Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  From then on, the world outside calls to her like an impatient child. Every evening she dresses in Bobby’s sweatshirt and glasses and walks him the few blocks to the subway. Gradually they begin leaving earlier and earlier, taking a longer, more circuitous route each time.

  And soon she begins to look forward to being alone with Bobby as much as she does the chance to escape the apartment. She likes to listen to him. He never talks about his past, or where he’s going to that night, instead he tells her about his plans for the future, his dream of being famous one day, of being rich and buying a big house in Beverly Hills. ‘Like they have on Cribs. We could all live there together,’ he tells her, his eyes bright. ‘Me, you, Shanique and Tyra.’ He shakes his head. ‘Fuck, man,’ he says wistfully. ‘Wouldn’t that be fierce?’

  She likes to watch him when he talks like this, and thinks how handsome he is, his face so animated, his huge black eyes so bright beneath their long lashes. Over the weeks she feels something strengthen between the two of them she can’t quite put her finger on, something that has started to linger there in the gaps between their words. ‘I like talking to you, Elodie,’ he tells her often. ‘You make me feel, I don’t know, calm or something,’ he laughs. ‘Feel like I could tell you anything.’

  One day, to her surprise, she finds herself wondering what it would be like to touch the soft dark skin of his neck. These thoughts startle her, and she pushes them away. But she likes to watch him and see the quiet stillness at the heart of his nervous energy, and sometimes, when he looks back at her, she feels almost as if she were touching him after all.

  Occasionally when she’s alone and holds their friendship to the light, her blood quickens, just a little; her heart beats a little faster. And sometimes she will look up and find his eyes upon her and she will see something mirrored there, as light and fine as spider’s silk. For only a second their eyes will meet and in that moment the air between them will thicken, quicken, before they both glance away, and talk of other things.

  Often on their daily walks he’ll tell her stories about the others. ‘Princess?’ he says one day. ‘She came over from England with big dreams and some dumbass guy who dumped her as soon as her feet touched JFK. Thought she was going to be in the movies, but instead she wanders from one shitty bar job to the next. Thing is, she starts getting a little too free and easy with the party powder. Sooner or later she runs out of money, can’t even get the plane home to mommy.

  ‘Then one night, some guy at the bar she works at tells her how she can make a few bucks, if you know what I mean. Then this same guy tells her he’s going to be her manager, tells her he’s going to take her to Hollywood, but she’s just got to turn one more trick first, so as to get the bus fare and all.’ He snorts with derision. ‘So she borrows some money off him to get herself set up, then a little more so she can buy a bit of coke to make it bearable, then she has to give him a cut of what she earns. Sooner or later she’s in too deep, owing money all over the place, and Hollywood? Hollywood’s forgotten.’ They turn the corner. ‘She’s clean now, though,’ Bobby continues. ‘Shanique won’t allow that shit around Tyra, so instead Princess spends her life popping pills instead. ’Ludes, Valium, Ritalin. You seen her jar of candy, right?’

  ‘But couldn’t she have just run away from the man?’

  Bobby snorts. ‘Run away? These motherfuckers have friends all over the city. She ain’t got the brains to dodge them and they’d kick her black and blue soon as blink, or worse.’ They cross the street, the subway just in sight. ‘Anyway, Princess’s guy gets sick of her eventually, and sells her onto Darnel, which is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to the poor dumb bitch, but now she has to work off the money Darnel spent buying her. And so it goes, Elodie honey. And so it goes.’ He shakes his head. ‘Funny thing is, she’s Darnel’s biggest earner. Bigger than Kiki, even.’ He shakes his head and smiles. ‘Turns out she’s got some talent after all.’

  And then, one day to her surprise he says with sudden, anxious frankness, ‘You know I’m just like them, don’t you Elodie?’

  She looks back at him blankly. Watches him colour and shift his gaze before finally mumbling, ‘I go with men for money too.’

  She frowns. ‘Go where?’

  ‘Jesus, Elodie.’ They walk in silence for a bit. Eventually he tries again.

  ‘You know about hookers, right?’ he asks.

  She shrugs, nods, and he looks away as he tells her, ‘Well, men do that too. With other men.’

