‘Kills it in the air, you see,’ his uncle had said. ‘If the impact doesn’t do it, then one slash with those talons…’
Behind them, cars pulled out of spaces, boys laughed, and a glum man walked past with a dog.
‘Holy shit,’ Adam had said.
His uncle laughed gleefully – a man with a convert.
Ever since that moment, Adam had become aware of the underworld – or rather overworld – that existed around him at all times. An endless life-and-death story; a high drama for all to see in the skies and the trees, but ignored by most of the humans going about their lives below. Crows angrily dive-bombing trees, because sitting within their branches was a raptor, or an owl that might want their dinner. Mockingbirds systematically quartering their domains, so territorial they’d drive away cats – or crows. Finches, warblers and flycatchers risking dangerous displays of their beauty to attract mates or to take insects on the wing.
Hawks and vultures that lived as opportunists and scavengers, watching the ground for rodents, lizards and carrion, or waiting for the chance to grasp an unlucky pigeon. Being constantly harassed and driven on by fierce, more agile corvids.
The apex predators that ate them all, cruising high above, watching from their cliffs or trees, staring down and seeing everything, waiting for a chance.
It made a mockery of human life, Adam had realized. It made it seem petty and vain, as though mankind was just a backdrop for this higher drama.
It was a glimpse of this other world that he hoped to see on Saturday morning, when as usual he woke early. Lie-ins seemed to have been permanently wrecked for him by age and worry, but this, at least, meant that mornings were there to be used.
The sun wasn’t fully up when he descended the stairs to the street, and threw his binoculars and a jacket into the back of his Mercedes C-Class. The early-morning world was deep blue and cold, the strip of grass beside the sidewalk glistening with dew. LA’s nights could be unexpectedly chilly. It was, after all, technically a desert.
He had the freeway almost to himself. Plunging down the 101 towards Downtown, he bore left, skirting Chinatown and picking up the Arroyo Seco Parkway towards Pasadena. This was a beautiful stretch of road, lined by palms, cliffs and hills, undulating upwards towards the rearing mountains in the background.
His destination was Ernest E. Debs Park, a hulking green foothill that rose up to the right of the freeway in a jungly mass. It wouldn’t be open as yet – its main gates still locked to vehicles – but Adam knew where there was a snick in the fence higher up. He parked by the last house on a steep, zigzagging lane, behind the Jeep Wrangler that was always there, and sneaked into the park.
The streets around Ernest E. Debs were visibly middle class, but lower down, Monterey Park, Montecito Heights and Highland Park all had their share of troubles. Adam had read that two young Hispanic girls had been murdered by a gang-banger and hidden in the park’s deep undergrowth. It would be a logical place to hide a body, he thought now, as he crept through the chain-link fence. The park’s steep sides were covered in verdant bush. There were deeply wooded areas, cliff faces and scrub. It was about as wild as a city park could be, which was exactly what made it an excellent spot for birding.
He climbed up a steep bank, an unofficial trail cut into it by the park’s other out-of-hours users. The sky was paling above him, and as he levelled out onto a plateau, a man was doing t’ai chi on a grassy flat, close to the brim of a slope. Behind him, Downtown’s skyscrapers were sharp and hard against the flawless sky, and a mild orangey glow could be seen broadening above the horizon.
Adam turned into the pine trees and entered a forested nook, which contained a large pond known as the peanut lake. It was surrounded by tall reeds, and Adam stopped and removed his binoculars from their case, running them slowly over the plants, which seemed a likely spot for a rail to be lurking. In a patch of sunny water a few feet from him two terrapins had surfaced, their red-spotted heads protruding from the water, still as mired driftwood. The green smell in the air reminded him of the LA River’s, and he thought of Erica, and his date that evening, his heart lurching a little.
He set off around the lake, heading for the higher paths that led out onto the park’s steep ramparts.
Another new woman. Still dating as he pushed his late thirties. It wasn’t what he’d have pictured, he didn’t think.
