Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  She moved into his place by almost imperceptibly small degrees. Gradually, more and more of her belongings filled the few, small rooms of his little Deptford house. After a while, she returned less and less frequently to her Kilburn bedsit, until, one day, Frank came back from the record shop where he worked to find her standing on his doorstep, a small suitcase in her hand. ‘Lease ran out,’ she’d said simply, her dense, petrol-blue eyes on his. ‘Can I live here, with you?’ And he’d felt his heart leap to an entirely new level of happiness.

  At night they would take a bath together in the small, cramped tub. It was old-fashioned and had taps with six knobbly prongs that she said were like his toes. She would sit in the front, her small buttocks wedged between his thighs, his long legs wrapped around her, while the hot tap leaked a slow, steady drip, drip, drip and he massaged soap into her narrow back, tracing her spiky spine with tender fingers until the water ran cold. He was blissfully happy.

  For those first six months Frank immersed himself so entirely in his new life with Kate that everything else was forgotten. He would go to the record shop where he worked every day as usual, but afterwards he would rush home, every part of him tense with a strange doubt until he saw her again, until he had reassured himself that she was still there, that she really existed, that she was his. So when, in January, an exasperated Jimmy sent him a text telling him to meet him at the pub that night or he’d come round and burn his record collection, he reluctantly kissed Kate goodbye, and set off for the Hope and Anchor.

  He was surprised, when he saw Eugene and Jimmy sitting at their usual table, how pleased he was to see them. At the same time it was oddly disorientating finding them so unchanged, when as far as he was concerned everything was different – the whole world was new. He had missed them, he realised.

  ‘It was the Big D peanuts bird that did it,’ Jimmy was saying when Frank had got himself a pint and sat down at their table. ‘Remember when you’d go to the pub with your old man, and you’d keep asking for more and more nuts, just so the barmaid would get to the ones on her tits? Fucking brilliant!’

  ‘No way,’ said Eugene, shaking his head. ‘That teacher at Morden, Miss Townsend. Remember her? She fell over and flashed her knicks once, dirty bitch. Now that was the first time Little Eugene came out to play. Serious.’ A brief glint of happiness shone in his eyes.

  ‘Bit young for you, weren’t she?’ asked Jimmy. He smiled at Frank. ‘You know he’s knocking off Jackie from the Feathers, don’t you? She’s got to be pushing forty.’

  Frank laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m doing the daughter as well,’ protested Eugene. ‘Here mate –’ he turned to Frank ‘– couldn’t lend us a score, could you?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Jimmy. ‘You only had one off me a couple of days ago.’

  Frank shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’m potless. You still owe me fifty quid anyway.’

  They sipped their pints and glanced around the Anchor. By the bar, a couple of thirtysomethings in stripy Gap jumpers talked loudly above the juke-box.

  ‘I mean, it’s not the ideal place to raise the kids,’ the first one was saying earnestly. ‘And, you know, Crouch End had more restaurants and stuff. But, what with the East London line and the Olympics and that, Isobel and I really think New Cross was such a sound investment.’

  His friend nodded enthusiastically. ‘Bottom line? There’s nowhere else so central you can buy period family homes for these sorts of prices.’

  ‘Besides,’ said the first one, ‘there’s so much character around here. Look at this place. It’s so, you know, London. I love it.’

  His mate nodded, and glanced around him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Me too.’ They finished their drinks in silence.

  Jimmy caught Frank’s eye and laughed. ‘Good to see you mate,’ he said.

  Frank smiled. ‘Yeah. Sorry it’s been so long.’

  ‘Kate OK?’

  The name sounded odd on Jimmy’s lips. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, she’s great. Things are great. I’ll bring her out one night, let you meet her properly,’ he trailed off, the idea of it making him feel a bit strange.

  Jimmy held his gaze for a beat or two. ‘Good idea.’

  Frank glanced across to the table opposite where an old man sat alone. He had perfectly parted yellow-grey hair and was dressed in a shirt and neatly-pressed trousers. He had a bulbous, purple nose and thick, horn-rimmed spectacles. Frank’s eyes drifted to his feet. They were clad in grey slip-ons, carefully polished, placed neatly side by side and slightly pigeon-toed. Frank raised his glass at him and the old man nodded back. He had sat there, in the same place, every single night that Frank could remember, always carefully dressed in his ironed slacks and shirt, always alone.

