The Unbelievable Death of Joseph Goldberg

Joseph Goldberg is the wrinkled old man you often see wrapped up in fraying scarves and dusty trilby hats, hobbling along the seafront promenade in the dead of winter. He does this for one and one reason only, and that is to observe the starlings above the Old Pier. Migrating in their thousands to roost in the rusty spires of that decrepit structure, the starlings can be seen rising, falling and swimming through the air all as one on a pretty much daily basis. That is to say, they can be seen “murmurating”; a random, apparently spontaneous group activity, the purposes of which have long baffled scientific thinkers. Whatever the explanation, it's an endless, almost symphonic parade of shifting, shimmering, description defying shapes. They meta-morph across the sky as easily as wind blows. As Joseph likes to say, it's fucking grand.

Sinking his behind onto the usual bench, Joseph was pleased this afternoon to inhale such crisp mid-winter air under a sky brushed with such sunset red clouds, full of starlings out in such force (a right flood of them). Not as many as in past years, of course, and the pier was certainly a dark shadow of it's former self, ravaged by neglect, battered by the untamed British seas. God knows how many years now he'd been plonking his arse in that very spot. In good times and in shit. He really had had a long, hard life. Been through a hell of a lot of crap.

And so, with a certain distaste, Joseph realised that a rather dreamy, nostalgic mood had crept up on him; certainly not something he ordinarily experienced; ordinarily he would much rather not; but sometimes one just can't help these things.

And so, quite helpless, he found himself thinking of Lucy, of his mostly crappy life, of all the things he'd never done.

*****

It was soon after the war. She loved the starlings too (silly young Lucy), sneaking past the barbed wire and pill boxes. All for a close up view. That's what she told him anyway. They had their first kiss in the winter of '45, roasting their bums on the pebbles, arm in arm under the starlings.

Life soon became problematic. Joseph worked as a language teacher to make ends meet. He hated it. The secondary modern system, students who couldn't give a rats arse for all that “Nazi Gobbledegook”. Ungrateful little shits, he used to say, though he did sympathize. For his part, he was a crap teacher, making as little effort as he could, being cranky and doling out punishments as often as he could. He sorely missed the flying. Flying was a much better mode, he always said.

After a few years of teaching, for a while things got pretty bad. He got seriously bored, drank a lot of cheap whisky, lost his job as a teacher, separated from Lucy. They got back together, eventually.

Life together was a small basement flat with a patio just big enough for two to smoke. They never left the town, although occasionally caught a bus up into the hills. Lucy trained as a nurse, worked as a GP's receptionist. She worked long hours for crap pay. Eventually Joseph quit the teaching malarkey for good, got a job as a department store security guard. He worked long hours for crap pay too, but nothing was as bad as those ungrateful little shits, he used to say. They never had children.

Some time later, he tried his hand at writing. He saved up, bought a lovely, heavy new typewriter and wrote hammy, glamour ridden war stories, but contemporary audiences were ever so changeable and fickle, especially after books like Catch 22. He read it, of course, secretly loved it, even though it made his own work pointless. Shot out of the sky by a Jew, he used to laugh and grumble. So he gave up the writing.

It wasn't long after that when Lucy got breast cancer. She was in her fifties. He read the Telegraph to her by the hospital bedside.

“Nixon really is a corrupt bastard after all,” he read.

She smiled and squeezed in equal ferocity. Then it was all over. Then he was alone.

He kept on coming to the beach to watch the starlings, partly to remember her by, he supposed, because they had their best moments together doing that. Mostly it was because that's what he'd always done.

Years passed. He was very lonely. Nothing much happened. He retired onto a measly state pension, the world changed all around. The town fell on hard times, the pier itself was closed down, falling into disrepair. Still he made a point of walking down there every day, through rain or shine. Dunno where-else an old gimp like me should go, he always said.

Really, he wanted to fly again, he thought. Just one more time.

*****

Suddenly he found the whole chain of thought bringing him to the brink of tears. Painfully self-indulgent and quite uncharacteristic the whole thing was, and only with great luck and speed did he manage to cough it away into his handkerchief.

The intention was for the usual brief cough and a spit, but he found that once begun, he couldn't stop. Something tickled and gnawed at his slashed old throat, creeping down into his lungs. He just kept on coughing.

After a couple of minutes of this, he became dizzy and keeled over onto the pavement. The starlings crossed his field of vision up above, a thick boomerang of black lumps, their calls like broken wind chimes, the rainy grime of the pavement penetrating deep into his hairy nostrils. He felt like a small child again.

Only at this point did he realise he was dying. He'd been dying all day. That's why he'd felt so... crumpled.