He sometimes wished, as he pottered around Los Angeles, that he could show Sofia these places. Soon after he’d lost her, in one of their final communications, she’d told him she missed their walks.
And it was true that their relationship had revolved around walks in parks. In fact, it was almost as though it had been processed and driven by long rambles, usually around Victoria Park and the Regent’s Canal. Here, on hungover Sundays, other couples drifting happily on bicycles or sprawled among ravaged copies of the Observer, decisions could be made, plans formed, disputes resolved.
This was the time before Victoria Park – built as a royal park for the poor, a lung for the choking, industrial East End – had been cleaned up for the Olympics. There was graffiti on walls, dog shit on the grass, no bright red, happy pagoda for tourists to marvel at. The canal was a faded place of abandoned warehouses, their windows pocked by thrown stones. Squats, tower blocks and beautiful, scruffy old terraces whose sleepy appearances belied their savage increases in value.
Adam would have loved to show Sofia the parks of Los Angeles. To point out what he knew about the city from Griffith Observatory’s airy, cool stone promenade, or to tell her that the lumps in the green water of the peanut lake were not in fact mired pieces of wood, but the heads of terrapins, which would flinch, duck, and dive away into the deep, dark recesses if you got too close to them.
Victoria Park’s lake had been beautiful, too. Towards the end of that life, he’d often stood in front of it, looking over to the island reserved for waterfowl, and dreamed of wading over and setting up a camp there, escaping from a world besmirched by his own stupidity.
They must have walked a thousand miles across that park, in the five years they’d been together.
‘Maybe we should sleep with other people,’ Sofia had said one day, as they set off along a path between stretches of damp grass. It was autumn, a time of year that emphasized how beautiful she was. The chestnut eyes and dark brown hair, the olive skin. She was an autumnal symphony herself.
‘Why?’ he’d said.
‘Because we’re not having sex any more. Something has to change.’
‘We do have sex,’ he’d protested.
‘Once every two weeks, and when we do it’s not good any more.’ She’d been frowning – he could see that she wouldn’t be easily distracted from this oft-deferred subject.
‘Why don’t you want to have more?’ she asked. ‘It’s fucking insulting.’
Because I’m sleeping with someone else, would have been the truth she deserved.
‘I promise we will. I’ve just become a bit lazy, I think,’ he told her instead. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Lazy?’ she’d said, the frown deepening as she considered this. ‘But it shouldn’t be an effort. It’s not a chore.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘What can I do to make it better, for you?’
He’d felt a change in the atmosphere at this – like an escape hatch opening up. She was almost shy, suddenly.
‘Well,’ she’d said. ‘… I don’t know.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, looking her in the eye.
She glanced away. ‘I’d like it if you’d rough me up a bit.’
That night, drunk on whisky, he had done his best at this, though he suspected it had been rather too polite for Sofia. Mainly, it had involved a surprisingly erotic form of play wrestling that had seen them crashing noisily into the living room furniture.
After half an hour or so of this, they’d given up, exhausted. They’d just settled down by the sofa to watch a DVD when there’d been a very loud knock on the door of their flat.
‘Hello?’ Adam had called.
‘Police,’ had come the shouted reply.
He and Sofia looked at each other. ‘Oh shit,’ she’d said.
‘Hold on,’ Adam shouted, putting his clothes on, shaking with shock and the aftermath of his physical exertions.
‘Open the door now, please,’ a male voice boomed.
Adam got to the door and swung it open. There’d been two cops. A middle-aged man with grey hair and glasses beneath his hat, and a tall, broad woman, her face rigid with concern.
Sofia appeared at Adam’s shoulder.
‘Can we come in, please?’ the woman asked.
‘Sure, yes.’
‘We’ve a had a report that there was a potentially violent situation here,’ the man said.
‘Oh God,’ Sofia laughed nervously. ‘We were just playing around. I’m really sorry. It’s all fine.’
‘OK, love,’ the female officer said to Sofia, pushing past Adam. ‘I want to separate you two, so is there somewhere we can go?’
