap and me?

  Oh words! Oh consciousness! Is this the very essence of abstraction: that consciousness and clarity should call it a day when you're on the very verge of the verity? Stay frosty, geez. Stay frosty, old Ravenscourt. Because this narrative will untangle with or without your concession of complicity.

  OK. I'm going to set this straight; or as straight as I can; or as straight as the crow flies (which, though a nik might not know it, is not always so straight). I am starting to suspect that there is a connection between Mishap and me that dates back to the time before time, the language before language and the flock before flocks existed. What is it that assures this assumption? I cannot illuminate. But there is something in his unilluminable phyzog that is as familiar as it is frightening; some manner in his movements; some charisma in his character. Most of all, however, I am coming to the conviction that my brief exhilaration of the consciousness of consciousness might not have been an exceptional experience after all. Perhaps I experienced it in the time before Trafalgar, when I was no more than a squib, when I was eye to eye with Mishap's inscrutable bead: certainly these are the shadowy images in the senile dimension of my mindeye, a motion flixture that casts his semi-comatose corpse into the sludge and slurry of a rising tide. Veritably.

  And yet, even as I ascertain as much, I recall that memory is about fear and the hollowest, most gizzard-twistingest fear of all is about loss. And what have I lost? Memory. And there's the hubris and hilarity of circularity right there. As my words wander off, therefore, and my consciousness continues to collapse, I realize with another inkling of inevitability that all will be illuminated as surely as, when it happens, I will no longer have the conscious capacity to comprehend. It's Mishap, I swear.

  As I cogitate on all these conundrums, I find I've fluttered down to terra firma once more and I'm scrabbling at the dirt with my pigeon toes and bobbing my beak at this barren soil like the mooniest moonatic. I know that revelation is coming but – aside from the conscious capacity to comprehend it – will I even have the appetite to appreciate it? If consciousness is a blessing in disguise then I'm starting to suspect that illumination may be an illness after all.

  20

  The drama and the farce of it

  As a rule, given the choice, you would want the significant, definitive events of your life to be characterized by broad drama rather than narrow farce. When such an event looms on the horizon, it's primarily for this reason that people fall into tried and trusted archetypes or so-called traditions of behaviour. A church wedding, for example, is generally regarded as the traditional means by which a young couple announce themselves to the community. These days, however, a church wedding can also be thought of as a safe, if unimaginative, dramaturgic bet. After all, the priest has done it before, the guests know what to expect and you're probably guaranteed ‘ooh's and ‘aah's at the right moments and the prerequisite album of happy memories. In fact, therefore, the wedding is no different from the proposal on bended knee. While society may have once imbued such an action with the tradition of romance, it is now ascribed by the individual in the moment; by the boy who genuflects and takes the girl's hand because, most of all, he's scared of screwing up. In fact, therefore, the proposal on bended knee is no different from the fear of being knocked down by a car in yesterday's underwear. Behaviour is driven by fear of farce. This was what Tom thought anyway.

  Karen, on the other hand, regarded Tom's hypothesis as very middle class. She got what he was saying, all right, and she agreed that avoidance of embarrassment could often be regarded as a primal motivation. After all, she understood that nobody wants to die on the toilet and, though from a plebeian background herself, she was English nonetheless. However, she couldn't help but surmise that the emphasis Tom placed on this smacked of privilege.

  When they were going out, Karen quickly learned that Tom would always make do rather than make a fuss. He hated to haggle with a cab driver or question a restaurant bill, on the basis that it was ‘more trouble than it was worth’. Of course, Karen thought this was easy for him to say because, whether school teacher or TV executive, he'd always get another cab and eat in another restaurant merely by virtue of his upbringing. But her? Her mum died when she was thirteen so she'd spent much of her adolescence dealing with prying social workers or trying to borrow a fiver off a neighbour or in endless, desperate queues for five minutes with a bored housing officer or, later, ignoring the patronizing advice of a middle-aged GP when she clocked the bruises on her shoulder and upper arm. She was used to embarrassment, you see.

  In fact, Karen figured that she could reasonably extend this class-based analysis of Tom to other aspects of his personality. She wondered, for example, about his capacity to regard world events as somehow definitive of him; to take them so personally. After all, she'd always been the one with the political spirit; the one who'd marched and rallied and, eventually, made a career out of it. But it was him who was most spooked by the '91 war with Iraq, by the came-to-nothing threat of the millennium bug and by 9/11; as if any of these events had the slightest practical impact upon his life. This was, she reckoned, an illustration of the middle-class quality of distant empathy; while the white collars had room for it, the hoi polloi were just too busy scraping by. What's more, in Karen's experience, its flipside was often a peculiar apathy to more proximate, prosaic scenarios.

