ANGELA (8 page)

MEMORANDUM

DUE TO THE ONGOING HEALTH CRISIS AND THE ADVICE OF THE W.H.O. THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM HAS DECIDED TO SUSPEND OPERATIONS UNTIL SUCH TIME THAT THE AVIAN FLU EPIDEMIC HAS PASSED. KEY POSITIONS WILL CONTINUE TO OPERATE FROM HOME AND CAN BE CONTACTED BY EMAIL.

THE COMPANY WILL PAY YOU AT FULL RATE FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF THE SUSPENSION AND AFTER THAT ANY OUTSTANDING ANNUAL LEAVE AND SICKNESS ALLOWANCE WILL BE USED UNTIL NONE REMAINS.

IT IS OUR HOPE THAT OPERATIONS WILL RESUME PRIOR TO SUCH TIMES.

WE URGE YOU TO STAY INDOORS.

THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM

Angela read the email and knew that it was over. She wouldn’t be coming back. The winter sun could barely look at her through the dirty office window. It knew as well as she did that today was the last day. She packed her desk. In the back of the bottom drawer was a stack of Christmas cards from Veronica. She flicked through them. 1978, 1985, 1999, 2008, years gone by. Years gone by. Her eyes fell on the empty desk to her left and she said she was sorry.

Goodbye.

She was the only person on the platform. A grey wind blew through it and brought an empty train. She saw the driver. He didn’t look well.

She was home. She felt His presence, bearing down from the second bedroom. She hadn’t fed Him in days, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need it anymore. He never did.

“ACKACKACKACK”, that guttural machine gun. He was calling her.

She climbed the stairs, her head low. “Please don’t”, she said to herself. Her hands found the wall and saw for her as her eyes filled with saltwater. I taste it on her lips.

“Please don’t.”

She stood at the top of the stairs between the two bedrooms in her macabre ivory church and looked through her tears and the screen door and the lace curtain.

He was there, in the shadow of her crime, stood on the gleaming white skull He had made His nest, eyeholes and jaw stuffed with feather and straw, trimmed wig off to one side.

“Come in”, He said in her mind.

“Look at her.”

“She is beautiful again.”

Angela pushed the screen door open and stepped into him. The birds had all gone now, just their beaks and skulls remained, crushed and scattered about like a beach of broken bone. And in the centre, there she was. And He was right. She was beautiful again.

Angela walked around the trestle table, taking her in. Veronica’s old bones were bright and clean and even the pale sun was compelled to look through the glass square in the sloped ceiling. She traced her outline with her finger, down her smooth tibia, past the metal knuckle in her hip and round the inside of her pelvis. Old curves. New beauty.

She held the framework of her hand but it fell apart in her own. With the wrinkled skin gone she was new again. Reborn. Angela kissed the hand that wrote her disciplinaries, then the radius, then the humerus. She let her eyes close and her tongue felt it’s way between her ribs and over her clavicle where she could still taste the petals in her perfume, the same one she wore every day for thirty eight years, indelible on her ivory after all that time.

Her face pressed into the place where the flesh of her neck once was and she imagined its resistance, its reassurance.

“I wish we’d danced”, she whispered into her spine and it collapsed away from her, taking her rib cage down with it, falling like a tired city.

The rook opened his big torn wings and flapped them slowly; his eyes wide and deep and empty. The air moved and the bones fell some more until it was hard to make out the shape of the matchstick woman on the table. Finally Angela was bereft, “no, NO!” She held her up, realigned the balls and joints but the tighter she held her, the more she came apart until Veronica was just swirling dust and a pile of bones. 

Angela scooped them up in her arms. She had to take her away from Him. He didn’t love her. He didn’t love at all. He just wanted the pain, and He’d had it. He’d had it in spades. She took the bones downstairs in bundles and laid them out on the kitchen units and He watched through the walls as she went outside and began digging the ditch.

The spade was cold in her hands and the force of her feet and the metal cut a rectangle in the tilted earth. The soil built up on either side as Angela sank lower and lower into the grave she was digging. She sliced through root and worm as they came to the surface, jerking blind and erratic. As she got deeper the soil became more cloying, thick and damp and dense, and she herself became more frantic, a new strength in her shoulders flicked the dirt up onto the pile. It coated her hands and stuck in her hair until her face was blackened and her eyes reddened by it.

The sky went dark. A sound like a million rustling papers took to the twilight. Above her a cloud of bird, a smoke of starling, a shade of wings. She looked up at it, wiping a little fat hand across her eyes, clearing a streak of dirt so she saw through a white flash of moon pale skin. The birds above her came apart and coalesced, one, millions, more. The cloud was so big it came low and she heard through the fluttering paper to an anger beneath. Violence was at the centre of this. Nature’s dark heart. It swelled and pumped larger and larger and when it could hold no more it rained its weak dead element down on her, tiny ragged birds falling onto her, gored and bloody.

Beauty is a matter of perspective. From the right point in time and space anything can be beautiful and from the hill behind the house the birds formed a shape, circles and lines splitting themselves into twos and fours and sixes with their own perfect symmetry. A target? Perhaps. A symbol? Certainly. But beneath it, up close, where Angela stood, it was a scythe, slashing, spinning, shredding itself, beaks and claws tearing beak from claw. The shape hung in the air, over the town, over what was left of her life.

