Read by Lois Tucker
They all went for a walk on Ramsgate beach before lunch and found a dozen washed-up dogfish, dull-grey in death, with down-slit, gurning mouths like sad baby sharks, scattered over the otherwise unblemished, sunny sand. It took the gleam off the morning, and they retreated up the zigzagging sea-stairs where chalk fell from the paperwhite cliffs and people wrote their names on the concrete. Ceri’s work-friend Lo, exhaustingly playful, grabbed a piece and scrawled their names, the date and HAPPY 30th CERI!
At the rundown clifftop café they all bought cheap icecream and chips: nobody wanted fish now. Gulls and pigeons, sensing bounty, attacked in waves, and Rachel noticed one scruffy pigeon lingering longer, more exhausted than the others. It had an angry pink bubblegum blob where one of its feet should be, and hobbled about with a theatricality which in a human would imply faking.
He frowned. “Ouch. Dunno. Maybe landing on a train rail or something?”
“Poor bird,” she said. “Can’t walk, can barely fly. Have a chip.” She tossed one at its good foot and the pigeon nodded obsequiously towards it. The martlet from the rental house’s crest flitted through her head: footless, restless, ever forward. She ended up giving the crippled pigeon half her chips out of pity and guilt. But guilt for what?
*
Ceri, queen history geek, had explained at length over breakfast how the Victorian architect who built the place (which was basically the Gothic mansion out of the Addams Family, secret door and all) had designed his own coat-of-arms, featuring this mythical bird without feet. “It flies forever, unable to land,” Ceri told them solemnly, through sourdough toast. “The motto is En avant: Forward.”
“Like the Flying Dutchman,” Ceri’s new boyfriend Mark had smirked. “To infinity and beyond!” But Mark was a dick. Good thing Rachel only saw the old crowd at Christmas and birthdays: Duncan and Ceri were pretty much the only ones left to like. Being out of the country was a good excuse to avoid the things she didn’t want to deal with. This year Reuters had posted her to Brussels: it was a pretty easy gig – more interesting than Stockholm, when she’d once got an urgent call at 3am because Sweden had won Olympic bronze in the luge. Less dangerous than Tallinn. OK, basically.
*
Saturday night. Drinking and party games. Ceri was hellbent on capital-F Fun, and Mark the wine-buff cracked out his case of red: ruby Riojas, crimson Chiantis, maroon Merlots.
Rachel sipped and studied the crest carved above the fireplace more closely. The martlet bird sat in profile on a shield: behind it twined stylised ivy on a shaded ground. Sure enough, its legs ended not in clawed feet, but a stubby little three-way stump, like the club in a deck of cards. It looked fine from a distance, if you didn’t know what it was, but now she couldn’t unsee it. Rachel felt a piercing pang thinking about that poor bird, like when she was premenstrual and could sense the sadness that lay beneath everything, just waiting to be stirred at a touch like mud at the bottom of a still pool.
They all drank lengthy, invented toasts to the birthday girl and then Ceri said she wanted to play Murder in the Dark, and even though they were all pushing thirty not thirteen, it was a party, so … The library was a large, gloomy, high-ceilinged room, wood-panelled and velvet-curtained. After explaining the rules Ceri flicked off the lights to test the effect.
It was utterly dark – a real blackout, the kind where you have to blink to test the black on the inside of your eyelids against the darkness outside them. The kind where you might as well shut your eyes or go blind.
And suddenly Rachel remembered the dream she had last night: black feathers spiralling like snow out of a starless sky, and the swish and rustle of wings unfolding. A shadow falling across her face, and when she tried to run her arms were stiff and jointed, no fingers any more, and her feet were stuck in something. She thought it was mud until she looked down and saw they were gone, and she started to fall and that was when she woke up staring and sweating sheets in that cool draughty maid’s room.
She stood in the darkness, paralysed. How did she forget that till now?
Suddenly the black was pierced by a squealing shriek. Rachel dived for the wall and snapped the lights on to reveal Lo, who was turning out to be a tiresomely excitable drunk. She was clutching Duncan’s arm like she’d just won it at auction.
“Oh God, soooo sorry! I bumped into someone and just freaked out! Sorry Duncs.” But she didn’t let go. Quietly-spoken, softly-bearded, hipster-spectacled Duncan didn’t stand a chance against Lo’s determined coquetry, thought Rachel. Mark doled out the cards: Ace was the murderer, Queen the detective: everyone else was just a victim waiting to happen. Rachel looked at her card: generic citizen. Oh well. She decided to lie down on one of the large sofas and stay very quiet. Maybe nobody would stumble over her and she could just keep still and think positive thoughts, get through the next few minutes. She got anxious in the dark sometimes, but she never told anyone because it was the second most pathetic thing to be scared of in the whole pantheon of fail-phobias, just behind mice.
The lights went out. She steeled herself, breathing evenly, fumbled her way to the sofa and lay down, barely daring to move. The muffled slide and stumble of hesitant feet on the thick carpet loomed closer, then faded. Slow breathing on her left, a slight nose-whistle like the flute of a bird, behind and above. Someone between the sofa and the bookshelf: she pressed herself further into the cushions and stopped her breath. Still nobody was dead. The victim was meant to count to three, then scream. At last the heavy breather passed on, and her heart hurdled so hard in relief she could almost hear it battering inside her chest. Or was that an actual sound?