Things then proceeded to melt themselves. In sepia, the pier slid drunkenly from left to right. In black and white, the birds whirled around and around, imploding into themselves.

Then something really strange happened. One moment, he was watching the fading, flickering flock of birds looping here and there; the next, he somehow was the flock of birds.

*****

Of course, it took a while to figure out. It was very confusing at first. Being a flock of starlings isn't all that easy. Certainly not a thing one expects to be.

*****

At first, a cacophony of disorientating, head spinning, erratic movement. Uploaded to a thousand fast moving pairs of eyes, he ebbed, flowed and occasionally whooshed like a roller-coaster, only able to catch a few brief, distorted glimpses of the people standing around the body, the ambulance that arrived in a blur of blue sirens. His face was impossible to make out as they took “him” away. Perhaps they'd covered his face, he hoped.

After flapping hither and thither for an uncomfortable spell, he managed to control it. A bit like learning to dance; once you'd nailed it, you didn't think too much. Or like breathing whilst swimming; impossible until you'd got the hang. But soon, it was a piece of piss, and he was ducking, diving, spinning and swooping, up to the clouds and down to the stones again and again and again, wet salty sea air lapping on his thousand tiny red tongues, icey winds like silken cushions under his wings. It was so much fun, he squealed for joy, (but it sounded nothing like that).

Eventually he calmed down, gliding along the coast for a while. He took his time, watching the sea roll it's massive white spray onto the stones. Serious, disturbing questions then began to enter his head, like “What the hell is going on?” and “Has old Joseph really transmigrated into a beautifully murmurating flock of starlings?” Was it possible he'd gone mad, or was it possible that this is precisely what happens when you die? Surely it was impossible. He tried to pinch himself, but it happened nothing like that. Still he was the flock of birds.

Fuck it, he eventually took to thinking, it's just bloody marvellous, that's what it is. A real chance to do amazing things. Probably the first man in the history of the world to become a flock of starlings.

So he attempted an amazing thing, a world's first: to spell out “Joseph” with a flock of starlings.

He failed, of course. “J” just a dark blob, not even vaguely or remotely a “J” (squawkers breaking formation, blown about like feathers). And why in God's name should you be able to do that? Like trying to consciously arrange your own brain cells to spell out the word “brain cells”. Impossible. Stupid old goat.

So he meandered up and down the beach, trying to figure out what to do.

*****

A thousand unexpected plops and a sensation of deep lightness brought him out of his deliberations, followed by the whack of a splatter. “Aha!” thought Joseph upon the scream of the unfortunate pair of cyclists passing on the pavement underneath. He could almost believe he'd timed that particular bodily function to perfection. Fucking cyclists, he always said.

But then the white poo strafed pair came to screeching halts next to one another. Splattered helmets were removed, followed by exclamations, laugher, the breaking of ice. What Good Luck, he could hear them joking in a blaze of laughter and twinkles. Mobile phones were pulled out, numbers exchanged. “Christ all-bloody-mighty!” Joseph could have screamed. In despair, he tried to force more on them, finish the job, but his little tanks were all spent. Not quite knowing what to do, he whisked himself away.

But still, he reasoned to himself, you've discovered a new talent. A new weapon. And so the next move must be to refill.

Gliding optimistically to the nearby beach front, he soon located a cohort of geriatrics and their squealing grandchildren fortuitously tossing breadcrumbs onto the shingle. A small company of seagulls were pecking in. Nothing compared to his thousand strong horde. Fuck it, he thought.

A small number were lost in the ensuing skirmish, a dozen or so fleeing to the four winds, scores severely battered and bruised, but the majority fought through, and he won out in the end. Indeed, much beak was given to the bemused, retreating gulls, and the spoils of war were pecked up greedily. All gobbled down.

Whilst pecking and gobbling, Joseph drew up further battle plans (he had the white one now, after all).

First it had to be the old school. Then the other schools. Fuck it. After that, the park. They always went to the park to smoke and drink and snog and have fun doing whatever. After that, why not the library? There were so many places really.
So he spent the next hour judiciously mastering the art of dropping the white one. It wasn't difficult. He joyfully painted the pebbles white, until the sky blackened.

Once night fell unambiguously, the starlings just seemed to take over. Joseph, rather worn out, found himself heading to the pier. The flock then draped itself down over the entirety of that hobbled old structure, and he found his thousand eyes suddenly spreading their field of vision across it's length and breadth. They did so with such even regularity, it was as if he became the pier. I'm the bloody pier incarnate, he chuckled, (though it sounded nothing like that).

