‘But surely you only have to go in, check that any squatters know that the place is about to be demolished, and leave? A few birds about the place is hardly going to stop you doing that.’ He’d stopped blinking the alphabet now and was staring down at the floor, his hands loosely draped across his knees.
‘Phobia. Irrational,’ I said. ‘If it was just fear I’d be fine, I’d put a bucket on my head and walk in, but I can’t.’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘Feathers on my face, flapping, birds getting tangled in my hair, beaks, claws, pecking my eyes out, and the way they stare at you.’
‘You could lie down. Are you scared of them walking up to you?’ The man didn’t sound amused, he sounded as though he were giving my predicament serious thought.
‘I amnotgoing into a, quite honestly, probably haunted house, and lying on the floor just so the birds don’t get me!’ I reviewed the sentence, decided that it summed up the situation albeit in a these-words-may-never-be-repeated-in-this-order way, and stopped.
‘No, no, I see that.’ He stood up. It seemed to take some effort as he had to push at the desk in order to get upright and I wondered how long he’d been sitting here. He was taller than he’d seemed when he’d been hunched in the chair, wearing nicely cut jeans and a very white shirt which was wrinkled and creased as though he’d slept in it. His hair looked very slept-in too, pushed and poked about so that it stuck at odd angles, and there were grey hairs threaded through the dark tangle. ‘Look, I’ll pay you double.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m not going back in there.’
‘Treble.’
I was about to restate my non-dwelling-entering position, but then the reality of triple pay cut in. ‘Seriously?’
‘Quite frankly I’m so desperate that you could pretty much name any figure between zero and the sum total of my bank balance and I’d give it to you.’ The man seemed to realise what he’d just said, and turned around to face me, crumpled and worn, and he’d bitten his lip again. ‘But please don’t ask for the entirety of my bank balance. Which actually isn’t that much, now I come to think of it, because I’ve sunk everything into this.’
‘What exactly isthis?’ I asked, but he ignored me and began pacing around the inside of the little office. His long-limbed frame should have let him move with the grace of a tiger, but he actually did an odd sort of bouncing lope more like a cocker spaniel. But then, there wasn’t a lot of room.
‘People have said they’ve seen someone coming and going and lights in the old house, so I need to know it’s empty before I go in with a giant bulldozer and level the site. I just need the place guaranteed vacant.’
‘It’s not empty,’ I said, with certainty. ‘It’s full of birds. And have you considered that it might not be actual humans that people have seen? That place looks like Haunted Mansion Central; you could rent it out for vicars to practise their exorcisms on.’
I got a tired, dark stare. ‘It’s just a house.’
‘No, no it’s not! It’s an aviary. A spooky, haunted aviary. It’s where Edgar Allen Poe would keep his budgie, if Poe kept budgies, which he hopefully didn’t because he’s bad enough without adding bloody birds into things.’ Memories of long-distant school lessons which had featured a raven had been enough to make my flesh creep at the thought, swam to the surface. ‘Or maybe he did. He was weird enough to have done that.’
‘Quadruple,’ said the man. ‘That’s my final offer.’
Finally, and rather too late, I stopped seeing the inside of this glossy office and mentally pictured my sagging bed, the cluttered room, the bills. My makeshift life, with this makeshift job that wasn’t a job but a series of part-time gigs, anything to claw together enough cash to keep us from drowning. I thought about Tilly and I thought about Christmas.
I tried very, very hardnotto think about feathers, claws and beaks or shadows which followed in the deeper dark.
‘Quadruple,’ I repeated, and watched the chewed lips writhe as though second thoughts were also running through the man’s mind. ‘Or I won’t go,’ I added.
A moment of stillness. He’d stopped bouncing his long-legged way around the office and now I noticed the clutter, the scrunched-up sandwich wrappers, the smell of hot plastic and the general detritus of someone who needs to get outside and into the fresh air more often.
‘And I want it in writing,’ I put in quickly while I still had some kind of advantage.
His hand moved, seemingly of its own volition, grabbing at a loose piece of paper and a rolling biro which perched precariously over the edge of the desk. ‘Writing, right,’ he muttered. ‘And you’ll go? You’ll check the place out?’
I swallowed down the powdery fear that coated my tongue when I remembered that room, although my heart hammered a Morse code message on my ribs about the dark hallway with the horror at the end. I could do this. Ihadto do this. For me, for Tilly, for any kind of future that didn’t involve beans from the can and Salvation Army parcels. ‘You write what you’re going to pay me and sign it and I’ll Daniel Craig down the chimney if I have to.’
The man paused in his action of beginning to write on the piece of paper. ‘I don’t thinkthatwill be necessary,’ he said.
‘Birds,’ I said. ‘If I could go in with a flamethrower, I would.’
He had bitten his nails too, I noticed as he wrote. His hair hadn’t seen a barber for a good few months, he’d got several days’ worth of stubble making his face look pale and uncared for and, if the food wrappers lying around the place were anything to go by, his diet consisted entirely of supermarket meal deals. All in all he was giving the impression of a man under so much stress that he might at any moment shatter.
‘Here.’ He handed me the scribbled-on paper. ‘That’s my promise.’
I looked at the page. He’d written:
I promise to pay Libby Douthwaite four times the quoted amount if she gets Elm Cottage empty within the month.
