Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  For some months Elodie’s trips to the hospital have included regular visits to a Doctor Menzies. Unlike the other specialists, Ingrid and Doctor Menzies always greet each other warmly, with a hug and kisses. But these sessions are almost unbearably dull to Elodie. The activities she’s made to do seem pointless. Often she’ll be told to draw a picture, and will then be asked endless questions about it. Sometimes she’ll be asked about her old life in the forest, and Elodie will answer as best she can, all the while staring restlessly out of the window. Other times the doctor will give her dolls to play with, while she watches and makes notes, scratching away with her pen in her notebook. When, at last, the hour finally drags to an end, she’s made to sit outside, while Ingrid and the doctor murmur to each other behind the closed door.

  It’s after one of these sessions that Elodie firsts asks Ingrid about her mother. They are in the midst of reading a story about a family of bears when she interrupts and says, ‘Do I have one?’

  The anxiety that flashes across her teacher’s eyes is brief and almost imperceptible. Ingrid sits down in the chair next to her, and it’s a while before she answers. When she does, her voice is very careful. ‘You do have a mother, yes, Elodie,’ she says. ‘But she’s very far away and not very well. You will see her soon, when she’s feeling a little better.’

  Elodie nods, and turns the page. After a pause, Ingrid continues reading. ‘Who has been sleeping in my bed?’ she says.

  Only one strange incident mars the contentment of this time; something confusing that happens one afternoon, shortly before they are about to finish work for the day. Ingrid has been called to the telephone and Colin is busy packing up his movie camera and files of notes when Elodie wanders from her desk to where Yaya sits. Putting her arms around her neck, she idly plays with a strand of black, springy hair that has come loose from the older woman’s headscarf, tickling her ear with it until Yaya starts to laugh and pulls Elodie towards her in a hug.

  But their laughter comes to an abrupt halt when a sound from the door distracts them and they both turn to see Ingrid staring in at them.

  Elodie isn’t sure what it is about the expression in Ingrid’s eyes, only that both she and Yaya react to it instantly by jumping apart. It’s brief, the look she shoots them before quickly turning away, but Elodie is seized by unaccustomed and confusing feelings of guilt. The moment passes. Quietly, Elodie goes back to her own chair and her books and the four of them continue with their work.

  But still Ingrid’s expression confuses her. Later that night when Elodie is getting ready for bed the little gnawing feeling of doubt returns. There had been something unrecognisable in Ingrid’s eyes, a dark and painful thing she couldn’t understand. That night, when Ingrid comes to say good night, instead of the brief kiss on her cheek that she usually bestows, Elodie finds herself pulled into a tight embrace. And when Ingrid releases her, the sense of unease lingers.

  eleven

  Deptford, south-east London, 15 December 2003

  Historically, Frank’s track record with women wasn’t great. At twenty-five, it wasn’t that he ever really found it a problem attracting girls – it was the keeping hold of them he always seemed to struggle with. He had a habit of falling hook, line and sinker for a person, putting her so high upon a pedestal that the only inevitable direction they could go after that was down. All would be great for the first few months, but then, out of the blue, entirely without warning, everything he had once found so charming about her would start to sour. Her laugh would begin to grate, in mid conversation she’d say something dumb, he’d notice that when she stayed she’d leave her things all over the bathroom floor. Suddenly, reality would come screaming into focus and the relationship would become instantly and irretrievably intolerable. Pretty rich, he knew: he was hardly catch of the year. But there it was.

  When he was ten, something happened to Frank that would stay with him forever. It was a few weeks after his dad had left and his Aunt Joanie had taken him and her spaniel Bongo to Greenwich Park. It was a beautiful day and the place had been full of sunbathing tourists, picnicking families, kids playing football. The dog had been running in circles at their feet as they walked, and Frank remembered thinking how strange it was that the sky was so blue and the air so warm when inside he felt so horribly cold, so horribly grey.

