Open heart brings pigeon

Hello friend,

Have you ever caught sight of a cat, a fox or maybe a squirrel in the street and thought, how strange that we walk among these animals, roaming around, them doing their own thing?

I sometimes ponder it on my way home from my allotment, when I see a cat slinking, all lioness-like, across the street. There’s something about spending a while with the kale, or the celery that means I see very clearly that we are all wild animals, just hoping to get fed, and maybe, stroked.

Last week, I returned from Lesvos. I had been to the Skala Eressos Women’s International Festival. When I told some people where I was off to, a couple made a sort of ‘huh’ scoffing sound. Then, when I said I was going for research, one commented, ‘how clichéd.’ This shocked me. Was being a lesbian going to Lesvos a cliché?

It's the clichés that cause the trouble - Jeanette Winterson from her novel, Written On The Body.

Well, I did go to Greece, and I came back altered. I won’t tell you how. I won’t disclose whether it was the naked moonlit group swim, the cat sitting on my chest one morning in my apartment, the too-hot-gong-bath, or meeting a couple from the original Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. No, it wouldn’t be wise to go into how I hurt my back on a bicycle because I rode it too freely, or how I felt my shoulders drop while watching river turtles, or met a famous Austrian actress who whispered, ‘Don’t move for the Dutch woman’, or the strange writing workshop where one woman refused to write anything on her Post-it note. No - I won’t mention those particular pearls because they are being strung onto a necklace for my future novel.

I tried to point at my writing table to send to a friend, but I couldn’t see where the table was, so look to the right of my finger.

The evening I returned home from Greece, I wearily opened my suitcase, and tipped the contents over the lounge floor. Burdened by the obligation of dirty laundry, I sat down, and examined a sea shell. It was then that a blunt banging began at the kitchen window. We live on the sixth floor, so this was a highly unexpected sound.

I went to the kitchen to find two eyes peeping over the window frame at me. A pigeon, quite attractive, apart from the tuft of cobweb stuck to its head, stared into the kitchen as if she knew it. While she cocked her head this way and that, walking up and down the ledge impatiently, I wondered if I could ignore her. Then it fluttered its wings and flew straight at the window, as if the glass shouldn’t be there and her rightful place was inside.

My heart was very open from the trip. I had just said farewell to a beautiful Greek cat and had felt too much towards leaving her, promising how I would return next year. Now it was a bird who wanted me. It was all a bit much on top of the pile of washing.

The bird did not go. She resolutely stared at me waiting for me to act. So I opened the window and in she stepped. I pushed her out, panicking about a bird being in the flat, an image of my mother telling me how once she had a bird in the house and it had got caught in her perm. Or was that a false memory generated from Hitchcock’s The Birds?

Noticing a blue band around her leg, and a second yellow coiled ring with letters and numbers attached to the other foot, I rushed to my laptop, and searched: ‘bird with blue ring on foot.’ I found out she must be a racing pigeon who had either become lost or disorientated. And worse, I read how because the bird would’ve been raised by humans, they cannot feed themselves. They depend on the handler to be able to survive. The weight of a bird who could not feed themselves suddenly overwhelmed me.

‘DO NOT feed the bird bread’, said the Royal Pigeon Racing Association. Give them ‘bird seed or crushed cornflakes’. While I opened the cupboard doors, thinking seed, seed, seed, the bird tapped its beak on the window impatiently, waiting for me to come up with the goods.

Soon Min was beside me with a tea cloth. She was so calm, whereas I was panicking, imagining our new life stretching ahead of us as a birdy threesome. I crushed a Rivita into a bowl and added sesame seeds. On a jam jar lid, Min poured a little water. We cracked open the window, and in the bird stepped, being contained by the tea towel. She pecked furiously at the seed, then drank the water. She did a loose green shit in her water bowl, then Min ushered her back onto the ledge.

I cooked us dinner, filled pasta I think. All the time I cooked, sweating in the airless room, I kept the window shut and kitchen blind down so I couldn’t feel her watching.

After dinner, when I had picked all my holiday things from off the floor, I pulled the blind up to peep at the bird. She had fluffed her feathers into a big coat, tucked her head under her wing and fallen into a deep sleep. Later, while online, I researched recent pigeon races. On the previous Saturday, birds had been released in a race starting in Dundee. People race birds for prize money. I hate the human race sometimes.

That night, against what I thought would happen, I slept soundly, only getting up once for a glass of water and to peek at her. In the dark, puffered up, she slept soundly.

The next morning I didn’t get straight out of bed to check on her because I couldn’t bear it. But Min came rushing in, ‘she’s going, she’s going!’ I raced naked to the window. This bird has probably seen much more than my thighs and bottom. As we watched go, she flew first to the right, then swooped back towards us, and finally darted off to the left in a way which later translated as her finding her bearings. Of all the hundreds of ledges in our apartment block, she’d come to rest on ours.

Sometimes I think occurances like these mean something deeper. I mentioned this to a famous comedian who I happened to bump into. Let’s call him Daniel Kipson.

‘I had a pigeon visit me for the night,’ I said. ‘I think she was trying to tell me something.’

He looked directly at me and said, ‘Why do you think it’s about you?’

I understand what he meant, but it’s not useful for me to remove myself from my own stories. I have done that enough. I guess what he said does point to an element of truth - the bird was in its own world, and needed just a little help from mine.

I like to think of her having returned home to her shed or loft, and how she is now being petted by a man in elasticated trousers. He is running his finger over her cobweb-free head, cooing, perhaps somehow recieving an image of a pair of thighs high up in the sky.

Bird by bird, we can but try to help.

Write soon, write often.

Love Karen xxx

P.S. Thanks to all my V.I.P paid subscribers. Your support really helps the writing of this short tall letter which is a monthly piece of life writing. If anyone fancies helping keep this going, you can subscribe from as little as a fiver a month. From time to time I will send you a specially made film, or piece of art, or unpublished story. K xx