It was witnessing a murder that first drew me in.
An extract from The Edge, by Jamie Collinson
In this age of grand stupidity, birds seemed increasingly clever to Adam. In fact, across the whole history of human folly, they had carried on doing pretty much the same thing.
The revelation of what it meant to watch them had come to him shortly after he’d moved to LA. A favourite relative had visited, an eccentric uncle whose taste in books and wine Adam admired, but whose birdwatching habit he’d always considered faintly amusing. They’d driven to Santa Barbara to visit a distant cousin – a gentle, diffident widower who lived in an upscale apartment block on the edge of town. The three of them drove around the rolling green hills together, Adam staring up at the airy crags that jutted from their tops like exposed bone.
‘There’s a little wetland, by the beach,’ the cousin said. ‘You might be interested.’ He had the habit of giving a short, self-effacing chuckle after everything he said.
‘Oh goodie,’ Adam’s uncle, enjoying playing the Englishman abroad, had said. ‘Yes please.’
The place turned out to be a car park for a beachside restaurant. Blond, muscled, tanned boys paraded in swimwear, throwing and catching an American football. Little groups of girls walked slowly between cars and the beach, arms folded over bikinis, expressions of practised boredom on their faces. A row of palms separated the parking lot from the sand itself, on which were beach volleyball courts. Most of the vehicles were new and expensive – Lexuses, BMWs and Audis. Even the driftwood on the sand looked upmarket, as though waiting to be turned into tasteful beach-house furniture.
At the south side of the lot was a bank overlooking a small slough, backed by a swathe of very tall trees. Adam stared out at the scene. There were a few white birds in the water, and something with a very long beak and legs, pecking at the sand. He prepared himself for a tedious hour, and wondered if he could leave the relatives to it and go and have a drink.
His uncle ran his green Swarovski binoculars over the trees and water. Adam glanced at their host, who shrugged.
‘Very interesting,’ his uncle had said, finally.
‘What do you see?’ Adam asked.
‘Well, it’s quite a scene,’ the older man said. He chuckled, as if everyone was in for a treat.
‘I guess you need the binoculars,’ Adam replied, becoming irritated.
‘Not necessarily. Not if we wait a few minutes, and get a bit of luck.’
‘So what’s going on?’ Adam demanded.
‘Well. Down here we have a curlew.’ He gestured at the bird on stilts, which prodded the ground with its ludicrous bill. ‘Those are mergansers. A type of duck. There’s a great egret.’ He peered at Adam over his glasses. ‘The thing that looks like a white heron. You know what a heron is, don’t you?’
Adam nodded.
‘And several snowy egrets, those smaller ones. In the bank below us are night herons. They’re waiting for dusk, which is when they do most of their fishing.’
Adam peered down below him. Sure enough, there were five or six squat, furtive-looking herons lurking in the bushes. Their eyes were red, their backs a smooth grey over white flanks.
‘Jesus,’ Adam said. ‘They’re sort of, evil herons.’
‘Night herons,’ his uncle repeated, peering through the binoculars again. ‘On that power line, over the river, that’s a kingfisher perching. It’s not fishing at the moment. Just watching out. Twitchy little fella.’
‘Ah yes, I see it.’
‘And in the trees are great blue herons. The type you’ll have seen before.’
He pointed, and Adam made out tall, grey shapes in the branches, perfectly still, their u-bend necks and stiletto beaks tucked into the trees.
‘And watching over the whole scene, at the heart of this story, is the thing in that tree, there,’ his uncle said, passing the binoculars. ‘That’s why some of the other birds aren’t moving around much.’
Adam was surprised at the clarity and scale through the viewfinders, and had to look away again to find his bearings.
‘Don’t adjust the focus. Just run them up that tree,’ his uncle said.
Adam did so. After a moment, the image was filled by a pair of sharp yellow talons, the legs above them like thick, scaled cable. Adam steadied the binoculars and lifted them another fraction.
‘Oh wow…’ he said.
Sitting in the tree was a muscular raptor, its breast striped grey-white. Its bill was also tinged with yellow, its wide base culminating in a sharp hook. Its eyes were what struck Adam. They were huge black orbs – big as a human’s, it seemed to him – rimmed with more yellow.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
‘A peregrine falcon. It’s the fastest creature on earth, actually.’
