The Bird Room by Chris Killen Read Free Book Online

filthy. But she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s putting on music – Serge Gains-bourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson , the last thing I listened to – and slinking around in the mess. She picks books off the floor to read the spines. She knocks nothing over.
    â€˜You’re a …What are you again?’ she calls through.
    I’m a bit scared of her.
    In the kitchen, as the kettle comes to the boil, I take a big swig from the vodka bottle. I’m too sober and all I can think about is that winking taxi driver in the mirror. If I turn round, he’ll be there in the doorway, gawping at me.
    The vodka stings my ulcer.
    â€˜I work from home,’ I say. ‘It’s pretty dull. You don’t want to know.’
    This is how we met. I was sat at a table in the club, not even able to peel the label off my £ 1 alcopop. I wasn’t dancing. I didn’t know why I’d come. And then a girl appeared. She’d been stood up, she said. I realise now how contrived that sounds. I guess it was. She contrived it. She approached me, asked if I was alone and sat down. (Maybe she was lying. But at the time, both of us piss-drunk, it seemed pretty plausible.) And I was left thinking, She has decided to like me, now I must decide to like her, too.
    So I sat there, squinting at her, trying hard to like her.
    It wasn’t hard.
    She’s very pretty.
    She has black hair cut just above the shoulder and black eyes and pitch white skin.
    She has crooked teeth and thin piano-y fingers.
    She dresses well.
    She’s confident.
    She’s smart.
    (I have no idea what she’s doing in my house.)
    We get up from the table and go to a corner of the club. She puts her arms around my neck and sucks the collar of my shirt. A man comes over and taps her on the shoulder. He’s thick-shouldered and brooding, his face in shadow.He goes away. She’s ignored him. We don’t dance. We just stay there in the corner until the lights come on. Out in the street she stands at the kerb with her arm sticking into the road, one corner of her skirt hitched up. She’s grinning at me. A taxi pulls over and I get into it, not knowing who she is, and then at some point I sober up.
    Now I’m standing in the kitchen of my house waiting for the kettle to boil and there’s a strange girl in my living room.
    â€˜What do you do again?’ I call back.
    This one I know. I remember it from earlier.
    Everything is silent. Even the clock, ticking, is not making a noise.
    â€˜I’m in eyes,’ she whispers.
    She’s snuck up behind me.
    â€˜I work in an optician’s. It’s rubbish. I should quit.’
    I turn round. She’s taken off her clothes.
    Her eyes are wide and black. We aren’t using a condom. I didn’t ask if she’s on the pill. She isn’t blinking. She bites her lip. She’s so loud she has to, to stop the sound of her from escaping out of her mouth and going through the walls and into the ears of next door’s baby. Her eyes don’t close. Instead they widen. They widen and widen again and just keep widening, until I am painfully sober and painfully aware of her watching me, and that once this is over, even if I never see her again, she will be able to remember the face of mefucking her. Here she is, scratching my back and biting her lip and no sound is coming from her mouth except breathing and her eyes do not close but instead they widen and widen and widen, until impossible, until they are like huge black lenses recording me.
    Afterwards it’s warm and quiet. Blue, 5 a.m. light. We lie on top of the sheets with our legs tangled and I wonder what we’ll say when we wake up in the morning, hungover, not-drunk. Will we pretend it didn’t happen?
    (Maybe I ask the question out loud.)
    â€˜I won’t regret this,’ she says.
    She’s almost asleep.
    â€˜But sometimes I just need to do something and not think of the