Little Bird

Small. She’d barely reach his shoulder. Short tufts of bleached hair. Dark eyes, blue and quick. A delicate chin. So slim that he knew that if he were to trace a finger along her spine he would feel every tendon and bone and muscle of her. Knew the touch, already, of her skin.

‘Love? What do you want, Love?’ The barmaid stuck her bearded chin in Frank’s direction and he asked her for three pints. By the cigarette machine she stood amongst the barking crowds as if in an empty room and somewhere, somehow, a glam-rock paedo screamed on too fast. Frank sipped his pint and watched as she was approached by a tall, spiky looking redhead and a chubby brunette. She smiled, then, the girl. A smile that seemed to flood her face with light.

The hiss and thump of the needle in the grooves.

Time to go back. Put another record on. Sort it out, Frank. Not till she looks at me. Not till she turns round and looks at me. Tony the Turk with his sick, dwarfy legs steaming towards him, oily hair glistening red, blue, green in the disco lights. This is not what he paid Frank for, no way. Come on Frankie, gotta get going, move it. (But just … look at me. Look at me first.) In mid conversation she half turned her shoulders, this stranger, lifted her chin, scanned the bar, searching for something. Searching for someone. Found him. Found his eyes, lifted her chin. Held him. Held him there, right there, in her gaze. When does love start?

Back at the decks Jim and Eugene, pissed and stoned and deep in inane conversation and fucking useless as they always were had not noticed, were the only people who had not noticed that the evening’s musical entertainment was, and had been for some minutes, absent. Frank fought his way through the crowd again, past two kids swapping cash for drugs and a middle-aged woman passed out upon a table, and dropped a Beyoncé track on the turntable. The dance floor refilled instantly. Easily pleased, was the Mermaid’s clientele. The night sped on, the place filled out, Frank’s records keeping the dance floor rammed and the atmosphere about as good as the atmosphere ever got there. The three girls stayed by the bar meanwhile, a hundred eyes landing on them like rain, the brunette and the redhead porous, thirsty.

As he watched her, the hectic squalor of the Mermaid seemed to recede to a meaningless blur. She was dressed in a simple skirt and T-shirt, unfashionable plimsolls on her feet, her closely cropped hair a yellow cap. The hard-faced pair next to her, the noise and flashing lights were just a monochrome haze against which she stood out in sharp, vivid relief. And as his gaze traveled over the small triangle of her face, the almost supernaturally large blue eyes, the slender neck, he felt almost as if her were touching her.

It didn’t take her friends long to notice Eugene. It rarely took any woman long to notice Eugene. The effect was instant, like kindling under flame and Frank smiled at their sudden animation, the volley of glances that flew past him to where Euge stood, oblivious and drunk, with Jimmy. For the next hour, Frank played his records, keeping one eye on the girl, the other on the ebb and flow of the pub. The usual Friday-night mess of east-end geezers with their shit coke and their mean-eyed women drinking cheap cocktails, and he wondered what she was doing there, what it meant. After a while he spotted his friends amongst the dancers, Jimmy pogo-ing out of time to the music, bellowing happily at the brunette’s chest. Eugene chatting up the redhead, his eyes gleaming with either lust or booze. Frank wondered what had taken them so long.

And there she was, his girl. Stood slightly apart, a half-smile on her lips. And when suddenly she looked up and turned her eyes on him again he knew with a shock of certainty that he would hold that image of her, in the smoky flashing gloom of the Mermaid, glass half raised, the sudden, full, frank, petrol-blue gaze of her eyes on his. He knew he would look back on that image one day many years from now as the night he first saw the girl whose name he didn’t yet know.

‘How’s it going old son?’ It was two a.m., the Mermaid almost empty. Frank knelt on the floor packing up his records. He looked up to see Jimmy’s flushed face peering down at him.

‘Those birds are coming back with us,’ he grinned. ‘That dark-haired one’s a right laugh. Eugene’s tucking into the ginge already, lucky bastard. Think you might be stuck with their mate though is the only thing. She don’t say fuck all, but as you know,’ he winked, ‘that usually means they go like a frog in a sock.’

Frank nodded, but continued kneeling for a moment, staring needlessly into his record bag, the realization that he was seconds away from talking to her freezing him to the spot. Finally he hauled his gear onto his shoulder and then reached down again to pick up his headphones. When he straightened, she was standing in front of him.

She smiled. ‘I’m Kate,’ she said. ‘Do you want some help with that?’

