The Bird Room (9 page)

Helen goes into Barnardo's. The man she hopes might one day be her husband isn't working. Two old ladies stand behind the counter, listening to the radio and pricing books in pencil.

She goes up and down the shelves of ornaments, looking for something. She will know what it is when she sees it. It is not a teapot or a glass ballet-dancer figurine or a set of Yorkshire Dales placemats. Helen looks carefully at the objects, making sure the thing she's looking for is not hidden behind some other thing or inside it.

Corrine should be home now. Tonight is one of Corrine's two week nights off. Helen wants to go home and find Corrine sat on the sofa underneath a big orange duvet, and for Corrine to look at her when she comes in
and say, ‘Come 'ere,' and hold the duvet open for Helen to get under.

There'll be some film on – something corny like
Grease
or
The King and I
– and they'll make jokes about John Travolta's hips or Yul Brynner's head and hold hands under the duvet.

Corrine doesn't approve of what Helen does. She's never said this out loud; Helen's not even 100 per cent sure that she
knows
what Helen does. But, still, she gets the impression sometimes.

Corrine is hard and cold. Corrine is like a 70p porcelain biscuit jar.

When Helen answered the advert – Female housemate wanted, to share with quiet female, 26, smoker. Single room.
£
200ppw. Bills inclusive. – Corrine sat her down on the sofa and asked her a series of cold hard biscuit-jar questions.

What do you do?

(I'm an actress.)

And you get regular work?

(I have done so far.)

How clean and tidy are you?

Helen waited for a joke.

No joke came.

Despite all this, Corrine is Helen's best friend because – apart from Duncan and her mum – Corrine is the only person who doesn't call her Clair.

* * *

Corrine is home when Helen gets back. She's on the sofa, watching TV. No duvet, though. No corny film. Corrine has music television playing and she's reading a magazine and drinking a cup of tea.

‘How was your day?' Corrine asks.

Helen sits down on the sofa. She looks at Corrine's bare blotchy legs and then at the TV. Corrine has a voice like a nail file, one which smoothes away anything rough or unnecessary.

Helen thinks about her day.

She thinks about Will or William and that bare house. How there wasn't even a smell she could find anywhere. She thinks about the pube stuck to the toilet. She thinks about sitting back down on the sofa and being asked to tell the story. She told it well, she thought. Her voice shook a bit, but that added to the effect. By the end of it, his eyes were closed and he might have been smiling.

He'd asked if she wore coloured contacts to make her eyes blue, and Helen flinched, feeling more exposed than if she'd been lying on her back with her legs over her shoulders and a camera pointing at her crotch.

Yes, she'd said, and he'd asked her to take them out. Good, he'd said, looking at her real eyes, her other eyes, at
Clair
's eyes – dull black-brown pebbles.

‘It was alright,' she tells Corrine, and Corrine nods and sips her tea.

‘There's half a pizza left in the oven,' says Corrine.

‘Thanks,' says Helen, feeling like she'll never be able to eat anything again for the rest of her life.

In her room, Helen stands in front of the Ethan Hawke picture. He looks sideways, avoids her. To catch his eye, she would need to go right into the corner of the room, by the window, and over there she wouldn't be able to see him any more.

‘Look at me,' she says in her head. ‘Look me in the eye, Ethan.'

This is a new scene in the film, a scene you never see, awkward and pointless. It doesn't ‘move the plot along'. It lasts about five minutes – one single pointless take of nothing happening – and then Helen sits at her desk and turns on her computer. She checks her emails.

Nothing.

She checks the site where people from her old school post information about themselves.

It says Angela Lawrence is buying a house with her boyfriend. It doesn't say who Angela Lawrence's boyfriend is. Helen tries to remember Angela Lawrence. She opens the profile. ‘No photos uploaded by this member'. The screen urges Helen to get in touch. It suggests some ‘ice breakers'.

Angela Lawrence, Angela Lawrence. Helen finally remembers a girl in the front row of Maths, with lank black hair and a full-moon face, a salt-and-vinegar complexion. She logs out.

She logs in to the adult contacts site and checks her message box. There are two new replies to her profile:

and

Helen clicks ‘Reply'.

Helen books herself an appointment over the phone; four o'clock with Laura. She's decided to try a new place. Until then she's walking around town looking in windows and smoking fags and fingering mobiles in the Orange shop. It's Monday. If she goes back then she's going back tomorrow. She needs a haircut, anyway. She needs to keep herself smart. She would have got one whatever she was planning. In her hand she holds a Sainsbury's bag with a home hair-dye kit inside.

