Murmuration Read online

  ROBERT LOCK

  Murmuration

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Robert Lock 2018

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-78-719824-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-78719823-4

  Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd.

  Cover design by Gudrun Jobst | www.yotedesign.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Robert Lock began a degree in Applied Biology, but decided science wasn’t for him. He worked in Paris and then as a tour director taking US students round Europe. He eventually became a professional photographer, writing three novels in his spare time before Murmuration.

  The story is set in a seaside resort, its characters inspired by those he has met through his job on the local newspaper.

  The title came to him while watching the starlings dance over and around North Pier.

  To Caroline, for always knowing when I needed to write

  Yesterday

  Murmuration

  1865

  The New Frontier

  Zlatka

  Victoria

  The Pebble

  An Ocean Of Forgetting

  Hannah

  1941

  Observer Corps

  1965

  The Inscrutable Glass

  The Corrosive Powers Of Birdshit

  Nightmares

  As Old As My Tongue …

  Centenary

  1989

  Hats

  The Rusting Truth

  Angel Delight

  The Euphoria Of Uncertainty

  Home Sweet Home

  Counting The Seconds

  The Plausible Tide

  Today

  The West Wind

  TV’s Very Own

  Glitterball

  The Karmic Imperative

  A Heart Less Rosy

  The Spanish Carrot

  The Friable Fabric of History

  … And A Little Older Than My Teeth

  Destiny’s Alembic

  Murmuration

  Yesterday

  Murmuration

  “Roll up! Roll up!”

  Look! There he stands, scarlet frock coat flapping in the breeze, a circus ringmaster balanced, improbably, on top of the promenade railing. In one white-gloved hand his top hat continues the line of his outstretched arm as he gesticulates towards the birds now gathering on the pier theatre roof, while with the other he beckons to his audience, drawing them in.

  “Roll up!” he hollers again, moustache flexing. “See the artistry of nature displayed for your delectation and delight! Take your seats for the greatest show in town! Never the same performance two nights running! A miraculous demonstration of timing and synchronisation in such numbers as to take your breath away! Watch these masters of the air as they perform their mysterious dance only inches from disaster!”

  But is this merely circus ballyhoo designed to lure the gullible? Indeed it is not. Not here, not as a mauve-coloured dusk settles on the resort, like the house lights dimming. The birds assemble in their hundreds, their thousands, and the wind quietens, for it feels something akin to love towards the starlings. There is something of the wind made visible in what the starlings do.

  They come, until the theatre’s white roof is black with them, drawn irresistibly to this priapic statement of Victorian engineering. But is it merely instinct that calls them? And why the pier? The town possesses any number of edifices that would suit their purpose just as well, so why do the starlings choose the pier? Perhaps it is simply easier to target from the air, a bold exclamation mark standing out from the resort’s jumble of rooftops. Perhaps the clear air around the pier affords the birds a broader canvas on which to work. Or maybe it is simply that they recognise the resort’s heart, its defining venue, and know their nightly show deserves top billing.

  Then, as though on some secret signal, the birds take off. For a moment there seems only chaos, a dark explosion above the theatre, but within seconds the starlings settle into their shifting cloud: the murmuration. Could there be a more appropriate noun? What better word is there to describe the sound of an audience as the curtain rises on a much-anticipated performance? Whoever coined it had a poet’s touch.

  Up, down, back and forth, changes of direction and rhythm as perfectly orchestrated and paced as the finest symphony. Yet the display’s most astonishing fact is that it weaves this magic from nothing more than thousands of birds flying wingtip to wingtip. Are there leaders amongst the flock, dictating its course? Maybe the movements are externally driven, either by subtle atmospheric changes or magnetic fields. And whatever their motivation, how do the birds on each manoeuvre’s outer edge know that they must fly slightly faster than those in its centre? Because there is never a collision, or a moment’s hesitation; the starlings dance, impeccably, for perhaps half an hour, before scattering to their roosts across the resort, returned to the individual scraps of black which no one deems worthy of a second glance. It is like the dismantling of some kinetic sculpture by its dissatisfied artist, who flings the fragments to their studio’s furthest corners, where they will lie until tomorrow’s twilight brings them together once again.

  No one will squabble with the ringmaster now, demanding their money back. They have seen the greatest show in town, that much is certain. In fact they are slightly embarrassed by their former cynicism. Yes, they heeded his call, because humankind has a fondness for showmen which does not necessitate a belief in their claims, but, in all honesty, they were not expecting much. What can a few birds achieve, after all? And then, as the starlings began to shapeshift above them, a silence settled on the crowd which reflected a different form of disbelief, one born out of enchantment. There is little room for magic in this tumultuous modern world — it requires quiessence and humility — so when it does manifest itself the contemporary mind tends to over-analyse the spell being cast. You can see the questions in their upturned faces: how can so many thousands of individuals act in such concord, with such beauty? What allows them to subsume their own needs and desires for the sake of this hypnotic display? And to what purpose?

