Little Bird

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He shrugged non-committedly. ‘He’s always been like that. We’ve had this conversation ever since we were kids. He’s a grown up, Jimmy. It’s not our job to rein him in all the time is it? And to be honest I’ve got enough to worry about other than Eugene’s benders.’

He realised that Jimmy was looking at him strangely. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. A silence fell.

‘Look, Jim,’ Frank said, getting up. ‘Sorry, but I’m feeling a bit gyp. I’m going to head on home.’ Eugene had just re-emerged from the gents and he waved over at him. ‘Have a good night, yeah? I’ll give you a call in the week.’

On the edges of Deptford he passed vast sites of half-built apartment blocks. Bill boards boasting designer living with river views. White towers of little square rooms with the same dimensions and soullessness as the council flat he’d grown up in five minutes down the road, only with Italian-style taps and a £300K price tag. He felt his mood worsen.

And then, turning the corner, his spirits soared as he spied a familiar flash of yellow hair outside his door. She was sitting on his step smiling up at him as he approached. It was all he could do not to shout out with relief: the world sang.

twelve (#ulink_42fa733a-1e92-5792-9f26-a36baed3126f)

Long Island, New York, 1997

She is fourteen when she firsts asks Ingrid about the photograph. They are eating breakfast one morning when her gaze happens to fall upon the image of the little, blond child and she asks, ‘Who is that?’ vaguely remembering Robert’s reaction to it the summer before.

‘Eat your breakfast, Elodie,’ Ingrid pours more coffee, and looks pointedly at Elodie’s bowl of cereal.

‘Yes. Who is that?’

‘That is my son, Elodie. Our son, Anton. When he was a little boy.’

Elodie continues to spoon Cheerios into her mouth. ‘Anton. Where is Anton?’

Ingrid doesn’t answer for a moment. In the silence Elodie stretches across the table to trail her fingers along the sharp lines of the silver eagle, its gleaming half-raised wings. She hums a tune she has learnt from a television advertisement for detergent.

Ingrid’s voice, when she speaks, is very quiet. ‘He lives in England, Elodie, in something called a boarding school.’

‘Oh,’ says Elodie, mulling this over. ‘Why?’

It’s the sound of creaking floorboards that alerts them to Robert’s presence. In the forest there had been a stagnant pond in which the water had sat dank and green beneath a layer of rotten leaves. Once, she had broken the stillness with the end of a stick and had recoiled in shock when a large, slime-covered toad had suddenly sprung out at her. This is what she thinks of when she sees the look that slithers between Ingrid and Robert at that moment.

Ingrid breaks the silence first. ‘Was there something you wanted, Robert?’

A second, and then another, drips icily by, before Robert drops his eyes and turns away. ‘No,’ he says, quietly. ‘Nothing.’

‘Go and get dressed, now, Elodie,’ Ingrid tells her. ‘You have an appointment with Doctor Schultz at nine.’

Later, she will be able to recall this incident vividly, because it happens on the morning that the blood comes, an event that would render every detail of that day unforgettable. Ingrid had already prepared her for her first period. Only a few months before, soon after she had turned fourteen, she had sat Elodie down and carefully explained what would soon be happening to her. She had used unfamiliar words and though Elodie had nodded and said she understood, the subject had fallen from her mind in the time it had taken to turn the TV on again.

She is about to get into the shower when it happens. It’s not until she’s removed her pyjamas and is about to turn the tap on when she looks down and notices the smears of blood. ‘Ingrid!’ Her cry is so loud and panic-stricken that she hears her footsteps on the stairs almost immediately.

In the few seconds that it takes Ingrid to grasp the situation, she stands in the doorway, her startled face looking in at Elodie as she shivers, naked on the bath mat. Within moments she has fetched sanitary napkins and clean underwear, turning on the shower and gently pushing Elodie beneath the water. Afterwards, wrapping her in a towel she patiently explains what has happened to her. Soon, Elodie is back in her bedroom, dressed and reassured, a mug of coco in her hands.

But later that evening, alone in bed, something from the incident lingers in her mind, something quite separate from the shock of her first bleeding. In the moment that Ingrid had opened the door and gazed in at her, something had passed between the two of them that had reached Elodie even through her confusion and panic. She had been undressed in front of Ingrid before, but this was the first time that she had been conscious of her nakedness. In the few seconds before Ingrid had grasped the situation, Elodie had become acutely aware of her new, small breasts and the soft down of hair that had recently begun to sprout between her legs. And as she’d stood there, shivering on the bath mat, she had felt Ingrid’s gaze linger on her body for a moment. She wasn’t sure what she had seen there, in the other woman’s eyes. Like a black crow landing briefly before quickly taking flight again. The moment passed, and almost immediately Ingrid had dropped her gaze and begun to busy herself with helping her.

