Lunch

Lunch

I T’S SUPPOSED TO

be a sausage-and-egg sandwich but the sandwich maker (or sandwich robot; I don’t know how sandwiches are made these days) has got the ratios disastrously wrong. It is nothing but slimy egg whites and cold, congealed ketchup.

‘That looks horrible.’ I look up, and there’s Bella.

‘It is turning my stomach,’ I agree, and she points to the spot on the bench beside me.

‘May I?’

‘You certainly may.’

Out of a Sainsbury’s bag, she pulls a ham-and-cheese roll and a barbecue-chicken wrap. ‘Want one?’ she asks.

We tuck into our sandwiches in companionable silence.

Pigeon Park is uncharacteristically quiet. A woman with a tiny fluffy dog walks past, and then a man who looks like he’s had a few too many heads in the direction of the Jewellery Quarter.

‘I realized,’ she says, ‘that I didn’t ask you your name.’

‘What do you think my name might be?’ I ask her, and

she grins and appraises me, takes in my beige cardigan, bow tie, grey slacks.

‘Ernest,’ she says.

‘Not far off, actually!’ I say. ‘It starts with an E

!’

‘Erving?’

‘Erving?’

‘You know, like Irving Layton. But with an E

.’

‘Do you like poetry?’

‘I like the good stuff,’ she says as she takes a big bite of her chicken wrap and a slime of lettuce slips out of the bottom and lands on her work slacks. ‘Balls,’ she says.

She unpins her name badge from her fleece and then pinches the fabric of her trousers and slides the safety pin in. Now midway through her thigh, her trousers declare that her name is Bella and she is a Sales Associate. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Nobody’ll notice now.’

A scruffy pigeon lands at our feet, his long neck inclined with interest at an old sandwich wrapper beneath our bench.

‘Here,’ I offer him a quarter of my unwanted sandwich and he takes it in his beak and flaps away in case I am about to rescind the offer. Within seconds, three or four grey pigeons and a white and brown fella descend on him and an intense tug of war for the crust begins.

‘How are you?’ I ask Bella. ‘I bet everyone is always asking that.’

‘They did at first,’ she says. ‘Not so much now. My mum keeps saying I need to get back on track

.’

‘On track?’

‘Stop working in Sainsbury’s. Use my degree.’

‘Perhaps she’s right.’

‘I don’t want to do anything,’ she says, watching the melee of pigeons fighting over the egg-white sandwich.

‘Then it is not a career change that you need,’ I say to Bella. ‘But a little fun.’