Little Bird

by Camilla Way

  There it is: the strange off-kilter grimace, the wild eyes, the long mane of auburn hair. With trembling fingers she picks up the rest of the photos and riffles through them with increasing agitation and speed, staring in cold astonishment at pictures she’d long forgotten ever being taken. Here she is at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen – in the schoolroom with Yaya and Colin, or in the neurology ward with Ingrid, Doctor Irving and the rest. Here she is at the conference. And there she is again, standing outside High Barn.

  Her throat is dry, her heart pounds. Next she turns to the newspaper clippings; the familiar headlines screaming back at her. ‘Who is Little Bird?’, ‘Monster Who Imprisoned Tot for Ten Years’, ‘Little Bird Flies to America’, her childhood revealed in a series of lurid articles. Besides them is a stack of books and with growing confusion she reads from their spines: The Science of Language by Ingrid Klein, Wild Children by Martin Chambers, The Mowgli People, Raised by Wolves: Tales of Feral Children, and dozens more. Picking them up one by one she sees that each of them has been bookmarked at the place detailing her own story.

  At last she throws the final book to the floor and running from the living room she bursts into the kitchen and demands, ‘Who are you?’

  But even through her shock and confusion she feels a sharp tug of fear at the sight of him. It’s so strange, the way he’s standing in the corner facing the wall like a chastised child. He doesn’t turn to look at her and her scalp prickles as she watches him.

  It’s some time before he answers. Without moving a muscle he says in a quiet, pleasant voice, ‘Did you get the little bird, Elodie?’

  Her heart drops. ‘Who are you?’ she whispers now.

  It’s only then that he turns, only then that she sees the gun in his hand. ‘I’m Anton,’ he tells her. ‘Remember me, Elodie? You murdered my mother.’

  ‘Anton.’ She begins to sway within the spinning kitchen. ‘Anton?’

  He raises the gun until it’s pointing at her head. There is something utterly unreal about it all: the gun looks incongruous in his hand, unconvincing, like a toy. She sees that he trembles with excitement; that his eyes keep flickering between her face and the weapon at the end of his arm. His eyes are bright, feverish, he has a strange, almost fearful grin, as though he can hardly believe what he is holding, like a boy acting in a play.

  ‘Sit down,’ he orders, and silently, her eyes never leaving him, she feels for one of the chairs and lowers herself into it, the table between them.

  As she stares at him, an image suddenly appears to her of a tall, awkward teenager spied from the window of the schoolroom at High Barn. Long hair obscuring his face. An air of quiet rage. Anton.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asks at last.

  ‘You killed her,’ he says, his voice tight with excitement. ‘You ruined everything.’

  ‘No!’ her eyes fill with tears.

  His hand stops trembling, his arm straightens and holds the gun still, aiming it squarely at her face.

  She will die here, she realises. Here, now, after everything. A dreamlike succession of faces flashes across her eyes. Mathias, Ingrid, Robert, Shanique, Bobby. The grainy pixels of her mother’s features. And finally, it is Frank she sees, his face that smiles back at her across the flashing, smoky gloom of the Mermaid.

  twenty-nine

  Deptford, south-east London, 13 May 2004

  Frank had woken to a new morning. In the week or so since Eugene’s funeral, his days had followed more or less the same pattern. He would wake, blearily, from dank, black sleep, groggily rising to the surface of blissful ignorance, until all at once the memories would hit him like a sack of rocks and he’d turn over, hiding his head beneath the pillow.

  On this particular morning however he had sat up in bed and, waiting for the familiar boot of doom to come as usual and grind him beneath its heel, was surprised when, in fact, this time it didn’t. He still felt like shit, certainly; he still felt the same wrenching sadness, but now something else began to seep through his misery. He tried to decipher what it was exactly he was feeling but try as he might he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. After a while he decided that it could only be summed up with two words. And they were: Fuck this.

