The Gatwick Bagger

Clive’s tenth year as Gatwick Airport’s B.A.S.H. specialist was fast approaching — and there was a celebration in the offing, with chat of vol-au-vents and crudités. 

Yet as he fished through the guts of this expired Great White Egret, blown to pap by a 737 to Corfu, he wondered whether all this toil had really been worth it, and whether, ultimately, he was happy with his lot in life. 

Clive had stumbled into the birdstrike game, following a short but tumultuous stint as a trainee snake milker for the New Forest Reptile Centre down in Hampshire in the South of England. By reputation, the Vipera Berus is a docile creature — shy, retiring, timid — but by God did they take against Clive, whose first and only day was marked by a series of brutal skirmishes, and not one milked ophidian. 

So off he went — first to the hospital, and then to the Job Centre, where an advert for a “quick learner with experience working with animals” caught his swollen eye. He applied, and got the gig. And so it was off to Crawley to get trained up in the ancient art of scraping burst birds off of Boeings.

B.A.S.H. stands for “Bird Air Strike Hazard”, and Clive’s role involved inspecting and, ideally, preventing, the collision of metal with feathered birds in Gatwick’s airspace. Well, in the end it comprised this; early on, he was what’s known as a “bagger”, or sometimes just “the bag”, whose job it was to follow the B.A.S.H. operative with a black bin-bag for the birdbits. If the specimen was intact enough, “the bag” would go on to deposit the carcass in deep freeze for later inspection and dissection. More often than not, though, the bird was a bin-job. 

Early on, Clive had enjoyed the camaraderie amongst The Bash Street Kids (a self-appointed nickname), and had found the cut and thrust of concourse life exhilarating: they even had a van with a flashing light and a siren. But as the years passed, things changed: retirements, injuries and budget cuts saw the team dwindle, and, before long, Clive himself was being tapped up for the top job — a prospect which ran exactly counter to his long-held conviction to shirk any and all responsibility. 

After the cuts, Clive’s role as Chief B.A.S.H. Operative involved heading up a measly two-person team: Clive himself and an oily young twerp called Dave Plimsole, who pronounced Clive as “Clife” and who once came to work with his trousers on back to front. Perhaps more pressingly, this promotion also meant that Clive was in charge not only of “Runway Hygiene” but also “Birdstrike Prevention” — a far more demanding role which necessitated management meetings and monthly status updates, as well as the ability to identify vole parts in recently thawed bird stomachs.

Dissection was needed, so the higher-ups told Clive, in order to determine whether birds and other critters were being drawn to Gatwick in search of food; the idea being that if they could ward off the prey, then perhaps the predators would follow. But Clive hated dissection, and in all honesty, he would rather see a passenger jet downed by a wood pigeon than be forced to ferret through the contents of another acrid pink balloon.

Despite all this, though, on he’d gone, sighing and hawing, year after year, stomach after stomach, logging contents and typing up reports, staring into the abyss. 

~

“Nothing to be done,” thought Clive to himself, splaying open the egret’s cloaca with thumb and forefinger. “I hope the vol-au-vents are good, at least.”

“OK, this one’s clear.” 

“Right you are, Clife,” said Dave, ticking off the paperwork. “Anything else for today? Or will I sling this one in the bin?”

“No, that’s it. Finish up here and you can head off for the night.”

Clive watched as Dave scooped the egret’s remains into a garden waste bag and began to wipe down and disinfect the stainless-steel worktops. He noticed for the first time the purposeful, well-practiced way in which Dave went about his work — the quiet, deliberative actions, rehearsed and repeated for years — and it made Clive feel sad deep within his bones: an aching, swingeing sadness, like grief. 

“Dave?”

“Yes, Clife?”

“Do you ever wonder what all of this is for?” Clive gestured to the refuse sack, the scalpels and forceps, the blunt-force instruments for smashing open ribcages. 

“No,” replied Dave. “Not really, anyway — what do you mean?” He thought for a moment in silence. “To save lives, I guess. To make things safer? Anyway — I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Dave picked up his coat and left Clive alone in the dissection room, together with the dead egret which he’d forgotten to remove. He listened as Dave’s footsteps receded into silence down the corridor, until all he could hear was the dull buzz of the chest freezers, full of all those petrified, gawking birds. 

“To make things safer?” Clive thought to himself, untying the bin-bag and staring at the tangled mess of feathers and bone, the twisted yellow beak. “To save lives?”

“Ten years,” said Clive to the egret. “A full decade — how do you like that?”

He refastened the zip-ties and headed out to the bins to dispose of the specimen. It was a cold autumn night, and perfectly still, save for the tremoring jets coursing overheard. Clive slid open the lid and tossed in the bird; as he did so, he heard from inside the office the dull monotone of the automated B.A.S.H. alert system, indicating a fresh strike, a further casualty.

“Poor bastard,” said Clive to himself, sliding shut the lid and turning back to the door from which he’d just come. “Poor, poor bastard.”

(November 2021)