The Bird Room

by Chris Killen

  I go into the final room. Will’s studio. Canvases and bits of wood rest against the walls. The floor is covered with a paint-flecked old sheet which is taped to the carpet. An empty easel stands in the middle of the room. By the window is a desk with a laptop and a cheap stereo on it.

  I sit down.

  I turn on Will’s computer.

  He has a photograph of Anna Karina as his desktop.

  I go to ‘My Computer’.

  I double-click.

  I open ‘My Documents’.

  I open ‘My Pictures’.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting to find.

  The window fills with folders. They’re not named, just dated. I open the first one: ‘09/01/07’.

  A photo of Will, stood in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom. He holds a digital camera in one hand. His shirt is unbuttoned a bit, so you can see wisps of his scraggly chest hair. He looks into the lens, his head tilted and one eyebrow raised.

  I click ‘Next’.

  Will, again, now with his shirt completely unbuttoned. His non-camera hand rests, posed, on his hip. His mouth is curled into a snarl, showing off his yellowed wonky teeth. It looks like he’s swept his hair back with his hand between photos.

  ‘Next’.

  Will, with his top off, leaning back on the bed. His flies are unzipped, his belt unbuckled, black hair curling in a line over his beer gut. He’s thrust his legs wide apart and he’s stroking his chest with his free hand like he thinks he’s in a Prince video or something. His chest looks like it’s been oiled. I squint at the picture and make out a bottle of baby lotion lying on the tiger-print bedspread behind him. His mouth is open, his tongue flopping out ‘seductively’.

  Christ.

  I turn off the computer and stand up, feeling like he could walk in at any moment.

  On my way out, I leave a note on the kitchen table:

  Will,

  Plants watered. Give us a ring when you get back. Alice would really like to meet you.

  Will

  The bathroom is bare. A stark cold white. There is nothing in this bathroom – absolutely piss-all – that gives the impression a man uses it, ever, has even used it the once. There’s no towel, for instance.

  So how does he dry himself?

  Helen imagines he must get out of the shower and just sort of stand there. Or he doesn’t dry himself at all and just puts his clothes on still wet. This leads Helen to imagine his naked body. Slight and pale, she imagines. All ribs and goosebumps. A long thin cock with wiry black hair.

  There is no mirror.

  She pulls up her skirt and sits down. Her eyes drift around the room.

  There is no toothbrush or toothpaste by the sink, just the remains of a moth, its wings stuck to the porcelain.

  If his teeth had been bad, Helen would’ve noticed. So what does he clean them with, then? His finger?

  There is no soap.

  Helen can’t remember him smelling bad or smelling of anything at all. She lifts her sleeve and sniffs it; lemons, clouds and fabric softener. This is a bad habit of hers. She’s sniffed sleeves ever since first school.

  Helen decides on a fag. She’s going to need one if she’s to get through another half an hour of that looking. She digs the packet out of her handbag and lights one, tapping the first speckles of ash into the sink. What about the story he wanted her to tell? Darren and the casino and the taxi. So far he’s said hardly anything. The wisp and smell of the fag ghosts round the bathroom like a cat of smoke, rubbing itself against the pipes and tiles. It purrs its way down the back of her throat.

  This sparseness, bareness, or whatever you want to call it, is not confined to the bathroom either. It hangs over the whole house (what Helen’s seen of it). To get to the bathroom you have to walk along a very bare corridor and up a very bare staircase. The carpets are gone. There is nothing on the windowsills except layers of thick grey dust and a couple of dead flies. The only furniture is stained and battered and old-fashioned, like it’s been rescued out of skips. There are empty cans and food containers everywhere, but they don’t count.

  She thinks she hears something; a soft foot on a floorboard. So she turns on the tap and runs her fag under it. With her other hand she shoos away the smoke cat. She wonders if William or Will or whoever he is is pressed up against the door, listening to the glassy tinkle of her piss.

  She’s been here now a good half an hour and he still hasn’t said anything much. He’s spent most of the time just looking at her.

