The Bird Room (4 page)

Helen's mum calls back later, once they're both a bit pissed, separately, on cheap wine.

‘Hello, love.'

‘Hi, Mum,' says Helen.

‘How was work?'

‘Oh, you know,' says Helen.

Helen's mum thinks Helen's rehearsing for a play.
Romeo and Juliet
, at some repertory theatre in the city. The play's been in rehearsal now for quite some time, for something approaching six months. In conversations with her mum, Helen has created a camp neurotic director, a heart-throb leading man, a sulky fingernail-biting leading lady and a bunch of alcoholic boorish set designers and minor cast members. Helen is setting up disaster, very slowly, in these conversations – cancelled
rehearsals, differences of opinion, etcetera, etcetera – so that when she finally tells her mum the play's been cancelled, her mum won't be too surprised or disappointed.

‘I'm
Helen
now, mum,' she told her once, for the last time, one afternoon when they were floating around Primark, fingering the blouses. ‘I'm a professional actress.'

‘Okay,' Helen's mum said. ‘Helen.'

It felt good to hear her say it, finally. It felt scary and complete, like triumph and like standing at the top of a massive cliff.

Helen went into a dressing room and looked at herself in the mirror. She said ‘Helen, Helen, Helen' in her head. She bit her tongue, tried on a dress and quietly burst into tears.

Sometimes – like when she's standing in a long queue at the Tesco Express and shuffling her basket forward with her feet – Helen feels cobbled-together. She feels like a rack of gaudy blouses and T-shirts in the Barnardo's charity shop. She looks at other people in the basket queue and wonders if they feel the same way. She wonders if their lives make sense. Sometimes she tries to make a list out of herself.

Helen eats fish-finger sandwiches at least three times a week.

She's never learned to swim.

She feels really beautiful only when she has sex with someone and then only sometimes, and then only while it's happening.

Helen thinks of herself as an actress, a proper one. Not a model and definitely not a porno one.

When she was still Clair she never finished her GCSEs, but that doesn't mean she's stupid.

I am the one in control, she tells herself. When filming a scene – when she is the thing being filmed – she imagines herself as a cog. Sometimes it's the cog in her auntie's cuckoo clock. She is turning. She is responsible for making the wooden cuckoo pop out through his wooden doors once an hour; she is responsible for making him chirp.

Helen listens to pop music on the bubble radio in the kitchen. She's never yet heard a song that means something to her. She really likes the idea of the radio, though / all that infinite variety / the tuning dial / the one wonderful song she will eventually happen on / what will happen when she does.

Helen's first sexual experience was at eleven years old with a candle. Her mum and dad were watching telly downstairs. It was turned up loud enough to carry through the floorboards. They were laughing and people on telly were laughing too. It was a funny programme. The candle didn't have a name. It was clammy in her fingers. She hid herself under the covers, shivering and hot, and became the flame on the end of it.

Duncan tried it on with her in his car, just before the shoot. Duncan sometimes finds her work. Helen is trying to find her own work, too, but it was Duncan who got her into it. He had this mate who worked for a website. He knew people. She met him in a pub.

Duncan was sweating at the neck.

He was stubbing his fag out.

He was smelling like a pickled onion.

He was smiling at her.

When you unscrew the lid of a jar of pickled onions and put your fingers inside, you are the one reaching for the onion. But when Helen opened the door to Duncan's car, the onion was the one reaching for her. It was reaching for her leg with a bloated red hand – for her left leg, right up near the crotch.

Helen didn't know what to do. Duncan had never tried it on with her before. She really needed a lift to the shoot. She didn't know where it was on her own.

So Helen closed her eyes and imagined her sister was in the car with them.

‘Get the fuck off her,' the sister said, ‘you fucking pickled onion. This isn't a chip shop, mate.'

It would've made Helen laugh, under different circumstances.

Duncan moved his hand up and down her leg. She could hear him breathing heavily. She could hear the breath hissing between his thick chapped lips and bad teeth. When the hand moved to her crotch, Helen grabbed it at the wrist. The hand became limp. She let go of the wrist and the hand moved away.

