Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  He had also found a dressing-gown, striped maroon and gold, with Chinese hieroglyphics on the pocket, and a pair of mule-type slippers which were far too big for her and slipped off instead of on. She couldn’t understand why he kept nightwear there at all, or had bothered setting up a bedroom when he claimed to sleep at home. He even had a double bed, an expensive-looking one with a thick well-padded mattress, not just some old divan. Perhaps he used it as a guest-room when his own house got too full. He was bound to have a lot of friends – all those names he’d mentioned – important wealthy clients, famous architects.

  She pulled the duvet right beneath her chin, liked the way it moulded to her body, moved when she did, followed all her fidgets; so different from that heap of heavy rugs she’d got used to in the cottage – dirty rugs which prickled, and either trapped her with their weight, or fell off altogether if she tossed and turned too much. It was like a minor miracle to have these things restored – bedsprings underneath her, instead of a lumpy fifth-hand mattress rolled out on the floor; clean and painted walls; switches which obeyed her, electric everything. The power had come back on last night, announced by the newsreader with a whoop of satisfaction, a euphoria she’d shared. Her own particular power-cut had lasted not just sixteen hours, but twenty-eight long days. Now she’d been delivered from it, her dilapidated beach-shack seemed like something in a nightmare – unreal and terrifying. Perhaps she’d make some tea, to celebrate, enjoy the buzz of switching on a fast electric kettle, instead of boiling stubborn water on a temperamental Primus stove; relish the omnipotence of snapping every light on – striplights in the kitchen, spotlights in the studio, instant light-up mirrors in the bathroom.

  She rolled swiftly out of bed, slipped on the silky dressing-gown, feet groping for the slippers, then stood leaning on the balcony, peering down at the studio below. She had been almost scared at first, to be so high up, with such a plunging drop, as if she were living in a tree-house or in the rigging of a ship. Both above her and beneath her was a dim and shadowy no-man’s-land; the roof-beams lost in darkness; the studio a blur of murky shapes. Just this slice of upper gallery was clearly lit, defined. It was an exciting place to sleep, the sort of den or hideaway she would have relished as a child – that sense of being in command, high up, on her own, and also unassailable – cocooned, enclosed, cut off from the nagging world below. And her mother would have hated it, complained about the difficulties of heating it and cleaning it; damned the narrow staircase as dangerous to life and limb.

  She suddenly rummaged in her duffel-bag for the small framed snapshot she had brought with her from Shrepton. She could hardly understand now why she had scooped it from the mantelpiece and squeezed it in her bag, on her way out through the sitting-room. She was leaving home, wasn’t she, breaking all last ties, so why should she want a photo of her parents? It wasn’t even a good one. Both of them were frowning, her father looking down, so that his eyes had disappeared, her mother’s perm and mouth too tightly set. She stared at it a moment, then shoved it in a drawer, face-down. Better to forget them, treat them as the strangers they’d become. She had found another refuge and should be revelling in the fact, brewing up that pot of tea, wolfing down some food.

  She took the steep steps slowly, hampered by her mules, flip-flapped to the kitchen, flicked every switch she could – lights, heater, kettle, toaster, hob – just to see them glowing, just to prove her power. She checked the clock – ten to six – more than time for breakfast. She’d still eaten almost nothing since that bowl of Poacher’s Broth, which seemed so long ago now, it could have been pre-history. Christopher hadn’t mentioned eating, the whole long afternoon, had seemed totally absorbed in checking through his books on modern architecture – especially Stanton Martin’s sublimely unconcerned with paltry things like meals. And she herself had somehow lost her appetite, troubled by the fact that she’d returned with him so tamely, like a puppet in his power, even accepted a job she’d vowed she didn’t want. By the time he left, having instructed her to help herself to anything she fancied in the kitchen, she was too tired to eat at all; obeyed her flagging body which was urging ‘sleep’ instead.

  Now she felt ravenous as she hunted through his cupboards, which were bare of any basics such as coffee, tea-bags, milk or cheese. She nosed out some coarse black tea-leaves, which she spooned into the pot, then topped with boiling water. She poured an inch to try. The tea looked very pale, with a dark sludge at the bottom, and a strangely scented taste, like incense mixed with cheap cologne. She preferred her own Typhoo.

