Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  A dull rage builds inside her. She doesn’t notice when her hand crushes the plastic cup with a snap, is oblivious to the wine pouring over her fingers and the mutters and curious looks around her. But wasn’t he right, this Martin Chambers? Wasn’t he right to compare her to these others? Hadn’t she, after all, proved her savagery the night of Ingrid’s death? At last she turns and stumbles from the bar.

  Breaking into a run, she hurtles along Upper Street, barely conscious of the Saturday-night stragglers as they jump, startled, from her path. She runs until she gets to the station where she almost throws herself down the escalator, and makes the train just before the doors close. In the bright lurching glare she sits, hunched, oblivious to anything but her own thoughts. When at last she reaches her stop she flies towards Kilburn, not stopping until she reaches her flat where she slams the door behind her and finally gives into her fury, kicking and punching the walls, hurling everything she can pick up before at last she falls to her bed.

  After a while she gets up and goes to her window. Below her, in the street, a couple, hand in hand, hurry beneath a brief splattering of rain. A group of teenagers laugh and shriek drunkenly; a woman emerges from a car carrying a sleeping child in her arms. She thinks about their lives, and about the lives of her colleagues; their families, husbands, friends. As she stands there, the street below her gradually empties, the cars pass less frequently until they all but stop. A hush falls over Kilburn. And at last she comes to a decision.

  It is a few weeks later that she sees the tall, quiet man playing records in the corner of the Mermaid pub in Dalston. He touches her: his slight stoop, his air of quiet calm, the shy hunger in his eyes. And when she wakes next to him the following morning and hears herself promising to return, she watches, mystified, as the smile breaks upon his face like sunshine. She will not be like them, she promises herself.

  twenty-one

  London, August 2003

  Anton Klein stood beneath the painting of Kaspar Hauser and sipped his warm white wine. Opposite him hung the photograph of Elodie Brun, and he hadn’t taken his eyes off it since he arrived. By the door, a prim girl with a clipboard cast him furtive, hungry little glances, tiny missiles of longing bouncing ineffectually off his skin, while the wine waiter standing next to her stared with a more naked admiration. He ignored them both. Slowly the room filled and he felt a familiar deadening ennui. He wasn’t sure why he had come; he could have bought the book online. He would take a copy for his collection, he decided, then leave. He drained his glass and looked around for somewhere to deposit it, steadfastly ignoring the waiter’s eye.

  It was only then that he noticed the girl standing a few metres away from him, staring at the same photograph of Elodie that he had been looking at. She had her back to him – an out-sized, faded red sweatshirt, the hood pulled over her head – but it was her air of focused stillness that held his gaze. She stood as if transfixed, leaning slightly forward, entirely oblivious to the people who milled around her. He waited for her to relax, to move on, but she remained, still.

  He examined her more closely. He couldn’t see her face. Just a few yellow feathers of hair escaped the hood. She was dressed in a shapeless cotton knee-length dress or skirt, legs bare and on her feet she wore simple white plimsolls with short, childish red socks. As he watched, he was startled by a loud crack of splintering plastic and noticed with confusion that wine was pouring over her fingers and onto the floor. People were glancing over at her curiously, but still she didn’t move. He took a step towards her, feeling an urgent desire suddenly to see her properly and at that same moment she turned, dropped her ruined cup and shouldered her way through the bodies and out of the bar.

  And in that split second, he had seen her face. The hood still half obscured it, revealing only a narrow oval of eyes, nose and chin, but still he was sure. Her hair was different, her face a little plumper, older, but it was her, he was certain: it was Elodie. A hot excitement gripped him and within seconds he was pushing his way through the bar, past the disappointed gaze of the waiter and door girl and out onto the street where he spotted her steaming through the Saturday-night crowds of Upper Street. She ran fast and he was out of breath before he caught up with her, just as she was disappearing into the entrance of Highbury and Islington station.

