Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  She smiles and nods, drawing the blanket under her chin. ‘Good, thank you,’ she tells him, and he smiles back at her sleepily.

  Bobby scrabbles around next to the bed for a while and eventually locates a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. It is only then that she notices with a flush of embarrassment that he’s naked from the waist up, and takes in his thin back, the fine, pale-brown, hairless skin, the bumps and spikes of his spine, his delicate neck as he bends to dip his cigarette into the flame. Across his shoulder is a large tattoo of a dragon, its wings moving as if to take flight whenever his muscles flex.

  ‘Bobby?’ she says tentatively.

  He looks back at her. ‘Yeah? What’s up?’

  ‘I just wanted to say thank you. I don’t know what I would have done if –’

  He exhales a long stream of cigarette smoke. ‘Speak real nice, don’t you?’ He smiles. ‘That’s OK, kid. Couldn’t just leave you there for those assholes to find.’ A long moment passes in which he considers her seriously. ‘Who’re you running from, anyhow?’

  Before she can answer they hear a door open and close somewhere in the apartment, followed by a woman’s voice, a clatter of crockery and a stereo bursting into life. Bobby gets up and stretches. ‘Well, come on, you might as well meet the others.’

  The woman standing by the kitchen table is vast and black and in her twenties. Everything about her is extraordinary to Elodie: her hair, which erupts from her head like molten lava in a million deep-red coils, her breasts, straining beneath tight, hot-pink Lycra, the three gold hoops hanging from each ear, the make-up in splashes of neon upon her dark-brown skin. She’s wiping down the table when they walk in, and every movement she makes sets off slow ripples of flesh and a jangle of gold bracelets. Her nails are three inches long, elaborately varnished, their tips encrusted with tiny gems. She wears a diamond stud in her nose.

  ‘Hi honey!’ she calls to Bobby when she spots him. Her enormous voice is low and deep. When she spies Elodie hovering nervously in the doorway her hand pauses in mid-wipe and eyeing her from beneath turquoise lids she asks, ‘Who’s this?’ Elodie can only stand and stare in amazement: it’s as if an exotic bird of paradise had just swooped down from the sky and begun to make conversation with them.

  ‘Elodie,’ Bobby tells her. She notices with alarm that the woman’s smile reveals a gold tooth like a pirate in one of the books Yaya used to read to her. ‘Elodie, this is Shanique,’ says Bobby. ‘And that’s Darnel,’ he adds, jerking his head towards the corner of the room.

  It’s only then that she notices the short black man wearing nothing but his underpants sitting in a chair by the window. He glances at her disinterestedly for a second before returning to a basketball game playing silently on a little TV on top of the refrigerator. As he watches, his head nods along to music playing on the stereo, a man shouting angrily above a repetitive beat. One hand rests upon the bulge of his belly and his fingers clasp a large, messy cigarette that emanates thick, yellow smoke, and Elodie recognises the sour, pungent smell as the same one she’d smelt when she first walked into the apartment.

  And then, just as she’s beginning to feel entirely out of her depth another girl walks into the cramped little kitchen. Shoving past Bobby she goes over to the refrigerator where she rummages bad-temperedly among its shelves. She is dressed in a short, silky nightdress and is small and slim but for her breasts which are perfectly round and high and entirely without movement. Her skin is a pale, creamy brown and her long dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail, away from her feline little face which, despite wearing a perpetually displeased expression as if the whole world smells bad to her, is the most beautiful Elodie has ever seen. At that moment she swings around and spots her for the first time. ‘Who’s that?’ she demands, her pretty nose wrinkling in distaste. To Elodie it sounds like, ‘Hoo dat?’

  ‘This is Elodie,’ says Bobby. ‘She’s going to stay for a night or two.’ There’s something in his tone that tells Elodie he doesn’t like the girl much.

  She raises one delicate eyebrow. ‘Oh yeah? Says who?’ The ways she looks at Elodie makes her suddenly conscious of Bobby’s too-large clothes, her messy hair and bare feet. ‘Last time I looked the shelter was four blocks away.’ Her voice has a scratchy, metallic quality that reminds Elodie of the noise a mosquito makes when it hits the blue neon bars of a Bug Buster. ‘Where’d you find this one anyway? We ain’t got room for your skanky waifs and strays.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Kiki,’ snaps Bobby.

