Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  But mostly Alan seems content just to listen to his wife’s endless monologues, for his part contributing every now and then with one or other of a long selection of favourite, well-worn sayings: ‘Waste Not Want Not,’ he’ll say. ‘Never Rains But It Pours. Each To Their Own. Less Haste, More Speed. Live And Let Live.’ He nods while he speaks, as if anxious to be agreeable. Elodie has no idea what these things mean, or what relevance they have, and they are usually entirely ignored by Bev, but the phrases seem to comfort him, the words worn smooth as pebbles with repeated use and said with quiet relish. Only Percy, the caged minor bird seems to take any real interest in Alan, mimicking him malevolently whenever he opens his mouth. ‘Never rains but it pours!’ he’ll hector. ‘Waste not want not!’ he’ll sneer, while a frenzied Brandy yelps and yaps and tears around in circles beneath his cage.

  In the evenings the three of them watch the television with their dinner trays on their laps. Bangers and mash, pizza and chips, spaghetti bolognaise. Coronation Street. Inspector Morse. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Outside, the darkness falls and the street lamps buzz insipidly beneath the never-ending drizzle.

  Little by little, Elodie begins to discover the world that lies beyond 45 Burlington Road. At first she embarks on tentative explorations under the cold, white April sky. Wrapped in Bobby’s sweatshirt, the hood pulled down low out of habit over her eyes, she drifts past row upon row of identical square houses, through little parades of shops, past dusty, shabby Halaal food stores, the boarded-up banks, the kebab shops and off-licences and pubs that constitute this corner of suburbia. Trees sprout from between paving stones, torn carrier bags snagged on their twigs like strange fruit. She thinks that it is very different to Queens. Her memories of New York have already taken on a surreal, dream-like quality, but she remembers the city as being either very hot, or very cold. Here the climate seems to be perpetually indifferent; tepid, waiting. Sometimes, as she moves, a faint smell of Bobby rises from the fabric of his sweatshirt, the sweet, musky scent causing the memories to slam into her, his voice and touch and face suddenly unbearably vivid, a nameless pain catching in her chest making her sick with longing.

  Every day she walks a little further; to Stanmore, Sudbury and Southall. Here at least a restless energy bubbles between the mosques and market stalls, selling spice and jewellery and Bollywood DVDs. In Harrow she wanders past bookies and bowling alleys, past fashion boutiques and fast food joints, travel agents and tanning salons, supermarkets and cinemas. She slips through automatic doors into the shiny, overheated worlds of shopping centres where people glide with single-minded purpose over faux marble floors.

  She walks home past kebab shops glowing blue in the falling dusk, past pubs gurgling orange, emitting short bursts of laughter and music. The streets are empty but for lone figures who drift ghostlike along pavements, their gazes shifting to their feet as they shuffle past her in the gloom. She turns into quiet, residential streets, the front gardens cement squares, their rooms alight with flickering plasma screens. In one house she spies a fat ginger boy punching his fat, ginger sister. In another an elderly man sits alone, eating cereal from a box. On the corner of Burlington Road a lamppost marks the scene of a traffic accident, festooned with bouquets of flowers, shiny plastic and bows wrapped around the rotting vegetation. She thinks of Shanique, Kiki and Princess, she thinks of Bobby. I am Kate, she tells herself. I am Kate Eaves. Through the tepid air she walks.

  After a few months she takes some of the money that is still stashed away in her suitcase beneath Princess’s bed, and, remembering Shanique’s advice enrols at a nearby college, paying in cash for classes in literacy, reading and writing. This has been her plan – her only one – and she follows it through with a kind of numb determination, unable to think how else to fill her days. Before her first class she waits outside as the daytime students come flooding out and pour down the steps towards her. They wear low-slung jeans and shiny trainers, have studs in their eyebrows, hair that is dyed and waxed and shaven. She stands alone, clutching her books and trying to make sense of their accents which seems to make everything they say end in ‘ar’: ‘Nar man’, they say. ‘Remem-bar?’ they ask. ‘Yeah,’ they shrug, ‘whatev-ar.’

