Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  ‘Thank you,’ Elodie whispers.

  ‘Just for a week though,’ Shanique warns her. ‘I’m serious.’

  fifteen

  Queens, New York, November 1999

  But a week passes and then another. The fact of Ingrid’s death is like a stone lodged permanently beneath her windpipe and each night she wakes from shallow, jittery sleep, alert with panic, her last moments at High Barn replaying in sickening clarity over and over in her mind. Once again she feels herself pushing Ingrid away, watches her teeter, lose her balance, slip then fall. By the second week, when yet again she wakes, gasping and sobbing into the darkness, she finds the light shining suddenly in her eyes and sits up with a start to see Bobby kneeling next to her, his eyes grave.

  ‘Girl, you got to stop this,’ he tells her.

  She rolls away from him. ‘I killed her,’ she moans into the pillow. ‘I killed her, I killed her.’

  At first Bobby doesn’t reply, but after listening to her cry for a while longer he turns the light off and gets back into the bed next to her. At last he begins to talk, his voice in the darkness quiet but emphatic, and as her sobs subside, she begins to listen.

  ‘Elodie, there ain’t one person living in this apartment who hasn’t done something they regret,’ he tells her. ‘Trust me, we sure as hell wouldn’t be living like this if something hadn’t gone seriously fucking wrong somewhere down the line. But the thing is, you got a choice. You either let it eat you up and destroy the rest of your life, or you accept there’s not one thing you can do about it now. You hear what I’m saying, Elodie? Don’t keep doing this to yourself. The lady slipped. She’s dead and nothing’s going to change that now.’

  In the darkness Elodie lies awake for a long time, thinking about what he’s said. And little by little she feels the burden of her guilt begin to change. Gradually, she feels the painful obstruction in her chest loosen, and from that moment the fact of Ingrid’s death and her part in it becomes instead like a poison in her bloodstream; an integral and permanent part of her. ‘She’s dead, and nothing’s going to change that now,’ Bobby had said. When moments later he puts his arm around her and tells her to go to sleep, she finds that she can. And when she wakes the next morning she’s touched to find that Bobby’s arm’s still there.

  At first she keeps to Bobby’s room, but as the days wear on and she finds herself looking after Tyra more and more, she begins to venture out from the tiny bedroom, creeping into the kitchen or the living room when she’s sure that she’s alone. The world of the apartment is soporific and unchanging, as if suspended in its own reality. It floats, high above the streets, warm and cramped and a little smelly, held snugly between the apartments on either side, the noises of unseen lives seeping through the walls. She is encased, secure, hidden. And yet, each day she waits for disaster, for the moment when she’ll be asked to leave.

  At last she steels herself to talk to Bobby, only for him to wave her concerns away dismissively. ‘You any idea how much childcare costs these days?’ he asks. ‘And it ain’t like you eat much.’

  Perhaps, she thinks, she’ll be allowed to stay here forever, buffered from the world, suspended forever in midair, high above the consequences of what she’s done.

  She soon notices that the others seem to work the strangest hours, leaving at nine or ten at night and not returning until five in the morning, when they disappear into their rooms until the afternoon. At these times she’ll often take Tyra with her to the small living room, where together they play with building blocks or the child’s cuddly animals, one eye always on the TV.

  Every evening, before they leave, Shanique, Princess and Kiki emerge from their bedrooms and begin the intriguing process of preparing for the night ahead. As the weeks pass, Elodie begins to look forward to these nightly routines, often sitting quietly in the kitchen with Tyra on her lap while music pumps from the stereo and the three of them run back and forth between their rooms and the bathroom, creating a stink of hairspray and perfume, singed hair and deodorant. When at last they are preened and dressed in Lycra and stilettos, they congregate around the kitchen table with their cosmetics and their vodka, setting about the business of making up their faces.

  Elodie sits, watching from her corner of the kitchen as they transform their faces, soaking up with wide-eyed envy the camaraderie between the three women. Even Kiki, who usually reminds Elodie of a wasp caught in a jar, loses some of her spikiness and joins in the party atmosphere, refilling glasses and lending her mascara. Elodie always feels a little sorry for Princess however, who never seems to achieve quite the same end result as the other two. Whereas Kiki and Shanique, when they’re finally ready, look to Elodie like beautiful, exotic creatures straight from a television ad, Princess somehow manages only to accentuate her plainness. On her pasty, spotty skin the make-up seems to slide and gather in little blotchy pools of grease, and her wide thighs and lumpen flesh seems to squirm unpleasantly beneath her miniskirt. It’s clear, though, that Princess doesn’t share Elodie’s concern, always studying her reflection with a beatific smile, the same one she always wears.

