The Magpie

Clugston
Clugston
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

It was a magpie that started it.

All hopping and inquisitive. Pecking about. Clacking and chattering away like all good magpies do.

The brisk movements of the compact, well-formed bird caught Tsutomu’s eye as he was gazing out at the ugly Osaka cityscape just after 5am in the morning.

No gleaming Tokyo high-rises or shining SkyTower here.

Instead, the endless grey density of the meso-scale city suburb; dense, dingy apartment buildings cut off by railway lines and dry dirt sqaures. Nearby, a sad looking disused theme park complex decaying over half a city block.

Something about the looping twist in the roller coaster tracks unsettled Tsutomu, especially at half-light. The way the straining metal rails jarred against the linear edges and predictable order of everything else.

To the west, a struggling lone lime tree provided some relief. The tops of the leaves rising up above the roofline of a social housing complex adjacent to Tsutomu’s ten storey block. Perhaps the magpie lived there, amidst the rough leaves and dry bark.

Tsutomu often wondered on the significance of this bird. What if it was a sigil of some sort? Some kind of otherworldly metaphor. Or simply a harbinger ill-fortune?

He wanted to sneer at these thoughts, but he couldn’t quite dismiss such notions. What was he doing staring out of his apartment window at 5.15am on a drizzling February morning anyway?

By 5.19am he’d already dozed off and was stealing the last minutes of sleep. Half dreaming about impending wakefulness and the need to get up before his alarm went off at 5.30am, and the red LEDs of his bedside clock would flash brightly out of their resting moon-mode.

Later that same day Tsutomu was surprisingly alert at work — updating maps for the Osaka Loop-line interchange.

The map-making process, all digital now, was repetitive, but in a soothing non-tedious way. Map design demanded a satisfying mixture of order, hierarchy and bounded creativity, the sum effect of which was rhythmic and absorbing.

Two new links were going to be constructed on the Osaka-Higashi line later in the Autumn. As a result, every one of the JR network maps to be replaced in advance. Previously they’d used stickers to simply update any superseded sections of maps in-situ, but the new outspoken mayor took issue with this innocuous detail, calling it “Basic and British”, in his frank address to the senior rail engineers.

At that time the way the Mayor had lingered on the word British required everyone present to make a subtle show of unease at the implied hint of nationalism. Tsutomu knew he was right though.

The British did use stickers to update their famous London Underground maps and whilst pragmatic, it was disrespectful to the integrity of the map at large.

Tsutomu’s father, a legendary industrial designer of sorts, once told him during a spontaneous pause in a walk in the woods;

“Never forget, the essence good map-making is making things cohere without the appearance of effort. Effort-fulness is the enemy.”

It was true.

No mater how carefully applied, a sticker rudely interrupted the flow of the whole. Technically it made two maps from where before there was only one. And the dirty edges of stickers were not at all harmonious to those who had a long metro ride to consider such things.

Tsutomu thought about his father’s sentiment; elegance in design was hard to define formally, being defined more by the absence of inelegance. Via-negativa if you like.

Via negativa’, the phase had a nice ring to it.

It was at lunchtime, chewing on a very ordinary unagi roll in the cafeteria, and forgetting all thoughts of principled design, that the magpie came back into Tsutomu’s mind. He thought of it hopping on the edge of the shipping container, it’s small claws scraping and sliding on the worn metal.

Directly underneath Tsutomu’s window up on the 5th floor, the container had simply appeared one day. Bullying out an empty volume in the parking lot behind the apartment block. This silent cuboidal mass, courtesy of some faceless manager at Maersk. None of the residents knew what it contained, but it had been there for so long it had become an accepted, even homely object to them all.

Gulls, rooks and even scattish jackdaws seemed to find solace perching on it, sharing some birdlike contemplation of not being in flight for a few moments.

A narrow gap between the corrugated metal sides of the container and the stained tiles on the outside of the apartment building had long ago filled with windblown trash.

All of the birds gave cursory pecks at the assorted rubbish. Only the magpies seemed to be truly curious about this neighbourhood detritus.

Creatures who truly fulfilled their cliche thought Tsutomu.

“Honto-desu.” He said, exhaling.

He was always surprised that the gulls, usually so aggressive and menacing, even to humans, appeared not to take issue with their exuberant magpie cousins. Even with the magpies erratic fits of screeching and squawking.

The magpies seemed to boldly disregard any sense of respectful proximity to the powerfully built gulls. Surely this was in direct violation of some primordial hierarchy, thought Tsutomu.

That morning there was only one magpie, all alone, without any kin.

Surreptitious in isolation, as if on some clandestine mission. Until he broke cover, letting out a loud, excited squawk right at the edge of the trash filled crack.

Woken by the sudden noise of the bird, Tsutomu must have watched him hopping for a full minute or two. It was at just as his clock displayed 5.19am, still dimly, that Tsutomu noticed this bird was different to the ones he’d observed before.

Almost precisely as the last digit on the clock changed from eight into nine, the bird stopped moving suddenly. It just froze right there, its head thrust into the crack, it’s body directly aligned with Tsutomu’s line of sight.

Beep.

Tsutomu looked over towards the noise rapidly, flinching and feeling a wave of tension at the interruption.

Even in moon-mode the clock made a faint noise marking the passing of each minute — a design flaw if ever there was one. What he saw when he looked back down to the container made his blood cool;

The magpie was now twisted, it’s neck at a queer angle so that it’s left eye was shining up at Tsutomu, all the way from five floors below him.

He wanted to look away but felt transfixed. The bird’s gaze bored into him, penetrating into the marrow.

An awful childhood memory of seeing a tank full of adult horse-shoe crabs at the marketplace in shin-Osaka filled his consciousness. All of those foul creatures writhing and articulating wildly over one another. Full of chaos, desperately aware of their mortality.

Still the bird remained frozen, an eyeball staring.

Another creaturely memory overcame Tsutomu. This one of seeing his cousin chased by a turkey on his eighth birthday when Uncle K took the family to the city farm.

Tsutomu remembered how all of the adults, and even his cousin, found humour in the scene. For days later all he could think of was the terrible single-mindedness of the flightless bird. How, without the adults present to intervene with superior violence, it would peck his cousin apart and think nothing of it.

The magpie bought him back to the present.

The black bird had something in it’s beak. A dull, white mask. The sort you might wear to play a prank on a skittish pal. Or rob a bank. A mask that made one blank and unknowable.

At that moment still looking at the bird with the mask in its beak, Tsutomu felt a strange sense of completion.

He knew he must wear it.

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