TERMINAL, page 8
“Put me through to your manager. Put me through….”
Her colleagues feigned the support she never had in life and eventually she fell asleep listening to them speak, holding their voices to her face, feeling their vibrations against her cheek.
“Hello? Are you there? You’re through to Veronica, can I help you?”
THE ROOK
It was the day before her leave left her, and when she slept she dreamed of a shaking cage around a beating black heart. The summer sun found her through the curtains and she woke with a picture behind her eyes of the Larson trap she set on the shelf in the dark of the trees.
He was here. He had returned to her.
Dressed light in the deep blue morning she tiptoed with as much grace as her inelegant frame allowed through shrub and thicket to the secret place she would run to from her uncles, the place that she now found her cage rattling with an inhabitant. The cage held a little black rook. No older than a few weeks, his wings still so meagre that Angela thought it was a wonder he had made it in there at all. His head swivelled to the side so he could regard her better and she had a strange feeling that she was late. And what was this? Behind the little rook was the jerking remains of another, bigger bird, plucked and boned almost to death, but not quite. The rook’s black eye caught hers and then looked nowhere. She knew what he’d done, but he had only done what he must to survive, hadn’t he? The dying bird was so big, and he was just an infant. He had been defending himself, surely? The rook sat and waited as the life left the bird at his back, and Angela didn’t even put on her handling gloves, she just opened the door and he ducked under the lifted gate, took a slow, deliberate step out onto her hand and gripped her finger tight. She looked down into those black diamonds in his head and saw herself in so many ways. Angela opened her jacket and fed him into the warm place between the light beige lining and her big, low breast. He didn’t flinch; he just gripped the fabric with his little black claws and held still. On the way home he pecked at her soft skin till she bled out onto his oily black feathers and she gripped the sleeve of her jacket and let Him.
On their first night together an unseasonable wind picked up and shook the house. The tiles rattled on the roof and in the garden the fence panels fought their cases to fly away. Inside the second bedroom the light flickered and the birds flapped and panicked, their beady eyes spinning and wide and their beaks drawn open, showing off strange little tongues that poked at the air. Every one but the rook. The rook just sat under the sloping eaves of the rattling house on a stack of old books with the same stillness He had in the rattling cage. He let His eyes reflect his new home with ambivalence. Was it ambivalence? Angela regarded Him from behind the mesh door and lace curtain that hung over it, making the scene a mosaic. She felt the change. She wanted to go in and feel the soft wind from their little wings as they flew around her and landed on her shoulders and nestled in her hair. She wanted to smile as she fed them from her hands, but not that night. Not anymore. The room was His now, and when she closed her eyes to sleep it was as though she was at sea. She could feel the spray on her cheeks and the salt on her lips, she felt herself corroding, but a light pulsed to the right of her vision like a lighthouse.
She was almost there.
OFFICE HOURS
She woke to find herself naked on the beige bed linen. Warm yellow light cut under the blue curtain and to her bleary eyes it was a shore. She was washed up. She was home.
She looked through the crust in her eyes at the tall pile of neat washing. Work outfits cleaned and pressed dutifully called to her like a beacon. She wore them enthusiastically and left the dankness of her home for the fluorescence of work with a spring in her stomp, the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, and a cold sore. She boarded the train and found her seat and overhead the cuckoos flying south scrawled a “V” in the sky.
At work Veronica asked how she’s been and she was too happy to see her face and hear her voice to answer the question honestly. “I’ve been great,” she lied, “Great. Got a lot done.” Veronica asked if she enjoyed the Isle of Man with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “Yes, thank you,” Angela said, thinking of the imaginary isle that has swallowed her kitchen. “I saw a lot of wonderful things.”, then she was swept away by a calming tidal wave of paper work that cleansed her soul of the dirty black bird who filthied her mind and heart and second bedroom.
Beyond the dusty office window a charm of finches spiralled through blue sky. She felt the salvation and it tasted like honey on her lips, like a salve on her soul. But the day drew on and the phone didn’t stop ringing and Veronica wouldn’t look her way. Then the sore on her lips began to sting and she felt His damp decay creep back in, tickling up her veins, nerves stuttering on and off like a dying light. She held the arms of the chair with hands that buzzed with a static that seemed to interfere with the picture on her screen, which smeared in front of her, an electric mess of blue and black. She felt Him swarm through her brain, turning parts of her off, turning parts of her on, and she wanted to touch herself and she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. Her lips trembled but she didn’t scream, but the people looked over at her anyway, their faces full of holes, and then she was lost again at the bottom of the deep black sea.
