Bird Inside

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Wendy Perriam

  Bird Inside

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  For Keith New

  il miglior fabbro

  Chapter One

  Jane jolted out of sleep. A bomb had just exploded right outside the house. She could feel the cottage shaking, as if its whole foundations had been snapped or shocked apart; the faintest shudder still throbbing through her body, through the thin and scratchy mattress laid out on the floor. She jerked up from the mattress, kicked aside the pile of tangled rugs.

  ‘They’ve come,’ she thought immediately. ‘They’ve found me.’

  She could hear their noise, the noise she heard in nightmares, but real now and all round her: a constant muted roaring, as if her small one-storey refuge had been wrenched up from its stretch of lonely shingle and resited in the centre of a motorway. She reached out for her torch, startled by a sudden louder booming – an articulated lorry overtaking in the fast lane, its huge reverberating bulk juddering through the room. The torch felt clumsy – cold beneath her hand. She probed her fingers up and round, to find the smooth bump of the switch. The beam flickered for a moment, died. She shook it, terrified. Everything was not just dark, but damp – torch, walls, bedding, mattress, uneven wooden floor. She was crawling on the floor now, fumbling in the blackness for the lamp. She only knew she’d found it when she knocked it over, felt paraffin ooze between her fingers like warm wet blood. She inched back to the mattress, wiped her hands clean on the rugs, found the matches where she’d left them, on her bedside orange-crate, used her sense of touch again to locate the rough side of the match-box. She struck one and then another – three, five, seven, eight – their tiny futile raspings refusing to flare into a flame. Damp, like all the rest.

  She must get out, escape. She couldn’t stand the darkness or that insistent threatening roar. It wasn’t just the sea noise, which she was used to now, accepted – waves pounding on the shingle, encroaching on the house – but something far more menacing, like war. She felt her way across the room, negotiating obstacles in a stumbling zigzag course between the wrecks of tatty furniture she had arranged around her mattress, to try to turn a bolt-hole into home. Now they simply slowed her, tripped her up. She groped out to the poky hall, unbolted the front door, was knocked half off her feet as the wind swooped belching in – a pouncing, frenzied, violent wind, which forced an entry like a mugger. A shower of whirling debris struck her on the legs – old plastic bags, dried seaweed, litter, scraps of shells – scuttling to the corners of the hall, a scrum of desperate victims seeking sanctuary. It took her all her force to close the door again, as the wind tugged the other way, lashing out at her now, clawing at her clothes, whipping strands of hair against her face.

  She stood huddled in the outside porch, trying to fight the wind off with her hands. The roaring noise was louder, and what she’d taken as a bomb was just an empty oil drum which had been dashed against the house and was now lying like a spent exhausted missile. It was a war – a war of wind and weather – the most savage storm she’d ever seen, raging round the row of crumbling cottages; maybe even a hurricane, like the vicious one four years ago, which she’d watched safely on the television news. She’d felt secure and almost smug then, living in a sturdy home in a solid street in Shrepton, a rugged little grey-stone town between Newcastle and Hexham; the whole brave northern county more or less unscathed.

  This time she was totally exposed, camping all alone in a dilapidated house, precariously positioned on the sea’s edge; a house already old and sick, and now crying out in pain. Its fragile walls were creaking and complaining, its tattered roof-felts ripping in the wind, and the lopsided garden swing, which had been left, a rusty relic, behind the last cottage of the row, rattling like a mad thing on its chain, crashing against the metal struts with a hideous clanging noise, which seemed to echo and re-echo down the beach. She could barely glimpse the sea, only hear the waves thwacking with a fury on the strand, battering the wooden groynes somewhere far beyond her. The shingle seemed alive, grinding on itself, as stone slashed angry stone; old cans and lengths of driftwood spinning up like frisbees. The light was mean and grudging – just a slice of frightened moon caged in swollen clouds; clouds moving far too quickly, as if delirious and ill, the whole sky churned, inflamed.

  She took a step out from the porch, terrified, yet needing still to check her eyes, make sure she wasn’t trapped in some wild nightmare. Through the whirling salt and spray, she could just make out the shapes of towering breakers, surely too high and violent to be real; glimpse cascades of fluorescent white, foaming from the black hole of the sea. Her eyes were stinging, streaming, flecks of spume clinging to her clothes. She turned her back, half-fell against the door, wrestled with the wind again, to tug it from its grip, rammed the bolts home, stood against it, trembling. The old tracksuit which she slept in felt wet against her body, her bare feet numb with cold. She needed tea, tea to warm her, calm her. She blundered to the kitchen, stopped a moment, rigid, in the doorway, reached out both her hands. She had suddenly lost all sense of boundaries in the stumbling clotted darkness, lost the shape and
feel of things, like someone just struck blind.

