ANGELA
Page 5
“Which one?” she asked and waited for an answer that never came. She would have to choose for herself. She got to her feet, pushing herself up on fat white knees clad in earth and went over to the birds she tried to love in the daylight, all huddled together in the corner of the room amongst piles of the most sapphic Woman’s Own from the nineteen eighties. With hungry wide eyes and a clawed white hand she plucked a brown sparrow from the flock.
“Is this what you want?!” she shouted at the rook.
He didn’t blink.
“Is this…” she tailed off, shaking. She looked in his little sparrow eyes.
There was a universe in there.
She chewed the head off the little brown bird, who offered only the smallest bit of resistance as her teeth separated his tiny vertebrae. The air became a frenzy of beak and bird. Wings flapped and claws clawed and blood dribbled gently down Angela’s hand. She knelt again before her dark black master and painted red circles and lines on her low belly with the stump of its neck, thrashing her head and thrusting her hips, her blood pumping her dirty urges, chanting words from another place into a billow of down and dust.
Feathers flew and sparrows shrieked and Angela lay back on the clay white floor and put her fingers inside her wrinkled wetness. She opened herself and picked a floating plume out of the air then stroked it over her tender swelling beneath the cloud of chaos storming above her, the black rook calm in its eye.
“Tell me. Tell me you want me. Say it.”
“I want you,” He said.
“No, say it in her voice.”
“I want you,” Veronica said through a black bird’s beak.
Angela’s legs bucked, rigid and restless, and her body wracked until it could wrack no more. Then she seized, then fell still, fevered, clammy, and spent.
A thick energy filled the room, coming out of her, filling the room that smelled of sulphur and the sea. What had she done? What had she conjured? What had she asked of Him? Her blood pooled cold and she held herself in panic and regret.
The birds fell silent and lined up all in a row. Their feathers still hung in the air but the room was pregnant with expectation. Then it began to shake, the air tight with a terror from beyond this place, and it brought with it a sound, a distant friction, like knives being sharpened in a chasm. Louder and louder it got, until the sound became like a band around her head, getting tighter and tighter until she squealed like a pig on a spit. Her scream fought the air and forced the feathers out of it, saltpetre to their bullets of lead.
BAM
BAM
BAM
They hit the plastic covered boards hard and heavy with a furious pelt and she covered her face, protecting herself from the buckshot, while sixty-six little beaked heads looked away from her where she lay naked and addled and in the grime of her crimes. The last feather hit the ground with a splintering crack and at once the birds stiffened as if stricken with the same rigors that had seized her only moments before. Their heads turned toward her, cracking and clicking like a terrible ratchet until their beady little eyes were all trained on her, all one hundred and thirty two. Then their beaks began to open in perfect synchronicity, but they opened too wide, far too wide, so wide she could hear fine sinews separating, coming away from keratin and cartilage, mandible tearing from mandible until they were all screaming the same silent scream. Then a whistling began again, emanating from their awful yawns, like the wind between the eaves, and with it came a voice from The Other Place.
It said, “I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT I WANT.”
And with one loud crack every one of their precious bird necks snapped into a right angle, the wrong angle, and they fell to the floor for the last time, broken and lifeless.
She crawled through their dead bodies, out of the room, pathetic and sobbing, cursed and cursing, and pulled the screen door closed. At 4:30am she fell asleep on the worn hallway floor, the carpet wet with her own regret. She woke when she heard the alarm rising from the adjacent bedroom and pushed herself up into a seated position. She looked down at her badly daubed body art now dry and brown and then back at the second bedroom. The rook was stood on the floor at the other side of the screen door.
He had watched her sleep.
THERE IS A MAN AT THE DOOR
KNOCK KNOCK.
There is a man at the door. She can see him from where she still lays naked on the floor between the first and second bedrooms. She can see his shape through the textured glass, wide and tall and motionless.
“Go downstairs,” says the rook in her mind, so she does, and she holds her hands over her breasts and the dark triangle beneath her painted belly.
“Open the door,” the black bird says, and through the glass the man at the door seems to grow wider and taller. She sees his fists swinging by his wide thighs and her head begins to shake.
“No. No I won’t,” she says.
“But I brought him here for you,” He replies.
“Love him.”
“This is what I want.”
“NO, no I can’t. Please don’t make me,” she says into her hands. She can feel the intentions of the man at the door, boring through the glass, penetrating her flesh, trained on the circle she painted in blood on her belly.
“Take him into you.”
“Take his seed.”
“This is what I want.”
“NO! Not that!” she screams. “Anything but that!”
