ANGELA (7 page)

Dear Veronica,

I know I’m not supposed to contact you at the moment, or anyone from work for that matter, and I’ve tried, really I have, but things aren’t good here. My birds, they’re all gone. All gone. All except for Him, and He’s very angry. I think He’s done something to me, I don’t know… I don’t know but I’m scared. I’m scared and I need a friend Veronica. Please be my friend Veronica. Please.

Please.

There are things I need to say to you and they can’t wait.

I know, you see? I know what you’ve been doing. Down there in HR.

And if you don’t come I’ll tell.

I’ll tell everyone.

11:30 pm.

Come to the back door.

Don’t bring the car.

All my love.

I miss you.

Angela

x

She was eleven when she killed them. Three years to the day after I left her alone in that pile of bricks and secrets. They kept her in the attic, between boards and felt. Between bags and boxes. A girl in storage. Early mornings, late nights. Cleaning and cooking around car parts and canisters. Scrubbing away her own evidence. That was her life. She was nothing to nobody, even then, but she had her birds. She always had her birds. They came to her through a gap in the eaves, drawn in by the tune she whistled into the wind. A tune I taught her. A tune my mother taught me…

…alouette allo, allouette. Allouette…

The hole in the wall brought her the stinging winter but it also brought her company, and the birds took refuge from the storm outside, perched around her in their uneasy alliance. Her uncles worked in the yard behind the house, cutting cars in half, grinding and welding in a spray of sparks and oil. They never left that house and when she was there, she was theirs.

After school it was always the same. They tied her to the kitchen table and stripped her and struck her and shattered her teeth for the things she hadn’t done, and for things she had. I felt every blow. Every touch. Down here. Down there. And behind the blows, behind the crack of the whip, she heard angry wings beat the air and on it she smelled petrol and revenge.

“You ugly little bitch. You ugly little burd gurl”. Slack and northern. Words kept by time.

Months went by and her child’s mind made a plan. She would do it on a Saturday morning. They drank the most on Friday nights and wouldn’t wake until noon, all angry and numb. She would go into town early, like she did every Saturday and get them their bacon and tobacco but she would take a bird. Her most loyal, the one that perched on her finger, and who always came home.

It was the night before. She had cleaned the kitchen before bed, arranging cups and saucers and exhausts and ratchets on the worktops, and lining their petrol canisters up along the wall in the way they told her she ought to in this house of cog and oil. They had fallen asleep in their armchairs like they always did, empty beer cans strewn across the threadbare carpet, oily men with dirty hearts. They looked so small in their unconsciousness. Vulnerable, with chins as weak as their desires, and for a moment she felt pity; stood in the room between them, dim light from the fading fire licking her side. Then she remembered her broken jaw and her eyes raged red in the dark, pure with an ancient hatred. A shadow grew out of her and formed on the ceiling above, like a bird drawn badly in soot, and she made a promise to them, and to the night. She dragged her finger across the sharpness of her shattered tooth, letting her bad blood bubble up, and painted a crossed out circle with it on both of their brows, marking them, then leaving them to their final slumber. In the attic her bleeding finger stroked his little sparrow head, following the gentle curve, bones so light she could hardly feel them. She cried for the last time the tears of the innocent, and then fell out of the world.

Angela slept a blank sleep until the morning came and peeled it off her. It was time. Time to change everything. She dressed and took her bag and the meagre money they left her to do their shopping with and went downstairs, but not before she took her best bird friend from the perch at the foot of her bed and dropped him in it. He looked confused, but then, he
was
just a bird. Tip toeing through the kitchen she was careful not to wake her snoring uncles, her torn red leather shoes padding quietly on the cold flagged floor. She opened a window and let it swing on its hinges then decanted a little petrol into a jar before lowering the canister onto its side, where it quietly vomited its contents. The thin liquid darkened the grey flags and she pulled the door behind her, sealing them in, and sealing their fates.

The day hit her face. It was sunny but cold and she walked through the back streets to the one behind the butchers and knelt there in the shade. She took the bird out into the thin blue light. He had changed during his time in the bag, as if he had learned something in the dark. He didn’t resist when she dipped him in the petrol, and he didn’t flinch when she struck the match, and when she lit him on fire he seemed to know that he had one last job to do and flew up into the air, burning wings leaving a cough of filthy black smoke in the clear blue sky as he made his way home.

Little Angela ditched the empty jar in the undergrowth and was ordering Sunday’s chicken from a man in white when the house around the corner exploded.

She is in the corner of her life. The light from the candles she lit touches the edges of the things she’ll miss when she’s gone. She sees a beach, tastes the salt.

“Knock knock knock”

It’s 11:25pm. She’s early, of course.

Through the texture of the opaque glass in the uPVC back door she recognises Veronica’s shape, though she’s torn at the edges. Angela pats down her short, dirty, nightdress and opens the door to let her in, and to put her back together. There she is, whole again. My goodness, how’s she missed her.

“Come in”

“Do you want a cup of tea?

“No, I don’t. I want to get this over with and I want to go home to bed”, Veronica said.

Angela was surprised at the tone in her voice. Didn’t she realise what was at stake?

“And let’s put the bloody lights on shall we?”

“No!” Angela said, leaving her seat and getting between the woman and the switch.

“No. I don’t want the neighbours to know I’m up.”

“Sit down, please”

“No, I prefer to stand.” Veronica held her hand to her crooked hip, “I’m not staying Angela.”

“Now what have you got to say?”

What
did
she have to say? For all her planning she had thought very little about how this might actually play out, and she hadn’t expected her to be so touchy. She expected her to be at least a little happy to see her, ask how she’d been doing perhaps, but that definitely wasn’t the case and it was clear that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in Angela, her life, or her loneliness.

