Tentatively Joined

Now someone has graffitied the pigeon. It has been lying face down in the garden for a week, and now someone has tagged a green international post label and stuck it to its wing. I am standing at the window of my studio watching a fat girl with a cigarette in one hand and a camera phone in the other take a picture of this. She is wearing Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses—huge like a ski mask—that she doesn't remove to take the photo. I wonder what she will do with the photo. Will she show it to a boy she likes? There are pigeons sitting on a nearby fence, also watching the girl. This is what kills me the most. Someone should bury the pigeon, or take it away—there's a rubbish bin out front. Put a bucket over it at least.

I look around my studio. Although I know I will not find one here, I am looking for a spade. I forget about the brush and shovel under the sink, and instead I pick up the ceramic kettle plate sitting on the table.

Outside, with the plate in one hand and an umbrella in the other, I try to lever the pigeon out of the garden and onto the plate. While I am doing this I avoid looking into the eyes of the pigeon. Its eyes no longer look like eyes. The only thing to indicate they are eyes is where they are located on its head. So far my levering is only managing to spread the pigeon across more garden area, stretching it out. The pigeon is more decomposed than it looks from above—it is no longer a tidy unit of animal. It is now many pieces, tentatively joined. I close my eyes to a squint and breathe heavily through my mouth. I don't know how bad it smells and I don't want to know.

I think about the council's plan to kill off the pigeons en masse. Can you imagine mercenaries, armed with guns, knocking off the pigeons one by one? While some criminal fulfils his community service by running around after them with a spade and a sack? I hear a door slam behind me and suddenly terrified that someone will catch me page 92 doing what I am doing, I leave the pigeon as it is, and dash back into my studio.

Standing at the window, I watch the fat girl walk past again. She is with someone else this time. Neither of them acknowledges the pigeon. I can see the pigeon is sitting up more convincingly now, half on and half off the ceramic kettle plate, almost as if it were a sculpture on a plinth. I am unsure whether to be ashamed or pleased with myself. I watch the other pigeons slowly come down from their fence. Someone has thrown a loaf of sliced white bread into the courtyard. The pigeons take one slice at a time. All crowding around it, they work away at the middle first, pecking out a small hole that grows till it meets the crusts. They do this slice by slice, working collaboratively, leaving behind rings of crusts in their wake.