When a thousand eyes closed themselves simultaneously, he slept. For the first time in his life, he didn't snore. He dreamt of being the pier, of the pier rambling out to sea. It was old and rusty, but still managed to do a little splashy dance. Then it rambled back.

He also had a nightmare which he didn't clearly remember the next morning, but which left him with a vague uneasiness. He dreamed that his head was sliced off, or rather, that the sleeping flock was attacked by a sharpshooting, shadowy bird collector with a slingshot. He threw the many carcasses into a huge plastic bag, dragged them home, cleaned them with fairy liquid and stuffed them with dust and fluff from old vacuum bags. Then he sold them on the internet to God knows who. Fucking internet, Joseph always said. It'll be the death of us all.

*****

In the morning, a thousand little eyes opened one by one on the world; on the choppy waters beneath, on the grey skies, inward on the cavernous rusty spires, outwards towards the pebbles. As each eye opened his heart warmed that degree further, as if ignited by waking fireflies. He shouted for joy (but it sounded nothing like that). Unfurling and rustling his wings, a slight breath of emptiness tinged his hearts, but his wings just kept on rustling, until all disquiet was thrown off into the fresh sea air.

He wasted no time. After snacking on some litter, it was straight off to school. He glided over many houses and streets, up and down a few hills. The school was way back in the suburbs, amongst the semi-detached houses. Skivers roamed the streets along the way, in their little groups, spitting under their hoods, tempting Joseph with their shaven heads, but he held fast, not wanting to waste his load, continuing up onto the playing fields, swooping right across till he reached the main buildings.

The playground was empty with the calm of class time. No matter, he thought, soon the whole concrete space would be jammed full with screaming and giggling teenagers. They'd never know what hit them from the clear blue skies. He perched along the frontage of the rooftops, encircling.

When the bell rang, his hearts raced. At first it was just a few pushing through the creaking doors, and he stayed put, biding his time. Soon it became a deluge, class after class dismissed into their frantic first morning break. Joseph focused all his eyes down, blocking all else from his attentions, feeling at once the model of a true hunter. “Come on you little bastards, I've got you!” he whispered to himself (but it sounded nothing like that). Some strolled out, most ran, pushing and shoving, hanging onto each other, shouting, screaming (always like monkeys...). From his vantage points, it almost seemed like he was watching a giant industrial spill. When the ground was finally choked with hopping, skipping and all manner of quick footed stepping, and the babble of the assembled had reached a shrill climax, Joseph picked his moment and launched into the air.

In seconds, the crowd was a full blown mess of plops and splatters and piercing shrieks. Some of the more sensitive were brought to tears, others were knocked over by the panic as many ran for cover, or just ran to and fro. Some boys organised themselves and began to throw things at him (sticks, books, shoes). They had good arms, and several of the flock were knocked out. Joseph experienced it as painful, heavy body blows. A strange dizziness ensued, and he had difficulty keeping his heads together, coordinating the flock. Those who fell were left to their fates. Once collective bowels were fully expelled, Joseph swooped away dazed and filled with an unexpected, deep unease. The sea and it's wizened old man, the pier, beckoned, as always.

*****

He made his ways via the town centre. The hustle and bustle of Christmas shopping comforted him, and he flew a little slower to appreciate it from above.

In a similarly random fashion, he passed over the old Synagogue. It was situated amongst the new shops and restaurants, like a mangled old pair of shoes (it being part of a much older building spree that had shaped the towns centre many decades ago). Birds eyes gave him a true sense of the deterioration and expired uselessness about it: the dilapidation, slates missing from the roof, rubbish and bricks strewn about the court yard. Not that he passed it that often, but from the front it always maintained a fairly well kept appearance. Now the length of it's disuse was crystal clear, and just how many had given that all up. (Those who kept going had always been too few, too old. Too dead.)

Joseph hovered there, caught by a sudden deathly sleepiness rearing its' heads across the flock. In all truth, he was worn out by the attack, (and, he increasingly suspected, by the loss of flock members, for he dared not count the number that had fallen, nor estimate the extent of damage caused by the sharp lobbing boys). And so, despite the guilty fact that he hadn't seen the inside for nigh on God knows how long, Joseph found himself landing for a spell of rest atop the old Synagogue.

Unfortunately, an echoey conversation was taking place inside that made rest a difficult
proposition. He tried to ignore it, but it soon perked his interest.

*****

“Oh Jacob, did you hear?” said a rather squeaky voice, amplified by the dusty emptiness of the interior.

Another grunted, and the squeaky voice continued:
“About old Joseph?”