  But the students who attend her classes are very different from these chattering, laughing, shrieking teens. Her fellow classmates have been at work all day, and have an air of weary determination. They are Albanian, Bosnian, Chinese, Somalian. And when the teacher begins to speak, they listen avidly, hanging with intense concentration on each word. In silence they study their grammar and spelling, their verbs and adjectives and nouns.

  At first, Elodie sits at the very back and stares tensely at the blackboard, feeling a mounting panic as she listens to the teacher’s instructions. Each time she tries to focus on the lesson, she finds herself transported to High Barn, experiencing again the familiar anxiety; the fear of blundering, of disappointing always present. By the end of each class she is shaken and flustered and finds she can’t remember one thing. But slowly, day by day, she begins to relax. Gradually, and with increasing confidence she begins to make progress. Soon she enrolls in more classes – computer studies, secretarial skills, introduction to mathematics – amazed by her growing abilities, the speed and ease with which she learns, relieved to have found something at last to take her mind off Bobby, whom she misses with a constant, physical ache.

  Sometimes, when she’s watching the TV with Bev and Alan or wandering the streets between her classes, it strikes Elodie that the limbo she experienced on the plane, of being suspended between two lives, has not yet left her. When she tries to imagine the future, she finds that she cannot. When she thinks about her past she finds she can’t quite grasp it, so far removed is it from the life she’s leading now. At night she will wake at one or two or three o’clock, shaking with fear and drenched in sweat, the fading remnants of Ingrid’s voice still lingering, barely.

  One evening as she’s leaving the college to go home, she looks up to see Tomas, a Polish student from her class falling into step besides her. She has noticed him before, his eyes that stare at her when he thinks she isn’t looking, his grave silence. He doesn’t look at her as they walk, and she in turn doesn’t say a word as they turn off the main street into a narrow road she has never ventured down before. She follows him unquestioningly, sensing instantly what he wants. For the next few weeks after class she goes with him, back to his tiny, bare-walled bedsit, where they undress silently in the dark, while outside, in the corridor, doors slam and footsteps hurry past. Afterwards, he turns from her and mutters in his own language, sometimes he cries. And when one day Tomas doesn’t turn up to class and there is no word from him, she doesn’t mind. Kate, she tells herself. My name is Kate. Each night she dreams of Bobby. The weeks pass, and then the months. I am Kate Eaves.

  nineteen

  Kingsbury, north-west London, May 2001

  The blue screen glows softly in the darkness, a quiet drone floats just above the silence. The computer room is empty. She takes her seat and logs onto Google. Her hands hover above the keyboard for a few seconds, and then, in the box marked Search, she types the words ‘Elodie Brun’ and hits Return. Almost immediately a list of sites appears. Her fingers fly to her lap as if burnt. Fear sits heavy in her stomach. She had not planned this; had not known that this was what she would do until she found herself here, and now she sits, too afraid to move, poised between ignorance and knowledge. A part of her wants only to run. But finally she clicks the mouse and begins to read.

  The first article is dated 1996. Her eyes fall to a colour photograph and she flinches in shock. The child who stares back at her has a small pale face with huge, wildly staring eyes below a mane of red-brown hair. She is a ragged sprite in a white, hospital-issue gown, flanked by two, kindly looking nurses in a cheerful looking room with children’s pictures on the walls. In her hand is a little carved wooden bird. There is something about the set of the child’s jaw in the picture, the almost sl
ack-mouthed smile, the peculiar posture, the extreme nakedness of her gaze, that is utterly arresting. It is an extraordinary picture. Like looking at two incongruous images superimposed upon one another, each one from different eras, different worlds.

  She studies the faces of the nurses. Is there something else behind their smiling eyes, besides the kindness? The faintest whisper of unease, perhaps? There in the computer room Kate turns to the window and examines her reflection in the glass: the eyes that stare back are reassuringly guarded, contained, controlled, the hair short and neat and blonde, the face a little plumper, softer. And yet she cannot quench the disquiet that the picture has provoked in her.

  She turns back and scrolls down to the second photo. She barely notices her tears as she gazes at the familiar face. The caption beneath it tells her his name is Mathias Bresson. He is younger than when she knew him, but still she recognizes the deep-set, haunted eyes, the hunted expression. Now that she has other faces to compare his to she sees how strangely intense his was, how different to anyone else’s she’s seen since. Very gently she reaches over to the screen and with her fingertips traces the features of the face that she had loved so much.