The driver who took them home to south-east London turned the volume up on his radio, trying to drown his passengers out with LBC. Kate and Frank sat alone in the back seat of the people carrier, a silent audience to their friends in front who were noisily making their way through a hefty spliff and a bottle of whisky blagged from the bar.

And there they were, as simple as that. He could feel the soft weight of her leg against his, the heat of her shoulder on his arm. She continued to stare straight ahead, the same half-smile fluttering across her mouth, the air between them taut with possibility. Desperately he searched his mind for a topic of conversation but it remained blank. The silence lengthened. Panic shifted queasily in his gut. He was never normally like this with girls. Bit by bit that brief, sweet moment when their eyes had met in the bar receded. Why could he think of absolutely nothing to say?

She shifted her weight slightly and now her thigh burned through his jeans. His gaze fell to her hands, folded in her lap. The cab stopped at a light and he looked out at the black and yellow street, fighting the impulse to open the door and throw himself under the wheels of the nearest night bus – anything but this. The light turned green. The car growled and lurched. Come on, Frank: say something. She continued to stare ahead, her eyes revealing nothing. Anything, say anything. Frank pushed his hands beneath his knees and wondered when it was exactly that he’d turned into such a prick.

The cab sped on across Waterloo Bridge. He cleared his throat as if to speak and she turned to him expectantly, while the words died instantly in his throat. The air between them thickened, the world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. But the silence lengthened, the tension withered and at last she looked away. With a sinking heart he watched her gaze out at the floodlit buildings of the South Bank, the fuzzy, neon reflections strewn across the black river like the trails of fireworks. Soon they would be there and his chance would have passed. He was an idiot.

The car approached the Elephant. In no time they were in Deptford.

Too late. Too late.

He called to the driver to stop. Clambered awkwardly through the car, treading on the foot of the redhead who was sprawled across Eugene’s lap, and almost falling onto the brunette, her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. ‘I’ll see you later, yeah?’ he said. He had bottled it and he couldn’t bear to look at her now.

‘What you doing?’ protested Jimmy. ‘Come back to mine!’

Eugene nodded through a cloud of smoke. ‘You gotta come back, man. Come and party.’

‘I’m just dropping my records off,’ he lied soothingly. ‘I’ll come round after.’ He got out of the car, tried to think of how to say goodbye to her, could only manage a brief smile, disappointment clutching at his throat. Fuck it. It was only after he’d unloaded his bags and the car had sped away that he turned and saw her standing beneath the fuzzy orange glow of a street lamp.

‘I thought I might keep you company,’ she said, her voice quiet, precise.

She had the most vivid face he’d ever seen, he thought. No make-up but full, red lips, a patch of pink high on each cheek, her eyes dark blue, speckled black. Dense and quick, like water running over rocks.

‘Are we going in, then?’ Amused, expectant.

‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘Yeah. Sorry. It’s this one.’

He unlocked his front door and realized by the smell that he’d forgotten to take the bins out again. She followed him along the dark, cramped hallway to the lounge. The overhead bulb had gone, and he crashed around for a few seconds trying to locate the lamp.

He cringed when the light eventually revealed the chaos of his lounge. He hadn’t done anything to the house since moving in three years ago apart from install a large sound system. There was a smell of damp, and leaky gas fire. A green, flowered carpet cringed beneath purple wallpaper. The furniture was sparse, had seen better days. But the worse thing, he decided, the very worse thing was that everything – every inch of space: the floor, the table, the sofa, the shelves – was covered in piles of records. Twelve-inch and seven-inch black, shiny orbs, naked or half-dressed in white paper sleeves or peeping out from colourful, cardboard covers. It was like a bizarre kind of record shop that had recently been burgled, he realised. He looked over at Kate, who stood surveying the room from the door.

‘Interesting … décor,’ she said, a smile like a bird’s wing brushing her lips.

‘Yeah,’ said Frank. ‘Sorry. Bit of a dump. It was my Aunt Joanie’s. I inherited it from her a few years back and I never got round to, er –’ He rubbed his face and glancing at her, fell silent.

‘You’ve done wonders with the place,’ she laughed, and watched as he began picking up records from the floor and the sofa, making space for her to sit.

‘You like music.’

He smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I like music.’ What was he going to do with her now, now that she was here?

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after a short silence. ‘About your aunt. Were you close?’

Frank shrugged, nodded. ‘I suppose we were.’ He continued to shift piles of records from one space to the next.