  Some days ago, after yet another night of drinking whisky alone in the dark while Kate slept upstairs, he had phoned Tim and told him he was too ill to make it in. Ever since then he had spent the hours until Kate returned from work staring up at the ceiling or sleeping, and forgetting to wash, dress, or eat. When the phone rang he ignored it. It would only be Jimmy, and Jimmy would only want to talk about Eugene. And talking about Eugene was something Frank just couldn’t face.

  This particular morning however he had gotten out of bed, showered and dressed for the first time in a week, and set about clearing up the house. As he worked, his sense of purpose grew. With every passing minute the idea that had been playing around his brain before Eugene died grew more and more tangible. By the time he had finished mopping the kitchen floor he had made up his mind: he was going to take over the shop from Tim. No more fucking about; this time he meant business. He was going to make something of himself. As he shaved, his mind buzzed with plans. He’d need to mortgage the house, get a business plan together, talk to the bank, convince Tim to sell East Side Soundz to him, and work seven days a week if necessary to turn his idea into a reality. But he could do it, he was sure he could.

  The more he thought about it the more it made sense, and the more he pushed Eugene’s pointless death to the back of his mind. He looked at the kitchen clock: 3 p.m. He would go and call in at the shop, see what a pig’s ear Tim had made of it in his absence, then go and meet Kate and take her out to dinner. At the thought of Kate he smiled properly for the first time in days. And then the second life-changing revelation came. He was going to ask her to marry him. He stared at himself in the hall mirror, his face flushed with excitement, his eyes shining. Then, when the shop began doing really well, they’d have a couple of kids maybe. He grinned to himself as he pictured the two of them standing outside the shop, children by their side, who knows: maybe a dog or two for good measure. It would be perfect. He grabbed his keys and remembering that once again his car was out of action, whistled as he began the short walk to the station.

  East Side Soundz was in chaos when he arrived. Tim was standing behind the counter, trying to decipher the stoned mumblings of a burly supplier with a fat spliff in his mouth, a delivery note in his hand and a mound of boxes by his feet. His face lit up with relief when he saw Frank. ‘Thank fuck for that. Barnaby was too hungover to make it in, I wouldn’t have bothered opening up but my dad said he might call round at some point to see how it was going and I didn’t want to risk it.’

  ‘Sorry for the past week, man,’ said Frank, nodding hello to the supplier. ‘Close friend of mine passed away.’

  ‘Really? Oh dear. What happened?’

  Frank hesitated. How Tim would love this tale of Drugs and Death in Deptford. ‘Pigeon,’ he said finally, with an I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it air.

  Tim’s mouth fell open.

  ‘Straight up. Got into his water tank. Decomposed, poisoned the water. My mate got sicker and sicker then one day … carked it. Nasty.’

  ‘Really?’ Tim was so thrilled he momentarily lost his gangster accent. ‘I mean, gosh, Frank, I’m dreadfully sorry.’

  Frank almost smiled. There was actually something quite endearing about Tim when he dropped the Rude Boy act.

  ‘Thanks. Do you mind if I shoot off? Got to organise the funeral and stuff. Sorry. I’ll be in next week.’

  Tim’s face fell. ‘Yeah, might close up anyway. This place is more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘What’re you doing tomorrow night?’

  Tim looked at him hopefully. ‘Nothing, why?’

  Frank had always suspected that Tim’s evenings were not as full as he liked to make out. ‘Fancy going for a few beers?’ he asked casually. ‘There’s something I want to talk to
you about. Got a proposition for you.’

  Tim flushed with pleasure. Frank had never shown any interest in socialising with him before – except for the time he’d come to his girlfriend Fiona’s twenty-first and brought that awful person Jimmy along. He shuddered at the memory. Of course, Fifi had promised there’d been nothing untoward happening when he’d come across her and Jimmy amongst the coats on her parents’ four-poster, and he believed her. Of course he did. But still, the man had been an appalling, drunken, nuisance. A night out with Frank, however, was an entirely different matter. Frank knew how to behave himself. Perhaps they could swing by the Engineer later, introduce Frank to the chaps. Show them that Tim Rimington was the sort of guy who had friends from all walks of life. ‘Awesome,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night then?’

  ‘Great. See you then, Tim.’

