A good territory may well be matched by good occupants. Plenty of experience, high levels of vigilance, and strong group cohesion (effective teamwork) may be the most important qualities that mature individuals can bring to maintaining a territory.
Gisela Kaplan, Australian Magpie
This is what happened at the office.
I can’t get to any of my emails today because we’ve been forced to go to a group dynamics workshop. I don’t need to give you any more detail than that. You can imagine. I’ll let you decide for yourself what the facilitator looks like: if she’s ratty-haired or poised; if she delivers her point about roles and responsibilities with a flourish, or if she wavers between each thought, her words clagging the corner of her mouth. The tables in the conference room might have been divvied into small clusters, flowing with butcher’s paper; or they might have been managed into a large rectangle that’s now tacking us to the walls. There’d be a lopsided hole made by the shape of the tables in the middle of the room, and we’d all be rolling our eyes at one another across the expanse. You can see the textaed jargon-terms razor-bladed into the whiteboard, but the specific words aren’t important. I want you to look instead at two of the people in the room who are the focus of this story. Two members of my team.
The first is our team leader. She’s dynamic, inspiring, zealous: a stickler for detail, a cutter-to-the-chase. Her polished hair is shrewdly scraped back and her earrings glint. Her jacket is tailored precisely: v-shaped around the neck, bold at the shoulders, slender at the waist. A permanent silhouette. Only occasionally do you see flashes of the white blouse underneath. Her eyes dagger about the room. She’s been essential to the department since it started and she’s always been proud to represent it. When the facilitator proposes a discussion topic, any discussion topic, our leader’s incisive solutions resolve the matter. She pivots in her chair and adjusts her collar.
The second person is not polished or decisive or inspiring. His name is Peter. He’s probably in his fifties; he might always have been in his fifties. He’s a bit sloppy. Today he’s wearing a lumpen jumper over his shirt and tie and there’s a glob of breakfast on it. There’s a shred of unshaven beard in the bend of his jaw. He’s kind of foul. We’re always on task-and-finish working groups together, but I never want to make eye contact with him. I try to make small talk in the stairwell up to our department. He has terrible teeth: brown and clumsy.
Peter talks a lot about stationery. His office is next door to the cupboard where we store the Post-it notes and the extra suspension files. He’s often passing my office, his clotted body clutching another ream of paper for the photocopier. He’s very dutiful. Right now, he’s listening carefully to the facilitator’s sales pitch, nodding his head politely. He’s even taking notes.
At one moment, after a succinct summary of core competencies from our leader, Peter offers his extemporaneous thoughts on the matter.
Our team leader stiffens. You can feel the hair bristling on the nape of her neck.
‘Peter, that’s hardly the point.’ The outburst is a bayonet. We all reel from it.
Our leader is unruffled. Systematically, mathematically, she extracts the fallacies from his flabby argument. She peels away the oversights. His ideas are not proactive or innovative or sustainable. She’s absolutely right. Peter tries to smooth down the cowlick in his hair. He turns away from her pinprick gaze. The facilitator interposes, but quickly retreats. Nobody else moves.
I won’t say we’re used to the behaviour. It’s always a surprise, even when you see it coming. It comes in high and fast like a sniper’s headshot; it spikes in deep like an arrow. Up close, she can bite sharp and quick, serrating a suggestion or ripping into a memo. She can also sting in from a distance: via email or with a shout, whirring down the corridor. Some of us are targeted more than others, but she’s always got her eye on Peter. He tries to avoid her, I think. I see him peeping furtively out of the stationery cupboard and bolting for it, running the gauntlet, waving his hands above his head. But she senses his presence. ‘Peter—a minute?’ she calls. Her black wings open and he’s assaulted by the flash of white shards.
