Matthew S. Batham

I emerge from my quilt like a moth, soggy from its rebirth. It's too early to spread my wings and show their not so glorious colours. First I need caffeine and three cigarettes. These will be consumed while feeding on the mental nectar of breakfast television, staring bleary-eyed, blank-faced at the inane antics of the presenters.

Perhaps an hour from now I will tentatively unfold, uncurl, lick off the remnants of sleep and fly into the day.

Breakfast TV is as stupid as ever. The presenter, who is highly rated, I understand, talks like a school yob while his co-host giggles in a helium-high voice at everything he says. I could turn over to one of the less infantile offerings, but they irritate me even more because they try to be serious but give even the most horrendous news a morning make-over. I feel angry at myself because I find the ludicrously upbeat female presenter attractive.

The pigeons are courting outside the living-room window. It is a black, sickening sound. The worst sound to wake up to. Before I open my eyes I see the male’s bloated, dirty body, head held up so proud. I have bought rat poison to kill them. I’m intending to mix it with some bread and other tasty tit-bits and leave it on the ledge outside my bedroom window. I hope they won’t die there. I don’t fancy finding stiff, maggot-invested pigeons when I open the window to a new day.

The pompous male reminds me of businessmen, swollen beneath their grey plumage, full of self-admiration for their commercial achievements.

Soon I will be crushed against such pigeon-men on the sweating tube, my head glued to someone's stale armpit, or cocked unnaturally against a shoulder dusted with dandruff.

I swig the cold remains of coffee and surrender to the pull of work.

2

 The tube is as packed as ever. Morning breath hangs like smog. Someone is prodding my back. I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but I still want to lash out. I can feel their breath on my neck, their thigh pressed to my leg. This is the closest I get to intimacy.

They prod me again and I try to edge away, but the slightest movement brings me uncomfortably close to molesting someone. I strain to see the culprit, but they are just out of range.

 The doors open at Oxford Circus and the carriage breathes out, spraying commuters onto the grey platform. I feel the prodder back up a little, but not as much as they could. I slide into a new space, leaning against the glass partition. I'm aware that my back is sweating and that I will leave a large smear behind me. I glance towards the prodder. 

She is short and a little stout. She is carrying a rolled-up magazine under her arm. Her linear shoulders are at the level of the tender area of my back. She looks fierce like a small dog trained to kill. Her mouth is puckered like the bottom of the same animal. I resent that screwed-up face. I imagine her prodding me again, deliberately, painfully, urging me off the train.

 "Quickly," she barks, "I'm late for a meeting."

I grab her by the ears and spit into her face: “Fuck off you stupid little bitch. Poke me again and I’ll fucking kill you!”

I pull a black curtain across the scene before it turns grisly. Sometimes I disturb myself with the images of revenge I conjure up. Self-censorship has become instinctive. Once I shoved a young lad through the tube window. Posted him like a fat, flashy letter, stuffed with bubble-wrap. His crime had been to fire a ball of spit and paper at my head from the gutted body of a pen. His head had caught in the narrow gap, the flesh peeling back, the skull scraping on metal.

I had drawn the black curtain before the screech of brakes or the crack of bone.

By my stop the train is almost empty. The prodder is long gone to her executive job, unaware of my dark intentions towards her.

Air quells my mood a little. The sun is out and London is bright and warm. I walk through a small park to the office block where I work. There are more fat pigeons strutting around the benches, eating scraps even as they prepare to mount their chosen partners. I feel queasy again and a cloud covers the sun. Black mood returns.

I'm employed by a company that sells financial packages to individuals and commercial enterprises. It's a high-powered environment. I'm responsible for taking calls and directing them to the correct person.

 I've been working here for six years.

I can't smoke in the offices so by mid-morning I'm desperate for a cigarette. Sometimes Edith covers for me while I slip outside. Edith is about sixty. Too old to be working. The company keeps her on because she's related to the managing director. If she wasn't here maybe I would have been promoted by now.

I imagine slipping arsenic into Edith's tea. Her face blows up like a blue football, her neck swells like a snake that has eaten an antelope. She drops dead and everyone turns to me, her successor, their faces a mixture of horror and relief.

I draw aggressively on my cigarette. There are pigeons on the pavement in front of the office-block, pecking at the ash as I flick it.

Ashley Hayes, one of the company's most successful young reps, strides towards me from the park. He is swinging his black briefcase like a school child on his way home for summer holidays would a satchel. "Just clinched a major deal!" he chirps.

I smile, go to respond, then hear the deep reply of another rep who has been smoking in the doorway just behind me. I shrink, feel ugly, puff even more violently on my cigarette.

The reps give each other a high five and jog up the stairs to the office, grey plumage fluffed up with arrogant air.

I follow them a few seconds later. Edith is laughing with a female colleague as I approach my desk. I assume they are talking about me and give the second woman a cold stare as I relieve Edith of her temporary duties.

"Thank you," says Edith crisply as she returns to her own position, still gossiping with her friend.