  ‘Look,’ Eugene interrupted, ‘I’m sorry to be a cunt and that, but seriously, you sure you can’t lend me a score?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ Irritably, Jimmy pulled out a couple of notes and handed them over.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll give it you back next week.’ Jimmy and Frank watched as Eugene hurried to the other side of the bar, to a grimy looking man with adult acne and a stained FUCK Me T-shirt standing shiftily by the pool table.

  Frank raised his eyebrows at Jimmy, who shook his head. ‘It’s getting worse. He’s off his tits most nights. Booze, coke, spliff, you name it. That Jackie from the Feathers, can’t believe her luck, can she, so she’s giving him handouts left right and centre. Not to mention all the other birds he’s scrounging off at the moment.’

  Eugene returned looking pleased with himself. He nodded at Jimmy and jerked his head towards the toilets.

  ‘Nah,’ said Jimmy. ‘Have a word: it’s Tuesday night.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Jimmy and Frank sat in silence for a while. ‘Work all right, is it?’ Frank asked.

  Jimmy smiled broadly, ‘Good as gold, mate.’ Jimmy had set up his own business a few years ago buying and selling second-hand cars. Now he had his own garage and a two-bedroom flat around the corner.

  ‘Still seeing that Amy?’ Frank asked next, referring to a nurse Jimmy had been going out with off and on for six months or so.

  ‘Nah,’ Jimmy raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘Nah, mate. You know how it is. You go out with a girl for a bit and it’s all –’ he put on a high falsetto giggle ‘– Oh Jimmy, you’re so funny, Jimmy you’re such a laugh, let me suck your knob Jimmy. Before you know it you’re walking round Tesco’s with a hangover, she hasn’t touched your dick for two weeks and she’s not talking to you because you can’t be fucked to go to her best mate Gemma’s engagement party.’

  Eugene had returned. ‘Why is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Why’s what?’

  ‘Why are birds’ best mates always called Gemma?’

  The three of them puzzled it over for a while, and Frank realised that he hadn’t ever actually met, or even heard Kate mention, any friends of her own. ‘Dunno,’ he said.

  At the other end of the pub, the barmaid was setting up a karaoke system and a hum of expectation buzzed through the regulars. A few tables away an overweight, defeated looking man a few years older than them was sitting with his girlfriend, a sour-looking woman with an expression of bored indifference on her face. The man looked over and gloomily raised his glass at them before continuing to stare at the table.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Frank, nudging Jimmy. ‘That’s John Bennet over there.’ Jimmy and Eugene glanced over at the man, before looking embarrassedly away. John had been a god at Morden Comprehensive, a cross between Pele and James Bond. When they were kids nobody had doubted for a minute the glittering future that lay ahead of him. The three of them sat in silence for a few moments, staring into their pints. ‘Christ,’ said Eugene at last, getting up, ‘I’m going for another line.’

  A woman in her fifties with a face full of make-up started singing My Heart Will Go On along to the Karaoke machine and Jimmy nudged Frank. ‘Look at those two,’ he said. Watching the singer on
the other side of the pub were two girls in their early twenties. Goldsmiths students slumming it most likely. Frank grinned as one of them – a short, attractive blonde – turned and shot a disdainful look at Jimmy, who sniggered and went to get more drinks.

  After a while Eugene returned and started telling them at double speed about one of the regulars at the Feathers. ‘ … so this bloke’s starting to feel ill as fuck yeah, and he can’t work out why. Everyday he comes back from work, makes himself dinner, goes to bed, gets up, goes to work, comes home, has his dinner, goes to bed ’

  ‘Sounds like a right laugh,’ interrupted Jimmy.

  ‘Yeah, well, so anyway, every day it’s the same as normal, but suddenly he starts feeling a bit gyp and he can’t work out why. A week later his old lady goes round and finds him in bed, dead as a dodo.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Frank. ‘What’d happened to him?’

  Eugene lit a fag. ‘Pigeon had flown into the water tank hadn’t it? Got stuck, carked it, then started decomposing. Geezer’s drinking his water and getting poisoned.’ He looked at Frank and Jimmy and laughed. ‘Straight up!’

