The London Pigeon Wars Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LONDON PIGEON WARS

  Patrick Neate is the author of two previous novels: Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko, which won a Betty Trask Award, and Twelve Bar Blues which won the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award. He divides his time between London and elsewhere.

  PATRICK NEATE

  THE

  LONDON

  PIGEON

  WARS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Published by Viking 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  5

  Copyright © Patrick Neate, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192235-5

  For my coochie-momma and my oldgeez, who never sold their souls to cynicism nor this city neither.

  ‘The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city’

  Euripides

  Contents

  1. The unilluminable peepnik and the declaration of war

  2. Hat semaphore

  3. The signs are good

  4. The thing about Murray

  5. Of consciousness

  6. Because poetry's disappointing

  7. The art of conversation is dead

  8. Murray tells a lot of stories, including the one about Der Vollbartclub Von Aachen

  9. The Remnant of Content

  10. Of faith

  11. When Murray got down, Tariq got smacked and Tom got the girl

  12. Infidelity as love

  13. Murray-fun

  14. What goes up must come down

  15. Reality. Television

  16. Pyaa-pyaa duppy

  17. Of happiness

  18. Getting on with it

  19. Inklings of inevitability

  20. The drama and the farce of it

  21. Sainsbury's car park

  22. The London Pigeon Wars

  23. Half-lifes

  24. Anecdotal evidence

  25. Of illumination

  1

  The unilluminable peepnik and the declaration of war

  It might have been as much as two months after Trafalgar that the war began. Or as little as two weeks. You want to know the verity? Don't ask a pigeon. My memory fades like an aeroplane's puff into the clouds and I scope that the peepniks don't say ‘bird-brained’ for nothing.

  Gunnersbury likes to claim that hostilities were commenced at the ‘battle of Trafalgar’ (a battle named after a square named after a battle; isn't that something?). She says this because, accepting all her qualities of leadership and politics, she does like to be at the acorn of it all. An honest pigeon admits we are a vanitarious species and Gunnersbury, with her wholesome white breast and pink toes to die for (even an old bird like me can't help but notice those), is surely the vanitariest. But the verity is that Trafalgar was just a skirmish, a starling-tempered flare-up of pointed beaks and posturing. How can it have been the beginning of a ‘war’ when, as far as I remember, none of us had heard that word before let alone spoken it? For me, therefore, the ‘war’ began with its utterance and that was two weeks or two months later with the murder of Brixton23 above the Brixton Tarmac.

  Can I illuminate Brixton23 for you? I want to because, even to my bird brain, his good character merits a place in this history and illustrates the tragedy of our conflict.

  Ask anybirdy and they'll tell you same as me: Brixton23 was well-liked. Not a bad feather about him; a straight-talking, crow-flying sort of geez. He was a live-and-let-liver who died for taking sides and isn't that a contradiction only civil wars can explain?

  When most birds recall him, they talk about a genial, simpleminded soul who liked to spend his summers around the profligate wastebins of the Brockwell Lido where all shapes of peepniks clucked like chickens and strutted like peacocks at the first signs of the sun. He was content like we all were once; the kind of geez who let the sparrows take first pick at a best bit or a bisquit and stood back with a benevolent smile on his beak. He'd say something like, ‘Aren't we all birds of god's own sky?’ Only I don't remember him speaking, of course.

  He was also, by the geography of his roost, just about typical of the In-Out birds (as they came to be known). Caught in the no man's land between the Pigeon Front and us Surbs, he could have joined either side and the other would have had no reason to grumble. But Brixton23 was a real pigeon-fancier and, like a lot of us, he took a wholesome shine to Gunnersbury and I hazard it was that, in the end, that cost him his life (that more than political or religious certainties anyway).

  That night we were flying back from a bin raid, keeping low on the Kennington Road to avoid the RPF spotters who could see for miles from their lookouts high above the Thames. We were beaking on about our successful mission. It had been our most daring raid yet: Leicester Square, right in the heart of Pigeon Front territory, their proudest possession. Of course, a raid like that would be impossible now because we'd be clocked before we made it across the river. But, back in those early days, us pigeons (RPF and Surb alike) still struggled to tell one another apart so, with equal measures of planning and luck, we could swoop into an enemy stronghold like it was our god-given right.

  We were talking as we flew, reliving the thrill of it, and the night-owl peepniks – minicabbies, drugsters, hermetic sexers and the like – looked up in astonishment when they heard our chattering squawks overhead. Gunnersbury was telling how she swaggered up to that geez Garrick (only Regent's right-wing, for god's sake!) and swiped the niblet right out of his beak. Not just any niblet either but a six-inch squirm that wriggled all the way down to her gizzard. And squirms were a delicacy in the RPF Concrete, even if they were still two-a-penny on our Surb commons.

  Gunnersbury was at the apex of our formation as we passed Brixton station and began, with the confidence of proximate Surb territory, to climb high over Acre Lane. I had Gunnersbury's left flank and Sutton9, a crude hulk of a pigeon and typical suburban heartlander, had the right. The rest of our party was made up of the usual suspects: radical, young hotheads (all fly-by-night ideals and high-pitched calls) and older extremists who'd spent their whole lives waiting for a cause like this to follow (though they hadn't known it, of course). Brixton23 was right at the back; our tailguard.