  It was a nice afternoon so Frank decided to walk up St John Street to the Angel and then get the tube to Soho. It should have been a ten-minute journey but thanks to his train getting stuck in a tunnel for an hour, it was nearly six before he made it, sweltering and pissed off, out of Leicester Square station.

  He quickened his pace. He would be just in time to catch Kate if he hurried. As he walked, people began to scurry from office doorways. The sun, in one last attempt to make up for its behaviour over the past few months, shone apologetically over the shop workers and media kids who were already congregating outside the pubs and bars, smiling bravely up at the insincere sky, colluding in the sun’s half-arsed pretence at an Indian summer. His heart flipped as he imagined Kate’s face when he told her of his plans. He pictured himself proposing to her. Should he get down on one knee? Or would that just be embarrassing? He had missed her, he realised, over this past week while he had been too caught up with grief to pay her any attention.

  Turning into Brewer Street it was a few minutes past six when he finally reached the Soho Picture Library, but even so, the scrawny blonde behind the front desk informed him snootily that Kate had just left. Emerging into the street once more he looked to left and right until at last he spotted her disappearing around a corner in the distance. Squinting after her, he could just make out another figure by her side; a man, well built with very blond hair. He began walking after them, quickening his stride in an attempt to catch them up. Berwick Street market was just beginning to pack up and the air was full of the calls of tired traders.

  He crossed over into Broadwick Street. Where was she going? Charing Cross was in the other direction. He wondered who the man beside her was. Steven, he supposed; he’d heard her mention him before along with a girl named Daisy. Perhaps they were going for an after-work drink, he thought, and felt a pang of irritation as he realised that he had lost them again. He stopped, gazing from left to right, and just as he was about to give up he glimpsed a flash of her hair in the distance and saw them turn into Poland Street.

  As he followed, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on began to trouble him. He realised suddenly that he didn’t have a clear idea of Kate when she wasn’t with him – it was like he could only really see her when she was physically standing in front of him. He felt a sharp stab of jealously at the thought of some stranger – this stranger – seeing something, understanding something, he didn’t. Telling himself to get a grip, but feeling strangely like a child abandoned in a busy crowd, he crossed Oxford Street and was about to call out when they began walking again. Was there something in the way they walked together? A kind of intimacy? But, no – he was being paranoid, surely? And yet they were moving with some urgency. He stopped when they did, an instinct telling him to hang back, baffled, when they paused nearby a house with several bells on the door. He didn’t notice the silver Mercedes parked outside.

  Kate seemed to be upset, was saying something to the man as he unlocked the door. She had her back to Frank, but he sensed that there was something very wrong. Every instinct told him to go to her, to gatecrash this strange private scene and pull her away. But then, just as he was about to cross the road it happened. As he watched, the man came back down the stairs and reached out and touched Kate’s shoulder. And then he kissed her. In that moment the world around Frank seemed to fall away. He watched them kiss.

  A hundred images flashed before him as if he were drowning. His parents, Joanie, the shop, Jimmy, Eugene. He saw his own face earlier, staring back in the mirror, his stupid, stupid plans, his idiotic belief that he could make a success of his life, that he would recover from Eugene’s death, that Kate loved him. That Kate loved him. As she turned and followed the man into the house he returned, fleetingly, to Greenwich Park, the summer he was ten: saw again the girl with the red hair and the dragonfly eyes sitting beneath the tree staring back at him. Saw her smile one last time, and then she vanished.

  Walking, running across Oxford Street, steaming through Soho and Leicester Square to Charing Cross, no coherent thoughts, just pure blank rage. Shouldering his way through the crowds, his fists clenched, trying to hang onto the fury because if he let it go, the pain would floor him and he would have to face the idea of life after this.

  Almost unaware of what he was doing he jumped on a train to New Cross, his movements mechanical, conscious only of his anger. On the train he sat and hated the other passengers; a couple with their kids, a drunk man with his can of cider, an elderly lady doing the crossword: hated them, all of them, with their complacent, unknowing ordinariness, their smug smiles, their retarded happiness. When he got home he would put every scrap of Kate’s possessions into the garden and burn them, he told himself. But first he would go to the Hope and Anchor and get totally, irretrievably, numbingly, mindlessly drunk.

