The Bird Room by Chris Killen Read Free Book Online Page A

consequences.’
    I’ll lock the door, I think.
    (The door doesn’t have a lock.)
    Somehow I’ll trap us here.
    â€˜Hold on,’ she says, suddenly awake and sitting up.
    This is it, I think. She’s leaving. She’s left. She’s gone into the street, naked. She’s disappeared.
    She leans across me, her head and arms doing something confusing over the side of the bed. I can hear the rattle and jingle of things in her handbag. She comes up holding a little plastic container, tilts her head forward and puts a finger to her eye, the left one, wiping it across the pupil.
    â€˜See,’ she says, sticking the finger under my nose. ‘I almost forgot.’
    On the tip of her finger is a contact lens.
    â€˜I don’t need these,’ she says. ‘I stole them from work. I just like putting things in my eyes.’

This is the first time I’ve noticed the scar. It starts at the curve of her shoulder and curls down around her arm. It is a darker nastier blue than the rest of her 3.15 a.m. skin. It’s about six inches long.
    She’s asleep.
    I lean over her, close enough for my breath to shuffle the wispy little hairs on her skin. There are more scars, too; lighter ones that criss-cross down her arm. But this one is the biggest.
    I imagine a razor blade, a blot of blood on toilet paper and a locked bathroom door. I imagine other invisible scars that run underneath her skin. They shoot and crackle like a scar firework display.
    She moves sometimes when she sleeps. She hunches and starts, as if someone in her dream is poking her witha stick or catching her in a net. She makes noises, she moans, but so far she hasn’t woken up. Once she said something that sounded like ‘Darren’. This is the fourth time she’s slept in my bed. I really don’t think she’s going home now and I still don’t know where her home is. She has a toothbrush here, a big bag of clothes and today a couple more boxes.
    I lick the scar. It tastes of salt and shower gel.
    There is a glass girl in my bed. If I ask too many questions she will shatter. So I’ll wait for her to answer her own questions and in the meantime play join-the-freckles in the dark. Here are some of the freckles I have joined by myself, by not going to sleep:

    We went to the pub earlier – The Princess and Noose, my local – after she finished work. She asked what was wrong.
    â€˜Nothing,’ I said.
    â€˜You know, you can ask me anything you want,’ she said.
    (I don’t believe her.)
    â€˜Ask me a question,’ she said.
    So I asked, ‘Would you like another drink?’
    She smiled and said, ‘Vodka and Coke.’
    Stood elbow-to-elbow with all the shifty old men at the bar, I had to stop myself from turning round and checking she was still at the table.
    Stop it, I told myself. Your luck has turned. Your luck has turned around on itself like an owl’s head. She is not going to run away from you, at least not this evening.
    Barry, one of the regulars, kept nudging me on the arm and asking who she was.
    â€˜She’s my girlfriend,’ I told him.
    â€˜About time, lad,’ he said. ‘We all had you pegged as a poof.’
    Across the table, she kept on smiling at me.
    (She looked very sad when she did it.)
    Each time I went for a piss, I expected to get back to that table and find she’d gone. There wouldn’t even be her drink there any more, and it would turn out to be some elaborate practical joke which everyone in the Noose is in on.
    â€˜Fuck’s sake. What’s wrong?’ she says, suddenly, slamming her glass on the table for effect. Her lips curl at the edges. ‘Something’s up. Tell me.’
    But I don’t quite know how. I’m sitting on my hands, not even permitting myself a sip of my drink. If I do or say the wrong thing she will become a terrible accident. There are hard wooden floors in this pub. She’ll