  ‘Fuck you, we ain’t got space.’

  ‘She’s staying in my room, so it ain’t your business.’

  The girl snorts. ‘You into pussy now or something?’ she mutters.

  ‘OK,’ Shanique says wearily, turning to put a dish into the sink. ‘Quit it, both of you, or you’ll wake Tyra.’

  Elodie hovers nervously in the doorway, almost as terrified of Kiki as she is of being sent back out on the streets again.

  Suddenly, however, Shanique smiles kindly at her. ‘Why don’t you come and sit down, honey?’

  Darnel continues to stare mutely at the TV screen, sucking on his foul-smelling cigarette. Eventually, Kiki goes over to him and after shooting one more poisonous glance at Elodie, settles down to watch the game.

  While Elodie perches nervously at the table Shanique grabs hold of Bobby and wraps him in her massive arms. ‘Where’d you go last night, baby?’ she asks him.

  Bobby’s muffled voice replies from somewhere deep between her breasts, ‘Oh, you know, girl: Dancing, romancing. Getting laid … getting paid.’ He frees himself and pulls out a roll of dollar bills from his back pocket. ‘Getting rent.’

  ‘Good boy.’ She takes the roll of money and kisses him on the cheek. Just then, they hear the sound of a baby crying and she hurries away. Moments later, Darnel slowly lumbers to his feet too, grunts something indecipherable, and slopes after her.

  When Shanique returns she has a plump little girl of about two tucked under her arm. The child has the same rich brown skin as Shanique and her hair is pulled into a dozen little sausages, each wrapped with a different coloured band. She picks up the child’s podgy little fist and waves it at Elodie. ‘Say hello, Tyra,’ she says, while a phone begins to ring somewhere. ‘Here,’ she turns to Elodie and thrusts the baby at her. ‘Hold her for a second will you?’

  Elodie is so surprised to have a baby sitting on her lap that for a moment she can only sit and stare at her. Tyra stares back, her big brown eyes considering her gravely while she sucks determinedly on a pacifier. In her little lobes are tiny gold hoops. She’s dressed in a diaper and an orange dress with Versace Baby written across the front in diamante studs. Tentatively, Elodie puts her arms around the child and pulls her closer, surprised at how comforting it is to hold the little warm body and breathe in her sweet, milky scent.

  When Shanique returns she watches Elodie with her daughter for a moment. ‘Hey, you’re a natural. You mind holding her while I make up some formula?’ She turns to Bobby. ‘That was Wanda, she can’t sit tonight.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘You staying home?’

  She sighs distractedly. ‘I don’t know. I gotta work, Bobby. I need the cash.’

  He nods. ‘Yeah, me too.’

  They both turn to Kiki, who is humming to herself and gazing out of the window. Suddenly she turns and sees them looking at her. ‘No way,’ she snaps. ‘You’re both tripping if you think I’m staying home tonight.’

  Elodie keeps her eyes on the child as Kiki stalks past her and out of the room. While Shanique and Bobby murmur together, her mind drifts back once again to her last moments at High Barn. An image pops into her mind of Ingrid lying slumped upon the floor and she closes her eyes for a moment against a dizzying wave of anxiety. She’ll be OK, she tells herself. Ingrid will be OK. Please, let her be OK.

  Just then, she’s dragged from her thoughts by the appearance of a large, pale girl with stringy yellow hair walking into the kitchen and yawning extravag
antly. ‘Hey, Princess,’ Shanique calls to her.

  ‘This is Lorraine,’ Bobby tells her, ‘Only, we call her Princess, as in Princess Di, on account of her being from England.’

  Princess turns her slow, watery gaze to Elodie for a moment, smiles vaguely, then says in a British accent to no one in particular, ‘I just had the funniest dream.’

  Her voice is thin and nasal and as she recounts her dream to the room the words seem weightless, drifting through the air without consequence. Her tone is monotone, the story endless. She seems to take no pleasure in the telling of it, as if she’s compelled to let the stream of sounds emerge from her thin lips, each word so insubstantial that Elodie feels she’s unable to hold on to any one of them. On and on and on they go. Unlike the quick-fire of Bobby’s speech, a rally of words that he seems to throw like a fistful of pebbles for you to catch, or the sonorous depths and shallows of Shanique’s, or even Kiki’s blistering outbursts, Princess’s speech is like a puff of tepid air.

