4 The pigeon

You think I’m tough, eh. I think I’m tough. Yeah. But I have – I have a–

A tendency to slip. Slip slide slurrup slam headlong down into – OK. How to describe it? It’s another state. It’s crap. I can’t describe it to you but I have to tell this story.

Do I have to tell you?

Yes, obviously. Well sometimes I’m afraid.

Will that do?

Afraid. You understand? Frightened. Fearful. Got the message? Sometimes I get – Fear.

Like this. I feel it coming on. Like you see the shadow of a big building slanting across the street in front of you and you keep walking and you step from sunlight into the shadow and you think it’s OK, I’m still on the pavement, same ground beneath my feet same sky above my head same traffic roaring past – but–

it’s not the same.

It’s not the same. You’re entering the shadow and you feel the chill – I feel the chill, I feel the way the earth is turning I feel ordinary comfort sliding away over the rim I feel abandoned – I feel – Fear.

It comes on. I can’t tell you why. A typical instance of it coming on: the day I saw the pigeon. I took a short cut across the park and I saw a pigeon trapped. It was nothing – insignificant, utterly and completely insignificant.

But it’s how the shadow falls.

There was a pigeon trapped, in the park. They put thread like fishing line across the flowerbeds. Its feet were tangled in it. When I saw it it was standing very still, then it flapped, hard. When it stopped it looked at me with its glittering eyes.

I was on the path. I stopped. They’d been working in the park, I suppose because it was spring. Dug up the flowerbeds, put in some ugly little polyanths. And this line, crisscrossing above the soil, staked. It must be to keep the birds off, I never saw it before. There was a tractor turning on the football pitch, dragging something over the muddy grass. A cloud of birds following it. Pigeons and seagulls everywhere. But this one was trapped.

I watched to see if it would flap itself free. No. It was making things worse. The line was tight around its scrawny leg, cutting in. You can amputate a finger like that. Tie a line around it tight. Wait for the end to drop off, kids used to play it at school.

I looked for other people. Two briefcases going to the office. They didn’t see me, never mind the pigeon. A bleary-faced woman in a blue cleaner’s overall. People going to work. What would you say? ‘Please can you rescue this pigeon?’ ‘Rescue it yourself you silly bitch. If it matters to you.’

What’s one pigeon the less? They’re vermin. Carry diseases. Deface city buildings. The council poisons them, they have to. That’s why they put the line. To stop pigeons eating the seedlings. Trap them, make an example. There were no other pigeons near this flowerbed. Leave one and it scares off the others. Scarecrow. Scarepigeon.

It flapped dementedly, its wings beat up small lumps of soil, it heaved its body upwards. The foot could have just sliced off. I wished it would. So the pigeon would be gone.

To rescue it I would have to step over the little green hooped railings, step carefully between the crisscrossing lines of thread, bend down in the middle of the garden and touch the pigeon. It stared hatefully. Its beak was sharp for pecking. I think they carry rabies, I’ve heard that. I hadn’t got any gloves.

My face was red and my heart was beating, I could feel it shaking my ribcage. A woman came by with a baby in a pushchair and a young kid in uniform. I turned away so she wouldn’t see my face. The kid said, ‘Mum!’ and I knew he’d seen the pigeon but she was telling him off and didn’t stop.

I decided to find a park keeper. A gardener. With proper thick gloves, with gauntlets. He could free the pigeon, it was his job. I went on along the path and part of me thought I won’t come back then I won’t have to see it flapping and heaving again, or sitting still and staring. Once I get to the gate it won’t be important.

There weren’t any gardeners. Only the tractor down on the football pitch, across a wasteland of boggy lawns. When I got close I’d be shouting over the noise of the tractor, at last he’d turn the engine off in exasperation and lean out. ‘What?’

‘A pigeon,’ I’d say. ‘I’m sorry but it’s trapped–’

‘A fucking pigeon?’ He’d stare at me then turn his engine on again.

I went back along the path. If I’d had some scissors. Or a penknife. I could have cut the thread. I wouldn’t have had to touch it.