  ‘You’re going to have to be a big, brave boy now Frankie,’ his aunt was saying as they tramped along. ‘The thing is, sometimes grown-ups find life difficult …’ He tried his hardest to block out her voice but suddenly he couldn’t bear it any more. Why was everyone talking like his dad wasn’t coming back? Why had his mum not gotten out of bed for three weeks? It was disgusting, stupid the way they were all talking. He pulled his hand from Joanie’s and throwing a stick for Bongo, began to run.

  Ignoring his aunt’s call he threw the stick further and further, tearing after Bongo up the steep hill, on and on until he’d left the crowds and Joanie far behind. Of course his dad was coming back. Of course he was. He ran until he was in a part of the park secluded from the rest, on the heath side, near the deer and the big oak trees. And then he’d seen her. Under a tree twenty yards away was a girl of about seventeen, her legs stretched out before her, a book resting upon her lap. Bongo was sitting next to her, his big stupid tongue lolling out. Both of them watched him as he approached.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, when he reached her.

  He had opened his mouth to speak, but it seemed he’d forgotten how. The sun was low in the sky behind her and shone through her curls so her face was framed in a flaming halo of golden red. Her eyes were luminous; dragon-fly green. Never, never had he seen anything so beautiful. He could barely breathe, certain that if he even blinked she’d disappear, or he’d wake and find himself back in his bedroom, staring at his collection of dinosaurs. A feeling of perfect calm settled upon him.

  She was very slender, across the pale skin of her chest was a faint sprinkling of freckles. Through the thin white cotton of her top he could just make out the swell of her breasts and he felt himself flush red as something unrecognisable began to stir in his underpants. He gazed at her. Everything – the green of her eyes, the golden red of her hair, the blue of the sky – was supernaturally bright. With a little sigh, Bongo had flopped down and rested his head in her lap, and Frank had almost groaned with jealousy when her small, white hand had reached over and stroked the dog’s ears.

  ‘Are you lost?’ she’d asked.

  And even though he wasn’t, not really, he had nodded. She’d smiled, and after considering him a while said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll find your way back.’

  He felt as if he could stand there looking at her for the rest of his life. The world was perfectly silent, perfectly still. The sun sank lower in the sky. Just at that moment he heard Joanie’s voice calling him. ‘Frank! Frank!’ His name drifted to them like a sound from another world. He held his breath and willed her to go away.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Auntie Joanie.’

  ‘Ah.’ She continued gazing at him for a while, and then smiled. ‘Well then, Frank,’ she said, ‘give me a kiss and then you’d better go.’

  As if she was an exotic bird that might take flight at any moment, very, very slowly he had knelt down and carefully kissed her cheek.

  She smiled. ‘Bye then, Frank. Be good.’

  And then he had turned and run towards Joanie’s voice, Bongo racing after him.

  ‘Did you see her?’ he asked urgently, when he reached his aunt. ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Who?’ Joanie had squinted over in the direction he’d run from, scanning the grass. ‘No dear, I don’t see anyone.’

  He had turned and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, but Joanie was right: there was nothing there. The girl had vanished.

  Since that day he had tried to find her again, had got into the habit of searching for her in crowds, of scanning the faces of every passing woman, but nothing. Someti
mes in his dreams he would find himself back there, under the tree the summer he was ten, but just as he was about to kneel down and kiss her, he’d wake. Occasionally, listening to music, he would come close to finding again that sense of beauty – there amongst the notes and melodies and beats – but it was never quite enough: the thing he was searching for was always just out of his reach. His whole life he had been trying to find that perfection again, and in Kate he knew he had found it; he had found her.

  At first, their meetings were maddeningly infrequent. Kate was the most evasive person he had ever met. She had no mobile phone, moved from job to job, avoided talking about her home (to which he was never invited). And yet, just when he was about to give up hope of ever seeing her again she would appear at his door or at the record shop where he worked, saying simply, ‘Hello, Frank,’ with that same, breathtaking smile of hers beneath that same, steady gaze.

