ANGELA (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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?”