He shrieks a response she can’t decipher and it peels the paper from the walls and the man knocks again,
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
The swirling carpet seems to undulate beneath her feet and she runs from the door to the kitchen, throwing herself back against the wall, sobbing and fearful and the cups rattle on their hooks. Then there it is again, the knocking that seems to come from the walls now, from the earth, insistent and furious.
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
And with each quaking knock her world burns and the white light dims until there is none left and the world rots black on red. The mirror on the wall rattles and through it she can see the man at the door, still cutting the same square silhouette but now from a blood red sky.
“LOVE HIM”
The words tune through her bones, vibrating her till her lips tingle and her fingernails feel as though they might come loose from their pale pink beds.
She thrashes through her kitchen and opens the door of the cupboard beneath the sink with singing fingers, dragging out bottles and brushes and before forcing herself into it, bending herself into its tiny space like a dog broken into a suitcase. She pulls the door closed and holds it shut with nails that bend back then break off.
He sucks the light from her eyes, punishing her for her insolence. Blood pours into her vision, somehow she can see it growing like red trees through her mind. They needle into her brain and she falls into the shrieking black pit He opens in her soul. Terror consumes her, pure, endless. She opens her mouth to scream but it is not her scream that comes from her constricted throat but his caustic call. It clamps open her jaw and tears through her throat. She covers her mouth revolted at the sound that echoes out of her but her hands scratch her face. She feels one with the other and they clash together in a way that sickens her. They are not her hands at all. They are claws, hard and sharp. Her stomach bubbles with disgust and she gags and coughs but her windpipe is filled with something. Feathers. They fill her throat and pack her sinuses and line her mouth. Spitting and thrusting she convulses as her body tries to expel Him, her whole being thundering with revulsion. She hits out at the walls of the cupboard, fighting the present moment with everything she has, as though she can tear her way out of His grip with these new hands and her hate and her fear. But the terrible shaking only builds and builds and she has no choice but to scream His scream and hold on with those angry claws, and she knows that she must open herself up to Him, let the man and the bird into her sacred places, let them fi
ll her up with that black swarm.
“TAKE ME THEN! TAKE ME!” she says, but she says it in her mind because her mouth is already full of Him.
In the darkness of the cupboard beneath the sink she sees nothing but the air seems to swell at her surrender and the walls become turgid flesh, pulsing and hot. Her knees hit the walls of fevered flesh as her legs are forced apart and she feels the air move fast and fluid as a dry bracken wind blows between them and into her, pumping, belching, filling her up, testing her extremities, testing her seams until she is filled with a plasticine width and her eyes bulge forth from her face, threatening to burst, threatening to leave her blind and hysterical with only her aching stinging sockets filled with their relative void as proof they were ever there at all. She wants to push them back into her head but with these claws they will surely pop like balloons and the walls sweat salty and bristle with wire and swell until there is no room left between her and the cupboard at all, and then, in one black minute, it stops as though it had never begun. The door swings open revealing her own kitchen floor. She falls out onto it, onto all fours, and into the white light that has spilled back into the room. She heaves out the torture; thick and bitter onto her kitchen floor and her hands stroke the normality of the lino through it, leaving trails in her own black bile. The rook upstairs goes RATATATAT, and she looks through the dirty mirror on the kitchen wall and gasps. Not at the man who had darkened her doorway, who has since vanished from the scene, nor at the nail-less tips of her bloody fingers, nor at the whites of her eyes now a deep blood red, but at her belly, distended and swollen, and at the claw marks and rivers of blood that streak her inner thighs.
THE READ LETTER
Dear Veronica,
I know I’m not supposed to contact you at the moment, or anyone from work for that matter, and I’ve tried, really I have, but things aren’t good here. My birds, they’re all gone. All gone. All except for Him, and He’s very angry. I think He’s done something to me, I don’t know… I don’t know but I’m scared. I’m scared and I need a friend Veronica. Please be my friend Veronica. Please.
Please.
There are things I need to say to you and they can’t wait.
I know, you see? I know what you’ve been doing. Down there in HR.
And if you don’t come I’ll tell.
I’ll tell everyone.
11:30 pm.
Come to the back door.
Don’t bring the car.
All my love.
I miss you.
Angela
x
A BURNING BIRD
She was eleven when she killed them. Three years to the day after I left her alone in that pile of bricks and secrets. They kept her in the attic, between boards and felt. Between bags and boxes. A girl in storage. Early mornings, late nights. Cleaning and cooking around car parts and canisters. Scrubbing away her own evidence. That was her life. She was nothing to nobody, even then, but she had her birds. She always had her birds. They came to her through a gap in the eaves, drawn in by the tune she whistled into the wind. A tune I taught her. A tune my mother taught me…
…alouette allo, allouette. Allouette…
The hole in the wall brought her the stinging winter but it also brought her company, and the birds took refuge from the storm outside, perched around her in their uneasy alliance. Her uncles worked in the yard behind the house, cutting cars in half, grinding and welding in a spray of sparks and oil. They never left that house and when she was there, she was theirs.