The week drew on, Tuesday becoming Wednesday becoming Friday, and sleep, Angela’s oblivious mistress, left her aching alone in the dark with only the memory of her embrace and the taste of her beautiful oblivion on dry, angry lips.
In the night He called to her, He pecked out a message on the floorboards and she lay trembling in His pervasive presence, trying to decode His Morse code. On the third night she thought she did.
It seemed to say, “B….U….R….D…G….U….R....L”
SECRETS AND LIES
It was two in the afternoon when she realised something was wrong. Lunchtime had finished and the familiar clackety clack of keys being tapped resumed after its brief reprise the same way it always did. It was a day like any other, all these days were the same, so when Veronica didn’t come back to her desk at 1.58pm exactly, as she always, always did, Angela knew that something was amiss. An electric dread crept through her bones. Was she dead? Had her hip given way on the metal steps that lead up from the car park? Was she now lying prone in the spiked shrubs, helpless? What if Angela discovered her there, so in need? She’d be so grateful to see her! So beautiful, and vulnerable, and indebted. Angela could save her, lift her up in her short wide arms and carry her home where she could undress her and nurse and nurture her. Of course she would have to silence the birds and move the boxes from the bedroom, and she’d certainly have to take the bones off the walls, but she could always cover her head to get her upstairs, and she could keep her unconscious, if she had to.
At seven minutes past one Angela could take no more. She called Veronica’s mobile. Tap tap tap, tap tap, tap. It was ringing. No one answered but Angela noticed that the arm of her boss’ chair was vibrating. Her jacket was still on the back of it. So had she not gone into town? She said she was going into town... It was cold outside. She wouldn’t go without a jacket... Angela checked the pockets of the little black jacket and sure enough there were her car keys, a hair band, and her phone. She was in the building. Angela flicked through Veronica’s year planner where it lay on her desk. The space between one and two o’clock had been coloured in with a red pen. Something was going on. Someone was hiding something. Someone was lying. The office had been built in the 80s during the boom and the company had expanded with all the gluttony of the period, and when the sequins and shoulder pads and cocaine hangovers faded so did the revenue, leaving vast swathes of the building empty caverns of faded commercial endeavour. There were three unused floors in the building, one above and two below. Angela knew them all, in fact she’d worked in most of them over the years, and further to that, she still had the keys. “Downstairs” said a voice in her head. She made her way down the back stairs that led into the corner of the building where HR had once existed, before process had bitten off its own tail and they had outsourced themselves. She got out the keys and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. She shouldn’t be here, she knew it right away. The air down here was different. It was still and cold and... sorry, somehow. The blinds were down as they always were and through them the afternoon sun drew parallel lines over rows of empty filing cabinets. Angela crept between the banks of desks, trying not to disturb the air but failing, motes spinning around her, stars around her barren planet. Silence. There was no one here, just Angela and the flecked dead skin of old employees. She had been wrong, there were no secrets here, just dead dreams, dust bunnies and abandoned venture. She went back over to the stairwell and let her daydream die too. She’d found nobody, so many times. She berated herself for having hope when there was no hope to have. She had been a stupid little girl. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl…
But wait...
What was that?
Was there a sound coming from the disused bathroom past the old meeting room? Yes, yes there was. It sounded like carpet being scrubbed. Was it the cleaner? On a Wednesday? Why would they clean an unused toilet in the dark? She moved back through the room, stomping now, swirling the air, more curious than afraid. The sound got louder as she turned the corner, turning her wide back to the striped sunlight and looking down into the area outside the men’s toilet, where natural light did not reach and no artificial ones were lit. On the far wall was the door to the toilet. It was open a little and, yes, inside there was movement. Beige shapes moved in the dark, and Angela knew that perfume. She didn’t recognise the salty note that came with it, but she recognised the huffing and the friction. It had been a long time, but she still recognised it, so out of place here in this beige box of bureaucracy. Angela adjusted the blind just a little and one of those stripes of light crawled along the floor and up a foot and onto the exposed, naked backside of the person she was hoping to save, of the boss she was hoping to hold, of the friend she dreamed she could love. She stood transfixed, her senses open like a broken tap, frigid information gushing all over her, slapping her face with a frost bitten hand, filling her with fire and ice. There it was, the thing she didn’t know she never wanted to see, an image of Veronica, getting ruined on all fours by a hunched man with knuckled hands, a pale white devil made of cartilage and lust, rapacious and carnivorous, devouring her love from back to front.
