Canary
Garry Crystal
March 2006
March 2006
"There’s blood on your shirt."
"What?"
"On your shirt, you’re bleeding."
I look down at my left arm knowing instinctively that that’s where the blood will be. A small dark stain, the size of a ten pence piece has appeared through the white cotton. It doesn’t surprise me.
"I see it, I cut it earlier on some boxes I was moving, it’s nothing, no bigger than a scratch. I’ll get a plaster."
"Wasn’t that where you burnt your arm on the iron before?"
She was beginning to irritate me now. I had shown her my burn a few months previously, telling her I had knocked over an iron, a stupid accident. I knew that Karen, in a previous life, had been a nurse before she had taken this admin job, and I had wanted her opinion on the burn. It had looked bad; my arm had turned dark red around the small burn area. That had never happened before. I was worried it might have been infected, maybe blood poisoning, some film I’d seen where the guy had lost an arm. Lately she’s been looking at me with suspicion, as if I’ve done something wrong, as if she knows something about me just from looking at the burn. She had told me to go to my doctors and have it looked at, I didn’t and I didn’t lose my arm either.
That’s probably why she wasn’t a nurse anymore.
One day, on a break, out of the blue, Karen had told me that in her previous life her husband had beaten her, no warning. He just grabbed her by the neck one night while she was cooking dinner and smashed her face repeatedly with his fist. At 17, it was her first marriage, she’s on her third marriage now and it seems that at the age of 55, and having been beaten by her husband and then beaten breast cancer, she was finally happy. It had taken her a long time, but she’s finally found happiness. I find out later that two other women I work with have also been beaten by their ex husbands. I know this because Karen has told me, on a break, out of the blue.
"I was caught in between them at a Christmas party and all they talked about was their husbands beating them, you don’t talk about things like that, who wants to hear about that?"
"But you talked to me about it happening to you."
"But I didn’t go into the depth they did, every detail, they told me everything."
And now she’s looking at me suspiciously because my shirt has blood on it. She’s putting two and two together and coming up with the 17-year-old she had been. What did she think? My girlfriend is beating me viscously on the arm? Some people are never happy unless they are speculating on the problems of others? That’s why soaps are so popular. I might have a shit life but Jesus, look at theirs.
I see it out of the corner of my eye as I walk down the corridor towards my office. I’m looking straight ahead of me but I can’t avoid it. I see it in my mind before I’m even near it. That fucking painting. It had just appeared one day out of nowhere. Huge, green, hideous, on a grey, concrete wall. The first time I saw it, I was transfixed. I soaked up every detail of the painting I would grow to hate. A woman was sitting naked on a bed, combing her short lank hair, looking into a small hand held mirror. She was admiring herself as if she was beautiful, and although not ugly, she was, ironically, no oil painting. And she was old. Well, oldish, middle aged, past the first flush of youth. Her breasts sagging above folds of fat on her belly, her scrawny legs stretched out over the edge of the bed, and yet you could tell from her face that she thought she was beautiful. Then I noticed the man in the painting. He was also naked, standing at the door ready to leave the room, his head turned to take one last look at the woman. He looked sad, dejected, tired out. Face drawn, his shoulders sagging, as if they were being invisibly pushed down by something heavy. The man and woman were obviously lovers, in the woman’s mind at least. She was the focal point of the whole picture. You would only see the man after having looked at the woman, as if he were almost an afterthought. The whole thing was painted in varying shades of dark green. The only dash of colour was a small, yellow bird in a cage, hanging from the ceiling above the woman’s bed, wings flapping, it’s head tilted upward in silent song. This was another person’s world that I tried to avoid entering and yet at other times I gave in and stared, as it drew me deeper into a room that I was becoming more and more familiar with.
My office, if you could call it that. A small room that used to be a stationery store and still was a stationery store. Stationery supply ordering was now a new, unexpected, exciting addition to my duties. The blank white wall I face taunts me every time I sit down at my computer.
"You don’t need to see out of the window, it will distract you from your work." said my boss.
"But I’m going to be sitting staring at a blank wall all day. I have to turn round every time someone enters the office."
"It’s fine where it is, the cables to your computer wont stretch to where you want it. Always moaning about something aren’t you, never happy."
I know the real reason of course. My new office is set out so that she can look across from her office and see exactly what I am doing on my computer. Bang goes time wasted on the internet or emailing friends. If you’re having any fun at work, sooner or later they will find out and take it away. "They" have people employed specifically to work out how to make your seven hours and fifteen minutes less bearable for you and more productive for them. I take a biro and start scribbling on the wall behind my computer.
"Mersault", which I score a line through and draw an arrow pointing up towards the word "Crusoe".
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