My desk is next to a window, tarnished brown by pollution. I can just about make out the small park and the grey dots which are the pigeons. Around me grey-suited reps strut and peck between the desks.

The rep who has just scored the great deal approaches, barely looking at me, and asks if I can call Interflora and order his wife some flowers.

"It's her birthday,” he says, dropping a slip of paper in front of me, on which he has scrawled her name and address, and walking off before I can reply.

 It is not my job to order flowers for the wives of young, superior reps. But I do it anyway, making sure her name is misspelled.

I think I am becoming paranoid. The reps seem to be looking at me more than usual. Not staring, but glancing from behind their computer screens and looking quickly away when I turn.

A pigeon has landed on the ledge outside my window. It is the fattest, ugliest bird I have ever seen. It has a tumour-like growth on one leg which looks blue and bloody, like the knuckle of a joint of meat.

 Some people eat pigeon meat. That makes me feel sick.

David Blakely is the boss of the company. He is only thirty-seven, but looks older, probably because of the stress. He has his own office not far from my desk. It is made from partitions which are half glass, but he has blinds on every wall so that he can shut out the work force.

 He rarely speaks to me so I am surprised when he pops his head round the door of his office and beckons me over. At first I look to see if anyone is standing nearby, but he points at me and beckons again.

I push my chair back, still hesitant even though there is no doubt now as to who he is beckoning. I glance around the office and forty heads duck back behind their computer screens. Edith is in the midst of making tea so ducks behind the kettle, pretending to hunt for a dropped sugar sachet.

My legs are starting to feel weightless. I hope that the reps will stay behind their screens while I make my way to the office. If I feel them watching I will think too much about how I am walking and then walking will seem like an alien activity.

I stand and begin the journey. I focus on a spot just to the left of the boss's head, desperately trying not to think about what my legs are doing. I reach the office without stumbling and fall into a chair facing Blakely who has already sat down. "Thanks for coming," he says, as if I had received a formal invitation.

I nod.

"I'm afraid I have some rather bad news."

For a brief moment I think that someone I know has died, but it is far worse than that.

"I need to make some cutbacks," he continues. "And there really isn't anyone else I can let go, except you. Please don't take it personally..."

I have stopped hearing him. I am leaping across the desk, and gripping his long white neck in my hands. We both fall, me forwards, him backwards, me still fastened to his throat. His Adams apple is cracking under my grip.

 "...I really am sorry," he concludes, and insults me with a patronising smile of sympathy.

I know I should say something. "Why not Edith?" seems like a good start, but my tongue is too big and my throat too dry, so I stand and wander back into the main office, eyes fixed to the grey carpet.

I know that forty-one pairs of eyes are staring at me from behind forty-one computer screens - Edith will have returned to hers by now.

The first thing I notice when I reach my desk is a trail of pigeon shit dripping down the window. It looks like anaemic snot.

I fumble my jacket from the back of the chair and push my shaking hands into the appropriate arm holes. At least I manage that manoeuvre without too much difficulty. I should be asking about redundancy pay, my pension, references, but I feel stunned. If I try to speak I will either fly into a rage or cry. I don't want to do either until I am somewhere private.

I head for the stairs without looking back at the office. Once through the exit door I light a cigarette. My hands are shaking so violently I have to clasp one in the other to steady it enough to hold the lighter.

Each stair seems like a drop of three feet. I reach the outside and react to the sun like a vampire, covering my eyes with my right arm.

Squinting, I head for the park. I chance one glance up at the office and forty-one heads duck from view - or so I imagine.

In the park the pigeons are swarming, tumbling over each other. Some are fighting over pieces of bread or potential mates. I want to kick one, send its bloated body rocketing into the trees, feel the weight of it against my shoe.

 "It's pigeons that have put me here," I think angrily.

I sit on a bench, not yet overcome with the rat-birds. Usually when I sit here I eat a sandwich bought from the cafe just round the corner. I won't be doing that any more. I feel hot tears in my eyes, but fight them. I start to think about sales reps and pigeons, and soon the two have become one. I glance at the sandwich and have an idea.

3

I’m greeted with wary looks when I appear in the office a couple of hours later, brandishing the large white box of cakes.

“Thought I should have some sort of leaving-do,” I say. “Who’s for a cake?”

I see their expressions flicker between uncertainty and sympathy. It’s super-rep Ashley that makes the first move.

“Thanks mate, that’s really good of you. How about we take you for a beer later?”

“Great!” I say, grinning, watching him bite into the doughnut, hoping the extra jam I have shoved into the middle will disguise the taste of the other added ingredients – a little rat poison, and some arsenic I bought over the Internet months ago when the pigeons were really getting me down. I’m glad now I didn’t waste it on them.

The rest of the office comes forward, following the example of their champion. I stay long enough to see the first of them drop, blood spurting from their mouths, eyes bloated with shock.

I don’t enjoy their rattling screams and wet, bubbling cries as much as I’d imagined, and this time its not just a matter of closing my eyes for a few seconds and thinking of something else. This time it’s real.