Angela baited her breath, then turned and left the scene of their crime as gracefully as she was able, her immediate grief an infinite empty universe. She walked up the stairs then out of the front door, away from the office and the questioning eyes and down the tall dark alley behind the building. She crouched between the refuse and brick and pressed her nails into the palms of her hands as hard as she could, letting the tears that fell from her chin and the blood the dripped from her fists bloom in the dirty brown puddle at her feet. She had never seen love, but she knew that what she saw in their darkness was not even an approximation. She could love her so perfectly. Veronica, you are better than that cold toilet floor. How could you let yourself be degraded like that? If it was degradation Veronica desired then Angela could give her that. Yes, she could degrade her in many, many ways. And what about her? What about Angela? If she had never even had the privilege of being handled roughly in a disused toilet, then how far was she from love? The gulf was so great it spanned the ages and her heart sunk to a new, deeper fathom. The lowest yet. A seagull dropped out of the heavens so far above her, onto the black plastic sack of shit to her left. She regarded him through the shattered windscreens of her eyes. She had never liked seagulls. Dumb, squawking, awkward creatures. In fact she hated them. She realised now that she always had. Her little eyes glinted once then she leapt out of her squat shadow, grabbed him by the neck, and, with her own torn hands, shredded him in a frenzy of bird and blood. His open throat made a noise nevermore.
She found herself at home, in dull grey feathers and red. Sat at the kitchen table she listened to the phone ring ring and the birds upstairs beat their wings and sing a panicked song. By the evening the phone had stopped and the blood had dried and she remembered herself, and her situation.
Oh yes, I was supposed to carry on working, wasn’t I?
Oh yes, yes I was. It was probably work on the phone.
It was probably her.
The world outside her window went black. Angela pressed herself up from the stand chair and on a weary frame staggered across the kitchen to the drawers. She opened the second drawer down and pushed aside all the tiny pale bones and directed her clawed hand toward the candle she knew was there. Taking the matches from the windowsill behind the sink she lit it and in its tiny sphere of warmth she stripped down and cleaned the grimy blood from that dirty seagull off her hands and face. The light flickered over her naked body, which wavered like a broken table as she prepared her clothes for the inquisition she knew she would face the following day. And, as the candle faded, so did she, and she slept the sleep of the damned there, on the torn linoleum floor.
AN ANGEL
I knew her name before I saw her face. Even in the darkness He brought into my life I could see it burning. I could see it when I closed my eyes, indelible, like it was the only light I had ever seen. The name He chose for her.
“Angel”
“An Angel”
“Angela”
A joke, surely? His laughter echoes through the cruelty, through the ages, that awful guttural squawk. She would be no angel; she would never be an angel, coming from where she did. From such atrocities. How could she ever hope to ascend? No, she would endure the same slow slide underground that I did, and my mother before me. How far back did it go, this curse? Who had let Him into our blood? I’ll never know, He keeps me alone down here, but when I breathe, when I breathed, I felt not blood in my veins but his dark flock.
Let it end.
Let it end with her.
SHE IS SUSPENDED
A new day. She was up with the birds and saw the first light through the branches of the dead tree that forked out of the front lawn. Her sleep had been short but thorough and she had woken with a rare resolve, and a new realisation. The boss that would be so mad when she got into work had no power anymore, she had left it all over that dirty little bathroom floor, and when she whisked Angela off to the meeting room for what would no doubt be a disciplinary meeting regarding her sudden and unexpected absence on the previous day, Angela would drop her bomb, and a new order would begin. One in which the Formica tables had turned, and one in which Angela would finally, finally have the upper hand.