  Her eyes fall to a tiny, inset picture and she freezes in shock. She leans in closer, at first unable to believe her eyes. It is the woman in the green dress, the same photo that Mathias showed her on that final evening in the forest. There, after all this time, is that strange, unforgettable half-smile, the mysterious dark eyes glancing downwards beneath the heavy fringe. She scrolls up to the beginning of the article and begins to read.

  ‘Tragic loner who caged Little Bird,’ the headline announces in large, heavy type. ‘Little is known about the man who held Elodie Brun captive for ten years in a remote forester’s cottage in Normandy,’ she reads. ‘A mute since birth and abandoned by his mother aged six, Mathias Bresson spent the rest of his childhood in various care homes. Records from the time describe a shy, introverted boy with severe behavioural problems, and attempts to assign him foster parents were short-lived. Eventually he was sent to a children’s home in Rouen where he was to remain until he was seventeen.

  ‘After that, little is known about Bresson’s whereabouts, but it seems he lead a reclusive, nomadic existence, occasionally employed as a labourer in nearby farms but often living in hostels or on the streets of Rouen. When he was twenty-eight he was admitted to the city’s hospital after a failed suicide attempt and ironically, it was whilst undergoing treatment on the psychiatric ward here that Bresson found happiness at last with fellow patient Celeste Duchamp (pictured inset).

  ‘Both Bresson and Duchamp made good progress under their doctors’ care and were eventually discharged. The couple set up home and eventually married, settling down in a quiet village where Bresson found work in nearby woods as a forester. A neighbour from the time, Jean Petit, remembers the couple well. “They were nice,” he says. “Quiet, decent people. They kept themselves to themselves, mostly, but Mathias was a good man. He helped me tile my roof once. I liked him – everyone did. They seemed very happy, especially when Celeste became pregnant. We were all pleased for them in the village and Mathias seemed delighted.”

  ‘But tragedy soon struck when Celeste developed antepartum psychosis, a mental illness that, if not properly treated can lead the expectant mother to experience terrifying hallucinations and thoughts of suicide. When she was seven months pregnant, Mathias returned home one evening to find that she had hanged herself.

  ‘“It was terrible, dreadful,” recalls Petit. “We hardly saw him after that – he barely left the house. And then, one day, he just wasn’t there anymore. Clean disappeared, and we never saw him again until ten years later when he was in all the papers.”

  ‘Petit continued, “He wasn’t a bad man. He was gentle. I don’t think he’d ever had hurt a fly. I was shocked to the bone when I heard he’d taken that young kid. Who knows why he did it? Perhaps he was just trying to replace what he’d lost.”’

  She is unable to read any more. Her head sinks into her hands and for a long time all she can do is let the sadness sweep through her. She closes her eyes and casts herself back to the forest. She is sitting outside the little stone house. It’s twilight and the birds have begun their evening song. The air is soft and hazy, and the man is sitting on the old bench, smoking his pipe and smiling down at her. There in the college’s computer room her fingers stir in her lap as they remember the touch of the little carved bird, how perfectly it had fit inside her palm, how she had carried it with her always, her fingers stroking the familiar, smooth curve of its head, the grooves of its wings. His gift to her. At last she opens her eyes and kissing her finger, places it on Mathias’s forehead.

  Outside in the corridor, a security guard rattles his keys. ‘Thirty minutes, love,’ he warns her. She exits the page and opens the second article on the list. The six-page feature that appears next is from an English colour supplement dated 1999.

  ‘Where is Little Bird?’ the headline asks. ‘Six months after the disappearance of Elodie Brun, the police still have no leads on her whereabouts. We investigate the extraordinary mystery that began in a sleepy market town in northern France, and ended in tragedy fourteen years later on Long Island …’

  The piece is illustrated with several photographs. The first, slightly blurred and yellowing, is of a young woman about the same age as Kate is now. She has dark auburn hair and blue eyes and is looking at the camera with a shy, lopsided smile. Kate gazes at it confused: it is both her, and not. She reads the caption and her hand flies to her mouth as realisation dawns. ‘Thérèse Brun, mother of Elodie, was just 19 when her daughter was abducted,’ it says, and her heart rockets to her mouth. ‘Mother of Elodie,’ she reads again, and the three words begin to swim before her eyes. The rest of the world seems to disappear, for a long time all she is aware of is Thérèse’s face and the loud beating of her heart.

