The Bird Room

by Chris Killen

  Will’s face flickers from confusion to pretending-he-gets-it then back again.

  I edge my way in through the crowd, reach out my hand and touch Alice on the shoulder. She turns to face me with those blank cold eyes.

  ‘I’m going to have another look round,’ I tell her.

  ‘Alright,’ she says, like I’ve just told her some irrelevant fact off the back of a matchbox.

  So I go over to the free drinks by myself.

  There are a lot of people here. It’s a small gallery space, somewhere in London, and we’ve booked into a hotel for the night. We’ll go back to our room later this evening in a taxi, not speaking, not touching each other, and hoping the hotel bed will be big enough and cold enough to be almost like sleeping by ourselves.

  I’m not going to ask what’s wrong.

  She’s not going to tell me.

  This was her idea. When the cryptic little invitation card fell onto the doormat – just the date, the address and a stencil of a yellow bird – it was Alice who suggested attending. It might be fun, she said. And her eyes sparkled. She smiled at me. Alright, I said, thinking, I should do more things like this if it will make you happy.

  (But as far as I can tell, neither of us is happy.)

  I look around.

  I’m not having fun.

  I have nothing to say to these people.

  I notice a tall thin woman at the opposite end of the gallery. She is standing next to a large painting of a lurid orange-breasted robin, but facing away from it, her wine glass lost in the spindly white claw of her fingers. She’s wearing a shiny red dress that hangs off her body as if it’s very bored. Her long dark hair is piled up on top of her head. She’s wearing a big black pair of sunglasses.

  I can’t stop looking at her.

  Alice is probably still at the front of the group, listening.

  Will’s probably started in on some new anecdote by now: ‘When I was a kid, I accidentally burned my nan’s house down’ or ‘One time at uni I fucked this epileptic.’

  A man walks towards the woman and touches her on the shoulder. He’s tired-looking and grey-haired. He’s dressed like a secondary school teacher. He whispers something in her ear and she turns to him and smiles. He takes her elbow gently in his hand. He leads her across the gallery and positions her in front of a sparrow. It’s only when she puts out her hand and leaves it there – letting him take the headphones off the wall for her and put them in her palm, her fingers anticipating them, twitching and fumbling slightly – that I realise; she’s blind.

  He whispers something else in her ear, touches her shoulder and goes off into the crowd.

  She’s put on the headphones.

  She’s only a few metres away from me.

  I walk up behind her. The dress is cut low at the back, so you can see pockmarks, freckles and the fine down at the nape of her neck. Closer still is her scent; not perfume but something medicinal, like a long clean hospital corridor.

  From where I’m standing, I can hear the whisper of porno, leaking from her headphones.

  I close my eyes and breathe her in.

  Later, Will takes us to Tequila Mockingbird (his favourite Mexican-themed bar).

  He will not let me buy any of the drinks.

  He buys round after round of beers and shooters, bringing out fistfuls of notes and coins from his pocket and dropping them onto the bar. Then he stands back, making the bartender reach over and sort through for the correct amount.

  Will does not tip, either. He refuses. ‘I will not tip,’ he shouts in my ear and then doesn’t. He just scrapes the remaining wet notes and coins off the bar and shoves the mess back into his pocket.

  We’re sat at a corner booth, crammed in, our knees touching under the table; just Will, Alice and me. I’m on my fourth Corona label. Alice is smiling at him. Her eyes are bright and sparkling. Will is drunkenly saying something about art (with a capital A), some half-formed thing that calls for lots of dramatic hand gestures and the slamming of his bottle on the table.

  ‘There should be no division,’ he’s saying, ‘between art and life. There should be no division between “high art” and “low art”. In fact, there should be no division between anything and anything.’

  He looks at Alice when he says this.

  ‘All things should just be basically fucking each other at all times.’

  His teeth are grey. His lips are black from all the free wine at the preview. Now his chin too is slicked wet and glittering from the beer and tequila.

