TERMINAL, page 10
“Take him into you. Take his seed. This is what I want.”
“NO! Not that!” she screamed. “Anything but that!”
He shrieked a response she couldn’t decipher and it peeled the paper from the walls, and the man knocked again,
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
The swirling carpet seemed to undulate beneath her feet. She ran from it to the kitchen, out if the man’s sight, throwing herself back against the wall, sobbing and fearful while the cups rattled on their hooks. Then there it was again, the knocking that seemed to come from the walls, no, from the earth, insistent and furious.
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
With each quaking knock her world burned and the white light dimmed until there was none left and the world rotted black on red. The mirror on the wall rattled and through it she could see the man at the door, still cutting the same square silhouette, but now from a blood red sky.
“LOVE HIM” The words tuned through her bones, vibrating her till her lips tingled and her fingernails felt as though they might come loose from their pale pink beds. She thrashed through her kitchen and opened the door of the cupboard beneath the sink with stinging fingers, dragging out bottles and brushes before forcing herself into it, bending herself into its tiny space like a dog broken into a suitcase. She pulled the door closed and held it shut with nails that bent back, then broke off. The Rook sucked the light from her eyes, punishing her for her insolence. Blood pours into her vision and it grew like red trees through her mind. They needled into her brain and she fell into the shrieking black pit He opened in her soul. Terror consumed her, pure, endless. She opened her mouth to scream but it was not her scream that came from her constricted throat but His caustic call. It clamped open her jaw and tore through her throat. She covered her mouth, revolted at the sound that echoed out of her, but her hands scratch her face. She felt one with the other and they clashed together in a way that sickened her. They were not her hands at all. They were claws, hard and sharp. Her stomach bubbled with disgust and she gagged and coughed, but her windpipe was clogged with something. Feathers. They filled her throat and packed her sinuses and lined her mouth. Spitting and thrusting she thundered with revulsion as her body tried to expel Him. She hit out at the walls of the cupboard, fighting the present moment with everything she had, as though she could tear her way out of His grip with those new hands and her hate and her fear. But the terrible shaking only built and built and she had no choice but to scream His scream and hold on to her wretched life with those angry claws, and she knew that to survive she must open herself up to Him, let the man and the bird into her sacred places, let them fill her up with that flock of doves.
“TAKE ME THEN! TAKE ME!” she said, but she said it in her mind because her mouth was already full of Him. In the darkness of the cupboard beneath the sink she saw nothing but the air seemed to swell at her surrender and the walls became turgid flesh, pulsing and hot. Her knees hit the walls of fevered flesh as her legs were forced apart. She felt the air move fast and fluid as a dry bracken wind blew between them and into her. Pumping. Belching. Filling her up. Testing her extremities. Testing her seams until she was filled with a plasticine width. Her eyes bulged forth from her face, threatening to burst, threatening to leave her blind and hysterical with only her aching sockets filled with their relative void as proof they were ever there at all. She wanted to push them back into her head but with those claws they would surely pop like balloons so she grit her teeth and waited while the walls sweated salt and bristled with wire and swelled even further until there is no room left between her and the cupboard at all. She breathed out and her chest fell and the cupboard swelled once more to take up the last of the space, then, in one black minute, it stopped as though it had never begun. The door swung open revealing her own kitchen floor. She fell out onto it, onto all fours and into the white light that had spilled back into the room. She heaved out the torture thick and bitter onto her kitchen floor and her hands stroked the normality of the lino through it, leaving trails in her own black bile. The rook upstairs went RATATATAT and she looked through the dirty mirror on the kitchen wall and gasped. Not at the man who had darkened her doorway, who had since vanished from the scene, nor at the nail-less tips of her bloody fingers, nor at the whites of her eyes now a deep blood red, but at her belly, distended and swollen, and at the claw marks and rivers of blood that streaked her inner thighs.
THE READ LETTER
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
A BURNING BIRD
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.
ONE HAMMER
She was in the corner of her life. The light from the candles she lit touched 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 was early, of course.
Through the texture of the opaque glass in the uPVC back door she recognised Veronica’s shape, though she was torn at the edges. Angela patted down her short, dirty, nightdress and opened the door to let her in, and to put her back together. There she was, whole again. My goodness, how’s she’d 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?” 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 there, 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 there. “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, but 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 quite bereft, but at the same time annoyed with Veronica’s stupid dance, which trailed and stumbled her 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 cried a deep cry, an underground cry, a cry from before there were words, and she wished 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 became a space in people’s lives. The man she married presumed she has finally left him and so doesn’t chase her; he was too exhausted by his shame and suspicion. And the son she loved didn’t dare ask where his mother went, because what Angela couldn’t know is that his father was 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 listened to the radio talk of an epidemic. Airborne they said. She kept the windows shut, wore a mask. The smell of rot filled the house and eventually the six weeks of her suspension expired. Back at work she sat at her desk and listened to the people who still turned up wonder where Veronica was, but there were so many off sick that it didn’t seem as important as it once would. And besides, there was so much work to do with so few people that there wasn’t even time to think, and so Veronica was buried not by dirt in a churchyard, but by circumstance. The people who missed her at work couldn’t even imagine the truth. They couldn’t fathom that maybe her broken body was laid out on a trestle table in Angela's second bedroom, her arms spread wide and crooked like broken wings, yellow bones picked clean by a ragged bird with a dirty old soul. They couldn’t imagine the wig askew on her shattered skull, a wig that had been combed and trimmed in pursuit of a bygone beauty, or the way her grey flesh came so easily from her spongy bones. They could not imagine the deep obsidian seam that runs through the bedrock of families like ours, or the horrors that take place in the shadows at the edges of their boring gardens and on the other side of the walls we share, because the truth is Angela is not alone, and nature has a dark heart.