  He tore down the escalator and leapt onto the train moments behind her. He took a seat at the end of the carriage furthest from where she sat, rigidly and on the edge of her seat, her hands two tense balls in her lap. Her hood had slipped, revealing the yellow cap of hair, the delicate features, the huge, dark blue eyes, now aglow with a kind of anguish. His gaze lingered over her lips for a while and an intense loathing filled him. He savoured the feeling: it was the first tangible emotion he had felt in some time.

  His eyes fell to the curve of her bare legs. A memory snaked its way beneath his hatred and for a moment he was pulled back to High Barn, to the last time he had seen her. He had been sixteen, creeping up the stairs to the top floor, the forbidden key clasped in his hand. He had loitered outside her bedroom door, hatred brewing even then in his jealous adolescent heart. He had put his eye to the crack, the noise of her TV drowning out the floorboard’s creek. And there she’d been, his mother’s precious project. There she was, lying naked upon the bed, her fourteen-year-old body sliced by rays of light streaming through the window, her long hair gold-red against her pillow. Her beauty so absolute that for a moment it had stopped time, held him in its light, snaking its way into the clenched fist of his heart, a tantalizing glimpse of something as yet unknown. As he’d watched, her fingers had trailed across her breasts then slowly down over her belly and he had given a low involuntary moan in response. And though he had been suddenly and brutally snatched from his trance by the sound of his mother moving dangerously close below, the image of her lying there would be seared across his mind forever. There in the train he reddened with shame at the memory of how this girl, now so hated, had once been the fodder for so much subsequent energetic teenage fantasy.

  The train pulled into West Hampstead station and the sudden distraction of her getting to her feet broke him from his reverie. He followed her from the train; careful to keep at a distance he trailed her out of the station into the street, breaking into a run when she began to sprint down Iverson Road. At last, on reaching Kilburn, she turned off the High Road into a narrow, grubby street. The road was poorly lit and he remained concealed by a tree on the opposite pavement when she stopped finally and let herself into one of the tall shabby houses.

  Anton waited until, after a brief pause, a light appeared in one of the windows on the top floor. He sheltered beneath the sycamore’s branches, his mind returning, as it often did, to the night his mother had died.

  There had been an argument over dinner – the usual, pointless bullshit. Eventually he had bolted, sneaking back later to steal his mother’s car keys.

  What he hated most about his mother, what he could never forgive, was the way she manipulated his father. If it hadn’t been for Ingrid poisoning his mind, Robert would never have agreed to him being sent away. Never. His father loved him and the blame was entirely on his mother’s shoulders, of that, he had always been certain.

  He remembered that he could still hear his parents yelling as he’d slid the keys from her purse. For the rest of the night he had driven aimlessly. At last he’d pulled up in a deserted car park and rolled a joint, the heady effects of the weed mingling with his anger and self-pity. Mulling over his younger self’s futile claims on his mother’s attention, he saw failure; tantrums and disobedience evolving over time into more serious misdemeanours, and still nothing. He remembered when he had hit her, the satisfying, terrifying sensation of her cheekbone beneath his fist, his own triumph matched only by hers.

  Dawn had just begun to bleed over the roofs of High Barn when he returned. He had been surprised to find the front door wide open. Perplexed, he had stood staring dumbly at it for a moment or two, had even looked around him s
uspiciously as if expecting someone to appear from behind one of the trees. An eerie quiet had contributed to his unease; a strange sense that he was being awaited. At last he entered. And then he had walked into the kitchen. On the threshold he had frozen, taking in the awful sight, a cold disbelief pinning him to the spot. His first reaction had been an involuntary gasp of laughter. ‘What?’ he had asked the empty room, half thinking it was some bizarre kind of joke. ‘What?’ he had said again, his hand flying nervously to his mouth.