  All she found to eat was one small tin of crabmeat and a jar of garlic paté. Neither seemed quite suitable for breakfast. The ‘Gourmet Meal-for-One’ she had better save for lunch, which left plain brown bread and butter – well, bread and low-fat spread. She could turn it into toast this time, upgrade it with some strawberry jam, which she discovered in the fridge. It seemed a strange place to keep strawberry jam, until she realised it was sugarless, a special brand for diabetics. Was he diabetic, or simply obsessional about his weight? Or perhaps his wife cooked hugely fattening meals for him, so he preferred to pick and nibble when working on his own.

  That wife kept bursting in – surprising her, confusing her – always plump, voluptuous, sometimes naked as a pink blancmange. Was that the reason she’d changed her mind, said yes to Christopher’s job – because she was jealous of a wife? She grabbed hot bread from the toaster, crammed it down her throat, so furious with the thought she was glad to scorch her mouth. The whole thing was pretty crazy. She’d be absolutely useless to him – couldn’t type, couldn’t drive, knew nothing about art. She could hardly spend all day all week cleaning just three rooms, or cooking meals he clearly didn’t want. She couldn’t even shop for him, stock up his fridge and larder, not without the car. So why had he employed her, and why had she said yes?

  She padded into the studio, still chewing flabby toast, switched on the main light. It was those scarlet birds which magnetised her, kept tugging at her mind, yet she could hardly even see them now. They died without the daylight, faded into sombre shapes, lost their sap and life-blood. How extraordinary stained glass was – to possess that force and fervour once the sun had risen, yet dwindle into impotence at dusk. She touched a gaping beak, a fragmented flaunting tail; envied him his skills, his ability to lose himself in total concentration. She had watched him yesterday, his whole mind and verve and energy focused on a wall of coloured glass, which didn’t yet exist except as challenge. She had seen him rough the shape out, sketch his first ideas, feeling totally superfluous herself. He had offered her a job, yet appeared to forget that she was there, as if he’d already gone to Manchester and was weighing up the site, or was deep in consultation with the architect.

  She rooted in the waste-bin for a crumpled piece of paper, smoothed it out, laid it on the table where he’d sat sketching yesterday – a sturdy scrubbed-pine table at the far side of the room, which stood beneath a tall but narrow window. She turned the long-necked lamp on, found herself a pencil, then tried to draw her own bird. It came out stiff and stupid, a stuffed bird or a caged bird, with no vigour in its wings. She made another start, but was distracted by a noise, the faintest drone and buzzing just above her head. She looked up from her paper, saw a good two dozen wasps crawling up the outside of the window, attracted by the strong beam of the lamp – frantic wasps, weaving round in circles; flailing, jostling, slipping down the pane. Each time a tiny body slumped, another seemed to take its place; wasps fighting for more window-space, crawling over each other’s heaving backs; transparent wings vibrating, shiny stripey bodies throbbing and pulsating. Jane watched them, fascinated, startled by their energy, their determination to achieve a hopeless task – to fly through a closed window, penetrate a pane of solid glass.

  However frequently they fell, they’d doggedly return, as if desperate for the light, bewitched by it, sucked in by it; feelers waving valiantly, as they flapped and lurched and staggered. Were these the sam
e two dozen, or were there thousands more outside, a whole universe of wasps, with her the only human; this one small lamp the only source of light? She peered out at the darkness, aware of the surrounding fields, spreading cold and desolate for miles, the waste of sea beyond them, the black and lowering sky. These wasps were homeless, shelterless, driven in by cold and dark to grovel at her window. She realised she was like a god, could accomplish the impossible, end their hopeless flounderings and release them into warmth and light. She kicked her chair back, reached across the table, tried to ram the window open. It felt reluctant, stiff with age, but she kept resolutely pushing, falling forward suddenly as it yielded to her pressure.

