Friday flaps frantically at the windows, but Felix does not open the door to it. He thinks of little all day except the vicar’s words, and the shivering sack of bones on the church floor beside him. Only a few years older than he, Sam is alone in the world, except for the angel beside whom he sometimes sleeps and begs. It is no wonder a moment with her in the storm-tossed skies seems preferable to this absurd life. Felix feels as though he is living underwater, in this city where the air smells of salt; sinking deeper and deeper with each passing day into the crushing oblivion of life’s depths.
“What a week,” says Michael, when he returns from the office in the evening. He showers immediately, no doubt eager to escape his work shirt, trousers and tie. Felix knows the feeling. As Michael rejoins him in the kitchen, his hot, damp presence fills the room. A towel finds his wet mane of hair.
“How is Coleson?”
“Besides being a bastard? He’s fine.”
Finding a bottle opener in a drawer, Felix uncaps two of the beers. The bottles hiss drily in his hands. “I mean with me taking the week off work.”
“He hasn’t mentioned it since I spoke to him on Monday. I doubt he’s noticed, to be honest.”
“Charming.”
“It’s not as though you’re always taking time off. All things considered, you’re a model employee. I wouldn’t give it another thought.”
They finish their first beers, then their second. Slowly a stash of empties begins to grow; brown bottles standing like stems of glassy fungus in the light. They seem out of place in the otherwise clean kitchen; a wet intrusion on the sterile surroundings.
“How are things going with Helen?”
“They’re all right.” Michael’s head vanishes beneath the towel again, emerging moments later vaguely drier. “She didn’t take well to me cancelling tonight.”
“You had plans?”
“Nothing that couldn’t wait.”
“You could have seen her, I wouldn’t have minded.”
“I know you wouldn’t have. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”
Michael tells him about all the time Helen and he have been spending together; the evenings out, dinner in the city, sleepy Sundays drifting through the New Forest. None of it sounds especially exciting to Felix, but he can’t ignore the discomfort in his stomach, of movement inside him; an unborn chick, still fresh and foetal, yet to break free but stirring now inside its sticky yolk –
“I’m happy for you,” he says, and he realises he means it. Not since Rachel broke up with him has Michael spoken at such length about one of his girlfriends. He remembers what Michael said about feeling lost, stripped bare and abandoned, and hopes that he is feeling better now; that Helen has made a difference.
“Enough festering,” says Michael, tapping his empty bottle against the work surface and springing suddenly from his seat. “It’s Friday night and we have places to be.”
“We’re going out?”
“We certainly are. Maggie’s having a house party and I’ve RSVP’d for the both of us.”
“Maggie?”
“Your work colleague? I realise she must be a distant memory after almost a week off, but she still remembers you.”
Felix showers and changes while Michael calls for a taxi. He is still getting dressed when their lift arrives. Sliding onto the back seat of the taxi, he buttons up the top of his shirt while the car pulls away. City lights flash past, catching his face in the reflection of the car window, and he realises his pulse is racing.
Beside him, Michael’s face is lit-up. Black skinny jeans cling to his slender legs, a white shirt draining his already pale skin. Michael holds his gaze for a moment. Then he turns back to his window, and Felix does likewise. Taking a deep breath, he closes his eyes, clears his mind and surrenders to the approaching night.
He hears Maggie’s house before he sees it, beating with music, nestled noisily in the street. Some effort has been made to black out the windows, bin liners stuck fast to the glass panes, but flickers of strobe light still escape at the edges, shining on tall grass and the children’s toys nestled within; plastic tractors and oven sets still speckled with rainfall. There is a potting shed that does not look as though it has seen use in twenty years, flower beds filled with a mixture of daffodils and weeds, and at the front door a thin woman in a large shirt and white skin-tight jeans. She sucks on a cigarette while the door frame supports her, and it is not difficult to associate the sounds of the gulls with her own lips as they pucker and twitch, milking the rollie for every ounce.
Excusing himself, Michael slips past her, and inside. Hurrying after, Felix follows suit.
He has never been to Maggie’s house before, and does not think he would recognise it again, were he ever to return here. The hallway is heaving, and he struggles through the press of bodies to keep pace with Michael. On their right, a spare room is being used for storage, a pile of coats and leather jackets like a puddle across the single bed.
