TERMINAL, page 9
“Can we talk about yesterday,” said Nicola from Finance. What was she doing here? Why would… “Angela, after lunch you were seen coming back into the office and you sat for a while at your seat like everyone else, but according to reports from your colleagues you appeared to suddenly become angry. It says here,” her eyes flicked over a stack of shuffled papers, “…that you banged your hands on your desk and were heard swearing to yourself. Can you explain what the matter was?”
“No I didn’t,” said Angela, her wide white forehead gridded with lines and beaded with sweat as her mind showed her pictures. Maybe she did hit the desk but… “I was just wondering where she was,” Angela said, pointing a crooked finger at the woman that had deceived and abandoned her in ways she couldn’t face. “She was late and I was worried…” but she couldn’t go on. To say more would be to expose her secret and sacrifice the only thing she had left. If she said those words to these people they would lose their power, and despite her predicament, that power was still the only thing she cared about.
“Why should you be worried where Veronica is? What concern is it of yours?” said a suit with a man in it that Angela didn’t recognise. Who was he? Was he from another site?
“Well I just wondered and...”
“You “just wondered” where your line manager was and thought you’d leave work for the day?” said the man, all air quotes and cocked brows. “Angela this is most concerning. As far as we can tell you came back from a perfectly normal morning at work, flew into a rage for no discernible reason then left the building, leaving your jacket and handbag, and then didn’t answer our phone calls, or the door when Veronica called at your home after work…”
“What?!” she asked, “she didn’t come to my house…”
“Yes I did,” said Veronica meekly and without meeting her gaze, “at six fifteen. I knocked and knocked and you didn’t answer. I could see the TV on.” She was lying, and both women knew it. Angela hadn’t had the TV on. Veronica was hedging her bets. She must have been with him again, that angry white devil. Defiled twice in one day... my God she was a filthy little bitch, she thought. Filthier than Angela had dared dream.
“No!” said Angela, shouting now, unsure where to start, unsure how to defend herself. “I was, I was sick and I, I hadn’t slept well, I don’t sleep well, the birds keep me up and…. I’m on my own you see...”
“Angela, calm down, please,” he said, and all their eyes sang along, birds on a wire. “It’s not just yesterday is it? This is the second time in two weeks that you’ve left early without explanation and quite aside from these unauthorised absences we’ve had growing concerns about your conduct for a while now, documented here in your private meetings with Veronica, who, by all accounts has really struggled with you Angela.”
Bitch.
“I’m afraid we really have no choice but to suspend you for a period of six weeks to allow you time to rest.” Angela could feel herself start to ice over. No. No, she couldn’t be alone for six weeks.
“No, please,” she started, but they just looked down at their papers.
“And furthermore we must demand that you do not make contact with the office nor your colleagues during this period, even if you are pretending to be someone else.” Veronica caught a snigger in her throat and busied herself scribbling.
Ok. Ok. Angela saw what was happening. She dropped her defence and let her face hang loosely from her soft bones. She signed a paper with an angry spike, turned on a callus heel, and left the room. She took her bags and jackets from the silent office then left the place as laughter began to build like a tidal wave behind her.
Angela sat at home in a kind of terrible waking dream, with an image in her mind’s eye of her desk and her phone and her workstation at the bottom of a black and white pit. She brought in an old office chair from the garage and sat at the kitchen table and tapped at imaginary keys with variable degrees of accuracy and despite her best efforts her thoughts drifted upstairs, to the rook in the second bedroom. He had grown so big, so quickly and the larger he got the darker his greasy wings became until it seemed like there was no light left and the birds that he didn’t kill spoke of nothing, but their empty eyes said they had no more hope to lose.
She was eight. There was nowhere else for her to go because I left her so alone so she lived with her uncles. My brothers. Twins. They were all that was left. They never married. They had our father’s eyes, and his fists. They called her “Burd Gurl” because of her strange little nose; turned down and sharp like a beak. She didn’t ask for that beak, but she had it. Her mother had it too, but I could never tell her that. I never spoke of that woman because some secrets are to be whispered, like these I am whispering to you, and some are for the void, never to be spoken, even in our final moments. Even at the end of everything I would never say those things.
FROM THE HEDGEROW
The darkness rolled over her and she hid in it. The birds in her brain sang their maddening song and, as the last lights blinked out in the street she lived on Angela grabbed her black mac and, wrapped in plastic, made for the night.
