The Bird Room by Chris Killen

was horrible. It sounded like the man was killing the woman every night. Like he was bouncing her head off the walls. I’d lie in bed and wait for the sound of police cars.’
    â€˜Where are your parents now?’ I say.
    As soon as I’ve said it, it feels like the wrong thing to say. Something changes in her. Something freezes. Something snaps off. She shuffles in the bed, so we aren’t touching as much any more. She turns to face the wall. I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to answer if she doesn’t want to. That she doesn’t have to tell me anything at all.
    â€˜Not in England,’ she says, and I leave it at that.

She was on the phone again. She takes her mobile into the bathroom and locks the door. She talks to somebody in a low whisper.
    After she finishes work she comes back with boxes. Slowly the house is filling with her things. In the daytime I go through it all; books, clothes, hair products, CDs. No letters, diaries or photos.
    It’s not much to go on. I now know she likes Joy Division, Tom Waits and Erasure. I know she reads Albert Camus, Jane Austen and Anaïs Nin. I know she shops at Topshop, H&M and Dorothy Perkins.
    I know nothing about her.
    I sit there in my room – ‘our room’ – with her boxes around me, trying to find some sort of connection or piece of her in all this stuff. There are perfumes and threenew kinds of soap in the bathroom. (What do her parents do?) There’s a purple scrubbing-thing hanging from the shower. (Am I imagining it or does she somehow manage to steer any conversation away from ‘her past’?) Her underwear comes mostly from Marks & Spencer. (Why did she suddenly start crying, that time last night when we were in bed?) She has about one hundred pairs of tights.
    It’s coming from her ex’s place. It must be.
    Darren.
    He’s bigger than me. He has short dark hair and wears a rugby shirt with his name written on the back. DARREN. The number 69. He is bullish and surly, his face perpetually in shadow.
    (He is the man from the club that first night.)
    Alice is still in love with him. She goes round to his house after work. Darren lives in a two-bed terrace, a kid’s bike rusting in the grass out front. She rings the bell. The door opens. She goes inside.
    â€˜What do you want, then?’ he says in the hall, his bottom lip flopping heavily as he speaks.
    Darren reads FHM , cover to cover.
    â€˜I’ve come for the rest of my stuff,’ she says, not making eye contact. She’s afraid to. Instead she looks down at her shoes and then at his. Black boots next to chunky bright-white trainers.
    Darren smells of aftershave. His skin is red and smooth and babyish. He backs against the wall, letting her pass.
    Darren touches her arm.
    Her skin remembers him.
    Her skin sends something like a text message to her brain, which reads:
    Fuck Darren 1 last time. Make sure u arent making a mistake.
    Alice is in the bedroom now, putting things in a shoebox. Little things, all that’s left; a bottle of perfume and a pen.
    (Maybe she left them here on purpose.)
    Darren stands in the doorway, watching.
    His thoughts sound like gangsta rap, blunt and violent. His thoughts say things like bitch and ass in his head. They say fuck that bitch’s ass one last time . There is an obvious beat behind his thoughts. It is Darren’s heart.
    â€˜So this is really it, huh?’ he says to her back.
    Darren speaks like television; something American, with advert breaks and sponsorship.
    Alice is leaning over the small mirrored dresser, catching his eye in the glass. She watches him walk around the bed, come up behind her and put his hands on her. He pushes her skirt up around her hips.
    She doesn’t stop him.
    She just closes her eyes and breathes him in.
    I am outside Darren’s house, hiding behind a car. I’ve been here too long. It’s getting cold. I can see nothingthrough the windows