"It was pigeons I tell you!"

"Pigeons? Don't be daft! How can pigeons kill a man!"

"Who you callin' daft? And nobody says daft anymore anyway!"

"I do, and you're it! Pigeons indeed!"

I heard this exchange between two elderly men, while sitting on one of those back-to-back park benches. By the look of their clothes and pungent odours, both men had seen better days,  It being a sunny day, an almost forgotten phenomenon in these parts, I had decided to eat my lunchtime sandwich in the small park next to my office. The only vacant bench on that bright day was that behind the two old men. I realized why, as soon as I sat down. My seat was downwind from where they were sitting, and everytime the breeze played up, my nostrils were overwhelmed by an aromatic cocktail of old beer bottles, unwashed socks and 100% proof body odour. I was about to get up again when the pigeon came into their conversation, and I was intrigued. It is not my usual habit to eavesdrop on other peoples' private discussions, but considering the olofactory price I was paying I reckoned I was entitled to it. In any case there was nowhere else to sit, and like everything else, after a while, one gets used to such things. For a while I was concerned that the smells would stick to my hair and clothes like stale cigarette smoke, but my curiosity in pigeon murderers, or rather, pigeons who are murderers, made me throw caution to the wind. I'm known to take chances like that, my dad used to say I got it from mum's side of the family. But enough about me - back to the old men and their criminal pigeons.

The man with the felon pigeons theory, (I shall call him Fred, not his real name, but he looked like a Fred, and I'm good at putting names to faces; my dad used to say I got this from him) was saying that the last time he had seen Joe (Joe was the victim - his real name, at least Fred called him Joe, and I believed him) he (Joe) had told him (Fred) that the pigeons roosting up on the ledge of the building adjacent to the alleyway where he (Joe) lived had it in for him. Joe had said that things started to get nasty after he had chased a large group of them away from a large chunk of not quite dry bread someone had thrown into the alleyway. At first, all Joe had noticed was an unusual number of direct hits to his head while sleeping over the alleyway grate of the Shanghai Sue take-away. Things had got really nasty after Joe used a piece of 2X4 to club a particularly bold pigeon who was trying to get at a doughnut he had set down on the ground, while he opened a bottle of Chinese cooking wine.

"I remember the incident well" said Fred, "because Joe had asked me whether I had ever tried pigeon broth. Joe had said I should try it sometime!"

"Anyway," Fred continued, "Joe said that the next night, after he had the pigeon broth, a pigeon had tried to peck his eye out while he was asleep! And he showed me his red eye to prove it."

"Red eye, schmed eye!" shot back Bart (Bart is the name I gave the non-believer in the pigeon theory. Not his real name either, although it could be, considering my skill at putting names to faces.) "Joe had permanently red eyes, like an albino rabbit! He was probably away in pigeon-land from that Chinese cooking wine he drank! I tell you you're as crazy as he was if you believe he was done in by a pigeon. Pigeons are like chickens the idiots of the animal world - why, even you have a much higher IQ than a pigeon!"

The sarcasm was lost on Fred. "What's an IQ?" He asked. "Oh, never mind. Forget it," said Bart, who, among other things, obviously considered himself an authority on ornithological intelligence. The conversation then drifted to other topics and, having finished my sandwich, I got up and slowly made my way to the office. I took a longer route back, purposely walking between two office towers where I knew the wind generally spent time playing on a day like this. I wanted to air my clothes. Any residue of the old gentlemen's smell on one's clothes was enough to give one a reputation. I never gave another thought to the old men and the pigeon conspiracy theory.

Some weeks later I was again sitting on the park bench over my lunch hour. I was eating my sandwich and scattering crumbs to some pigeons who were hanging around the area. Suddenly they took off and flew up to a tree, where they sat and looked down, all beady eyed and making those strange pigeon noises. It was then that I noticed that Bart and Fred had settled on the bench behind me. I guess I hadn't noticed them earlier, because this time I was sitting upwind of them. I was about to get up, when I heard Fred say, "I tell you they have it in for me! One of these days they'll catch me off-guard and do me in!" This intrigued me, and remembering their previous conversation I decided to sit there and listen. (I know I shouldn't have, but what the heck. Had I not done so, I wouldn't be telling you this tale, would I? And by reading this, I guess you're as guilty as I am. Anyway, forget the moralising and let me get back to the story!) Fred went on, "Only yesterday, as I was picking up some perfectly good pizza from the dumpster in the alley behind the Capri Pizzeria, a whole flock of the filthy beggers dove down on me. They pecked the back of my head - I showed you the marks didn't I - and made me fall and bang my face on the dumpster. That's how I got this black eye." ( I casually looked around, as if looking for someone I was waiting for, and noticed that Fred had a real shiner for a left eye!) "I tell you, I ran out of that alley like the hounds of hell were after me. That pizza went to waste. The beggers want me dead I tell you. Look at them on that tree, even now they're watching me, plotting their next move." Bart had not said a word till now. He must have been listening to this kind of thing for a long time, because now he sighed deeply and said. "If I told you once, I told you a million times, pigeons are stupid birds. How the hell can you believe that they're plotting to kill you! You know, I'm getting a little tired of this, and I seriously think that you're going bananas! I think that Joe's accident has unhinged you! Look, just look at those pigeons in the tree - have you ever seen such stupid expressions. All they care about is where they're going to get their next meal!" It occurred to me that in this way the pigeons were not too different from Fred and Bart, although in their case I would substitute "drink" for "meal".