After school it was always the same. They tied her to the kitchen table and stripped her and struck her and shattered her teeth for the things she hadn’t done, and for things she had. I felt every blow. Every touch. Down here. Down there. And behind the blows, behind the crack of the whip, she heard angry wings beat the air and on it she smelled petrol and revenge.
“You ugly little bitch. You ugly little burd gurl”. Slack and northern. Words kept by time.
Months went by and her child’s mind made a plan. She would do it on a Saturday morning. They drank the most on Friday nights and wouldn’t wake until noon, all angry and numb. She would go into town early, like she did every Saturday and get them their bacon and tobacco but she would take a bird. Her most loyal, the one that perched on her finger, and who always came home.
It was the night before. She had cleaned the kitchen before bed, arranging cups and saucers and exhausts and ratchets on the worktops, and lining their petrol canisters up along the wall in the way they told her she ought to in this house of cog and oil. They had fallen asleep in their armchairs like they always did, empty beer cans strewn across the threadbare carpet, oily men with dirty hearts. They looked so small in their unconsciousness. Vulnerable, with chins as weak as their desires, and for a moment she felt pity; stood in the room between them, dim light from the fading fire licking her side. Then she remembered her broken jaw and her eyes raged red in the dark, pure with an ancient hatred. A shadow grew out of her and formed on the ceiling above, like a bird drawn badly in soot, and she made a promise to them, and to the night. She dragged her finger across the sharpness of her shattered tooth, letting her bad blood bubble up, and painted a crossed out circle with it on both of their brows, marking them, then leaving them to their final slumber. In the attic her bleeding finger stroked his little sparrow head, following the gentle curve, bones so light she could hardly feel them. She cried for the last time the tears of the innocent, and then fell out of the world.
Angela slept a blank sleep until the morning came and peeled it off her. It was time. Time to change everything. She dressed and took her bag and the meagre money they left her to do their shopping with and went downstairs, but not before she took her best bird friend from the perch at the foot of her bed and dropped him in it. He looked confused, but then, he was just a bird. Tip toeing through the kitchen she was careful not to wake her snoring uncles, her torn red leather shoes padding quietly on the cold flagged floor. She opened a window and let it swing on its hinges then decanted a little petrol into a jar before lowering the canister onto its side, where it quietly vomited its contents. The thin liquid darkened the grey flags and she pulled the door behind her, sealing them in, and sealing their fates.
The day hit her face. It was sunny but cold and she walked through the back streets to the one behind the butchers and knelt there in the shade. She took the bird out into the thin blue light. He had changed during his time in the bag, as if he had learned something in the dark. He didn’t resist when she dipped him in the petrol, and he didn’t flinch when she struck the match, and when she lit him on fire he seemed to know that he had one last job to do and flew up into the air, burning wings leaving a cough of filthy black smoke in the clear blue sky as he made his way home.
Little Angela ditched the empty jar in the undergrowth and was ordering Sunday’s chicken from a man in white when the house around the corner exploded.
ONE HAMMER
She is in the corner of her life. The light from the candles she lit touches the edges of the things she’ll miss when she’s gone. She sees a beach, tastes the salt.
“Knock knock knock”
It’s 11:25pm. She’s early, of course.
Through the texture of the opaque glass in the uPVC back door she recognises Veronica’s shape, though she’s torn at the edges. Angela pats down her short, dirty, nightdress and opens the door to let her in, and to put her back together. There she is, whole again. My goodness, how’s she missed her.
“Come in”
“Do you want a cup of tea?
“No, I don’t. I want to get this over with and I want to go home to bed”, Veronica said.
Angela was surprised at the tone in her voice. Didn’t she realise what was at stake?
“And let’s put the bloody lights on shall we?”
“No!” Angela said, leaving her seat and getting between the woman and the switch.
“No. I don’t want the neighbours to know I’m up.”
“No, I prefer to stand.” Veronica held her hand to her crooked hip, “I’m not staying Angela.”
“Now what have you got to say?”
What did she have to say? For all her planning she had thought very little about how this might actually play out, and she hadn’t expected her to be so touchy. She expected her to be at least a little happy to see her, ask how she’d been doing perhaps, but that definitely wasn’t the case and it was clear that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in Angela, her life, or her loneliness.