The Bird Room Read online

  My head is filled to bursting with other people’s amateur ex-girlfriends.

  She’s slouched on a sofa next to another girl. They spot me and Alice gives a loose-wristed wave. They’re both drunk off the 6 o’clock cocktail happy hour.

  It’s just gone seven, so I buy a pint and swig it quickly, trying to catch up.

  I’m introduced. William, this is Lauren. Lauren also works at the optician’s. Lauren thinks working at the optician’s is rubbish, too. Lauren wonders what you do for a living.

  ‘I work from home,’ I tell her.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Lauren says, raising her eyebrow. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘It’s really dull,’ I say. ‘You wouldn’t want to know.’

  ‘Try me,’ Lauren says.

  So I say that I do something with ‘systems’ – trying to drop in vague technical words like ‘protocol’ and ‘analysis’ and ‘statistics’.

  Lauren furrows her brow. Something doesn’t sound quite right about this. Something doesn’t add up, and Lauren can’t put her finger on it.

  ‘How was your day?’ I ask Alice, trying to change the subject, putting my hand on her knee and rubbing it, feeling the static-y friction of my thumb against her tights, trying to act normal but feeling way too conscious that everything I’m doing is an act.

  Lauren’s still looking.

  Lauren will not stop looking at me.

  Lauren thinks I’m a liar, a dirty perv.

  It’s written all over my face. It’s obvious what I did all day.

  And Lauren will tell Alice this the next time they’re alone – the next time they go off to the toilets, maybe – she’ll tell Alice what I really did with my afternoon and Alice will freak out and leave me.

  At eight the bar starts filling up. Big blokes in Ted Baker shirts. Shaved heads. Ibiza tans.

  Alice kisses me, forcing her tongue into my mouth. She tastes of Seabreeze. Her teeth are as cold as crushed ice.

  I open my eyes for a second and Lauren’s staring at us. She looks uncomfortable.

  Once we’ve finished, Lauren makes a show of looking at the clock, at her mobile and suddenly remembering something.

  ‘Oh god,’ she says, ‘I’d better shoot …’ standing up with half her cocktail still on the table.

  ‘Alright,’ Alice says, smiling. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Before Lauren’s even out the door, Alice has taken my hand and put it under her top. She’s not wearing a bra. She buries her head in the crook of my neck and mumbles something.

  She gets like this, usually once she’s had a few. She gets turned on, I think, by the idea of people watching.

  I accidentally gaze into the black piss-hole eyes of a bloke at the bar.

  He doesn’t blink.

  I look away, but I can still feel him there, staring at me.

  It feels like everyone in the bar – everyone in the world – is looking.

  I feel sick and cold.

  She’s almost sitting on my lap.

  She’s winding herself around me, kissing my neck and tonguing my Adam’s apple.

  ‘Get a room!’ the bloke at the bar shouts and a few people cheer in agreement.

  So, after one last vodka shot, we do. We take a taxi home and I have to help her out of it. She slings her arm across my shoulder and leans in heavily.

  I walk her to the bathroom.

  She locks herself in.

  ‘You alright?’ I call through the door after a while.

  Inside I can hear crying.

  I switch on the telly.

  I turn it up.

  She comes out and sits next to me on the sofa. I turn down the telly. She leans her head against my shoulder, smelling of soap, her eyes red and raw. I put my arm around her. We watch a news story about Third World debt. My hand is near her boob. She sniffs. I reach down and cup it in my palm, feeling its sad quiet weight.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, so I drop it.

  It isn’t her, but it’s close. She smiles at you. Her teeth are neat. They are bleached a high-contrast white. She shakes the hair out of her eyes. She is moving slowly, sliding a bra strap delicately off her shoulder. Her eyes are wide and black. She isn’t nervous. There is no sound except your breathing. Off slides the other strap. This isn’t her. It isn’t. But it’s the closest yet. She licks her lips and laughs to herself. Then she reaches behind her back, unclasps the bra and holds it to her breasts. She pouts like a Marilyn Monroe photocopy. She moves closer, smiles again and lets the …

  She freezes. Frantically, you click on the next file. You’re fumbling because the mouse is in your left hand. Four in the afternoon. The curtains are drawn. The room smells warm and musty. A toilet roll stands next to the computer.