  She thinks about what she knows of sex. The pornographic films Darnel watches and which she views only in quickly stolen glances, brief snapshots of a mechanical clarity that both excites and terrifies her. She thinks about a TV show she watched once, where two men kissed and held each other’s hands. She thinks about the nameless longing she had felt at High Barn. She looks up, and notices that Bobby is watching her expectantly, his eyes worried.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘OK.’

  She smiles at him, and holds his gaze until he returns her smile then ducks his head once more.

  Whenever they part, he touches her lightly on the shoulder and says goodbye. She feels his fingers there long after she has returned to the apartment. Sometimes she’ll be sitting in the kitchen, playing with Tyra and realise with a start that she has spent the last ten minutes thinking about his eyes.

  Occasionally, when the others are asleep and Tyra is safely tucked up with Shanique, and she can no longer fight her impatience to be outside, she’ll creep out of the apartment alone. Each time, she ventures a little further, unable to resist walking just one more block. When she returns to the apartment the city seems to call plaintively after her as she loiters on the sidewalk for as long as she dares before reluctantly turning to the heavy, brown peeling door and allowing the dark hot walls to claim her once more.

  One day she returns from roaming the streets to find Shanique and Tyra sitting in the kitchen waiting for her. Two sets of disapproving brown eyes watch her as she takes her place at the table. Her heart sinks. She knows that Shanique hates her leaving the apartment by herself. ‘What if you’re recognised?’ she has asked her more than once. ‘Trust me, that would not go down well with Darnel. He has certain … business concerns he don’t want the police sticking their noses into. If the cops spot you walking down the street and follow you back here, we’re all fucked, for real.’

  ‘Hey, Shanique,’ she says weakly now. ‘Everything OK?’

  But instead of the dressing down she’d been expecting, Shanique gets up with a heavy sigh, and, putting Tyra in her highchair, goes over to Elodie, takes her chin in her hand and surveys her critically with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘if you must keep running around outside all the time, we’d better do something about this hair of yours.’

  Ten minutes later, she finds herself sitting with a towel wrapped around her shoulders, while Shanique stands behind her with a pair of scissors in one hand, a fistful of her hair in the other, and a determined look on her face.

  Princess, Bobby and Tyra sit across from them, watching wide-eyed.

  ‘I don’t usually like white-girls’ hair,’ Shanique tells her thoughtfully, letting a long strand fall between her fingers. ‘Always thought there was something kinda … droopy about it.’ She strokes Elodie’s with a look of wonder on her face. ‘But this is beautiful.’ She picks up another handful. ‘And the colour! Man, the colour’s fierce. Like leaves in fall, or something.’

  ‘Very poetic,’ observes Bobby dryly. But, when Shanique raises her scissors to make the first cut, Elodie notices him wince and hide his eyes behind his fingers.

  Elodie stares at her reflection in the little mirror Princess has propped up for her on the table. ‘Cut it!’ she whispers urgently, her eyes focussed on the blades. As Shanique makes the first snip and she sees one long, auburn chunk fall to the floor, she feels a surge of exhilaration.

  ‘I can’t watch,’ says Bobby, his head sinking to t
he table.

  An hour later Elodie emerges from the bathroom with Shanique, the stench of peroxide still in her nostrils, a towel draped over her head. Bobby and Princess eye her expectantly.

  ‘Let’s have a look then,’ urges Princess.

  Elodie and Shanique turn to each other and smile. ‘You ready?’ Shanique asks her. When Elodie nods, she leans over and snatches the towel from her head with a flourish.

  ‘Holy shit,’ whispers Bobby.

  ‘Blimey,’ says Princess.

  Elodie picks up the little mirror and stares back at her reflection, gingerly putting a hand to the shorn, yellow locks. Shanique’s face looms behind her.

  ‘Your eyes look enormous,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Bluer.’ She smiles. ‘You look cute, honey. Like a cute little boy.’

  At that moment, Kiki walks into the kitchen. Spying Elodie, she stops in her tracks, her customary sneer replaced by a pantomime display of incredulity. ‘Hell,’ she says. ‘“Boy” is right.’ She cackles spitefully. ‘Damn, Elodie, you better watch your back when Bobby’s around,’ she nudges Shanique with her elbow, hugely enjoying her own joke. ‘Might not be able to keep his hands off you.’

