Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online

Queensland or in Florida but in London. You feel there should be superstitions associated with such an event. When a pelican crosses your path on Boxing Day it means you’re going to go on a long journey, or inherit a fortune, or lose your heart to a beautiful feathery white woman with a big mouth and an inordinate appetite for fish. Unless pelicans materialise vengefully on Boxing Day in a spirit of bird solidarity with the turkey you stuffed and ate the day before. When a pelican crosses your path on foot on Boxing Day you know that the next time you gorge on flightless fowl you’ll choke on it.
    Whatever the auguries, I was out strolling in St James’s Park with my wife, enjoying the wintry sunshine, relieved to be walking off the previous day’s excesses, when a pelican cut across us. We were approaching the Blue Bridge in a westerly direction, and he was approaching it in a easterly direction, on foot, as though he’d just come from the Palace. Since he wasn’t going to pause, we did, allowing him to get on to the bridge without obstruction. It is a strange experience meeting a pelican, pedestrian to pedestrian, and it must have been even stranger for those already on the bridge observing him coming towards them. You don’t expect to meet a pelican on a bridge.
    In fact, I know this pelican. He’s the sociable one who sometimes joins you on a bench in St James’s Park and tries to eat your mobile phone while you’re filming him with it – though I’m sure he does that only because he knows it makes a better photograph. Even by pelican standards he has a piercing eye and a wonderfully Italianate beak, all distressed umbers and citric yellows and patina’d verdigris. He also has more pink in his feathers than you expect of a white pelican – as though a flamingo long ago sneaked in between one of his forebears’ sheets. Some consciousness of his individually fine deportment, despite the inherited absurd appearance of his species, must explain his conviviality. Food has nothing to do with it. He perambulates more like a human than a bird, in order to be seen and admired.
    It is, in general, a wonderful thing to run into any of the large birds as long as they don’t mean ill by you. You wouldn’t want to find yourself alone on a bridge with a cassowary, for example, on account of his penchant for ripping out your stomach with his big toe. And even the most flirtatiously feather-boa’d emu always looks as though she will turn on you if you read her signals wrong. But there is something benign about a pelican. On his own territory, fishing on a lonely beach or sitting folded and uncomfortable, as though buggered, on a pole, he will cast an idle but protective eye your way. They say a dolphin will save a swimmer who gets into trouble in the water, but a pelican offers more existential assistance. He teaches the virtue of imperturbability and absurdism. On our territory, however, that something benign about him is increased a hundredfold. Have a pelican amble towards you in St James’s Park and you believe a kindly hand is ordering the universe after all.
    There wasn’t anyone on that bridge, no matter what language they spoke, no matter what kind of Christmas Day they’d had, who didn’t laugh to see him. Though he is a show-off and even a bit of a bully when it comes to right of way, he inspires, in humans at least, an unconditional joy.
    So why is that? Because he is out of place, partly. Because we don’t expect to see a pelican strolling through the park on Boxing Day as though he too needs to walk off a heavy dinner from the day before. And because, though he chooses our company, he comes from a world we can’t begin to understand. But most of all, I think, because he isn’t beautiful. He is grand but it is the grandeur, as it were, of adversity overcome. Fancy managing to look good when you have all that extraneous bulk and