They move into the sitting room, made into a rave den, then the basement, where bowls of crisps and dip are doing the rounds. The room is a strange hybrid of home and dance club; wash baskets have been filled with bottles, spotlights stuck on top of dusty utilities. At the far end of the room, a washing machine works its way through a colour wash, filled with orange glow sticks like dancing flames. Everywhere, people are moving to the music’s beat.
Faces flock around them, more orange, then green, and white under the wild spotlights, but none of them Maggie’s.
“Drinks,” Michael mouths, or at least Felix fancies that he does. They each knock back a beer, then another, until they find themselves beginning to dance, helpless not to in this place where private residence meets underground club. Hands find Felix’s waist, Michael’s face in his face, so close he can see the whites of his teeth, smell the crisp lager on his breath.
They drink more, and dance harder, while their basement surroundings melt slowly away. Behind Michael’s head, the washing machine begins a new cycle. Its drum flashes with glow sticks, steadily at first, then faster and faster until the glass door is a blaze of green, burning everything else from Felix’s eyes, leaving only spiraling incandescence, Michael’s laughing face, then the dark.
A kaleidoscope of chart music fills Felix’s ears. People press into him as they squeeze past; hands grasping, firm where they fumble down his wrist. He knows he is at a house party, although he is not sure quite how he got here, or when. His head is a splash of colour and confusion.
Tearing himself from his place on the wall, he wanders through the house. Partly he is anxious, and does not want to draw attention to himself. Mostly he cannot move for other bodies in the way. The kitchen, when he finds it, is a bright, stinking place, alive with hot breaths and the aroma of liquor. Grinning faces hover all around him. He searches for Michael’s.
“Down in one,” somebody shouts; a tall, bald man with tattoos down his neck.
“Same time next week,” chirps a woman beside him, her eyes wide, lush lips smiling.
“Glass is empty –”
“In no hurry –”
“What’s a guy got to do to get a drink around here?”
Pushing through the crowds into the next room, he heads further into the house. Another corridor stretches ahead of him, busy and boisterous as the last. Forcing his way between warm bodies, he takes the first opening – a sliding glass door – and finds himself in a kind of conservatory. The music is quieter here, or at least muffled, if not by the glass then the smoke that seems to swell and press against it; mist billowing from cigarettes like rich fumes from exhaust pipes.
“Michael?”
“Who are you?” says a slurred voice. Figures form in the smoke; few and phantasmal.
“Who is anyone? Does it really matter, here?”
“Have you seen Michael?”
“Who the hell is Michael?”
He lingers in the conservatory, surrounded by the semi-formed shapes of the loungers. He cannot help but linger, in this room where there is no up or down, no left or right, no solid forms or certain things, only insubstantial smoke and half-seen shadows shifting in the gloom. For a moment he feels respite from the music, the raucous colours that seem to saturate the rest of the house. Then the shapes of the loungers grow more certain around him.
There is no mistaking the shabby wings, like old bin-liners in the wind, pointed faces with black beaks below which dangle wattles, scarlet like open wounds. Laughter caws from the throats of the assembled, quietly at first then louder; moronic sounds from rough mouths thick with tar, and suddenly there is no safety in the smoke, no sanctuary from the rest of the house or the music, which seems to hammer at his head, slide under his flesh, reverberate his bones and there inside disturb something, which has long waited to be hatched.
He stumbles back from the conservatory. Retracing his steps, he flees through the corridor, the kitchen and the hallway until he reaches the front door, where he does not hesitate but flings it open, throwing himself outside.
“You’re leaving?” someone says. The door slams shut behind him.
Quiet settles over him, muting the music from the house. The difference is sobering, as though he has stepped willingly into an ice bath, or the arms of the sea. Cold stings his skin; refreshing, reviving, the most real thing he has experienced all night. Embracing the chill, he begins to walk.
There is a house number, a street name, a city district on a sign beside an abandoned church. Cars line each side of the road, the vehicles perfectly parked. Street lamps illuminate the pavement every few metres or so. Otherwise it is empty; one street in a city made of many. Something that he learned to recognise long ago as loneliness clutches at him, and he looks back to the house, but already it seems dimmer, the music darker, the lights a distant murmur in the night.