Hearing his own name was always enough to put Joseph into a spin.

“Old Joseph? Joseph Flint?” said a slower, lower pitched, croakier voice. “I thought he passed years ago. The cricketer, you mean? What did you ever care about cricket?”

“No... the Goldberg, you know... The bird watcher. The barmy one, you know...”

The women was obviously very sure that Jacob should know, and he imagined the old man scratching his head, caught defenceless, unable to recall as he had been caught himself so many times when prompted to remember some long forgotten irrelevance.

“Come on Jacob,” berated the woman, “it was all the talk of the town... Don't you remember? The boy who got away?”

“Oh yes...” said an unconvinced sounding Jacob,

“So he died did he?”

*****

When it sank in, Joseph couldn't help but to leap into the air, the flock jumping all at once like a swarm of flies.

The boy who got away. The barmy one. Yes, of course.

The really strange thing was just how successfully he'd put all thoughts of “them” out of his mind for so long. When one of “them” died he wouldn't have the faintest clue, even would have done his utmost to keep it that way. Yet some old dear remembered him.

He fluttered towards the sea, but his thoughts were entirely of the old days; the real old days, before Lucy, before TV, the war, before drink and fags. It wasn't something he normally thought of; ordinarily it was far too much trouble; but right now, he just couldn't help himself. The flock watched the sea crash into the shore, the cars chugging below, the clouds on their never-ending odyssey across the sky, while his mind stewed itself in different sauces entirely. Memory superimposed itself onto the winter's morning as if the world were composed of doubled exposure film.

*****

It began with his childhood self, bang in the middle of a particularly God-awful scene in the school yard. There were shouts of “Yid”, some little bastard pulling his underpants right up into his scrotum. It hurt. He then relived a further two painful scenes he tried not to think of as often as possible.

First came his Bar-Mitzvah, the embarrassment he felt chanting in a foreign language to a room full of mostly foreign immigrants, clueless as to what any of it meant.

Next came the terrible row he had with his parents not long after, during the festival of Yom Kippur. His father had given the order, and so Joseph had to spend an intolerable day cooped up in the dusty old Synagogue, fasting and worrying about sins he hadn't committed yet, even having to miss a particularly unmissable inter-school game of rugby to be there. His rage behaved itself until about 6pm, when the service was being wrapped up with one last collective choral wail. Then, just as people were beginning to think about supper, he had it out with his parents.

“Fools!” he shouted, in loudly enunciated Yiddish (to spite them). “You forbid me speak the old tongue, yet you use it constantly amongst yourselves. Why am I forced to learn Hebrew, to grow up a Jew in a nation of bacon and eggs?”

He threw down his skullcap, rubbing it under his boot, the whole Synagogue watching in shocked silence. Even the Rabbi stopped his eternal bowing before the shrine. It was a painful moment; in the back of his mind Joseph knew he was greatly dishonouring his father.

“Does it hurt to be crazy, my son?” his tearful father had asked, before slapping him clumsily across the nose. Joseph ran out of the Synagogue, slamming the great doors of the entrance, leaving God knows what scene in his wake.

In the end, he didn't care. What with the Synagogue being near the sea, and Yom Kippur being a seasonal festival, seemingly for the first time in his life Joseph found himself on the seafront in winter. The cold, bracing gale blew away all mental disquiet, and he enjoyed the view.

Muddy grey sands shone from under the pebbles. Shards of sunlight twinkled atop the bubbling seas, a magnificent sunset forcing its way through cracks in the otherwise thick clouds behind the grand old Pier, (still a well maintained, chic place in those days). In the busy skies above it, a thousands starlings swooped majestically together. He'd never seen that before.

Sitting himself on a bench, he watched them hurl and dance themselves across the skies. They never stopped to rest, never let up for one moment. They were possessed. It was beautiful.

After some time sitting there alone, contemplating things, he got to thinking; strange, rebellious thoughts that were suddenly just the thing.

Why shouldn't we paint such things on our walls? he thought. It made just as much sense to suppose a majestic flock of birds was animated with the will of God; surely more sense than to suppose only us stupid humans deserved the honour. Why shouldn't we build statues of them, love them, sing to them, worship them? They were grand, Godly grand at that (if such a thing made any sense). Everything he'd been taught, it was all nonsense. Just nonsense. Here was truth.

Possessed with such thoughts did he watch, until the stars began popping themselves out, until he heard them calling for him.

*****

His thoughts faded into the indistinct blur of the ensuing sadness. Very strange to think of it again. Then he was surprised to find himself superseding it all with questions. Nonsensical questions really, going almost entirely against the grain of his life, but he couldn't help himself.

