ANGELA

by Adam M. Booth

  LEAVE

  Angela wakes on the first day of her two-week leave with dread sitting on her chest and time hollow all around her. She drags herself out of that grubby bed more through habit than desire, the summer heat close and cloying, her sweat coating her like cling film.

  She eats a breakfast she doesn’t remember then turns on the TV, the radio, and the washing machine. Their sounds combine into something approaching company and she sits in the garden and imagines there are people inside the house.

  For the first few days she filled the light times with television and the dark ones with her own gentle touch. Both helped her sleep, and she did, here and there. She dressed as the women in her boxes and talked to a mirror about the things they had done and the ways they had been loved. She put birds in her hair and learned their songs. Sometimes she was Veronica, in a black sequinned gown. She hated how pathetic she was, that girl she kissed in the glass, a messy amalgam of a beauty lost by decades. For hours she stared into that mirror of lipstick, just dust and shadow beyond, a self-portrait of her loneliness. Many aching hours passed. Stop crying you silly bitch, Angela said into an hour far, far away, slapping herself across the face with a full hand. It stung and her ear rang out like a bell, so she did it again, and again, and again, until one side of her face laughed, while the other still cried.

  Day became night became the oily sea, and her sanity slipped beneath the surface. Panic filled her lungs, testing their strength, dragging her down. Her mind thrashed in the riptide, trying to find land, trying to find something to hold on to. Where was she? Where was up and where was down? Was she east or was she west? She could have been nowhere or everywhere. A map. She needed a map, and one night she found one between her boxes and her birds. A map of the Isle of Man she took from me as a child. It anchored her in space and time, her eyes eating it like it was a cake with a key inside, like it could show her a hidden way home. But she trembled at its impermanence. What if she lost it? What then? She might find herself so adrift that she would never see anyone ever again. She would copy it, she thought, somewhere she couldn’t lose it. Somewhere she would always see. She scrambled through her fading kitchen taking a knife from the drawer, and began to scratch out a scale drawing of the island on her kitchen wall. It started accurately enough, but by the end of the third day her blistered hands were wet with sweat and too much of her sense had ebbed away. She marked places on an imaginary cove with words such as “The Dark Place”, and “This is where they hurt me”. Over the final twelve hours the Isle of Man became much, much more. It became so much more that it was necessary for Angela to extend it up onto the ceiling, standing on a squat three-step ladder to reach and craning her short, wide neck back at perilous right angles to her square body. And when the fluorescent strip light blocked the progress of the detailed drawing of the island in her mind she decided it had to be removed, tearing it from it’s housing with a wrench of her claw hammer. Awake so long and so abandoned on her distant island, she had lost the sense to know that the bulb was still burning and as her hammer destroyed her light she was showered in glass and sparks, and darkness flooded in to fill the space the light left behind.

  Contrast brought her home. In the dim living room light that made it through the door she looked around at her fractured kitchen with new eyes. This was the edge of her sanity. She had walked up closer to that ragged ridge than she ever had before and dared to peer over at the limitless black sea that looked back and told her only that there was so much further to fall.

  The following night she woke from her sleep choking on the sheets bunched up in her mouth, as one part of her tried to kill another. She pulled the fabric out of her in ribbons of spit and ran out into the street where there was nobody else and shouted, “Please! I can’t take this! I can’t take all this loneliness!” but no one heard her. No one listened. The identical houses lining the street kept their windows closed and their mouths shut so she went back inside and sat by the phone. She gripped the armchair until the sun rose and the phone lines opened at work, and when they did she packed her nose with tissue and called and called and complained in different voices about insurances she didn’t have. She complained about policies and prices and her polycystic problems until her throat was dry and her eyes rolled back in her head.

  “Put me through to your manager. Put me through….”

  Her colleagues feigned the support she never had in life and eventually she fell asleep listening to them speak, holding their voices to her face, feeling their vibrations against her cheek.

  “Hello? Are you there? You’re through to Veronica, can I help you?”

  THE ROOK

  It was the day before her leave left her, and when she slept she dreamed of a shaking cage around a beating black heart. The summer sun found her through the curtains and she woke with a picture behind her eyes of the Larson trap she set on the shelf in the dark of the trees.

  He was here. He had returned to her.

  Dressed light in the deep blue morning she tiptoed with as much grace as her inelegant frame allowed through shrub and thicket to the secret place she would run to from her uncles, the place that she now found her cage rattling with an inhabitant. The cage held a little black rook. No older than a few weeks, his wings still so meagre that Angela thought it was a wonder he had made it in there at all. His head swivelled to the side so he could regard her better and she had a strange feeling that she was late. And what was this? Behind the little rook was the jerking remains of another, bigger bird, plucked and boned almost to death, but not quite. The rook’s black eye caught hers and then looked nowhere. She knew what he’d done, but he had only done what he must to survive, hadn’t he? The dying bird was so big, and he was just an infant. He had been defending himself, surely? The rook sat and waited as the life left the bird at his back, and Angela didn’t even put on her handling gloves, she just opened the door and he ducked under the lifted gate, took a slow, deliberate step out onto her hand and gripped her finger tight. She looked down into those black diamonds in his head and saw herself in so many ways. Angela opened her jacket and fed him into the warm place between the light beige lining and her big, low breast. He didn’t flinch; he just gripped the fabric with his little black claws and held still. On the way home he pecked at her soft skin till she bled out onto his oily black feathers and she gripped the sleeve of her jacket and let Him.