We all know about magpies. We all have anecdotes about When Magpies Attack. Mine happened when I was very young—during my first year of school, I’d say. There were poplar trees between the classroom and the oval. I wandered down during playlunch and the bird roared down at me vertiginously, viciously. Its stiletto beak actually drew blood—at least that’s what I remember. I know I howled. The deputy called my mother in, so it must have been when I was very young indeed. My mother swooped in and scooped me away.
My daughter regularly brings home notes from her school, warning that ‘Magpie Season’ is upon us. These scrunched-up pieces of paper provide handy hints to reduce the risk of assault. They include:
- Avoid areas where magpies are swooping, and make a cardboard sign to warn others.
- Walk quickly and quietly away if you see a magpie swooping, trying to keep an eye on the magpie as you do so.
- Make a hat from a cardboard box or an ice-cream container and scribble on a pair of eyes.
- Carry a stick or an open umbrella above your head.
- Above all, if you’re swooped by a magpie, do not stop. You are in the magpie’s territory and he will keep on swooping.
We have other handy sources of information about the magpie. There’s the Sunday-arvo barbecue banter: know-it-all insights, informed by the scent of burned sausage and the comforting beer in the stomach. Usually commencing in spring, these insights are foraged from slivered articles in the local newspaper and half-watched segments on TV science shows. Apparently, the conversations begin. Apparently, magpies are super-intelligent, even more clever than crows. Apparently, they can distinguish one human from another and carry this memory for years, even decades. According to scientists, magpies can communicate this knowledge to other magpies in their community. They target some individuals for swooping and not others. I heard this one story, someone says, squinting from the sizzle on the hotplate, about a man who threw sticks at a magpie in his garden when he was a kid. Hoppy, he called it, because the bird only had one leg. His mother used to lay out hunks of bread on the lawn for the poor bird. Years later, fully grown up, he comes back to visit and Hoppy’s son scimitars through the air and takes his revenge. It’s not about provocation, someone else says. He takes a swig of his stubby. You can just be walking by and bang! Man, those beaks are sharp.
Then what’s the reason? Why do they pick some people and not others? Everyone wonders, and the sausages are turned over to reveal their charred underbellies. We believe, smugly, that magpies won’t attack us. But we’re all scratching the tops of our heads, soothing old wounds between the hair follicles.
A magpie once settled in the centre courtyard of the building I work in. She built her nest in the crook between two branches in the courtyard’s solitary leafless tree. She swooped for weeks: any time people wanted to smoke or eat lunch or take a diagonal shortcut. Eventually, security came and escorted her away. Our team leader pointed out that this was an incorrect strategy. As the cage passed the gathered crowd, our team leader snipped, ‘It’ll only come back. They’re sharper than you think.’
She was absolutely right. I don’t know where security released the magpie, but a few weeks later, there she was, pitched on the flat roof of our building, vigilant as a prison guard.
Our team leader keeps a strict routine. First thing in the morning it’s emails and then a briefing with her PA. Then she does the rounds. ‘This office has a lot of moving parts,’ she often says, ‘and it’s essential to touch base with the team.’ She clears a path down the corridor as we all scamper to our desks. She works the plot systematically. She looms. You never know what she’s going to do next. Sometimes she’s jocular, throwing her head back and jubilating. That can be more terrifying than her stern head-tilt; in me, it induces a hollow replica of a laugh, spindly and embarrassed.
Despite the pain, it pays to stay at your desk: poised, alert. As soon as she passes, though, we tend to disperse. I hear her pontificating to a colleague further down the corridor. I strike off another action item and abscond.
Our building is one of those sixties blocks, a cube with the middle cut out of it. Cancerous concrete with a gravel roof. Our department is three floors up, so you don’t always have time to sneak down to the courtyard. My colleagues tend to linger in the stairwell. It’s your basic cement chasm, echoey and cold, the white paint peeling off the metal railings. It’s not unpleasant. We install ourselves on the steps and gossip. It’s a half-escape. It’s like we’re working up the courage for the real liberation, the total bolt.