“Well, I saw you the other day. The day I left work early”, she started. This was awkward. Angela didn’t have the words to describe the things she saw in that grubby little cubicle without showing some emotion and playing her hand.

“Ok. And what did you see?” Now Veronica's tone was inquisitive, mocking almost, as though it was Angela who was on trial here. As though it was her who had put her own filth and lust over everything else, and here, in the wilds of Angela's kitchen, Veronica's mask was slipping, and Angela found she was afraid of the person behind it. It scared her to see there was fire behind those tired eyes.

“I thought I knew you!” The words left Angela's trembling lips and the energy in the room changed around them. The candles flickered and upstairs something went RATATATAT.

“Oh Angela stop this stupid bloody game. We get it, you’re lonely but I’m married and I’m not into….

RATATATAT

“I don’t think of you…”

RATATATAT

“What is that bloody noise?”, Veronica broke off, wandering away from Angela, towards the stairs, towards the…

“No”, Angela said. “Don’t go upstairs.”

She considered running ahead, blocking her way, making an excuse for the noise upstairs but Veronica’s words still reverberated through her, clawing at her soul, pecking at her heart.

No, she would let her see. It was time for her to meet Him.

She heard her foot fall on the first tread.

“Angela what is all this…?”, and Angela knew she’d got to the wall of bones. She’d already seen too much. Angela picked up the hammer from the bottom of the stairs and started up behind her.

“Oh Angela! Hahahahaha”, Veronica laughed.

Laughter? What was she laughing at? Not the remains of her birds, surely? Not her friends, all dead and pale and beautiful. She would take shock, fear even, but humour? No. There was no humour to be found here.

“Angela! What is all this!?” she laughed again. How dare she?!

The curtain dropped.

“Angela you filthy cow! How could you? I knew you were bloody mad but really?! This?! Ha! Now I know why your clothes always smell the way they do! Bird shit! Everywhere!”

She spun around, taking it all in, seeing behind the lace, not registering the rusty, blood-stained hammer that swung at Angela's cottage cheese thigh.

“And what are these?, she flicked on the light, “Boxes? Is that my name on there? And Janet?” Her eyes were wide now, her teeth showing, all yellow and brown.

She opened Janet and peered into her, lifting up the wig and the wool.

“You’re mad Angela! Absolutely fucking mad! Oh my God, they are going to love this at work!”

And then came the immortal line Angela just couldn’t hear,

“Is it any wonder you’re on your…”

But she didn’t finish the thought. The hammer entered Veronica's head from the right hand side and pushed her eyeball forward and dropped her jaw. It dropped too low and yawned a scream as her head came apart and her brain dribbled down her shoulder. She wheeled, spinning and moaning like a record playing backwards while blood pumped in big glugs out of the hole Angela had made in her head, painting her wall of bones with a streak of beautiful crimson. Veronica's remaining eye spun in its socket, looking for logic in this new world but the wretched woman got herself wrong, trying to sit down, trying to stand up, waving at the wall of bones, her brain of very little use where it lay on the floor.

“Nooowwwww...” she slurred, clutching her broken face. “Angthlll…maaaiifffath…… ithhh wrrrrng”

And Angela was here and there, happy and sad. Not yet bereft, but at once annoyed with Veronica’s stupid dance, which trailed and stumbled about, rising and falling, choking and gurgling. She watched Veronica make one last pirouette, then, with a twist, a frown and half a smile, she knocked her in her wet head once more and the once beautiful girl from work hit the floor for the last time.

“Oh Veronica! OH Veronica! What has happened to you”, Angela said as she knelt at her side, swaying back and forth holding the hands of her dead boss, wiping the blood from her hammer and her hands on the pale blue nightdress that stuck to her clammy thighs.

“Let me see”, she said, and took off all her clothes. There was no beauty left, just age and surgical scars. It was too late, in every possible sense. Life had gone by so fast. So fast. And here she was at the end of Veronica's. She had waited too long to hold her like this. It was nothing like she’d imagined in their twenties, or thirties, or forties. Sat there, in an expanding pool of the object of her affection she cries a deep cry, an underground cry, a cry from before there were words, and she wishes she had understood sooner that beauty drains away with every passing day and the longer you hesitate to take the things you want, the poorer the reward when you do.

Days pass, the way days do, and Veronica becomes a space in people’s lives. The man she married presumes she has finally left him and doesn’t chase her; he is too exhausted by his shame and suspicion. And the son she loved daren’t ask where his mother is, because what Angela can’t know is that his father is home to a terrible rage, and it was this that drove his wife into the arms and bed of that other man, a man that listened and cared and touched her gently. A man without blackbirds in his veins.

At home Angela listens to the radio talk of an epidemic. Airborne they say. She keeps the windows shut, wears a mask. The smell of rot fills the house and the six weeks of her suspension expire. At work she sits at her desk and listens to the people who still turn up wonder where Veronica is, but there are so many off sick that it doesn’t seem as important as it once would. And besides, there is so much work to do now and with so few people there isn’t even time to think, and so Veronica is buried not by dirt in a churchyard, but by circumstance. The people at work can’t know that her broken body is laid out on a trestle table in Angela's second bedroom, her arms spread wide but crooked like broken wings, being picked over by a ragged black bird with a dirty old soul. They couldn’t imagine the wig she wears that has been combed and trimmed in pursuit of a bygone beauty, or the way her flesh comes so easily from her spongy bones. They can’t imagine the deep obsidian seam that runs through the bedrock of families like ours, or the horrors that take place on the other side of the walls they share with us, or in the shadows at the bottom of their boring gardens, because Angela is not alone, and nature has a dark heart.