ANGELA

by Adam M. Booth

  Angela pulls on the dress and a pair of purple heels and the combination makes her look like a frog on stilts wearing a bag. She looks over at the boxes, now just boxes again, and feels the old ache return. She climbs up on a little plastic stool, taking a box marked “FIONA, 1987” from the stack. She lifts the hair net from the top of the bundle of clothes and holds it to her face. It still smells of her.

  She arrives at the restaurant at 7:40pm and hears their laughter before she sees their faces. They are stood at the bar, all of them, twenty five of the people she works with, their drinks two-thirds empty, their cheeks too flush to have just arrived. They see her over the room and Veronica does her regal little wave, beckoning Angela to her side. She makes her way over, through their shoulders and backs to Veronica's side, the place where she is most comfortable.

  “Veronica, I thought you said quarter to eight?”

  “Do you want a drink Angela?”

  “Yes, I’ll have a Bacardi and Coke please Veronica.”

  “Diet?”

  “Yes, Diet Coke, thank you”

  The room crackles and hums as workplace dynamics reorganise themselves through alcohol and repression into something vaguely dangerous. She sips sweet black tar through a pale pink straw and watches. Their laughter makes their eyes wide and their lips curl back. Angela sees white teeth and white eyes, fingers pointing here, there, everywhere. Jewels of sweat form beneath the sequins in the folds of her back and she feels them coalesce and run in rivers down her canyons, tickling and shaming her till they soak into her tights. The smell of her own fear rises up, bitter and shameful, kissing her face as a sign shines in red above a fake door and tells her that it is not an exit.

  “I need to visit the ladies, Veronica”

  “Excuse me, can I get past. I said excuse me, please I just need to….”

  In the toilet cubicle she hitches up her dress around her neck and dabs herself off as best she can with what tissue is left on the roll. It is too hot in here. She hates the heat. She hates it. The music from the bar rises and falls through the opening door as girls come and go, touching up and talking and peeing. Young high voices, full of malice and life.

  “What is that hair about!??

  Laughter.

  “1988 called. It wants its dress back”

  More laughter.

  That could be about anybody. It could be about anybody.

  Dried off and rearranged she’s back in the bar which is almost empty now apart from those couples out on a Wednesday night for whatever reason. A girl with kind eyes says, “Are you with the party?” from behind the bar, and she says yes and wants to cry. “They’re through there”, the girl says and points round the corner to the dining area at the back of the building. Angela notes her name badge. Maria.

  Ah yes, she can hear them again. Their voices come to her around the angle.

  Move it! I don’t want her!

  Do you want her Sheila? Aaahahahahahaha!

  Veronica you have her.

  No, I have her all bloody day! Jeremy?

  Fuck off!

  Hahahahhaaaaa Ahhh, Jeremy…

  NO WAY.

  Ok fine, put it here next to me, I’ll have her, AGAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…….. .

  It takes effort for her to turn that dark corner, out of the relative peace of the bar area, with the quiet couples and down turned eyes and into the unbridled electric maelstrom that boils just out of sight. She considers just going home, but makes herself stay. Yes, it hurts here, but it would hurt at home too, and at least here the voices she hears aren’t pre-recorded, or in her head.

  She turns the corner and pretends to be looking in her bag as they pretend not to see her and tumble on with their rabble and rouse.

  “Janet”, she says. “Janet, I was in Leeds last week and got you this. I know you’ve got one but…”

  “Oh, thank you Angela. You didn’t need to do that but thank you.”

  “Not sure it’ll be your size. Probably too small for you because you’re quite swollen up these days aren’t you?”

  The room goes quiet, betraying the fact that they are paying her no attention.

  “You’re here with me Angela,” says Veronica, saving the moment, and pointing down at a piece of folded card with her name written on it.

  It is stained with wine.

  NO ANGEL

  I was twenty-three.

  I was working on the docks when He came to me. I had been given the job by a friend of my mothers who had pitied me enough to take me in after she died. She had found me destitute on the cobbles behind my mother’s terraced house and lifted me up from my morosity with a kind condescension. To me she was a shimmer of ecclesiastic light, cutting through the shadows with delicate authority. I had never seen anything like her, and I never would again. She died that night, in a sleep I helped her find.

  I had never been a strong man, I had never built or brawled, but I had my voice, and it was all mine. Too lilting for a man of substance perhaps, but I was no man of substance. I would sing my aching song and the birds would come from all around and sit on the windowsill and whistle along, my balsa wood bones reverberating with the pleasure I brought myself. Mother would say I had the voice of an angel, and then cry herself to sleep stroking my jet-black hair, her sharp nails tracing the scars on my scalp.

  You’re weak, she said as she drifted away. Weak like your father.

  And she was right.

