The Plumber’s Paranoia: When Lady Gaga and Her Feathered Army Came to Paddington
Enzo was a man who had seen things. He had fixed pipes in the most hostile environments known to humanity. He had crawled through crawl spaces inhabited by spiders the size of dinner plates. He had confronted burst mains that could flood a suburb in minutes. But nothing—absolutely nothing—had prepared him for the day he became convinced that Lady Gaga was hunting him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumber
It started innocently enough. Enzo, a third-generation plumber of Italian descent who had emigrated to Australia as a young man, was enjoying a quiet lunch on the steps of his van in Paddington. He had his thermos of tea, his meat pie, and his usual avian audience—a flock of Rainbow Lorikeets that had taken to perching on the power lines above him, chattering away in their unmistakable, piercing screech. He called them his “little critics.” They watched him work, chirping what he imagined were judgments about his pipe-welding technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosella
Enzo had spoken to the birds for years. It was a harmless habit. He told them about his day, about the difficult jobs, about the weather. They screeched back. It was a relationship built on mutual indifference.
But that morning, something was different.
Enzo had just finished a particularly tricky repair on a heritage-listed terrace when he looked up and saw a woman standing across the street. She was tall, blonde, and wearing something that could only be described as a “mechanical butterfly.” A large, brimmed hat obscured most of her face, but Enzo could feel her eyes on him. She was staring—not at him, exactly, but at the lorikeets. And the lorikeets were staring back.
[Menu]
“Strange woman,” Enzo muttered in Italian. “Probably a tourist.”
He packed up his tools and drove home. That night, he dreamed of lorikeets. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They were flying in formation, swooping down in coordinated attacks, their rainbow feathers glinting like warning lights. And riding at the front of the flock, like some kind of avian general, was the woman in the mechanical butterfly hat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Gaga
He woke in a cold sweat.
Over the next week, Enzo’s paranoia grew. Everywhere he went, he saw birds. Not just lorikeets, but Crimson Rosellas, Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, and King-Parrots. They watched him from trees, from power lines, from the roofs of houses. They followed his van. They perched on his windscreen wipers and stared at him with their unblinking, beady eyes.
And then, the sightings began.
The blonde woman appeared again. This time, she was in Glebe. Enzo was fixing a kitchen sink when he glanced out the window and saw her standing in the garden, surrounded by a ring of King-Parrots. She was pointing at him. The parrots were nodding.
“Okay,” Enzo told himself. “This is… this is fine. She’s just a bird enthusiast. A very… unsettling bird enthusiast.”
But it kept happening. A flash of blonde hair in the reflection of a window. A glimpse of a bizarre hat behind a hedge. A hauntingly familiar silhouette on a distant balcony, silhouetted against the sunset, accompanied by the unmistakable silhouette of a very large bird perched on her shoulder.
Then came the kangaroo.
Enzo was driving through a quiet residential street when a massive Eastern Grey Kangaroo bounded out of a side alley and landed directly in front of his van. Enzo slammed on the brakes. The kangaroo stared at him. Not with the distant, vacant gaze of a wild animal, but with something that looked almost… purposeful. Intentional.
And perched on the kangaroo’s back, gripping its fur like a tiny cowboy, was a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo.
“You’re not real,” Enzo whispered to himself. “This is a stress dream. I’ve been working too hard.”
But the kangaroo didn’t disappear. It hopped alongside the van for two full blocks, the cockatoo screeching what sounded suspiciously like a command, before finally veering off into a park.
Enzo drove home and locked all the doors.
His Italian wife, Francesca, found him sitting in the dark, clutching a pipe wrench.
“Enzo,” she said gently. “What is wrong with you?”
“There’s a woman,” Enzo said. “A famous woman. I think she’s an opera singer. Or maybe a pop star. She wears strange clothes. And she has… powers.”
Francesca raised an eyebrow.
“Over the birds,” Enzo continued. “She controls them. She’s been following me. And now she has the kangaroo. The big one. The one with the cockatoo on its back.”
Francesca sighed. She had seen his iPhone search history. It was full of queries like “Lady Gaga birds connection,” “Lady Gaga kangaroo,” and “is Lady Gaga Australian animal whisperer.” She had also found his half-finished email to the Sydney Morning Herald:
To Whom It May Concern: I am being stalked by Lady Gaga and her army of winged creatures. Please help. I have photographic evidence.
“This is from a music video,” Francesca said, holding up his phone. “That music video she made with the birds. Remember? You showed it to me last week.”
Enzo shook his head frantically. “No, no, no. That’s what she wants you to think. It’s a cover. A smokescreen. She’s been following me for months. She knows I’ve been talking to the lorikeets. She’s… she’s recruiting them.”
Francesca pinched the bridge of her nose. “Enzo. She’s a pop star. She’s here for a concert. She has better things to do than recruit lorikeets.”
But Enzo wasn’t listening. He had seen the lorikeets circling the house, their screeches forming what sounded like a melody. The same melody. A low, humming tune that reminded him, somehow, of a song he had almost written with a blonde woman in a café a year ago.
“They’re learning the song,” he whispered. “They’re going to sing it back to her. It’s a signal. A summons.”
The next day, Enzo took a sick day for the first time in twenty years. He stayed home, boarded up the windows, and refused to leave the bedroom. Francesca, exasperated but loving, brought him pasta and tried to calm his fears.
But at 3:00 PM, there was a knock at the door.
Enzo froze.
“I’ll get it,” Francesca said.
“No!” Enzo screamed. “Don’t open the door! It’s the birds! They’ve come to take me!”
Francesca opened the door anyway. Standing on the doorstep was a woman with platinum blonde hair and a fedora, accompanied by a single Crimson Rosella perched on a tree branch behind her. She smiled warmly.
“Buongiorno,” the woman said in perfect Italian. “Is Enzo here? I’ve been looking for him.”
Enzo, hearing the voice, bolted upright. He knew that voice. It was the same voice he had spoken with in fluent Italian about pipes and lorikeets and the poetry of pressure. It was the voice of the most famous woman on earth. The woman who had somehow, impossibly, tracked him down.
He peered through the blinds. She was holding a notebook. On the notebook, written in what looked like bird droppings arranged into letters, were the words:
“Finish the song. The birds need the finale.”
Enzo collapsed onto the bed. He was being chased not by a pop star, but by an army of Australian wildlife, all of them demanding a musical resolution. The lorikeets wanted a bridge. The cockatoos wanted a key change. The kangaroo, apparently, wanted to produce.
He turned to Francesca. His voice was hoarse.
“Tell her,” he whispered. “Tell her I’ll write the damn song. But I need to save the Rosellas first. It’s part of the deal.”
Francesca smiled and walked to the door.
Outside, the woman in the fedora nodded. “I’ve got his rhythm,” she said. “Tell him the Rosellas are fine. But the lorikeets… they’re getting restless. He’s got a week.”
And with that, she vanished into the afternoon, leaving behind only the echo of a melody and a single fallen feather from a Crimson Rosella.