The Bird Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

hands, either. He has such long neat perfect fingers .
    The guiro and Christmas lanterns resume their scraping and fluttering.
    He doesn’t look at me again, apart from that first time, and I really want him to. I’m breathing heavier and sticking my tits out, hoping he’ll look at them. We have to wear such horrible blouses in here and I hope he doesn’t think I’m ugly. I start making jokes with the regulars in the hope that he’ll laugh too, but he doesn’t. When he cashes a third hundred his hand touches mine. We aren’t supposed to touch the customers, ever, but I don’t say anything. It only happens for a second and I get wet just from him touching my hand .
    They are louder now. It sounds like Christmas morning in the school music room. The lanterns are going fuck, fuck, fuck over and over again.
    Then – all of a sudden – he gets up and leaves. I watch him walk out the door and my heart sinks. It’s gone three and I don’t finish till four. At the end of my shift I check out, get my stuff and as I’m standing outside waiting for my taxi I feel this big warm hand on my shoulder. I turn round and it’s him. He’s been waiting for me all this time. And we don’t even say anything then, we both just wait and get into my taxi when it arrives. In the back of the cab, he puts his hands on me and whispers in my ear and I melt .
    The noises have stopped. Helen is lying in her bed, her heart hammering hard. Something is caught in herthroat. She’s excited and scared. She’s just had a very good idea.
    This is the thing I’ll tell him, she thinks. This is the story I will tell WR.

It turned out the real Darren – the one who slunk down the stairs behind Corrine, as Helen was halfway through lunchtime Neighbours – was some bulldog white bloke with shit tattoos and sovereign rings and a thick pink neck like uncooked sausage skin.
    This is fine.
    Helen’s Darren is tucked away safely inside her. She’s polished him up a bit, added things to him. And later she will ask Corrine a list of questions about the casino – little details to make it sound more plausible – because research is what good actresses do.
    Corrine said her and Darren were going out for lunch. She told Helen she wouldn’t be home before work.
    Helen’s in Corrine’s room.
    She’s lying in Corrine’s bed, pulling the covers around her, sniffing in the musky smell of their post-sex bodies. She’s dressed in Corrine’s spare casino uniform and seeing herself from above, like some kind of glamorous Hollywood suicide crime scene photograph; tranquillisers, champagne, her make-up immaculate.
    Helen has all the windows open. Maybe this will cure the damp, somehow. It is raining and freezing, and the curtains of Corrine’s room flutter, like there are men behind them; Tom Selleck, Ethan Hawke and Chandler from Friends . They watch Helen curl and uncurl, swishing her legs in Corrine’s bed. They have their big celebrity hands down their trousers.

Helen follows a stream of middle-aged middle-class men and women off the bus. She’s at the very edge of the city now, the nicer part of town. Victorian townhouses. BMWs. It’s still raining here, but only very lightly. Streets like this look nice in the rain. The pavements are dark. They reflect the just-gone-on streetlamps. Helen has the address written down on the back of an envelope. She holds it in her hand. Her hand shakes. She isn’t nervous. She isn’t nervous. Two weeks ago she pissed into a brandy glass. She filled it to the brim, in front of a cameraman and a soundman and this bloke who just watched who said he was the producer. She wanked herself off with a shoe. She shouldn’t be nervous.
    Helen is stood outside his house.
    No BMW in the drive.
    The front garden is overgrown.
    Something – a skirt? – is tangled in the bushes.
    She has to step round