The Seagulls

The sun has nothing better to do

Richard woke up. The seagulls were making their usual din. The incessant screeching which seemed to never stop, like the grandfather clock his father always made sure was ticking, continued unabated. Richard liked living by the sea though. He had lived in London when he was young and he detested the city. He was always penned in there and had no sense of direction. In London he felt he couldn’t centre himself, living by the sea he always knew what direction he was facing. This home by the sea wasn’t perfect as it was constantly bombarded by weather but at least he felt free. Or as free as he could living with his parents. They were not too strict he kept telling himself. He still wanted out though. They never really understood him. Richard felt disengaged from his family. His older brother had left home and he never really spoke to him. His brother was a cliché. Richard was not.

He looked over at his digital alarm radio clock. The blinding red numbers showed it was 5:23 in the morning. The sun was coming up because it had nothing better to do; but Richard wanted to sleep. He had another hour before he had to get up for work and he didn’t want to waste any sleeping time, though he knew he would probably just lay in his bed with his eyes closed not sleeping. He hated his office job and disliked many of his colleagues but not as much as the seagulls. Richard closed his eyes.

On his way home

Richard closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. The office was cloying him. He was stuck in the toffee of office politics and wanted to escape. The girl across the office had sent Richard an e-mail in which he declined the offer of a drink. He could never find a girl who he liked and liked him back. This situation of his life and relationships annoyed him.

On his way home he glanced through the Metro and realised he hated commuting. Richard had been indifferent to it but this was the first time he had felt any real emotion towards it. He needed the toilet but never went on public transport. He always felt invaded. Richard looked across at another passenger and saw she was trying and failing to hold back tears. He wondered why she was crying and thought he should ask what was wrong and whether she was ok. He didn’t.

21 and bored

He didn’t like commuting. To an office he hated. Back to a home he didn’t care about. People surrounded him but he constantly felt alone. As he approached his parents’ house he looked up and saw something that resembled a nest. He was 21 and bored. As he went to his room to throw off his work clothes he could hear the scratching of the seagulls on the roof. Then they started their screeching. He hated the seagulls. Could it be that they had more in terms of relationships going for them than he did? They were seagulls! He was a human being!!

At five that morning he was woken again by the relentless screeching of the pair of birds. They were scrabbling about on the roof. A surge of annoyance shot through his body. It was Saturday. It was his day off. He wanted to sleep in and those creatures were doing their very best to make sure that he was not going to be able to fall back to sleep. Richard turned over and buried his face into the pillow. He could smell the cheap washing powder his mother used. Why didn’t she buy the nice smelling stuff!! As he drowned in the pillow and his hearing became numbed he thought he heard the seagulls shut up. His face came back out of the pillow and he listened. There was silence. Richard closed his eyes and bathed in the sound. Then the noise started again. Richard shouted into the pillow. This had torn it. He was fed up with these birds making his life a misery. He decided he was going to pay a visit to his neighbour across the road. He was going to visit Keith.

The same old smell

Keith Boarer was the boy who lived across from Richard. When they moved down from London he had come over and called on Richard to say hello to what he thought was another young male like him. But Richard wasn’t like Keith. Keith listened to hip-hop and drove his crappy car with silver flames adorned on the sides and had a disgustingly orange girlfriend called Tanya. Richard just put up with him the same as he put up with everything and everyone. Apart from the seagulls. One time he had called on Keith and had hated walking into the bedroom of the boy. The walls were plastered with ironically named glamour girls. What’s so glamorous about plastic women getting their tits out and sneering provocatively into a camera and into teenager’s bedrooms? The room also smelled of pot noodles and stale sex.

As Richard knocked on Keith Boarer’s green peeling front door he looked at his house opposite and saw the seagulls looking back at him and then chattering to each other. Did they know what he had planned for them? Keith opened the door. He smiled and let Richard in. They walked upstairs and into his room. The same old smell. Tanya was in Keith’s bed. Keith made a joke about the state of his room and his girlfriend; Richard faked a chuckle. Tanya said hello and did not seem to be bothered that another person was in the room when she was probably naked under the duvet cover. Richard cast his eyes around the room and saw Tanya’s bare feet sticking out the end of the bed. Did he feel a twinge of jealousy towards Keith? Or was it something else towards the perma-tanned Tanya and the just woken up look? catcarcatcarcat. Keith’s DVD collection appeared to consist of Proud To Be British/Guy Ritchie films, splatter core movies (that had been banned in the 1980’s Keith proudly told Richard), and from what he could make out from the ‘comedy’ titles cheap pornography. Keith offered to lend Richard a couple but he declined the generous offer. Richard had only come over for one thing.

Looking a little too hard

One thing that hadn’t really struck Richard before he called on Keith was how he was going to ask for the instrument that he was after. Keith popped out to the toilet. Richard was left in the room with Tanya. She smiled at him. Should he smile back? Her smile didn’t let anything be told about it. Was it a genuinely friendly smile or a derogatory one? Or maybe a sexual one? Richard pushed the thought to the back of his mind. Was she naked under the duvet? catcarcatcar. He caught himself looking a little too hard at her. He started talking about the seagulls. Tanya agreed with him. She hated the fucking things too. Keith came back in. Richard noticed dark spots on Keith’s grey jogging bottoms. He had to leave quickly. The smell was becoming too much. Richard just blurted out what he was after. The words came too quickly. Keith shrugged his shoulders and didn’t really pay any attention to the excuse Richard made up off the top of his head. Richard smiled. Thanked Keith, said goodbye and made his escape. As he walked across the road with the equipment one of the seagulls flew dangerously close to his head and screeched mockingly at him as he made his way home and closed the door behind him. He was ready for the fuckers now.

Wine coloured grass

The fuckers now were finished. Richard kicked the lifeless body. He had no idea where the other one had fallen. But he knew he had got it. When the first seagull crashed in his back garden Richard had made a whoop of joy. And as the other had tried to make its winged escape he had managed to get the other shot off. He had seen its head jerk at an impossible angle and then it disappeared from view. Richard bent down for a closer inspection of the seagull’s body. Its beady black eye stared back at him. He wondered if this was the one that had dived bombed him so confidently yesterday. He chuckled to himself with the idea of drawing a chalk outline around the bird in the wine coloured grass. The white feathers were stained with blood. Richard picked up the body and walked it up to his parent’s compost. He threw the bird on the heap and walked back down the garden whistling.

As he sat down dinner with his parents he felt happy for the first time in a long time. Before he made the first bite of his roast chicken there was a knock on the front door.

With a hatpin

The front door was closed by Richard and he turned to face his parents. He shrugged and smiled. The neighbours had come round with the other body wrapped in an old Tesco carrier bag. His parents started with the questions. He shrugged them off. They could question him all they wanted, they would never understand. They never did. He remembered the time he had stabbed a beetle with a hatpin and watched the impaled mini beast writhing in the garden when he was five. He remembered the time when he had got a lighter and burned the under side of a snail. It sounded like it was screaming and shrieking though he knew it wasn’t. He remembered the time he fed slug pellets to his Auntie’s budgie and watched it twittering on the floor of its little cell with blue foam coming out of its beak. He remembered when he was fourteen and he saw a cat get hit by a car. He felt excited by the creature’s high pitched mewling and twitching around on the bloody tarmac. He thought of Tanya.