  And Elodie is careful, always, not to draw attention to herself. Kiki rarely acknowledges her and Elodie understands that she must, for some reason, have accepted Shanique’s decision to let her stay, but every so often she’ll look up to find Kiki’s cool, assessing gaze upon her, and she’ll hurriedly turn away, an uneasy, shivery feeling creeping up her spine.

  ‘Kiki doesn’t want me here,’ she confides to Bobby one evening.

  ‘So what?’ he replies. ‘She’s got no say in it anyway. This place’s in Shanique’s name.’

  ‘She hates me,’ persists Elodie, flatly. ‘And I don’t know why.’

  ‘She hates everyone,’ replies Bobby in a bored tone. ‘Quit worrying about it.’

  Elodie drops the subject, but something tells her that Kiki’s dislike comes from a deeper instinct she can’t begin to fathom. And so she continues to keep out of her way, and hope that Kiki never acts upon it.

  Every night, once the three women are finally ready, they leave the apartment in a flurry of last-minute phone calls, lost purses and hurried goodbyes. At some point just before or after they go, Bobby always leaves abruptly on his own, announcing he has business to see to and giving a distracted wave. It’s strange, the quiet and stillness of the place after everyone has left. She busies herself with bathing Tyra, feeding her and putting her down for the night the way Shanique has taught her, and then she waits for the silence and emptiness of the apartment to descend.

  At first, thoughts of Ingrid refuse to let her be, returning like a flurry of hungry crows to peck and peck away at her mind at odd and unexpected moments. Or else she’ll be hit, suddenly, with a flashback so vivid it slams into her with the force of a punch, leaving her shakey and sick. Alone in the apartment she forces these images from her mind and ponders instead the lives of the strangers she has so unexpectedly found herself amongst.

  She puzzles over where it is they go to at night. She often hears them mention a place called Pinkies, and wonders if it’s perhaps a restaurant – a strange sort of restaurant that’s open all through the night. She wonders too about Darnel, whose role in the apartment and relationship with the others she can’t quite determine. Bobby has told her that he’s Tyra’s father, but often she’ll see him shuffling bleary-eyed from Kiki’s bedroom, sometimes from Princess’s. Wherever he goes he’s followed by the pungent smell of the green herbs he rolls into his cigarettes and his eyes are perpetually half-closed and slightly bloodshot. When he speaks, which isn’t often, it’s in a slow, quiet mumble, as if he’s always just on the verge of falling asleep. But still, Elodie detects a quiet intelligence there; something sharper lying beneath the outward show of sleepiness.

  What fascinates her most is the subtle way in which the others change whenever he’s around. It’s as if they become less, somehow, she notices. Like colours left out too long in the rain. The very essence of Shanique – he
r loud, rich voice, the way she seems to fill a room all by herself, her physical brightness – fades. When Darnel is nearby, everything in her is focussed on him. She fusses around him, fixing him snacks, fetching him cushions, massaging his shoulders, her voice taking on a sing-song, soothing tone, ‘You OK, baby, anything I can get you baby? You look tired, why don’t I fix you a sandwich?’ Sometimes Elodie half expects her to pick him up, throw him over her shoulder and burp him, the ways she does with Tyra.

  Kiki, too. When she speaks to Darnel it’s as if she’s poured a thick layer of syrup over her voice. Her corrosive tongue, mocking eyes and tightly coiled demeanour are concealed beneath a cloud of fluttering eyelids, sickly-sweet smiles and flirtatious pouts. As if she, too, has left the point of herself in the next room, along with her cell phone, purse and cigarettes.

  Even Bobby who ordinarily is never still – continuously drumming his fingers on the table, swirling Tyra around the kitchen, dancing along to the stereo, fighting with Kiki – is subdued when Darnel’s around. Only Princess remains the same, the dazed eyes never changing, nor the meandering, dreamy voice. And through it all, Darnel remains impassive, sucking on his reefer, staring with half-closed eyes at the TV screen, accepting their attentions like a flame accepts moths.