  She shambled on, bumped into the dresser, clung on to it, arms around its solid jutting bulwark, face against its wood. The darkness seemed to thicken, blank her out. She was being switched off, disconnected, as the electric-light supply had been cut off in this cottage, months before she’d come there. She had found the row of houses dark and derelict, threatened by erosion, in danger from the sea – a perfect place for hiding, or so she’d thought naïvely. Now she was defeated, bullied by the elements as well as prey to cold and fear. She would have to go back home, face all the fuss and questions, a new round of lies, or rows. It had been hard enough to live here in a smugly gold October, with winter just a word still, a vague and distant threat. But tomorrow was the first day of November, and had come raging in so spitefully, it was just as if they’d planned it, laid it on deliberately, to break her spirit, force her home. She hadn’t done too badly, had survived a month alone, living like a tramp, collecting scraps from litter-bins, or daring some large supermarket when she could find the strength and purpose to walk the three miles into town, but where at least it was impersonal and no one probed or pried.

  She would go there now – to town – go there for the light, whole sweeps and streams of light: lamp-posts, headlamps, neon, bright arcs in shops and houses. And the houses would be homes, not shivering gouty shacks, but healthy and alive: rooms with beds and curtains, gardens with real flowers, instead of sand and stones. She edged back to the largest room, which she had made sleeping-room and eating-room, the one room she kept warm – or tried to, when the stove worked, or she could coax damp logs to burn. She had always been untidy, cursed her own stupidity as she tried to find her trainers, which she had kicked off somewhere late last night, socks flung somewhere else. But she’d been relying on the lamp – that loyal and faithful lamp, which hadn’t failed her in twenty-seven days. She had chosen it herself, lugged it back from town with a super-pack of matches, a dozen instant packet-soups with names like Golden Vegetable, which sounded rich and comforting, but actually tasted thin and salty-sour. She was learning how things lied – not just parents – everything: false promises, false names. She didn’t have a name now, could hardly go on using theirs, had never liked it anyway – too fancy with plain Jane. ‘Plain’ was right, at least. She shook back her damp hair – straight and boring brown. Pretty girls were blonde, or had hair which held a curl, tendrilled in the rain instead of forming rats’-tails.

  Everything seemed difficult: tying shoes, forcing fiddly toggles through their loops, as if the wind had struck at coats and clothes, not just roofs and windows. The windows were all rattling, so hard she feared they’d break; sudden cold and squally gusts blitzing through new gaps in roof and wall; a sheet of corrugated iron beating an SOS against the shed. She tried the back door, this time, steeled herself to battle down the path, bent double like a soldier advancing into fire. The wind scalpelled through her body, slashed away its contents – lungs, heart, liver, womb – all those vital organs which doctors claimed you had, but you never quite believed in, never saw to check. She felt so light without them, she was barely able to stand, the wind pummelling her hollow frame, determined to uproot her.

  The moon had dared to show itself, cowering out from behind a cloud, a three-quarters moon, looking lumpy and misshapen, as if it had also been manhandled by the wind. She used its light to pick her way along the rutted track which led on to the coast road; fighting for her balance, struggling for each breath. It was madness to be out. She could trip and break a leg, or be killed by flying debris – wooden slats from smashed and scattered beach-huts, cruelly splintered window frames. Yet she had to find some help, defeat that terrifying sense of being the only person alive in all the world. Perhaps it was her punishment. She had left her home and parents, left her school and friends, her neighbours, county, safe and sheltered cul-de-sac, and only now had she really grasped the concept ‘on her own’. She had always been called brave – independent, self-sufficient, spirited – all those words which were only empty syllables, disproved now by the fear she felt; fear so raw and choking it seemed to be closing in and round her like another sort of darkness.

