BOMB SCARE
Gregor is feeding
pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.
A stoop-shouldered
fortysomething male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays
no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at
the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to
have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer
pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread crumbs.
Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with
plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels.
Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread is a
deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian
struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he
thinks. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical
positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained
understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the
air-raid sirens start up.
The pigeons scatter
for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and
looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a
policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path toward him, waving
one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”
Gregor turns and
presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest
shelter?”
The constable points
toward a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there.
If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the
east wall—if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the
nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black
boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a
reply. Shaking his head, he walks toward the public toilet and goes
inside.
It’s early spring, a
weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the
emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his
porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down
the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue
uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll.
“Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing
uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they
believe that if they play their wartime role properly, the
ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly
comprehensible enemy.
A double bang splits
the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF
or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near
Hanworth. Gregor glances round: a couple of oafish gardeners sit on
the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a
louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably
fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING
signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s
direction.
Gregor composes his
face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his
Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic
boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more
fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith.
He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly,
signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make
small talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen
often?”
The corporate tough
relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a
visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where
they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists.
Taking in the copy of the Telegraph and
the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie, he’ll have realized what
else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting
down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line,
eh?”
“I am here in this
bunker with you.” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a
circular surface.” He sits down gingerly on the bench opposite the
businessman. “Cigarette?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish:
the symbolic peace offering accepted, they sit in silence for a
couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for
World War IV, or just a trailer.
A different note
drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all
clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the
ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll
dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No
smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”
Gregor walks back
into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread crumbs
and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office.
The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested,
and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile,
Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit,
at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead
for the wood pigeons.