  On the kitchen floor, in the gloom of the cold blue half-light were overturned chairs, broken crockery, puddles of wine and food. And amongst it all, his mother’s body. He had crept closer, adrenalin sluicing queasily through his veins, his skin prickling and hot, and he had felt an overwhelming desire to run. There she lay, slumped on her side, a pool of blood already congealing beneath her. Her skin was white, her lips blue, her eyes glassy and blank. ‘Mom?’ that was what he’d said, just like a little kid. ‘Mom?’

  And it was only then that he had noticed his father. A tiny noise had made him turn and there he’d been, just sitting at the table. He did not look at Anton when he spoke, his voice so quiet that he had had to strain to hear, ‘She killed her,’ was what his father had said, ‘Elodie.’

  There in the Kilburn street, he saw her suddenly appear at the window and he took a couple of steps back into the shadows. It began to rain. A couple clasping hands ran past him followed by a shrieking zig-zag of drunken teens. A little way down the street a mini cab pulled up, ejecting a woman carrying a sleeping child. Still he stayed, still she remained.

  At the time, Anton had been surprised by the depth of his grief. Hadn’t he, after all, wished his mother dead a million times before? He had not been prepared for the gnawing, guilt-edged sorrow that had attacked him like a sickness. Instead of returning to England he had abandoned his plan to retake his A-levels in favour of staying with his father. The two of them, he had thought, would keep each other company. Perhaps this might bring them closer, he hoped.

  But something strange had begun to happen to his father. Over the following weeks he had remained peculiarly distant, refusing to talk about Ingrid’s death or even meet his son’s eyes. Instead he had kept to his study, often locking the door and refusing to answer Anton when he called him. But the confusion and dismay he felt was nothing compared to the moment when Robert had finally emerged to make his announcement. He had looked out of the window as he’d spoken and Anton had noticed that his hair was much greyer, his face more gaunt and lined. In a quiet, unfamiliar voice he had informed his son that not only had he put High Barn up for sale, he’d accepted a new job in Boston too – he would be moving to a one-bedroomed apartment the following month. Before Anton could even digest this news, he had then been told that all the proceeds from the sale would be his, along with his mother’s money, including his grandfather’s estate. Robert would be taking nothing. ‘Go back to England, Anton,’ was all he would say in reply to his son’s increasingly desperate questioning. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s for the best.’

  And so, aged nineteen, Anton had found himself in London, wealthy but entirely adrift. His father kept in touch only intermittently; a card at Christmas, a vague email here and there. It was then that the hatred he had once felt for his mother, left floundering in mid-air since her death, had landed squarely upon Elodie’s shoulders. She was to blame for this. For all of it. His mother’s death, what could only be described as his father’s breakdown, the fact that he was now entirely alone in the world. And once his hatred found its home, it flourished, expanding daily until it filled his thoughts, becoming the focus of all his energy and self-pity. Over the years he’d speculated endlessly on Elodie’s whereabouts, puzzling over the police trail that had gone so mysteriously cold in Queens. He had brooded over photographs of her face, collected every piece of literature he could find on her. And now, here she was, delivered into his lap like a gift.

  There, in the chilly north-London street, four years after she had murdered his mother, Elodie Brun moved away from the window of her flat. Pulling his coat more tightly around him against the cold, Anton went in search of a taxi.

  In the living room of his central London home he looked at the books, newspaper clippings, internet print-outs and photographs spread out before him on the floor. Taking a seat on the sofa he picked up a small cardboard box from the coffee table and lifted off its lid, pulling out a small, intricately carved figure of a bird. It fit neatly into his palm, and as his fingers stroked the wooden curve of its head he looked over at one of the photographs of Elodie, and smiled.

  twenty-two

  Deptford, south-east London, 20 February 2004

  They lay on the floor of Frank’s living room, a bottle of wine between them. ‘Auvrey,’ Kate said, staring at him, her fingers lightly stroking his wrist while she rolled the name around her tongue. ‘Auv-rey.’

  ‘It’s French,’ Frank told her. ‘My dad was – still is, probably – French.’

  ‘I would like to go to France one day,’ she said.