  She stopped a moment, blinded, crouched down face to knees, to rest her smarting eyes. Strange how calm she’d been the night she’d actually left – a careful concentration on just the practicalities: the clothes she’d need, the route she’d take, money, food and train-times. She must do the same thing now, blank her mind of everything save the next step on the path: how to strike a bargain with the wind – sidestep it and dodge it, using guile as much as force; accept its boom and roaring as just some loud, crude background music she had no way of turning off. Just one step at a time, one step at a …

  At last, she reached the road, stopped in shock as she saw a boat flung upside-down across it. Could the gale have hurled it quite that far, turned tarmac into sea? She longed to set it right way up, comfort it, explain. But what could she explain? The 1987 storm had been called a fluke, a one-off horror unlikely to occur again. Yet only two years later, there had been a second almost-hurricane, killing forty-seven people, striking at the trees again, the whole landscape scarred for life. Surely twenty million trees lost was enough destruction for a hundred years, yet here were the survivors, fighting for their lives once more: Scots pines bent almost double, as if the branches sought to touch their roots, huge limbs scythed off, or hanging maimed and helpless. She, too, was being blown away like some puny trifling twig; would never make the town, not even make the next few yards, since she could no longer even stand up on her feet. She should have stayed in bed. Even the claustrophobic darkness of the cottage was better than this sense of being trapped; too frightened to go on, too fragile to go back.

  Suddenly, the stretch of road in front of her was magically lit up, light gleaming on the puddles, flickering the trees. A car – behind her – slowing down and stopping. The driver might be dangerous, a rapist or a Ripper. She hardly cared. At least the hand was human, winding down the window – another person in the world, another blessed voice. She couldn’t understand the voice. She knew a little German, had just done French at A-level, but this exotic guttural language was one she’d never heard. Signs were quite enough though – a friendly hand gesturing to the passenger-seat, a welcome opened door. She scrambled in, shouting out her thanks above the wind, then stunned to silence by the sudden warmth and calm; the roaring muted, the shock and sting against her face miraculously removed. She was in a small cocoon, a heater blowing warm air on her legs, powerful headlights slicing through the black. She stole a quick glance at the driver before daring to relax. He seemed old and pretty harmless, from what she could distinguish in the gloom – a bald and plumpish man, wearing a comfy tweedy jacket and an old home-knitted cardigan in some sludgy nothing-colour she couldn’t quite make out – someone’s favourite uncle, judging by his looks. She could hug him, kiss him, just for turning up, rescuing her from terror and exhaustion.

  He was talking to her still, but the words made no impression, bounced off her like water off an oilskin. She tried a little English, in the hope he’d understand, but he answered in his own tongue, with a few eager flash-on smiles. Stalemate. Though perhaps it was a blessing that they couldn’t actually communicate. Questions were so dangerous, and she wasn’t good at lies yet.

  They were travelling little faster than her previous walking pace. The road was narrow anyway, and strewn with fallen branches. The man swerved and almost skidded to avoid a massive tree-trunk which had crashed right across their path, its roots gouging up the concrete, its branches like ungainly arms flung up to break its fall. They could only pass it by driving on the verge, and, even then, its long dark tentacles scraped along the paintwork, knocked against the windows, as if calling out for help. They bumped down on the road again, the car bucking like a panicked horse as a squall of even stronger wind hit it with full force. Leaves and twigs were hailing down around them, thudding on the roof, t
all trunks swaying on the near side of the road, as if they were mere flimsy fronds of fern. The man suddenly wrenched the steering wheel to avoid a heavy-duty dustbin rumbling down the road and right towards them, spewing tins and papers from its mouth.

  He laughed, a crazy chuckling sound, shrill and almost girlish. She laughed herself, just to be polite; then found the laugh was real, shaking through her diaphragm, hurting in her chest. This was how it should be – everything stirred up, solid things dissolving: boats upturned on pavements, trees hurled roots-to-sky. The evening she’d left home, it had been so calm, deceitful; not a breath of wind, just icing-sugar moonlight and stagey love-song stars. And the next day equally false – a coyly sunny morning with talk of Indian summers; people in their shirt-sleeves, licking ice-creams in the street. At last, nature had caught up and was expressing all its fury and its shock. Why should she be frightened? She had felt like that herself, felt like that inside: would have roared and raged and rampaged if she’d been a Force 12 wind with her parents’ house to blast.

  She rubbed the window with her sleeve, peered out through the glass. The road was mulched with leaves now, as if they were driving across a forest floor in some ancient fairy tale, or perhaps one in a dream, since the ‘forest’ seemed to plunge and writhe; strange shapes lowering in the gloom, then a cannonade of tangled twigs blocking any vision as it strafed against the windscreen. She could smell the ripe dank odour of crushed and bleeding leaves, hear sudden booming thuds as new branches thundered down. They could be killed at any moment; had already seen a Volvo buckled by a tree-trunk, a twisted wreck trapped beneath the foliage. It had been driverless, in fact, a parked abandoned car, but it could be their turn next. Yet she wasn’t scared at all now, almost revelled in the danger, longed to shout out ‘Harder!’ to the lashing pounding wind.