The Bird Room Page 4

  She will be kind and quiet and sweet.

  She will fall in love with me, completely and suddenly.

  We will stay in bed all day with the curtains drawn and not get up, even if we really need to piss.

  I arrange to meet Will at a bar in the city. A few years ago, we’d be out for a drink every other night. Now I hardly see him. He has other friends – ‘art friends’, ‘contacts’ – these days.

  Walking in, it wasn’t yet dark and I felt shifty and awkward. I pulled up the hood of my coat. I expected to turn a corner and run into Peter from work or Simon or Clare or Allan. I expected to run into some wrong-turn of conversation, leading to why I’d not been in and how I’d been ‘under the weather’ or ‘not feeling up to things, recently’, and what’s been going on in the office, and when I’ll be back, etcetera.

  I’d shuffle around and look at the floor and lie at them until they’d gone.

  Or worse, my boss. Prowling the streets, with my number set to speed dial.

  I’ll not get a reference now.

  I get there late. Will’s sat in a booth at the back. He’s opposite a girl. They’re holding hands across the table. When he sees me, he waves. She turns round in her seat. She’s blonde. Her face is pointed and flickering in the candlelight. She looks nice. She smiles at me.

  Will gets up. We shake hands. With his free hand he claps me on the back. He has stolen this gesture from somewhere; I’ve not seen it before. His grip is strong, like someone’s dad’s. One of my fingers pops loudly at the knuckle.

  Will tries out new personality traits.

  I don’t think he knows he’s even doing it.

  For a few months last year he took to holding cigarettes between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

  ‘William, this is Katrina.’

  ‘Hello,’ she says to me, sounding shy, possibly East-European.

  She’s very pretty. Smooth skin, straight hair, her eyes a greeny-blue colour.

  ‘And Katrina, this is my good friend, William.’

  I curl my mouth into a smiling shape. I nod my head as if I’m agreeing with something. Katrina. I have nothing to say.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he says. ‘I’ll get the drinks.’

  He leaves us alone.

  I pull up a chair and wait for her to say the first thing.

  The next table over, someone starts telling a long involved joke.

  ‘So …’ says Katrina. ‘Will doesn’t tell me what you do.’

  I look over. Leant across the bar, he’s saying something directly into the barman’s ear, his shirt hanging out from under his jacket. If I dressed like that, I’d just look a mess. But somehow Will makes himself look stylishly dishevelled; purposefully ‘artistic’. I wonder if he spends time in front of the mirror messing up his clothes and buttoning his shirt in the wrong holes.

  ‘I’m … unemployed,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ says Katrina.

  ‘I just quit my job.’

  The joke reaches its punch line and the people at the next table begin to laugh.

  ‘You quit your job?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  Will sits back down. He puts a pint of lager in front of me. For him and Katrina, a second bottle of red wine. He starts to refill their glasses.

  ‘I was just telling Katrina here that I quit my job.’

  Will stops pouring the wine and stands the bottle on the table.

  ‘You quit your job?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  I take a big swig of my pint. On the walk over, I was planning on telling him some sort of elaborate lie. But instead I decide on the truth. I begin to tell him – to tell them both – how trapped and panicked I was feeling. About how sometimes I would go into cold sweats at the bus stop. How I have a bit of money saved up and how I don’t feel like I can fill out one more monotonous form or enter another ream of data into a spreadsheet or type up another six-page report for a very long time. I tell them I plan to reduce the things in my life, to find the small essential elements in it and just focus on those for a while. Finally, I tell them – as clichéd as it sounds – that I want to ‘start again from scratch’.

  Will gets excited. He says it sounds like something this artist, Tehching Hsieh, might do. He attempts to turn my decision into a piece of performance art and says I should document everything, keep a journal and take a photo of myself once a day.

  He’s a bit drunk. He’s showing off to Katrina.

  She listens quietly, her eyes lowered, fingering the stem of her wine glass.

  Later, when she’s gone to the toilet, he leans across the table and whispers in my ear, ‘I met her on the bus back from the airport. It’s her first time in England. She’s supposed to be staying with her cousin, but she spent last night at mine.’

  ‘Great,’ I say.

  ‘Not really. I might finish with her tonight. She doesn’t talk that much and she’s rubbish in bed.’

  Out in the street, Will hails a taxi. We’re all a bit drunk. He ushers Katrina into it, then beckons to me, offering me a lift home. I tell him I’ll walk.

  I stop for chips somewhere.

  I weave through the city centre, past groups of men 100x more pissed and violent than I am.

  I should go straight home, get into bed, pull the covers over my head and try to dream about that girl I’ll meet.

  But instead, I join the queue to a nightclub.

  The swing of the cab presses her close against me. It straightens from the turn but she doesn’t pull away. Her hand gropes for mine. She leans into me, heavy and vodka-smelling.

  ‘I don’t normally do this,’ she says.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Go home with strange men in taxis.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘You’re not strange, are you?’ she says into my coat.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I need to be looked after.’ She says this last bit abstractedly, almost to herself.