‘Yes,’ Sofia said, ‘we can go into the kitchen, but honestly this is all just a misunderstanding.’
The woman guided Sofia through the lounge, past a half empty bottle of Scotch and an overflowing ashtray – wife-beater style, Adam thought with a pulse of worry – and into the kitchen.
‘OK, sir,’ the man said. ‘If you can stay here with me, please. Tell me in your own words what’s been happening tonight.’
‘Well, to be totally honest,’ Adam said, aware that he was slurring slightly, ‘earlier on we went for a walk in the park…’
A puzzled look came over the policeman, who was presumably already sensing a lack of menace in the flat.
‘… And Sofia – that’s my girlfriend – was telling me she was a bit dissatisfied with our sex life. I asked her what I could do to improve things, and she said I should rough her up a bit. So we were getting a bit drunk just now, and I thought “no time like the present”.’
‘Right,’ the cop had said, dubiously.
‘So I was roughing her up a bit, basically,’ he said.
‘And she asked you to do this?’
‘Absolutely. It’s not really my thing, if I’m honest,’ Adam said, smiling politely.
‘OK. Wait here please, sir.’
The cop walked through the lounge, glancing at the whisky and heading into the kitchen. There was some discussion in low voices, and then the two officers reappeared, Sofia behind them, apologizing.
‘Well, it seems you’re both telling the same story,’ the man said. ‘So please just keep the noise down now. You’ve given your neighbours a real scare.’
‘I’m very sorry, officers,’ Adam said. He felt a flush of warm, drunken affection for these two hard-working, harassed officers of the law. ‘Thank you,’ he said, waving from the door as they gave him a final, puzzled look and headed for the stairs. ‘Thank you very much indeed!’
Here, now, in Los Angeles, seven years later, Adam broke from the treeline and started along a narrow path which led up the spine of the park’s eastern flank – a catwalk high above the city.
Eyes on the skies, he scolded himself. Enough of all this bloody thinking.
He set off up the slope, the sun rising ahead, the day’s heat flooding over him in a wave. A man in a wide sunhat walked past and nodded good morning.
At the top of the slope was a viewpoint with benches, a line of trees rising up from the hill’s crest. Adam turned, and saw something moving in one of them.
Feathers, he realized with a sharp thrill. Tiny feathers descending from a branch, like a plume of smoke in a rewound film. He followed them upwards and saw a small bird of prey standing on a flat branch, another bird trapped under its foot, being eaten. Below it, an iridescent blue scrub jay was hopping about, waiting for scraps.
Adam raised his binoculars.
The raptor was a merlin – a small falcon that looked almost exactly like a peregrine in miniature. Like a small man, Adam knew, it compensated for its size with sheer aggression. Pugnacious, was the word from his field book that sprung to mind.
It was tearing at the flesh of the smaller bird under its foot, the feathers slowly twisting downwards in the still morning air. The prey was already too mangled to be identified. A murder victim. An innocent, whose day had barely begun when this monster had torn it from the air.
The jay hopped and bopped a foot or so below, its blue feathers shining in the sun. Very brave, Adam thought. Corvids were a tough family – the gypsies of the air. When the merlin was full, it took off from the branch and flew away, fast and straight like a squat little bullet. The jay leapt up to the branch it had vacated, and began hungrily cleaning up what was left.
12
Adam arranged to meet Erica the osprey lady at Khwām Suk-h, a Thai place in the little six-block chunk of Hollywood designated as Thai Town. Like many of LA’s finest eateries, it was unpromisingly located in a strip mall.
These short, squat blocks of uniform shopfronts could be found all over the city. Set back from the street across a small parking lot, they usually contained a launderette, a massage parlour, a liquor store and a restaurant or two. If you knew how to cook, and wanted a cheap space to sell your food, a strip mall was the ideal location.
Angelenos, Adam knew, would admirably suspend their snobbery if it threatened to get in the way of discovering a great new spot. They thought nothing of driving to insalubrious locales to park in front of a bum-magnet liquor store and eat Cuban food in a crammed storefront.
