Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  ‘Yes,’ he says, his eyes falling to his phone once more. ‘Of course.’

  She sees his fingers press the phone’s power button, sees it jerk into life, sees that he is summoning help. And in that split second, she makes her decision. Turning to the open front door, Elodie runs from High Barn. Through the darkness she runs, down the hill. When she reaches the bottom she flags down the first car that approaches and, still numb with shock, gets in.

  PART THREE

  fourteen

  Queens, New York, 15 April 1999

  ‘Kid? Hey, kid?’

  The voice nudges her awake, prodding and poking at her until she opens one eye.

  ‘Hey girl, you got a smoke?’

  She becomes aware, bit by bit, of the hard ground beneath her, the stench of rotting garbage, the cramped ache in her limbs. As the first worms of memory slither through her consciousness, she sits up with a start, spies the boy sitting on the low wall she had been sleeping behind, and flinches in shock.

  ‘Relax,’ says the boy. ‘I ain’t gonna hurt you.’ He shrugs and squints up at the lightening sky then turns back to her with wide, expectant eyes, ‘Just want a cigarette.’

  ‘I don’t have any cigarettes,’ she tells him, from where she sits between two large trashcans.

  ‘You don’t, huh?’

  He continues to stare at her while she rubs some feeling back into her hands, wraps her coat more tightly around her, looks down the wide street that’s beginning to take shape in the first pale glow of morning, and returns a nervous eye to the stranger, silently willing him to go.

  It had still been dark when the man dropped her off on a wide, busy intersection beneath a sudden spattering of rain. ‘Queens Junction,’ he’d told her with a shrug. ‘Far as I go.’ She’d felt his eyes watching her through his window wipers as she walked blindly away from the traffic and the noise until she’d come to a narrower, quieter street. She’d moved aimlessly, crossing over to avoid the few people still around at that time of night, keeping to the shadows, her eyes to the ground. In the distance a siren had wailed. On some nearby corner voices were raised in argument.

  She had come to a stop outside this low, deserted building, its bricks covered in graffiti and its windows smashed-in cavities. A hand-painted sign above the door read ‘Tire Shop’. At that moment, around the nearest corner, a group of men had appeared, moving towards her like a dark, many-headed beast. Their voices had gotten louder and she froze until she heard the crash of a glass bottle shattering on the sidewalk, harsh laughter like slews of ice water. Quickly she’d climbed behind the low brick wall and crouched in the darkness, waiting for them to pass. When she was sure they had gone, she had crawled between two dumpsters and stayed there, shivering, until at last she’d allowed herself to give in to the waves of despair. At some point the rain had returned and finally exhausted she had curled up beneath her coat and drifted into an anxious, shallow sleep.

  ‘Nice place you got here.’

  The boy is still staring down at her and she in turn takes in his appearance. He’s a few years older than she, and his skin colour and features are like those of Tram, she realises, a Vietnamese nurse from the neurology ward. Unlike Tram, though, this boy is very slender and his thick, black hair is cut and sculpted into the shape of a fin. Around his neck hang several thick, gold chains and his left eyebrow is pierced. His face is quick and delicate, his slanting eyes look like they’ve been finely carved from stone.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asks him, when still he refuses to look away.

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘You for real?’ He wrinkles his nose but doesn’t answer. Instead he pulls a bagel wrapped in greased paper from his jacket and begins to eat, looking off down the street while he chews. Mid bite, he turns and notices her hungry eyes on him, her mouth slack with longing. Wordlessly he tears off half and hands it to her, gingerly, as if to a wild dog, watching as she devours it in one greedy gulp. His shrewd black eyes continue to scrutinize her for a few moments. ‘Runaway, huh?’ he asks.

  ‘Please,’ she makes a move to rise from her huddled crouch, ‘I –’

  ‘Chill,’ he shows her his palms. ‘Trust me. I got my own problems.’ He sighs then. ‘I got to go anyhow.’ He jumps down from the wall, stretches and yawns. ‘Been a long night.’ He gives her another contemplative look, shakes his head and says in a gentler voice, ‘I don’t know what your story is, kid. But you can’t stay here. Go home, girl.’ When she doesn’t reply, he rolls his eyes and begins to move off, but after a few paces stops again. ‘You got money?’ he asks.