  He was on his fourth pint when he looked up and blearily saw Jimmy walking towards him. Vaguely, he remembered that somewhere around pint three, his mobile had rung and he’d mumbled something into it.

  ‘All right, mate?’ Jimmy was reaching for his wallet when he got to where Frank was sitting, shooting daggers at the other regulars. ‘What you having?’ When Frank didn’t respond and kept staring grimly into space, his smile faltered, and he looked at him quizzically. ‘Well? What’s it to be? Piss-weak Fosters or flat Stella? Come on mate, it ain’t Sophie’s Choice is it?’

  He sat down. ‘I’m glad you’re here, actually. I’ve got something to tell you. Mel’s pregnant, isn’t she? I only just found out. I’m telling you, Frank, I’m –’ He looked more closely at his friend’s face and realised at last that something was very wrong. He lit a cigarette. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Kate,’ was all Frank could say.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I saw her, didn’t I? Saw her with someone else.’ He drained what was left of his pint.

  Jimmy stared back at him as he tried to process what Frank was telling him. ‘Fuck off,’ he spluttered finally. ‘Kate? Kate? You sure?’

  ‘Course I’m fucking sure,’ spat Frank. ‘Saw them with my own eyes, didn’t I? Jesus …’ he put his head in his hands. ‘Fucking bitch. Christ knows how long it’s been going on.’ Raging about Kate seemed to make him feel slightly better and gathering his strength he started ranting into Jimmy’s astonished face, ‘All this time she’s been living in my house, telling me that she loves me, lying to my face, laughing at me all along. Well good luck to her. Good luck to the pair of them. Jesus I’m a mug, I should have let that wanker run her over when I had the chance,’ he said, recalling the evening when he had pulled Kate out of the way of the maniac in the silver Merc, and not meaning a word of it.

  He helped himself to one of Jimmy’s cigarettes while Jimmy tried desperately to think of what to say. ‘Look, Frank,’ he began, ‘you must be gutted. But I … Frank?’ he asked, when an expression of stunned disbelief flew across his friend’s face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Frank. ‘The geezer in the car! Jesus fuck, Jimmy – it was the same bloke. The same bloke I just saw Kate with.’ He got to his feet. ‘That was the bloke who tried to run her down. I
’d recognised the fucker’s face anywhere.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Jimmy, but Frank had jumped to his feet.

  ‘My car’s fucked. Can I borrow one of yours?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, yeah. I can drive you wherever, mate, you know that. But –’

  ‘Right. Let’s go.’

  They rushed out of the pub, Jimmy wheezing a few yards behind Frank as they ran the mile around the corner to the car lot. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked, but Frank ignored him. When they reached his tiny office, Jimmy fetched the keys to a VW Golf he’d just had repaired, and unlocking the door, nodded at Frank to get in.

  But Frank hesitated. It was one of the strange anomalies of Jimmy’s personality that he was actually a rubbish driver. Frank didn’t have time to waste and as he thought of Jimmy pootling nervously in the bus lane, fannying around at junctions and dicking about at roundabouts, he held out his hand and said, ‘Give me the keys.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Jimmy half laughed. ‘You’re not insured and it’s my car and anyway, you’re pissed.’

  ‘I’m completely sober,’ he said, and realised with surprise that it was true. ‘Give me the keys.’

  A long moment passed while Jimmy considered his friend from the other side of the car. It was like looking at a complete stranger. Finally, wordlessly, he passed Frank the keys and got in the passenger seat. Within minutes, Jimmy sincerely wished he hadn’t. With a screech of burning rubber, Frank backed out of the car lot, spun the VW around and accelerated faster and faster until within minutes they were on the Old Kent Road. ‘Jesus Fucking Christ. Slow down!’ shouted Jimmy, as Frank cut up car after car to the sound of furious horns. But Frank ignored him. ‘Oh God Oh God Oh God we’re all going to die,’ yelled Jimmy, as Frank steamed through a red light, narrowly missing a bus.