Little Bird

by Camilla Way

The days, the weeks ticked by. Her daily close proximity both sickened and thrilled him like the strange, adrenalin-fuelled onset of sunstroke. By the end of each day he would be gasping for air, desperate to get away from her, unable to contain himself a second longer. And yet, once home he would be left floundering with a restless anxiety that could only be soothed by taking out her photographs or calling her up on the phone.

  It was his fourth week at the library; a hot, airless Tuesday. The afternoon stretched on ahead of him. She was sat so he could watch her from the corner of his eye without her noticing. She stared at her computer screen, completely absorbed in what she was doing. Suddenly, not taking her eyes from her work she swiftly removed her sweatshirt and hung it over the back of her chair. As she’d raised her arms he had caught the briefest glimpse of her bare midriff. Beneath her sweatshirt she wore a pale red T-shirt, scoop necked, quite loose over her slender frame. Her short blonde hair curled around her small ears and there was something about the curve of her neck that caused a strange discomfort in his chest and he could feel the warnings of a tension headache. Mentally he checked on his supply of Vicodin. In a sudden movement she lent forward to dip into her box of photographs and he caught a glimpse of the swell of her naked breasts before she straightened up again. He had looked away, his heart painful in his chest.

  The sweatshirt stayed there on the back of her chair when she left that night, and again the night after. On impulse, on the third day he snatched it up as he left and took it home with him. He discovered, lying on his bed, that it had different layers of scent; a faint whiff of washing powder, another vaguely sweet smell that was possibly body lotion, and then another, muskier odour beneath the armpits.

  He lay on the bed, the sweatshirt to his nose, and for no reason at all, thoughts of his old boarding school drifted into his head. It had been a dismal, bottom-end institution somewhere outside Wigan. He had hated it with a passion. Hated the masters, hated the rules and the ugly, comfortless surroundings, and above all hated his classmates and fellow boarders. The feeling was mutual. His dark, brooding moods had been interspersed with sudden rages, and the biting sarcasm that characterised his rare lighter periods had not endeared him to the other boys. Bursts of insomnia had blighted those years. At night, alone in his dormitory he would think of his father who, whenever they spoke on the phone, would, like his mother, be increasingly full of talk of her.

  He had meant just to sit in his car outside her house for a while. He did that sometimes, when he had nothing else to fill his evening with, or when he felt a sudden need to see her. At about seven she emerged to go to the Spar on the corner. When she returned the lanky prick that she lived with suddenly appeared at the other end of the street. He smiled and waved at her and she raised her own arm in response, began to cross the road to meet him. And something in the way she quickened her pace to go to him, the unthinking certainty between them had filled him with a sudden and overwhelming fury. In another moment they would be touching. Almost before he knew what he was doing his foot was on the accelerator. Moments later he was speeding towards her until, at the last instance, he swerved and ploughed on past down the road. Minutes later he was parked a few blocks away, sweat pouring down his face, huge jagged gasps catching in his throat, his heart thundering. Stupid stupid idiot he punched the dash with his palm. That was not how to go about it. That was not part of the plan.

  The following Sunday evening he sat on his sofa and stared at his phone. He was tempted to phone her – he enjoyed making those little intrusions into her home. There was something so intimate about talking on the phone to her – not that he talked, of course – but just hearing her voice on the other end was pleasurable, that rally of scared hellos. Her quick, fearful little voice. It was almost as if they were lovers, as if he were her boyfriend, he thought. Calling her up on the phone, her whispering into his ear, hello, hello, hello?

  But he didn’t call Elodie. Tonight was the night that Mike was coming round.

  Since he’d met him two years ago in a club in Shoreditch, Mike had been supplying him with a variety of pills. Mike, a large and largely silent Lithuanian, was a reliable and reassuring presence in his life, turning up at his door at the drop of a hat, with whatever Anton needed. When he had mentioned the gun, Mike’s narrow little eyes had not even flickered. ‘OK.’ A brief nod, his face expressionless as ever. ‘I bring next time.’