  First of all, after she came in, after she sat down in the armchair, he asked whether she’d like a cup of tea.

  ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘A cup of tea would be nice.’

  William disappeared into the kitchen.

  And once he was gone, Helen noticed something. She noticed that there felt more of him when he was out of the room than when he was in it. As if – by leaving – he’d moved up the sofa towards her.

  Helen rooted around in her handbag for her fags and lighter. There was no ashtray she could see and no smell of cigarettes in the house, but she was sure he wouldn’t mind. The men didn’t usually mind. She planned to tap the ash into her cupped palm, like something she’d seen in an old film. By the time the fag was stuck between her lips and the lit lighter inches away from it, William had finished making the tea. He was on his way back to the living room.

  Helen lit the fag.

  William opened the door.

  She breathed in.

  He stepped into the room.

  She breathed out.

  The feeling of him shuffled away one place down the sofa.

  ‘Don’t smoke,’ he said.

  He put a mug of tea on the wobbly tea-ringed old table in front of her and sat down. He sat down in the same place the feeling of him had moved to.

  Helen let her cigarette burn for a few more seconds, looking around for something to stub her fag in. She would’ve liked one more drag but she didn’t dare.

  ‘Put it in this,’ said William, holding out an old empty mug.

  Helen ground out her fag. She took a sip of tea. It wasn’t sweet enough. She needed it so sweet all you could taste was sugar. William didn’t touch his.

  Then they sat there for ages, not speaking. Helen drawing out her tea – slowly, slowly, slowly – and even once it was cold, lifting and sipping it, because once that was gone there’d be nothing. What about the story? What about Darren and the casino?

  He’d watched her close enough to make her feel like she was in a science video of someone drinking a cup of tea. And now she is utterly convinced that he’s listening to her piss from behind the bathroom door.

  It’s when Helen stands to flush that she sees it. A single black pube stuck to the inside rim of the toilet. It’s not one of hers. It’s long and black and crooked.

  She bends down. It makes her feel better. The pube. The bit of him. It looks sad.

  She smiles at it. The pube doesn’t smile back. A milky droplet of water dangles from it, at one end.

  Helen straightens up. She washes her hands (without soap), then dries them on her skirt. When she opens the door, she’s ready to say ‘Hi’ or something if she finds him standing in the doorway.

  Instead she finds nothing, just the empty hall.

  Helen goes into Barnardo’s. The man she hopes might one day be her husband isn’t working. Two old ladies stand behind the counter, listening to the radio and pricing books in pencil.

  She goes up and down the shelves of ornaments, looking for something. She will know what it is when she sees it. It is not a teapot or a glass ballet-dancer figurine or a set of Yorkshire Dales placemats. Helen looks carefully at the objects, making sure the thing she’s looking for is not hidden behind some other thing or inside it.

  Corrine should be home now. Tonight is one of Corrine’s two week nights off. Helen wants to go home and find Corrine sat on the sofa underneath a big orange duvet, and for Corrine to look at her when she comes in and say, �
�Come ’ere,’ and hold the duvet open for Helen to get under.

  There’ll be some film on – something corny like Grease or The King and I – and they’ll make jokes about John Travolta’s hips or Yul Brynner’s head and hold hands under the duvet.

  Corrine doesn’t approve of what Helen does. She’s never said this out loud; Helen’s not even 100 per cent sure that she knows what Helen does. But, still, she gets the impression sometimes.

  Corrine is hard and cold. Corrine is like a 70p porcelain biscuit jar.

  When Helen answered the advert – Female housemate wanted, to share with quiet female, 26, smoker. Single room. £200ppw. Bills inclusive. – Corrine sat her down on the sofa and asked her a series of cold hard biscuit-jar questions.

  What do you do?

  (I’m an actress.)

  And you get regular work?

  (I have done so far.)

  How clean and tidy are you?

  Helen waited for a joke.

  No joke came.

  Despite all this, Corrine is Helen’s best friend because – apart from Duncan and her mum – Corrine is the only person who doesn’t call her Clair.