Perhaps it was dead. It would die quite quickly of exhaustion. I hoped it was dead already.

But there was a man crouching in the muddy flowerbed. He glanced up at me. He had the pigeon in one hand, his fingers grasped around its body and folded wings. With the other he was untangling the line from its foot. The bird stared. It did not move its head or peck him. The line was around a wing as well; the man cursed quietly as he turned the bird over and tried to free it. I was embarrassed, ashamed to stand and watch him. I moved back the way I came. When I looked over my shoulder at last he was standing on the path again. He was holding out his arm and letting the bird go, it flapped at shoulder height like it had forgotten how to move through the air. Then it was rising. Flying up.

That’s it. It slips. An incident like that and I feel the whole thing slipping, I am in the picture but there’s a dotted line around me. Cut around the dotted line. I am cut out.

Night-time is worst of course. I’m exhausted. Raw, jangled, wanting only to curl up and close my eyes. Wanting nothing so much as the warm enclosed huddle, peaceful black oblivion. Check the windows, lock the door, switch off the lights, pretend the flat is safe. But as soon as I close my eyes I hear noises. A hedge, a thicket, a forest of noises springs up around me. And I’m listening, watchful and alert, for the thing behind them. Straining after the one noise I can’t quite hear. I lie still for a long time, while the noises become more and more deafening. There’s no way out of this, I don’t sleep, I won’t sleep, whatever I do won’t make any difference but still there comes a point when I can’t lie passively any more being assaulted by the racket around me while my inner ears strain to aching after a hidden sound – I have to heave myself up in my bed (heavy; the body is heavy and dull, the legs stiff, they ache when I try to bend them. The body weighs me down, it has a hollow sensation around its middle as if food might comfort it. I know it won’t.)

There is a routine of silencing: alarm clock’s tick to be wrapped in a jumper, wristwatch in a T-shirt, a folded sheet of paper to be wedged in the side of the window frame. I open my bedroom door, check the lock on the front door. The fridge’s hum has become a roar which drowns out everything else; I switch it off. The radio has been left switched to tape; its red light is still on and it emits a low exhalation of dull static like the roar of a gas flame. Pull out the plug. Next door’s TV is deafening, when I touch the party wall I feel it vibrating with the sound. Someone upstairs flushes a toilet and the intensity of the noise drenches me with sweat, I am hot then cold, my hollow head echoing and reverberating with sound. Outside the steady drone of traffic has become isolated incidents, the distant whine of a motorbike crescendoing to blast force then elongating itself into distance and vanishing. But as I track each moving sound and supervise its exit from the picture it is replaced, overlaid, interfered with by other, new intrusions – a shout, thudding footsteps, the roar of aircraft, the dripping of taps, the slamming of doors and pressure of wind against the panes, the crackle of electricity in the wires and gurgle of water in the pipes, the settling and shifting of the building’s bricks and mortar the pattering hail of falling dust motes the stampedes of house mites the thundering waterfall of my own blood roaring past my ears.

I turn off everything I can find. Unplug all the sockets. Listen. Strain.

There is a faraway sound, behind these walls of noise. I can almost – I think it’s someone screaming. A car floods the place with noise and then recedes, I can almost – if I hear that scream again …

I pull back the curtain a couple of inches. There’s no one there. Just empty pavement and road. It’s quiet and still. I wait. It’s waiting. Like a stage set. Something will happen. I am frozen here, waiting, staring into the dark street. I’m getting cold.

I back myself onto the sofa, I can still see out from here. I pull the cushions over me. Things are quieter now. I am holding them out by force. I don’t let myself be distracted from the street. What is it? What?

My eyes are burning. They ache to close. Just for a second or two. But they fly open when I blink. The eyes closing will make it come. The thing in the street. I have to watch out for it. Me watching keeps it out. I haven’t any choice, I must sit here paralysed, eyes glued to the empty night-time street only by my force of will can that emptiness be maintained can horror be held at bay can the suffocating press of nightmare be held outside the edges of my field of vision.