  It takes some minutes for her to finish, which she does without any apparent climax to the story and with a slightly surprised expression, and as soon as the last word is out of her mouth, Elodie finds she cannot remember any part of what she’s told them. The others, too, pause blinking and baffled in the silence that follows, before almost all at once they jerk back to life as if from a deep sleep and begin to talk again as if nothing had happened. After a while Princess gets to her feet and lumbers from the kitchen.

  ‘Why don’t you go and take your coffee to my room for a while?’ Bobby says to Elodie then, gently lifting Tyra from her lap. ‘Go ahead,’ he says, smiling at her reassuringly.

  At first she sits obediently on the bed, sipping her coffee, aware that her fate is being decided on the other end of the hall. She tries to think clearly about what she’ll do if they tell her to leave, but is incapable of picturing herself in the world alone. She puts her head in her hands and for a moment lets the fear wash over her. Her life with Ingrid had not prepared her for self-sufficiency. For all her yearning to be free from High Barn, it had been a vague, impractical longing without any real idea of how she’d actually survive by herself. Restlessly she gets up and pulls the curtains back from the small, dirty window. Below, the city reaches as far as she can see, a vast sea of roads and buildings and traffic, a world full of people living lives that have no place in them for her.

  At last anxiety forces her to the door and softly opening it a few inches she puts her ear to the crack. The stereo has been turned off and the kitchen door is still open and she can just make out Bobby and Shanique’s voices as they talk together at the kitchen table.

  ‘ … just sitting there behind a wall, a few blocks from the Junction,’ she hears Bobby say.

  ‘You think she’s on the stroll?’

  She hears Bobby’s yelp of laughter. ‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘You saw her Shan, she look like a hooker to you?’

  ‘Well what you going to do with her? Kiki’s right, there ain’t no room here.’

  There’s a brief silence in which she feels her heart sink. At last she hears Bobby’s voice again. ‘She’s just a kid,’ he says. ‘She’d last five minutes out there and if I take her to the shelter she’d be pimped out by Wednesday. We can put her up for a week can’t we? Till I persuade her to go on home? Hey, she could even sit with Tyra tonight.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t know …’

  The kitchen door is closed suddenly and she can hear no more. Dejectedly she returns to the bed and when Bobby at last comes for her, she keeps her face turned from him, not wanting him to see her desperation. ‘Come on,’ is all he says.

  Back in the kitchen, Shanique spoons orange mush into her daughter’s mouth. ‘Sit down, honey,’ she says. And then, her large brown eyes fixed upon her, asks, ‘So, what’s your story, girl? You gonna tell me what you’re doing on the streets?’

  Elodie looks down at her hands and doesn’t answer.

  Shanique shifts her enormous buttocks in her chair and says gently, ‘What happened, kid? Something bad? Police after you?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Come on,’ Bobby says. ‘We ain’t stupid. I see how you jump every time you hear a siren.’ He raises his eyebrows at her. ‘I see the blood all over your shirt, too.’

  She stares back at him. ‘I –’ she begins, but the prospect of reliving it all is too much for her. She stares helplessly back at him.

  ‘OK,’ he sighs after a long silence. ‘Well, I got to take you to the shelter then.’

  ‘No. Please, Bobby.’ She feels the panic rise in her chest, sure that Ingrid will have called the police by now, certain that if they find her she’ll be sent straight back to High Barn. Perhaps they’d even put her in prison for a while to punish her.

  ‘OK, OK. Calm down. But you got to tell me what you’re running from, Elodie. I can’t help you otherwise.’

  When she doesn’t answer he sighs and goes over to the window and stands with his back to them, staring out at the sky.

  Gently, Shanique reaches over and takes her hand. ‘What happened, honey? Your daddy been messing with you?’ Elodie stares back at her. ‘Had a fight with your momma?’ Shanique persists. ‘Got yourself in trouble? Come on, angel, you can tell Shanique. You in the family way?’

  Elodie has no idea what she’s talking about, but there’s something in her tone and expression that reminds her so much of Yaya that suddenly she can’t hold her tears back any longer. She drops her head and begins to sob. After a moment she feels Shanique’s arms around her. A comforting smell of coconut butter and cherries fills her nostrils. ‘OK now,’ the older woman says. ‘OK now honey. That’s all right. Come on now. You’ll be OK.’ For a few minutes they stay like that, the two of them, Shanique rocking Elodie in her arms. ‘Why don’t you tell me from the beginning?’

