The Bird Room (6 page)

This is the first time I've noticed the scar. It starts at the curve of her shoulder and curls down around her arm. It is a darker nastier blue than the rest of her 3.15 a.m. skin. It's about six inches long.

She's asleep.

I lean over her, close enough for my breath to shuffle the wispy little hairs on her skin. There are more scars, too; lighter ones that criss-cross down her arm. But this one is the biggest.

I imagine a razor blade, a blot of blood on toilet paper and a locked bathroom door. I imagine other invisible scars that run underneath her skin. They shoot and crackle like a scar firework display.

She moves sometimes when she sleeps. She hunches and starts, as if someone in her dream is poking her with
a stick or catching her in a net. She makes noises, she moans, but so far she hasn't woken up. Once she said something that sounded like ‘Darren'. This is the fourth time she's slept in my bed. I really don't think she's going home now and I still don't know where her home is. She has a toothbrush here, a big bag of clothes and today a couple more boxes.

I lick the scar. It tastes of salt and shower gel.

There is a glass girl in my bed. If I ask too many questions she will shatter. So I'll wait for her to answer her own questions and in the meantime play join-the-freckles in the dark. Here are some of the freckles I have joined by myself, by not going to sleep:

We went to the pub earlier – The Princess and Noose, my local – after she finished work. She asked what was wrong.

‘Nothing,' I said.

‘You know, you can ask me anything you want,' she said.

(I don't believe her.)

‘Ask me a question,' she said.

So I asked, ‘Would you like another drink?'

She smiled and said, ‘Vodka and Coke.'

Stood elbow-to-elbow with all the shifty old men at the bar, I had to stop myself from turning round and checking she was still at the table.

Stop it, I told myself. Your luck has turned. Your luck has turned around on itself like an owl's head. She is not going to run away from you, at least not this evening.

Barry, one of the regulars, kept nudging me on the arm and asking who she was.

‘She's my girlfriend,' I told him.

‘About time, lad,' he said. ‘We all had you pegged as a poof.'

Across the table, she kept on smiling at me.

(She looked very sad when she did it.)

Each time I went for a piss, I expected to get back to that table and find she'd gone. There wouldn't even be her drink there any more, and it would turn out to be some elaborate practical joke which everyone in the Noose is in on.

‘Fuck's sake. What's wrong?' she says, suddenly, slamming her glass on the table for effect. Her lips curl at the edges. ‘Something's up. Tell me.'

But I don't quite know how. I'm sitting on my hands, not even permitting myself a sip of my drink. If I do or say the wrong thing she will become a terrible accident. There are hard wooden floors in this pub. She'll shatter like a tower of toppled pint glasses, and everyone will cheer and look over, and even the fruit machines will stop rattling and blinking for a second.

‘Come on,' she says, trying to get my hand out from under my arse by tugging at my jumper. ‘Don't be such a coward.'

And before I can stop myself, I've said it. I've told her that I'm scared to touch her in case I do it wrong and she doesn't like it, and I've told her that I'm scared she will all of a sudden tell me to fuck off. I've told her how I feel like I need written permission before I can become comfortable enough with a person to know they won't mind me.

Her smile doesn't go away.

Her eyes don't stop looking sad when she smiles.

She doesn't say anything either, but she reaches for her bag and searches around in it and takes out a till receipt. She asks if I have a pen, which I don't. So she gets up and goes to the bar and comes back with a biro. She turns the till receipt over and writes something on the blank side. She chews her lip a bit as she writes.
She hands the receipt to me. In curly black biro it reads:

After I read the note I stop sitting on my hands and take a big swig of my pint.

‘You can't have always been like that,' she says, squeezing my fingers.

‘I wasn't,' I lie.

‘So what happened?'

I can't tell her the truth – that I've never really had a girlfriend before; that every person I've got involved with, I've scared away through jealousy and paranoia and the fear that I'll screw things up. I'm determined to make this work. I will reconstruct myself as a steady, stable and rational human being. I will be whatever she wants me to be. Alice, I'm yours if you want me.

‘I don't know,' I say.

‘Sometimes, if you want to do something, you should just do it,' she says, letting the lights above our table settle and glint in her eyes.

She sighs. She shuffles slightly. The receipt is in my wallet and my wallet is in the back pocket of my jeans and my jeans are hanging over the chair next to the bed. I move my hand from her hip and put it between her legs from behind. I push my middle finger slowly inside her.

She doesn't wake up.

She doesn't mind.

In fact, she probably likes it quite a lot.

We are laughing at the neighbours.

‘Does this happen every night?' Alice says.

‘Most nights,' I say. ‘You'll get used to it.'

The woman neighbour is making a squealing sound.

The man neighbour is making a grunting sound.

‘Help me,' the woman neighbour is saying. ‘Help me. Help me.'

‘How can I help you?' the man neighbour is saying.

Then more squealing, more grunting.

‘It sounds like they're arguing and having sex at the same time,' I say. ‘A sex argument.'

This makes Alice laugh. She curls up against me, puts her mouth on my chest and bites softly. I tickle her under the arms and she squeals. She blows a raspberry on my stomach.

‘We should have a sex argument sometime,' she says.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘Help me.'

‘How can I help you?' she says.

I make a squealing sound and she puts her hand over my mouth.

‘Shh,' she says, ‘they'll hear you.'

Then she makes a loud grunting sound.

‘When I was little,' she says, ‘when my parents were still in the country, there was this couple next door who argued all the time.'

