217 Babel Street | Apartment 15
A herring gull outside the window, half-still in the draught.
Julietta stands in her flat watching it hang in the air. A seagull turns the air underneath it solid.
Such remarkable birds, gulls. They thrive everywhere, on land, in air, on water, under water. Salt water, fresh water, they don't mind. They have these glands under their eyes that flush the salt from their systems through holes in their bill.
As she's considering that remembered fact, turning the evolutionary miracle of it over in her head, the gull seems to glance at her, standing at the window, and then away again, as if it has found nothing of interest, nothing of consequence.
She read once that at Sellafield they shoot seagulls. Local people are worried they'll carry the radiation away, so they employ sharp-shooters to slaughter the birds that land on the building. And because the birds might have possibly been riddled by the alpha, beta, and gamma rays, the dead ones become radioactive waste, so they can't just chuck them away. They have a big freezer there. It's full of hundreds and hundreds of dead seagulls. They're not sure what to do with them.
That's so terribly sad, isn't it?
Tom Carson hasn't been at work for two days now. Julietta overheard someone say he phoned in sick. She'd like very much to call him but he never left her his phone number.