| Real life - The pigeon and the dove |
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REAL LIFE By Dave Winfield The pigeon and the dove We stood a short distance from the grave with our hands in our pockets, but near enough to be seen. We wanted to be noticed, and hoped the chief mourner would discreetly slip us a fiver; which he did. Then when the funeral party left, we filled in the grave and decided which pub to spend the money in. Back at our gravedigger’s shed I sat apart and let the others get on with a card game without me. I was thinking about one of the monuments…< It was on the main path through the cemetery in a line of tombs dating from the 19th century. Standing high above them all, one mausoleum housed a famous preacher and was surmounted by a huge statue of Jesus. Sometimes there was a seagull on top. Today a pigeon sat there. I borrowed a pencil and started to write: Jesus suffered the little children to come with a pigeon on his head. Beneath a placid sky and early trees of spring white stone shone in consecrated ground amid flower-bed sprinkled ashes of the dead. Jesus, pit with the pock of Time, had a pigeon and guano on his head and watched necropolistic memories wear away from the common start of common end and the windblown scattered ashes of the dead. It was a bit morbid, but that was my take on life. Ever since my Gran died I’d thought about life and death; and although I was developing an interest in Jesus, the statue seemed to sum him up. He was a great bloke who’d become a magnificent myth like Robin Hood; a myth with a pigeon on his head. And all around him death was crumbling into dust. I’d decided God didn’t exist and so life is random. It just happens, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re born, suffer it and die. The whole thing is pointless. If I’d been clever or successful things might have been different. But I kept messing up my opportunities. For instance, it was only a matter of time before I’d be sacked from the cemetery, because I could never get to work on time. The previous week I’d been walking to a friend’s and crossing an empty road when a car thundered round the bend. Without thinking I stopped in its path and waited for it to hit me, to put me out of my misery. It must have been further away than I thought, because it simply raced round me and disappeared without even honking or shouting at me. As I wrote, I thought of the preacher buried beneath the Jesus statue and the pigeon. Did he do burials here when he was alive? Did he use the same words the vicar used today? Of course, I assumed he was mouldering away in his coffin. But what if his soul had survived? During the burial some of the ritual words had floated across to us on the breeze; weird things, like ‘not dead but sleeping’, and ‘a sure and certain hope of resurrection’. And, as ridiculous as they sound, they raised a smidgeon of hope in me. I knew that Christians imagined Jesus rose from the dead. But it had never occurred to me they would actually believe it! So I wondered what difference it would make if it had really happened like that. I’d tried reading the Bible once. The language was archaic and it was divided into sections that didn’t always make sense; but the pigeon evoked a kind of déjà vu. Wasn’t there a time when, not a pigeon, but a dove settled down on Jesus’ head? Doves seem more spiritual than pigeons and I assumed it had something to do with Jesus’ resurrection; actually, it was his baptism, but I didn’t know that. So I decided to try and find out if he really did come out of the tomb; because if he did, it was pretty sensational! |
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