Sometimes Peter joins us, and we engage in polite, awkward chitchat. I sit on a lower step, not wanting to get a whiff of his sour breath. Most of the time, though, he doesn’t hang around. He seems to prefer walking down to the ground floor and back up again. He tells me that he’s trying to lose a few kilos. He’s rubbing his wobbly jumper. So up and down he goes. He calls it his daily regimen. When he’s out of earshot—or when we assume he’s out of earshot—our conversation turns towards him. I know she’s awful, we say, but a lot of the time he does bring it on himself. If he just learned to placate her, if he just kept his trap shut …
There have been times in meetings when Peter has floundered over a piece of policy. I’ve seen our leader’s hackles rise but before she has a chance to strike, another colleague cuts in to Peter instead. I’ve done it myself. If I do it, I think, I can explain his mistake in a reasonable way, in a friendly way. Another colleague joins in, just as pleasant, just as helpful. We’re providing a buffer, we reason, a safe zone. Our team leader sits back, smoothing down the front pocket of her jacket.
We’re still chatting when he plods back up the stairwell. As he passes, his head flicks to us: furtive, disappointed.
It’s lunchtime and we’ve all been called to a systems review meeting. It’s a small meeting—our leader calls these a ‘huddle’—in the glass-walled conference room next to her office. We were ordered to submit our reports in advance of the meeting, but we still don’t really know what it’s actually about. I’m shuffling at my office door. I don’t know if I should print copies of my reports or not. I want to make the right impression: the big boss is coming, the boss above our team leader. Better to be primed for all contingencies. But I also remember the rant our leader bombarded us with at our last meeting about resource management and greening the office. I decide against the printouts.
I slip through the glass doors. Our leader is pitched next to the big boss. She’s touching her hair conspicuously and nodding as the big boss talks to indicate how intently she’s listening. Between them is a platter of catering. It’s fancier than the too-dry, too-wet sandwiches we normally get. There’s a chopped-up baguette, some pickles, slabs of salami and cubed feta, lettuce and sliced cucumber, and, in the middle, some chicken wings. The big boss takes the corner piece of the baguette and affixes some salami to it. Our leader lifts a chicken wing, daintily.
The big boss announces he’s only got forty-five minutes until his next conference so we’d better get a hustle on, hadn’t we. We settle. The first report—an update on a new policy—has already swung into action before our team leader twigs that Peter is missing.
One of my colleagues mutters something about seeing him loitering near the stationery cupboard.
Our leader looks askance at him and the colleague is silent.
I’m sent to fetch Peter. My murmuring colleague is right. He’s not in his office, and I can hear whistling emanating from the stationery cupboard.
It’s not quite a melody: it’s the absent-minded sub-song of someone happy and on his own.
The door is plastered with bits and pieces: almost-risqué cartoons, postcards from gloating colleagues, clippings from the social pages showing our not-game-enough-to-be-debauched Christmas parties. It’s pretty ratty: the clippings are frayed like hessian bags; the sticky tape is sallow. The whistling—the sound of a flat kettle boiling—continues from within. I’m wondering if I should knock. I opt to make a vague scratching noise with my throat.
The whistling stops and Peter peers out. He tells me he’s sorry, he lost track of the time, he’d just come in for a minute and he’d noticed … He opens the door and for a moment I’m blinded by the light behind him. There’s a large window above the shelves letting in a multitude of sky. Peter, a blobby shadow, tells me he just thought he’d do a spot of spring cleaning. When my eyes adjust I see how organised everything is. A density of stacked manila folders, their rounded corners aligned. Glue sticks in a row like soldiers. Hoarded boxes of staples stacked, neat and compact, in a pyramid. I think he’s waiting for me to pay his tidiness a compliment. I turn back to the glass room and he shuffles after me.