She zigged and zagged over puddle and cobble and they reflected her back as she stamped on her own warped image, and by two in the morning she was out of town and at the bottom of the winding lane that lead up to Veronica's house. Even from the bottom of the lane she could see that one downstairs light remained on. The kitchen light. The same kitchen Angela heard so much about every day at work. The kitchen where this woman played out what Angela now knew was just pretence of perfect domesticity. Button the shirt. Glaze the pastry. Pretend to be happy. Fool us all, you bitch. Well now here they were, with one comfortable in her shadows and the other exposed in her prison. The light came through the bushes into Angela's little black eyes, which darted around the scene. She was looking for something, hints or clues to this dirty hidden life that both fascinated and appalled her. And she missed her company, the scent of petals that emanated from her. She wanted more of her. More secrets. More power. A reason to end it. And there she was, in her shabby pink dressing gown, sat half on a tall breakfast barstool taking big glugs from a glass of pink wine and propping her rose tinted glasses on the end of her nose, tapping out texts, all fingers and thumbs. No prizes for guessing to whom, Angela thought, and gagged. It was late, maybe 2:30 am, and suddenly Veronica was moving. She was getting up and putting on her shoes and she was leaving the house! Still in her dressing gown too.
“What kind of madness was this? What kind of maniac goes out at this time?” Angela questioned, wiping tears from her eyes.
An engine purred up Veronica’s lane and Angela began to understand. It died in the night and two shadows met on the black lane, then went together through a hedge and up over a field into the deep blue night. Angela knew only too well the scene that would play out over that copse and she had no desire to see that again. She had stolen enough secrets. She made her way away from another agony, past the dark blue Mondeo that had arrived while she squatted in the bushes. The car window was open and the air moved toward her, bringing with it the smell of men, of leather and diesel and sweat. She stuck her arm in and tugged the handbrake sharply up and down. The hunk of steel lurched backwards a little, moving slowly at first but getting faster and faster, churning up gravel and verge. She took the next left and walked back towards town, and as she did she heard the car tear through the bushes and drop down the embankment, crashing into the river, metal and glass meeting rock and water, elements fighting in the night. The sound wrapped itself around her and she smiled for the first time in weeks.
A plan began to form in her mind.
Yes, said the rook in her head.
Yes.
IT BURNS LIKE AUTUMN
Autumn encroached into her vision. Cell by cell the world around her started to die, and she found comfort in it. Summer would vibrate at too high a frequency for her, it is too unstable, too unpredictable, all that heat and light. She was better surrounded by its charred remains. She was born in them after all, on this same day, in a graveyard, in autumn.
She took a walk through it, through the death, through the decay. The leaves burned in the trees then flaked away, falling in spirals around her giving shape to the wind, leaving their branches alone and complex and beautiful.
Skeletons.
Varicose veins.
She stopped on an overpass and leaned over the barrier, looking down. She could feel the sky at her back and it felt like the end was near, and it was. A crow sat on the power lines that sliced across the sky with something squirming in its beak. It dropped an infant rabbit on the Tarmac. Cars zipped over the body, crushing its bones and oozing its purple tubes out of it, onto and into that nasty black highway. The bird jerked its head left and right then hopped down off the bridge and into the open entrails, bouncing and picking at the spoils between all that metal danger.
I remember her birth, in that burning ring of fire. The chanting, the awful chanting rang through me for years. Whenever it was dark, it was there. I only had to close my eyes. I knew not the words but the intention was only too clear. In the end I jumped from a bridge to stop that evil hum and yes, the sticks and stones hurt her mother, I saw the wounds and welts as they formed on her pregnant belly, but none hurt so much as those words, forged in fire and ungodly ritual.
I can still hear them now.
The way they cut her out, held her up to His face…
No father should… I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
No father should let that happen.
I see Him. I see HIM through the back of my head! He’s behind me!
Oh Lord, He’s behind me!
My God it’s so dark here.
My God….
THREADBARE
Time blows through us, leaves us threadbare. It echoes across the cracked earth, a God and a monster. A prison and a desert.
Three, six, nine, twelve. All those wasted moments thrown into that booming black hole, a black eye wide in the dark. Loneliness replicates, creating more of itself, her reflected solitude birthing cogs and numbers.
Her hands spin backwards. She’s aching and creaking, then she breaks. The sands blow out of her shattered hourglass. She mixes it with the saline that streams from her face, kneading and fisting with broken arms. Chemicals react. A structure forms. A church. The heat of her wasted love cracks its fine walls and screams at me across the plains of this Other Place and I reverberate forever in its stinging wind.
Now you are nowhere in a cathedral of your own loneliness. The wind carries your song to me over time’s scorched veined terrain and, yes, it reminds me of you, but more than anything it reminds me of me. A version of me. A terrible version of me.
And though no one else ever did, and though it’s too late to save either of us now, for all it’s worth, I loved you Angela.
LET US PRAY
Suspended in time Angela's life became a spiral, a curling downward movement that forced the blood away from her brain and loosened the ties that bound her, setting her adrift. She had never had company, but she had never been so alone. She missed Veronica and work and sleep’s blind embrace, and the time and solitude they left behind ate into each other, becoming an echoing cathedral, a place to worship my legacy, and the madness I left her.