  On their first night together an unseasonable wind picked up and shook the house. The tiles rattled on the roof and in the garden the fence panels fought their cases to fly away. Inside the second bedroom the light flickered and the birds flapped and panicked, their beady eyes spinning and wide and their beaks drawn open, showing off strange little tongues that poked at the air. Every one but the rook. The rook just sat under the sloping eaves of the rattling house on a stack of old books with the same stillness He had in the rattling cage. He let His eyes reflect his new home with ambivalence. Was it ambivalence? Angela regarded Him from behind the mesh door and lace curtain that hung over it, making the scene a mosaic. She felt the change. She wanted to go in and feel the soft wind from their little wings as they flew around her and landed on her shoulders and nestled in her hair. She wanted to smile as she fed them from her hands.

  But not this night.

  Not anymore.

  The room was His now, and when she closed her eyes to sleep it was as though she was at sea. She could feel the spray on her cheeks and the salt on her lips, she felt herself corroding, but a light pulsed to the right of her vision like a lighthouse.

  She was almost there.

  OFFICE HOURS

  She wakes to find herself naked on the beige bed linen. Warm yellow light cuts under the blue curtain and to her bleary eyes it’s a shore. She’s washed up. She’s home.

  She looks through the crust in her eyes at the tall pile of neat washing. Work outfits cleaned and pressed dutifully call to her like a beacon. She wears them enthusiastically and leaves the dankness of her home for t
he fluorescence of work with a spring in her stomp, the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, and a cold sore. She boards the train and finds her seat and overhead the cuckoos flying south scrawl a “V” in the sky.

  At work Veronica asks how she’s been and she’s too happy to see her face and hear her voice to answer the question honestly. She’s been great, she says, great. Got a lot done. Veronica asks if she enjoyed the Isle of Man with the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “Yes, thank you,” Angela says, thinking of the imaginary isle that has swallowed her kitchen, “I saw a lot of wonderful things.” Then she is swept away by a calming tidal wave of paper work that cleanses her soul of that dirty black bird who filthies her mind and heart and second bedroom.

  Beyond the dusty office window a charm of finches spiral through blue sky. She feels the salvation and it tastes like honey on her lips, like a salve on her soul. But then it’s the late afternoon and the phone won’t stop ringing and Veronica won’t look her way. Then the sore on her lips begins to sting and she feels His damp decay creep back in, tickling up her veins, fluttering and flaking, nerves stuttering on and off like a dying light. She holds the arms of the chair with hands that buzz with a static that seems to interfere with the picture on her screen, which smears in front of her, an electric mess of blue and black. She feels Him swarm through her brain, turning parts of her off, turning parts of her on, and she wants to touch herself and she wants to scream, but she doesn’t. Her lips tremble but she doesn’t scream, but the people look over at her anyway, their faces full of holes, and she is lost again at the bottom of the deep black sea.

  The week draws on, Tuesday becoming Wednesday becoming Friday, and sleep, Angela’s oblivious mistress, leaves her aching in the dark, with only the memory of her embrace and the taste of her beautiful oblivion on dry, angry lips.

  In the night He calls to her, He pecks out a message on the floorboards and she lies trembling in His pervasive presence, trying to decode His Morse code, and on the third night she thinks she does.

  It seems to say, “B….U….R….D…G….U….R....L”

  SECRETS AND LIES

  It was two in the afternoon when she realised something was wrong. Lunchtime had finished and the familiar clackety clack of keys being tapped resumed after its brief reprise the same way it always did. It was a day like any other, all these days were the same, so when Veronica didn’t come back to her desk at 1.58pm exactly, as she always, always did, Angela knew that something was amiss. An electric dread crept through her bones. Was she dead? Had her hip given way on the metal steps that lead up from the car park? Was she now lying prone in the spiked shrubs, helpless? What if Angela discovered her there, so in need? She’d be so grateful to see her! So beautiful, and vulnerable, and indebted. Angela could save her, lift her up in her short wide arms and carry her home where she could undress her and nurse and nurture her. Of course she would have to silence the birds and move the boxes from the bedroom, and she’d certainly have to take the bones off the walls, but she could always cover her head to get her upstairs, and she could keep her unconscious, if she had to.

