TERMINAL, page 6
Veronica had never been late, not once in almost four decades. In fact she was never less than fifteen minutes early. It was one of many ways she managed to stand proud in a crowd, catching the attention of light and men with such casual ease. Angela couldn’t help but admire her, and she couldn’t help but be cast into her shadow. It was a darkness that Angela had come to love after years in its comfortable shade, but back when the light was anyone’s for the taking Veronica’s extreme earliness had forced Angela to arrive earlier still, or feel second best in too many ways. So began a silent competition that spanned an age, each shaving precious seconds off their shrinking lives, throwing them on the pyre of time that burned them away, each trying to prove themselves keener to the powers that be, before Veronica had become Manager of the department, when they were still equal, in one way at least. It was an ugly dance, full of waste and pride, and in truth Veronica’s eventual trophy life, with the title and the husband and the swan-like grace, had less to do with her timekeeping and more to do with the shape of her body, a competition in which Angela just couldn’t compete, and, if she was honest, was the same reason she went to the bathroom and applied a smudge of lipstick to her thin dry lips while she waited for the object of her affection to arrive. Maybe, she considered idly as she smeared herself in red grease, she had even been complicit in Veronica's win, her adoration contributing to the consensus, but as much as she resented it, old habits die hard, and so here she was, very old, very hard, and very, very early.
Veronica arrived at 8:04 a.m., and to Angela she was as beautiful as she had ever been. Her fifty-nine years had made their mark, that couldn’t be argued, but Angela saw through the lines and looseness and liver marks to the tight little thing that used to strut back and forth around these same desks all those years ago. In those heels. She remembered those heels, those slicing, spiking heels, her legs so long and lean…
Veronica joined Angela in her pool of light and her eyes ate her up. Gold rings and clumped mascara, coal on spider legs; her body draped in a sequinned black dress that hugged her hills and caressed her valleys, and a pair of pink rimmed glasses, perched on her perfect little nose. Angela recognised the dress. It was from Next.
“I like your dress,” Angela said. Veronica nodded, as if her adoration was a foregone conclusion and her sequins winked in sequence as she drifted by like a tired old peacock displaying threadbare plumage. She was overdressed, and she knew it, but she had always liked to let a glimmer of her dinner party lifestyle leak into the nine to fives. Still, Angela marvelled at the display, and as Veronica walked around her to her own desk, she noticed a whisper of the elegant grace that hadn’t completely left her, despite being on her second hip.
They said their hellos, complained about the TV over Christmas and began their work.
“How was your dinner at your cousin’s?”
“Fine. It was fine. The potatoes were dry.”
Their shared history echoed between their small talk and over time’s barren planes. All the meetings and supervisions. The birthday meals and office parties. The leaving do’s and redundancies, like crystal sculptures that only they could see.
Once all those numbers had been entered into those black and blue screens Veronica packed up her belongings and told Angela, sat alone, that she had to nip to the loo but then she’d have to be leaving because her boys were waiting for her to eat. Angela blinked and nodded then stared into the space Veronica left behind. She considered following her into the little pink bathroom and holding the door closed, holding her down and doing the things she’d dreamed of so many times, taking what she had never been given. Trembling, she blinked twice more, waited for the bathroom door to swing shut, then grabbed her bag and trotted to the front door as quickly as her short wide legs would carry her. She fell out into a wind and the pale blue street, wiping a scrag of black hair out of her small wet eyes, then took the waiting train out of the ice grey station and was home before the lights above her vacant desk had cooled. She slammed the front door shut, ran upstairs to the second bedroom and I watched through a tear in the celestial cloth as my daughter put two nails through two small, blue, birds.
IN BETWEEN
It had been a grey Christmas in every way imaginable. Snow didn’t fall, bells didn’t ring, and the empty hours yawned in her face, begging to be filled. She did her best. She bathed in the static of the TV and the gentle wind from the wings of the many birds in her second bedroom. She wrote lists of things she didn’t really need from town, and from time to time she let her mind into the life of her friend from work, who would not think of Angela at all. She pictured Veronica cooking and cleaning and undressing for bed and, finally, seeing behind the clothes she hid in and into the rawness beyond. She smiled at the thought and looked out of the wide kitchen window at a sky that wasn’t so much a sky as a ceiling.
In the very early hours of New Years Eve Angela dressed in a pair of old jeans, a woolly jumper and an anorak. She packed an orange and one of her small metal cages into a black leatherette trolley and set off into town, where the sun rose only a little into a space slightly outside of time.