Soon, Elodie grows accustomed to her monthly bleeding, but the strangeness that passed between them in the bathroom that morning stays with her, and for reasons she cannot even begin to explain to herself, she takes to locking the door now, whenever she undresses.

It’s a few months later when Anton arrives. It’s winter, Christmas time, and recently Elodie has been woken more frequently by the sound of angry, raised voices and the slamming of doors. One afternoon, not long after Yaya and Colin have left for the day and Elodie is sitting in the schoolroom finishing her lessons, Ingrid leaves her desk and comes to sit beside her.

‘Elodie, do you remember I told you about my son, Anton?’

She nods. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s coming to stay with us for a little while.’

‘Oh. Is he nice?’

‘Elodie. He’ll only be here for two weeks, but you will notice certain changes. You will eat your meals up here, that sort of thing. Things will be a bit different for a short time, just while Anton’s here. Do you understand?’

‘OK.’

The first change is the locked door. Although she’s never been allowed to leave the house by herself, she’s always had free range of all the rooms. Now, however, the door at the end of the landing which separates her top-floor quarters from the stairs to the rest of the house remains locked. Yaya and Colin are on vacation, and so her days are spent alone with Ingrid.

With each day, Ingrid seems to grow more distracted and unhappy, and Elodie notices that the flaky, raw patches on her arms have begun to flare again, sometimes into angry, red welts. One afternoon she looks up from her books and sees her absently scratching at herself, seemingly unaware of the tiny specks of blood that have begun to appear beneath her nails. Quietly, Elodie gets up from her seat and goes to her, gently taking the slim white hand in her own, while Ingrid looks up, startled, blinking in surprise at what she’s done.

But often during the few weeks of Anton’s visit, Elodie is left alone. In Ingrid’s absence she whiles away the time staring out of the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the stranger who’s so mysteriously kept apart from her in the house below. Mostly she watches the little TV set that Ingrid has recently allowed her to have in the corner of the schoolroom. Through endless cop shows and soap operas, romantic comedies and late-night thrillers, Elodie stares unblinking at a world beyond High Barn that she can barely comprehend. Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey, The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Letterman and Larry Sanders, Hill Street Blues and America’s Most Wanted. With no Ingrid to monitor what she sees, two or three hours will pass without her stirring, and she’ll watch an infomercial for skin cleanser with the same open-mouthed incredulity that she’ll watch a report from Death Row. There she sits, night after night, while love and death, sex and betrayal, murder and redemption in all their myriad variations are played out before her in a billion pixellated images upon a nine-inch screen.

Later, in bed, beneath the silent darkness, her fingers caress and stroke her new, changing body. And day by day, a nameless hunger grows.

Only twice does she catch a glimpse of Anton during his stay. The first time, she is standing at her bedroom window when Ingrid, Robert and a tall, slim teenage boy emerge from the house onto the drive. The boy has long messy hair that hides most of his face and a tense, tight way of holding himself, his fists clenched by his side. It’s strange, watching the three of them without their knowledge; they seem small and far away somehow, like characters in a movie. She sees Ingrid speak to Anton, her pink, anxious eyes fixed nervously on her son’s face. And though she can’t hear them she sees that the words that escape the boy’s barely open lips in reply make Ingrid flinch as if he’d struck her. She sees, also, the quick flash of enjoyment that momentarily lights up Robert’s face, even as he puts a remonstrative hand on Anton’s shoulder.

The second time, she spies him standing alone at the very end of the garden, between the two cherry trees. And although he has his back to her, something strikes her about his bearing; the droop in his shoulders, the still, somehow defeated way he remains at the edge of the lawn as if reluctant to return to the house. Silently she wills him to turn, desperate suddenly to see his face. But just at that moment Ingrid returns to the schoolroom with her supper and Elodie obediently takes her seat, instinctively keeping quiet about what she’s seen.

It’s a few days later that the police come. She’s woken in the night by Ingrid and Robert arguing more loudly and more passionately than usual. She is lying there in bed waiting for them to stop when the red and blue lights start flashing across the ceiling and she hears the sound of a car pulling up on the gravel outside. Going to her window she watches as a police officer leads Anton from the back seat up to the house. It’s too dark to see clearly but she notices that he puts up no resistance and waits silently next to the policeman while his parents come to the door.

Elodie sits and waits in the dark, unable to hear anything but a low rumble of voices from the kitchen below. When after half an hour the policeman leaves, the shouting starts immediately. Elodie can’t make out Anton’s voice, only Ingrid’s shrill pleading and Robert’s exasperated bellow. But at last she hears the front door slam and from her window sees the boy running across the lawn. At the end of the drive he pauses and looks back at the house. For a split second his gaze falls upon her bedroom window and she retreats quickly back into the shadows.