  She goes over to the refrigerator, still laughing, while Shanique sucks her teeth disapprovingly and tells her to shut up. Nobody notices the look that passes between Elodie and Bobby then; the fraction of a second where their eyes meet like an electric shock, the way they hurriedly drop their gaze again.

  Elodie wakes the following morning with an impatience in her belly that she can barely contain. That afternoon, when she walks with Bobby to the subway as usual, she stops him just before he turns into the station’s entrance. ‘I want to come with you,’ she tells him.

  ‘Oh god, don’t do this to me.’ He shakes his head. ‘It ain’t safe. Queens is one thing, but … it just ain’t safe.’ He catches her look of disappointment and continues more gently, ‘Look, Elodie, we don’t know if the police are after you or not. Chances are they’ll know that what happened to Ingrid was nothing but an accident. But it ain’t worth the risk. Plus they’d put you in care. Trust me, honey, you go on back home.’

  ‘Bobby,’ she stares back at him, tears of frustration in her eyes. ‘I spent nearly four years locked up in that place. I did nothing without Ingrid’s say-so, saw no-one she didn’t want me to see. Please. I need to do this. I need to see further than the same four blocks every day. Take me with you.’

  She holds Bobby’s gaze until at last he sighs and rolls his eyes in defeat. ‘All right, already,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’ He puts an arm round her and together they walk into the subway. ‘Thought I was the drama queen around here.’

  From then on, she and Bobby ride the number seven train into Manhattan every day, parting company as soon as they emerge from the darkness onto the sunlit sidewalk. She knows better than to ask Bobby where he goes each evening, and he always disappears swiftly, without a backward glance, leaving her to navigate the surging streets alone.

  She soon discovers something extraordinary about the faces that she sees in the flashing yellow gloom of the subway train, or lost among the sea of other faces beneath the looming Manhattan buildings: they all share the same, blank, inward-looking gaze; the same unseeing eyes. Nobody, not one, gives her a second glance. With this realisation comes a surge of exhilaration. She especially loves the subway ride into Manhattan, the way the train soars high above the various districts of Queens before rumbling down beneath the streets. At first, when she emerges from whichever subway stop they have chosen that day, she never ventures further than a few blocks, anxiously memorizing each landmark so she can find her way back again. Gradually though, she casts her net wider as the corner of another block, and then another, calls to her. Slowly, piece by piece, she gets to know the city, finding that she has an instinctive sense of direction, an innate ability to find her way.

  Blocks and blocks she walks that long, hot, close summer, the whole grid, from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, from China Town to Liberty Harbor, the roar of the subway escaping from grilles beneath her feet, her nostrils filling with the smells of the city. Along the Hudson, over Brooklyn Bridge. She walks with such certainty it’s as if she’s back there in the heart of the forest again, the skyscrapers her trees. At Times Square she stands and gazes up at the glass and steel, the neon signs floating in the soft twilight. She walks the length of Broadway to Central Park and wanders beneath its leafy ceiling, the trees filled with birdsong, the perimeter edged by patient skyscrapers which gaze down at the green undulating bowl like beasts around a lake.

  Fall arrives, abruptly seeing off the summer warmth. One morning just before dawn, Elodie is woken by Bobby returning as usual from his night out alone in the city. She’s used to him waking her like this, to stirring from her sleep while he carefully and quietly slips beneath the covers to lie next to her, his breathing almost instantly becoming slower and deeper as he sinks into unconsciousness. But recently, something new has crept into the space between them and more and more often now they’ll lie awake for a while, side by side, without touching, their eyes closed, each pretending to be asleep; each pretending not to listen to the other’s breathing.

  This particular night Bobby is noisier than usual when he comes in. She listens to him undress, hears a sharp gasp of pain when he pulls himself free from his T-shirt. When he crawls into bed next to her he lets out a sudden whimper.