  He saw the intense sadness pass over her face, and felt a familiar stab of anxiety; the sensation once again of glimpsing, as though through a crack in a door, something dark and painful. For a moment, just a moment, he hovered outside, debating whether to push the door open and go in. He felt unsure, inept. Instead he lent over and kissed her. ‘We could go together if you like.’

  She smiled. The moment had passed; a key turned in its lock. ‘Do you speak French?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘My old man used to speak it to me. When I was a kid I would pretend it was our secret language that nobody else could understand.’ He smiled. ‘Stupid, really. I kept it up though, after he left. It’s the only lesson at school I was any good at apart from Music. And Joanie – Dad’s sister – used to speak it too.’

  He stared up at the ceiling, remembering how after his dad left, he would return home from school full of the day’s news to find his mum sitting in the fading light, staring blankly out of the window. He would retreat at once to his room, guiltily stashing away the day’s triumphs or successes the way a shoplifter secretes his stash about his person. After a while he’d started going round to his aunt’s house after school instead. He smiled at the memory. When the house had been Joanie’s it had smelt of cats and air freshener. Radio One had blared all day while sunlight shone on brown linoleum. She used to dye her long, curly hair pillar-box red to match her lipstick. She wore dangly earrings and low-cut blouses and always smelt of Diorissimo and cigarettes. By the time he was eleven she had taught him how to make her the perfect gin and tonic.

  She was a dressmaker and most afternoons would see Frank standing on a chair with a biscuit in his hand, draped in whatever dress or skirt she was making at the time, while he chatted about his day and she crawled around him, humming along to the radio through a mouthful of pins. Sometimes though, when she opened the door to him, she would announce, ‘Bonjour mon petit! Ce soir, nous parlons seulement en Français!’ He’d liked that, it had made him feel as if he was still, somehow, talking to his dad.

  Frank had been twenty-one when Joanie had got cancer. For the seven weeks before she died he’d visited the hospital almost every day. In the end she’d left him her house; to his mum she’d left her collection of ceramic ducks with the handwritten message, ‘For the love of God, dear, CHEER UP!!’

  ‘Say something in French to me,’ Kate said, pouring them both more wine.

  So he said, ‘Je crois que tu es belle. Et je t’aime.’

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘I said that I think that you’re beautiful.’

  After that she made him talk in French all the time, repeating the words back to him, holding each one lovingly in her mouth: fleur, nuit, cœer, quelquefois, nous, peut-être, merci, demain.

  To say that she was unlike any other girl he’d ever known was something of an understatement. There was so much about her that fas
cinated him: her extreme independence, the way she would go walking the streets alone for hours, her innate ability to find her way wherever she was, the strange, shadowy wildness he glimpsed in her sometimes when her guard was down. The complicated mind games that had seemed to be such an inevitable feature of his previous relationships seemed entirely absent from Kate’s psyche. There were no subtexts to decipher, no frosty atmospheres to navigate, wondering what it was he’d done wrong. In fact, she seemed to be always disarmingly to-the-point. (‘Why are you so angry with her?’ she’d asked soon after they met, when he had been sure he’d been referring to his mother in the friendliest of terms.)

  And whenever he saw her, he would be overwhelmed by his need to touch her. Within a few moments his fingers would be itching for her. In bed, he felt as if every shred of feeling in his body rose to the surface of his skin, that every part of him was focussed in the sensation of touching her. They would make love everywhere, anywhere; there, in the hall before she’d barely dropped her bag, on the stairs, in the kitchen, on the sofa, in the bath. Her small legs wrapped tight around him, her lips kissing every part of him, her deft hands urgent, her steady eyes on his.

  And as the months passed, little by little he began to feel surer of his place in her life. The words had been bubbling on his tongue for weeks before he finally allowed himself to say them. ‘I love you.’ The first time he’d said it, she had stared back at him for a long time, until finally she had repeated back to him, carefully, thoughtfully rolling the words around her tongue, ‘I love you.’