The Bird Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

her once, for the last time, one afternoon when they were floating around Primark, fingering the blouses. ‘I’m a professional actress.’
    â€˜Okay,’ Helen’s mum said. ‘Helen.’
    It felt good to hear her say it, finally. It felt scary and complete, like triumph and like standing at the top of a massive cliff.
    Helen went into a dressing room and looked at herself in the mirror. She said ‘Helen, Helen, Helen’ in her head. She bit her tongue, tried on a dress and quietly burst into tears.

Sometimes – like when she’s standing in a long queue at the Tesco Express and shuffling her basket forward with her feet – Helen feels cobbled-together. She feels like a rack of gaudy blouses and T-shirts in the Barnardo’s charity shop. She looks at other people in the basket queue and wonders if they feel the same way. She wonders if their lives make sense. Sometimes she tries to make a list out of herself.
    Helen eats fish-finger sandwiches at least three times a week.
    She’s never learned to swim.
    She feels really beautiful only when she has sex with someone and then only sometimes, and then only while it’s happening.
    Helen thinks of herself as an actress, a proper one. Not a model and definitely not a porno one.
    When she was still Clair she never finished her GCSEs, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid.
    I am the one in control, she tells herself. When filming a scene – when she is the thing being filmed – she imagines herself as a cog. Sometimes it’s the cog in her auntie’s cuckoo clock. She is turning. She is responsible for making the wooden cuckoo pop out through his wooden doors once an hour; she is responsible for making him chirp.
    Helen listens to pop music on the bubble radio in the kitchen. She’s never yet heard a song that means something to her. She really likes the idea of the radio, though / all that infinite variety / the tuning dial / the one wonderful song she will eventually happen on / what will happen when she does.
    Helen’s first sexual experience was at eleven years old with a candle. Her mum and dad were watching telly downstairs. It was turned up loud enough to carry through the floorboards. They were laughing and people on telly were laughing too. It was a funny programme. The candle didn’t have a name. It was clammy in her fingers. She hid herself under the covers, shivering and hot, and became the flame on the end of it.
    Duncan tried it on with her in his car, just before the shoot. Duncan sometimes finds her work. Helen is trying to find her own work, too, but it was Duncan who got her into it. He had this mate who worked for a website. He knew people. She met him in a pub.
    Duncan was sweating at the neck.
    He was stubbing his fag out.
    He was smelling like a pickled onion.
    He was smiling at her.
    When you unscrew the lid of a jar of pickled onions and put your fingers inside, you are the one reaching for the onion. But when Helen opened the door to Duncan’s car, the onion was the one reaching for her. It was reaching for her leg with a bloated red hand – for her left leg, right up near the crotch.
    Helen didn’t know what to do. Duncan had never tried it on with her before. She really needed a lift to the shoot. She didn’t know where it was on her own.
    So Helen closed her eyes and imagined her sister was in the car with them.
    â€˜Get the fuck off her,’ the sister said, ‘you fucking pickled onion. This isn’t a chip shop, mate.’
    It would’ve made Helen laugh, under different circumstances.
    Duncan moved his hand up and down her leg. She could hear him breathing heavily. She could hear the breath hissing between his thick chapped lips and bad teeth. When the hand moved to her crotch, Helen grabbed it at the wrist. The hand became limp. She let go of the wrist and the hand moved away.
    Helen opened her eyes.
    The hand was on the steering wheel