  ‘Cause that’s all humankind’s after, right? Hardcore fucking. Cosmic tits and ass.’

  I try to speak. ‘So when …’

  But Will isn’t listening to anyone except himself.

  ‘One day,’ he’s saying, ‘I swear I’ll find a way to fuck my own cock, like some kind of Möbius strip.’

  I try again. ‘So when are you moving to London, Will?’

  This time he hears me.

  So does Alice.

  I feel her flinch slightly and she stops smiling.

  ‘Dunno,’ he says. ‘London’s bullshit.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I want to live somewhere real – Norwich or fucking Preston or something. London’s everything wrong with contemporary art.’

  His eyes narrow and he turns to Alice.

  ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’

  She smiles. She actually smiles when he says this.

  ‘It’s Alice,’ she says. ‘Like the looking-glass.’

  ‘And what do you do, Alice?’

  ‘I’m in eyes.’ She flutters her eyelashes. ‘I work in an optician’s. It’s rubbish. I should quit.’

  He takes her hand off the table, lifts it to his mouth and licks a drop of tequila from her fingertip.

  ‘Well, Alice-who-works-in-eyes, you, me and William here should go out for dinner sometime. What d’you reckon?’

  She doesn’t even think it over.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, nodding vigorously. ‘That’d be nice. We really don’t get out enough. In fact, we hardly do anything.’

  I say nothing. It’s settled.

  There’s hardly any money left. Next week the rent’s due, the week after that the council tax. I’ve told Alice there’s been some sort of mistake with my job and the people who handle the payroll are in the process of sorting it out. In the meantime, she pays for everything. She puts a bag of groceries on the kitchen table. She doesn’t look me in the eyes. I want to kiss her, but if I kiss her now, she might burst into tears.

  I will take out a loan.

  I will extend my overdraft.

  I will start selling my possessions on eBay.

  Will calls the land line. Alice answers. She turns into someone else. She stands in the hall, twisting a strand of hair around her finger, biting her lip and jiggling at the knees. She laughs three times. ‘That would be lovely,’ she says, putting a finger to her mouth and biting at a hangnail.

  ‘We’re going out for dinner this Friday,’ she tells me afterwards, ‘with Will. I’ll have to get something nice to wear.’

  She goes into the bathroom and starts running the bath. She takes off her work clothes and lets them drop to the floor. She looks at her body in the mirror, before it steams up, and she is chalk-white, like a primed empty canvas. She waits for something wonderful to happen to her. In her head, Will appears behind her. He puts his hands on her waist, slides them up over her tits and magically her nipples harden.

  I’m fucked.

  I want to disappear.

  I want to not be a part of things any more.

  An Italian restaurant. This is Will’s choice. ‘The best lasagna in the city’, apparently. We’re still on the garlic bread. In the corner of the room a widescreen TV plays international football on mute.

  Will gets up to go for a piss.

  ‘What is it?’ Alice asks me once he’s gone.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Relax,’ she says.

  ‘I don�
�t know,’ I say.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

  I take a sip of wine and miss my mouth.

  ‘For god’s sake,’ she says.

  I want to start again. I want to completely start my life again; to make no mistakes this time; to somehow watch my life from behind a screen; to double-click on the options of my life, very carefully and in my own time. There will only ever be two options to choose from and they will be easy ones, things like ‘go forwards’ or ‘go backwards’. Things like ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  ‘This is great,’ Will says when he gets back from the toilet, grinning so wide you can see the fillings in his back teeth.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Really great.’

  I feel for Alice’s foot and press down lightly on it with my own. She doesn’t seem to notice so I press down harder. Still nothing, so I press down really, really hard. Then I look under the table. I’m pressing down on a curled bit of the table leg.

  The food arrives.

  They’ve both ordered lasagna.

  I’ve punished myself with the blandest item on the menu.

  ‘So, have I told you about my new idea?’ Will says with his mouth full.