  The wasps poured in, triumphant, swooped towards the lamp, others venturing further to the spotlights on the roof-beams, lunging in a manic dance; the shadows of their bodies like daubs of grey-blue paint, splattering and rippling the white walls. She could feel their wild exhilaration pulsing through her own body, as if she shared their sense of purpose, and had joined their spiralling dance, skittering and reeling from lamp to lamp to lamp. Yet they were risking death in aiming for the light. Several of them had already hit the bulb, wings sizzling in the heat, the faint smell of singeing in the air, the plop of falling bodies. More swarmed through the window, like replacements in a battle, stirring up clouds of dust as they circled round the lampshade. She realised only now that the studio was full of dust, not spotless as it seemed before, spruced and scoured by Christopher. It was as if the wasps had found him out, revealed the private dirt, the layers of rebel dust still lurking on the roof-beams, on countless hidden ledges and secret nooks and crevices.

  She slammed her pencil hard against the table, angry with the intruders, angry with herself for allowing them inside. They were threatening Christopher’s order, disturbing his whole studio, and he had told her to be careful, warned her very sternly that there was a lot of valuable stuff around – dangerous stuff as well. Before he’d finally engaged her, he had suddenly seemed anxious about taking on a stranger, and had started barking questions at her like a heavy-handed father: did she smoke, did she drink, did she have a boyfriend, could he trust her not to use the place as a doss-house for her friends? What he hadn’t thought of asking was whether she was fool enough to let in not her boyfriends (who were non-existent anyway), but a plague of footling wasps.

  Well, she would have to get them out again – and fast. She turned off all the lights, opened the window as wide as it would go, counting slowly up to sixty in the dark. She switched just one small light back on, to check they’d disappeared. A frantic buzzing swarm seemed to spring to life from nowhere and zoom towards the bulb. Again, she snuffed the light out, waited for ten minutes, shivering in the wintry draught knifing from the window. Surely they would leave now, with nothing to attract them; a raw and clammy dankness creeping through the studio from the pre-dawn cold outside.

  Her fingers fumbled for the light-switch, pouncing on it fiercely, about to cry, ‘I’ve won. They’ve gone!’ They hadn’t gone, resurrected instantly, as if the blazing lamp were a magic source of life. So long as she sat quietly in the dark, they would seem to die, or disappear, but one weak shaft of light brought an immediate buzz and whirring as they flurried to embrace it. She rolled her dangling sleeves back, seized her piece of paper, folded it in three, swatted at them wildly, flapping with her other hand. A sudden stab of scarlet pain lasered through her arm. She dropped the paper, stared at the red mark, already swelling quite dramatically just below the elbow. She limped into the kitchen, hand across her mouth, to stop herself from crying. She mustn’t fall apart because they’d stung her, but fight back, pay them out. She remembered seeing wasp-killer when she’d been riffling through the cupboards. She grabbed it from the shelf, flipping off her slippers as she ran back to the studio, and switching all the lights on, so she that could see what she was doing.

  A cloud of wasps besieged the room immediately, zigzagging in dizzy arcs towards every source of light. She followed with her aerosol, finger on the trigger, darting round in circles, spraying them relentlessly. Yet their numbers seemed still greater, rather than diminished, or were they simply doubled by their convulsive restless shadows, projected on the walls like some speeded-up picture-show borrowed from a dream? She focused on just two or three, mercilessly dousing them until at last they fell; their limp and powdered bodies now silent on the floor. She pursued another cluster, aiming very steadily, despite the pain and throbbing in her arm. Soon, small white-shrouded corpses littered the whole floor; more bodies on the table, on the cutting-bench, the worktops. She slumped down on a chair. The aerosol was empty now, and both her feet were cut and sore from tiny shards of glass, which, like the dust, coated the whole studio, though she hadn’t been aware of it before.

  ‘There’s an excitement in destruction,’ Christopher had claimed, and she had tried to close her ears. Yet now she had experienced it herself – felt an almost gloating relish in wreaking her revenge, a hateful sense of triumph as she’d stunned each tiny body. She rubbed her eyes impatiently. No point sitting crying. The murderer must dispose of all her corpses.

  She went to find a dustpan – and some aspirin – grimacing at the reek of acrid chemicals which was choking from the studio, tickling up her nostrils like a sneeze that wouldn’t come. That smell might linger all weekend, prevent her hushing up her crime. She flung open all the windows, and then the doors as well. The place was freezing cold now, but better that than the artist’s accusations. She could always bundle up in the chunky Shetland sweater she’d seen stuffed in his top drawer. She dragged upstairs to fetch it, yanking the drawer open, removing not the sweater, but her parents’ photograph. She sank down on the bed with it, touched the two pale faces. Were they really frowning, or simply squinting in the sun?