  ‘Death by pigeon,’ Jimmy grinned, shaking his head. ‘What a way to go.’

  It was 10.30. Frank stood up and put his jacket on. ‘Sorry lads, but I better get back.’ He didn’t meet Jimmy’s eyes as he added, ‘got some early deliveries in the shop tomorrow.’ He waved a hand at his two friends and headed for the door. As he left he turned and saw them make a beeline for the two students.

  The night was freezing. He turned up his collar against the wind and set out along the deserted New Cross streets. He passed the blackened bricks of the Venue club, the elaborate porticos and turrets of deserted Victorian pubs, grafittied chipboard covering their smashed-in windows. Cafs with handwritten menus blu-tacked to the glass, cab offices with iron grilles to keep out the lunatics and robbers. He passed Afro-Caribbean hairdressers and nail bars, second-hand furniture stores and Cash Converters. Each one was in darkness; the only light in the black streets came from the pubs and off-licences glowing orange on every corner.

  He hurried on towards Deptford and his thoughts turned to Eugene. Maybe Jimmy was right: it had been some time since he’d seen Eugene not half out of his head on something or other. He speeded up as he got closer to home and mentally shrugged it off. Eugene had always been a bit nuts, and he and Jimmy had always looked out for him: lending him money, putting him up, helping him get work. He always sorted himself out eventually. He’d probably be fine in a week or two.

  When he got home he found Kate sitting on the back step to the garden, smoking a cigarette. She never seemed to feel the cold for some reason. The light from the moon and his kitchen bathed the small bricked-in space in a pale glow. She seemed deep in thought and didn’t hear him approach and for a moment, just for a moment as he looked at her it struck him, inexplicably, that he was looking at a complete stranger, and he felt a sharp chill of fear. But then she turned, saw him, and smiled. Relief flooded him. Hugging his coat tighter to himself he sat next to her and she leant her head on his shoulder. They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘I really should do something about this garden,’ said Frank at last, looking at the mess of overgrown weeds, the rotting carcass of an armchair he’d dumped out there the summer before and then forgotten about, the dead twigs poking out from moss-covered terracotta pots. ‘Used to be Joanie’s pride and joy, this.’

  ‘We could make it nice again,’ said Kate, reaching for his hand. ‘Grow new things.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Frank, pleased with the idea. ‘I used to quite like helping her out here when I was a kid.’ He laughed, embarrassed. ‘Always fancied myself as a bit of a gardener actually. A butch one, naturally.’

  He stared out at the small, bricked yard. ‘We could have honeysuckle over that wall,’ said Frank, ‘and a magnolia over there. Then, in that bed we could plant loads of wild flowers and stuff, maybe some hollyhocks …’

  And as he talked, Kate kept her eyes on his lips, softly repeating the names of the flowers under her breath. ‘Honeysuckle, magnolia, camellia, rose.’ They sat in silence for a while and rather than the dark, cold yard, they saw their garden in bright sunlight, overflowing with flowers in full bloom on some distant summer’s day.

  twenty-three

  London, April 2004

  Such a gentle start to the nightmare. Such a quiet beginning to it all.

  The Soho Picture Library takes up two floors of the offices on Brewer Street. Kate stands on the pavement outside. She’s used to the small, brown-carpeted shabbiness of high-street insurance firms and solicitors, and though she had asked her agency for a placement more central now that she’d moved south, she’d not expected anything like this. Newly pointed yellow bricks and real sash windows, a discreet flower box on each sill. She passes through the large glass doors and into the foyer with its fat, expensive sofas and curvaceous vases of plump flowers. A skeletal blonde eyes her suspiciously from behind the reception desk. ‘Courier?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ says Kate. ‘I’m –’

  ‘From the agency?’ She doesn’t wait for a reply. ‘Through that door, second on the left.’ The blonde jerks her head towards a large, glass door, fires a brief, appalled glance at Kate’s shoes, and returns to her magazine.

