The Bird Room (2 page)

Alice is at work. Alice thinks I'm at work. I'm not at work. I'm trying to guess the password to her email account. I've tried her birthday (160581), her middle name (victoria), her favourite colour (blue), her favourite film (break-fastattiffanys), her favourite band (thecure).

And so far, no luck.

I don't know what it is I'm supposed to have done. I don't know what's gone wrong but she doesn't even look me in the eyes any more. She's become as quiet and cold as something left on a windowsill. She's started wearing those long black jumpers that cover her neck and hang down past her knuckles. She's started turning her face away when I try to kiss her and speaking in clichés. She says things like, ‘I'm just tired tonight' and ‘I have a headache' and ‘Don't worry, it's not you, it's me.'

But it is me, Alice, it must be. And I don't know what I've done.

If only she wrote a diary.

I imagine short sad emails to friends in other cities:

and

and

The only time she's got excited recently was that afternoon she met Will.

Will.

What was it that excited her; the thing that seems to excite every girl he meets? It can't be his looks. His
nose is long and crooked. His teeth are yellow from tea and nicotine. His hair is unwashed and scraggy and spotted with dandruff. It can't be his mind, either. Will's observations are surface-level, obvious things, un-thought-through. I don't think Will really cares what he's saying, as long as he's saying something.

So it must be some other thing, maybe the whatever-it-is that connects these ridiculous predictable elements of him together.

Also, Will doesn't stay inside all day with the curtains drawn, trying to hack into his girlfriend's email account. Will doesn't spend his mornings hidden under the duvet with his phone switched off.

I imagine them together.

Will and Alice.

They lick each other's faces like dogs. They tear off each other's clothes, not thinking, not worrying, not analysing their actions or considering the consequences.

I don't know what happened; when it was I started hating Will. I can remember us going to gigs, watching videos in the back room of his mum's house, getting into pubs underage. I can remember a night when we sat on a bench at the top of the town and looked down at it, and the town looked very small and pathetic, and we both decided we needed to get out of it and move to the city.

Back then we were such good friends.

‘Once I bit the head off my sister's budgie for a dare.'

We're at the preview night for Will's exhibition and Will is telling his favourite anecdote; the one he tells to charm strangers. It's exactly the same each time he tells it. It has grown slick and cold as a pebble on a riverbed.

This is the story he told me, too, the first time we met. Stood in the school art room, I remember finding it funny and a bit shocking. I remember thinking,
Fucking
hell
.

Then I heard the anecdote a hundred more times.

Fucking hell, I think, as he starts in on it again.

‘I remember reaching in and picking him up – Bert, that's what Maddie called him, Bert. I remember picking Bert out of the cage and he was so still in my hand, like a toy. And my mates were all watching, thinking,
He's not gonna go through with this, surely?
The funny thing is, I wasn't gonna go through with it. I was just going to put him in my mouth for a second, you know, to freak them out a bit.'

Alice is listening intently. She's using Will's anecdote as an opportunity to stare openly at his face.

She's finding his face attractive and mysterious.

She is watching his face like an advert for expensive food; a swarthy chocolate gateau with cream and black cherries.

(Will once told me his secret for attracting women: ‘Just ignore them.')

‘And then, I don't know what happened. I guess I thought,
fuck it
, and bit him in two.'

He swings his wine glass for effect, bringing it up near his mouth then pulling it away.

‘
Snap!
Just like that.'

Some Merlot sloshes over the lip of the glass, becoming a drop of budgie's blood and spotting an art critic's shirt. The art critic dabs at the stain with his handkerchief but doesn't say anything.

‘Of course, it tasted bloody awful. I mean, I spat the head out straight away, but there was still all this blood and feathers and shit in my mouth. But that wasn't even the worst part. You wanna know what the worst part was? The worst part was that I'm pretty sure I heard the little bastard scream inside my mouth, just before I did it. You wouldn't think birds screamed,
would you? Well, this one did. I swear it on my mum's life.'

A journalist near the back of the group raises her pen.

Will purposefully ignores her for a while.

He licks an imaginary feather from his lips.

Then he looks her way and nods.

‘Do you think perhaps this incident has had something of an impact on your work?' she says, gesturing with her pen at Will's exhibition,
Fucking Birds
.

Crooked rows of canvases line the gallery walls. Wrens, robins, chaffinches, budgies (lots of budgies). Each painting has an accompanying pair of headphones that plays you a looped audio track from a hardcore porno.

Will squints at her earnestly.

He stops licking his lips.

His mouth becomes a slit.

Lines appear on his forehead.

Will is thinking. You can almost hear it.

The group wait for him to speak. A whole minute passes. People start shuffling around uncomfortably. They start examining their fingernails. Even Alice looks confused. She's still staring at him, but her eyes have narrowed and switched off, which they do sometimes; they become cold and dull.

‘Um,' says Will, eventually. ‘How do you
mean
exactly?'

A pause. Good lord.

The little group don't know how to take this.

He's being ironic, right?

Or maybe he's being post-ironic.

Or maybe he's just being dumb.

Post-dumb.

Then, very carefully, somebody begins to laugh. Someone else joins in. And soon they're all smiling and laughing and clapping Will on the back. Good one, they're saying politely. Good one.

Will's face flickers from confusion to pretending-he-gets-it then back again.

I edge my way in through the crowd, reach out my hand and touch Alice on the shoulder. She turns to face me with those blank cold eyes.

‘I'm going to have another look round,' I tell her.

‘Alright,' she says, like I've just told her some irrelevant fact off the back of a matchbox.

So I go over to the free drinks by myself.

There are a lot of people here. It's a small gallery space, somewhere in London, and we've booked into a hotel for the night. We'll go back to our room later this evening in a taxi, not speaking, not touching each other, and hoping the hotel bed will be big enough and cold enough to be almost like sleeping by ourselves.