  And so she does. She tells her everything. She tells her about the forest and how she’d found the man dead and ran all night until she reached the road. She tells her about the children’s hospital and about coming to America and being taught to speak. She tells them about Ingrid and Robert and Anton, about the arguments, about Ingrid’s anger and jealousy, and Robert’s hatred for his wife, about the feeling she’d had of slowly suffocating, and how she had longed to escape from it all. She tells them because she has nothing left to lose.

  Shanique and Bobby are staring at her open mouthed. ‘Go on,’ Bobby urges her. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ she begins, her voice so quiet that they have to lean in closer to hear her. And then, taking a deep breath she describes her last moments at High Barn. How she’d walked past the kitchen and heard Ingrid call her name, how Ingrid had put her arms around her, begging her to stay. The overwhelming revulsion that had made her struggle from her grip, pushing her away. Ingrid falling backwards, slipping on the wine, Elodie reaching for her, snatching at empty air. The sight of her slumped and bleeding on the floor. Robert returning, and, then, finally, her decision to run.

  ‘Shit,’ whispers Bobby when she has finished. ‘That’s the most fucked up thing I ever heard.’

  ‘I saw you,’ says Shanique with hushed awe. ‘On TV, I mean. Years ago. There was a special about you on the Discovery Channel. Shit girl. That was you?’

  Mutely, Elodie shrugs. ‘She’ll be OK, won’t she?’ she begs them then. ‘The doctors at the hospital, they’d have taken care of Ingrid, wouldn’t they?’

  And then, her hand flying to her mouth with the sudden shock of realisation, Shanique speaks. ‘Oh honey,’ she tells her. ‘That lady? Ingrid? Honey, that lady died.’

  Dimly, as if from very far away, she hears Bobby ask Shanique something and then a distant, muffled response – some story about a radio at the hair salon. But she doesn’t listen. Ingrid is dead. The sorrow fills her, clinging to each bone like black oil. Dimly, the idea of prison – what she knows about prison from the television – sends thin tendrils of fear snaking their way through her gr
ief. After a while, she becomes aware that she’s gasping for breath, feels the room swoop and rock and then a plunging dizziness. Somehow, suddenly, Bobby’s arms are around her, lifting her up, pulling her back from the darkness, his voice calling her name. She is back, seated on her chair, the kitchen slowly easing its sickly dipping. At last her vision clears and she sees the worried faces of Shanique and Bobby gazing back at her. ‘Oh please,’ she whispers. ‘Oh please, no.’

  From very far away, she hears Shanique’s voice talking to her. ‘Listen, girl. You’ve got to get a hold of yourself,’

  ‘I killed her,’ she whispers.

  ‘You pushed her,’ replies Shanique firmly, putting one large, talloned hand on her shoulder. ‘Hell, I’d have shoved that creepy bitch too if it’d been me. You didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident. She slipped and fell and that ain’t your fault.’

  ‘But I didn’t stay and help her,’ says Elodie, her voice rising.

  ‘Well, didn’t I hear you say her husband was there?’

  A silence falls heavy upon the kitchen, as each of them pursue their separate thoughts.

  ‘Are you going to call the police?’ Elodie asks at last, in a small voice.

  ‘The police? Here?’ Shanique chuckles and returns to her own seat. ‘No, honey, me and the police ain’t exactly on speaking terms.’

  She and Bobby say nothing for a while longer, just continue staring at her as if she’d grown an extra head. But at last, Shanique rouses herself and all at once is brisk and businesslike. She gets up and fills the kettle.

  ‘OK,’ she says decisively. ‘You can stay in Bobby’s room for a while until we work something out. You can help mind Tyra for me until I find someone to replace that pain in the ass Wanda.’

  ‘Really?’ She feels a vague hope trickle through the darkness.

  ‘For a little while at least. Shit, I can’t send you back out on the street after a story like that.’

  ‘What about the others?’ Bobby asks Shanique.

  She sucks her bottom lip for a while. ‘Well, Kiki and Darnel never read a paper or watched the news in their lives, and Princess, she don’t know what day of the week it is half the time. Don’t you worry,’ she says firmly. ‘You leave them to me.’