She went the long way, through the gloom, along the path and up into the park on the hill. There was no one there. She’d been counting on it. And anyway, even if there had been others, the kind of people that made it out at that time could only see themselves. She got up to the high point of the park, where rooks wheeled overhead like flying black daggers stabbing the sky. There she bent down and removed the cage from the trolley. The birds in the trees swivelled their heads, their black diamond eyes glinting cold and knowing. She dragged herself and the rattling cage into the shade between shrubs and bushes then clambered through them, through the deep shadow of the trees, feeling her way through the murk along the ground back to the damp soft place where the fence of the old estate behind the park began. She set the little Larson trap on a small shelf she’d nailed up years ago, filled it with seed, then made her way out. Back in the light she brushed herself off and walked down into town where she sat on a green bench, ate her orange, and waited for the shops to open. She needed margarine, glue and disinfectant, and she made herself think about all the beatings she took as a child.
She took so many.
THE GRINDSTONE
On the first day back in work Sheila called in sick so Angela had to do the work of two people. She spent the morning grey in resentment, her face pressed against it, warping her features. Veronica asked her how the rest of her break had been and Angela told her that she’d been bored, but that really only scratched the surface of the monolithic truth which was that every day spent in the house with only herself and seventy-two strangely silent birds was like sinking into a sea of black oil, endless and viscous. Veronica guffawed at the revelation. “Bored?! I wish I’d had time to be bored! The boys kept me so busy I didn’t get two minutes to myself!” Veronica’s beautiful voice went on and on, singing of parties and people and places Angela would never see.
“Well I finished my puzzle book, and my birds keep me busy”, Angela interjected.
“You and those birds!” said Veronica, smiling and tutting all at once, and Angela understood that in every way she was less than the woman with the devoted husband, loving son and designated parking space.
The weeks drew on and nothing much happened. Angela spent as much time as she could in the company of her birds, her beloved little birds, sat in their midst where she whistled Alouette with the world just a square of sky on the other side of a roof window. Amongst them, locked in the second bedroom of her semi detached suburban box, she felt understood. I remember the first bird. It was the day before I left her. A small brown sparrow flew in through her bedroom window. She pulled the window closed behind it and the little bird never left. That night she sat on Angela's stubby little finger and chirped for her mother as Angela looked into her little eyes and pretended the insistent song was for her.
“Angela!” Veronica shouted, and Angela blinked an inky blackness from her mind. She was back in the room. “You might want to answer the phone.” Veronica pointed a knuckly ringed finger at the chirping beige box bound to Angela’s head by a curly black wire.
“Sorry”, Angela said, “I’ve had a headache...”
“Well take some tablets and get on with it! I don’t want to be back in there with you next month”, pointing that same finger at the private office at the end of a long, dark corridor. Veronica leaned in and whispered, “Maybe if you lost some weight you’d feel better, wouldn’t get so many headaches. Are you still going to Weight Watchers? I think it would do you the world of good. Get you out the house. Meet people.” Angela lied with a nod and answered the insistent little box tied to her head, and although her mouth shaped words and her own crooked fingers made things happen on a screen in her mind she was flying through the night, tears stinging cold in the wind, with sharp claws and a razored beak.
THE PITCH
It was a Saturday and Angela took the train to the place where I would take her as a child. It was just a grassy embankment overlooking a football pitch where a team with no name would play games that didn’t matter on Saturday afternoons. I’d take her there with sandwiches and she would sit away from me and eat them so gingerly, always watching me. Always watching. It was as though she knew I would leave her. It was my way of saying sorry, you see? Sorry for the things I hadn’t done yet. Sorry for the things I had.
It wouldn’t be enough.
On the train my grown up Angela listened to a woman speak about the death of her infant grandson in that bleak way that only women of a certain age and from a certain part of Liverpool can. Her words were quiet and slid out of her like wet slate under the grey sky.
The train pulled into the flickering station and Angela stepped off it into disinfectant, diesel and tobacco smoke. The walk from the station to the grassy knoll took twenty minutes between semis and garages and when she got to the pitch the grey rain began and she ate three jam sandwiches in the same spot she had all those years ago, with her anorak pulled up over her head. No one played football. No one passed her by, and ninety minutes later she retreated down the same path, and boarded the return train.
From the window of the train from Liverpool to Preston she saw a body in the shrubs at the side of the track. Grey skin. Blue jeans. Face down. She mentioned it to no one and now somehow, in death, he became hers.
SHE'S LEAVING
Janet was leaving. Twenty-three years after walking through those doors for the first time, she was leaving, and she wouldn’t be coming back. Angela had been there on Janet’s first day. She’d shown her the fire exits. She’d even shown her to the office on the day of her interview, but now it was over like it had never begun. With a condemned solemnity Janet cleared her desk into a cardboard box she’d brought from home and once she’d emptied her last drawer there would be only a broken seat and brown finger stains on a beige keyboard to prove she’d ever been there at all. Angela thought of Janet often. She was a kind but quiet woman who had learned to keep herself to herself. In her younger days she had been attractive, in her own way, and Angela had always had the impression that she was the kind of woman who would have liked to have children but wasn’t able. She had a propensity toward heavy knits and denim skirts, which didn’t work together at all, but the combination had become unmistakably hers over the years. When Angela learned she was leaving she walked over to her desk and asked where she got them from, the jeans and the wool.