  It was the fifties and the newspapers sold me dappled monochrome images of palm trees and distant beaches and I felt the cold north repel me. My dream had been to get to a beach in Spain before I lost the use of my legs, before I went the same way as my mother. Hereditary, they had said, and I knew it to be true. As I sat in the waiting area at her first appointment I could already feel the ends of my fingers and toes dipping into the same static sea that eventually washed her away. I had to do something with the life I had left, before I was just a broken twig of a man, bent up and salivating.

  So I took the job down by the black estuary. I worked hard and late with all the strength I had. I just needed to earn enough to take the ferry out into those wild curling waters, away from that isle of men like me, across the channel, to where I could use what remained of the power beneath the tremor in my legs and the breath that shook in my lungs. I would busk and hitch until I saw those blue waves break on that yellow shore, and then maybe I would too. That was my only goal. To see the blue sea and let it take me. My reason to run. My reason to live a little longer.

  I had never wanted a daughter, nor a son, and I had certainly never before wanted to watch my own child grow in the stomach of her wretched mother, caged and screaming, but then one night, despite all that, there He was.

  I felt Him before I saw Him, a stab in the chest.

  Outside.

  Go outside.

  Go into the rain.

  The black sea curled and slapped the dock walls. I looked between the sheds for the man in my mind, and He was stood there, where I feared He’d be, shocking my marrow, blacker than the night but darker than that even. He wore a coat of feathers; black feathers that seemed to reflect and remove the light all at once. And behind the feathers, the face. That face that burned me, burned my eyes and my soul and scorched the earth. He beckoned me over with an arthritic claw that clicked as it curled and I stood in His presence for the first time, but I knew then that He had been in these shadows all along. Ever since I was a little boy. He had seen me through my bedroom walls with those eyes, both red and black at the same time. Please know that I wanted Him out of me, every part of me wanted that, but the knowledge that He was a part of my life, indistinguishable from my blood and shit, for now and for always, saturated me. I was, no, I had always been His.

  “Yes Father?” I said, through the night that separated us and through the rain that streaked my face.

  He answered me in images. They flashed behind my eyes like epilepsy, taking my sight.

  The street.
/>   The girl.

  The deed.

  The cage.

  The knife.

  The flames.

  That night I dreamed but didn’t sleep. I saw Him before my brain, behind my eyes. A suit of feathers. A hole in His face, and that tongue. No man should ever have to see that tongue; even inside of a dream no man should see that. It is enough to separate you from your sanity.

  And it did, in the end, it did.

  A BAG OF BIRDS

  It was Monday, it was always Monday. At lunch, in the canteen, Angela overheard a conversation between two mothers, one saying how much she wanted to go to the south of France during the first week of August and the other how she planned to go to the Algarve during the second, taking the children, flying away from this nameless northern town on stiff metal wings. Angela, dirty with jealousy, threw the crust of her sandwich in the bin, went down the corridor to the office with a heavy tread and booked both, taking the two weeks for herself, and taking the opportunity away from her colleagues. In the afternoon she listened to the two women talk about her. They had seen her name go up on the tired corkboard that hung above them and knew what she had done. She didn’t care, but the air was thick with her crime. Eventually one of them said, “So where are you going then?” over the grey felt partition between her desk and theirs.

  “Isle of Man”, Angela said as she typed.

  The women complained about Angela for the rest of the day. She heard them remind each other just how rude she was, how terrible she looked, that lazy crazy bitch, and when she went to bed that night those words echoed around the warehouse of her bedroom, stacked high with boxes with women’s names.

  The next day she woke to find that three little chaffinches had died and one of the two magpies she had been keeping for good luck. She knelt on the plastic floor of the second bedroom and held their lifeless, flightless bodies to her chest. She cried for them, and then for herself.

  The dead magpie sat in her sweaty palm. Magpies were such beautiful creatures up close, more iridescent blue than black, like a nocturnal rainbow in a white night sky. She wasn’t ready to let him go, she wanted to appreciate his beauty a little longer. But of course one magpie would only bring sorrow, so she placed the dead bird at her feet and walked over to the one still living, perched on the chest of drawers.

  “Come on”, she said quietly, and wrapped a stubby hand around its body, restricting its wings.

  The bird’s head twitched this way and that, trying to get a look at its dead friend, who Angela collected from the floor. She held one in each fist and took them to the hallway where the walls were lined with bird bodies and their alabaster bones. With a big hammer and a long nail she pinned them both to a clear patch, somewhere between neat rows of starling skeletons and the big soggy owl she caught last summer and who had died on the previous Tuesday. She sat on the dirty carpet, her back to the wall, and watched as the wings of the living bird strobed black blue and white as they flapped furiously, then weakly, as the last of its life drained out of the hole she made in its chest. Even in death she appreciated their beauty and she looked forward to watching them rot and smear down the wall, leaving their delicate bones exposed, all white and beautiful.