She arrived at 8:17 am and she was first, as always. She made up her desk, returning the incomplete reports she had abandoned the previous day to the Pending file, then sat with her coffee and a crooked smile, and waited for the game to begin. Here came Veronica, walking stiffly into the room, her coat pulled tight around her and her bag held closely to her body. The coat was new, Angela noted. Where did she get it? Was it from Marks? Angela let herself picture Veronica on that bathroom floor, glistening and shameful. It was no wonder she walked funny, Angela thought, and bile rose in her throat, acrid and astringent. “Morning,” Angela said, but Veronica just removed her coat and bag and walked away from her desk in that clipped, nervous manner that Angela had seen so many times leading up to the termination of someone or other. Her belly flipped at the prospect but she settled herself with the knowledge that she had the upper hand here. She would only have to hint at what she had seen in that dusty department downstairs and Veronica would be as helpless as a bird in a cage. She loved her family so much; Angela had listened to it so many times. They were her world. He was her rock, the boy her little soldier. She would do anything to keep them. Anything.
The others had begun filing in, one after the other they walked by, their eyes flicking over her, wondering what happened yesterday; bored, hungry minds picking over carrion for scraps.
“Can I see you in the office please,” came Veronica’s voice from behind her.
This was it. She stood up and followed the aged harlot to the cold back office where she would take one more telling off, then get everything she’d ever wanted. She tingled in a V shape, down into a point at the bottom of herself. On the long walk to the back of the building time stretched away from her, like a wave retreating from shore. Angela planned her attack. She would let Veronica do her spiel, list all the things she had done wrong, and then, when she passed her the document to sign, just before her ink stained the paper, Angela would ask Veronica if she enjoyed her “new position” in HR yesterday. Angela grinned her thin grin and realised she was salivating. She wiped her chin.
The door swung open and what she saw hit her across her ruddy face. Rather than the cosy little scenario Angela had pictured in her mind she was presented with a committee. Senior Managers all in a row, each with an identical piece of paper and with their faces twisted into expressions of concern, with varying degrees of success.
“Please, take a seat Ms Hanrohan. It is ‘Ms’ isn’t it?”
What was this? This wasn’t what she usually…
“Angela,” said the one wearing the most convincing mask, “How are you today?”
“Fine,” said Angela, trying to find her feet on shifting sands.
“Good, That’s good to hear” replied the suit. His eyes narrowed into a smile for a child. “We take the well being of the staff very seriously, as you know, especially those that have been with us as long as you have.” He nodded. She nodded. What else could she do? “But we have some concerns Angela. Concerns about your conduct, and your reliability. Does that come as a surprise to you?” Angela blinked and shook her head. Because it didn’t, but...
Her colleagues feigned the support she never had in life and eventually she fell asleep listening to them speak, holding their voices to her face, feeling their vibrations against her cheek.
“Hello? Are you there? You’re through to Veronica, can I help you?”
THE ROOK
It was the day before her leave left her, and when she slept she dreamed of a shaking cage around a beating black heart. The summer sun found her through the curtains and she woke with a picture behind her eyes of the Larson trap she set on the shelf in the dark of the trees.
He was here. He had returned to her.
Dressed light in the deep blue morning she tiptoed with as much grace as her inelegant frame allowed through shrub and thicket to the secret place she would run to from her uncles, the place that she now found her cage rattling with an inhabitant. The cage held a little black rook. No older than a few weeks, his wings still so meagre that Angela thought it was a wonder he had made it in there at all. His head swivelled to the side so he could regard her better and she had a strange feeling that she was late. And what was this? Behind the little rook was the jerking remains of another, bigger bird, plucked and boned almost to death, but not quite. The rook’s black eye caught hers and then looked nowhere. She knew what he’d done, but he had only done what he must to survive, hadn’t he? The dying bird was so big, and he was just an infant. He had been defending himself, surely? The rook sat and waited as the life left the bird at his back, and Angela didn’t even put on her handling gloves, she just opened the door and he ducked under the lifted gate, took a slow, deliberate step out onto her hand and gripped her finger tight. She looked down into those black diamonds in his head and saw herself in so many ways. Angela opened her jacket and fed him into the warm place between the light beige lining and her big, low breast. He didn’t flinch; he just gripped the fabric with his little black claws and held still. On the way home he pecked at her soft skin till she bled out onto his oily black feathers and she gripped the sleeve of her jacket and let Him.