  But still she would offer nothing concrete for him to hold onto, and he was always under the impression she might disappear at any moment. Whenever they parted she would leave no trace of herself. And he had never met anyone who talked so little about themselves – women, in his experience, always liked to talk about themselves. For hours. In contrast, Kate’s silence was like a blank sheet upon which people were invited to draw whatever version of her they wished.

  ‘Your accent,’ he said, the second time they met. ‘Sometimes you sound American. Did you used to live there?’ Her response – a short, blithe account of a New York childhood, a car crash that had killed her parents, her move to London to live with an aunt – was so brief and delivered with such a lack of detail that he had hardly been able to land on any part of it and, almost without him noticing, she had asked a question about the record they were listening to and he had been talking enthusiastically about it for a full ten minutes before he realised the original subject had been abandoned.

  And he didn’t press her. Frank was good with mystery, with a feeling of being always slightly in the dark. He was used to it, knew where he stood with it. Ever since his father had disappeared – seemingly slipping between the gaps in the pavements one day without so much as a backward glance – he had spent much of his life since wondering what the hell had happened. It was how he loved his father now; in the absence of the physical man his affection had become coloured and finally replaced by a vague, persistent bafflement.

  Once or twice he would come across Kate lost in thought and it was like glancing through a window at something he shouldn’t see, something private. With her guard down, just for a second, he would see an altogether different girl looming into view behind those dark blue eyes, like something emerging suddenly from behind a tree. It was like catching sight of a fox streaking down a London street at night; an unexpected glimpse of something wild. But the moment would pass, she would sense his presence and alter instantly back into Kate. These moments would provoke in him an almost unbearable protectiveness, and yet a part of him would be relieved too, frightened of having to deal with something he wasn’t sure he was ready for, something that might demand unknown, difficult things from him.

  He was falling in love. Despite the strangeness of their relationship at the heart of it lay something true, he was certain. And when, two months after they met, she didn’t turn up to meet him as planned his anxiety was unbearable. Two days passed, and then two more, and still she didn’t phone or come. Each hour without hearing from her was agony. He was certain that this time she had gone for good. Finally, sick to death of his dark thoughts he had gone to the pub in search of Jimmy and Eugene – anything to take his mind off her.

  The Hope and Anchor is a vast Victorian hulk of a boozer that looms malevolently over the New Cross–Old Kent Road junction. Inside its cavernous interior the flock wallpaper is covered in photographs. Yellow, curling Edwardian prints show the neighbourhood lit by gas lamp and patrolled by horse-drawn carriages. Others depict the pub in its sixties heyday: various monochrome gangsters, minor celebrities and glamour girls caught in frozen animation before the same flocked paper. In one, Ronnie and Reggie Kray leer into the camera with dead eyes and mephitic grins. Amongst the photos hang a selection of mysterious brass ornaments interspersed here and there by dead animals in glass cases. The wall above the bar meanwhile is dedicated to the landlord’s boxing trophies, celebrating the now chain-smoking, balding cirrhotic despot’s vainglorious past.

  The three of them had been drinking here since their mid teens and the ancient juke box still played the same selection of tired eighties pop. As Frank walked through the door Madness sang One Step Beyond. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and he squinted in the dimness – thick maroon velvet curtains blocked out the afternoon sun. In the Hope and Anchor, it was always midnight.

  He found Jimmy and Eugene playing pool and he fetched himself a drink, glad suddenly, that he didn’t have to make conversation. Almost immediately he began to wish he hadn’t come, that he’d stayed at home with the curtains drawn and the stereo on full blast. He barely had the energy to lift his pint he was so hacked-off. After a while, Jimmy potted the final ball and came over.

  ‘Not seeing Kate tonight?’ he asked after the hellos were over with and he’d sat down.

  Frank winced. ‘No.’

  Jimmy glanced at him questioningly, but taking in Frank’s face, merely nodded. Eugene began to shout loudly into his mobile phone.

  ‘How’re the savings coming?’ asked Jimmy after a brief silence. ‘You must be nearly there now.’

  Frank had to think for a moment before he realised what Jimmy was talking about. He’d been saving for the past year, trying to get enough money together to go travelling, and it had, until he met Kate, been the subject uppermost in his thoughts. ‘Oh,’ he said vaguely. ‘Yeah … you know. Still saving.’

