The White Pidgeon

*

"There's a pidgeon here, it's sick," Ian said in the front garden. He didn't bother to look at first. He was reading City At The End Of Time and did not feel well - and Ian's endless enthusiasms were exhausting. He looked inside to the cool of the house. The pool burbled occasionally beside him. Not so far away, the ever chaotic traffic of Bangkok growled and snarled; and people sat inside their tin cans. He deliberately looked down now as the Sky Train flew high across the darkened streets at night, the open air markets, the derelict buildings, the condos, the ancient style Thai shops and the glistening malls.

"It was as if nothing had ever happened, as if he had woken up in the future of his own life," someone said, and he shuddered because he could feel the contradictory forces pulling him in all sorts of directions. Perhaps he had woken up in the city at the end of his own life. Next morning, as he pottered about after yet another restless, semi-sleepless night, rotating from couch to bed to floor to sitting outside reading to couch to couch to bed to floor, he saw the white pidgeon in the garden. It had not flown away.

He liked to watch the pidgeons in the evening. They were roosting in the edge of the eves in the house next door. Half a million dollar house and they let that happen, I'd kill them, Paul declared; and we knew bad spirits had come to rest. He picked it up, after it shuttled nervously from him, and it instantly spewed liquid on to the ground. It was clearly very sick; pretty, white, and very very sick. He placed it next to the pool in the hope that it would at least take a drink of water. He had saved a pidgeon in Redfern, and after communing with the ancient spirits of the land, those voices left from long ago, it had flown away, rebuilt, refreshed, perhaps not grateful.

The pidgeon sat stunned next to the pool for the next two hours while he did his morning routines, including this. And when he went out it had barely moved more than a few inches, looking startled, sad. None of the other pidgeons came to visit it. Why was it so alone. He had liked watching them swoop down to the side of the pool for a quick dip of their beaks into the water until they flew high up into the protection of the neighbouring house; away from any danger at all. That's what he wished he could do; except his own head was the most dangerous place to be. Our heads are dangerous places, do not enter alone, went the old saying.

He shepherded the pidgeon into the sheltering plants of the garden before he left, hoping to give it shave and to protect it from the killer. And the next time he saw it it was back on the ground and legs in the air, clearly dead, barely two or three feet from where he had left it, sheltering under a wide tropical leaf. He looked at it briefly, sadly, and wondered whether he should bother to remove the corpse or leave it where it was. The sad little bird who's pidgeon friends cooed nearby, apparently unaware, unalarmed, uncaring about the fate of their colleage, their friend, their son. Things were always brutal, but why did they have to be so simply, so frequently so?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/world/asia/18marja.html

MARJA, Afghanistan — In five days of fighting, the Taliban has shown a side not often seen in nearly a decade of American military action in Afghanistan: the use of snipers, both working alone and integrated into guerrilla-style ambushes.

The Continuing Assault Five Marines and two Afghan soldiers have been struck here in recent days by bullets fired at long range. That includes one Marine fatally shot and two others wounded in the opening hour of a four-hour clash on Wednesday, when a platoon with Company K of the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, was ambushed while moving on foot across a barren expanse of flat ground between the clusters of low-slung mud buildings.

Almost every American and Afghan infantryman present has had frightening close calls. Some of the shooting has apparently been from Kalashnikov machine guns, the Marines say, mixed with sniper fire.

The near misses have included lone bullets striking doorjambs beside their faces as Marines peeked around corners, single rounds cracking by just overhead as Marines looked over mud walls, and bullets slamming into the dirt beside them as they ran across the many unavoidable open spaces in the area they have been assigned to clear.

On Wednesday, firing came from primitive compounds, irrigation canals and agricultural fields as the bloody struggle between the Marines and the Taliban for control of the northern portion of this Taliban enclave continued for a fifth day.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/18/2823197.htm?section=justin

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is defending his driver after yesterday's near miss at a Princes Highway accident blackspot near Geelong.

Mr Abbott's car was turning right off the highway when a semi-trailer travelling behind was forced to brake hard and swerve, narrowly missing the car.

This morning Mr Abbott told Macquarie Radio his driver did nothing wrong.

"A car is perfectly entitled to turn right into a rural laneway," Mr Abbott said.

"And I think that the Commonwealth car [driver] was doing his job professionally, and good on the truck driver for having the skills to avoid a difficult situation."

Mr Abbott's car had been waiting to turn right on a single-lane section of the road at Winchelsea when the truck nearly rammed him from behind.