The Insurgency

It’s a ramshackle dive of a place. The tables are worn and greasy from an age of slouching poets and patronising preachers, a patina of memory glazed fingernail deep across tight grain. The walls are patterned bright with bills, posters, photographs of old soaks, the come-hither garments of working girls all hiding from daylight and real time. A bar runs the length of one wall, a heavy macrocarpa trunk that must have fallen into place, the pub built around its ground and levelled surface, a time capsule turned away from the world of nature and now the ancient guardian of a menagerie of liars and fools. Bottles and glassware glitter in the small light behind the bar itself, a false constellation of consolation and respite.

He’s nursing a small beer, listening across a corner table to an old school friend, a fellow traveller from the days his generation were the darting urchins of the stifling, darkened lower floors of the urban surrounds. His friend is one of those lanky, far-seeing, absent types, the one who always saw that little further into the distance while his mates only saw the eyes of others looking back at them. He’d be called Lofty, or be accused of ‘having his head in the clouds’ while dreaming of places and things outside the hard boundary of the city, all the while seeing in a way that marked him out as a high-functioning, slightly manic weirdo in a community otherwise committed to conformity.

“Nah, thing is man, you’re looking at it like a person. You look out over there and you see the function of the thing you’re looking at. That is a building for work. That is a building for living in. That is a place for selling things. Each of those things is invisible to an animal, aeh? It’s just a big hard surface to sit on, or a place where food is laid out on the regular.” He pauses to take a long drag on his rollie, before shouting at the barista, “Derek! Two more?” and indicating the table.

“So imagine a town or city from their eyes, aeh? It’s just a wide space marked out with piles of rocks or piles of dead trees, infested with large, angry, flightless critters. Mebbe there’s greenery, and food in there, but there’s hardly any proper predators, hardly any large, sheltered spaces to roost, so the flocks scatter aeh and forage where once upon a time they might have, might have all landed in a big grassland or summin aeh and all picked over the place. Out there there’s safety in numbers, aeh, if a hawk or cat or summin kills one it’s no big, the flock just carries on, but here, in this crazy eruption in the landscape made by humans, they spread out into the gaps we’ve created, each wee bird finding its own food and hiding places.

“That’s the thing aeh, you just don’t know how many of them there really are, ‘cause they’re all tucked away in the wee corners of the urban jungle, like they’re hiding their numbers, but they have to be doing OK right? Because they’re always around.” He emphasises, leaning forward to avoid the bartender when threatens to interrupt the monologue by dropping off their drinks, “The tricksy wee buggers kind of spread their numbers out… like… like… an insurgency of sparrows…”

The Carpenter chuckles, “An insurgency of Sparrows. That’s pretty funny bro.”

“True though aeh… mebbe your grandad’s Quarrel just changed their tactics to better survive the increasing numbers of us, aeh? Well…, mebbe.”

The Carpenter looks back across the table, “It’s adaptation, aeh. The world changed around them, so they changed their ways to fit into it.”

Lofty nods, “Yeah bro, they fit into this new weird landscape we pushed up and out into theirs.”

“But, what if they can’t adapt man? What if this space was no good for all those critters?”

“Then they die man. And that kicks off something else… like… like… too many bugs in the city, or more rats eating food scraps, or, or, summin…”

The Carpenter finishes his first drink and mutters, “A long slow cycle of peace and prosperity…”

“Aeh?” asks Lofty.

“Nothing bro, just something I read.” He replies, smiling softly to himself.