Where Pigeons Don't Fly

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As the train moved out of Liverpool Street station at sunset on that mild July day in 2007 and headed north towards the coastal town of Great Yarmouth, Fahd al-Safeelawi felt happy.

He had granted himself a two-day break from his exhausting job at the print and copy shop in order to wander the streets and parks of London, taking up residence in a modest hotel in Queensway near Hyde Park. He had frequented a small Lebanese restaurant where he tasted white rice again after a long abstinence and an unassuming Iranian place where the tubes from shisha pipes crept like serpents between the cane chairs scattered about the entrance. He had discovered a little pub with a wonderful Victorian atmosphere called The Happy Lion and spent his time roaming between Oxford Street and Trafalgar Square and sitting in new bars and cafés down by the river near London Bridge.

Once inside the carriage he found a seat by a table on which he placed the backpack that had become part of his body and from its side-pocket pulled out a bottle of water and a box of Panadol Extra bought from a chemist’s on Edgware Road. He pushed a tablet to the back of his throat, followed it with a swig of water, then did it again. From the bottom of the bag he took out The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey, a novel about the relationship between Gustav Klimt and his young lover, Emilie, whose name Klimt had uttered as he died. Grown old, Emilie looks back over her life, from when she was a twelve-year-old schoolgirl taking art lessons from Klimt to the moment she moved his paintings from Vienna to the Austrian countryside.

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