Gulls
George Harrison
The market was ripe with gulls, as always. They bloomed in the expanse of sky above the awnings, harking back and forth as they chased and dived and tied invisible knots among the air currents. Their cries were sharp and furious.
I had been watching the gulls at work – at play, perhaps, for all I knew – as I ate my lunch, perched on a bench by the dried-up fountain. Those countless white bodies and the stark threads they formed against the blue. A couple of stragglers had broken off from the group, and I watched as they made a show of relinquishing their place at the dance, watched as they came circling down towards me. They landed a few feet away.
With my permission, the two gulls sidled closer, eyeing my sandwich. But then I motioned with my leg – motivated by a sense of superiority – and sent the gulls hopping backwards. Up this close, their feathers were ruffled, their wings scuffed with unaccountable filth. The gulls turned their eyes onto me, and the untroubled, glassy blackness was all the more shocking beside the outrageous yellow of their beaks. In four dead eyes I saw myself reflected.
I realised a moment too late that sauce had started oozing from my sandwich and was now leaking onto my fingers. What remained of my lunch I threw to the ground in disgust: a clot of damp bread, an offering. The gulls came rushing. They yanked at it with their beaks, frenzied as if with hunger or loss. Within a second or two, they had gouged out the last of the filling. I was transfixed. The way they tossed those shreds of meat down their throats, the way they stamped the bread beneath webbed feet. Sauce like blood on their beaks, flecking the ruined canvas of their feathers.
I stood up and tried to clean myself off with a serviette, but shreds of paper kept sticking to my skin. I balled up the remains of the serviette and the paper bag in which my sandwich had been sheathed and walked towards City Hall, where I dropped my rubbish into a public bin. I wiped a palm on the leg of my trousers. It was time to get back to work.
When I turned back to the market, I saw that the two gulls, my companions, had disappeared, and the remains of the sandwich with them. Then I noticed the relative quiet. There was something missing above the chatter of market punters, the hiss of frying fat, and the competing babble piped through undersized speakers, local radio dubbed over reggae. I looked up. Not a speck of white in the summer sky – not so much as a single feather. I scanned the sky until I realised the gulls had all landed – all at once, the way birds do. There must have been hundreds of them on the roof of the guildhall, passing silent judgement on the statue below: some forgotten figure in our city’s founding. I approached, and once again, the gulls began to call between themselves. What obscure knowledge were they trading? I had always liked to think they bartered probable futures which might transpire in place of our own.
Later that night, after we had both finished for the day, you and I set off from our apartment on Fishergate. The street bore the name of the former Viking settlement around which our city had calcified, although we rarely stopped to consider this history – so lost had we become in our ludicrous sliver of present time.
We walked gently over the bridge and past the cathedral, its vast spire lit improbably against the gathering dusk. We held hands as we jived past the busker playing the one song he knew by heart, an old man scratching out an old tune. It started raining, the afternoon’s bright blue sky relegated to memory, and damp clung to your collar like it had grown there. I remember, in my naivety, being shocked at how comprehensively the day’s weather had changed and how quickly the summer seemed to have been erased.
I remember it was a football night, the team playing under floodlights at the stadium across town. The club was on a promotion push, and we had to fight through crowds of fans to get to the market. Loud scarves bulged from jackets, so it was probably no coincidence that I found myself choosing yellow dahlia at our usual stall. When we got back home, you set the flowers in a vase by the sink, opened the taps, and waited for morning.
Dream currents are not like air currents; we were proof that two people could occupy the same place and yet be pulled in entirely different directions. I must have understood that your wings had been clipped, somehow and somewhere along the way, but I did not know that a growing part of you thought I was responsible. You woke up three times in the night – or so you told me as I came out of the shower. I asked why hadn’t you tried to wake me, and you shook your head and told me you had tried each time. We got dressed and made ready to go back to work.
But even as I opened the front door, even from all this distance, from over the water, I could hear a silence where the gulls should have been. It wasn’t until I had reached the office that I remembered the city had ordered a cull. After all, people had been saying for years that someone should do something about those awful birds. When lunchtime came around, I ventured out into the market. It was beset, once again, by a strange quiet in the place of furious bird calls.
I stopped to tip the usual busker on my way back to the office. But my coins had already rattled into his case before it dawned on me that he was playing a different song. I wrote you a message, hoping to share this happy news, and you replied only to say that you had gone home.
I left work early to check on you, going back via the market for another bouquet in the hope that the colours might lift you somehow. But when I passed the busker again, bouquet in hand, I realised he wasn’t a busker at all, but another statue. I imagined the knot in my stomach must have looked something like his stone fists, curled in anger like a child’s. Worse still, his open mouth was already streaked with mess – a mystery in itself, given the absence of the gulls. Disconcerted, I hurried on. And would you believe me if I said the cathedral was lit, despite the daylight, in a way that suggested it was both there and not there? If I told you the city had, in its own way, this time failed to calcify?
It has been a year now, and I can still feel, against my palm, the space your hand once occupied. Your fingerless mittens soaked through after another walk around the nascent city, our typical route taking us past the construction site where the cathedral would go. There is talk across town of relegation, and the lilies I buy keep wilting in their vase. Your coat stays dry on the hook, but its smell reminds me of you dancing in the rain, back when one song was plenty for us both. I knock your coat onto the floor, shut the front door behind me, and take flight.