  Anton had had to quell a stab of disappointment. He’d had visions of meeting the gun dealer in person, of perhaps going to a dingy East End pub with an envelope full of unmarked notes. Talk of ‘shooters’ and ‘hits’ – that sort of thing. But Mike had been confused when he’d suggested an introduction. ‘I just bring to you, yes? No problem, OK? I bring.’

  The phone rang: that would be him. ‘Mike?’ he put the mobile to his ear, his heart thumping pleasurably. ‘You’re outside?’

  Twenty minutes later the 9mm Glock was in his hands. He felt elated as he stared at the shotgun’s neat, blunt shape, felt its satisfying heaviness. For the fifth time in as many minutes he unloaded then reloaded the bullets the way Mike had shown him. Going to his window he aimed it at the heads of various passers-by for a while, making happy little shooting noises as he imagined picking off each one. He chuckled to himself as he returned to the sofa to stare at it some more. This was living.

  twenty-six

  Soho, central London, 5 May 2004

  Spring has washed over London at last, and the city emerges from the receding tide of winter yellow-tinged and victorious. Kate walks the journey from Charing Cross to Soho and the faces that she passes turn pleased but suspicious eyes to the fresh blue skies like crabs peering from beneath rocks. Through Leicester Square she walks, then along the edges of China Town, where boxes of exotic vegetables are unloaded from vans by men in white aprons. She crosses Shaftesbury Avenue into Wardour Street, stopping for a truck that washes away last night’s excesses from gutters with bubble-gum scented spray, past pub cleaners come to unlock doors on the ghosts of yesterday’s drinkers, on overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses, before she cuts into Brewer Street and passes through the entrance to the library.

  Down she goes, down two flights of stairs to the basement, through the door marked Archives, into the long, low-ceilinged room that already by 9.33 a.m. is humming with a quiet industry. She relishes the secret, underground safety of this place, but for the past few weeks she has moved through each day with anxiety snapping at her heels. Since that first, strange phone call there have been several more, on each occasion the person on the other end listening silently to her fearful hellos or to Frank’s irritated interrogation before finally, gently, hanging up. (And what menace, what cold, hard menace is held within that silence before the receiver is replaced.)

  It has been five days since the car tried to run her down outside Frank’s house; five days of scanning every passing face, of jumping at every sound. Five sleepless nights spent reassuring herself over and over that it was just a stranger on the other end of the line, a random maniac behind the wheel. Who else, after all, could it possibly be? And yet a niggling doubt refuses to release her. Now, like an infected wound expelling a splinter, memories of her last night at High Barn rise to the surface of her subconscious with horrible regularity. She cannot shake the idea that someone has found out who she is, that somehow, someone who knows what she did has tracked her down. But, with grim determination she tells herself that she’s mistaken. Her fears are irrational, she is sure. No one could possibly have found her out, not now.

  Down in the basement she hangs her jacket on a hook by the door and makes her way to the furthest workstation where Daisy and Steven are already turning on their Macs and delving into cardboard boxes. They look up and greet Kate as she approaches, in the manner that has already become so familiar to her: Daisy with her pleased, Labrador eyes, Steven with his quick, flickering smile, his quiet ‘Hello,’ the brief, penetrating gaze. She greets them both with relief. It feels good to be here again;
swallowed up in the comforting yellow gloom.

  Over the weeks the Archive room has settled into its patterns, friendships and routines. It is an easy, relaxed camaraderie between people who are used to the random, transient existence of the temporary worker. Only Kate, Daisy and Steven’s workstation, stuck at the far end of the room, has a certain self-contained aloofness to the rest. The three work quietly, diligently together, paying scant attention to their fellow ‘archivists’ (as Stuart likes to call them during his rare trips to the basement). For the first few weeks their talk is restricted to the job in hand: ‘Pass the sticky labels will you?’ ‘What’s the server password again?’ ‘That’s European cathedrals done with.’ And Kate is grateful for her two colleagues’ unobtrusiveness, enjoying the luxury of not having to dodge the usual innocent enquiries into her past.