‘Does it eat other birds?’
His uncle chuckled. ‘Oh yes, very much so. It’s like a sparrowhawk on steroids. That’s what it’s planning now, most likely. Rich pickings, here. The herons probably know it’s there. That’s why they’re all in their trees. It’ll eat most things given half the chance. Keep watching.’
And Adam had. A few moments later, a small flock of white birds had flown left to right across the slough.
‘Now, perhaps,’ his uncle said.
The peregrine exploded from its branch, flew for a fraction of a second, and then changed shape in the air. Its wings tucked away, it became a short, stout dart that fired itself at one of the white birds, stabbing down onto it from above.
‘It’s a tern,’ his uncle said, his voice tight with excitement. The peregrine smacked into the smaller bird with a lethal-looking thump, and Adam saw feathers puff outwards into the sky.
‘Got ’im,’ his uncle said.
The little world before them erupted. The shorebirds took off, scattering in every direction like woodchips under an axe. The ducks vectored overhead, calling out in alarm. The herons stamped and shook in the trees, their evil cousins in the bushes beneath Adam’s feet shuddering and flinching. A wave of animal fear pulsed outwards from the slough, strong enough for Adam to feel it.
‘Like someone shouting “shark” on a busy beach,’ his uncle mused.
Above, the peregrine made a lazy circle, a limp white shape hanging in an inverted U beneath it, and dropped out of sight behind the trees.
‘Kills it in the air, you see,’ his uncle had said. ‘If the impact doesn’t do it, then one slash with those talons…’
Behind them, cars pulled out of spaces, boys laughed, and a glum man walked past with a dog.
‘Holy shit,’ Adam had said.
His uncle laughed gleefully – a man with a convert.
Ever since that moment, Adam had become aware of the underworld – or rather overworld – that existed around him at all times. An endless, life and death story; a high drama for all to see in the skies and the trees, but ignored by most of the humans going about their lives below. Crows angrily dive-bombing trees, because sitting within their branches was a raptor, or an owl that might want their dinner. Mockingbirds systematically quartering their domains, so territorial they’d drive away cats – or crows. Finches, warblers and flycatchers risking dangerous displays of their beauty to attract mates or to take insects on the wing.
Hawks and vultures that lived as opportunists and scavengers, watching the ground for rodents, lizards and carrion, or waiting for the chance to grasp an unlucky pigeon. Being constantly harassed and driven on by fierce, more agile corvids.
The apex predators that ate them all, cruising high above, watching from their cliffs or trees, staring down and seeing everything, waiting for a chance.
It made a mockery of human life, Adam had realized. It made it seem petty and vain, as though mankind was just a backdrop for this higher drama.
It was a glimpse of this other world that he hoped to see on Saturday morning, when as usual he woke early. Lie-ins seemed to have been permanently wrecked for him by age and worry, but this, at least, meant that mornings were there to be used.
The sun wasn’t fully up when he descended the stairs to the street, and threw his binoculars and a jacket into the back of his Mercedes C-Class. The early morning world was deep blue and cold, the strip of grass beside the sidewalk glistening with dew. LA’s nights could be unexpectedly chilly. It was, after all, technically a desert.
He had the freeway almost to himself. Plunging down the 101 towards Downtown, he bore left, skirting Chinatown and picking up the Arroyo Seco Parkway towards Pasadena. This was a beautiful stretch of road, lined by palms, cliffs and hills, undulating upwards towards the rearing mountains in the background.
His destination was Ernest E. Debs Park, a hulking green foothill that rose up to the right of the freeway in a jungly mass. It wouldn’t be open as yet – its main gates still locked to vehicles – but Adam knew where there was a snick in the fence higher up. He parked by the last house on a steep, zigzagging lane, behind the Jeep Wrangler that was always there, and snuck into the park.
The streets around Ernest E. Debs were visibly middle class, but lower down, Monterey Park, Montecito Heights and Highland Park all had their share of troubles. Adam had read that two young Hispanic girls had been murdered by a gangbanger and hidden in the park’s deep undergrowth. It would be a logical place to hide a body, he thought now, as he crept through the chain-link fence. The park’s steep sides were covered in verdant bush. There were deeply wooded areas, cliff faces and scrub. It was about as wild as a city park could be, which was exactly what made it an excellent spot for birding.