  On TV the football finishes nil–nil.

  I double-click on Alice in my head.

  I will double-click on her until she falls in love with me again.

  ‘What’s that?’ she says.

  ‘I’m going to hire a girl,’ he says.

  I will copy and paste myself into the folder of her affections.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ she says. ‘Like a call girl?’

  Pull yourself together, I tell myself. Start having a nice time.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Kind of. I’m going to hire some girl to have a relationship with me and then break up with her and exhibit it all. I’ll take photos and video and audio of everything. Absolutely everything. So when you go into the gallery, it’ll be like really uncomfortable and you’ll wonder how much of this stuff you should be seeing. And then …’

  The waiter interrupts, to ask how everything is. He calls Will seniore. He calls Alice seniorina.

  ‘Magnifico,’ Will replies. ‘Just magnifico.’

  I excuse myself.

  In the toilets I lock myself in a cubicle and get out my mobile.

  I type a message:

  Nothing is wrong. I love u. I love u. I’ll try & sort myself out I promise. I’m sorry. X

  I delete it and try again:

  If you like Will so much why dont u just fucking go home w/ him tonight instead? Its over. This is ridiculous.

  And then again:

  If u see this msg while were still @ the restaurant & if u still love me please tap my foot with yrs 3 times.

  I settle on nothing and flush the toilet instead, watching the water crash and whirl in the empty bowl.

  Back at the table, they’ve moved on to vegetarianism.

  ‘I was one for years,’ says Will.

  (This is a lie. Will was vegetarian for about three months. Even then he was the kind that still eats chicken and fish.)

  Now the TV is showing footage of a heart transplant operation. Looks like I’m the only one who’s noticed. Couples at the other tables gaze at each other lovingly. Families and friends clink glasses, waiters and waitresses mill about, as behind them a middle-aged man lies slumped on an operating table with his chest laid open and his heart twitching and flapping obscenely.

  I stab my spaghetti.

  I double-click on Will.

  I select and delete him.

  ‘Are you sure you want to send Will to the Recycle Bin?’ I ask myself, then click ‘Yes’.

  ‘I guess I went veggie ’cause I started wondering what right I had to eat an animal, a rabbit or whatever. I mean, surely I’m just being selfish? I thought. And then I realised, you know, we’re all just animals at the end of the day.’

  The surgeon’s knife goes in.

  ‘And what do animals do? They eat each other. They eat each other and they fuck. You see what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so,’ Alice says quietly.

  She twirls a strand of hair around her finger.

  She lets her mouth fall very slightly open.

  She moistens her bottom lip seductively with her tongue.

  ‘It’s nothing to feel guilty about, is what I’m saying. It’s natural. It’s nature. If this was the wild, we’d probably be fucking by now … if we weren’t eating each other, that is.’

  He raises an eyebrow and she smirks.

  ‘But we’ve constructed all these … distractions. Restaurants, art galleries, clothes to wear, fucking stupid television programmes to watch. If this was the wild, Alice, I’d be fucking you right now, I’m sure of it.’

  Why don’t you just sweep the plates off the table and climb onto it, Alice? Hike up your skirt and beg him to fuck you.

  I might as well not exist.

  ‘What about me?’ I say.

  ‘You’d probably be dead by now,’ Will says, ‘if this was the wild.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Alice says, smiling.

  ‘His eyesight,’ Will says. ‘Think about it. He’d be picked off by a lion or something.’

  When the bill comes, Will insists on paying.

  I take out my wallet anyway, swearing I had more money than this, wondering where it’s all gone and making a show of going through it; getting out the one ten-pound note I have left and all my bits of paper and cards and things and laying them on the table, saying, ‘If you want, I can put it on my card …’

  Will says, ‘Don’t be a twat. It’s on me. My pleasure.’

  Then I say something.

  ‘We’ll have to do this again,’ I say.

  What am I saying?

  ‘You should give us a call later in the week,’ I say.