  She leans her head on my shoulder and closes her eyes. I think she’s gone to sleep, but then her hand untangles itself. It moves onto my thigh. Her head shifts from my shoulder. She bites my arm through my sleeve.

  Now the hand is massaging my crotch.

  It is working open the zip of my jeans.

  The zip sounds incredibly loud, even with the engine noise.

  I look at the driver and his eyes catch mine in the rear-view mirror. I can’t. Not now, not with him there. But the hand is curling around my dick. Her hair is falling into my lap.

  I check the mirror again. The driver winks at me.

  Very gently, I ease her up.

  ‘What? Whatsa matter?’

  She sounds slurred and dreamy.

  ‘Nothing. Shh. We’re almost there.’

  (This is a lie. We won’t be there for a few minutes yet.)

  I close my eyes and hug her. If I look again, he’ll be there in the mirror, winking.

  ‘Anywhere here’s fine,’ I say, trying to zip myself up without him seeing.

  He pulls up to the kerb and I hand him a tenner, telling him to keep the change, and bustle us out of the cab.

  The air is sharp. Suddenly I’m completely sober.

  ‘Which one’s yours?’ she asks, twirling on the pavement and looking up at the houses.

  A cat runs out from underneath a parked car.

  I drape my jacket over her shoulders.

  ‘It’s a walk from here,’ I say. ‘Fancied a bit of fresh air.’

  ‘Tell me a story,’ she says.

  So I start to tell her about me and what I used to do; my ex-job, my parents, my panic attacks and how something shifted inside me …

  But she’s no longer listening. She’s stopped to pick up an empty crisp packet and post it through a letterbox.

  Once we’re through my door, I give her the choice of tea or coffee or vodka. She chooses black coffee with vodka in. Maybe it�
�s just her drunkenness, but she seems more at home in my house than I am. The place is a mess of papers, clothes, plates and cans. I wasn’t planning on bringing anyone home tonight. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. My sheets are unwashed. I have no condoms. The bathroom is filthy. But she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s putting on music – Serge Gains-bourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, the last thing I listened to – and slinking around in the mess. She picks books off the floor to read the spines. She knocks nothing over.

  ‘You’re a …What are you again?’ she calls through.

  I’m a bit scared of her.

  In the kitchen, as the kettle comes to the boil, I take a big swig from the vodka bottle. I’m too sober and all I can think about is that winking taxi driver in the mirror. If I turn round, he’ll be there in the doorway, gawping at me.

  The vodka stings my ulcer.

  ‘I work from home,’ I say. ‘It’s pretty dull. You don’t want to know.’

  This is how we met. I was sat at a table in the club, not even able to peel the label off my £1 alcopop. I wasn’t dancing. I didn’t know why I’d come. And then a girl appeared. She’d been stood up, she said. I realise now how contrived that sounds. I guess it was. She contrived it. She approached me, asked if I was alone and sat down. (Maybe she was lying. But at the time, both of us piss-drunk, it seemed pretty plausible.) And I was left thinking, She has decided to like me, now I must decide to like her, too.

  So I sat there, squinting at her, trying hard to like her.

  It wasn’t hard.

  She’s very pretty.

  She has black hair cut just above the shoulder and black eyes and pitch white skin.

  She has crooked teeth and thin piano-y fingers.

  She dresses well.

  She’s confident.

  She’s smart.

  (I have no idea what she’s doing in my house.)

  We get up from the table and go to a corner of the club. She puts her arms around my neck and sucks the collar of my shirt. A man comes over and taps her on the shoulder. He’s thick-shouldered and brooding, his face in shadow. He goes away. She’s ignored him. We don’t dance. We just stay there in the corner until the lights come on. Out in the street she stands at the kerb with her arm sticking into the road, one corner of her skirt hitched up. She’s grinning at me. A taxi pulls over and I get into it, not knowing who she is, and then at some point I sober up.

  Now I’m standing in the kitchen of my house waiting for the kettle to boil and there’s a strange girl in my living room.

  ‘What do you do again?’ I call back.

  This one I know. I remember it from earlier.

  Everything is silent. Even the clock, ticking, is not making a noise.

  ‘I’m in eyes,’ she whispers.

  She’s snuck up behind me.

  ‘I work in an optician’s. It’s rubbish. I should quit.’

  I turn round. She’s taken off her clothes.

  Her eyes are wide and black. We aren’t using a condom. I didn’t ask if she’s on the pill. She isn’t blinking. She bites her lip. She’s so loud she has to, to stop the sound of her from escaping out of her mouth and going through the walls and into the ears of next door’s baby. Her eyes don’t close. Instead they widen. They widen and widen again and just keep widening, until I am painfully sober and painfully aware of her watching me, and that once this is over, even if I never see her again, she will be able to remember the face of me fucking her. Here she is, scratching my back and biting her lip and no sound is coming from her mouth except breathing and her eyes do not close but instead they widen and widen and widen, until impossible, until they are like huge black lenses recording me.

