Authors: Adam M. Booth
ANGELA
ANGELA
ADAM M BOOTH
ANGELA
© 2014 Adam M. Booth
Published: 30th November 2014
Publisher: Adam M. Booth
Editor: L. C. Davies
Amazon KDP Edition
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CONTENTS
For all the Angelas
From The Other Place I sing this song.
A starling song of love gone wrong.
Angela was one of only two people to go into work on the Thursday between Christmas and New Year. Christmas, as ever, had been a solitary experience and when she’d been asked if she could perhaps make it in to do the mandatory reports one morning between the two holidays she agreed, but did her best to make her answer look reluctant. Yes, she said, she should be back from a delayed Christmas dinner at her cousin’s house in Newcastle and would
probably
be able to make it in. She had sighed and grunted about it all afternoon, and the people with whom she sold health insurance to the great British public understood how greatly she had been inconvenienced, but there would be no Christmas dinner. There wasn’t even a cousin. There was nobody, and Angela had been hoping they would ask her to do this for months. As the bearded spectre of Christmas loomed up at her out of autumnal hues she had clutched her chest and begged the night for it. For someone. For anyone.
She arrived to the wide empty office and, from a grid of switches, turned on just the lights above her bank of desks. The stark lights clattered above her as they warmed up and the comma of a moon that punctuated the sky outside illuminated nothing, leaving the vast room almost completely black, except for the cold pool of light she settled in. She arranged her desk, and although it was cold and dark out there, Angela’s heart kindled its own flame and beat like a flaming bird in a cage of bone as she waited for her manager to arrive.
Veronica had never been late, not once in almost four decades. In fact she was never less than fifteen minutes early. It was one of many ways she managed to stand proud in a crowd, catching the attention of light and men with such casual ease. Angela couldn’t help but admire her, and she couldn’t help but be cast into her shadow. It was a darkness that Angela had come to love after years in its comfortable shade, but back when the light was anyone’s for the taking Veronica’s extreme earliness had forced Angela to arrive earlier still, or feel second best in too many ways. So began a silent competition that spanned an age, each shaving precious seconds off their shrinking lives, throwing them on the pyre of time that burned them away, each trying to prove themselves keener to the powers that be, before Veronica had become Manager of the department, when they were still equal, in one way at least. It was an ugly dance, full of waste and pride, and in truth Veronica’s eventual trophy life, with the title and the husband and the swan-like grace, had less to do with her timekeeping and more to do with the shape of her body, a competition in which Angela just couldn’t compete, and, if she was honest, was the same reason she now went to the bathroom and applied a smudge of lipstick to her thin dry lips. Maybe, she considered idly as she smeared herself in red grease, she had even been complicit in Veronica's win, her adoration contributing to the consensus, but as much as she resented it, old habits die hard, and so here she was, very old, very hard, and very, very early.
Veronica arrived at 8:04 a.m., and to Angela she was as beautiful as she had ever been. Her fifty-nine years had made their mark, that couldn’t be argued, but Angela saw through the lines and looseness and liver marks to the tight little thing that used to strut back and forth around these same desks all those years ago. In those heels. She remembered those heels, those slicing, spiking heels, her legs so long and lean…
Veronica joined Angela in her pool of light and her eyes ate her up. Gold rings and clumped mascara, coal on spider legs, her body draped in a sequinned black dress that hugged her hills and caressed her valleys, and a pair of pink rimmed glasses, perched on her perfect little nose. Angela recognised the dress. It was from Next.
I like your dress, Angela said. Veronica nodded, as if her adoration was a foregone conclusion and her sequins winked in sequence as she drifted by, like a tired old peacock displaying threadbare plumage. She was overdressed and she knew it, but she had always liked to let a glimmer of her dinner party lifestyle leak into the nine to fives. Still, Angela marvelled at the display, and as Veronica walked around her to her own desk, she noticed a whisper of the elegant grace that hadn’t completely left her, despite being on her second hip.
They said their hellos, complained about the TV over Christmas and began their work.
“How was your dinner at your cousin’s?”
“Fine. It was fine. The potatoes were dry.”
Their shared history echoed between their small talk and over time’s barren planes. All the meetings and supervisions. The birthday meals and office parties. The leaving do’s and redundancies, like crystal sculptures that only they could see.
