Prologue

Somewhere in southeast London a flightless young magpie tumbles to the ground.

From below, it’s hard to make out exactly where the bird dropped from. Its nest could have been high up in one of the plane trees that line this wheel-worn road, a bush-like bower hidden behind a green veil of leaves. Or it might have been tucked away somewhere in the jumble of semi-disused warehouses that clutter the area, an intricate formation of sticks and mud on corrugated iron and asbestos. Magpies construct their homes alongside ours, within sight but just out of reach. A magpie city superimposed on our own.

It is a harsh and very human environment into which this bird has prematurely arrived. Cars with crumpled fenders and shattered windshields wait in lines to be scrapped at the nearby junkyard. Illegally dumped fridges and sacks of rubble as immovable as boulders block the sidewalks. Puddles of spring rain shine purple with petrochemicals and, overhead, clouds of smoke and steam billow from the chimney of a huge waste-disposal facility that incinerates garbage around the clock. Trucks rumble past like thunderclouds and fans at the nearby soccer stadium roar. The only animals I’ve ever noticed there are pit bulls and rats, although a little farther afield, around the dump, there are flocks of gulls and pigeons along with a fleet of raptors sleek as fighter jets that are employed by the waste-disposal company to chase the other birds away.

My partner Yana’s workshop is just around the corner, in a leaky industrial unit on the edge of the junkyard. This part of the city seems to be full of secrets and surprises, but they’re rarely cute and fluffy. A police raid on a neighboring warehouse uncovers a cannabis farm one week; stolen motorbikes the next; a friend opens up a long-abandoned shipping container and finds it crammed full of Jet Skis; someone I once shared a prison cell with boasted of having dumped someone’s sawn-off limbs nearby. This is the last place on earth I would have expected something as yolky soft and bird-bone brittle as a chick to turn up.

The creature scuttles around in the gutter, lurching toward the curb like a drunk staggering down an alleyway. Magpies leave home far too soon—long before they can really fly or properly fend for themselves. For weeks after they fledge their nests, they’re dependent on their parents for sustenance, protection, and an education too. But this bird’s parents are nowhere to be seen. They’re not feeding it, or watching it, or guarding it; no alarm calls sound as a large apex predator approaches with footfalls made heavy by steel toe–capped boots. That doesn’t mean the chick’s parents aren’t nearby. It could be no accident that this bird is on the ground. If food was running short, a savage calculation may have been performed, showing that the only way to keep the family airborne was to jettison the runt.

The magpie has stopped moving now. The black-and-white bird crouches down in the gutter, shivering from dehydration and perhaps fear too. If nature is allowed to run its course, it’ll probably be dead before the day is out. The advancing human looms large as a tree trunk, sways uncertainly, and then, with a soft rustling, the bird’s world goes dark.

A couple of hundred miles to the west, and three decades distant in time, a young jackdaw tumbled from its nest in the steeple of a village church. Steely-gray feathers, yellow beak, injured wing dragging along the ground. Jackdaws and magpies share family ties. The crow family. Carrion kin. Someone, perhaps the vicar, stumbled across this injured young bird, boxed it up, and took it to the home of a local woman, an amateur animal healer. From there, the jackdaw found its way into the hands of the man who would go on to become my father. The magpie finds its way to me.