42

Lauren, 1999

Gemma slid down the aviary wall. Legs extended, stiff and straight as a puppet’s. Her heels scuffing the fluff and feathers on the ground into a dune. She was making funny noises, like she was trying to suck in air through a straw. As I bent over her, calling her name, asking what was wrong, the budgies panicked further, the frantic beat of their wings catching in our hair. Time went mushy. My arms and fingers started to prickle, as if a thistle was being rolled over my skin. My jaw clamped. My vision tunnelled until it was just two beams of torchlight. An underwater silence.

Then I was somewhere near the aviary roof, looking down through the leafy shadows, swinging ropes and perches, the feather-flashes of yellow and green. And I could see myself, crouched on all fours, kneeling next to Gemma, who was slumped, bent over. Glitter on our cheeks. My lips were moving, although I couldn’t hear what I was saying. And Gemma’s stomach was sucking inward with effort, the dress bagging at the waist. Her lips turning blue. I watched myself crawl on hands and knees to the aviary door, reaching up, fumbling, sticking my fingers through the metal grid, trying to undo the bolt from the inside. It took years and years, and then it was sliding open, and we were saved.

I crawled outside, slipped back into my skin again. I cried out but no one came. No one heard. The house’s bedroom windows were blank, curtains half drawn against the heat. But on the top floor, the studio window, just for a second, Angie. Naked, a nude in a frame, her head thrown back, her hands star-fished on the glass, her breasts squished. She looked straight at me, covered her breasts, and turned away. Then fluttering past, over my head, a bolt of yellow, a budgie, another and another – flock birds! – free, free, free, soaring into the summer sky.