death in the afternoon
Yesterday, I watched a living creature fight for it’s life, struggle and fail; and, on a suddenly bright and warm spring day, its demise brought a smile to my lips.
No, I’m not some sort of psycho-in-the-making. I don’t keep wax effigies of long deceased relatives in the attic, I don’t have a cupboard full of trophies - hair, teeth, that sort of thing - and I don’t even trawl the internet searching for victims; these days, it’s an achievement if I can clear out my emails twice a week, let alone groom the impressionable.
Work, the thing I always say I do to pay for the stuff I do in between work, has, at times during the past six months, become the be-all and end-all of my existence. I took a job with a monolithic international bank. It’s got hugely impressive offices in London’s Docklands, which, although new and spacious and designery and glamorous, are simply not big enough to hold everyone in the department.
So there’s an offshoot to the office. A place known popularly as the “Departure Lounge,” because, well, frankly, if you’re posted there, it’s only a matter of time before your job departs. To Mumbai or Bangalore or somewhere where they’d look at footage of a Torrential British downpour and say “Pshaw! Call that rain?” as large parts of their Monsoon-battered metropolis float past the window.
No, I’m not being posted to the Departure Lounge, but yesterday I did have cause to visit, mainly to try to get some training on one of the systems we’re using, before all the knowledge base of the organisation is fired and theuir jobs shipped to the subcontinent.
Now normally, one takes the elevator down from my office to the underground shopping mall, and the walk to the Lounge would be almost entirely underground. The only time one would come above ground would be the brief moment when one crossed a modern metal, frankly already rather dated bridge across the Thames. (It looks like some 1980’s version of The Future. Very Peter Davison’s Doctor Who. The bridge, that is; not old Father Thames, who, even surrounded by ‘futureistic’ temples to Mammon and naff cardboardy apartment blocks constructed with facades intended to imply, for some bizarre reason, the prows of 1930’s yachts, still lies darkly, unimpressedly impressive.)
But yesterday, the sun was shining, there was some heat in the day, and I decided to walk there above ground. And, having gotten there, I decided to continue on. I kept walking right past it, explored the neighbourhood, discovered that the entirety of Docklands has the feel of a movie set: Away from the Citibank Towers, and the HSBC Headquarters, the giant Waitrose and the Reebok gym; beyond the shopping malls filled with Diptyque candles, Mont Blanc boutiques (currently closed for an unneeded refit) and jewellery stores selling watches at prices my parents bought their house for, the area reverts to dull, slightly shabby, rather bland and not-far-from-impoverished normality.
So, the killing: I was walking back across the bridge, my iPod blaring a selection of Eurovision Hits 1997-2008 (long story, more later) when my eyes met an elderly couple - probably from one of those slightly shabby old neighbourhoods behind me, possibly from one of those vile 1930’s yacht-styled apartment blocks beside me - coming my way. Something - the sun, the cheesy music, the feeling that I’d stolen a little life from the day-to-day struggle of a demanding work existence - made me smile, and the old lady smiled back, her husband too - great beaming smiles, that flickered only as something caught her eye and diverted her attention.
I followed her gaze, and saw the distinctive, almost prehistoric, shape of a cormorant, it’s long black head and beady eyes atop a slender and graceful kneck. Wait ! No, there were two of them, the second one surfacing from the Thames’ black depths, into which it must have just dived.
I guess it was the diving that attracted my once again smiley old lady.
Then, as we watch, the first bird dives, vanishes entirely for a moment, then reappears, an incredibly long, impossibly silver, fish between its beak.
The fish flaps, wriggles, trys desperately to escape its doom, but the cormorant flips back its head, and opens its beak momentarily; enough to allow it to get a better grip without letting the fish free. And the movement is repeated again, and again, until almost all of the silvery fish has vanished down that long graceful neck, and, with a shudder, the bird entirely consumes it’s prey.
I glance at the elderly couple, and the three of us are still grinning insanely. Imagine, our smiles are saying, in the middle of all this, that.
And we walk on our separate ways, they back to their home, me to finish the day in a job I’m learning to like, and the cormorants float on down the river.
Imagine.