A taxi turns into the road, approaching from his left. Its wheels hiss through the gutter as it passes him. When the car draws level, he sees a face staring back from the passenger seat, pressed close to the window; drawn and angular in the dark. He thinks he recognises the face, although he cannot say from where or when. Then the shadows seem to rise up from the gutter and he is afforded one last look at the street, the rooftops, the destitute stars in the night sky, before blackness claims him.
He slips from sleep into vague consciousness, roused by the birds outside the window. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he recognises the sofa beneath his head, the flat-screen television in the corner, the shape of the sitting room, where he has lived now for a week, and it is a moment before he realises he is back at Michael’s house. Distorted by sleep, his surroundings seem strange to him. The man’s coat cuts a long silhouette where it hangs in the hallway, a deeper blackness inside the moonlit house.
Rising, he staggers into the kitchen. The tap whines, sending shivers through the piping. He sips a glass of water, relishing the coldness as it slides down his throat. Around him, chrome cabinets shine in the darkness, reflecting even the smallest glimmers of light. Vague memories percolate his mind; a house party, the city submerged, Michael and a taxi. Standing at the sink, he takes another sip.
Outside, the street is stagnant, Miserly Road trapped in the throes of night. And it is still night, he realises. It must be very early. Retreating from the kitchen, he finds his way back to the sofa, and with the smooth leather cushion against his face wonders when this nightmare will end.
The evening comes back to him, then the church, the bar, his office and the long streets that link all these things; the city filled with dark shapes, flapping for flapping’s sake, screaming into the sky, desperate to move, to live, to make themselves heard, a blackness in the corners of his eyes and in his ears.
Not for the first time, he wonders why his dreams have resurfaced now. Even Dr. Moore seemed only capable of repressing them. The dejected figure on the church floor fills his thoughts, and with it the vicar’s voice, distorted by the imagined heights of the service hall.
“What do they want?”
“To be loved. And to return that love in kind.”
He thinks of lovebirds, and wonders why they are called such. Do they love? Are they more than birds because of it, or indifferent except in name? What of scared birds too, and dead birds, and whatdoesitallmeanbirds?
The chirping that woke him grows louder, and it occurs to him that it is not coming from outside. There were no birds visible from the kitchen window, and none that could sing through double glazing. Despite himself, he begins shivering. Almost without realising, his eyes slide back to the indistinct coat, hanging in the hallway.
Time seems to slow as its silhouette shifts. Two tattered arms unfurl from its chest, and it occurs to Felix that it is starving. He does not know for how long it has been standing in the hallway, or what it will take for it to leave.
With its arms outstretched, it turns to face him from the doorway. Though he cannot properly make out its features, he is reminded of the statues from the church-yard, the night after the flood, their smiling faces black with soil and slime. It hovers uncertainly on the thresh-old of the sitting room, and he can’t be sure whether the clicking sound is coming from its throat or the joints in its arms. He imagines that it says a name. Then in one fluid motion it withdraws deeper into the house.
He remains frozen, unable to breathe, as though an ocean of water is pressing down on him. It holds his lips together, threatening to rush into his lungs and drown him from the world once and for all. Silence settles back over the room.
Then he gasps, drawing desperate breaths, struggling from the sofa as though capsized.
“No,” he chokes. Like a man asleep, he stumbles through the house. “Not Michael.”
His feet carry him to the hallway, then the stairs above. Steps creak beneath his weight, belying the real age of the house, and he is reminded of old flotsam, too long in the water, grown green and riddled with rot. Crossing the landing, he comes to a stop outside a door. The bird sounds are shrill now, almost reptilian in pitch, and he imagines hungry chicks, mouths wide, desperate to be filled. He pushes open the door.
Darkness fills the bedroom, except for the light from the street lamp outside, which floods through the open window. His eyes rush madly around the room, as though seeing it for the first time, but it is the sight on the bed that makes him buckle and cry out, because mounted atop Michael, legs clasped around his hips, skin shining with sweat as it rides him into the mattress, is the figure from his dreams, except this time there is no beak, no marble eyes, no loose dewlaps; just his own face staring back at him, cheeping like a clutch of newborn chicks.