Once all those numbers had been entered into those black and blue screens Veronica packed up her belongings and told Angela, sat alone, that she had to nip to the loo but then she’d have to be leaving because her boys were waiting for her to eat. Angela blinked and nodded then stared into the space Veronica left behind. She considered following her into the little pink bathroom and holding the door closed, holding her down and doing the things she’d dreamed of so many times, taking what she had never been given. Trembling, she blinked twice more, waited for the bathroom door to swing shut, then grabbed her bag and trotted to the front door as quickly as her short wide legs would carry her. She fell out into a wind and the pale blue street, wiping a scrag of black hair out of her small wet eyes, then took the waiting train out of the ice grey station and was home before the lights above her vacant desk had cooled. She slammed the front door shut, ran upstairs to the second bedroom and I watched through a tear in the celestial cloth as my daughter put two nails through two small, blue, birds.
It had been a grey Christmas in every way imaginable. Snow didn’t fall, bells didn’t ring, and the empty hours yawned in her face, begging to be filled. She did her best. She bathed in the static of the TV and the gentle wind from the wings of the many birds in her second bedroom. She wrote lists of things she didn’t really need from town, and from time to time she let her mind into the life of her friend from work, who would not think of Angela at all. She pictured Veronica cooking and cleaning and undressing for bed and, finally, seeing behind the clothes she hid in and into the rawness beyond. She smiled at the thought and looked out of the wide kitchen window at a sky that wasn’t so much a sky as a ceiling.
In the very early hours of New Years Eve Angela dressed in a pair of old jeans, a woolly jumper and an anorak. She packed an orange and one of her small metal cages into a black leatherette trolley and set off into town, where the sun rose only a little into a space slightly outside of time.
She went the long way, through the gloom, along the path and up into the park on the hill. There was no one there. She’d been counting on it. And anyway, even if there had been others, the kind of people that made it out at that time could only see themselves. She got up to the high point of the park, where rooks wheeled overhead like flying black daggers stabbing the sky. There she bent down and removed the cage from the trolley. The birds in the trees swivelled their heads, their black diamond eyes glinting cold and knowing. She dragged herself and the rattling cage into the shade between shrubs and bushes then clambered through them, through the deep shadow of the trees, feeling her way through the murk along the ground back to the damp soft place where the fence of the old estate behind the park began. She set the little Larson trap on a small shelf she’d nailed up years ago, filled it with seed, then made her way out. Back in the light she brushed herself off and walked down into town where she sat on a green bench, ate her orange, and waited for the shops to open. She needed margarine, glue and disinfectant, and she made herself think about all the beatings she took as a child.
She took so many.
On the first day back in work Sheila called in sick so Angela had to do the work of two people. She spent the morning grey in resentment, her face pressed against it, warping her features. Veronica asked her how the rest of her break had been and Angela told her that she’d been bored, but that really only scratched the surface of the monolithic truth which was that every day spent in the house with only herself and seventy-two strangely silent birds was like sinking into a sea of black oil, endless and viscous.
Veronica guffawed at the revelation.
“Bored?! I wish I’d had time to be bored! The boys kept me so busy I didn’t get two minutes to myself!” Veronica’s beautiful voice went on and on, singing of parties and people and places Angela would never see.
“Well I finished my puzzle book, and my birds keep me busy”, Angela interjected.
“You and those birds!” said Veronica, smiling and tutting all at once, and Angela understood that in every way she was less than the woman with the devoted husband, loving son and designated parking space.
The weeks drew on and nothing much happened. Angela spent as much time as she could in the company of her birds, her beloved little birds, sat in their midst where she whistled Alouette with the world just a square of sky on the other side of a roof window. Amongst them, locked in the second bedroom of her semi detached suburban box, she felt understood. I remember the first bird. It was the day before I left her. A small brown sparrow flew in through her bedroom window. She pulled the window closed behind it and the little bird never left. That night she sat on Angela's stubby little finger and chirped for her mother as Angela looked into her little eyes and pretended the insistent song was for her.
“Angela!” Veronica shouted, and Angela blinked an inky blackness from her mind. She was back in the room.
“You might want to answer the phone.” Veronica pointed a knuckly ringed finger at the chirping beige box bound to Angela’s head by a curly black wire.
“Sorry”, Angela said, “I’ve had a headache...”
“Well take some tablets and get on with it! I don’t want to be back in there with you next month”, pointing that same finger at the private office at the end of a long, dark corridor.
Veronica leaned in and whispered, “Maybe if you lost some weight you’d feel better, wouldn’t get so many headaches. Are you still going to Weight Watchers? I think it would do you the world of good. Get you out the house. Meet people.”
Angela lied with a nod and answered the insistent little box tied to her head, and although her mouth shaped words and her own crooked fingers made things happen on a screen in her mind she was flying through the night, tears stinging cold in the wind, with sharp claws and a razored beak.