Boots have a better selection, but Helen hasn't been back into Boots since she left. If she did, Sandra Jones would be sitting at the till near the door. Sandra Jones would give her a look; she'd roll her eyes and pretend not to recognise her. She'd go
uh
with her mouth, then look away.

Superdrug have a better selection, too, but about half a year ago she went home with a man she met in a nightclub who claimed he worked there as store security. Since then she hasn't even walked down the street that Superdrug's on, because store security always seem to stand around in the doorways.

Helen needs to get out of this city, to somewhere huge and anonymous. She wishes she could live in a rainforest or the sky.

The clock in Market Square chimes the quarter hour.

At the salon, Helen gets sat down by the window and asked if she'd like tea or a coffee or anything (‘Tea please, five sugars'). Laura will be over in a sec. She looks at herself in the mirror, her washed hair hanging wet and rough.

What does she think of William or Will or whoever he is? He seemed sad. He seemed like her, like he was trapped in that house, because every time he went out there'd be someone who knew him, someone he didn't want to see.

Does she like him a bit? Can you like a pervert? That's what Helen calls them; the men with saggy trousers and stains on their jumpers who invite her in and make her do things. The Perverts. They're like awkward ostracised uncles that no one wants round for Christmas. They send you gift vouchers in nondescript cards and stay indoors with microwave meals.

When Laura comes to cut her hair – says ‘Hello' and ‘How would you like it, then?' and begins lifting up a bit of her hair – it takes Helen a moment to work it out. She feels like she's looking at herself or something. Then she realises.

It's Laura Castle.

The one from school.

The pasty Helen ate earlier becomes a snowball in her belly.

‘Well?' Laura Castle says, looking Helen in the eyes, in the mirror.

‘Like it is now,' Helen says in a strange, small voice, ‘but half as long. Just above the shoulder.'

There is no small talk. The assistant has come back with Helen's cup of tea and put it on the little side table. Helen doesn't touch it.

She's too busy thinking she might be sick.

She counts to ten. She counts to a hundred. She counts to a million. She crawls into a sagging ketchup-stained bed with Ethan Hawke and William or Will and that squat little man with the beard from her last shoot. She gets prodded and poked with cheap camcorders and high-heeled shoes.

Helen doesn't feel like Helen any more.

She's Clair.

She's pretty sure that if she takes off her black smock thing, she'll be wearing her old school uniform underneath.

A clump of wet hair lands in her lap.

She is going to puke in front of Laura Castle and have to watch herself do it in the mirror.

She excuses herself. She says something vague, making it sound like she had a rough one last night, and Laura Castle has to stop cutting her hair and help her out of the chair and direct her to the toilet in the back.

A little round mirror hangs from a hook on the toilet door. Clair looks into it. Her hair is short on one side and still long on the other. She looks like a bad joke. The sick feeling has gone now but she sits on the lid with her head in her hands. Laura Castle and Jodie Salmon and all those other snooty stuck-up bitches at King's High never had anything whispered about
them
in the changing rooms after PE. Most of the rumours weren't even true.

She closes her eyes and feels something quiet and warm touch her on the cheek. She opens her eyes. It's the sister. The sister is speaking in sign language which Clair is somehow able to understand.

The sister tells Clair not to worry. She is an
actress
. Laura Castle is just some
poxy hairdresser
and, if this
is
a competition, if that's how she wants to look at it – which of course she shouldn't, but Christ does it feel like it sometimes – then Helen, who is not Clair anymore, has won. Helen is an actress and she is going to be a great one, the best.

Helen says ‘Thank you' in sign language to the sister.

The sister signs ‘Don't worry' and then ‘Laura Castle's a cock'.

It makes Helen laugh.

She flushes the toilet. She walks back to the chair and sits down, feeling icy and impenetrable.

Laura Castle finishes the haircut with sharp steely snips, not saying anything. Then she gets out the hairdryer, and Helen breathes out and looks at herself.

It's over.

She swallows calmly, nods at the mirrored version of herself and says thanks to the hairdresser. She walks over to the till to pay. She gets out the three notes and checks to see if she has the 50p. When she finds she doesn't, she hands over an extra fiver. As she's waiting for the change her eyes drift to the floor. A tiny feeling – something about the size of a coin – swells then deflates inside her. The floor is littered with thousands and thousands of little black hairs that could each be the pube of a strange man in a weird empty house somewhere.