“I’ve had them years Angela”, she said, her voice quiet, dry and trembling like she held a moth in her throat. She had got them from a shop in Leeds many years ago. It was where she was from, and where her parents still lived. She gave her the address and when Angela took the train there the following Saturday there they were, still hanging on the racks, like pieces of Janet. She bought two beige jumpers and a long denim skirt. At home she placed one jumper and the skirt in a cardboard box marked “JANET 2014” on her bedroom floor, and wrapped the second jumper in metallic red paper and a bow, and that was it. Janet was leaving, and that night there would be a meal to see her off. Another loss. Another ghost in the office. Another box in Angela’s bedroom.
“Are you coming tonight Angela?” Veronica said over the box files.
“Yes, yes, I’m coming. What are you wearing?”
“Black”
“So will I. I’ll wear black. And what time?”
“Um, say a quarter to eight”
“Ok, see you there”
“Yes, see you there”
Angela stood in the murk of her home. It was 7:15pm. The birds had been fed and she had shovelled the days crust from the plastic floor in the second bedroom and started to get ready for the meal. She picked out the black dresses from a slanted wardrobe and threw them on the bed before her, where they lay there like sad, empty people. She critiqued them all. Too wide. Too short. Too old. She picked one, the wide one, and dragged it over herself. She let it cover her face for a while and looked through the fabric and sequins at the room beyond. The boxes stacked around the bed shimmered through the fabric and glitter like a haphazard city. She thought of Janet dying. Surely she would now? The cancer had come back twice already. She couldn’t have long. Was she scared? Was she filled with regret? Or was she free, finally? Would she just fly away between crystal towers on brilliant white wings?
Angela pulled on the dress and a pair of purple heels and the combination made her look like a frog on stilts wearing a bag. She looked over at the boxes, just boxes again, and felt the old ache return. She climbed up on a little plastic stool and took a box marked “FIONA, 1987” from the stack. She lifted the hair net from the top of the bundle of clothes and held it to her face. It still smelled of her.
She arrived at the restaurant at 7:40pm and heard their laughter before she saw their faces. They were stood at the bar, all of them, twenty five of the people she works with, their drinks two-thirds empty, their cheeks too flush to have just arrived. They saw her over the room and Veronica did her regal little wave, beckoning Angela to her side. She made her way over through their shoulders and backs to Veronica's side, to the place where she is most comfortable.
“Veronica, I thought you said quarter to eight?”
“Do you want a drink Angela?”
“Yes, I’ll have a Bacardi and Coke please Veronica.”
“Diet?”
“Yes, Diet Coke, thank you”
The room crackled and hummed as workplace dynamics reorganised themselves through alcohol and repression into something vaguely dangerous. She sipped sweet black tar through a pale pink straw and watched. Their laughter made their eyes wide and their lips curl back. Angela saw white teeth and white eyes, fingers pointing here, there, everywhere. Jewels of sweat form ed beneath the sequins in the folds of her back and she felt them coalesce and run in rivers down her canyons, tickling and shaming her till they soaked into her tights. The smell of her own fear rose up, bitter and shameful, kissing her face while a sign shone in red above a fake door, telling her that it is not an exit.
“I need to visit the ladies, Veronica”
“Excuse me, can I get past. I said excuse me, please I just need to….”
In the toilet cubicle she hitched up her dress around her neck and dabbed herself off as best she could with what tissue is left on the roll. It is too hot in there. She hates the heat. She hates it. The music from the bar rose and fell through the opening door as girls came and went, touching up and talking and peeing, their young, high voices full of malice and life.
“What is that hair about!??
Laughter.
“1988 called. It wants its dress back”
More laughter.
That could be about anybody, she told herself. It could be about anybody.
Dried off and rearranged she arrived back in the bar, which was almost empty apart from those couples out on a Wednesday night for whatever reason. A girl with kind eyes asked, “Are you with the party?” from behind the bar, and she said yes, and wanted to cry. “They’re through there”, the girl said, and pointed round the corner to the dining area at the back of the building. Angela noted her name badge. Maria.
Ah yes, she could hear them again. Their voices came to her around the angle.
Move it! I don’t want her!
Do you want her Sheila? Aaahahahahahaha!
Veronica you have her.
No, I have her all bloody day! Jeremy?
Fuck off!
Hahahahhaaaaa Ahhh, Jeremy…
NO WAY.
Ok fine, put it here next to me, I’ll have her, AGAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…….. .
It took effort for her to turn that dark corner, away of the relative peace of the bar area, with the quiet couples and down turned eyes and into the unbridled electric maelstrom that boiled just out of sight. She considered just going home, but made herself stay. Yes, it hurt there, but it would hurt at home too, and at least there the voices she heard weren’t pre-recorded, or in her head.
She turned the corner and pretended to be looking in her bag as they pretend not to see her and tumbled on with their rabble and rouse.
“Janet”, she said. “Janet, I was in Leeds last week and got you this. I know you’ve got one but…”