  A small, dark-haired boy watches the birds and tries to visualise what they are seeing. He imagines it must be similar to the thrilling disorientation of a rollercoaster, all tilting horizons and surging undulations, but a child’s imagination, for all its strengths, tends to the anthropomorphic. The starlings are born to fly, so their eyes are perfectly attuned to spatial freedom. If only the boy could glimpse, even for a moment, what the birds see. Because the murmuration is a collective not only in flight, but also in vision.

  As individuals, starlings have good eyesight, but in their thousands they are able to see through the world’s disguises and discern the beauty or horror that lies beneath. Mother Nature has need of a monitoring system with which to oversee the behaviour and wellbeing of the creatures living within her borders; what could be better to act as agent t
han the ubiquitous starling, the dowdy starling, the unremarkable starling? Their ancient eyes, calibrated to detect the smallest of details, when multiplied a thousand-fold become a truly awesome sense. Listen to them chatter as they fly! This is their ongoing visual narrative, a stream of information regarding the small field of view available to each one of them as it tilts and scrolls beneath their wings, passed on to every other starling in the flock. Each of these fractions, processed within the murmuration and converted into an astonishingly detailed picture, offers a true window on the world for an otherwise blind Gaia.

  And, as the birds have danced above the pier for one hundred and fifty years, how many lives have passed beneath them, how many stories? Men and women, their children, their children’s children; lives so brief and fragile when compared to the enduring strength of the pier, but possessing a depth of feeling that iron and timber would exchange their immutability for in an instant. Only the ephemeral can truly appreciate the infinite.

  Who, then?

  In 1880 the starlings see Georgie Parr, music hall comic, emerge from beneath the pier, walk for some distance across the sloping shingle and then sink slowly to his knees, fall forward onto his hands and vomit.

  In 1941 the starlings see Mickey Braithwaite, proud member of the Observer Corps, sitting on the edge of his sandbagged look-out post as he watches their movements above him with sweet and imperfect eyes, imprinting on his mind a message which would turn him into a hero.

  In 1965 the starlings see fortune-teller Bella Kaminska hurrying to close her booth. In her haste she drops her key — there, there it goes, falling through a gap between the decking’s planks, caught like a dying ember in the last shard of sunset — and leaves the shutter unlocked, such is her need to be free of the pier.

  In 1989 the starlings see Colin Draper, pier archivist and local historian, slumped in a deckchair where he has been all day, his soft, flabby body wrapped in a grey raincoat. He appears utterly amorphous, more discarded sack than man.

  Today the starlings see comedian Sammy Samuels through the window of his dressing room above the pier theatre. He lights another cigarette with the glowing tip of his current one, grinds out the stub and picks up a copy of the local paper.

  But is this the extent of their vision? Of course not.

  As Georgie Parr steps out of the dark green shadows beneath the pier the starlings notice two small scratches on his jaw. His hair is dishevelled, and one sleeve of his coat has been ripped at the seam. There is a staccato quality to the way Georgie’s limbs move, as though he keeps forgetting how to walk, and the starlings can tell that the tears running down his face are for others long dead.

  They watch Mickey squint upwards. The birds know how much he is enjoying their display by the wonder in his tenaciously blue eyes; they also know that the extraordinary events of that night’s blackout will fundamentally change him and leave this most guileless of men with an enduring appreciation of life’s secret lyricism.

  The starlings note a creamy wink from Bella’s moonstone ring as her trembling hands attempt to guide the padlock through the shutter’s hasp. The key falls and vanishes, to await its discovery in the twenty-first century by a metal detector enthusiast, who is disappointed by his corroded find and tosses it aside. Bella gestures her abandonment of the booth and hurries away, leaving the shutter to inch upwards, revealing some of the faded photographs depicting her more well-known clients. One has fallen from its original position and now lies on the windowsill, the bleached image of a popular singer standing next to Bella, his features reduced to a pale rictus. The fortune-teller heads towards the resort without a backward glance, so she never sees a starling flutter down from the onion-shaped dome of the booth to stand on the pier and watch her go. It fluffs the feathers on its back, a gesture that looks remarkably like a shrug.

  With Colin the birds are quite able to discern the two sorrows that struggle for supremacy within his innocuous frame, and which have pinned him to the pier for hour after hour as he tries to reconcile them both. They also note the dandruff sprinkled on the upturned collar of his coat, the scuffed toes of his shoes, and an affinity for the pier so deeply felt that he is almost as much a part of its structure as the girders and planks.

