Little Bird. Camilla Way

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