  We were just swooping over Sa
insbury's when somebirdy – a mangy coochie called Finchley440, I think – spotted the peepniks in the car park below and we had to stop and watch, didn't we? Hovering 200 feet up where any hawkeyed pigeon could see us.

  Let me tell you something: before Trafalgar no peepnik ever paid us the blindest bit of notice and I could have flown into the lobby of the Ritz in a top hat and a monocle singing the FTSE 100 at the top of my call and the most attention I'd have got would have been a shower of stale crumbs from the Korean sous-chef. But vice versa? These days us pigeons can't resist watching the peepniks. In fact, some coochie-mommas fear for their squibs who'd rather watch the most boring street scene from the comfort of their nest than ever spread their wings. When I was barely out of the egg, I liked nothing more than pussy-teasing or bird-bathing. But times change and I don't want to sound like my oldgeez. Because it's not just the peepniks who say that's something they'll never do.

  The action in the car park that night was a real humdinger and we watched transfixed. There were about eight of them (a mixture: sweets and savouries; greysens, blaxens, brownsens and pinxens; even a babchick) and they were hammer-and-tonging it like you wouldn't believe. We couldn't tell exactly what was going on, flying in halfway through as we were, but one of the sweets, a tangled number with limbs like coat-hangers and electricity hair, was wailing almost as high-pitched as a squirm in your beak. And the babchick was crying, too, as only those peepnik babchicks know how.

  Then, sudden like a thunderclap, a strapping cue-ball pinxen pulled back from the group and he was holding a shooter; a small, blunt-snouted automatic that was cold and grey against his pinxen skin. One of the others, a blaxen with a penthouse manner, said, ‘Goodness me!’ even though there was no goodness about it.

  ‘What you want them for?’ exclaimed the strapping toter. That's what he said all right though I couldn't peep what ‘them’ were.

  One of the sweets spoke up and, though her voice was strained, she wasn't shitting herself like most of her fellows. ‘Its a bank job,’ she said.

  ‘A bank job?’ the toter exclaimed and he laughed nastily. I knew where that was coming from because this was no typical bunch of streetnik desperadoes. Although you can never say for sure.

  I tell you, this was better than the motion flixtures that I sometimes catch through a suburban window. And our raiding party was hovering on the edge of our thermals and we'd clean forgotten about the dangers of the RPF. Come to think of it, now I conjure it in my mindeye, even Brixton23 was watching the action unfold instead of guarding our tails. And didn't that In-Out geez pay for his carelessness?

  Picture it rolling out like this. The peepniks were gathered around a car, one of those cash BMWs with mirror polish and tinted bird glass. On one side stood the cue-ball pinxen with his shooter, on the other side were the cowering rest and between them a holdstuff that sat open on the bonnet (though we couldn't see what was inside it). At first, the pinxen (he looked a real thugalicious sort) pointed his shooter at a slouching greysen whose phyzog sang both courage and confusion; like he didn't know quite where he was (in front of a .22 in a car park in Brixton, whether he liked it or not). But then he turned his aim on another nik who detached himself from the pack. This savoury was talking to him. We couldn't hear what he was saying but the smoke of his voice wafted up among us and it smelled like calm.

  I stared at this peepnik and I doubletook. He wasn't what you would call a blaxen or a pinxen. He certainly wasn't a greysen and I don't think you could even describe him as a brownsen. I still don't know how I'd illuminate him but, at that time, I'd only seen one such peepnik before; the day of Trafalgar, two weeks (or two months) earlier. Was it the same fellow? Was it the same foodchit with the red and white box that had sparked that first scrimmage?

  The cue-ball pinxen was beginning to panic. You could hear it in his strained voice and see it in his movements as he jabbed his shooter towards the strange peepnik like it was an accusatory digit. But the savoury stayed cool and drew unheard clucks of approval from our pigeon posse above, who said things like, ‘What a Tom cat!’ and ‘That nik's frosty!’ I didn't say anything because, to be veritas, I was spooked at the sight of him. Looking down at his crown I was filled with a sudden and unexpected foreboding like a blocked gutter in the rain.

  In the immediate aftermath of what immediately followed, I attributed my misgivings to what had immediately preceded. But now, with the benefit of a little distance, I know that misgivings have a name. MURRAY. And when a bird says that name, especially a strong-accented Surb coochie with a tasteful vibrato, doesn't it sound as seductive as a mating coo? MURRAY. The Rs can roll for ever in a name like that. MURRAY. Those boundless syllables that stretch out beneath you like a road to the horizon. MURRAY. And disappear behind you to a time before the wars, before Trafalgar, before the Remnant of Content, before the consciousness of consciousness when you were as free as a bird. MURRAY.