She's never spoken about her parents before. Or her childhood.

‘But that was horrible. It sounded like the man was killing the woman every night. Like he was bouncing her head off the walls. I'd lie in bed and wait for the sound of police cars.'

‘Where are your parents now?' I say.

As soon as I've said it, it feels like the wrong thing to say. Something changes in her. Something freezes. Something snaps off. She shuffles in the bed, so we aren't touching as much any more. She turns to face the wall. I want to tell her that she doesn't have to answer if she doesn't want to. That she doesn't have to tell me anything at all.

‘Not in England,' she says, and I leave it at that.

She was on the phone again. She takes her mobile into the bathroom and locks the door. She talks to somebody in a low whisper.

After she finishes work she comes back with boxes. Slowly the house is filling with her things. In the daytime I go through it all; books, clothes, hair products, CDs. No letters, diaries or photos.

It's not much to go on. I now know she likes Joy Division, Tom Waits and Erasure. I know she reads Albert Camus, Jane Austen and Anaïs Nin. I know she shops at Topshop, H&M and Dorothy Perkins.

I know nothing about her.

I sit there in my room – ‘our room' – with her boxes around me, trying to find some sort of connection or piece of her in all this stuff. There are perfumes and three
new kinds of soap in the bathroom. (What do her parents do?) There's a purple scrubbing-thing hanging from the shower. (Am I imagining it or does she somehow manage to steer any conversation away from ‘her past'?) Her underwear comes mostly from Marks & Spencer. (Why did she suddenly start crying, that time last night when we were in bed?) She has about one hundred pairs of tights.

It's coming from her ex's place. It must be.

Darren.

He's bigger than me. He has short dark hair and wears a rugby shirt with his name written on the back. DARREN. The number 69. He is bullish and surly, his face perpetually in shadow.

(He is the man from the club that first night.)

Alice is still in love with him. She goes round to his house after work. Darren lives in a two-bed terrace, a kid's bike rusting in the grass out front. She rings the bell. The door opens. She goes inside.

‘What do you want, then?' he says in the hall, his bottom lip flopping heavily as he speaks.

Darren reads
FHM
, cover to cover.

‘I've come for the rest of my stuff,' she says, not making eye contact. She's afraid to. Instead she looks down at her shoes and then at his. Black boots next to chunky bright-white trainers.

Darren smells of aftershave. His skin is red and smooth and babyish. He backs against the wall, letting her pass.

Darren touches her arm.

Her skin remembers him.

Her skin sends something like a text message to her brain, which reads:

Alice is in the bedroom now, putting things in a shoebox. Little things, all that's left; a bottle of perfume and a pen.

(Maybe she left them here on purpose.)

Darren stands in the doorway, watching.

His thoughts sound like gangsta rap, blunt and violent. His thoughts say things like
bitch
and
ass
in his head. They say
fuck that bitch's ass one last time
. There is an obvious beat behind his thoughts. It is Darren's heart.

‘So this is really it, huh?' he says to her back.

Darren speaks like television; something American, with advert breaks and sponsorship.

Alice is leaning over the small mirrored dresser, catching his eye in the glass. She watches him walk around the bed, come up behind her and put his hands on her. He pushes her skirt up around her hips.

She doesn't stop him.

She just closes her eyes and breathes him in.

I am outside Darren's house, hiding behind a car. I've been here too long. It's getting cold. I can see nothing
through the windows of Darren's house; they are icy black and unyielding.

I followed her out of work and onto the tram.

(When they come out, when they stand on the doorstep and have their tearful ‘final goodbye' scene, I'll stand up and make my presence known. I'll go over to them, say something cutting and then somehow knock Darren's fucking teeth out.)

We rode the tram out of the city and into the winding redbrick residential area. Kids on bikes. Cornershops. King Size cigarettes. Bent old women. Shopping trolleys. I sat one carriage down, watching her through the little tram window.

(Once I've somehow knocked Darren's fucking teeth out, Alice will smile. She'll fall in love with me. Miraculously it will stop raining and someone in the distance will cheer. This will become the story we tell our grandchildren at Christmas, everyone laughing when they hear it and clinking their sherry glasses and clapping me on the back. ‘Oh you!' they'll say encouragingly, finding me roguish but endearing.)

Then the door opens.

The door to Darren's house opens.

Alice steps onto the path.

A woman comes out, not Darren but a woman in a long ill-fitting jumper. The jumper has a bad likeness of Michael Bolton knitted into it. The woman has copper-red hair. It's Alice's mum, it has to be. They have the same black
eyes, the same pale skin, the same slight crookedness to them. Their necks bend like flowers stood in bottles of vodka.

This is Alice's parents' house and Alice's mum is handing her a shoebox.

Why did she lie?

Her mum is standing in the doorway in a Michael Bolton jumper.

Her parents are not abroad.

I want to jump and wave and scream. I want her to know I've followed her here, that I don't trust her and I still think there's a bloke called Darren somewhere who she used to live with and who she's screwing on the side.

But instead I just stay crouched behind the car.

I feel awful enough to buy some cheap supermarket flowers on the way back home.

In time she'll tell me everything; about her mum, her ex-boyfriends, her life before me. She will open up slowly, like time-lapse photography. She will begin to feel safe and comfortable and start telling the truth. She will start to need me.

But for this to happen, I must give her space.

I must be quiet and calm; not jealous or possessive or judging.

Most of all, I mustn't scare her away.

(I know it's not been long but I don't know what I'd do if she left.)