  Their work is repetitive, uncomplicated and so engrossing that often entire mornings can pass in silence, punctuated only by Daisy’s occasional habit of embarking on a sentence, randomly and from nowhere, her eager eyes darting between Kate and Steven, her words tumbling out in a breathless rush while her two colleagues smile at her enquiringly until, overwhelmed, she dissolves into nervous laughter before lapsing once again into silence, and they tactfully drop their gaze.

  And as the weeks pass Kate feels an odd kind of kinship grow between the three of them. Sometimes it occurs to her that it’s not just the physical position of their workstation that separates them from everyone else, an instinct tells her that the three of them share a wider sense of being somehow cut adrift in the world. She gets used to sometimes glancing up and finding Steven’s thoughtful gaze upon her, almost as if she were one of the photographs he was holding up to the light. And though occasionally she will feel herself blushing beneath the beam of those green eyes, if sometimes she finds her heart beating a little faster when he speaks to her, she will stubbornly ignore the strange tension between them, pushing it firmly to the back of her mind.

  But one day something happens to mark a change between them. Kate returns from lunch a little earlier than usual and, finding the archive room empty, makes her way to the storeroom to fetch a fresh supply of labels. The room is large with high shelves stacked with boxes of stationery, and it’s while riffling through one of these boxes, hidden behind a shelf at the back of the room, that she hears the voices of Clive and Adrian, the two men who share the nearest workstation to theirs. Their voices are loud and clear within the storeroom’s musty quiet. Kate stops rummaging and holds her breath, waiting for them to leave. It’s some moments before she realises that it’s she who is the subject of their conversation.

  Clive is in his early thirties, a large man with dyed black hair and a ginger goatee and habitually dressed in army fatigues. Kate has heard him explain, loudly and often to anyone who will listen (and frequently when they will not), that he is in fact an artist, merely working in the library to fund his latest project, an instalment piece upon which he has been working for the past seven years. Kate, and indeed everyone else in the archive room, knows an awful lot about Clive already. She knows that he is a member of the Socialist Workers Party, that his favourite film is The Matrix and that he has an exhaustive knowledge of conspiracy theories. Adrian, his co-worker, is a limp, translucent man of about twenty with womanly hips who, despite being the butt of Clive’s frequent mood swings and constant ridicule, clearly worships the older man from the tip of his flaky scalp to the soles of his Scholl-shod feet.

  Clive and Adrian share their workstation with Marcella, an Italian foreign language student with a beautiful face, a large bottom and a rudimentary grasp of the English language. That both her co-workers would do pretty much anything to have sex with her has been clear to everyone for some weeks. Marcella has recently taken to wearing her iPod while she works, and throwing beseeching looks to the neighbouring tables.

  Today, in the storeroom, she hears Adrian’s voice first, ‘That one on the next table, what’s her name? Kate. She’s all right, isn’t she? Seems nice, like she’d be, you know, nice. Quite fit too, really.’

  Clive’s voice, when he answers is aghast. ‘Her?’ he snorts. ‘Well, each to their own, mate.’

  ‘No no,’ Adrian backtracks rapidly. ‘I just meant that she seems OK – didn’t say I wanted to fuck her or anything.’ The word ‘fuck’ rings unconvincingly through the room, but Clive laughs obligingly.

  ‘No,’ says Clive, after a few moments, and with the air of a man who knows a thing or two about women, ‘not my sort at all. I like my ladies with a bit of meat on them. Tits and that. And anyway, something a bit stuck up about those three. The thing about women, Adrian my friend, is the quieter they are, the more mental they usually turn out to be. Girls like that Kate, they might look all nice and quiet on the outside, but inside that little head of hers, mark my words: it’ll be like a fire in a pet shop, I guarantee it. Anyway … she’s got fuck-all arse.’

  They talk on for a few minutes before finally their voices drift away and Kate hears the door closing behind them. She exhales, at last, and continues her search through the shelves. Suddenly, a faint noise from a neighbouring aisle causes her to look up and peer through a gap in the shelf. Her heart lurches when she realises that she is staring into the pale-green eyes of Steven; that he has, in fact, been standing there for some time.