Questions like: Just how would things have been if he had stayed, continued a Jew, never left it all behind? And: What if he'd patched things up with mum and dad, married a Jew, found a pretty (or at least understanding) one, led a life of well performed Mitzvahs? Everything might have been different, so much richer. It might've gone well.

It was while such thoughts were unfurling their dark wings: the other flock appeared. A blip on the horizon at first, way out across the bay. It approached rapidly, and Joseph paid it no heed, his mind full of a million forbidden what ifs, unrelenting. Bucketfuls of long buried memories were resurfacing like the flotsam of a sunken ship. Joseph found himself brushing across them all, past the rest of his adolescence, heading straight to Burma. To Burma. And then it all clicked.

All the while, the two flocks were drawn to each other like magnets.

*****

Flying low, above the jungles. A pilot for three years already. A hell of a fucking job, he always used to say, in both senses of the phrase. He spat some tobacco out the cockpit, trying to purge the lingering anger he felt at being whisked away from the Reich. In the lead up to the war he'd become a sort of humanist, joining the airforce because he hated the Nazis for their inhumanity. Naturally, he wanted to bomb the fuck out of them. He'd even said so, loud and clear, yet still they'd sent him out to the jungle, to play hide and seek with the Japs. Fucking officers, he always used to say, (before spitting).

On this day, he muttered it through cracked lips, mouth dry like sandpaper, forehead like a boiled egg. But then something ear shattering crackled and sparked to one side, and all of a sudden the sun was spinning, the wet green canopy roof drawing messy squares around his flapping cheeks. He was going to crash, maybe even die. Strangely, the thought didn't worry him. In fractions of a second, branches slapped him unconscious.

He never could believe the next few weeks had really happened; even now the whole sequence had a dream like quality to it. Trekking through the jungle for days, even drinking his own urine on a couple of occasions. For a week, he was holed up with malaria in a little village along the borders. He would have died if it wasn't for that shaman, (that's what they told him anyway).

He could still see the naked, body painted old madman shouting and dancing around on the bamboo floor, lighting foul smelling incense, giving him slimy teas that made him vomit and slip in and out of consciousness for God knows how long, glimpsing only their animated faces, the rotting bamboo roof a buzz with warring geckos and flies. And the tea gave him vivid dreams. So very vivid.

One featured some of the village girls. That was nice. He wondered if that was a dream at all.

In another which until now he'd always assumed was most definitely and irrefutably a dream, a young man brought a severed head to the shaman, who proceeded to juggle it like a clown. Minutes later, Joseph then had the distinctly odd sensation of shrinking to the size of a nut, scuttling across the floor, and escaping through a small crack in the wall.

Once outside, he was almost instantaneously spotted by a humongous young boy who stalked and caught him, keeping him captive for the next hour in a cavernous wicker basket. Later the boy tricked him (with the delights of a sticky sugar cane) into climbing up a twig and into allowing string to be tied round his waist. So shackled, the boy proceeded to whip him into a frenzy of anger and aggression by spinning him around at an unearthly velocity above his head. He could hear other boys cheering when wings he didn't know opened, causing him to fly around in a circle of his own volition, yet still shackled by the string, and to feel ever more and more livid. When he was about to explode like he would throttle Churchill if it would only get him free, the boy stopped the spinning and dropped him onto the floor, where Joseph found himself locked in mortal combat with a giant stag beetle. It was only at this moment he fully comprehended the fact that he himself was in fact a giant stag beetle. Still, he couldn't help putting that unfortunate other into a pincer movement, and repeatedly smashing his shiny black backside until they were both shuddering and squealing with their own, dissonant emotions. All in all, it was a fucking nightmare.

He passed out of the delirium the following day, waking up himself again, on the bamboo floor, well into the drudgery of a full recovery. He trekked back to base. It was all a terrible bother, and he could still hardly believe it really happened. Fucking unbelievable, he always said.

*****

Fucking unbelievable, he now thought bitterly. Just a vivid dream, of course so amazingly unbelievable it was soon entirely forgot. Yet now, here he was, a man made of a thousand birds (with no time to think).

*****

The two flocks met one another at high speed; something like a car crash without the blood or the screeching metal; two events colliding without prior knowledge of each other.

No, not colliding. Merging. Thousands would soon dance together (they all instinctively knew this). Like a cliff growing taller, stronger. Safer.

But no, not for Joseph, no merger (well, he always had been a lone wolf). It had already begun. A descent into juddered slow motion. A fall into black and white, into softness and quiet echoes. For him, a scattering. For him, dilution. For him: an unbelievable death.