He climbed up a steep bank, an unofficial trail cut into it by the park’s other out-of-hours users. The sky was paling above him, and as he levelled out onto a plateau, a man was doing Tai Chi on a grassy flat, close to the brim of a slope. Behind him, Downtown’s skyscrapers were sharp and hard against the flawless sky, and a mild orangey glow could be seen broadening above the horizon.
Adam turned into the pine trees, and entered a forested nook, which contained a large pond known as the peanut lake. It was surrounded by tall reeds, and Adam stopped and removed his binoculars from their case, running them slowly over the plants, which seemed a likely spot for a rail to be lurking. In a patch of sunny water a few feet from him, two terrapins had surfaced, their red-spotted heads protruding from the water, still as mired driftwood. The green smell in the air reminded him of the LA river’s, and he thought of Erica, and his date that evening, his heart lurching a little.
He set off around the lake, heading for the higher paths that led out onto the park’s steep ramparts.
Another new woman. Still dating as he pushed his late thirties. It wasn’t what he’d have pictured, he didn’t think.
He sometimes wished, as he pottered around Los Angeles, that he could show Sofia these places. Soon after he’d lost her, in one of their final communications, she’d told him she missed their walks.
And it was true that their relationship had revolved around walks in parks. In fact, it was almost as though it had been processed and driven by long rambles, usually around Victoria Park and the Regent’s Canal. Here, on hungover Sundays, other couples drifting happily on bicycles or sprawled amongst ravaged copies of the Observer, decisions could be made, plans formed, disputes resolved.
This was the time before Victoria Park – built as a royal park for the poor, a lung for the choking, industrial East End – had been cleaned up for the Olympics. There was graffiti on walls, dog-shit on the grass, no bright red, happy pagoda for tourists to marvel at. The canal was a faded place of abandoned warehouses, their windows pocked by thrown stones. Squats, tower blocks and beautiful, scruffy old terraces whose sleepy appearances belied their savage increases in value.
Adam would have loved to show Sofia the parks of Los Angeles. To point out what he knew about the city from Griffith Observatory’s airy, cool stone promenade, or to tell her that the lumps in the green water of the peanut lake were not in fact mired pieces of wood, but the heads of terrapins, which would flinch, duck, and dive away into the deep, dark recesses if you got too close to them.
Victoria Park’s lake had been beautiful, too. Towards the end of that life, he’d often stood in front of it, looking over to the island reserved for waterfowl, and dreamed of wading over and setting up a camp there, escaping from a world besmirched by his own stupidity.
They must have walked a thousand miles across that park, in the five years they’d been together.
‘Maybe we should sleep with other people,’ Sofia had said one day, as they set off along a path between stretches of damp grass. It was autumn, a time of year that emphasized how beautiful she was. The chestnut eyes and dark brown hair, the olive skin. She was an autumnal symphony herself.
‘Why?’ he’d said.
‘Because we’re not having sex any more. Something has to change.’
‘We do have sex,’ he’d protested.
‘Once every two weeks, and when we do it’s not good any more.’ She’d been frowning – he could see that she wouldn’t be easily distracted from this oft-deferred subject.
‘Why don’t you want to have more?’ she asked. ‘It’s fucking insulting.’
Because I’m sleeping with someone else, would have been the truth she deserved.
‘I promise we will. I’ve just become a bit lazy, I think,’ he told her instead. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Lazy?’ she’d said, the frown deepening as she considered this. ‘But it shouldn’t be an effort. It’s not a chore.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘What can I do to make it better, for you?’
He’d felt a change in the atmosphere at this – like an escape hatch opening up. She was almost shy, suddenly.
‘Well,’ she’d said. ‘… I don’t know.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, looking her in the eye.
She glanced away. ‘I’d like it if you’d rough me up a bit.’
That night, drunk on whisky, he had done his best at this, though he suspected it had been rather too polite for Sofia. Mainly, it had involved a surprisingly erotic form of play wrestling that had seen them crashing noisily into the living room furniture.
After half an hour or so of this, they’d given up, exhausted. They’d just settled down by the sofa to watch a DVD, when there’d been a very loud knock on the door of their flat.
‘Hello?’ Adam had called.
‘Police,’ had come the shouted reply.
