ANGELA Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 in 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