Khwām Suk-h was one of the more famous examples – its walls and tables were covered in clippings of newspaper and magazine reviews, and reports of celebrity visits: ‘Drew Barrymore’s Thai Tip!’ ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Spice Shangri-La!’
To Adam, it had seemed the right balance of unpretentious and fashionable, and when he’d called Erica she’d seemed pleased by the suggestion.
He dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt, and took a cab to the restaurant, arriving a few minutes before their agreed meeting time of 7.30. There were no reservations at Khwām Suk-h, and he didn’t want an awkward wait. He’d just secured the promise of a table when Erica walked in.
He felt a bodily thud of nervous excitement as she did so. Out of her bike clothes, she was beautiful rather than pretty. She wore black heels and jeans and a deep red, shimmering top with a mandarin collar, embroidered with gold stitching at the hems of its short sleeves. Her black hair was tied back, and she flashed him a smile as she saw him.
‘Hello,’ he said as she approached. The word seemed to drown in the chatter around him.
When she reached him, he realized the heels had made her as tall as he was, and he didn’t need to lean down to kiss her on the cheek. He noted how good she smelled, how her height was somehow satisfying.
‘Hi,’ she said, looking around at the eating, murmuring couples at tightly packed tables, the low-lit cosiness of the newsprint-covered walls.
Adam suddenly felt very awkward. ‘How are you?’ he asked.
She laughed, breaking the tension. ‘I’m well, thanks,’ she said, dipping her head to ape his formality.
A young waitress with a bouncing ponytail gestured, and led them through the restaurant to a table by the windows.
When they sat, Erica looked at him expectantly, and the nerves stiffened him again.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said.
‘You too,’ she replied. ‘Did you have a good Saturday?’
‘Very good, thanks. I went birding.’
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Where?’
‘Ernest E. Debs Park. Do you know it?’
She was looking over his shoulder, distracted. Don’t be boring, he told himself.
‘I don’t,’ she said.
‘It’s near Highland Park. It’s a good spot. There’s an Audubon office nearby.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Interesting.’
She clearly wasn’t very interested, and a stab of
annoyance penetrated his anxiety.
‘It’s a strange place,’ he said. ‘Lots of birds. They have peregrines. And today I saw a merlin. But because of where it is there’s also some gang problems apparently. Two girls got killed and mutilated and then hidden in there.’
Erica frowned. ‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’ Adam took a deep breath. ‘I’m rambling… I’m actually a bit nervous.’
She looked at him and smiled. ‘Because you’re suddenly on a date?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I mean, I knew I was going on a date.’
She leaned forward a little. ‘Oh, you did?’
Abruptly understanding that she liked mischief, he felt himself to be on firmer ground. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But this place seemed so sort of…’
‘Datey,’ she said.
‘Exactly. And then you looked so beautiful when you walked in.’
She glanced downward, briefly, then looked back at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
The waitress reappeared with a notebook. ‘Drink?’ she asked them.
Adam gestured to Erica.
‘I’ll have a Singha, please,’ she said.
Adam ordered one too, relieved. You never knew, in LA, if the person you were with was going to say, ‘Just water.’ It seemed to be a plague.
‘So this isn’t your usual spot for dates?’ Erica asked him, smiling again. ‘You don’t take all the girls here?’
‘Absolutely not. To be honest, I haven’t really been on one for a while.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘And you?’
‘I haven’t either. It can be a pretty weird scene in LA.’
‘It sure can,’ Adam said. He had an excruciating flashback to the office bathroom, on his knees, brain popping on drugs, Angelina looking disgustedly down at him. I can be weird! he thought, quashing a churn of horror.
‘But I bet that accent gets you places, huh?’ Erica said.
‘Not as much as you might think,’ he said. ‘People always seem to think I’m Australian.’
She laughed again, unfolding the menu and scanning it. ‘Poor guy. Getting confused with a simple colonial.’
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