The Bird Room (3 page)

An Italian restaurant. This is Will's choice. ‘The best lasagna in the city', apparently. We're still on the garlic bread. In the corner of the room a widescreen TV plays international football on mute.

Will gets up to go for a piss.

‘What is it?' Alice asks me once he's gone.

‘Nothing,' I say.

‘Relax,' she says.

‘I don't know,' I say.

‘What's wrong?' she says.

I take a sip of wine and miss my mouth.

‘For god's sake,' she says.

I want to start again. I want to completely start my life again; to make no mistakes this time; to somehow watch my life from behind a screen; to double-click on
the options of my life, very carefully and in my own time. There will only ever be two options to choose from and they will be easy ones, things like ‘go forwards' or ‘go backwards'. Things like ‘yes' or ‘no'.

‘This is great,' Will says when he gets back from the toilet, grinning so wide you can see the fillings in his back teeth.

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘Really great.'

I feel for Alice's foot and press down lightly on it with my own. She doesn't seem to notice so I press down harder. Still nothing, so I press down really, really hard. Then I look under the table. I'm pressing down on a curled bit of the table leg.

The food arrives.

They've both ordered lasagna.

I've punished myself with the blandest item on the menu.

‘So, have I told you about my new idea?' Will says with his mouth full.

On TV the football finishes nil–nil.

I double-click on Alice in my head.

I will double-click on her until she falls in love with me again.

‘What's that?' she says.

‘I'm going to hire a girl,' he says.

I will copy and paste myself into the folder of her affections.

‘How d'you mean?' she says. ‘Like a call girl?'

Pull yourself together, I tell myself. Start having a nice time.

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘Kind of. I'm going to hire some girl to have a relationship with me and then break up with her and exhibit it all. I'll take photos and video and audio of everything. Absolutely everything. So when you go into the gallery, it'll be like really uncomfortable and you'll wonder how much of this stuff you should be seeing. And then …'

The waiter interrupts, to ask how everything is. He calls Will
seniore
. He calls Alice
seniorina
.

‘
Magnifico
,' Will replies. ‘Just
magnifico
.'

I excuse myself.

In the toilets I lock myself in a cubicle and get out my mobile.

I type a message:

I delete it and try again:

And then again:

I settle on nothing and flush the toilet instead, watching the water crash and whirl in the empty bowl.

Back at the table, they've moved on to vegetarianism.

‘I was one for years,' says Will.

(This is a lie. Will was vegetarian for about three months. Even then he was the kind that still eats chicken and fish.)

Now the TV is showing footage of a heart transplant operation. Looks like I'm the only one who's noticed. Couples at the other tables gaze at each other lovingly. Families and friends clink glasses, waiters and waitresses mill about, as behind them a middle-aged man lies slumped on an operating table with his chest laid open and his heart twitching and flapping obscenely.

I stab my spaghetti.

I double-click on Will.

I select and delete him.

‘Are you sure you want to send Will to the Recycle Bin?' I ask myself, then click ‘Yes'.

‘I guess I went veggie 'cause I started wondering what right I had to eat an animal, a rabbit or whatever. I mean,
surely I'm just being selfish
? I thought. And then I realised, you know, we're all just animals at the end of the day.'

The surgeon's knife goes in.

‘And what do animals do? They eat each other. They eat each other and they fuck. You see what I'm saying?'

‘I think so,' Alice says quietly.

She twirls a strand of hair around her finger.

She lets her mouth fall very slightly open.

She moistens her bottom lip seductively with her tongue.

‘It's nothing to feel guilty about, is what I'm saying. It's natural. It's
nature
. If this was the wild, we'd probably be fucking by now … if we weren't
eating
each other, that is.'

He raises an eyebrow and she smirks.

‘But we've constructed all these …
distractions
. Restaurants, art galleries, clothes to wear, fucking stupid television programmes to watch. If this was the wild, Alice, I'd be fucking you right now, I'm sure of it.'

Why don't you just sweep the plates off the table and climb onto it, Alice? Hike up your skirt and beg him to fuck you.

I might as well not exist.

‘What about me?' I say.

‘You'd probably be dead by now,' Will says, ‘if this was the wild.'

‘That's a bit harsh,' Alice says, smiling.

‘His eyesight,' Will says. ‘Think about it. He'd be picked off by a lion or something.'

When the bill comes, Will insists on paying.

I take out my wallet anyway, swearing I had more money than this, wondering where it's all gone and making a show of going through it; getting out the one ten-pound note I have left and all my bits of paper and cards
and things and laying them on the table, saying, ‘If you want, I can put it on my card …'

Will says, ‘Don't be a twat. It's on me. My pleasure.'

Then I say something.

‘We'll have to do this again,' I say.

What am I saying?

‘You should give us a call later in the week,' I say.

‘Alright,' Will says. ‘I will.'

Outside he offers to sub me the cab fare home.

I tell him we're fine with the bus.

‘
Magnifico
,' he says, smiling at Alice. ‘Just
magnifico
.'

I sit up in bed and throw off the covers. It's early morning and I'm sweating coldly, my stomach feeling sour and twisted.

