This is a work of pure fiction.
I moved to Brighton in the noughties in a bid to relieve the fatigue I had accumulated from a London life.
I felt there was some open space around me, the sea and the slow rolling Downs, a release from a dreary daily entanglement with tubes, escalators and travel cards.
The soundscape changed dramatically with it. Sirens and rumbling road noise was replaced by seagulls. Their sound began as a welcome reminder that I was free of London.
BUT after a few months I began to notice their call was phenomenally loud and piercing, and particularly insistent at dawn. I began to dream of howler monkeys and hyenas.
I also noticed that they are not seagulls, the crow sized birds circling the typical inland rubbish dump. At the seafront they are herring gulls, a much bigger species.
They’re about three, maybe four feet tall, and have a large razor sharp bill, perfectly suited to disembowelling even the most heavy duty dustbin bag.
I was now simply potential collateral damage for a remorseless airforce of feathered drones programmed to seek and destroy even the smallest scrap of food.
As you can tell, my view of seagulls was quite jaundiced, bordering on the Hitchcockian. And this negativity grew in lockstep with my disillusionment with Brighton.
Then things suddenly changed. It came with a light tapping on my attic room window one morning. I opened the curtains and I stood eye-to-eye with a herring gull.
It tapped again. I tapped. It tapped back. I tapped three times and it tapped three times. I tapped once. And it tapped once. I tapped four times and it tapped four times.
Then, to my surprise, it tapped once. The taps, one tap, four taps, one tap… “Oh, my,” I thought. “The first four digits of pi.” Finally, I had found a herring gull I could do business with.
Over weeks we became friends, developing a language of beak taps and foot stomps, first bonding over sudoku before progressing to more complex brain teasers.
Before too long we settled into a peaceable rhythm. The herring gull, who I began to call Kevin, agreed to keep the noise down until after I left for work.
And, for my side, I invited him in for scraps out of sight of his thieving peers. My warm relations with a herring gull restored my dwindling faith in my adopted home town.
But then, one morning, I went to the window ledge to let Kevin in, but he never came. Then, the next day, the same. And then the next.
“How dare you, Kevin,” I thought. “After all I have done for you.”
My bitterness towards Kevin grew and grew, and with it my enmity towards the whole herring gull species. They had added treachery to their long catalogue of sins.
Then, one morning on the ledge were a row of stones and fizzy drink ring pulls. They were grouped to spell out, tap… stomp … tap, tap, tap, tap… tap.
Unmistakably, the square root of two.
I knew Kevin well enough to know there had to be a message. Two, a pair. Square, home. It could only mean he had found himself a soul mate of his own species.
Slowly, as the months passed by, my bitter feelings towards Kevin mellowed, as did my acceptance of the white shrieking animal airforce which patrols Brighton.
Whenever I see or hear a herring gull laughing now, I first hide any food I have, and then I ask myself, “Maybe, just maybe, it’s Kevin offering me a helpful suggestion?” ■