  She shakes her head. Money. She hadn’t had time to think of that.

  He pulls some dollar bills from his pocket. ‘Here,’ he says, passing them to her. He points off down the street. ‘There’s a shelter two blocks away,’ he says, but seeing her blank expression lets his hand fall, shrugs and walks away.

  Left alone, desolation wraps its icy arms around her. The sun is higher in the sky now, and she begins to hear the pulse of traffic getting louder in the distance. At last she crawls out from behind the wall and begins to walk. Will they be looking for her yet? She imagines Ingrid in her hospital bed, calling for her. She pulls up the collar of her coat, keeps her eyes glued to the sidewalk, and wanders aimlessly. She has no idea where she’s going, no plan of where to head for. Briefly the idea crosses her mind to look for Yaya, but she only knows she lives in a place called Brooklyn. As she walks she thinks of the boy who gave her money; his thin wrists, his delicate black eyes, his fast, sharp way of talking, his weary kindness.

  Fear engulfs her. Everything in this world after the rarefied calm of High Barn seems too bright and loud and colourful and fast; unreal, as if she’d stepped into the schoolroom’s little TV set and was now walking around inside it with all the dials turned up too high. She walks blindly, concentrating on keeping the panic at bay. She finds herself on a large, busy street lined with small, shabby stores, their wears spilling out across the sidewalk: shoes and clothes and food and electrical equipment beneath colourful awnings and high gaudy signs. Smileys Deli, Checks Cashed, 99 Store, George’s BBQ, Fried Chicken & Pizza, DeeDees Laundromat, Church of Jesus. She turns into another, larger street, filled with people. As she walks a steady stream of traffic roars beside her. Above her, reams of cables cross each other, holding the sky in a net.

  She catches sight of herself in a shop window; a white, thin spectre wrapped in a black, too-large coat. Her eyes huge in her face beneath the mane of red-brown hair, staring back at her like a frightened animal. And then at last her hunger drives her into a fast food restaurant where she has to repeat herself several times before she’s understood by the girl chewing gum behind the counter, and whose own accent makes no sense to her, either, but who eventually shrugs and takes her money and gives her a burger and soda in return. The gratitude and relief she feels carry her all the way back to the tire shop, where she crawls once again between the two trash cans and eats her food and waits for the wretched, gnawing fear to return. She comforts herself with images of Ingrid sitting serenely in her hospital bed, nurses tending to her every need, her face rosy with health.

  When night falls she notices that on the other side of the wide intersection in the distance, a gang of women begin to congregate. She watches them for a while. Now and then a car pulls up and then away again, taking one of the women with it. The evening is warmer than the one before and on the mild, damp air, their voices and laughter drift over to her. ‘Hey honey, you wanna party?’ ‘Hi handsome, want some company?’ Edging nearer to the wall she shivers in her coat and tries desperately to come up with some sort of plan.

  A few hours later she’s jerked awake by the sound of running footsteps and a volley of aggressive whoops and yells. It’s pitch black, save for the insipid flicker of a nearby streetlamp. Carefully she pokes her head above the wall and peers out. Running towards her and pursued by three men is the boy from the night before. She realises that he’s heading straight towards her, his
face strained and flushed with the exertion of running. Jumping over the wall he crouches next to her, his eyes shining like black glass. He remains there, poised like a cat while he listens to the men’s movements. It has all happened within a matter of seconds and she’s too surprised to speak.

  ‘Motherfucker! Where’d he go?’ the voice behind the wall is very close.

  Raising a finger to his lips, the boy motions for Elodie to remain silent.

  They hear the men murmuring angrily between themselves. And then, a triumphant, ‘There!’

  She has no time to think about it. The boy has hold of her hand and they are running through the small lot to the back of the tire shop, over the low wall behind it and into the dark streets beyond, the three men’s yells and footfalls just behind them, spurring them on. The boy is agile and quick and seems to know exactly where he’s going, running and jumping over fences and ducking between cars. The men are fatter, older and drunk. Even with Elodie gasping and struggling to keep up, it doesn’t take long to lose them.