  Jimmy shot him a puzzled look, but Frank ignored him. How could he possibly explain how he felt? That he was half mad with thoughts of a girl he hardly knew? That nothing mattered at the moment apart from the one desperate hope that he would see her again. He knew exactly what his friends’ response would be: Stop being such a fanny, Auvrey.

  ‘You want a game?’ asked Eugene, nodding over to the pool table.

  ‘Nah, you’re all right,’ he said, continuing to stare into his pint. Now that he was here, he just couldn’t be fucked to talk to them. ‘You have another one.’ He pretended not to notice the look that passed between them.

  He watched them play for a minute or two, before sinking once again into his own thoughts. He felt with Kate as if he’d discovered a whole new country that he was desperate to explore if only he could find where to catch the boat from. How then, when Jimmy asked about his plans to travel could he even contemplate Greece, Turkey, Germany, France? What the fuck did he care about those places – boring, bland, flat compared to Kate – if they were somewhere she was not? He didn’t even have a phone number for her. He hadn’t seen her for nine days.

  ‘Fancy a line?’

  He suddenly realised that Eugene was talking to him.

  ‘Might cheer you up a bit.’

  ‘No. You know I don’t do that shit.’ He must have spoken more sharply than he’d meant, because Eugene was pulling a face.

  ‘Suit yourself. Jim?’

  Frank went to the bar and tried to think up an excuse to leave. When he returned he realised that Jimmy and Eugene were arguing about something and half-heartedly he tried to get the gist.

  ‘Well, what’s the point?’ Jimmy was saying. ‘It’s Sunday for fuck’s sake. Just chill out for a night – lay off it for a bit.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Grumpily, Eugene got up and moved off in the direction of the gents. ‘Just say no, right? Thanks, Jim. Gotcha.’

  When he’d gone, Jimmy turned to Frank and appealed to him. ‘It’s starting to do my head in. Seriously, Frank, I’m worried.’

  He shrugged. ‘He’ll be all right. You know what he’s like.’ To be honest, the subject bored him. He’d never been into drugs himself, but
everyone and their dog seemed to be coked up at the moment – it was a national sport. No big deal.

  Jimmy nodded unhappily. ‘Yeah. It’s just that he’s spending all his time with those wankers down the Feathers. Andy Mitchel and that. You know the kind of shit they’re into.’

  Inwardly, Frank groaned. Not this. Not now. He couldn’t bear the thought of Eugene becoming one of those sad fucks whose lives revolved around the dole office, the pub, and his next fix. In fact the thought was so depressing he refused to allow it as a possibility.

  He shrugged non-committedly. ‘He’s always been like that. We’ve had this conversation ever since we were kids. He’s a grown up, Jimmy. It’s not our job to rein him in all the time is it? And to be honest I’ve got enough to worry about other than Eugene’s benders.’

  He realised that Jimmy was looking at him strangely. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. A silence fell.

  ‘Look, Jim,’ Frank said, getting up. ‘Sorry, but I’m feeling a bit gyp. I’m going to head on home.’ Eugene had just re-emerged from the gents and he waved over at him. ‘Have a good night, yeah? I’ll give you a call in the week.’

  On the edges of Deptford he passed vast sites of half-built apartment blocks. Bill boards boasting designer living with river views. White towers of little square rooms with the same dimensions and soullessness as the council flat he’d grown up in five minutes down the road, only with Italian-style taps and a £300K price tag. He felt his mood worsen.

  And then, turning the corner, his spirits soared as he spied a familiar flash of yellow hair outside his door. She was sitting on his step smiling up at him as he approached. It was all he could do not to shout out with relief: the world sang.

  twelve

  Long Island, New York, 1997

  She is fourteen when she firsts asks Ingrid about the photograph. They are eating breakfast one morning when her gaze happens to fall upon the image of the little, blond child and she asks, ‘Who is that?’ vaguely remembering Robert’s reaction to it the summer before.