  Although Karen insisted this was at least half a compliment, it's perhaps not surprising that Tom took offence and, claiming that she was missing the point, he changed tack. What he'd been trying to say was simply that the desire for appropriate drama, which was both stimulated by and combined with the modern penchant for a hyperbolic story (with nods to everything from Hollywood to soaps via the red tops), had led to ever more numerous learned behaviours appropriate to life's more extreme circumstances. If, he said, he was ever in a room and someone lobbed a grenade through the window, he'd probably dive on top of it; not as an act of bravery but simply from desire to fulfil the script. All these stories you watch, read and hear, he explained gravely, gave new meaning to ideas of fate.

  Karen laughed at this and suggested it was a good job his theory would never be tested. She said that, the way she saw it, in extreme circumstances people generally reverted to type.

  Again Tom baulked. It wasn't just in questions of heroism, he said. You could apply it to almost anything. Take tennis players. Before the late seventies none of them grunted as they served, whereas now they all did. In fact, you could walk past park courts and find kids who grunted with every shot, even when they were knocking up. What was that about? Either it reflected an intrinsic change in the modern game or, more likely, it was just a learned behaviour from a youth spent watching Jimmy Connors or, these days, the Williams sisters.

  So what?

  So lately Tom had been wondering if the same could be said of sex. He suspected it used to b
e a quiet kind of business whereas now sexual grunting was pretty much a required soundtrack. Were the wordless moans, oh yeses, oh gods and oh fucks really spontaneous and irrepressible markers of pleasure or simply expressions of a new fucking etiquette?

  At this point the breadth of the conversation itself narrowed considerably. When Tom first started talking about church weddings and the like, Karen had carefully steered the conversation elsewhere in case he was building up to the clumsiest and most unwelcome proposal of his own (after all, with Tom's capacity for prevarication and inopportune timing, anything was possible). Now, however, she took Tom's reference to the joys or otherwise of sex as a (thinly) veiled insult with a whole lot of history; not least because he accidentally lent the phrase ‘new fucking etiquette’ a frustrated and offensive tone rather than the intended meaning of revolution in bedroom convention. She therefore responded with a barrage of (unveiled) comments about, among other things, his sexual prowess which left him at first bewildered, then hangdog and finally irritated enough to retort in kind.

  Of course, all this confusion and subsequent bickering would probably have been avoided if Tom had ever properly learned (in therapy, say) to speak his mind. But he hadn't. You see, although Tom began talking about an abstract idea applied to hypothetical situations, he actually had a very specific event in mind. Specifically, he was thinking of the night they went to buy guns from Kush. Specifically, he was trying to address (in the most circuitous and, perhaps, middle-class fashion) his regrets with regard to both the drama and the farce of it.

  It was undoubtedly, for Tom, a momentous and definitive occasion just as surely as, for Karen, it seemed to have been easily forgotten or, perhaps, wilfully ignored. It was also an occasion that had mixed dollops of the broad with lashings of the narrow to leave an altogether unsavoury aftertaste.

  On the arranged midweek night, they planned to meet at eleven thirty at Emma and Tariq's. And that was pretty much the end of the harmony. They couldn't even agree who was going to attend the rendezvous.

  Emma suggested (and assumed the others would concur) that the party should consist of Murray and her (as schemers in chief), Karen (since she'd set up the deal and knew Kush) and Kwesi (because he was 1.) the biggest; 2.) could do that Yardie accent, which might impress a small-time gangster; and 3.) had once claimed in a poem to have had dealings with the mobs hooked in to the West African diamond racket). This was, she proposed, a group of about the right size to lend each other support and demonstrate to Kush some kind of weight of numbers.

  Unfortunately, however, it was Freya who'd fronted the 600 quid to buy, as Karen informed them with a smirk, ‘three shooters’. (‘That sounds like a lot of cash,’ Tom commented. Karen shrugged. Like he'd know.) And, since Freya Franklin Hats had begun to grow and blossom, so had something else. Freya described it as ‘self-confidence’ while others were already beginning to use words like ‘self-importance’ or even plain ‘selfishness’. Whichever way you looked at it, it meant that Freya reacted to Emma's proposition by saying, ‘I think I should be there.’ And then, ‘Seeing as it's my money.’

  In the cold light of day (or even the muggy night of a London summer), this was hardly a rational response and the others were quick to say so. What did she think they were going to do? Run away with the wad for a slap-up dinner and a West End show? And besides, a night of gun-buying in a South London car park was hardly the hottest invitation in town. But as Freya's self-confidence (or self-importance) had increased so, as is typical, had the depth of her stubborn streak and she wouldn't be swayed. So Emma looked to Karen and Tom, who both shrugged. It was OK. There was room for five in the Volvo. Karen took the brown envelope full of cash and tucked it into her handbag.