‘What's up? What's going on?' Alice says, startled and half-asleep.

‘Nothing,' I say. ‘Shh. Shh.'

I stroke her hair and wait for her to go back to sleep then crawl out of bed and take my wallet from the back pocket of my jeans. I scurry to the bathroom, where turning on the light won't wake her up. I kneel on the tiles and empty it out; all those useless receipts and club cards and expired 10% OFF vouchers and cash cards and coins and bits of fluff from in the corners and my old student ID and the strip from a fortune cookie that reads
AN OUTGOING ATTITUDE IS THE KEY TO YOUR EFFORTS
and my library card and a torn-off bit of menu with half
a mobile number scrawled on it. I spread them out. I paw through them, again and again and again, but it makes no difference.

The note she wrote is gone.

There's this girl on the bus with yellow hair and blue eyes.

Her name is Clair, but if you called her Clair she wouldn't answer.

Not any more.

She doesn't like Clair.

Clair reminds her of things.

When she thinks of Clair, she thinks of someone else, someone with bitten fingernails and a secret wobbling tooth at the back of their mouth. She thinks of things falling down stairs, things dangling out of bins. She thinks of a boxroom as cheap and fancy as a small iced cake.

Her name is Helen now. She's been Helen for almost a year.

Only very occasionally – when she wakes up in a strange room, next to a sleeping body that she doesn't recognise and she doesn't know what time it is or remember quite how she got there, only then, and only for a few seconds – is she still Clair.

Helen is a better name for an actress.

Helen was as simple as trying on a dress. She left Clair tangled on the dressing-room floor. She's Helen now. She's an actress. She could be Amanda, Angela or Alice if she chose. Kate, Chloe or Camille. Just not Clair, she's sick of Clair.

Clair had mousy brown hair. Helen's bleached hers yellow.

Clair had brown eyes. Helen wears contacts.

Clair worked five years in Boots. Helen makes two hundred quid in an hour and a half.

Helen's legs are stinging of piss. It's not her piss. She washed them afterwards, but they're blotched red and raw. She hopes no one can smell it. Up near the train station, this lad gets on. He swaggers down the aisle. The bus is half-empty but he sits next to her, pressing his knee against hers and grinning. He plays bad hip-hop on his phone, the words rattling from the speaker like windblown tinfoil.

Helen feels her heart beat hard and rhythmically in her chest.

She looks firmly out the window and tries to focus on something at the centre of her; something as small
and hard and cold as a peach stone. She will discover this thing inside her, whatever it is, and when she does she'll never let anyone touch it; not the lad, not her mum, not even God.

Next she tries to imagine no one is sitting next to her. Just empty space in the shape of someone, a minus-person. But it's no use. She can feel him there; his wet-grass hair and razor-burnt skin, his body swelling like an aggravated spot. He reeks of Lynx and sweat and the boys' changing rooms.

He is swelling in his seat.

He is puffing out his chest.

He is about to say something, too, so she gets out her phone and dials her mum.

It rings.

It rings.

It you-have-reached-the-voicemail-service-of-s.

(Her mum is in the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, the taps thundering into the sink. She'll call Helen back later, once they're both a bit pissed, separately, on cheap wine, and even her mum will call her Helen.)

Meanwhile, the lad is continuing to swell. He's swelling past the line that divides his seat from hers. The veins are standing out on his neck. His neck is bulging over the collar of his tracksuit. Soon he'll be on top of her.

No more lads, she thinks. Lads can screw themselves from now on.

She stands and dings the bell, pushing past his knees to get off.

Helen lives in a two-bed terrace with her friend, Corrine. Except for twice a week, Corrine is away from six in the evening till four in the morning. She works as a croupier at the casino in town, not the swanky one near the roundabout, the cheap one where the only rule of dress is
NO HOLES IN YOUR CLOTHES
. When Corrine is not at work, she's usually asleep or she's out drinking. They hardly ever see each other. All Helen sees is half-finished dinners on the table, stubbed out Bensons in the ashtray and usually some note like:
WE NEED MILK! OR PLEASE TAPE
GHOST AT 9 – CHANNEL 5
.

Corrine, in the flesh, is a rarity.

Helen puts on the light in the living room.

CAKE LEFT IN THE FRIDGE
is taped to the TV screen.

She has a shower. The water runs down her thighs. She doesn't wash between her legs with her hands. She takes the shower off the hook and points it up at herself. It stings.

In the shower (and at other times too), Helen has a sister. The sister is witty and cruel and sarcastic – not to Helen, just to everyone else. When they're alone the sister reveals her true self and it is soft and kind, like the underside of a kitten. Helen imagines this sister soaping her back now, very gently. In return she soaps the sister's back. She's never given the sister a name; it would make her feel too sad.

Helen's room is small and damp. If there were books in here, the covers of them would curl. Helen has a picture of Ethan Hawke Blu-tacked onto the wall. She has a single bed. She has no urge to do anything. The Ethan Hawke picture sheepishly avoids her gaze.

She sits down at her desk and turns on the PC. She checks her emails.

Nothing.

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

Nothing.

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

and

and

Helen clicks ‘Reply'.