She ran from the starling storm, taking shelter from it in the house she had called her home and stood at its kitchen sink as the kettle rattled in its cradle, barely containing the rage boiling within. Three heaped spoonfuls of glinting white rubble fell from a spoon held with shaking hands into the bottom of a tea-stained mug, her favourite. Princess Diana’s faded face smiled meekly from within a blue crest. Tea, water, milk and sugar did their alchemy and gave her what weak reassurance they could. She sipped it. It was too hot. It burned her lips.

A laundry basket overflowed in the corner of the kitchen. She tipped out its contents. It was Natalie. Wig and all. Dirty and stained, and beneath her was Janet, resplendent in denim and wool. She hugged them to her chest.

Girls. Girls together.

She pulled Natalie’s red hair over her own black mop and looked in the dusty mirror on the kitchen wall. She was her own monster. A black face, a sharp beak, a head of flames. Her eyes murdered her through the grime. Fear and solitude, all of it. All the world had to offer. She took Veronica's femur from the worktop and swung it at the menace in the mirror. It cracked a star that reflected her back in triangular elements, one part fire, one part dirt, one part bone.

She took off her clothes and dithered into Janet’s wool and denim then looked out of the window, over the yellowing bones on the worktop, and out into the wild of the garden where the birds still circled their black sign over her deep dark ditch. She could see its maw - gaping, inviting.

Behind the circle of birds that blackened the sky the clouds rolled purple and blue over the sun’s burst eye. A tear swelled at the corner of her own and coursed a rosacea path through the dirt that covered her face, while the eye in the sky threatened to do the same.

The time was now.

It always had been.

Veronica's bones made morbid music as Angela dropped them into the laundry basket and she clutched it tight and went outside.

She knelt in the soil piled up on the high side of the hole, piled around the lips of the dirty mouth that wanted to kiss her, wind and rain whipping their lash. She wiped Natalie’s red hair from her wet eyes and tucked it behind her little ears without looking at the birds and clouds that blackened the sky. She laid Veronica down in neat lines. Parallel. Organised. It’s what she would have wanted. The skull she held up to the sky, pulling the fuzzy grey feathers and straw out of its crevices, and looked through its eyes into the place where her love had lived. It was too small in there to hold all that love. Too tight inside that cracked cranium to hold all their experience. A strange purple light came in through the hole the hammer had made, Angela's entrance, and Veronica's exit.

Veronica's old jaw hung low at one side in a long slur. She held it closed.

“Don’t speak,” she whispered into the wind, and they kissed, finally.

A tear dropped out of the sky and ran down her cheek. Then another. And another. The twilight eye cried on her, its tears becoming indistinguishable from the storm in her eyes.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said to her dead friend’s head, and it smiled back at her. She climbed down and they lay together in the dirty black bed she had dug for them in the earth, and she watched through wet and absent eyes as the span of the sky spun overhead, birds dipping low, rain falling through them. The water drained the dirt into their bed, filling it up, touching her sides until she could feel it in her ears, and the storm of starlings came so close that some fell in, kamikaze, filling in the gaps between her legs and Veronica’s bones. They fell into Natalie’s red hair and got caught in Janet’s woollen jumper, where they twitched then gave up as bird, dirt and water formed a calcium mud. It was thick and it was gritty and it covered her ears as the tempest above gave itself to her. Still more birds came. This could be all the birds there are, she thought to herself and smiled. They have all come for me. More birds dropped onto her, pelting her body, their beaks tearing at Janet’s denim and then Angela's white skin, and with more birds came more dirt, some washed in by the downpour, some flicked in by wings that skimmed the ground. Then she saw Him, sat in the tree at the end of the garden, His head cocked, one red eye on her black hole.

“I’m leaving you.” she said and when He laughed his bitter laugh it burned her brain like battery acid, searing a white light behind eyes that watched him fly away, a diminishing V shape convulsing in the purple sky.

She bled into the filth through dirty punctures and the earth fell on her in sods, pressure building, holding her down. She didn’t struggle. She wanted this. Bird and dirt fell on her head and she lost the sky. She felt the strange weight of it all against her eyeballs and the sharp grit and twitching mulch fill her throat. She breathed in one last time and took the earth into herself.

She was underground.

They were quiet, those last few moments. Yes, her throat gagged and lurched in reflex and her heart pumped what oxygen it could find around the body she had been cursed into, but she herself found that peaceful place from before she was born, and finally the dark light died.

Finally she fell asleep, and it was the deep kind of sleep. The kind you escape into. The kind I’ll never know, because I see all this through His sleepless grid, where time meets space. Where they cut each other in half. Where things are made of knives and chaos.

Years pass. Grass grows. She rots a little, then a lot. Her cells become spores, become knowledge.

Nature eats her and reads her.

Overhead stars shatter and worlds end.

Heat unimaginable cracks infinite emptiness.

Hair, flesh, bone and feather. They spin through the screaming vacuum, clashing and fracturing, their particles forced together fuse into something else.

Something old.

Something new.

A cerise crystal, shaped like a rough heart.  

Adam M. Booth’s first book, THE END, is available now through Amazon.

His third, DRIVE, will be available in 2015.

Please visit
www.adammbooth.com
for more information.

Thank you for reading.