  The thirty or so people gathered with her in the small, plush room are students, mostly. Foreigners and students, the majority of them young – cheap labour for mundane work, brought together here by chance to graft for a few months, for a few quid. They are being addressed by a middle-aged man with an earnest, tired face and a soft Birmingham accent. ‘Welcome to SPL. I’m Stuart,’ he says, and begins to tell them about the ‘special project’ they have been ‘selected’ for. But though his audience stares politely at him, they are, Kate knows, barely listening. Just get on with it, man. Tell us what the fucking job is and we’ll do it, if you pay us. Only Kate listens intently, as she always does.

  At last he leads them down a flight of stairs to the library’s basement, through a door marked ‘Archives’. It’s a long, low-ceilinged room, warm and dimly lit and each wall is lined with filing cabinets. Groups of tables with scanners and computers run the length of its centre. In the far corner are stacked several hundred cardboard boxes of what turns out to be photographs. A few people shuffle and cough while Stuart inducts them into the task of sorting, scanning, categorizing, sub-categorizing, labelling, numbering, cross referencing and filing the contents of the boxes.

  It’s Kate he singles out first, probably because he has noticed she has been paying such close attention. He smiles at her. ‘You,’ he says, ‘and you, please –’ carelessly he points to the girl standing next to her and beckons them over. He takes them to the boxes, and picking two, hands one to each of them. ‘Architecture,’ he says, reading from their labels. ‘That should do you for starters.’ Next he leads them to the nearest workstation, spends a few minutes explaining the computers, then moves on to the others.

  Left alone, the two smile shyly at each other. ‘Hi,’ says Kate after a pause. Her co-worker is in her mid twenties, tall and slightly mannish with very short hair and large hands. Kate had noticed her earlier, tripping over her feet and dropping her bag on the way down to the basement.

  ‘I’m Daisy,’ she says, offering a clumsy handshake.

  They look down at the boxes in front of them. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better get on with it,’ says Kate. They grimace and smile, and turn to their Macs.

  Her first day passes quickly enough: the work is easy and absorbing, the low gloom of the archive room peaceful, soporific. That evening she emerges somewhat dazedly onto the scuttling pavements of Soho, taken by surprise by the sudden surge of dark energy. Turning down one furtive little alley she finds a narrow, cobbled street lined with sex shops and strip bars, their secretive entrances and windows lit by neon letters: Peep Show, Sex Toys, DVDs, XXX-Rated. Groups of leather-jacketed men huddle in doorways while young women shiver behind coun
ters staring out with swift, blank eyes. Two German tourists with backpacks whisper furiously in front of a movie theatre. A group of excited lads push past her, shouting and swaggering and swigging from cans. And amongst it all a steady procession of tired office workers head home.

  Turning a corner she passes open doorways with handwritten signs: ‘Sexy Swedish, 19’, ‘Naughty Teenage Model’, ‘Big Black Beauty’. Arrows in marker pen point towards narrow staircases lit by naked bulbs. She looks up and sees a net curtain twitch then part to reveal a pale face staring down at her. On the other side of the street, from a parked car, a man hisses then calls to her, ‘Hey sexy girl. Yeah you, Beautiful! You like black cock?’ She ducks her head and hurries on, past the mocking smile of a girl in apple-green hot pants standing beneath a sign that says MASSAGE. At last she cuts down Rupert Street and heads for Charing Cross.

  Every lunch hour Kate slips from the library to wander the Soho Streets. Leaving the sex shops and alleyways behind, she roams through Berwick Street market up Wardour Street, Old Compton and Frith, down Poland Street, Broadwick and Lexington. Discreet silver plaques shine at her from doorways, alluding to the mysterious practices within: ‘Post Production’, ‘Design Boutique’, ‘Animation Suite’ she reads. Only the young and attractive inhabit this world. Gleaming with entitlement they prowl the streets, mobile phones glued to their murmuring lips.

  Sometimes she’ll spy one of her fellow basement dwellers shuffling past and clutching a sandwich, blinking bemusedly, as if dazzled as much by the passing glamour as by the sun’s cruel spotlight. They are incongruous blemishes upon these chic streets and it seems to Kate over the following months that, as if by silent agreement and in recognition of their subterranean inferiority, they each begin to turn up for work in steadily gloomier outfits, pawing at their cardboard boxes in clothes the colours of shadows, of stains.