  She sits up and turns on the lamp. ‘Bobby,’ she says, blinking in the sudden glare. ‘Are you OK?’ No sooner has she said the words than her eyes take in properly the state of Bobby’s face. He stares up at the ceiling while she itemises the damage, the bruised cheek, the bloodied lip, the half-closed eye that’s already turning a deep and angry purple.

  ‘What happened to you, Bobby?’ she asks, dismayed.

  He doesn’t answer, but a tear slides out of the corner of his swollen eye.

  ‘Bobby,’ she repeats, ‘please tell me! Are you OK?’

  When he speaks, his voice is tight with anger. ‘Got jumped,’ is all he says, and still he won’t look at her. ‘Happens, sometimes.’

  Gently she lifts the pink blanket and gives a little gasp. His ribs, too, are covered in bruises. She lies down next to him again, her eyes fixed anxiously on his face.

  ‘Why, Bobby?’ she whispers. ‘Who did this to you?’

  He turns on his side, his back to her. ‘Fuck, Elodie. I’m so sick of this. I’m just so fucking sick and tired of it.’

  She switches the lamp off and reaching over, begins to stroke his hair. He starts to cry, then. She moves closer to him and after a moment’s hesitation, puts her arms around him. After a while he begins to talk.

  ‘I’m nineteen next month,’ he tells her. ‘Which makes it four years since I been working the streets.’ He turns on his back and stares up at the thin sliver of moonlight squeezing through the curtains.

  ‘When I was fourteen I got into drugs pretty bad. Been drinking with some older guys for a while anyway. Pretty soon I got to like getting high so much I couldn’t ever seem to steal enough to pay for it. Then one day, this guy I know offers me fifty bucks for a blow job. Fifty bucks! All that money for what my step dad had been taking for free anyway. I didn’t need to think too long about it. Pretty soon I got a nice little collection of customers. I looked young for my age, even then – you get more work that way.’

  Elodie doesn’t say a word, just continues to stroke his hair.

  ‘Pretty soon I’m high on everything I can get my hands on – coke, crack, you name it – and letting strangers fuck me every day just to pay for it. After a while my mom cottoned on to what I was doing and threw me out. So I started living on the streets. I was fifteen – getting picked up by the police every week and sent off to care. Each time they picked me up, I just ran away again. One day Shanique finds me half bleeding to death behind a dumpster after some local fag-haters decided to teach me a lesson. I’d known Shanique all my life, since we were kids, bu
t she left the neighbourhood before me. She was already one of Darnel’s girls, hooking for him, so she brings me home with her, gets me off the drugs. If it weren’t for Shanique I’d be dead by now, most likely.’ He turns onto his side so that he’s facing her and they stare at each other for a long time. ‘One day I’ll get out of this,’ he tells her seriously. ‘I’ve been saving up. Going to start going to auditions, maybe join some classes, you know?’

  She nods, and they continue to lie there, not speaking or moving. At last she reaches over and very gently strokes the soft skin of his cheek, then lets her fingers trail slowly over his jaw, hovering over the fresh growth of stubble there, before moving on to trace the outline of his lips. She hears her name catch in his throat and her fingers halt for a moment, a clear current passes between them, the moment glimmers and fills the room. She doesn’t think about what she does next. Very slowly she leans over and puts her lips to the skin next to his swollen eye, then to his bruised cheek, and finally to his cut and bloodied mouth. For a second, just for a second, it seems that he won’t respond, and then at last with a sudden, swift movement he pulls her to him.

  His lips are hot and soft; surprising and thrilling, and when his tongue touches hers it brings electric shockwaves of something dark and terrifying and almost unbearably exciting. Soon there’s no thought; only the need to feel his naked skin next to hers; his body in her hands, and her urgency is matched by his. When he pulls her free of her shirt she shudders with relief. They lie for a long time, their lips and fingers exploring each other. And then his slim hips are moving with hers, her fingers stroking the bumps and hollows of his back, urging his small, slender buttocks closer until she feels the sudden sharp shock of pain, and then, at last, the surprise of him moving inside her, the building pleasure of it, the final release. Finally they fall apart, their fingers still entwined and it feels as if her whole, breathless body remains filled with the scent and touch of him and a lingering amazement. Bit by bit their sweat cools, their breath slows, and he raises her fingers to his lips.