  At seven minutes past one Angela could take no more. She called Veronica’s mobile. Tap tap tap, tap tap, tap. It was ringing. No one answered but Angela noticed that the arm of her boss’ chair was vibrating. Her jacket was still on the back of it. So had she not gone into town? She said she was going into town... It was cold outside. She wouldn’t go without a jacket... Angela checked the pockets of the little black jacket and sure enough there were her car keys, a hair band, and her phone. She was in the building. Angela flicked through Veronica’s year planner where it lay on her desk. The space between one and two o’clock had been coloured in with a red pen. Something was going on. Someone was hiding something. Someone was lying. The office had been built in the 80s during the boom and the company had expanded with all the gluttony of the period, and when the sequins and shoulder pads and cocaine hangovers faded so did the revenue, leaving vast swathes of the building empty caverns of faded commercial endeavour. There were three unused floors in the building, one above and two below. Angela knew them all, in fact she’d worked in most of them over the years, and further to that, she still had the keys.

  “Downstairs” said a voice in her head.

  She made her way down the back stairs that led into the corner of the building where HR had once existed, before process had bitten off its own tail and they had outsourced themselves. She got out the keys and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. She shouldn’t be here, she knew it right away. The air down here was different. It was still and cold and... sorry, somehow. The blinds were down as they always were and through them the afternoon sun drew parallel lines over rows of empty filing cabinets. Angela crept between the banks of desks, trying not to disturb the air but failing, motes spinning around her, stars around her barren planet. Silence. There was no one here, just Angela and the flecked dead skin of old employees. She had been wrong, there were no secrets here, just dead dreams, dust bunnies and abandoned venture. She went back over to the stairwell and let her daydream die too. She’d found nobody, so many times. She berated herself for having hope when there was no hope to have. She had been a stupid little girl. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl…

  But wait...

  What was that?

  Was there a sound coming from the disused bathroom past the old meeting room? Yes, yes there was. It sounded like carpet being scrubbed. Was it the cleaner? On a Wednesday? Why would they clean an unused toilet in the dark? She moved back through the room, stomping now, swirling the air, more curious than afraid. The sound got louder as she turned the corner, turning her wide back to the striped sunlight and looking down into the area outside the men’s toilet, where natural light did not reach and no artificial ones were lit. On the far wall was the door to the toilet. It was open a little and, yes, inside there was movement. Beige shapes moved in the dark, and Angela knew that perfume. She didn’t recognise the salty note that came with it, but she recognised the huffing and the friction. It had been a long time, but she still recognised it, so out of place in here, in this beige box of bureaucracy. Angela adjusted the blind just a little and one of those stripes of light crawled along the floor and up a foot and onto the exposed, naked backside of the person she was hoping to save, of the boss she was hoping to hold, of the friend she dreamed she could love. She stood transfixed, her senses open like a broken tap, frigid information gushing all over her, slapping her face with a frost bitten hand, filling her with fire and ice. There it was, the thing she didn’t know she never wanted to see, an image of Veronica, getting ruined on all fours by a hunched man with knuckled hands, a pale white devil made of cartilage and lust, rapacious and carnivorous, devouring her love from back to front.

  Angela baited her breath, then turned and left the scene of their crime as gracefully as she was able, her immediate grief an infinite empty universe. She walked up the stairs then out of the front door, away from the office and the questioning eyes and down the tall dark alley behind the building. She crouched between the refuse and brick and pressed her nails into the palms of her hands as hard as she could, letting the tears that fell from her chin and the blood the dripped from her fists bloom in the dirty brown puddle at her feet. She had never seen love, but she knew that what she saw in their darkness was not even an approximation. She could love her so perfectly. Veronica, you are better than that cold toilet floor. How could you let yourself be degraded like that? If it was degradation Veronica desired then Angela could give her that. Yes, she could degrade her in many, many ways. And what about her? What about Angela? If she had never even had the privilege of being handled roughly in a disused toilet, then how far was she from love? The gulf was so great it spanned the ages and her heart sunk to a new, deeper fathom. The lowest yet. A seagull dropped out of the heavens so far above her, onto the black plastic sack of shit to her left. She regarded him through the shattered windscreens of her eyes. She had never
liked seagulls. Dumb, squawking, awkward creatures. In fact she hated them. She realised now that she always had. Her little eyes glinted once then she leapt out of her squat shadow, grabbed him by the neck, and, with her own torn hands, shredded him in a frenzy of bird and blood.

  His open throat made a noise nevermore.

  She found herself at home, in dull grey feathers and red. Sat at the kitchen table she listened to the phone ring ring and the birds upstairs beat their wings and sing a panicked song. By the evening the phone had stopped and the blood had dried and she remembered herself, and her situation.

  Oh yes, I was supposed to carry on working, wasn’t I?

  Oh yes, yes I was. It was probably work on the phone.

  It was probably her.

  The world outside her window went black. Angela pressed herself up from the stand chair and on a weary frame staggered across the kitchen to the drawers. She opened the second drawer down and pushed aside all the tiny pale bones and directed her clawed hand toward the candle she knew was there. Taking the matches from the windowsill behind the sink she lit it and in its tiny sphere of warmth she stripped down and cleaned the grimy blood from that dirty seagull off her hands and face. The light flickered over her naked body, which wavered like a broken table as she prepared her clothes for the inquisition she knew she would face the following day. And, as the candle faded, so did she, and she slept the sleep of the damned there, on the torn linoleum floor.