  * * *

  Corrine is home when Helen gets back. She’s on the sofa, watching TV. No duvet, though. No corny film. Corrine has music television playing and she’s reading a magazine and drinking a cup of tea.

  ‘How was your day?’ Corrine asks.

  Helen sits down on the sofa. She looks at Corrine’s bare blotchy legs and then at the TV. Corrine has a voice like a nail file, one which smoothes away anything rough or unnecessary.

  Helen thinks about her day.

  She thinks about Will or William and that bare house. How there wasn’t even a smell she could find anywhere. She thinks about the pube stuck to the toilet. She thinks about sitting back down on the sofa and being asked to tell the story. She told it well, she thought. Her voice shook a bit, but that added to the effect. By the end of it, his eyes were closed and he might have been smiling.

  He’d asked if she wore coloured contacts to make her eyes blue, and Helen flinched, feeling more exposed than if she’d been lying on her back with her legs over her shoulders and a camera pointing at her crotch.

  Yes, she’d said, and he’d asked her to take them out. Good, he’d said, looking at her real eyes, her other eyes, at Clair’s eyes – dull black-brown pebbles.

  ‘It was alright,’ she tells Corrine, and Corrine nods and sips her tea.

  ‘There’s half a pizza left in the oven,’ says Corrine.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Helen, feeling like she’ll never be able to eat anything again for the rest of her life.

  In her room, Helen stands in front of the Ethan Hawke picture. He looks sideways, avoids her. To catch his eye, she would need to go right into the corner of the room, by the window, and over there she wouldn’t be able to see him any more.

  ‘Look at me,’ she says in her head. ‘Look me in the eye, Ethan.’

  This is a new scene in the film, a scene you never see, awkward and pointless. It doesn’t ‘move the plot along’. It lasts about five minutes – one single pointless take of nothing happening – and then Helen sits at her desk and turns on her computer. She checks her emails.

  Nothing.

  She checks the site where people from her old school post information about themselves.

  It says Angela Lawrence is buying a house with her boyfriend. It doesn’t say who Angela Lawrence’s boyfriend is. Helen tries to remember Angela Lawrence. She opens the profile. ‘No photos uploaded by this member’. The screen urges Helen to get in touch. It suggests some ‘ice breakers’.

  Angela Lawrence, Angela Lawrence. Helen finally remembers a girl in the front row of Maths, with lank black hair and a full-moon face, a salt-and-vinegar complexion. She logs out.

  She logs in to the adult contacts site and checks her message box. There are two new replies to her profile:

  [Posted from Sexwand_52 @ 20:19] You are a slut. You like it up the ass. You are a horny ass tramp. Assssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssss

  and

  [Posted from WR @ 21:05] I am happy with our meeting today. If you come back next Tuesday, I will pay you £500 cash to have sex with you and film it. Do not wear your contact lenses. Get your hair cut to just above the shoulder and dye it black. I will only pay you if you do these things.

  Helen clicks ‘Reply’.

  Helen books herself an appointment over the phone; four o’clock with Laura. She’s decided to try a new place. Until then she’s walking around town looking in windows and smoking fags and fingering mobiles in the Orange shop. It’s Monday. If she goes back then she’s going back tomorrow. She needs a haircut, anyway. She needs to keep herself smart. She would have got one whatever she was planning. In her hand she holds a Sainsbury’s bag with a home hair-dye kit inside.

  Boots have a better selection, but Helen hasn’t been back into Boots since she left. If she did, Sandra Jones would be sitting at the till near the door. Sandra Jones would give her a look; she’d roll her eyes and pretend not to recognise her. She’d go uh with her mouth, then look away.

  Superdrug have a better selection, too, but about half a year ago she went home with a man she met in a nightclub who claimed he worked there as store security. Since then she hasn’t even walked down the street that Superdrug’s on, because store security always seem to stand around in the doorways.

  Helen needs to get out of this city, to somewhere huge and anonymous. She wishes she could live in a rainforest or the sky.