  At last she drags her gaze away and eagerly turns to the article, desperate to discover everything she can. But soon her excitement gives way to bitter disappointment. The writer tells her nothing she doesn’t already know: that Thérèse had been a young, single mother, struggling to cope, that after Elodie’s abduction she had turned to drugs and alcohol, and after living in a squat for a while had finally disappeared, assumed dead. It was exactly as Ingrid had told her. Kate turns back to the photograph, wanting to remember each strand of hair, each freckle and eyelash, every pore and line. She prints out the photograph, folds it up and puts it in her pocket.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ The college security guard is standing in the doorway, staring in concern at her white, tear-stained face. Without answering him, she turns off the PC and runs from the room.

  She has been sitting in the dark, staring out of Princess’s bedroom window for over two hours now. Bev and Alan have long since turned off the TV and gone to bed. Outside, above the small neat back yard, the moon floats in milky blackness. Somewhere a fox screams and she hears Brandy whimper a sleepy response from the kitchen below.

  Turning from the window she goes to Princess’s dressing table and sitting down, stares at her reflection in the little gilt-edged mirror. Her mother’s face returns to her. Who had she been, this stranger, Thérèse? This woman who had named her, made plans for her, loved her? And who would she herself have been if Mathias had not taken her that day? Elodie Brun. She must begin again. She looks around her at the pink walls of someone else’s childhood. Kate Eaves. She thinks of the girl standing on the stage at the conference in New York, Ingrid by her side. She thinks about the girl who, in a split second of anger, had pushed Ingrid to her death. ‘Kate Eaves,’ she whispers, staring at herself. ‘Elodie Brun.’

  A week later, she spies on the college notice board a square white card advertising a flat to rent a few miles away in Kilburn. The next day she pays in cash the deposit and first month’s rent, and moves out.

  twenty

  Kilburn, north London, November 2002

 
; It creeps up on her, London. To begin with, as if comparing it to a past lover, she finds the city lacking; not up to the power and passion of her first infatuation. Compared to New York, London is cramped and oppressive; the dark brick buildings press down on her, the sky is shrunken and pale. But then, slowly, freed from the cloying drear of suburbia, she starts to look about her with new eyes. Kilburn, with its run-down pubs and bingo halls, its shabby energy and seedy bluster, seems to her as volatile and unpredictable as a drunken old man: charming and flirtatious one minute, embittered and hostile the next. She begins devouring the city in the way she once consumed New York. And inch by inch, step by step, brick by brick, it claims her.

  Wild, cramped, fast, dark and sprawling, turning the corner from ugliness she will suddenly find beauty. From Hampstead to Hammersmith, Clerkenwell to Canning Town she roams, the aggression and glamour of the West End, the eerie, waiting hush of the Square Mile at night and every alley and square and dead-end street in between beginning to edge its way beneath her skin.

  Even the climate, which she’d once dismissed as insipid, begins to seduce her as she witnesses the city’s mutability beneath each season’s spell. The smell of the pavements after rain, the frozen hush of a January dawn. The shimmering neon of Piccadilly Circus beneath snow, the blossom trees of an Islington square in spring. The scent of the cold, black streets in winter, the hazy glow of Hyde Park in summer where once she spies parakeets flying between the trees. It seeps into her soul.

  But something else, something even more beguiling than the city begins to make its claim. Wherever she goes she loiters on the corners of strangers’ conversations, catching words like falling leaves, sifting through other people’s dialogue like a tramp scavenging through bins. In Mayfair words flutter like butterflies from beneath Arab housewives’ veils. At bus stops school children bat them back and forth like ping pong balls. In Newington Green elderly Turks slide them across cafe tables like pieces on a backgammon board. In churches they rise in prayer like dissipating steam. Words as currency, as intimacy, as love or reassurance. Words of anger or persuasion. Words that are curled with tenderness, or scorched by anger, that spit and fizz or slice and wound, words that warm and nourish. She collects them all.