He and Sofia looked at each other. ‘Oh shit,’ she’d said.
‘Hold on,’ Adam shouted, putting his clothes on, shaking with shock and the aftermath of his physical exertions.
‘Open the door now, please,’ a male voice boomed.
Adam got to the door and swung it open. There’d been two cops. A middle-aged man with grey hair and glasses beneath his hat, and a tall, broad woman, her face rigid with concern.
Sofia appeared at Adam’s shoulder.
‘Can we come in, please?’ the woman asked.
‘Sure, yes.’
‘We’ve a had a report that there was a potentially violent situation here,’ the man said.
‘Oh God,’ Sofia laughed nervously. ‘We were just playing around. I’m really sorry. It’s all fine.’
‘OK, love,’ the female officer said to Sofia, pushing past Adam. ‘I want to separate you two, so is there somewhere we can go?’
‘Yes,’ Sofia said, ‘we can go into the kitchen, but honestly this is all just a misunderstanding.’
The woman guided Sofia through the lounge, past a half empty bottle of Scotch and an overflowing ashtray – wife-beater style, Adam thought with a pulse of worry – and into the kitchen.
‘OK, sir,’ the man said. ‘If you can stay here with me, please. Tell me in your own words what’s been happening tonight.’
‘Well, to be totally honest,’ Adam said, aware that he was slurring slightly, ‘earlier on we went for a walk in the park…’
A puzzled look came over the policeman, who was presumably already sensing a lack of menace in the flat.
‘… And Sofia – that’s my girlfriend – was telling me she was a bit dissatisfied with our sex life. I asked her what I could do to improve things, and she said I should rough her up a bit. So we were getting a bit drunk just now, and I thought “no time like the present”.’
‘Right,’ the cop had said, dubiously.
‘So I was roughing her up a bit, basically,’ he said.
‘And she asked you to do this?’
‘Absolutely. It’s not really my thing if I’m honest,’ Adam said, smiling politely.
‘OK. Wait here please, sir.’
The cop walked through the lounge, glancing at the whisky and heading into the kitchen. There was some discussion in low voices, and then the two officers reappeared, Sofia behind them, apologizing.
‘Well, it seems you’re both telling the same story,’ the man said. ‘So please just keep the noise down now. You’ve given your neighbours a real scare.’
‘I’m very sorry, officers,’ Adam said. He felt a sudden flush of warm, drunken affection for these two, hard-working, harassed officers of the law. ‘Thank you,’ he said, waving from the door as they gave him a final, puzzled look and headed for the stairs. ‘Thank you very much indeed!’
Here, now, in Los Angeles, seven years later, Adam broke from the tree-line and started along a narrow path, which led up the spine of the park’s eastern flank – a catwalk high above the city.
Eyes on the skies, he scolded himself. Enough of all this bloody thinking.
He set off up the slope, the sun rising ahead, the day’s heat flooding over him in a wave. A man in a wide sunhat walked past, and nodded good morning.
At the top of the slope was a viewpoint with benches, a line of trees rising up from the hill’s crest. Adam turned, and saw something moving in one of them.
Feathers, he realized with a sharp thrill. Tiny feathers descending from a branch, like a plume of smoke in a rewound film. He followed them upwards and saw a small bird of prey standing on a flat branch, another bird trapped under its foot, being eaten. Below it, an iridescent blue scrub jay was hopping about, waiting for scraps.
Adam raised his binoculars.
The raptor was a merlin – a small falcon that looked almost exactly like a peregrine in miniature. Like a small man, Adam knew, it compensated for its size with sheer aggression. Pugnacious, was the word from his fieldbook that sprung to mind.
It was tearing at the flesh of the smaller bird under its foot, the feathers slowly twisting downwards in the still morning air. The prey was already too mangled to be identified. A murder victim. An innocent, whose day had barely begun when this monster had torn it from the air.
The jay hopped and bopped a foot or so below, its blue feathers shining in the sun. Very brave, Adam thought. Corvids were a tough family – the gypsies of the air. When the merlin was full, it stepped from the branch and flew away, fast and straight like a squat little bullet. The jay leapt up to the branch it had vacated, and began hungrily cleaning up what was left.
Jamie Collinson is a British novelist living in Los Angeles. His debut, The Edge, is available now.
Follow him on Twitter, @JRCollinson