The pigeon
A one-legged pigeon is hopping along a wall on the promenade. It’s a bright summer day. A mother and father, both wearing Metallica t-shirts, are sitting a few yards away with their little girl, eating fish and chips from polystyrene trays. The father is telling the mother about a dream he had last night: ‘I was in a jungle, hanging by my fingertips from a flimsy branch of a huge, rotting tree, when the ghost of Margaret Thatcher appeared. She looked even worse as a ghost, honest to god. But I was polite, I waved at her with my legs…’ He trails off, or stops talking, as the one-legged pigeon hops closer. The little girl, who is wearing a Pikachu t-shirt, stares at it. ‘Don’t feed it,’ the mother says, batting the one-legged pigeon away. ‘It won’t leave us alone, and then more will come as well.’ ‘But he’s by himself,’ the girl says, ‘and he’s only got one leg. If we give him a chip he’ll love us forever and have a nice day.’ She holds out the chip for the pigeon, who starts cooing. It hops slowly towards her, and then pecks it from her fingers. ‘Good boy,’ the little girl says. ‘Or are you a girl?’ Then the one-legged pigeon hops back and cocks its head. It stares at the little girl, who smiles back; at least, she smiles until she sees a second, rubbery leg slowly appear underneath the pigeon. ‘So as I was saying, the father says, I was hanging on to this tree for dear life, with Maggie Thatcher’s enormous mouth wide open below me. There was a scent of petrol…’ The one-legged pigeon hobbles away down the wall, and then flies off towards another family who have just sat down with a box of hot donuts.
The claw machine
A teenage boy in an Adidas tracksuit has a consultation with a respected seaside doctor, who listens very carefully as he tells her about his life in the claw machine: It’s right in the corner of Pleasureland, he says, opposite the Streetfighter and Tekken machines. I live very comfortably, along with a few pandas, badgers and a couple of dinosaurs. We get on well. We talk rubbish and make jokes about the old biddies who spend all day on the penny machines. When one of us is unlucky enough to be plucked out of the machine (usually by a red-faced dad who’s been at it for hours) we wish them well, but we feel terrible. We like being in the machine, we like it a lot. We – I should say I – sleep very well in here and barely dream at all. The thought that the claw might one day drop down, pick me up and carry me through the glass is terrifying. The idea of a warm human hand…good god. I should say (I think I should say?) that as a child I used to have nightmares that the claw would reach down into my throat, pull out my insides and fling them against the glass. But that’s when I was little, I don’t dream about that now; as I said, I enjoy myself.
The addict
A man wearing a scuffed navy suit is sitting on the pier, next to a bin. You might think he’s staring at the huge orange jellyfish that’s bobbing about on the water beneath him, but really he’s staring at nothing, and thinking about work. He always thinks about work. First thing in the morning, he checks his work emails; then he reads job listings, on the off-chance that he’s laid off and needs to get another job; then he goes to work. After work, he applies to the jobs he’s identified (just in case!) and researches courses he might one day take to improve his chances of getting another job, in the event that a role that might improve his future job prospects becomes available. He recognises he has a problem, a ‘special interest’ as his mother used to say, he admits it freely: he’s obsessed with work because he’s terrified of having no money and being homeless. But he’s been so busy with work that he hasn’t managed to find anywhere to live, so he’s homeless. Also, that pier burned down years ago.
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