I'm not going to ask what's wrong.

She's not going to tell me.

This was her idea. When the cryptic little invitation
card fell onto the doormat – just the date, the address and a stencil of a yellow bird – it was Alice who suggested attending. It might be
fun
, she said. And her eyes sparkled. She smiled at me. Alright, I said, thinking, I should do more things like this if it will make you happy.

(But as far as I can tell, neither of us is happy.)

I look around.

I'm not having fun.

I have nothing to say to these people.

I notice a tall thin woman at the opposite end of the gallery. She is standing next to a large painting of a lurid orange-breasted robin, but facing away from it, her wine glass lost in the spindly white claw of her fingers. She's wearing a shiny red dress that hangs off her body as if it's very bored. Her long dark hair is piled up on top of her head. She's wearing a big black pair of sunglasses.

I can't stop looking at her.

Alice is probably still at the front of the group, listening.

Will's probably started in on some new anecdote by now: ‘When I was a kid, I accidentally burned my nan's house down' or ‘One time at uni I fucked this epileptic.'

A man walks towards the woman and touches her on the shoulder. He's tired-looking and grey-haired. He's dressed like a secondary school teacher. He whispers something in her ear and she turns to him and smiles. He takes her elbow gently in his hand. He leads her across the gallery and positions her in front of a sparrow. It's only when she puts out her hand and leaves it there –
letting him take the headphones off the wall for her and put them in her palm, her fingers anticipating them, twitching and fumbling slightly – that I realise; she's blind.

He whispers something else in her ear, touches her shoulder and goes off into the crowd.

She's put on the headphones.

She's only a few metres away from me.

I walk up behind her. The dress is cut low at the back, so you can see pockmarks, freckles and the fine down at the nape of her neck. Closer still is her scent; not perfume but something medicinal, like a long clean hospital corridor.

From where I'm standing, I can hear the whisper of porno, leaking from her headphones.

I close my eyes and breathe her in.

Later, Will takes us to Tequila Mockingbird (his favourite Mexican-themed bar).

He will not let me buy any of the drinks.

He buys round after round of beers and shooters, bringing out fistfuls of notes and coins from his pocket and dropping them onto the bar. Then he stands back, making the bartender reach over and sort through for the correct amount.

Will does not tip, either. He refuses. ‘I will not tip,' he shouts in my ear and then doesn't. He just scrapes the remaining wet notes and coins off the bar and shoves the mess back into his pocket.

We're sat at a corner booth, crammed in, our knees touching under the table; just Will, Alice and me. I'm on my fourth Corona label. Alice is smiling at him. Her eyes are bright and sparkling. Will is drunkenly saying something about art (with a capital A), some half-formed thing that calls for lots of dramatic hand gestures and the slamming of his bottle on the table.

‘There should be no division,' he's saying, ‘between art and life. There should be no division between “high art” and “low art”. In fact, there should be no division between anything and anything.'

He looks at Alice when he says this.

‘All things should just be basically fucking each other at all times.'

His teeth are grey. His lips are black from all the free wine at the preview. Now his chin too is slicked wet and glittering from the beer and tequila.

‘Cause that's all humankind's after, right? Hardcore fucking. Cosmic tits and ass.'

I try to speak. ‘So when …'

But Will isn't listening to anyone except himself.

‘One day,' he's saying, ‘I swear I'll find a way to fuck my own cock, like some kind of Möbius strip.'

I try again. ‘So when are you moving to London, Will?'

This time he hears me.

So does Alice.

I feel her flinch slightly and she stops smiling.

‘Dunno,' he says. ‘London's bullshit.' Then, after a pause, ‘I want to live somewhere real – Norwich or fucking Preston or something. London's everything
wrong
with contemporary art.'

His eyes narrow and he turns to Alice.

‘By the way,' he says, ‘I've forgotten your name.'

She smiles. She actually smiles when he says this.

‘It's Alice,' she says. ‘Like the looking-glass.'

‘And what do you do, Alice?'

‘I'm in eyes.' She flutters her eyelashes. ‘I work in an optician's. It's rubbish. I should quit.'

He takes her hand off the table, lifts it to his mouth and licks a drop of tequila from her fingertip.

‘Well, Alice-who-works-in-eyes, you, me and William here should go out for dinner sometime. What d'you reckon?'

She doesn't even think it over.

‘Yeah,' she says, nodding vigorously. ‘That'd be nice. We really don't get out enough. In fact, we hardly do anything.'

I say nothing. It's settled.

There's hardly any money left. Next week the rent's due, the week after that the council tax. I've told Alice there's been some sort of mistake with my job and the people who handle the payroll are in the process of sorting it out. In the meantime, she pays for everything. She puts a bag of groceries on the kitchen table. She doesn't look me in the eyes. I want to kiss her, but if I kiss her now, she might burst into tears.

I will take out a loan.

I will extend my overdraft.

I will start selling my possessions on eBay.

Will calls the land line. Alice answers. She turns into someone else. She stands in the hall, twisting a strand of hair around her finger, biting her lip and jiggling at the knees. She laughs three times. ‘That would be
lovely,' she says, putting a finger to her mouth and biting at a hangnail.

‘We're going out for dinner this Friday,' she tells me afterwards, ‘with Will. I'll have to get something nice to wear.'

She goes into the bathroom and starts running the bath. She takes off her work clothes and lets them drop to the floor. She looks at her body in the mirror, before it steams up, and she is chalk-white, like a primed empty canvas. She waits for something wonderful to happen to her. In her head, Will appears behind her. He puts his hands on her waist, slides them up over her tits and magically her nipples harden.

I'm fucked.

I want to disappear.

I want to not be a part of things any more.