  … bra fall to the floor. You lean up close to the screen and squint. Her nipples are too small. They’re a pinky-red colour. She takes them in her fingertips and pinches. She giggles silently. The camera moves down her belly. Her fingers follow it towards her knickers. She hooks her thumbs under the strip of flimsy black elastic and wiggles, rubbing her thighs together. You can see fine down on her skin. There is no chicken-leg birthmark on her thigh, though, and no mole next to her belly button. She bends forward as she slides off the knickers, the top of her head obscuring …

  Again, she stops. You grope for a wad of toilet paper with your non-mouse hand. Was that the letterbox in the hall? Quickly, you check the curtains for gaps. It’s just the free paper, the paperboy walking back down the path. Alice won’t be home for another hour yet. So you click on clip three (which is all Virgin British Beavers will give you without a credit card).

  … the view. She steps out of her knickers and sits back on the bed. The camera moves between her thighs. You inch your nose up against the screen. Her pubic hair is black. It’s clipped. Her lips are shaved. She prises them apart with shiny lacquer-pink nails and sinks in a middle finger. The screen is warm. It buzzes against the tip of your nose and up this close she pixellates and distorts. She begins to look like a game of Tetris. So you pull your head away again, just enough, but wish you could force it past the plastic and into the volcanic red of her cunt.

  Alice, Alice, Alice, you think, as your eyes close, and the curtains and the free paper and the headache are swallowed in a warm, swelling, consuming nothing.

  I button my jeans and stand. My spine crackles. I open the curtains and have a look into the street. An old bloke stands at the end of our path, waiting for his dog to finish crapping on the pavement.

  In the bathroom, I try to piss without catching the reflection of my red-raw, semi-erect dick in the mirror. This is impossible. The mirror faces you. It confronts you. It is a gaping glass eye, streaked with stray toothpaste spittle and the wet flicks of her hair from drying. It sits just next to the toilet, reflecting me. Pissing should be enough, surely? Pissing and shitting and being an animal should be enough without having to watch yourself as you do it. The mirror was there when I moved in. It has something to do with feng shui, Alice reckons.

  My dick looks how I imagine a bloated drowned body might look.

  I take down the mirror and carry it into the yard. I lean it against the wall, the one where the child of a previous tenant drew a Ninja Turtle in chalk. I stand back to admire my work. That’s more like it. Let nature have its stupid cock reflected back at it. See how the leaves and slugs and bottle tops like it for a change.

  I do nothing the rest of the day.

  I watch TV.

  I eat Rich Tea biscuits.

  I am repeatedly haunted by the image of a blonde girl fucking herself with a shoe.

  At a quarter to six Alice gets home from work.

  ‘Good day?’ I call over my shoulder.

  She doesn’t answer. She takes off her coat, steps out of her boots and goes into the bathroom.

  After a pause, the toilet flushes.

  ‘Where’s the mirror gone?’ she says.

  ‘It’s in the yard,’ I say. ‘I put it there.’

  I
wait for her to ask why.

  I almost want her to ask why.

  (I don’t know what I’ll say if she does.)

  But she just puts on her boots, goes into the yard and carries it back to the bathroom.

  In bed we listen to one of Alice’s CDs. Some sort of electronica. She’s leafing through a fashion magazine which is about 80 per cent adverts. I’m watching the pages turn from the corner of my eye.

  ‘Hold on,’ I say, laying my palm flat across the magazine.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  I lean over, pretending to take a closer look at a redheaded model in a photo shoot.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, letting go of the magazine. ‘Just looked a bit like someone I knew.’

  I wait.

  The silence swells around us.

  ‘Like who?’ she says eventually.