‘Come and sit down.’ She’d taken her jacket off, and he could see the goose pimples on her thin arms. He could not remember when he had last felt so nervous. And what was it about her voice? It was incredible, he thought, like music. When she stopped talking it was as if that final word hung in the air afterwards like the last note of a song, his ears stretching after it in the silence that followed.

They stared at each other for a moment. ‘Coffee,’ he said abruptly, and left the room.

In the pitch-black hall on the way to the kitchen, he tripped over another box of records and told it he was sorry. As he made the coffee and crashed through some washing up, his mobile buzzed repeatedly in his back pocket. Jimmy and Eugene, he supposed, and turned it off. His kitchen smelt of bad fridge. From the next room, he heard her put a record on. A Bowie track, Life On Mars.

When he returned she was standing by the window. She didn’t notice him for a second or two, and he stood, poised in the threshold, looking at her slender neck bent over the record sleeve she held. He wondered what her skin smelt like. She turned to him then, and he felt himself flush with pleasure at her smile, momentarily dazzled. She put down the record and walked towards him.

Carefully, she took the mugs from his hands and put them on the table. She led him to the sofa, gently pulling him until he was sitting next to her. She reached for his face and drew it closer to hers and then grazed his mouth with her lips. Frank scarcely breathed. Next she kissed his brow, his cheek, his eyes, and, finally, his mouth again, her tongue flickering between his lips. Frank put his hand on her back, his long fingers tracing the dips and hollows of her ribs, pulling her closer to him. In the silence they kissed and he felt himself respond with a mad exhilaration as if he’d just stepped off a cliff.

The coffee went cold, the record came to an end. She took his hand and led him into the dark hall, then up the narrow staircase as if she’d been there many times before. In the doorway of his bedroom they stopped to gaze in at the room that like his lounge was strewn with records. Kate moved first. Lightly kicking the Stones from her path she led him to the bed, still holding Frank’s hand she stepped neatly over the Kinks. With one arm she swept Aretha Franklin off the duvet, and sitting down next to John Coltrane she pulled Frank towards her. Letting go of his hand, she tugged her T-shirt over her head, and pushing Frank back onto the bed, she kissed him again.

three (#ulink_2624ef95-9793-52e7-bc6f-c13024aa1edc)

Normandy, France, 10 April 1985

Nobody really knew the man who lived in the forest, and the few who were acquainted with him knew him only as ‘the mute’. He would arrive in his rusty blue pick-up truck at a store in one of the villages some distance from the Forêt de Breteuil, and the shop owners who served him would be struck by a distant memory of the peculiar weight of his silence. And as they helped him take his provisions to the truck or collected money for his petrol, they would feel sure, suddenly, that they had served him once before, one day long ago.

Their conversation would be met with a pleasant, apologetic smile and the silent man would raise a single, bony finger to his mouth and sadly shake his head. Then he would pull from his pocket a note pad and write down his order, and the shop keeper would be struck by the frank sweetness of his gaze, would watch him drive away, wonder briefly who he was and where he lived, before shrugging and turning back to their day.

The young woman who worked in the charity shop in Argentan, however, had never seen the man before. Wham blared loudly from the radio and she was busy on the phone when the tall, grave stranger with the shy smile and slight stoop handed her the amount she had absent-mindedly rung up on the till. And so, ten years later, when the same man’s body had been found in a forest twenty miles away, and when a picture of his face flashed across TV screens around the world, the young woman, whose name was Laure, would not remember that this was the same, silent person who had once bought bags and bags of clothes one afternoon a decade ago, for a toddler, for a child, for a young girl.

four (#ulink_b918359a-6860-508a-8342-94d38f1ec3a0)

Forêt de Breteuil, Normandy, 1985

Her old life is soon forgotten, here amongst the trees. She’s almost three. At first she babbles the few baby sentences she has learnt, but when the man does not reply, language too, is lost. There are no words in the forest. Hot sun and cool rain and freezing ice come and go and then return again, and her mother’s smell and touch and voice, her home, everything is forgotten, the wind takes all that with it as it rushes and bellows and whips between the beeches and oaks, over the river, escaping through the snatching leaves, out, out of the forest, leaving her behind.

The small stone cottage is little bigger than a shack with two small rooms, a leaking roof, a narrow bed on either side of the wide hearth. Dense woodlands surround it, the nearest road eight miles away is only rarely used by passing truckers on their way to somewhere else.