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Artwork: The Girl Who Became a Bird by Will Jacques
The Pigeon
Alison Curry
About three weeks ago I ran over a pigeon.
I couldn’t help it.
I’d just picked up my tired and sticky granddaughters from school and playgroup and they were completely unaware of the whole proceedings. Their dad, in the front with me and always deeply critical of my road sense, which for a non-driver is a bit rich, realised there was nothing I could have done.
The stupid thing just walked under the front wheel. A white puff of feathers seconds later at the back was evidence, if any was needed, that there had been no escape for the bird, but I couldn’t have stopped, there was a car behind me and, well, shit happens.
So, car behind me, granddaughters in the back seats, no point in traumatising them by stopping to see what the damage was, it was definitely terminal. I drove on.
I felt bad, of course I did, who wouldn’t – but it’s a pigeon, not worth crashing for, and, anyway, I remember my driving instructor telling me that one of his students failed once for doing an emergency stop for a pigeon on her test. Apparently, if she had clearly checked her mirror and been sure there was no one behind her, it would have been OK to stop, but she would have been too late at that point anyway, as I was.
If that had been an end of it, then I would have just moved on and forgotten the whole episode.
But now there is a knocking in my car.
Only I can hear this noise. My husband and my father-in-law both drive the car and neither of them can hear it.
It started about a day after I hit the pigeon.
Just a strange knocking coming from that same wheel arch. The next day it seemed to be coming from the rear, so I checked the boot. The usual stuff, although why I have a roll of kitchen paper in there I’m not sure. But the dog toys, some stuff I was taking to a charity shop that had belonged to the girls when they were smaller, a jumper, the first aid kit, safety triangle, spare shoes, my raincoat and an umbrella – nothing new, nothing that hadn’t been there for months. There’s a toy turtle that plays a tune if you press the top which occasionally goes off if I brake hard, I really must get around to dropping these toys off. Nothing that would really account for the noise.
It was still there the following day and this time sounding like it’s in the roof. It definitely seems to be moving around now.
What sort of sound is it? Well, sometimes it’s like a knocking, almost a pecking sound against the metal. Sometimes it sounds as if there is something rolling or flapping around in there.
I went to our mechanic. He’s really nice, Scottish, with a voice like Sean Connery. He looks after both our really old Mercedes and has done for years, so he knows us well. I explained about the knocking noise. He gave me that ‘menopausal women, what can you do?’ look when I asked him if it was possible for something to have got into the body of the car. Such as? Well, I don’t know. I didn’t want to say a dead pigeon, did I?
Anyway, he thought not. Apparently it’s a sealed system, although there are sometimes small holes in the bodywork of older vehicles, so not entirely impossible, I guess.
So now I’ve spent a week imagining that I had decapitated the bird in the process of mashing it into the tarmac, and what I could hear was the head, well, maybe now the skull, just moving around the body of the car between the inner and outer skin. Is there even an inner and outer skin? My cousin used to work as a welder and his job was to weld the inside of a ship to the outside of the ship, crawling between the two sheets of steel and attaching, I guess, spars of some kind. I visualise it like that, though, with the pigeon head rolling about in there like a desiccated skull, and the beak still pecking at the metal to get out.
Three weeks later the noise is driving me nuts.
I work for a Professor of English and she writes about Gothic novels, so I have some understanding of the enormous body of work dealing with haunting and guilt. So maybe I’m driving a haunted car.
I’m going to Google it.
I’m not sure what to do, my car is the one place that my family can’t get to me by phone, it drives me between home and work, and for that 30 minutes it is a small moment of peace in my very busy day.
Now it’s ruined.