  ‘Oh, just some girl I used to go out with.’

  ‘Right,’ says Alice and turns the page. She starts to read an article on celebrity collagen injections.

  Is that it? ‘Right’, as if she didn’t believe me? Why shouldn’t I have an ex somewhere who looks a bit like the girl in her magazine?

  I had a whole relationship planned, ready to tell her; a girl I met at an old job – Carol – who ended up moving to London. We lived together for almost a year and then things finished amicably. It was her job, not me, that made her unhappy and caused the move. We tried things long-distance for a bit, but it didn’t work out. We’re still friends but have kind of lost touch.

  ‘Carol,’ I say, out loud.

  ‘What?’ she says, looking up from the article.

  ‘Carol. That was the girl’s name. The one I went out with.’

  ‘Great,’ she says.

  I leave a dramatic pause.

  ‘We used to live together for a bit.’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘And then she had to move to London.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘I’m still in touch with her.’ Alice has closed the magazine. ‘But not like that. Just as friends.’

  She flips off the covers and gets out of bed.

  She walks out of the room. I think she’s going to the toilet, but then I hear the sound of her walking down the stairs and across the hall and into the kitchen. I wait for a running tap or the clink of a plate on the countertop.

  Nothing.

  I wait a long time.

  Still nothing.

  Alice is down there in the kitchen, probably sat at the table with her head in her hands, hating Carol, seeing images of me and her in bed together, at the park, laughing, kissing, sharing an ice-cream …

  Carol, fucking Carol, Alice is thinking, biting her lip and wringing her hands and wanting to smash Carol’s knees and stick hot pins in her eyes.

  I am something worth getting jealous over, I think.

  I’ve won.

  Alice is definitely in love with me.

  Will calls round unexpectedly. Three in the afternoon. Alice is at work. I’m upstairs in the empty second bedroom, using the computer. The screen is full of pop-up windows. [Teen Sex Fiesta] [Housewife Pool Party] When I try to close them, more appear in their place. I’m peering down from a crack in the curtains. Will rings the doorbell a second time. I wait for him to go away. But Will is persistent. He steps back. He looks up at the window. He spots me and waves.

  I turn off the monitor and walk down the stairs, feeling shifty and sore-eyed.

  ‘Just wanted to see how your new life was going,’ he says when I open the door.

  I lead him through to the living room.

  He sits down on the sofa and starts rolling a fag.

  ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘It’s going fine.’ [Abigail’s Fuck Playground] ‘Drink?’

  ‘Can’t stop,’ he says. ‘Meeting some bloke in town in a minute. Might have another exhibition lined up.’

  ‘How’s Katrina?’ I say. [Hardcore Ass Fest]

  ‘Who?’ he says.

  ‘The girl you introduced me to the other week.’

  ‘Oh, Katrina,’ he says, pronouncing it differently. ‘Don’t ask.’

  So I don’t.

  Will lights his roll-up and looks around for an ashtray. He spots something of Alice’s, a CD on the coffee table.

  ‘Since when did you start liking Erasure?’ he says.

  ‘They’re alright,’ I lie.

  He picks up a half-empty mug of tea and taps his ash into it. He puts it down by his foot.

  ‘It smells different in here,’ he says, raising an eyebrow and looking around the room.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘And it’s tidier, too.’

  Then he notices a pair of Alice’s trainers under the coffee table.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘Are you seeing someone?’

  ‘Why do you make it sound so unbelievable?’ I say. [Horny Midwives, Now Online!]

  ‘Because in the however-many years I’ve known you, you’ve never seen anyone.’

  ‘Well, now I am.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he says again, smiling and shaking his head.

  He drops his fag end into the mug.

  ‘You’ll have to introduce us sometime,’ he says, standing.

  I walk him out to the [One Hundred Free Snatch Movies] door.