  It is these things Elodie ponders when she’s alone in the apartment at night.

  ‘They’re hookers,’ Bobby tells her, when she asks one afternoon.

  Hookers. Elodie mulls the word over for a moment or two.

  ‘Prostitutes?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Prostitutes.’ She has learnt about prostitutes from the TV.

  The two of them are in his room, listening to David Bowie, whom he likes almost as much as Prince, while Bobby gets ready for the night ahead. He glances at her and, putting down his tub of hair wax, sits next to her on the bed.

  ‘See, Darnel’s their … manager, yeah? He owns Pinkie’s, which is where they all operate from. Well, Kiki works in a titty bar in Manhattan too, which is why she thinks the sun shines out of her crack, but mainly they all work for Darnel.’

  He gets up again, and peering into the mirror, resumes applying wax to his hair, teasing it into stiff peaks with expert precision. ‘Shanique’s his babymomma, so she’s his number one, but it don’t mean much.’ He turns and looks at her seriously. ‘The thing you have to remember with Darnel is, he ain’t as stupid as he looks. He ain’t bad, trust me, he’s an OK guy compared to most, but you wouldn’t want to fuck with him, put it that way.’

  She takes it all in, or at least, tries to. ‘And you?’ she asks politely.

  He doesn’t look at her. ‘Oh, kinda, you know … I dance at a club down town,’ he tells her vaguely. ‘It don’t pay too well, though.’ He shrugs, avoids her eye. ‘Sometimes I need to find money other ways.’

  She nods at this, aware by his tone that he’s hinting at something else, but has no idea what it is. ‘Oh,’ she says vaguely.

  ‘I’m saving up to go to classes, though. Dancing and acting, that sort of thing.’ He turns and looks at her. ‘This ain’t what I’m going to be doing the rest of my life.’

  ‘You’re a wonderful dancer,’ she tells him, glad to be on firm ground again.

  He smiles. ‘You think so?’ he asks her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I really do.’

  The weeks pass, and still, no mention is made of her leaving. At first her gratitude and relief is so great that she ignores the first soft tendrils of doubt. When she tries to imagine her future, she finds that she cannot. Sometimes, waking in the morning and faced with another day stretching ahead of her in the confines of the small apartment, some of the old claustrophobia and hopelessness of High Barn returns.

  ‘Do you mind me staying in your room?’ she asks Bobby.

  ‘Nope. I’m hardly there.’

  ‘What about Shanique? Do you think she wants me to leave?’

  Bobby smiles. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. We like having you here. Tyra’s crazy about you and anyway, Shanique’s never happier than when she’s saving someone’s ass, trust me.’

  Elodie smiles too at this. Even during the short time she’s known them she has come to love Shanique and Bobby. Her favourite times are spent alone with them in the kitchen, drinking coffee, playing with Tyra and listening to them talk. She enjoys the closeness between them, and it touches her how generously they include her in their friendship.

  The first time she sees Shanique laugh, she can only stare in open-mouthed amazement, and no matter how many times she witnesses it again, the sight, she is sure, is something she’ll never tire of. It begins with the faintest quiver of the lips, a gentle flaring of the nostrils, followed by a low warning gurgle. As the sound crescendos, the lip-quivers are joined by shoulder tremors and chin wobbles, her chest heaving and falling until at last she throws back her head, her breasts and belly undulating, her shoulders and arms shaking and jiggling and finally, with tears streaming down her face, she gives herself up to an almost deafening, tooth-rattling Wuh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha that fills every corner of the apartment and has the neighbours banging on the walls.

  But sometimes, the way Bobby and Shanique talk to each other confuses her. It’s like a rapidly flowing river that’s impossible to keep up with, full of slang and private jokes, innuendos and nicknames, and everything said at double speed. She notices that Shanique sometimes calls Bobby ‘Girlfriend’ or ‘Miss Thing’, or ‘Roberta’, even though he’s a boy. She says these things in an affectionate, jokey kind of way, and yet, Elodie is sure, she doesn’t say them to Darnel. There’s something she doesn’t understand, something being said that she doesn’t grasp and she watches the two of them with a perplexed frown, wondering what it means.