  I took my eyes off the action for a moment and noticed Brixton23 talking to two pigeons I didn't recognize who must have ghosted into our party from up and out of the Santley Street shadows. He caught my eye and he looked sheeply. ‘They're local,’ he cooed. ‘17 and 228.’

  Brixton23 didn't get that things were already past neighbourhood. But I don't think any of us did. Not really.

  It was at the exact moment that I hissed a warning to Gunnersbury that I caught sight of them; a mass of the Pigeon Front, maybe 200, rising from behind the terraces with Regent himself at their head. The peepniks below were immediately forgotten as the RPFs fanned out around us, all cooing, soft and threatening. Our posse quickly organized ourselves in a tight tail-to-tail unit and only Brixton23 was left out. He looked confused as he floated further away from his comrades. Then one of the ‘locals’ he'd been calling to nipped his leg with her beak and he yelped in pain.

  I can still picture him now as the two birds manoeuvre him further and further away from the safety of our midst; the nervous flutter of his wings and the fear in his amber beads.

  Gunnersbury was at our head and she addressed herself directly to Regent (an ugly, magpie-looking geez with dull grey feathers, a mottled breast and a black ring around one eye). I could tell she was scared but, to her credit, that coochie managed to keep the warble in her call.

  ‘You're in our air now, Regent,’ she declared. ‘You think my spotters haven't already pinned you? There'll be 2,000 Surbs here before you can flap twice. You'd better head back to your dirty eaves in the Concrete where you belong.’

  Gunnersbury was right, of course. But we didn't know when the reinforcements would arrive and Regent just chuckled and his RPFs pressed perilously closer. I thought we were roasted for real and Sutton9 began to make bold braggadocio threats. ‘Come on, you fucksters, I'll peckchop the lot of you!’ That kind of thing.

  ‘Gunnersbury?’ It was Brixton23's plaintive call and he'd lost his warble for sure. That poor bird was now surrounded by the Pigeon Front and there was nut all we could do about it.

  Suddenly we heard a distant coo and I knew at once that our Surb reinforcements were nearby. There was a clucking of concern among the RPF and I swear I even saw a flash of fear in the twitch of Regent's head.

  As soon as she realized that the Pigeon Front would have to retreat, Gunnersbury began to laugh; a low, taunting rumble of a noise. But Regent wasn't going to leave Surb territory empty-beaked and he signalled to Garrick. Those two geezs spread their wings and took a vertical. At first we thought they were flying for cloud cover but then they diverted and dived into their own forces, scattering the RPFs as they flew, homing in on the isolated silhouette of Brixton23.

  Nobirdy made a sound, not even the victim himself, as two sharp beaks tore at his wings, breast and feet. We had never seen such a thing and our calls caught in our thinning throats, Surbs and RPFs alike. How can you react to the unimagined horror of a pigeon killing a pigeon? You can't, that's how. And as Brixton23's feathers floated away, up and down on gentle gusts, we found ourselves transfix
ed by the evil of it all. Soon that gregarious geez wasn't flying any more; he was airbound only by the biting beaks of his attackers. And then, with one final jerk of his head, Regent gashed a huge wound in his chest and pulled away and Brixton23 plummeted like a stone.

  Time moves fast for us pigeons. Do you think we (mostly) avoid pussy claws with the mock of flight alone? No. We live in an accelerated world that elongates the anger of even an experienced Tom to retarded-looking movements. So I swear that I watched Brixton23's fall in slowtion, his crumpled carcass plunging to the peepnik world of terra firma. And when his corpse impacted the birdscreen of the cash BMW in the car park below, shattering that glass like a map of Who Owns What, I knew that nothing would be the same again.

  Our Surb army was close at our tails now and Gunnersbury flew out of the security of our unit and right up to where Regent hovered. In verity, Regent himself looked shock-stilled at what he had done. But there is no doubting that we were one coo away from an all-out, mass dogfight. Who knows? Maybe such a sky battle would have ended the conflict then and there.

  Gunnersbury had just opened her beak when the whip crack of a shooter shot rang out from below. I tell you something, courageous or cowardly, there's nothing so sure to scatter pigeons as a shooter's report and the sky was soon massed with birds flying every which way, searching their bearings, squawking like crows. In a matter of seconds, the RPFs were heading north (I could see Regent and Garrick in their midst) and the Surbs flying south. But I had to hang on for a moment or two longer to ensure that Gunnersbury was safe and I rode the currents, looking every which way. When I found her, I could scope that she'd been confused by the shooter's volume and the coochie was circling no more than twenty feet above the ground. In spite of myself, I glanced at the peepniks below and I couldn't believe what I saw.

  I'd assumed that the shooter shot was shot by the cue-ball pinxen; that he'd either been firing at us pigeons (one of whose number had smashed the birdscreen of his car) or, spooked by the falling Brixton23, he'd pumped a startled round into the unilluminable savoury. But, instead, my bird's-eye view picked out the pinxen's corpse spreadeagled on the Tarmac and over him stood that same frosty nik with another shooter in his hand. I couldn't help myself, I just hovered there for a second too long and – I tell you veritably! – the man I call Mishap glanced up and looked me straight in the bead.