The Bird Room by Chris Killen Page B

scared to, but it sounds, when she says it, not strange or cheap or like something off the television. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have to speak very loudly and her head is so close to mine and about 90 per cent of her speech is just soft warm breath in my ear.
    â€˜Yeah,’ I say.
    I want to say the word ‘love’, too. I want to really, really badly, but I can’t.
    â€˜How about you?’ I say, instead.
    I feel the muscles clench in her back.
    I feel something change inside her.
    I wait for her to answer.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she says, finally.
    Everything seems suddenly not-moving and very far away.
    â€˜Okay,’ I say.
    My voice has gone quiet and strange-sounding, like I’m speaking long-distance.
    â€˜God,’ she says, ‘I’m joking.’
    But she feels about four hundred miles away from me.
    I can’t see her face. I can’t see if she’s smiling when she says this.
    â€˜Bloody hell. Of course I do.’
    She lifts her head up and looks me in the eyes. Her eyes are so clear and large and black, it feels as if my whole face could disappear into them. She props herself up on her elbow and brushes my hair with her hand.
    â€˜Come here,’ she says and kisses me. ‘It was a crap joke. I think I saw it in some film or something. Christ. Lighten up.’
    Now she only feels about four hundred metres away from me, like we’re standing at opposite ends of an empty field and waving at each other.
    She starts to walk across the field by kissing me and biting my neck.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ she whispers occasionally on the way. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘They’re big,’ she says with the toothbrush in her mouth. ‘They don’t go hard.’
    Then she spits, runs the tap.
    My fingers are pinching her nipples. Her eyes look into mine in the mirror. We’re going to bed next. We’ve washed our faces and in the morning she’ll have to get up and go to work, and I will hang around all day in the house, missing her and looking at the clock.
    The cold tap rattles. I put my fingers under the water and touch some more against her nipple; against the oval chocolate-red aureole and large puckered teat. She shivers but doesn’t pull away.
    â€˜Told you,’ she says, a fleck of toothpaste foam on her lower lip. ‘I’m not that pretty. Sometimes I don’t even know why you like me.’
    I don’t reply. I’m not here. I’m watching this on TV.
    I’m watching my fingers touch the drips of water to her skin in the mirror.
    This is someone else’s hand, I think, not mine. This hand is acting out the mirror of my actions and her nipple is doing the opposite of hardening.
    How in love we were.

One night in bed she tells me how an ex-boyfriend talked her into doing porn. He had this mate who worked for a website. It would all be completely anonymous.
    â€˜It was a few years ago.’
    She’s whispering.
    It’s so dark I can hardly see her face, so quiet I can hear empty crisp packets wisping along the street outside our house. Two in the morning. Her breath smells acidic. My hand is on her hip.
    â€˜I hardly knew him, really. We were only together for a couple of months.’
    I want to know and I don’t want to know.
    â€˜What did you do?’ I ask.
    â€˜Just sex,’ she says. ‘His mate lent him a camera and one night he filmed me, you know … as he fucked me.It was for this amateurs’ site. All he had to do was make sure he held the camera steady. It wasn’t art. I didn’t talk.’
    I want to know the specifics. I want to know if she went down on him first. I want to know what positions they used. I want to know if he came inside her or if, like in most porn I’d seen, he came on her face or her tits. But I can’t ask. Her voice is small and shaky. My hand moves from her hip.
    â€˜Did you watch the tape