Helen opened her eyes.

The hand was on the steering wheel now. Duncan was looking sheepish. He was looking sheepish out the
window. He mumbled ‘Sorry' or something and then drove them to the shoot. Outside the house, he tried to turn himself back into a nice guy by asking Helen if she wanted him to wait for her, to give her a lift back afterwards.

Helen said no, she'd be alright with the bus.

Once Duncan was gone, Helen swore to herself never to get in a car with Duncan again. Fucking pickled onion. She'd find her own work from now on. The sister agreed this was a good idea.

A small terraced house, like the first result on a Google image search for ‘English suburbia'. Helen passes a cat on her way to the door, an oil-stained moggy, creeping out from under a Ford Escort. The sister stops to stroke it, getting oil on her fingers, and is still there saying something to it when the door opens.

A squat little man in a woollen jumper and a sagging pair of trousers says, ‘You must be Helen,' and ushers her in. His beard and fingers are nicotine-yellowed. Helen goes into the hall. She looks back for the sister but the sister is gone. She does that sometimes; she disappears.

The man with the beard takes Helen to a room upstairs, one with plastic sheeting taped to the floor and a cheap-looking camcorder on a tripod in the middle. Things are laid out on a little coffee table; a vibrator, a tub of jelly, some ‘Chinese love beads' and an empty
plastic washbasin. The man assures Helen that he has ‘connections in Germany', that that's where the tape is going, that no one over here will see it.

Then he gives her the two hundred quid up-front and offers to take her coat.

‘Right. Let's get to it, eh?' he says.

Helen is not even slightly asleep when she hears the voices.

They are whispering. The front door has just slammed. It's five or so in the morning. Helen has the lights off. She's been lying in her bed, on her back, trying her hardest to get to sleep by focusing on her nostrils and the air going in and out of them. She read this somewhere. She is trying to focus on one nostril at a time, isolating them in turn.

(One of the voices is Corrine's.)

The air goes
whewww
, in through one nostril.

(The other is a strange man's.)

The air goes
whewww
, out through the other.

‘Darren, fuck me.'

Helen is awake. Her nostril-meditation has gone square out the window.

Helen lies as still as she can. She pictures Darren as a black guy, she doesn't know why. Tall and well-dressed. He is still wearing most of his clothes as he has sex with Corrine and his breathing makes it through the wall and into Helen's ears.

Darren's breathing is deep and raspy like the guiro in the school music room.

Corrine's is high and papery like home-made Christmas lanterns.

They aren't using the bed, Helen imagines. They're up against the wall. Corrine has her legs wrapped round Darren's back. Darren still has all his clothes on. Just his flies and his belt are undone.

Then there is a pause.

As she waits for more noises, Helen imagines how they met, with herself as Corrine:
I was working on
the blackjack table. It was getting on for three when this
bloke sits down. It's a quiet night – pretty much dead, only a
couple of regulars playing – and then he turns up, plays
a hundred quid and quickly loses it all. He has nice eyes,
dark and black. He's dressed well, too – a suit and shirt and
this little gold chain that I can see beneath his collar. He
brings out a big wad of twenties and cashes another hundred
and loses that, too. I have to be very professional not to laugh
at him. He doesn't even win one hand. It's quite sad, really,
and he seems serious, as if he's coming in here to lose on
purpose – like this is a special game he's playing and one
win will screw it all up. Maybe he is, I think. I can't stop
looking at his hands, either. He has such long neat perfect
fingers
.

The guiro and Christmas lanterns resume their scraping and fluttering.

He doesn't look at me again, apart from that first time,
and I really want him to. I'm breathing heavier and
sticking my tits out, hoping he'll look at them. We have to
wear such horrible blouses in here and I hope he doesn't
think I'm ugly. I start making jokes with the regulars in
the hope that he'll laugh too, but he doesn't. When he cashes
a third hundred his hand touches mine. We aren't supposed
to touch the customers, ever, but I don't say anything. It only
happens for a second and I get wet just from him touching
my hand
.