We haven’t missed anything. A lively conversation is taking place between our team leader and the big boss, a flustered colleague shelved on the sidelines. The big boss is evangelising about breaking through the clutter, about focus, about consolidation and maximum impact, about attention to detail. He’s telling us that without attention to detail we can’t drill down to the real problems, we can’t take it up to the next level, we can’t get to the bleeding edge.
Our leader concurs, absolutely, unequivocally. Nobody, it seems, knows how to follow procedure. Nobody knows how to leverage an opportunity. She’s licking her lips. Despite her desire to impress, she’s making a bit of a mess with her lunch. She’s hooked the end of the chicken wing and has snapped the sticky bone at the join. She turns it upside down and the marinade drips. The big boss notices. He snorts and tells her that she needs a serviette, no, several serviettes. He laughs at the splotch of sauce she’s got on her blouse.
Her lips tighten.
‘Peter?’ she hackles. ‘Isn’t your report ready?’
Peter looks up from his notepad and gives one of his grotty good-natured smiles. He dithers out stapled photocopies of a gritty spreadsheet, one for each member of the team. He’s sorry he didn’t have time to submit it earlier.
Our leader snatches and pokes at the report as Peter commences a zigzagging account of budget analytics and potential streamlining models.
We’re not listening. We’re waiting, our eyes fixed.
‘Peter,’ she piques, with a Taxi Driver tilt of the head, ‘look at the error in the third column.’
Peter contemplates the splotchy ink. He doesn’t think … he could be …?
She maintains her binocular gaze, her smooth head thrown back, her chest expanded. She’s steely and still. We all duck and cover. It’s much worse than her usual attack. This is what she means about procedure, this is what the big boss means when he’s talking about clutter, attention to detail, updating systems.
She whirls in her chair. ‘I mean honestly, Peter, this is ridiculous. How could you make such a fundamental fuck-up?’
Yes, yes, Peter says, his head down, the cowlick exposed. Yes, yes, he knows.
‘Well, if you know—if you know—then why did you do it?’
We don’t say anything. Peter faces away from the team. His head isn’t bowed, but he’s not making eye contact with anyone. His nose is pointed at the glass walls. For the rest of the meeting, you can sense him trying not to shudder.
A colleague passes my office en route to the weekly round-up. I delete some send-all emails and follow. We haven’t had a chance to debrief about the Peter incident—we all left the meeting shell-shocked and silent—but now isn’t the time or the place to raise the topic. Only a moment later we’re at our team leader’s door.
She waves us into her office. It’s a vast room, trimly furnished: a white desk, neat bookcases, a small cleared table for intimate conferences. There’s a strip of windows along one wall and they’re open today, letting in late afternoon sun and airy sounds. She’s recounting a story the big boss told her about someone in another department. It’s not an unfunny story, and she’s telling it expertly. At the punchline, she lifts her head and laughs. I catch a glance of her pristine-white blouse.
She doesn’t mention Peter. He’s meant to be at the meeting.
We discuss the action items for next week. We follow a routine of points. There are a few moments when we encounter a task in Peter’s domain: we skirt around it, hoping our team leader won’t notice. She notices.
‘I think I should say—’ she begins.
And, absolutely, unequivocally on cue, there’s the sound of breaking glass. A cry from a colleague, confused, rattled, using Peter’s name and words like ‘Don’t—’ and ‘What are you—?’ A whoosh and a scream. A kerfuffle of feet. One of my colleagues is in the doorway, saying, ‘I think—I think—’. Through the open windows, there are other voices rumbling, calling from the cavernous space below.
I think Peter may have—the voice is saying.