On their first night together an unseasonable wind picked up and shook the house. The tiles rattled on the roof and in the garden the fence panels fought their cases to fly away. Inside the second bedroom the light flickered and the birds flapped and panicked, their beady eyes spinning and wide and their beaks drawn open, showing off strange little tongues that poked at the air. Every one but the rook. The rook just sat under the sloping eaves of the rattling house on a stack of old books with the same stillness He had in the rattling cage. He let His eyes reflect his new home with ambivalence. Was it ambivalence? Angela regarded Him from behind the mesh door and lace curtain that hung over it, making the scene a mosaic. She felt the change. She wanted to go in and feel the soft wind from their little wings as they flew around her and landed on her shoulders and nestled in her hair. She wanted to smile as she fed them from her hands, but not that night. Not anymore. The room was His now, and when she closed her eyes to sleep it was as though she was at sea. She could feel the spray on her cheeks and the salt on her lips, she felt herself corroding, but a light pulsed to the right of her vision like a lighthouse.
She was almost there.
OFFICE HOURS
She woke to find herself naked on the beige bed linen. Warm yellow light cut under the blue curtain and to her bleary eyes it was a shore. She was washed up. She was home.
She looked through the crust in her eyes at the tall pile of neat washing. Work outfits cleaned and pressed dutifully called to her like a beacon. She wore them enthusiastically and left the dankness of her home for the fluorescence of work with a spring in her stomp, the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, and a cold sore. She boarded the train and found her seat and overhead the cuckoos flying south scrawled a “V” in the sky.
At work Veronica asked how she’s been and she was too happy to see her face and hear her voice to answer the question honestly. “I’ve been great,” she lied, “Great. Got a lot done.” Veronica asked if she enjoyed the Isle of Man with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “Yes, thank you,” Angela said, thinking of the imaginary isle that has swallowed her kitchen. “I saw a lot of wonderful things.”, then she was swept away by a calming tidal wave of paper work that cleansed her soul of the dirty black bird who filthied her mind and heart and second bedroom.
Beyond the dusty office window a charm of finches spiralled through blue sky. She felt the salvation and it tasted like honey on her lips, like a salve on her soul. But the day drew on and the phone didn’t stop ringing and Veronica wouldn’t look her way. Then the sore on her lips began to sting and she felt His damp decay creep back in, tickling up her veins, nerves stuttering on and off like a dying light. She held the arms of the chair with hands that buzzed with a static that seemed to interfere with the picture on her screen, which smeared in front of her, an electric mess of blue and black. She felt Him swarm through her brain, turning parts of her off, turning parts of her on, and she wanted to touch herself and she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. Her lips trembled but she didn’t scream, but the people looked over at her anyway, their faces full of holes, and then she was lost again at the bottom of the deep black sea.
The week drew on, Tuesday becoming Wednesday becoming Friday, and sleep, Angela’s oblivious mistress, left her aching alone in the dark with only the memory of her embrace and the taste of her beautiful oblivion on dry, angry lips.
In the night He called to her, He pecked out a message on the floorboards and she lay trembling in His pervasive presence, trying to decode His Morse code. On the third night she thought she did.
It seemed to say, “B….U….R….D…G….U….R....L”
SECRETS AND LIES
It was two in the afternoon when she realised something was wrong. Lunchtime had finished and the familiar clackety clack of keys being tapped resumed after its brief reprise the same way it always did. It was a day like any other, all these days were the same, so when Veronica didn’t come back to her desk at 1.58pm exactly, as she always, always did, Angela knew that something was amiss. An electric dread crept through her bones. Was she dead? Had her hip given way on the metal steps that lead up from the car park? Was she now lying prone in the spiked shrubs, helpless? What if Angela discovered her there, so in need? She’d be so grateful to see her! So beautiful, and vulnerable, and indebted. Angela could save her, lift her up in her short wide arms and carry her home where she could undress her and nurse and nurture her. Of course she would have to silence the birds and move the boxes from the bedroom, and she’d certainly have to take the bones off the walls, but she could always cover her head to get her upstairs, and she could keep her unconscious, if she had to.