  Within the few seconds that they hold each other’s gaze a variety of emotions flood Kate: embarrassment that he has overheard her being discussed in such a way, self-consciousness that she has been observed by him without her knowing it, shyness at being alone with him for the first time, and something else; something she cannot quite put her finger on, but that makes her drop her eyes in confusion. When she raises them again Steven is still staring at her, but now his eyes are lit with amusement. And all at once, the tension of the moment, of the past five weeks, breaks, and, still holding each other’s gaze, they burst into laughter.

  Something alters between Kate and Steven from that moment. An unspoken shift in the atmosphere; a barely perceptible loosening. At first, Kate registers this but doesn’t give it much thought, so preoccupied is she with other things. But when, one morning, Steven interrupts the quiet progress of their work and casually suggests that the three of them go to a nearby café for lunch, she is, nevertheless, slightly surprised at the flicker of excitement she feels in response.

  ‘Sure,’ she says, matching the nonchalance of his tone, and looks at Daisy who is staring at Steven with transparent delight.

  It’s the first of many lunchtimes the three of them will spend together. When one o’clock comes they head somewhat self-consciously to the door, emerging with shy smiles into the bustle of Brewer Street. The day is warm and the pavements are full of office workers baring white flesh for the first time that year. Steven breaks the silence first, as they trudge in the direction of the nearest sandwich bar. ‘I thought it was about time we had a team outing,’ he jokes awkwardly, a touch of apology in his tone.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Kate rushes to reply. ‘Good idea, yes.’ They lapse into silence again and, when Daisy trips over a paving slab and scrabbles to pick up her bag, they catch each other’s eye momentarily before dropping their gaze to smile at their feet. In the café, they sit at the only empty table, placed in the noisy, busy restaurant by the door to the kitchen, and the hubbub of the surrounding tables only serves to highlight the silence that is now weighing rather heavily between the three of them as they settle into the seats and pick up their menus. Kate opens her mouth to speak, mentally groping around for a topic of conversation. She feels anxious, suddenly, that Steven shouldn’t regret his invitation. Before she can utter a word, however, Daisy begins to talk.

  And it is as if Daisy has waited her entire life for this moment. As if she has been storing a lifetime’s worth of words for this particular Tuesday lunchtime. Because, once she has opened her mouth and begun, it seems that she is incapable of ever closing it again. Steven and Kate can only listen dumbly while, as they
read the menu, order and then eat their meal, Daisy talks, and talks, and talks. Within that first hour Kate and Steven learn that she is twenty-six and a Taurus, that she has three rabbits, Billy, Tilly and Bob, that she lives with her mother in a flat in Neasden. They learn that her favourite TV show is Vets In Practice (‘or anything to do with animals really, I don’t mind’), that her mother has ME, and on Saturday nights she goes to the pictures with her next-door neighbour Haley. She tells them that she’s a vegetarian and that she doesn’t like to take the Tube and that one day she wants to live in the countryside with her mum, maybe in Sussex because she went there on a school trip once and it was nice.

  Not once during that first lunch together do Steven and Kate exchange a word. As Kate stares at Daisy’s ever-moving mouth, she finds herself becoming steadily lulled, almost hypnotised by the endless stream of words, by their unceasing flow. It’s only when she becomes slowly aware of a strange heat upon the side of her face that she glances up to find, once again, Steven’s eyes upon her. But there’s nothing unreadable in his expression now; nothing negligible in this stare. His desire for her is so naked that she feels herself burn red beneath its beam.

  His eyes hold her, refusing to let her look away, and trapped within their glare she feels the first flickers of an instinctive, physical response. She sees that he sees it, and she’s aware of a faint mockery in the curve of his lips, a hint of invitation in one slightly raised eyebrow. And there is something else, something else lurking below the sexual current – something dark and frightening that makes her catch her breath. The moment swells and fills the room, she feels that she could almost touch the air between them and wonders how Daisy can just talk on through it, oblivious; why the whole café doesn’t turn and stare. Finally, abruptly, he looks away, releasing her, and she hears herself sigh with relief.

  When they have finished eating and they get up to leave, Daisy, slapping a hand over her mouth, looks at them both in wide-eyed horror.