I don’t know much about magpies. Peter did, though. I joined him on his journey up the stairwell once. I was coming from the carpark; he was slowly trudging through his regimen. I don’t know what made us get onto the topic of birds. He’s an ornithologist, he told me. Well, an amateur ornithologist. A twitcher. He went on to tell me how he always goes bushwalking on the weekend, binoculars at the ready. But he doesn’t have to venture far to watch his favourite bird. The magpie is a much-maligned creature, he said. Everyone harps on about their aggression, their steely beaks, their yellow eyes. They’re not aggressive. Their swooping behaviour is limited to four to six weeks in the year, and they’re always only defending their hatchlings. We think of the attacks as unprovoked, but, for them, we’re invading their territory. There are statistics to show that magpie attacks count for something like 0.01 percent of human injuries from animals. Magpies are beautiful. Did you know they’re one of the few birds—in the world—to engage in play? Did you know they have facial expressions? They can fluff the feathers below or above their beak to show fear or anger or surprise. They’re capable of binocular vision, so they can look you in the eye. They sunbake! They lie on their back, wings outstretched, and it looks like they’re dead. But one eye is always in shade under the beak, keeping watch. They have a complex social structure with a tight hierarchy, but they also work cooperatively. They forage side by side and, if there’s a predator, one bird will warn the others. Their calls are a warning for other animals in the wild. They’re the police of the bush. Magpies can even forge close connections with humans. Peter told me how he’d cared for an injured magpie once. He thinks a cat had got her. He gathered her up and fed her droplets of water. When her wing was healed, Peter released her into the wild. But she didn’t go far: in fact, she built her nest in his backyard. Peter loves to watch her fretting the grass, plunging her smooth beak into the ground.
Look, I’ve been playing with a metaphor here, but, like most metaphors, it doesn’t always stay still. I’ve never been very good with analogies. I started writing this story with a simple correlation: magpie-attacks-human-equals-workplace-bullying. Thanks to the conversation with Peter on the stairs, though, I’ve moved from a simple metaphor to one where the analogy shifts, mid-swoop. Peter is sometimes the small boy, walking between the poplars, howling when the beak-knife pierces the top of his head. Then he becomes the magpie, expertly fashioning an elegant nest: the outer layer rough with plastic, rope and hessian bags; the inner layer ordered and scrupulously cared for, insulated against the wind. Sometimes he’s a marginal member of the magpie clan, ostracised, not permitted to eat or drink. Crouching for hours in front of a tree, beak touching the bark. Sometimes we’re all magpies.
In a book I read, a scientist describes an experiment in which she placed a stuffed eagle carcass in the bushes. One magpie spotted it and called the alarm. Then all the magpies mobbed the stuffed eagle, picking it apart, beaks clapping and wings flapping furiously. We’ve all been there.
And as for our team leader—
We’ve all stumbled down the corridor, seen the shattered glass in the stationery cupboard, the two black scuff-marks on the shelf. We’ve all flown down the stairwell and splayed into the courtyard. Security has got there before us and is attempting to cordon off the area, but we can all see the carcass. It’s mangled, splintered, frayed. I’ve seen something like that before. I’m paralysed, staring at another broken body. We’re all paralysed. Except for our team leader. She swoops towards Peter. Security tries to warn her away but she persists. ‘It’s my job,’ she cries. ‘It’s my responsibility.’ She peels away her black jacket and folds it over him. She’s careful not to move him. She knows exactly what to do. She’s the one who went to the first aid course last year when we all deleted the email. She tells everyone to stand back. She whispers into his grazed ear. She listens. ‘He’s alive!’ she calls. ‘Get the ambulance here!’ She feels along his rib cage, his pelvis, the open edge of his thigh bone. All the time she’s warbling to Peter, soothingly, a sub-song, a song a bird might sing when he is sitting on his own. She glances at one of us and a colleague offers her a water bottle. She sprinkles droplets of water over Peter’s forehead, making sure to keep them away from his mouth.
When the ambulance arrives she lets them do their job. We watch as the paramedics shuffle Peter onto the stretcher. I don’t want to look as they carry him towards the ambulance. His blood-splattered eyes twitch. One eye is open under a broken nose. Teeth are barbed through his bottom lip.
Our team leader is watching, too. There’s blood on her white blouse.
I step forward. As the courtyard darkens and the siren fades, I have to comfort her.