I am dyeing my hair black, Helen tells herself. I am dyeing my hair black because I feel like a change. I am dyeing my hair black to look like the winter.

She's sitting on a kitchen chair, wrapped in a towel, eating a cold slice of that pizza from the fridge, a plastic bag over her head.

I could go on holiday.

I could spend the money on a car and drive it into a rainforest.

I could live in the back of it and eat small flowers and drink out of ponds.

Corrine is out again at the casino.

Corrine has never asked Helen a question. Not really. When Corrine says, ‘How are you?' or ‘How was your day?' it's not a real question. It's just a sound; a kind of
protection against silence and awkwardness. A statement: ‘I am not going to be awkward around you. You make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. Fuck you.'

By the morning Helen still hasn't decided anything. When she gets on the bus it just happens to be going in the direction of his house. Plus, she needs the money. The rent is due next Monday.

She's taken out her contact lenses.

She presses her forehead against the window and feels the buzz of the wheels in her cheeks and smells the grit of old burnt plastic in her nose. She imagines herself sitting on that sofa of his in the living room and not smoking and him in silence, looking at her. He gets her to tell the Darren story again. He moves towards her and puts his cold empty hand on her cheek and whispers something beautiful and unexpected in her ear.

She does not imagine anything dangerous happening to her, as out of the bus window she sees nothing and
nothing and nothing much zip past again and again and again.

Helen is wearing black heels, black tights, a black skirt, top and jacket. She has moistened her lips with her tongue and pressed the doorbell, and the door is swinging open and he is stood there in the gloom of the hall, looking older than he did last week, a lot older than seven days. His skin is grey and his eyes are sunken and his cheeks are hollowed. But maybe it's just that he's standing in the shadows and if he takes a step out onto the path he'll look clean and young and how she's kind of made him in her head since the first afternoon.

‘Come in,' he says.

She walks past him into the hall and he closes the door behind her. She was expecting something else, she doesn't know what. Something more. Something kinder? It's very cold in here. Cold and impersonal, like coins in a till.

‘This way,' he says.

She follows him up the stairs and into the bedroom. He's walking strangely, slightly hunched over. He wears jeans and a T-shirt. The hair on the nape of his neck is curly. Helen imagines taking all the clothes off him and laying him out on a patio in blazing sunshine and letting him cook. He's very white. He'd sizzle like bacon.

Like the other rooms, the bedroom is bare. Just a bed. The bed linen looks new, still scored with sharp creases from the packet. A cheap-looking hand-held
video camera lies on top. There are a few clothes, too, folded neatly into squares and stacked in a pile.

‘Right then,' she says, smiling awkwardly and looking at him, not knowing what else to say.

‘Put these on,' he says, handing her the pile of clothes. ‘Do it in the bathroom.'

Helen takes the pile of clothes. She goes into the bathroom. She locks the door, feeling silly but doing it anyway. She takes off her own clothes, folds them and puts them on top of the toilet.

The clothes he's given her are not things Helen would normally wear; a pair of blue jeans, a black vest top, a cardigan. There's even a pair of little black knickers and a pair of grey socks and a bra. Helen feels odd at first, putting them on, but the clothes themselves don't feel weird. They're the same size, exactly. They feel like her clothes, maybe, but from the future.

She wishes there was a mirror in here. She'd like one final look at herself before she goes back into the bedroom. She still isn't nervous. She imagines what she must look like; the black hair, Clair's eyes, the clothes of someone else.

Helen is an actress. She acts slight fear, making her heart beat a bit faster, making her breathing shallow. She unlocks the door and goes back into the bedroom.

William or Will is sitting on the bed. He looks up. Something changes in his face, like a drop of lemon juice has been dropped on it.

‘Okay,' he says. ‘Good.'

‘What do you want me to do?' she says.

He gets up off the bed, takes off his T-shirt, unbuckles his belt and steps out of his jeans. His penis springs out of his trousers. It looks very hard and red. She thinks she can hear a buzzing sound. Maybe it's coming from the camera he's holding now and pointing at her. She hears the beep. She sees the red light come on.

‘Take off your clothes,' he says.

He walks around her, behind her, so she can see him in the dresser mirror. He films her from behind as she begins to unbutton the cardigan, unclip the bra, shuffle out of the jeans.

In the mirror, she stares into the gaping glass eye of the lens.

Inside she's shivering.

She steps out of the knickers, then feels his cold hand on her shoulder. He turns her to face him.

Helen and Clair feel very beautiful.