At seven minutes past one Angela could take no more. She called Veronica’s mobile. Tap tap tap, tap tap, tap. It was ringing. No one answered but Angela noticed that the arm of her boss’ chair was vibrating. Her jacket was still on the back of it. So had she not gone into town? She said she was going into town... It was cold outside. She wouldn’t go without a jacket... Angela checked the pockets of the little black jacket and sure enough there were her car keys, a hair band, and her phone. She was in the building. Angela flicked through Veronica’s year planner where it lay on her desk. The space between one and two o’clock had been coloured in with a red pen. Something was going on. Someone was hiding something. Someone was lying. The office had been built in the 80s during the boom and the company had expanded with all the gluttony of the period, and when the sequins and shoulder pads and cocaine hangovers faded so did the revenue, leaving vast swathes of the building empty caverns of faded commercial endeavour. There were three unused floors in the building, one above and two below. Angela knew them all, in fact she’d worked in most of them over the years, and further to that, she still had the keys. “Downstairs” said a voice in her head. She made her way down the back stairs that led into the corner of the building where HR had once existed, before process had bitten off its own tail and they had outsourced themselves. She got out the keys and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. She shouldn’t be here, she knew it right away. The air down here was different. It was still and cold and... sorry, somehow. The blinds were down as they always were and through them the afternoon sun drew parallel lines over rows of empty filing cabinets. Angela crept between the banks of desks, trying not to disturb the air but failing, motes spinning around her, stars around her barren planet. Silence. There was no one here, just Angela and the flecked dead skin of old employees. She had been wrong, there were no secrets here, just dead dreams, dust bunnies and abandoned venture. She went back over to the stairwell and let her daydream die too. She’d found nobody, so many times. She berated herself for having hope when there was no hope to have. She had been a stupid little girl. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl…
But wait...
What was that?
Was there a sound coming from the disused bathroom past the old meeting room? Yes, yes there was. It sounded like carpet being scrubbed. Was it the cleaner? On a Wednesday? Why would they clean an unused toilet in the dark? She moved back through the room, stomping now, swirling the air, more curious than afraid. The sound got louder as she turned the corner, turning her wide back to the striped sunlight and looking down into the area outside the men’s toilet, where natural light did not reach and no artificial ones were lit. On the far wall was the door to the toilet. It was open a little and, yes, inside there was movement. Beige shapes moved in the dark, and Angela knew that perfume. She didn’t recognise the salty note that came with it, but she recognised the huffing and the friction. It had been a long time, but she still recognised it, so out of place here in this beige box of bureaucracy. Angela adjusted the blind just a little and one of those stripes of light crawled along the floor and up a foot and onto the exposed, naked backside of the person she was hoping to save, of the boss she was hoping to hold, of the friend she dreamed she could love. She stood transfixed, her senses open like a broken tap, frigid information gushing all over her, slapping her face with a frost bitten hand, filling her with fire and ice. There it was, the thing she didn’t know she never wanted to see, an image of Veronica, getting ruined on all fours by a hunched man with knuckled hands, a pale white devil made of cartilage and lust, rapacious and carnivorous, devouring her love from back to front.
Angela baited her breath, then turned and left the scene of their crime as gracefully as she was able, her immediate grief an infinite empty universe. She walked up the stairs then out of the front door, away from the office and the questioning eyes and down the tall dark alley behind the building. She crouched between the refuse and brick and pressed her nails into the palms of her hands as hard as she could, letting the tears that fell from her chin and the blood the dripped from her fists bloom in the dirty brown puddle at her feet. She had never seen love, but she knew that what she saw in their darkness was not even an approximation. She could love her so perfectly. Veronica, you are better than that cold toilet floor. How could you let yourself be degraded like that? If it was degradation Veronica desired then Angela could give her that. Yes, she could degrade her in many, many ways. And what about her? What about Angela? If she had never even had the privilege of being handled roughly in a disused toilet, then how far was she from love? The gulf was so great it spanned the ages and her heart sunk to a new, deeper fathom. The lowest yet. A seagull dropped out of the heavens so far above her, onto the black plastic sack of shit to her left. She regarded him through the shattered windscreens of her eyes. She had never liked seagulls. Dumb, squawking, awkward creatures. In fact she hated them. She realised now that she always had. Her little eyes glinted once then she leapt out of her squat shadow, grabbed him by the neck, and, with her own torn hands, shredded him in a frenzy of bird and blood. His open throat made a noise nevermore.
She found herself at home, in dull grey feathers and red. Sat at the kitchen table she listened to the phone ring ring and the birds upstairs beat their wings and sing a panicked song. By the evening the phone had stopped and the blood had dried and she remembered herself, and her situation.
Oh yes, I was supposed to carry on working, wasn’t I?
Oh yes, yes I was. It was probably work on the phone.
It was probably her.