  The clock in Market Square chimes the quarter hour.

  At the salon, Helen gets sat down by the window and asked if she’d like tea or a coffee or anything (‘Tea please, five sugars’). Laura will be over in a sec. She looks at herself in the mirror, her washed hair hanging wet and rough.

  What does she think of William or Will or whoever he is? He seemed sad. He seemed like her, like he was trapped in that house, because every time he went out there’d be someone who knew him, someone he didn’t want to see.

  Does she like him a bit? Can you like a pervert? That’s what Helen calls them; the men with saggy trousers and stains on their jumpers who invite her in and make her do things. The Perverts. They’re like awkward ostracised uncles that no one wants round for Christmas. They send you gift vouchers in nondescript cards and stay indoors with microwave meals.

  When Laura comes to cut her hair – says ‘Hello’ and ‘How would you like it, then?’ and begins lifting up a bit of her hair – it takes Helen a moment to work it out. She feels like she’s looking at herself or something. Then she realises.

  It’s Laura Castle.

  The one from school.

  The pasty Helen ate earlier becomes a snowball in her belly.

  ‘Well?’ Laura Castle says, looking Helen in the eyes, in the mirror.

  ‘Like it is now,’ Helen says in a strange, small voice, ‘but half as long. Just above the shoulder.’

  There is no small talk. The assistant has come back with Helen’s cup of tea and put it on the little side table. Helen doesn’t touch it.

  She’s too busy thinking she might be sick.

  She counts to ten. She counts to a hundred. She counts to a million. She crawls into a sagging ketchup-stained bed with Ethan Hawke and William or Will and that squat little man with the beard from her last shoot. She gets prodded and poked with cheap camcorders and high-heeled shoes.

  Helen doesn’t feel like Helen any more.

  She’s Clair.

  She’s pretty sure that if she takes off her black smock thing, she’ll be wearing her old school uniform underneath.

  A clump of wet hair lands in her lap.

  She is going to puke in front of Laura Castle and have to watch herself do it in the mirror.

  She excuses herself. She says something vague, making it sound like she had a rough one last n
ight, and Laura Castle has to stop cutting her hair and help her out of the chair and direct her to the toilet in the back.

  A little round mirror hangs from a hook on the toilet door. Clair looks into it. Her hair is short on one side and still long on the other. She looks like a bad joke. The sick feeling has gone now but she sits on the lid with her head in her hands. Laura Castle and Jodie Salmon and all those other snooty stuck-up bitches at King’s High never had anything whispered about them in the changing rooms after PE. Most of the rumours weren’t even true.

  She closes her eyes and feels something quiet and warm touch her on the cheek. She opens her eyes. It’s the sister. The sister is speaking in sign language which Clair is somehow able to understand.

  The sister tells Clair not to worry. She is an actress. Laura Castle is just some poxy hairdresser and, if this is a competition, if that’s how she wants to look at it – which of course she shouldn’t, but Christ does it feel like it sometimes – then Helen, who is not Clair anymore, has won. Helen is an actress and she is going to be a great one, the best.

  Helen says ‘Thank you’ in sign language to the sister.

  The sister signs ‘Don’t worry’ and then ‘Laura Castle’s a cock’.

  It makes Helen laugh.

  She flushes the toilet. She walks back to the chair and sits down, feeling icy and impenetrable.

  Laura Castle finishes the haircut with sharp steely snips, not saying anything. Then she gets out the hairdryer, and Helen breathes out and looks at herself.

  It’s over.

  She swallows calmly, nods at the mirrored version of herself and says thanks to the hairdresser. She walks over to the till to pay. She gets out the three notes and checks to see if she has the 50p. When she finds she doesn’t, she hands over an extra fiver. As she’s waiting for the change her eyes drift to the floor. A tiny feeling – something about the size of a coin – swells then deflates inside her. The floor is littered with thousands and thousands of little black hairs that could each be the pube of a strange man in a weird empty house somewhere.