Bare Pickings
(published 'Digital Workshop' 1996)
"Can't we rehearse it?" asked a strange bag-lady. David Ogden was looking for a certain random pub but, having been accosted by her in the West End of London street, he saw that she was not strange in herself; it was merely the way she seemed haphazardly to pick him for something her mind believed was far from haphazard.
He tried to unlock his eyes from the ones with which she pleaded—as he normally would with street beggars: those tattery rinklings under blankets who often whispered out for a few spare coins from down in the corner where pavement met wall. "Have you a penny for us?" "Just a coin for me?" Underbreaths of whining. Pitiful pasty plates instead of faces. The sole difference here was that she was well-dressed, or as well-dressed as it was possible for a bag-lady to be. Even standard folk, these days, were no more than a drift short of dapper, he thought.
David was torn. The start was a conclusion: ignore her pointblank. The second option was to ask what she meant by the question so he could proffer an answer. Neither course was a sensible one, however, as it began to dawn on him that she was giving the impression that she already knew him and, what was more disturbing, that he must know her. She nodded as if expecting a certain reply: thus, the last option—an inevitable one.
"Why?" he asked, realising that he was plumping for none of the three options he'd painstakingly weighed.
"Well, it'd make things ... quieter, simpler and cleaner when it ... goes off— and we'd have every corner covered..."
Her voice took the higher ground as she pursued the gambit to its fuse-wire, or a conversational fox to its earth. She began to look prettier than his first impression of her and even more familiar. If this were a pick-up, he decided to be its stylus.
"Yes, why not? What do you suggest?"
He was sinking up to his neck in a gluey pit of misunderstanding. She grabbed his hand and tugged him along, weaving between the long black cars, until they reached Soho Square. And as they arrived in that green oasis, where the people were shown, by contrast, to be stranger creatures than they appeared elsewhere on the city streets, an indeterminate creature scattered a sackful of bread pellets in the vicinity of one of the benches and scuttled off before seeing the result of such an action. An ill-disciplined flock of moth-eaten pigeons swooped amid much warbling as they began to beak up the scraps, whilst fending off the single hop-hoppety bird that tweeted hopelessly for its meagre share. After the pellets had been consumed in such a mass frenzied peck-in, the shuttling swarm departed piecemeal: a whirr of tawdry feathers and birdish instinct. David pointed to a sign forbidding the feeding of birds in Soho Square. The bag-lady smiled, as if condoning such minor law-breaking for the sake of another greater law—that of averages.
"May I introduce you to Padgett Weggs?"
She pointed to an older man who was seated on a nearby bench, someone David had not previously noticed. David was always unnoticing things, it seemed. Yet, here was another vaguely familiar face, one he should have recognised despite the woman's evident assumption that Padgett Weggs needed introducing. It was as if Padgett Weggs didn't exist, unless he was introduced—as if dossers like Padgett Weggs needed wheedling into reality with a modicum of courtesy: in the correct stages of existential etiquette: an ontological protocol. David shook his head. Not for some months now had he suffered such mindless verbiage. The last time he had finished up in a ditchy gutter, discovered by a boy policeman who had inferred drunkenness from David's post-philosophical demeanour.
"How do you do?"
Was that actually the question David had asked of Padgett Weggs?
"Very well, thank you," replied Padgett Weggs, rising with a palm outstretched for one of those slapping handshakes so popular with many of the more modern, as well as down-trodden, people. David forthwith stood his ground and shared the mutual congratulatory applause with a smart flourish that surprised even himself.
Soho Square was by now fast emptying of others, with dusk in the vanguard of an unseasonable cold snap. There was one Chinese lady reading a book not far away—no doubt reading the peculiar hieroglyphics better than David could read his own form of upper case English. A number of loud-mouthed oberströps were limb-splayed around a tree, frequently bursting into raucous laughter: cruel whoops and bouts of gratuitous hobbledehoy swearing. There was no sign of pigeons since the earlier fray had dispersed—not even the black scrawny ones that usually roosted on the conical roof of the Elizabethan wendy-house in Soho Square's middle.
David unnoticed the Chinese lady disappearing—and Padgett Weggs, too. So, at the back of his mind, he assumed they were still in the Square. The bag-lady was grubbing around in a litter bin. She looked up at David and whispered a request for some of his spare coins. A whine in each of her eyes, as if they wheedled louder than real words. She should have been in a home for the old, infirm, senile. Being a number of yards away, he couldn't catch what she softly whistled nor what her look gently piped. He shrugged and continued on his way, forgetting that he had never intended to go anywhere, let alone via Soho Square.
He cried, with no real impulse behind such tears. He wished he'd got to the bread before the ratty pigeons had. The city around him was uncharacteristically quiet—and darker than such a way-station of time should have entailed. He turned on his heels to take one final look at the woman in the gloom. But others had surrounded her: too much like vultures for his liking. Yet they were not the raucous oberströps, as he had first suspected. Those had left stage left, without even any catcalls. No, those surrounding her were the hush-voiced rinklings, the silently whispering wrinkless ones, who fell in around her, clucking tongues in tune with some silent backward ticking of homeless despair.
There must have been an abrupt power-cut in the city, accounting for the black air now swirling about—as if from erstwhile Victorian chimneys. The air moved in swirls of lung-sucking implosion.
"Can't we rehearse it?" Was that what the bag-lady had asked? Things were so unpredictable, even in careful hands. But the law of averages was not an average law. It was the toughest law of all. Best for some sort of dry run-through, especially with senile dementia hitting even youngsters these days.
And, yes, there was Padgett Weggs, waiting for David beyond the Square. Half his face off and body-fluid glowing as if it carried a charge. The fruit of his head was ripe, ready for plucking. Still, Padgett Weggs was determined to die soon, in any event, so that his body could follow its mind into the wings. He had already become old enough to remember when they first put horror into terror. David passed by, as if he had become a stranger again. Things whispered in around: dossers desperate for spare deaths, or vice versa: deaths dying for dossers. Rinklings & oberströps. Parts of people, looking like babies on all fours, were whining for just one bare picking. Dreading just the start of a single wrinkle.
Things would be better on the night. Give or take the odd leading lady and her bag. And the long black cars.