The world outside her window went black. Angela pressed herself up from the stand chair and on a weary frame staggered across the kitchen to the drawers. She opened the second drawer down and pushed aside all the tiny pale bones and directed her clawed hand toward the candle she knew was there. Taking the matches from the windowsill behind the sink she lit it and in its tiny sphere of warmth she stripped down and cleaned the grimy blood from that dirty seagull off her hands and face. The light flickered over her naked body, which wavered like a broken table as she prepared her clothes for the inquisition she knew she would face the following day. And, as the candle faded, so did she, and she slept the sleep of the damned there, on the torn linoleum floor.
AN ANGEL
I knew her name before I saw her face. Even in the darkness He brought into my life I could see it burning. I could see it when I closed my eyes, indelible, like it was the only light I had ever seen. The name He chose for her.
“Angel”
“An Angel”
“Angela”
A joke, surely? His laughter echoes through the cruelty, through the ages, that awful guttural squawk. She would be no angel; she would never be an angel, coming from where she did. From such atrocities. How could she ever hope to ascend? No, she would endure the same slow slide underground that I did, and my mother before me. How far back did it go, this curse? Who had let Him into our blood? I’ll never know, He keeps me alone down here, but when I breathe, when I breathed, I felt not blood in my veins but his dark flock.
Let it end.
Let it end with her.
SHE IS SUSPENDED
A new day. She was up with the birds and saw the first light through the branches of the dead tree that forked out of the front lawn. Her sleep had been short but thorough and she had woken with a rare resolve, and a new realisation. The boss that would be so mad when she got into work had no power anymore, she had left it all over that dirty little bathroom floor, and when she whisked Angela off to the meeting room for what would no doubt be a disciplinary meeting regarding her sudden and unexpected absence on the previous day, Angela would drop her bomb, and a new order would begin. One in which the Formica tables had turned, and one in which Angela would finally, finally have the upper hand.
She arrived at 8:17 am and she was first, as always. She made up her desk, returning the incomplete reports she had abandoned the previous day to the Pending file, then sat with her coffee and a crooked smile, and waited for the game to begin. Here came Veronica, walking stiffly into the room, her coat pulled tight around her and her bag held closely to her body. The coat was new, Angela noted. Where did she get it? Was it from Marks? Angela let herself picture Veronica on that bathroom floor, glistening and shameful. It was no wonder she walked funny, Angela thought, and bile rose in her throat, acrid and astringent. “Morning,” Angela said, but Veronica just removed her coat and bag and walked away from her desk in that clipped, nervous manner that Angela had seen so many times leading up to the termination of someone or other. Her belly flipped at the prospect but she settled herself with the knowledge that she had the upper hand here. She would only have to hint at what she had seen in that dusty department downstairs and Veronica would be as helpless as a bird in a cage. She loved her family so much; Angela had listened to it so many times. They were her world. He was her rock, the boy her little soldier. She would do anything to keep them. Anything.
The others had begun filing in, one after the other they walked by, their eyes flicking over her, wondering what happened yesterday; bored, hungry minds picking over carrion for scraps.
“Can I see you in the office please,” came Veronica’s voice from behind her.
This was it. She stood up and followed the aged harlot to the cold back office where she would take one more telling off, then get everything she’d ever wanted. She tingled in a V shape, down into a point at the bottom of herself. On the long walk to the back of the building time stretched away from her, like a wave retreating from shore. Angela planned her attack. She would let Veronica do her spiel, list all the things she had done wrong, and then, when she passed her the document to sign, just before her ink stained the paper, Angela would ask Veronica if she enjoyed her “new position” in HR yesterday. Angela grinned her thin grin and realised she was salivating. She wiped her chin.
The door swung open and what she saw hit her across her ruddy face. Rather than the cosy little scenario Angela had pictured in her mind she was presented with a committee. Senior Managers all in a row, each with an identical piece of paper and with their faces twisted into expressions of concern, with varying degrees of success.
“Please, take a seat Ms Hanrohan. It is ‘Ms’ isn’t it?”
What was this? This wasn’t what she usually…
“Angela,” said the one wearing the most convincing mask, “How are you today?”
“Fine,” said Angela, trying to find her feet on shifting sands.
“Good, That’s good to hear” replied the suit. His eyes narrowed into a smile for a child. “We take the well being of the staff very seriously, as you know, especially those that have been with us as long as you have.” He nodded. She nodded. What else could she do? “But we have some concerns Angela. Concerns about your conduct, and your reliability. Does that come as a surprise to you?” Angela blinked and shook her head. Because it didn’t, but...