They are louder now. It sounds like Christmas morning in the school music room. The lanterns are going fuck, fuck, fuck over and over again.

Then – all of a sudden – he gets up and leaves. I watch
him walk out the door and my heart sinks. It's gone three
and I don't finish till four. At the end of my shift I check out,
get my stuff and as I'm standing outside waiting for my taxi
I feel this big warm hand on my shoulder. I turn round and
it's him. He's been waiting for me all this time. And we don't
even say anything then, we both just wait and get into my
taxi when it arrives. In the back of the cab, he puts his hands
on me and whispers in my ear and I melt
.

The noises have stopped. Helen is lying in her bed, her heart hammering hard. Something is caught in her
throat. She's excited and scared. She's just had a very good idea.

This is the thing I'll tell him, she thinks. This is the story I will tell WR.

It turned out the real Darren – the one who slunk down the stairs behind Corrine, as Helen was halfway through lunchtime
Neighbours
– was some bulldog white bloke with shit tattoos and sovereign rings and a thick pink neck like uncooked sausage skin.

This is fine.

Helen's Darren is tucked away safely inside her. She's polished him up a bit, added things to him. And later she will ask Corrine a list of questions about the casino – little details to make it sound more plausible – because research is what good actresses do.

Corrine said her and Darren were going out for lunch. She told Helen she wouldn't be home before work.

Helen's in Corrine's room.

She's lying in Corrine's bed, pulling the covers around her, sniffing in the musky smell of their post-sex bodies. She's dressed in Corrine's spare casino uniform and seeing herself from above, like some kind of glamorous Hollywood suicide crime scene photograph; tranquillisers, champagne, her make-up immaculate.

Helen has all the windows open. Maybe this will cure the damp, somehow. It is raining and freezing, and the curtains of Corrine's room flutter, like there are men behind them; Tom Selleck, Ethan Hawke and Chandler from
Friends
. They watch Helen curl and uncurl, swishing her legs in Corrine's bed. They have their big celebrity hands down their trousers.

Helen follows a stream of middle-aged middle-class men and women off the bus. She's at the very edge of the city now, the nicer part of town. Victorian townhouses. BMWs. It's still raining here, but only very lightly. Streets like this look nice in the rain. The pavements are dark. They reflect the just-gone-on streetlamps. Helen has the address written down on the back of an envelope. She holds it in her hand. Her hand shakes. She isn't nervous. She isn't nervous. Two weeks ago she pissed into a brandy glass. She filled it to the brim, in front of a cameraman and a soundman and this bloke who just watched who said he was the producer. She wanked herself off with a shoe. She shouldn't be nervous.

Helen is stood outside his house.

No BMW in the drive.

The front garden is overgrown.

Something – a skirt? – is tangled in the bushes.

She has to step round snails and slugs to get to the front door. The curtains are drawn. Her finger hovers over the doorbell. She rests the tip of her finger on it and takes a deep breath.

And then her phone goes off. It startles her. She snatches it out of her raincoat pocket. She takes a few steps back down the drive, putting some distance between her and the door, and treads on a snail accidentally. She checks the display. It's her mum.

Helen waits for the phone to stop ringing. She holds it in her hands, waiting for her mum to put down the receiver. She thinks about lighting a fag but decides against it. Once the phone stops ringing, she steps carefully back past the snails.

This time the door opens before she can touch the bell.

‘Are you Helen?' says the man in the doorway, extending his hand towards her.

She nods.

‘I'm William,' he says. ‘Or Will.'

His hand is cold. She forces a smile. He doesn't. His face is drawn and dark with stubble. She's guessing he's thirty but it's pretty hard to tell. There's this blankness to him, as if he's more an idea than an actual person.

Something is missing.

William or Will shakes her hand for a long time, long enough for the coldness of it to go in through her fingers and start to make its way up her arm like tetanus.

Then he turns and leads Helen inside.