Soft at first, a sort of fluttering struggle; what was it, something trapped? A mouse, a rat? A muffled thudding, like a tiny fist against wood, too near. Rachel counted, ignored it. She was hearing things. Why won’t somebody die? The thick silence surged up, filled her ears like seafoam, then suddenly wings were beating next to her head, horribly close, the scrape and flap right under her, beneath the sofa, a bird must have got in, trapped and suffocating –
Rachel sat up and screamed.
Matey applause and a scramble for the lightswitch. Mark flipped it on: standing in the middle of the lounge was Lo in the act of tapping Duncan on the shoulder, both of them looking stunned and guilty.
“So – what, Lo’s the killer?” pouted Ceri, confused. “Did you scream, Duncs? You’re supposed to count three.”
“No, sorry, it was me.” Rachel’s voice was high and tight in her chest; not enough air in her lungs. Stupid, stupid, it’s only a bloody bird. Probably terrified out of its mind.
“What? Did you kill Rachel, Lo?”
If looks could, she would now. “No.”
“I think there’s a bird stuck under the sofa,” Rachel gasped. “Sorry, it surprised me, I screamed …”
But there was nothing under the sofa, or anywhere else: they all hunted enthusiastically, thrilled by this potential diversion, then bored and annoyed.
“Quoth the Raven, nevermore!” said Mark as he opened the writing-desk drawers sarcastically. “Maybe it was a ghoooooost bird?”
Nobody’s heart was in the game after that and Rachel felt the smart of shame. She slipped out to check emails on her phone: news never slept and her editor didn’t seem to recognise the concept of annual leave.
Returning, she found Mark and Ceri snuggled smug and Lo leaning into Duncan, tits cocked, determined: one couple and one waiting to happen. Rachel curled in a reading chair and watched them swirl and flit through the library like fish in a tank, or swifts in flight. They didn’t seem to notice she wasn’t joining in as they played student classics: Truth or Dare, Spin the Bottle (really?) retreating into adolescence as the night advanced.
Eventually the fun dwindled like the snapping fire, until only Lo and Duncan were still playing a game they’d invented: Drinking with Cluedo: Rachel tried to join in for a while before she made one too many wrong guesses and had to drink more than she wanted and started to feel like her feet were very far away and hard to steer. As two a.m. struck and Ceri lay passed out on the chaise-longue, Mark offered to see her up the tower-room stairs.
“Fancied being alone up here, eh?” said Mark. “It’s nice. A little eyrie. Little nest.” He crinkled his eyes. He meant well. “Hope we weren’t too dull compared to your journo pals.”
“No, not at all.”
“Glamorous foreign correspondent, a boy in every port …” He was pretty drunk; drunker than she’d thought. “Lucky you. Free as a bird!”
But he didn’t know about the panic-attacks, about lying in bed at 4am in yet another rented flat in another new city, where everything’s familiarly different again: the money, the language, the job, the life. Standing stone-still in a locked bathroom for an hour, terrified the noise from the kitchen is someone breaking in to kill her. He doesn’t know she’s tried to put down roots but they never take. That the thing she’s most afraid of is this: that medieval image she heard once and never forgot, about the sparrow flying in through the banqueting hall – sailing in through the door from the night outside. For a brief snatch of a moment, a blast of noise and colour, light and warmth; maybe three, four wingbeats before it flies out again, back into cold and darkness. But of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.
“Goodnight then,” said Mark, swaying and staring.
No. Not tonight.
“Goodnight,” she said, and listened to him stumble down the narrow servants’ stairs.
She lay in bed and heard the battering of wings like blood beating in her head. She felt her cold toes curl into themselves as if they were tired of being feet, tired of walking, and a sleek hard ache singing in her arms like she’d been flying so far and so fast she’d gone past the last of the land. There was only the throb of the sea now, the moon on clouds. Where was she going? Infinity, beyond. Who knew? A dark shape against a cloud, flickered and gone: the martlet flying forever, en avant.
Even now she could convince herself that the wild flapping, like a bird trapped in her chest, was only that and nothing more. That the flashing sheen of the darkness was not black feathers spreading before her. That the tremulous weight on her belly was nothing but wine and loneliness. That the thing moving up her body, waddling a little, stump by stump, lightly kneading her sternum and breasts, was a dream like last night, like so many nights, the emptiness made solid in the dark. Her overworked heart thrummed like wings. She opened her mouth to scream or to caw and tasted feathers.
(c) Abigail Lee, 2019
Abigail Lee writes a lot, and crosses out even more. Her stories One Thousand Rupees and Maryam’s Prayer have previously been read at Liars’ League, and she’s also published flash fiction in Noun and X+1. She is shirking on a novel.
Lois Tucker has done various bits and bobs and will probably end up doing more. Previous stuff includes penning and performing three solo shows as her silent comedy alter ego ‘Lois of the Lane’ and releasing the MissLLaneEous EP on Bandcamp, which consists of catchy, silly songs. More details at the FRESHLY PIMPED www.loistucker.net
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