The Bird Room Read Online Free PDF

now. Duncan was looking sheepish. He was looking sheepish out thewindow. He mumbled ‘Sorry’ or something and then drove them to the shoot. Outside the house, he tried to turn himself back into a nice guy by asking Helen if she wanted him to wait for her, to give her a lift back afterwards.
    Helen said no, she’d be alright with the bus.
    Once Duncan was gone, Helen swore to herself never to get in a car with Duncan again. Fucking pickled onion. She’d find her own work from now on. The sister agreed this was a good idea.
    A small terraced house, like the first result on a Google image search for ‘English suburbia’. Helen passes a cat on her way to the door, an oil-stained moggy, creeping out from under a Ford Escort. The sister stops to stroke it, getting oil on her fingers, and is still there saying something to it when the door opens.
    A squat little man in a woollen jumper and a sagging pair of trousers says, ‘You must be Helen,’ and ushers her in. His beard and fingers are nicotine-yellowed. Helen goes into the hall. She looks back for the sister but the sister is gone. She does that sometimes; she disappears.
    The man with the beard takes Helen to a room upstairs, one with plastic sheeting taped to the floor and a cheap-looking camcorder on a tripod in the middle. Things are laid out on a little coffee table; a vibrator, a tub of jelly, some ‘Chinese love beads’ and an emptyplastic washbasin. The man assures Helen that he has ‘connections in Germany’, that that’s where the tape is going, that no one over here will see it.
    Then he gives her the two hundred quid up-front and offers to take her coat.
    â€˜Right. Let’s get to it, eh?’ he says.

Helen is not even slightly asleep when she hears the voices.
    They are whispering. The front door has just slammed. It’s five or so in the morning. Helen has the lights off. She’s been lying in her bed, on her back, trying her hardest to get to sleep by focusing on her nostrils and the air going in and out of them. She read this somewhere. She is trying to focus on one nostril at a time, isolating them in turn.
    (One of the voices is Corrine’s.)
    The air goes whewww , in through one nostril.
    (The other is a strange man’s.)
    The air goes whewww , out through the other.
    â€˜Darren, fuck me.’
    Helen is awake. Her nostril-meditation has gone square out the window.
    Helen lies as still as she can. She pictures Darren as a black guy, she doesn’t know why. Tall and well-dressed. He is still wearing most of his clothes as he has sex with Corrine and his breathing makes it through the wall and into Helen’s ears.
    Darren’s breathing is deep and raspy like the guiro in the school music room.
    Corrine’s is high and papery like home-made Christmas lanterns.
    They aren’t using the bed, Helen imagines. They’re up against the wall. Corrine has her legs wrapped round Darren’s back. Darren still has all his clothes on. Just his flies and his belt are undone.
    Then there is a pause.
    As she waits for more noises, Helen imagines how they met, with herself as Corrine: I was working on the blackjack table. It was getting on for three when this bloke sits down. It’s a quiet night – pretty much dead, only a couple of regulars playing – and then he turns up, plays a hundred quid and quickly loses it all. He has nice eyes, dark and black. He’s dressed well, too – a suit and shirt and this little gold chain that I can see beneath his collar. He brings out a big wad of twenties and cashes another hundred and loses that, too. I have to be very professional not to laugh at him. He doesn’t even win one hand. It’s quite sad, really, and he seems serious, as if he’s coming in here to lose on purpose – like this is a special game he’s playing and one win will screw it all up. Maybe he is, I think. I can’t stop looking at his