  The part of the day she least enjoys are the hours when they’re all in bed, locked in the private world of sleep behind their bedroom doors. Often, Shanique will take Tyra in with her and Elodie will wander listlessly between the living room and the kitchen, killing time until they all wake again. Sometimes even the living room is out of bounds to her, as she’ll suddenly stumble upon Darnel passed out on the couch, his fat, sleeping fingers trailing on the carpet, his wet farts escaping into the warm air, the grunts and groans of a pornographic film competing with his snores.

  Sometimes Elodie whiles away her afternoons in Princess’s bedroom, tucked up with the fat English girl beneath her lilac comforter, surrounded by her collection of cuddly toys and watching a British TV show called EastEnders on BBC America.

  ‘That one’s Pauline, and that one’s Pat,’ Princess tells her, helping herself to another pill from a large jar on the bedside table and absent-mindedly passing one to Elodie. ‘And that’s the Queen Vic.’

  Elodie smiles and shakes her head at the proffered pill.

  ‘That’s Sharon,’ says Princess, perking up and pointing to a large blonde girl. ‘Pretty, ain’t she?’

  She turns to Elodie and says, ‘My dad says I look like her a bit, but I don’t think so, do you?’ She eyes Elodie hopefully. ‘Do you think she looks like me, Elodie?’

  ‘A little,’ Elodie lies and is rewarded with a delighted grin.

  ‘Want one?’ Princess asks her, once again passing her the jar of assorted capsules, tablets and pills.

  ‘No, thanks, Princess,’ Elodie replies, for the seventh time that day.

  Mostly though, she spends these lonely hours staring out of the kitchen window, across to the tenements opposite, or at the lone figures trailing across the scrublands far below. At night she’ll wake at three or four or five a.m., and listens to the sounds of the city below. It calls to her. She lies on her back and looks up at the ceiling and listens to the roar of other people’s air con, music from car stereos, strangers shouting to each other in the street, their voices floating up towards her window like pieces of burnt paper. She watches as distant headlights illuminate the ceiling like the flashing eyes of some great, purring, waiting beast.

  At last she stops Bobby just as he’s about t
o go out one evening. The girls are still getting ready, Tyra gurgling happily in her high chair.

  ‘Take me with you,’ she says.

  ‘What? No way, Elodie, you know I can’t. Shanique don’t want the police spotting you and following you back here, sticking their noses in Darnel’s business.’

  ‘Please, just to the corner of the street? I’ll come straight back, I promise.’

  ‘No. Maybe the police are looking for you, maybe they ain’t, but it’s not worth the risk.’ Bobby shakes his head and puts on his jacket.

  She looks back at him, her eyes pleading.

  At last he sighs. ‘Jesus. OK, OK.’ Bobby runs his fingers through his black fin of hair and casts a critical eye over her. ‘Not like that, though.’ He turns and rummages through his closet. ‘Here,’ he says, flinging an oversized, hooded sweatshirt at her. ‘Put this on.’ He goes to his chest of drawers. ‘And these,’ he passes her a pair of sunglasses.

  She puts them on, the hood pulled down low, the enormous, 70s-style lenses half obscuring her face.

  Bobby surveys her, ‘Well,’ he says with a smile, ‘you look like a fucking bug, but at least you don’t look like you.’

  She smiles back, excitement nudging through the strange, deadening languor that has crept over her during the past few weeks.

  ‘You can walk me to the subway, and then you gotta come straight home,’ Bobby tells her as they leave the apartment and make their way down the six flight of stairs.

  Emerging into the street she feels a sudden rush of relief, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time without realising it. As they move away from the apartment blocks and past rows of houses and shops she breathes in the warm, sweet-smelling May air and smiles. Walking close to Bobby she watches as the passers-by rush home beneath the darkening sky, the storekeepers shutting up shop for the night, groups of kids gathering around their cars, music blaring from their stereos. She and Bobby talk little as she stares around her, wide-eyed behind the dark glasses, anxious not to miss a thing. Too soon they come to the subway and reluctantly she says goodbye to Bobby, watching him disappear into the station before turning and slowly making her way back home. She takes her time, drinking in every detail: the rust on a fire hydrant, the face of a child sitting on a step, a scrap of paper drifting across an empty basket ball court, the vibrant green of a passing truck.