  She stood up and regarded the mesh of bones and nails and broken bird, faded in patches from the bleach she sprayed at it when the house got warm and the smell became unbearable, a high contrast display of all the loss she had felt. She had known them all, and loved them in her own way, but now they were as hollow inside as she.

  She looked at them and her wall of death and said, “All beauty must die”.

  Life was loss, and with the magpies gone Angela knew she needed more things to lose. With resolve she went to the bedroom and took a box marked “NATALIE, 1998” from the piles that surrounded the place that she slept. She set it on the mattress, opened it, and pulled out the items bundled within. Laid out on her bed were the ingredients for someone else. A long curly red wig, a padded bra, brown jacket and black boots. Natalie lay deflated on the dirty duvet. She had been a nurse at the gynaecologist. She wore a lot of makeup and had three children from two different men, and tonight after work an approximation of her would be taking a train to Chester to buy as many birds as she could fit in her big black bag. Last month it had been Sandra from the chemist, the month before, Kirsty from the tearooms.

  In Chester the grey day did its best to conceal her, but Natalie’s red wig made it seem as though the shadows were bleeding, and she just couldn’t escape the sideways glances and side street whispers. She went from pet shop to pet shop buying the saddest looking birds she could find, concealing herself in toilet stalls and wrapping their little bodies in tissue and elastic bands, before packing them tight in her big black bag.

  It was early evening, maybe 5:45 pm, and the bag was full and she was tired. Sat under the heavy sky on damp grass that framed a dirty black church she opened the bag and peered in at the little twitching bundles.

  "You won't all make it, no you won't, but it's not my fault, you see? You shouldn't have been in those cages in the first place. You should have flown away when you had the chance. You should have flown away”

  She rocked and flapped her imaginary wings, oblivious to the red wig that sat skewed on her head and to the stares of the crowd that had formed around her.

  She was at the train station. The sky had blackened and the free birds had fallen out of it. On the train home she cried to a version of herself reflected in the glass.

  A little girl pulled away from her nervous parent and said, “Are you ok lady?”

  Angela's wet eyes looked into the clean little soul speaking to her and managed to say “No”, before the girl was tugged away.

  And they didn't, the birds, they didn't all make it.

  TIME FLIES

  Days and weeks passed, and Angela sat in the same three chairs, the one at home, the one at work and the one on the train, and as the months ticked by the air got warmer, and with the heat came the smell. She brought in the fans and fresheners and kept the velux in the second bedroom open a crack, but still she had to bleach the walls and disinfect the floor every day just to keep the stench from filling her throat. It was work, but then wasn’t everything?

  The two weeks off in August had felt so distant from February, just a notional wisp in her mind, far, far away. She had only booked them to prove to those two women that she had things to do too, that she had people to see and places to be. A life to live. But the truth was she didn’t, and now here they were on the horizon of her life, like an exit through which the scant few people forced into it by shared employment were queuing up to leave. The prospect of so much empty time began to hollow her out. She could hear the call of an owl echo inside herself. It asked,

  “Who? Who? Who?”

  She tried to hold it back, tried to go back on her idea to take the two weeks off, but she was too damn proud when the people were there. Too proud, too afraid and so lonely.

  She cries in the bathroom and the clock says 2:47pm but the hands keep spinning and time slides like water on glass.

  Then it’s June, and the TV plays between the days and the birds don’t sing and she never sleeps, and then it’s July and she cries at night and catches more birds because so many have died, and when the sun goes down she wears red wigs and in the twilight she could be anyone.

  And then it’s August.

  HE'S HERE

  On the night before the last day Angela almost wakes into a thousand nightmares. The red LED alarm clock blinks 03:17 through the silver darkness and she has a feeling she’s not alone. Is there someone here? Yes, she thinks, yes there is. She thinks she sees a shape of something dark stood at the foot of the bed, easily six foot tall. Something with wings. Is that the red light from the alarm clock reflected in its nightmare eyes? Panic clasps her chest closed and paints images behind her eyelids. In her sleep she grips the mattress with bleached fists.

  “Just wait Angela, you have to wait until He’s
finished. Don’t struggle. Remember. You were always so good at this.”

  I try to say this to her from the bottom of this terrible place, through the bars of my abstract prison. I feel her pain. All of it. It is deeper than the sea.

  She goes limp on the bed.

  Could she hear me?

  Could she hear me all this time?

  And then I am with her. I am in the bed with her again, invisible in the pale blue light.

  The moon sees the three of us between the curtains and gives the phantom bird a silver stripe until he opens His wings wide and blots it out, and then, in the shadow of His own wings, God loves His children.

  Then it’s the last day and she works and leaves and no one says hello, and no one says goodbye.