THE ANIMALS

This summer, a gathering of blackbirds have made home at the small common outside my house in South Tottenham. More specifically, they have made home in a tree that arches over my bedroom skylight. They bring an urgent energy to the estate and their chatter is now my alarm clock. That’s not a complaint, though I have had to make some accommodations for our new guests. I no longer keep my window open at night, for example, which means that mornings are now a race for what will wake me first, the heat, or the blackbirds. Google told me that a plural of blackbirds can be called a grind so I like to think of them as my morning grind of blackbirds. In the evenings they congregate back in the tree. I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a big board meeting while lying on my bed staring up at the pink sky. I do this on those paralysed evenings that fall when thoughts have become too heavy to lift.

There are a lot of animals at the estate. Pigeons (obviously), ring-necked parakeets which, until the blackbirds came, dominated the soundscape with cackles that reminded me of my best friend. Magpies loom on satellite dishes propped at the edge of back gardens. Since the bin men accidently cracked the green lid off of our recycling bin they also like to pick through our plastics and cans. Squirrels endlessly rummage for bits that they've buried and then lost. Some days I find it hard to look at them though I do enjoy finding walnuts strategically tucked amongst the things that lie around the garden, or elegantly balanced in the elbows of our potted olive tree.

The walnuts, and I guess most of the food that these animals thrive off, come from a man that me and the women I live with have nick-named The Animal Man, who not only scatters seeds and nuts on mornings but has also nailed little squirrel ledges to each poplar tree and hanged bird feeders at the far side of the common. He tops these feeders with fresh apples and sometimes pears. This is seemingly the parakeets’ spot who come late afternoons, their dazzling lime greens offset by the orange brickwork.

Bex, who lives up in the attic with me, spends time cupping spiders that glide off the trees into her room or getting me to do it for her, with the threat of killing them. I like to think of my room as a haven for spiders. When I find egg sacks glued like phlegm in the corners of my ceiling I know it’s gone too far. We had a fly thing here recently, not with those big hairy bluebottles but small gnats that lived in our houseplants. I liked their company, especially when they landed on my phone screen during bouts of scrolling. Another housemate buys nematodes, microscopic parasites that you receive freeze-packed in a box. You wake them with water then they go on a two-day bender eating the gnats. Then they die too. BRING IN THE NEMATODES! I like to shout when they come through the letterbox. We’ve got a pack in our fridge as I write this.

The bed bugs took the piss. I still don't know how they arrived but they were in it for me and only me. Speaking to pest control, the man over the phone keeps referring to me as THE BLOOD SOURCE. He says I’m sorry to say it but you are the blood source and we need you to be live bait for them. We spray the room four times with chalky poison, opening the windows and evacuating the house for a day each time. When I go to bed each night I strip naked and look at the bed. I am the blood source. The sacrificial lamb who will pull them out of the cracks and through the fields of poison. I am practically holy to these arseholes. In the mornings I find bits of them in the dip I’ve created in the mattress.

After the poison my room stops being a safe haven for other creatures. I find flies and spiders who have found themselves in hell while looking for a nook to rest in. I find a moth, folded up like a brass bullet, in the cupboard I keep my moisrurisers in. The trajectory of creatures like these always seems to include a sad fate caused by humans. The pigeons with their feet caught in a bit of wire, the fruit flies drowning in my glass of beer. When it rains worms and snails cover the pathway that leads up to my front door and walking back late comes hand-in-hand with the crunch of a misplaced step. A whole life just like that. Shards of a shell that once protected them now cut into their soft body. As a child, I seemed to find it the most upsetting out of my friends, even more so now as an adult. My ex used to plead THEY’RE NOT WORTH IT! as I plucked the pavements.

My therapist has theorized that the reason I feel such an affinity with animals is because of an animal that lives in me. One that’s hurt and unable to speak the language of those who can help. I don't have much to say about that, just that I find it hardest with the foxes. At first, they were a great addition, taking turns to slink across the common or sunbath with their eyes half closed, ears back to the traffic. But since they’ve caught mange their movements have became notably desperate. Ribcages flex at me through the kitchen window. When I’m drunk I go out with a bag of dog treats and crouch in the middle of the common. They come up one by one to delicately pull them from my fingers. Sometimes they manage to sneak into the house and I find them standing in between the doors, hairless tails. I followed one recently as it skulked under a bench seemingly to die. I went to buy a can of dog food but a crowd of school kids had scared it off by the time I came back.

Actually, manically trying to save the life of every living creature that I cross paths with has landed me some good in the past. When spending a year traveling, I caught the attention of an amazing woman from Chicago thanks to her overhearing that I had saved the cockroaches from drowning while working at a banana farm. In bed she told me that she attributed it to a big heart. I wouldn’t say my heart is big - whatever that means - or that my anxious desire to help these creatures comes from any sense of morality. I did not correct the woman from Chicago.

I’ve only seen The Animal Man a couple of times, and only once have I actually seen him throwing seeds, but he’s a presence nonetheless. The council came to cable-tie signs to the lampposts - DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. Not everyone is happy with him, especially now that the estate has rats, one of which likes to accompany the blackbirds by scuttling up and down my roof at the moment. But one day I would like to be The Animal Man of my neighbourhood. After I learnt which door he was, I spent some time lingering outside his house hoping to get to speak to him. I had to move on once the other neighbours noticed.