  ‘Here,’ says the boy at last, and they turn into a narrow alley lined with the backs of colourful, clapperboard houses, crammed in side by side like the skirted behinds of old ladies, nudging and jostling each other for space. Above them a row of boots and shoes hang by their laces from electricity cables. A dog, tied to a fence, barks at them as they pass.

  ‘Well, we lost them,’ says the boy. As they walk she watches him from the corner of her eye and senses that even the tips of his fingers and the black spikes of his hair crackle with anger.

  ‘Who were they?’ she asks, timidly.

  ‘Who, them? No one.’ He doesn’t look at her.

  They continue in silence for a while and she realises that she’s happy to see him, that her situation feels fractionally less bleak than it did a few hours ago. He is kind, she feels. He will help her.

  ‘What’s your name, kid?’ he asks after a while.

  ‘Elodie,’ she says eagerly without thinking, then anxiously bites her lip.

  ‘Aye-lo-dee, huh?’ He stops and holds out a hand. ‘Well, I’m Bobby.’ She takes it and they shake, but she flinches nervously when a siren’s wail erupts around the far corner of the street.

  Bobby takes in her reaction, one eyebrow cocked, but says nothing, merely blinks as if storing the information for later. ‘Well, Elodie,’ he says, ‘I guess you could do with some food and a shower. Guess I owe you that much.’

  His speech, like that of all the people she has heard in the street, is hard for her to decipher. Unlike Ingrid and the others, whose words were clear and separate from one another, Bobby’s all seem to run together, and he often leaves off their endings, or puts the emphasis on the wrong syllables. Also he seems to talk at double the speed to anyone else she’s met, and she has to concentrate hard to understand his meaning.

  The boy considers her for a moment. ‘How old are you anyways? Fourteen?’

  ‘I am sixteen,’ she says quietly.

  There is a brief pause.

  ‘Talkative little thing, ain’t you?’ he mutters.

  The alley opens onto another wide street. They pass junkyards, parades of shops, small, red-bricked houses with pointing roofs, and wooden ones with stoops and broken furniture outside. The world is lighter now and beginning to stir. Shutters are raised, cars drift past, people emerge from doorways. She moves by Bobby’s side in a state of bemused detachment, and once again she feels the strange sense of unreality, as if she has stepped inside the hyper-colourful, too-loud world of a movie. Gradually, the streets they walk through become dingier. Garbage spills from trash cans, old paint crackles over window sills, shop fronts are cramped and uncared for. A plane flies low above their heads.

  Bobby smiles, noticing her wide eyes. ‘Welcome to Jamaica,’ he says. The sky has lightened into a soft blue and the shining sun gathers conviction. Ahead of them some construction workers drop a large sack from a high building and when it hits the ground an enormous cloud of cement dust explodes into the air, the sunlight making it sparkle gold against the blue. For a moment, the dull gnawing in her guts recedes a little and unconsciously she smiles while somewhere, in the depths of her brain, she hears a voice whisper, ‘You are free.’ She looks up, and is embarrassed to see that the boy is watching her, a strange expression on his face.

  She wonders why the men were chasing him and as they walk she considers him from the corner of her eye. His clothes and hairstyle and jewellery are, she guesses, what Yaya would have called ‘hip’, but she notices that they are worn and made from cheap fabric and there is something about his outfit and his fast talk and jaunty manner that’s at odds with the expression in his eyes and something else she senses in him, but can’t quite define.

  Eventually they come to a stop outside a high red brick tenement. She gazes up at the hundreds of tiny windows and reams of black, iron staircases that hang across the bricks like spider webs. Bobby pushes open a heavy brown door. Inside, the hallway is dark, the walls a graffiti-strewn green. She smells the faintly sour smell of the hot, still air. For a moment she hesitates.

  ‘You coming?’ Bobby says from the bottom of the stairwell. She glances behind her, then follows him.

  ‘Elevator’s bust,’ he explains as they begin to climb. On each floor a puddle of noise seeps from beneath a line of closed doors: a baby’s cry, the thudding bass from a stereo, an unanswered telephone, a child’s shriek, TV laughter, the voices of strangers. When they reach the sixth floor, Bobby leads her to a door marked 68. ‘Come on in,’ he says, turning keys in three different locks.