  The dressing room window affords a glimpse of Sammy Samuels’ isolation, a detachment assiduously worked towards over his many years in showbusiness and which he now maintains with a seething, relentless dedication. They see a felt-tip circle round one of the ‘escort’ advertisements in the local newspaper. More than anything, though, the starlings recognise a coldness in the comedian’s eye which shakes them to their core.

  Each generation of birds can also sense a connection between all five people, like a slender and yet vital thread, though this conjugation of fates is at the very limit of even the starlings’ vision. They see it, but not its details, nor the extraordinary parallels that reverberate backwards and forwards along the thread, giving it its strength as well as its calamitous ending. The starlings are content within their limitations, however; they defer to a superior vision, which observes Georgie, Mickey, Bella, Colin and Sammy in their naked whole, mindful that an untimely death will shiver along the thread from one to the next until it finds reconciliation. The starlings, knowing what they can see in these briefest of moments, are terrified by the concept of how much detail there is to be observed across a century and more. They know it would send their tiny bodies spiralling upwards into the darkest blue, until their beaks gaped in the vacuum of space and the swirling planet below was reflected in the smaller universe of their eyes.

  Moments. That’s all we can cope with. Fleeting moments, and yet they can be filled with the kind of detail and mystery that characterise so much of the pier’s history. And if one second, seen through the right eyes, can hold within it the lives of five people, what else is a description of an hour, or a week, or a year, than an exercise in omission? Is this how the birds dance around what would otherwise be an overwhelming narrative? If only we could ask the starlings.

  If only.

  1865

  The New Frontier

  The air vibrated with incessant hammering as labourers riveted together another section of the pier. Pairs of them were positioned along the wooden scaffolding, timing their blows in perfect synchronisation to drive home and spread the red-hot rivet, whilst a third wielding a large pair of tongs prepared to pluck the next from a brazier of coals. Further out, towards the low tide mark, a team of men laboured at a capstan, which was gradually screwing a pile deep into the sand. A sheen of sweat sparkled on their bare backs, and snatches of what sounded like a rhythmic sea shanty carried on the breeze to the resort’s early visitors, who were taking the air on its new promenade.

  George Parr guided his wife Katherine to the railing so that they could watch the work more closely. Their train had arrived the day before, carrying them to the coast on gleaming new railway lines and depositing them in a town where construction work seemed to be taking place on every street corner. Long terraces of bay-windowed homes, the ornate facades of impressive stucco or red-brick hotels, foundations covering an acre of ground where a winter gardens and theatre were to stand. The resort, blossoming at remarkable speed from its origins as a coastal farmstead and cocklers’ cottages, was an incredibly dynamic and exciting place to be, particularly as George was attempting to build his reputation as a music hall entertainer. Here, he felt, was where his future lay; the resort possessed an almost tangible air of confidence, of unlimited potential. His career was choking on the squalid vapours of England’s city theatres, but here was space, and light, and clarity. These were surely the perfect conditions in which to perform.

  “They say it’s to be longer than the pier in Margate, by all accounts,” George informed his wife.

  Katherine, whose hand was resting in the crook of her husband’s arm, gave him a playful squeeze. “Why do men love iron and steam and noise so?”

  “Do we?”

  “Oh, yes
. The only things that can bring a tear to a man’s eye are engines or bridges or ships. I think you would all love to be engineers, hammering and banging away.”

  George grasped the wrought-iron railing in front of him, as though there were some answer to be found within the metal. “I suppose they are all attempts to impose our will on nature,” he replied. George surprised himself at the rapidity and intuitiveness of his response, which he felt sure was down to his wife’s bright and enquiring mind. Katherine loved to analyse and discuss any number of subjects, and even though it was not considered seemly for her to voice her opinion too rigorously across the dining table or in public, she often took the opportunity when they were alone to engage her husband in debate. He loved her all the more for her wit and reasoning, which he knew had sharpened his own mind in necessary response, but George Parr was still Victorian enough to occasionally feel uncomfortable with the suspicion that Katherine was his intellectual superior.

  “Ah,” she exclaimed, “so really these vessels and structures are for their creator’s gratification and honour. Why else attach a maker’s mark to them?”

  “But,” George countered, “doesn’t any creator deserve recognition? Writers have their name on the front of their books… artists sign their paintings… is a bridge any less of an achievement?”

  “Certainly not. It will probably endure for far longer than most books, and be of more use.”

  George turned to look at his wife. With the sun directly behind her parasol her profile was reduced to little more than sharp-edged shadow, giving a close approximation to the black paper silhouette that they had both posed for whilst at a fairground soon after their wedding. When the silhouette artist first showed Katherine her image she had argued that it was more caricature than portrait — ‘You’ve made me look like Mr Punch’ she had grumbled — but George could see how the set of her jaw grew bolder when she became absorbed in a discussion.