  Afterwards it’s warm and quiet. Blue, 5 a.m. light. We lie on top of the sheets with our legs tangled and I wonder what we’ll say when we wake up in the morning, hungover, not-drunk. Will we pretend it didn’t happen?

  (Maybe I ask the question out loud.)

  ‘I won’t regret this,’ she says.

  She’s almost asleep.

  ‘But sometimes I just need to do something and not think of the consequences.’

  I’ll lock the door, I think.

  (The door doesn’t have a lock.)

  Somehow I’ll trap us here.

  ‘Hold on,’ she says, suddenly awake and sitting up.

  This is it, I think. She’s leaving. She’s left. She’s gone into the street, naked. She’s disappeared.

  She leans across me, her head and arms doing something confusing over the side of the bed. I can hear the rattle and jingle of things in her handbag. She comes up holding a little plastic container, tilts her head forward and puts a finger to her eye, the left one, wiping it across the pupil.

  ‘See,’ she says, sticking the finger under my nose. ‘I almost forgot.’

  On the tip of her finger is a contact lens.

  ‘I don’t need these,’ she says. ‘I stole them from work. I just like putting things in my eyes.’

  This is the first time I’ve noticed the scar. It starts at the curve of her shoulder and curls down around her arm. It is a darker nastier blue than the rest of her 3.15 a.m. skin. It’s about six inches long.

  She’s asleep.

  I lean over her, close enough for my breath to shuffle the wispy little hairs on her skin. There are more scars, too; lighter ones that criss-cross down her arm. But this one is the biggest.

  I imagine a razor blade, a blot of blood on toilet paper and a locked bathroom door. I imagine other invisible scars that run underneath her skin. They shoot and crackle like a scar firework display.

  She moves sometimes when she sleeps. She hunches and starts, as if someone in her dream is poking her with a stick or catching her in a net. She makes noises, she moans, but so far she hasn’t woken up. Once she said something that sounded like ‘Darren’. This is the fourth time she’s slept in my bed. I really don’t think she’s going home now and I still don’t know where her home is. She has a toothbrush here, a big bag of clothes and today a couple more boxes.

  I lick the scar. It tastes of salt and shower gel.

  There is a glass girl in my bed. If I ask too many questions she will shatter. So I’ll wait for her to answer her own questions and in the meantime play join-the-freckles in the dark. Here are some of the freckles I have joined by myself, by not going to sleep:

  We went to the pub earlier – The Princess and Noose, my local – after she finished work. She asked what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You know, you can ask me anything you want,’ she said.

  (I don’t believe her.)

  ‘Ask me a question,’ she said.

  So I asked, ‘Would you like another drink?’

  She smiled and said, ‘Vodka and Coke.’

  Stood elbow-to-elbow with all the shifty old men at the bar, I had to stop myself from turning round and checking she was still at the table.

  Stop it, I told myself. Your luck has turned. Your luck has turned around on itself like an owl’s head. She is not going to run away from you, at least not this evening.

  Barry, one of the regulars, kept nudging me on the arm and asking who she was.

  ‘She’s my girlfriend,’ I told him.

  ‘About time, lad,’ he said. ‘We all had you pegged as a poof.’

  Across the table, she kept on smiling at me.

  (She looked very sad when she did it.)

  Each time I went for a piss, I expected to get back to that table and find she’d gone. There wouldn’t even be her drink there any more, and it would turn out to be some elaborate practical joke which everyone in the Noose is in on.

  ‘Fuck’s sake. What’s wrong?’ she says, suddenly, slamming her glass on the table for effect. Her lips curl at the edges. ‘Something’s up. Tell me.’

  But I don’t quite know how. I’m sitting on my hands, not even permitting myself a sip of my drink. If I do or say the wrong thing she will become a terrible accident. There are
hard wooden floors in this pub. She’ll shatter like a tower of toppled pint glasses, and everyone will cheer and look over, and even the fruit machines will stop rattling and blinking for a second.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, trying to get my hand out from under my arse by tugging at my jumper. ‘Don’t be such a coward.’

  And before I can stop myself, I’ve said it. I’ve told her that I’m scared to touch her in case I do it wrong and she doesn’t like it, and I’ve told her that I’m scared she will all of a sudden tell me to fuck off. I’ve told her how I feel like I need written permission before I can become comfortable enough with a person to know they won’t mind me.

  Her smile doesn’t go away.

  Her eyes don’t stop looking sad when she smiles.

  She doesn’t say anything either, but she reaches for her bag and searches around in it and takes out a till receipt. She asks if I have a pen, which I don’t. So she gets up and goes to the bar and comes back with a biro. She turns the till receipt over and writes something on the blank side. She chews her lip a bit as she writes. She hands the receipt to me. In curly black biro it reads:

  To whomever it may concern,

  I hereby give the bearer of this note

  written permission to do whatever the hell

  he likes to me and I promise I won’t mind.

  In fact, I’ll probably like it quite a lot.

  Very Sincerely,

  Alice Holborn

  After I read the note I stop sitting on my hands and take a big swig of my pint.