  Ami and Kwesi took no part in this debate. Ami was playing with her DVC; reviewing the day's material and already imagining a final edit. She had some great footage of Dave Purbright, one of the personal bankers, refusing a young couple an overdraft extension. His grave and patronizing demeanour was wonderfully undercut by Ami's surreptitious camera angle, which showed the glossy cover of a wank mag protruding from his desk drawer. This show was a winner. As for Kwesi, he was playing with Tommy, who was in turn playing with the badge that said ‘Ami Lester: Trainee’. Considering the hour, the baby was surprisingly good-natured. Infected by Emma's own nerves, he hadn't been able to get to sleep and he calmly turned the badge in his hands and then sucked on a corner while Kwesi, whispering in kiddy tones, tried out a new verse on him. The K-ster was doing all that he could to appear similarly calm, to give the impression that arms deals were second nature (which was, after all, what he'd claimed, in oft-repeated rhyme).

  Then Tariq came in from work and the atmosphere really soured. He was drunk. Of course he was; it was after pub closing time. Today, however, he'd far exceeded his usual levels of inebriation. Whether it was an especially bad day at the bankruptcy coalface or the thought of the night's activities had driven him over the edge was impossible to tell, since he was pissed beyond coherence. As hard as he tried to look repentantly sheepish, he couldn't stop his eyes rolling, the constant swaying and occasional belch.

  Emma was livid. She'd intended that he'd babysit while she was out buying guns. But she could hardly leave her son in Tariq's care, could she? He tried to give her a hug and repeated, ‘It's fine, fine, fine’, over and over like a mantra. This only made it worse.

  Ami pointed out that she was staying behind anyway and would happily keep an eye on Tommy. Emma said thanks and pulled a strained smile; but she wasn't really comfortable with that. Wasn't comfortable with it? This, in turn, put Ami's nose out of joint; all the more so when Emma added, thoughtlessly, that looking after the baby required more than just ‘keeping an eye’.

  Tom was gently chastising the drunkard, saying things like, ‘Come on, Riq! I thought you were making more of an effort’, and, ‘It's hardly helpful, is it?’

  Tariq was nodding dolefully. ‘It's fine,’ he said. ‘Fine, fine.’

  Until recently, Emma had surely appreciated any allies on the battleground of her marriage. Now, however, she was suddenly defensive of her husband. In the last couple of weeks she had, in her words, ‘tried so hard’ and ‘made all kinds of sacrifices’ and the last thing she needed was some outsider, well-meaning or not, putting his oar in. So she hissed at Tom: ‘Leave it out.’

  Tom was taken aback. ‘I'm sorry?’

  ‘It's fine,’ Tariq slurred. ‘Really. Fine.’

  ‘This is between Riq and me, OK? None of your business.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Tom muttered. ‘Shit.’

  Karen was the only one who seemed unaffected by the rising tension; this was partly because she secretly suspected they weren't going to go through with the whole thing anyway. ‘Where's Murray?’ she asked and they all looked at each other and then to their watches.

  ‘He'll be here,’ Tom said.

  ‘And what are we going to do?’

  Emma, who was now strung like a top C, said: ‘What do you mean, “What are we going to do?” ’

  ‘I mean, who's going on this outing, then? What are we down to? Me, Freya, Murray and Kwesi: is that the idea?’

  ‘No way!’ Emma snapped. ‘I'm definitely going.’ They all stared at her. A few minutes earlier she'd been the one who'd tried to explain to Freya that buying guns in a car park was hardly the height of glamour. Now she was being obstinate in exactly the same way. ‘I'm going,’ she said. ‘And that's that.’

  ‘So who's going to look after Tommy?’

  ‘Not me. Apparently,’ Ami mumbled.

  ‘I will,’ Tom volunteered. He bent down, rubbed the baby's crown and gently disengaged his fingers from Ami's badge. ‘He's my godson. I've done it before. And we get on like a house on fire, don't we?’ He mock-frowned. ‘I said, don't we?’ Tommy gurgled appreciatively and stretched out an arm to reclaim his new toy.

  Emma was shaking her head. ‘No. He's coming too.’

  They all stared at her again. Tom sa
id, ‘Em?’ while Karen burst out laughing. ‘Are you serious?’ Freya growled, ‘Oh, for god's sake!’ and loaded the exclamation with all her new-found pomposity. Tariq, who'd sobered up enough to pour himself an enormous Scotch and hand another to Kwesi (who gulped it in two), said, ‘We'll all go. It'll be an adventure. Why the hell not?’ And he embellished his words with an expansive, magnanimous gesture as if he were actually saying, ‘The Milky Bars are on me!’

  In the end, this was what they agreed. Or, if not agreed, concluded at least.

  Emma said she'd been thinking about it and her reasoning went like this: the more of them at the meet, the more that were implicated and that would head off any future discord and stop anyone backing out. Tom observed that they were supposed to be friends; they were supposed to trust one another. Emma reminded him that they hadn't even done anything yet and they were already squabbling. Karen suggested that Kush wouldn't be expecting such a posse and might feel threatened. Emma asked how he was going to feel threatened by a mother and baby. Karen shrugged. She was just saying. Privately she thought the more the merrier since, she figured, it increased the possibility of the loss of collective bottle.