  She finds herself in a narrow hallway.

  ‘In here,’ Bobby shows her into a small bedroom. The floor is almost entirely covered by a double mattress. In the corner a small wardrobe overflows with clothes. Next to the bed sits a cassette player and a pile of tapes. Every one of the grubby white walls is covered in posters of the same, small, dark-skinned man wearing a variety of flamboyant outfits. As she looks around her, her legs begin to sway with tiredness and her guts rumble noisily.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you where you can get cleaned up, then I’ll make us something to eat.’

  She stares back at Bobby and feels a rush of gratitude and relief. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers.

  The bathroom is small and windowless and smells of damp. An extractor fan, its slats covered in a thick layer of dust and little heaps of fluff, chugs feebly into action when she turns on the light. The tub, toilet and basin are a pale pink and around them the paintwork blisters with damp. On the shower rail and over the radiator hang a selection of drying panties and bras and on every surface is piled a dozen different types of half-used tubes of shampoo, razors clogged with rust and hair, greying slivers of soap. Five toothbrushes sit in a dirty cup above the basin. Quickly she undresses and stands beneath the shower, letting the hot water wash away the grime of the past couple of days and nights. She stands under it for as long as she dares, but the evidence of strangers frightens her and she hurriedly dries herself with the towel Bobby gave her and gets dressed.

  Her clothes, now that she’s clean, are revolting to her; stained and stinking of the dumpsters she has just left. Looking in the small dirty mirror she notices with horror that her sweatshirt is stained with blood and she does her best to wash it off, using all her strength to force from her mind the image of Ingrid as she last saw her, prone and bleeding upon the floor. Opening the door, she darts quickly back across the hall.

  In Bobby’s small bedroom she tries to cover the washed-out blood stain with her hand but too late, he sees it, and just before he turns away their eyes meet for a second. But, ‘Here,’ is all he says, throwing her some baggy cotton pants and a T-shirt. ‘Put these on.’

  For a moment she hesitates, suddenly self-conscious.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ he tells her. ‘Trust me, honey. You ain’t my type.’ He winks and leaves the room, closing the door softly behind him.

  When he returns a few minutes later he’s carryi
ng a plate of sandwiches. They sit on the mattress together to eat.

  ‘You like Prince?’ he asks her after a while, seeing her eyes scanning the posters as she crams a cheese sandwich into her mouth. She shrugs, and his jaw drops in amazement. ‘You don’t know Prince?’ His voice is scandalised. ‘Where you from, girl? Mars?’ Within seconds he’s on his feet and pressing a button on the tape player. Music fills the room, a man’s high falsetto over a fast beat. ‘Man, I love this one.’ He begins to hop up and down and gyrate his narrow hips to the music while he sings along, ‘Just need your extra time and your – ba-da-ba-da boom – KIISS!’ He puts his hands behind his head for a final thrust of his pelvis and despite everything, Elodie laughs.

  Bobby stops dancing and stares back at her. ‘Wow. You’re actually quite something when you smile. You know that?’

  He turns the tape off, and takes the plate from her while she stifles a yawn.

  ‘Go on,’ he tells her. ‘Lie down and get some sleep.’ He goes to the window and pulls the heavy blue curtains across the glass, shutting out the sunshine. ‘Go ahead,’ he nods. ‘It’s cool. We’ll work out what to do with you later.’

  She lies down, telling herself that she’ll just rest for a moment. In the silence of the strange dark bedroom she remembers the toothbrushes and the underwear hanging in the bathroom and feels again a stab of anxiety at the thought of strangers sleeping on the other side of the thin, grubby walls. She closes her eyes tightly and curls up beneath the pink blanket Bobby had thrown over her, trying with all her might to push any thought of High Barn from her mind. At last she falls into oblivion.

  Hours or minutes later the glare of a lamp shines in her eyes and Bobby is sat beside her in the bed. She struggles up with a start, suddenly anxious to have been asleep in the same bed as this stranger. After a few moments Bobby rubs his face and yawns, and then, turning and seeing that she’s awake, says mildly, ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’