  ‘Dad,’ she said, out loud, imploring him to raise his eyes. Were they searching for her, missing her, driven to distraction by worry and remorse, or merely continuing their calm well-ordered lives?

  She watched her tears splash on to the photo, run down her father’s cheeks. If only he would cry for her, prove he cared that much. She had refused to cry herself, the whole month she’d been away, but now she was weeping for the mess she’d made – not just the wasps, but because she’d lost a home again. It was the little things she missed – that precious goodnight ritual she had taken more or less for granted every single night for eighteen years – the curtains drawn, the blankets tucked around her, her father’s scratchy boisterous kiss, her mother’s more restrained one; both her parents solid and assured. She missed that more than anything – more than meals or company, more than roof and walls. She stretched out full-length on the bed, the photograph beside her, sharing the same pillow.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said to no one, aware that it was morning, and pulled the duvet right across her head.

  Chapter Six

  Jane flung off the duvet. She could hear a car drawing up outside, scrunching into the stretch of pitted wasteland just beside the barn. Christopher! She leapt up out of bed, grabbed a sweater, dropped it, dived towards the stairs, dithered back again. Should she hide, or brave him? He must have come to spy on her, only pretended that he’d be away in Oxfordshire. What was it he’d said? – some boastful fabrication about spending all weekend with friends who owned a water-mill – and how he’d see her in the studio, up and dressed and ready, at nine A.M. on Monday. She peered down at her watch. It was nine o’clock exactly, but Saturday, not Monday, and she was neither dressed nor ready. She hadn’t swept the wasps up, nor even washed her breakfast things; and the place was like a fridge. She’d left all the doors and windows open, and then dropped off to sleep, risking burglary and break-in, damage to the artist’s precious glass. He’d be absolutely furious, and could she really blame him? She had no excuse at all, except those aspirins must have knocked her out, so that she’d totally forgotten the mess and stink downstairs. She skittered to the door again, wondering why he’d not come in, not erupted u
p the stairs, cursing her and shouting. She could hear the engine grumbling still, as if he was sitting in the car outside, setting her a trap, waiting till she blundered down, guilty and dishevelled.

  She crept back to the window, the one high tiny window which looked out over the road; climbed up on a chair, so that she could see his face, judge his mood and temper. It wasn’t his sleek car, but a different one entirely – a smaller squatter model, a comic-looking toy car in a scatty shade of sunshine-yellow, with a snub nose in the front and its offside light splintered at the back. The driver’s seat was empty, the door left gaping open, the ignition not switched off. She could hear no footsteps underneath the gallery, so whoever owned it hadn’t ventured in yet. Suddenly she glimpsed a figure emerging from the garden at the back – a woman, not a man – a plump curvaceous woman with a tousled skein of auburn hair bouncing on one shoulder. The wife! It must be her – not quite as she’d imagined, but undoubtedly voluptuous, and if not young and beautiful, then statuesque and striking, and looking far more arty than the artist did himself. Perhaps Christopher had sent her as a more subtle form of spy, or had she come as a Samaritan, to invite her husband’s ‘skivvy’ for a home-cooked lunch or dinner? She’d ditch the invitation once she saw the mess; was already edging through the door with a wary apprehension, as if prepared for an encounter with a burglar or a thug.

  ‘Who’s there?’ the woman called, her anxious voice now rising from the studio below, a voice which matched the artist’s, urbane and thoroughbred.

  Jane tore off her pyjamas, climbed into her tracksuit, not bothering with bra and pants, just heaving up the bottoms, struggling with the fiddly zippered top. Mrs Harville-Shaw mustn’t find her naked, or dressed in men’s pyjamas. She might be shocked in any case – angry and astonished to find a stranger sleeping in her husband’s bed, and a female one at that. Perhaps he hadn’t told his wife he’d hired a new assistant. Perhaps he’d gone to Oxfordshire alone, without his wife, not thinking for a moment she might drop in at the barn. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. She knew absolutely nothing about either of the Harville-Shaws, except she was scared of both of them. She tied her laces, finger-combed her hair, crept slowly down the stairs – one step, one step, like a child, wishing she would never reach the bottom.