The Birdman

Like every weekday for the past thirty-seven years, Anne was sat at her desk at nine o’clock. Unlike every weekday for the past thirty-seven years, she had made no attempt to tackle today’s work. Every weekday morning, before the hour struck nine, her coffee was poured, her computer was active, and that day’s to-do list was beaming with self-importance. Usually. However, if she were asked, she would be unable to recall how she had arrived at her desk this morning at all. One may suppose that after thirty-seven years driving from home to this desk the journey would become unremarkable. It was entirely possible that such repetition would lead to no thinking on a person’s behalf; their body would follow its usual course, like water in a riverbed, without much input from a mind at all. Indeed, that her appearance resembled the Anne of last week – a tight grey bun; a bobbly cotton cardigan; a long smart skirt – was through no conscious action of her own. But here Anne sat. In a daze.

Though her colleagues at their desks rarely approached hers, she was vaguely aware of them going about their usual routine. Phones were answered. Keys were typed. Gossip was whispered. It was akin to being underwater; all movement and sound moved at a distant, leisurely pace. Anne sat upon this cubicled ocean floor with thin hands on her lap, studying the square-tiled ceiling above her. Forty-eight tiles by fifty-two. Almost two-and-a-half thousand altogether. Had she known that before? She must have.

“. . . and here is Anne – a stalwart of the Axel West family!”

Kevin. The baby-faced owner of the company was giving a tour to a small group of new-starts. Anne felt her head lowering from the ceiling and looked at this boy playing boss in his father’s clothes. She was, she now recalled, sat at this desk when he was born. Stewart running from his office, jacket draped over his arm, announcing to the room that Frieda had gone into labour was talked about for years after the fact. The workers had cheered and clapped from their desks. One chap called after him: “Does this mean we get the afternoon off?” to laughter from the room. She was the last of that cohort. All had moved on to bigger and brighter things. Not counting Kevin, of course. She had seen him in stages throughout his life. Brought in the pram by Frieda; toddling round the desks in dungarees; sitting in the waiting room, as a teenager, waiting for a lift home from Stewart. Now, he stood over her.

“Anne has been with the company since the start – from paper copies and filing cabinets to emails and the cloud,” he announced. Her new colleagues - who couldn’t have been much older than children – smiled and nodded with an enthusiasm that suggested their contracts would be cut on the spot had they stopped. As he spread his smarm, Kevin, out of a newfound managerial instinct, cast as subtle a glance as he could manage at her screen. Its lack of life had thrown him, and the rest of the speech Anne had heard countless times (“she’s great for a story”; “always here if you have any questions”; you’ll have to race her to the coffee pot!”) was now forced, out of tune. As he moved on, her new colleagues’ painted smiles dropped as they clucked after him, keen to catch up as he introduced them to the printer.

Anne’s gaze drifted round the room she had spent more time in than perhaps anywhere else in the world. She wondered how this made her feel, then quickly stopped for fear of finding the answer.

More time must have passed as, after watching the schools of fish drift past her, the silence was broken by Kevin once again.

“Anne? Is everything alright?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Are you having trouble getting logged on?” he looked, again, from her to the black screen. “Have you spoken to the technician?”

“I don’t think that would be necessary.”

“Well, and I’m sorry to say this, Anne, but It’s eleven o’clock. Almost lunchtime. You haven’t just been,” he paused, unable to fathom the possibility, “doing nothing, have you?”

“Oh. Terribly sorry. The time must have slipped away from me. I’ll just get sorted now. Two ticks.”

Kevin watched with kitted eyebrows as she extended a withered stalk of an arm to press the button on the monitor. It must have taken all her strength as once her fingertip was free from the machine it deflated and drooped back to her side.

“Are you sure you’re feeling alright? You seem a bit pale.”

“Quite alright, thank you.”

Kevin stood, stuck. His father had always talked highly of Anne yet he never quite knew how to approach her. Any angle he attempted with banter or small talk fell flat. There was no denying she was a good worker – she was one of the only people he could rely on to meet a deadline. But here she was, swirling slowly this way then that in her chair, eyes unfocused, hazy. Maybe the old bat had finally lost it. People had said she was odd. Never seen at a Christmas night out. Eats her lunch in her car, despite the renovated break room. Most new colleagues were intrigued by her and often sought information behind her back (though they usually lost interest in time). She was an old woman who went home in the evening and came to work in the morning. And this appeared (after, what was it, twenty-odd years of service?) to be the day she had given up.

“Maybe you should head home, Anne. I don’t want you here if you’re not feeling yourself.” Anne’s head swivelled, owl-like, once again from the tiles to his eyes. What was it, there? Fear? Anger?

Anne noticed the tan of another holiday on his face and hands. Another trip with the lads – or that wife of his, no doubt. His dad was the same. Always jetting off to sunny places far from here. Bringing back snacks from Italy, Germany, the Maldives to be pecked at. Well, she supposed, that’s what people did, didn’t they? Conversations in the office, when they weren’t about the shocking weather or the awful parking or the bloody deadlines were about holidays. “When you taking your holidays?”, “Where you going this year?”, “How much for flights?”, “All-inclusive?”, “Tenerife again?”. Her colleagues feigned surprise when, stuck with her in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, she told them she would be spending her – mandatory – two weeks of annual leave at home. They all knew she went nowhere. That she never had. They just liked hearing it for themselves.

Anne looked around her desk, as if she had just woken up.

