Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

The dream is nothing special. It’s just a dream of home. I can smell it. I can smell the old chip-fryer and Mum’s secret smoke behind the house. The triplets are a background noise of wants and fighting, the closeness of a full house. I’m in the bathroom, I’m lying in the bath but I can still see through to the room I share with Iris, and Iris is in there pashing with some boy. The house is trying to be normal but I know there is someone standing behind me that I can’t see. That is all it is, but I wake up with Karen sitting on my chest, gripping my arms to my sides with her thighs, and clapping in front of my face and saying my name.

‘Shit and Christ,’ she says, ‘what is it?’ She climbs off and puts on the ombiant lamp that lives on the floor and has a red bulb. She looks back for an answer and her face is puffy from sleep. She sighs when I don’t answer and pulls up her pillow so she can lean back and she lights two Holidays, passes me one. My heart is still fast and there’s sweat on my face.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and she looks at me sideways as she blows smoke out. ‘It was just a dream.’

‘No shit,’ says Karen, and she holds the smoke between her lips and moves a leaf of hair from my face. ‘You okay?’

I nod and, as my heart starts to slow, it feels like the dream is the smoke I breathe out. But the feeling is still there, the smell of the fryer in my nose. I practise closing my eyes and every time I do I see Iris through the knot in the bathroom wall. I feel my shoulders against the white curve of the bath, and I open my eyes again to replace the image with the one on our wall — the unicorn with the dolphins leaping behind him. He looks silly in the head.

‘You want to talk?’ asks Karen.

‘No. Thanks.’ Karen crushes out her Holiday and then takes mine from me. She puts that out on the saucer by the ombiance lamp, and then switches the lamp off. Light eases in from behind the towels hung on the window. She shifts further up the headboard so she’s sitting up, and then she surprises me by pulling me onto her so that her arm is around my back and my head is on her chest. I’m wary of hurting her boobs with my head, but she feels relaxed under me. I try to be too.

‘Think of your brain,’ she tells me. ‘Visualise it.’ I can hear her breathing deeply in the dark, and it’s nice. ‘Can you see it?’ she asks.

‘Okay,’ I say. My brain is neon pink and bulging.

‘See the cleft that runs down the middle? That separates your brain into two halves?’

‘I do.’ I zoom in on the line in my head.

‘Think of it,’ says Karen; ‘that line is the corridor of your brain.’

My imagined brain doesn’t know what to do, so it just pulsates.

‘Either side of the corridor,’ she goes on, and she starts to stroke my hair with the hand that’s scooped around my back, ‘are the rooms with the memories in.’ Her voice has dropped a bit, and coupled with her breathing, in and out like the feeling of lying in the bottom of a boat in a gentle swell, it’s easier to see the brain corridor. It’s lit with halogen bulbs, and the floor is shiny, like a hospital corridor. There’s no one in it, and it stretches on until it disappears out of sight. Karen starts to stroke my hair behind my ear, again and again. ‘Go in through one of those doors,’ she says. I reach out and when I look down, I’m dressed in an old-fashioned nursing outfit. My shoes are rubber-soled. I turn the door handle and step inside, where I see the bathroom back home and the little knot of wood that I can push out to watch Iris, but it is plugged with loo roll. Outside it is daytime, but also black. I can smell the world around me melting, I can smell the oil in the deep-fat fryer from downstairs, I hear a tinkle of glass breaking.

‘And now step out of that room, via the door you went in through,’ says Karen, and I turn around, and the hospital door is still there, hasn’t closed up while I wasn’t looking, and I step my rubber-soled foot through it and into the dim-lit corridor. ‘And now close the door behind you and lock it.’ I take a large ring of keys from my crisp white pocket, and it jangles as I lock the door.

‘And now walk down the corridor,’ says Karen and her fingers have started to slide deeper into my hair, stroking slowly in time with her breath, and she has slid down a little lower so that I feel her breath in my hair and it feels like hot bread, ‘and choose a new door. Open it. And go in, go into a good place. And if it turns into a bad room, leave, and find a new door.’

I stand at the door with my keys in my hand. I can see my reflection in the safety glass. There’s one of those little paper hats with the red cross on my head. Through the window I can see the room is under water, and something noses at the glass, but the water is dark and I can’t quite make out what it is. I stand in the corridor, with my neat white shoes close together.

‘Are you in that room? Is it a good room?’ asks Karen quietly.

‘Yes,’ I lie, matching her voice. I stay standing in the corridor a moment longer, and then I carry on walking down it — it stretches as far as I can see, and I may never have to go inside another room.

I fried flounder in butter and we had it with bread. The sheep was still missing; how long would it be before she showed up as clumps of blooded wool dotted over the hillside? Lloyd was drunk, and I tried to get there too. When we’d walked up the driveway together, Lloyd sprinkling ashes from his envelope as he went so that his fingertips were black, something shrieked and it echoed across the valley. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. Lloyd noticed nothing, sang his song.

While I cooked, he beetled around making a fire. I pretended not to notice when he unbalanced and had to sit cross-legged in the hearth to build it. He folded up the envelope and pushed it into the centre of his unlit fire, and then set a match to it. It was damp and so it took a few tries, and I felt sad for him that it hadn’t all happened in a more satisfying way. He sat on the sofa once the fire had lit, singing again. ‘“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long,”’ but his song was slow like a hymn.

Lloyd’s beard had ashes in it, and he only shrugged when I told him, and left them there. The fish was good and the bread mopped up the whisky inside me. We didn’t speak, just the scrape of forks on plates, the gullet swallow of our drinks, and of our glasses being refilled. Outside the rustle of the wind in the trees and now and again a howl that could have been the wind whistling through the valley, from off the sea through the blackthorn, down into the field of sheep feeding in the dark, and opening its mouth wide to swallow the house. We drank more and kept drinking.

‘God, I wish you’d get a haircut,’ he said.

I stood up and swiped at his face, but I only clipped his ear, and he grabbed me round the wrist.

‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted. ‘Just a trim!’

I went to bed.

I woke in the morning with a dry mouth. Downstairs, the fire was just a glow and I fed it with the logs Lloyd had leant against the hearth. Dog was coiled on the other side of him in a deep sleep. I felt a long pulse of nausea from my stomach to my throat and my head, and drank three glasses of water and lit a cigarette. I smoked staring out the window at where the light was starting, pale grey. A late bat whipped around in front of the house and then disappeared under the eaves. No mist today, but a crispness, frost on the ground.

At first I thought it was a cat, because it moved in that way, loped like a cat, but it was larger and even this far away from the woods I could see the hair on its back was thick and wiry, its shoulders dense and muscled.