ANGELA (4 page)

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.

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 the 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”

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.