Beyond the voile curtain that webbed the front window the lights in the houses that lined her street blinked out one by one, then, once the last had been extinguished Angela rid herself of her clothes and went outside, into the night, down to the bottom of the garden to the dirty earth beneath the big tree. She fell onto her knees and took it into her hands, smearing and pressing into herself the very earth she came from. The stars above winked while the moon looked away and when she went back inside she was wild eyed and alive and infused with the power of the negative light. In the second bedroom she pulled the door shut and fell once more to her knees. The big black bird bounced from foot to foot, ducking and weaving his head, His dark wings taking so much light from the room Angela could barely tell if He was there at all. “Which one?” she asked and waited for an answer that never came. She would have to choose for herself. She got to her feet, pushing herself up on fat white knees clad in earth and went over to the birds she tried to love in the daylight, all huddled together in the corner of the room amongst piles of the most sapphic Woman’s Own from the nineteen eighties. With hungry wide eyes and a clawed white hand she plucked a brown sparrow from the flock.
“Is this what you want?!” she shouted at the rook. He didn’t blink. “Is this…” she tailed off, shaking. She looked in his little sparrow eyes. There was a universe in there.
She chewed the head off the little brown bird, who offered only the smallest bit of resistance as her teeth separated his tiny vertebrae. The air became a frenzy of beak and bird. Wings flapped and claws clawed and blood dribbled gently down Angela’s hand. She knelt again before her dark black master and painted red circles and lines on her low belly with the stump of its neck, thrashing her head and thrusting her hips, her blood pumping her dirty urges, chanting words from another place into a billow of down and dust. Feathers flew and sparrows shrieked and Angela lay back on the clay white floor and put her fingers inside her wrinkled wetness. She opened herself and picked a floating plume out of the air then stroked it over her tender swelling beneath the cloud of chaos storming above her, the black rook calm in its eye. “Tell me. Tell me you want me. Say it.”
“I want you,” He said.
“No, say it in her voice.”
“I want you,” Veronica said through a black bird’s beak. Angela’s legs bucked, rigid and restless, and her body wracked until it could wrack no more. Then she seized, then fell still, fevered, clammy, and spent. A thick energy filled the room, coming out of her, filling the room that smelled of sulphur and the sea. What had she done? What had she conjured? What had she asked of Him? Her blood pooled cold and she held herself in panic and regret.
The birds fell silent and lined up all in a row. Their feathers still hung in the air but the room was pregnant with expectation. Then it began to shake, the air tight with a terror from beyond this place, and it brought with it a sound, a distant friction, like knives being sharpened in a chasm. Louder and louder it got, until the sound became like a band around her head, getting tighter and tighter until she squealed like a pig on a spit. Her scream fought the air and forced the feathers out of it, saltpetre to their bullets of lead.
BAM
BAM
BAM
They hit the plastic covered boards hard and heavy with a furious pelt and she covered her face, protecting herself from the buckshot, while sixty-six little beaked heads looked away from her where she lay naked and addled in the grime of her crimes. The last feather hit the ground with a splintering crack and at once the birds stiffened as if stricken with the same rigors that had seized her only moments before. Their heads turned toward her, cracking and clicking like a terrible ratchet until their beady little eyes were all trained on her, all one hundred and thirty two. Then their beaks began to open in perfect synchronicity, but they opened too wide, far too wide, so wide she could hear fine sinews separating, coming away from keratin and cartilage, mandible tearing from mandible until they were all screaming the same silent scream. Then a whistling began again, emanating from their awful yawns, like the wind between the eaves, and with it came a voice from The Other Place. It said, “I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT I WANT.” And with one loud crack every one of their precious bird necks snapped into a right angle, the wrong angle, and they fell to the floor for the last time, broken and lifeless. She crawled through their dead bodies, out of the room, pathetic and sobbing, cursed and cursing, and pulled the screen door closed. At 4:30am she fell asleep on the worn hallway floor, the carpet wet with her own regret. She woke when she heard the alarm rising from the adjacent bedroom and pushed herself up into a seated position. She looked down at her badly daubed body art now dry and brown and then back at the second bedroom. The rook was stood on the floor at the other side of the screen door.
He had watched her sleep.
THERE IS A MAN AT THE DOOR
KNOCK KNOCK.
There was a man at the door. She could see him from where she still lay on the floor, her naked body raw on the rough weave of the old carpet. She could see his black shape through the textured glass, wide, tall and motionless. “Go downstairs,” said the rook in her mind, so she did, and she held her hands over her breasts and the dark triangle beneath her painted belly. “Open the door,” the black bird said next, and through the glass the man at the door seemed to grow wider and taller. She saw his fists swinging by his wide thighs and her head began to shake.
“No. No I won’t,” she said.
“But I brought him here for you,” He replied. “Love him. This is what I want.”
“NO, no I can’t. Please don’t make me,” she said into her hands. She could feel the intentions of the man at the door, boring through the glass, penetrating her flesh, trained on the circle she painted in blood on her belly.