  ‘Alright,’ Will says. ‘I will.’

  Outside he offers to sub me the cab fare home.

  I tell him we’re fine with the bus.

  ‘Magnifico,’ he says, smiling at Alice. ‘Just magnifico.’

  I sit up in bed and throw off the covers. It’s early morning and I’m sweating coldly, my stomach feeling sour and twisted.

  ‘What’s up? What’s going on?’ Alice says, startled and half-asleep.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Shh. Shh.’

  I stroke her hair and wait for her to go back to sleep then crawl out of bed and take my wallet from the back pocket of my jeans. I scurry to the bathroom, where turning on the light won’t wake her up. I kneel on the tiles and empty it out; all those useless receipts and club cards and expired 10% OFF vouchers and cash cards and coins and bits of fluff from in the corners and my old student ID and the strip from a fortune cookie that reads AN OUTGOING ATTITUDE IS THE KEY TO YOUR EFFORTS and my library card and a torn-off bit of menu with half a mobile number scrawled on it. I spread them out. I paw through them, again and again and again, but it makes no difference.

  The note she wrote is gone.

  There’s this girl on the bus with yellow hair and blue eyes.

  Her name is Clair, but if you called her Clair she wouldn’t answer.

  Not any more.

  She doesn’t like Clair.

  Clair reminds her of things.

  When she thinks of Clair, she thinks of someone else, someone with bitten fingernails and a secret wobbling tooth at the back of their mouth. She thinks of things falling down stairs, things dangling out of bins. She thinks of a boxroom as cheap and fancy as a small iced cake.

  Her name is Helen now. She’s been Helen for almost a year.

  Only very occasionally – when she wakes up in a strange room, next to a sleeping body that she doesn’t recognise and she doesn’t know what time it is or remember quite how she got there, only then, and only for a few seconds – is she still Clair.

  Helen is a better name for an actress.

  Helen was as simple as trying on a dress. She left Clair tangled on the dressing-room floor. She’s Helen now. She�
�s an actress. She could be Amanda, Angela or Alice if she chose. Kate, Chloe or Camille. Just not Clair, she’s sick of Clair.

  Clair had mousy brown hair. Helen’s bleached hers yellow.

  Clair had brown eyes. Helen wears contacts.

  Clair worked five years in Boots. Helen makes two hundred quid in an hour and a half.

  Helen’s legs are stinging of piss. It’s not her piss. She washed them afterwards, but they’re blotched red and raw. She hopes no one can smell it. Up near the train station, this lad gets on. He swaggers down the aisle. The bus is half-empty but he sits next to her, pressing his knee against hers and grinning. He plays bad hip-hop on his phone, the words rattling from the speaker like windblown tinfoil.

  Helen feels her heart beat hard and rhythmically in her chest.

  She looks firmly out the window and tries to focus on something at the centre of her; something as small and hard and cold as a peach stone. She will discover this thing inside her, whatever it is, and when she does she’ll never let anyone touch it; not the lad, not her mum, not even God.

  Next she tries to imagine no one is sitting next to her. Just empty space in the shape of someone, a minus-person. But it’s no use. She can feel him there; his wet-grass hair and razor-burnt skin, his body swelling like an aggravated spot. He reeks of Lynx and sweat and the boys’ changing rooms.

  He is swelling in his seat.

  He is puffing out his chest.

  He is about to say something, too, so she gets out her phone and dials her mum.

  It rings.

  It rings.

  It you-have-reached-the-voicemail-service-of-s.

  (Her mum is in the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, the taps thundering into the sink. She’ll call Helen back later, once they’re both a bit pissed, separately, on cheap wine, and even her mum will call her Helen.)

  Meanwhile, the lad is continuing to swell. He’s swelling past the line that divides his seat from hers. The veins are standing out on his neck. His neck is bulging over the collar of his tracksuit. Soon he’ll be on top of her.

  No more lads, she thinks. Lads can screw themselves from now on.