Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(85)

Or this—

For a moment my key didn’t seem to fit the door. Imagine this—

Late at night you enter a house in which you’ve been as happy as anywhere in your life: probably happier. You go into the front room, where streetlight falls unevenly across the rugs, the furniture, the mantelpiece and mirrors. On the sofa are strewn a dozen colourful, expensive shirts, blue and red and gold like macaws and money. Two or three of them have been slipped out of their cellophane, carefully refolded and partly wrapped in Christmas paper. “Dear China—” say the tags. “Dearest China.” There are signs of a struggle but not necessarily with someone else. A curious stale smell fills the room, and a chair has been knocked over. It’s really too dark to see.

Switch on the lights. Glasses and bottles. Food trodden into the best kilim. Half-empty plates, two days old.

“Isobel? Isobel!”

The bathroom was damp with condensation, the bath itself full of cold water smelling strongly of rose oil. Wet towels were underfoot, there and in the draughty bedroom, where the light was already on and Isobel’s pink velvet curtains, half-drawn, let a faint yellow triangle of light into the garden below. The lower sash was open. When I pulled it down, a cat looked up from the empty flower bed: ran off. I shivered. Isobel had pulled all her favourite underclothes out onto the floor and trodden mascara into them. She had written in lipstick on the dressing table mirror, in perfect mirror writing: “Leave me alone.”

I found her in one of the big blanket boxes.

When I opened the lid a strange smell—beeswax, dried roses, vomit, whiskey—filled the room. In there with her she had an empty bottle of Jameson: an old safety razor of mine and two or three blades. She had slit her wrists. But first she had tried to shave all the downy, half-grown feathers from her upper arms and breasts. When I reached into the box they whirled up round us both, soft blue and grey, the palest rose-pink. Miami! In some confused attempt to placate me, she had tried to get out of the dream the way you get out of a coat.

She was still alive.

“China,” she said. Sleepily, she held her arms up to me. She whispered: “China.”

Alexander had made her look like a bird. But underneath the cosmetic trick she was still Isobel Avens. Whatever he had promised her, she could never have flown. I picked her up and carried her carefully down the stairs. Then I was crossing the pavement toward the BMW, throwing the nearside front door open and trying to get her into the passenger seat. Her arms and legs were everywhere, pivoting loose and awkward from the hips and elbows. “Christ, Isobel, you’ll have to help!” I didn’t panic until then.

“China,” whispered Isobel. Blood ran into my shirt where she had put her arms round my neck. I slammed the door. “China.”

“What, love? What?”

“China.” She could talk but she couldn’t hear.

“Hold on,” I said. I switched on the radio. Some station I didn’t know was playing the first few bars of a Joe Satriani track, “Always with You, Always with Me.” I felt as if I was outside myself. I thought: “Now’s the time to drive, China, you fucker.” The BMW seemed to fishtail out of the parking space of its own accord, into the empty arcade game of Whitechapel. The city loomed up then fell back from us at odd angles, as if it had achieved the topological values of a Vorticist painting. I could hear the engine distantly, making a curious harsh overdriven whine as I held the revs up against the red line. Revs and brakes, revs and brakes: if you want to go fast in the city you hold it all the time between the engine and the brakes. Taxis, hoardings, white faces of pedestrians on traffic islands splashed with halogen pink, rushed up and were snatched away.

“Isobel?”

I had too much to do to look directly at her. I kept catching glimpses of her in weird, neon shop-light from Wallis or Next or What She Wants, lolling against the seat belt with her mouth half open. She knew how bad she was. She kept trying to smile across at me. Then she would drift off, or cornering forces would roll her head to one side as if she had no control of the muscles in her neck and she would end up staring and smiling out of the side window whispering: “China. China China China.”

“Isobel.”

She passed out again and didn’t wake up.

“Shit, Isobel,” I said.

We were on Hammersmith Gyratory, deep in the shadow of the flyover. It was twenty minutes since I had found her. We were nearly there. I could almost see the clinic.

I said: “Shit, Isobel, I’ve lost it.”

The piers of the flyover loomed above us, stained grey concrete plastered with anarchist graffiti and torn posters. Free and ballistic, the car waltzed sideways toward them, glad to be out of China Rose’s hands at last.

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

We touched the kerb, tripped over our own feet, and began a long slow roll, like an airliner banking to starboard. We hit a postbox. The BMW jumped in a startled way and righted itself. Its offside rear suspension had collapsed. Uncomfortable with the new layout, still trying to get away from me, it spun twice and banged itself repeatedly into the opposite kerb with a sound exactly like some housewife’s Metro running over the cat’s-eyes on a cold Friday morning. Something snapped the window post on that side, and broken glass blew in all over Isobel Avens’s peaceful face. She opened her mouth. Thin vomit came out, the colour of tea: but I don’t think she was conscious. Hammersmith Broadway, ninety-five miles an hour. I dropped a gear, picked the car up between steering and accelerator, shot out into Queensborough Road on the wrong side of the road. The boot lid popped open and fell off. It was dragged along behind us for a moment, then it went backward quickly and disappeared.