  ‘Will,’ I say. ‘If you do ever meet her, don’t mention that I’m unemployed, okay? I kind of told her I work from home.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ he says, not really listening. ‘Before I forget … The other reason I came round … Is there any chance you could water my plants one day next week? I’m off to Paris for a bit, you see. Some exhibition thing. The old bint from next door was lined up to do it, but she died last night.’

  He hands me a key.

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ he says and walks off down the path.

  The phone is ringing in the hall. The phone hardly ever rings now. I’m in the living room, watching telly. Alice is in the kitchen. It’s her turn to cook.

  The phone is nearer to the kitchen than it is to the living room.

  It might just be cold-calling, but it might be someone from my old job.

  It might be my boss.

  I pick up on the third ring.

  ‘Hello, William.’

  It’s my parents.

  ‘We’ve put you on speakerphone.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say, speaking as quietly as I can, pressing the receiver against my mouth.

  Alice comes to the doorway, holding a wooden spoon. She watches me for a second, then goes back into the kitchen.

  ‘How’s things?’ says my mum.

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘How’s work?’ says my dad.

  ‘Not bad.’

  I’ve not told them about leaving my job or about Alice.

  If I tell them about the job, I’ll become a disappointment; immature and irresponsible, a child still.

  If I tell them about Alice, they’ll ask about her every time they call. They’ll want to meet her. And if Alice leaves – if I scare her away somehow – it will be like all the other girls I’ve mentioned to them; the ones I did scare off, the ones I had to pretend I was still seeing for months afterwards.

  So I answer their questions in monosyllables, telling them pretty much nothing, just that I’m tired, that work is ‘quite demanding’ at the moment and that I really have very little to report. I keep my voice low, hoping it doesn’t carry through to the kitchen.

  When I hang up, Alice reappears in the doorway.

  ‘Who was that?’ she says.

  ‘My friend, Will,’ I say.

  ‘Two Wills, eh?’ she says. ‘I thought you didn’t have any friends.’

  We had a not-exactly-argument the other night, about how we never go out or do anything or meet anyone new. I told her that the way my job worked, I hardly met anyone at all. I told her I’d lost touch with all my old friends. I said I was quite happy to do somet
hing with her friends if she wanted; have them over to dinner, maybe. She said all the people at the optician’s were twats.

  ‘He’s been out of the country for a while,’ I say.

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s an artist.’

  Will’s still out of the country. He gets back later this week. (I’ve not watered his plants yet.) I imagine them meeting. Will laying on the charm. Alice disliking him. The bus ride home afterwards. ‘That friend of yours was a bit of a smarmy prick, wasn’t he?’ I’ll introduce them.

  By meeting Will, I think, Alice might love me even more.

  Will’s house smells of roll-ups and aftershave. I water his plants from a chipped tea-stained Ghostbusters 2 mug. The only plants I can find downstairs are a wilting rubber plant in the living room and a tall spindly thing in the kitchen which looks dead already. It has fairy lights wrapped around its branches. I pour extra water into the pot, imagining Will getting electrocuted the next time he turns it on.

  Bird paintings are hanging in the living room.

  In the hall, a series of female nudes.

  I look closely at the face of one of them, at the crude black lines of her cheeks and neck, the rough swirls and dots of her eyes. Even reduced to a few brush-strokes, she looks familiar; most likely one of the hundred girls Will’s introduced me to in the past. I guess I still find it hard to take him seriously as an artist – I can remember us getting pissed on cheap cider in the car park behind his house, sixteen years old. Back then, Will wanted to be a singer. He wanted to be Nick Cave. He had this ridiculous messed-up haircut, and he used to talk incessantly about how, if he started a band, he’d be ‘swimming in pussy’. Then he did alright at college, went off to Glasgow and came back an artist.

  I go upstairs. I’ve never been upstairs in this house before.

  No plants in the bedroom. Just a bed, a dresser, a full-length mirror and clothes all over the floor. A tiger-print bedspread. On the bedside table, a full ashtray, an empty bottle of wine and a dog-eared copy of Mr Nice by Howard Marks.

  No plants in the bathroom, either.