“Well, I don’t seem to have made much progress this morning, have I? Maybe this isn’t the best place for me today, after all.” Kevin nodded, satisfied at a decision he had made being followed through with. He watched her a moment longer, gum sticking to and unsticking from his teeth. He left her as she pushed herself off her chair.

As if to delay her exit, Anne drifted to the window. There was nothing remarkable. The bank across the road was flanked by a betting shop on one side and a closed-down butchers on the other. Greenery from the park a few streets away could be caught in glimpses in gaps between the buildings. She turned her eyes to the sky. It was a common observation that when stating the obviousness of one thing, the sky’s blueness was called into question. But the sky, as she had known it, was rarely blue. Layers of white on grey lined the view above her. Only one space held a muted yellow light. It was clear, as she could see it, that whatever was emanating that anaemic glow was trying with all its might to break through. Push, she willed. Push through. Her thoughts were interrupted, with the slightest of yelps, by a pigeon landing on the windowsill. Anne looked over her shoulder, then back to the bird. It shook off the impact of the landing, pecked at the window’s seams, then, embarrassingly, looked up at her, cocking its head. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her as she moved to the exit.

Finding herself in the carpark, keys in hand, Anne froze by her car. She had run out of options. How could she return to what waited for her at home? She thought of what she had been avoiding all morning. The letter. Heartbreak wrapped in an envelope, adorned with a second-class stamp. How could something so commonplace, so small and ordinary, carry such weight? How could something so feeble and fragile cause her entire world to collapse so entirely? The pain from this morning had been patiently waiting wherever she dropped it. She pictured the rest of the day ahead of her. She’d have to pick it up, turn it over, read it again.

No.

Anne backed away from her car and moved, instead, to the street. Her heels clicked and clacked as she marched down the road the opposite way from home. Past the bookies and the bank and the butcher. She didn’t recognise much else down this way. Restaurants and boutiques and charity shops. Well, when was the last time she had come this way? Not this decade, at least.

Her feet had, it seemed, taken her to the park. The sound of the street seemed to muffle itself quite politely as she stepped through the park’s threshold. Lines of grey gravel paths snaked their way through fields of green. Flowers were just beginning to bloom in clumps and the tree’s leaves were just beginning to bud. She sat on a bench and watched the branches beckon and wave.

She recalled one day, fairly recently, when work had been called off. A storm; high winds. The buses and trains had been cancelled with The News saying to only travel in the event of an emergency. Sitting by the window, Anne watched as shopping bags, coffee cups and a barrage of leaves went sailing past the frame of her window. She watched the trees in the front garden of the big house across the road for most of the day. Rain lashed at the road as the trees struggled to maintain their usual composure. How could something unseen cause so much damage? Big branches and even whole trees were found scattered around town in the proceeding days. How can we prepare for chaos when it approaches so suddenly? These forces that bend the tallest of trees to their will and cause lampposts to stagger. Trees, Anne supposed, are used to change. They’ve just done it and will do it again soon, as they always have. But what about the birds in the branches? Come morning, the birds too will be forced to look about themselves and pick up the pieces.

As if on cue, her thoughts were interrupted by a frenzy of birds to her right. There must have been twenty pigeons at least, summoned from God knows where, crowding round a figure two benches down. Squinting, Anne saw the outline of a man around her age, tearing chunks of bread from a loaf and scattering them on the path before him. He wore a jacket from (what must have been) the sixties, trousers that were more patchwork than original fabric, and socks whose elastic had long since failed and pooled around his ankles in a tired heap. Pigeons continued to land from all directions, scattering gravel with the force of entry. The stillness of the moment was filled with erratic cooing and flapping.

But they weren’t there for the breadcrumbs.

Anne looked, really looked, as the pigeons did, at the man. She had missed him when she first sat down. He had, sort of, blended in with the scenery. The way he sat on the bench, it was as if he had always been here, had as much stake to his spot as the trees and the flowers. Then he began to move.

He bobbed his head back and forth while folding and unfolding his arms, like a child imitating a chicken. He slid off the bench and, keeping low to the ground, strutted like a peacock, padded about proud, flat-footed like one of them. He whistled and cooed and clicked and whirred with his tongue. The birds trampled the bread under their feet as they watched, entranced.

Anne looked around, mortified at the scene. She looked to her left for some support from any passer-by, but the path was clear and empty. She pushed off the bench and made to return the way she came. The thought of the letter caused her to stop. She turned and began looking closely. He was laughing. Any old fool could, she supposed, scatter their detritus on the ground in the hopes that some disease-ridden vermin would catch wind and show them some attention.

But they were here for him. The Birdman.

Anne edged forward until she was a few steps from the gaggle of feathers. The Birdman noticed her watching him. When he smiled, Anne could tell that, though the years had not been kind to him, he had been kind in return. His wrinkles fell into place and shaped his face, like a hot air balloon becoming clear at the opticians. The brownness of his eyes promised a world of warmth.

“It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” He spread his arms, beaming at the sheer joy of his world. Anne suppressed a giggle.

Sudden warmth flooded the scene. The heat hit her skin and the colours of the grass, the bench, the gravel illuminated, shifting into their true, proper colours. Dorothy stepping into Oz, she thought. With a hand over her brows, Anne looked up. The sun had broken through the layer of cloud. A faint blueness could be seen beyond some of the thinner layers of white. She returned her gaze to the Birdman.

His arm was extended, holding something. It took Anne a moment to notice what was being offered. He gestured, once again, with the loaf in his hand. The birds turned to her, expectant. For the first time in decades, Anne made a decision.