The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  In the living-room, Archie was moving about. I could hear the blundering passage of its wings, something was knocked over with a thud, some books or a lamp. There was the sound of a car outside the front door, voices, arousing the cormorant from its fireside slumber. I heard the bird shift from perch to perch, its clumsy progress from the table to the armchair, onto the back of the sofa. Quickly I stood up in the water and reached for a towel. Without beginning to dry myself, I wound it around my waist and went through into the living-room.

  Archie was wide awake, bristling like a panther. Every feather was electric with the tension of listening for the new voices. It stood bolt upright on the sofa and creaked with nerves. Someone was at the front door, a figure dimly outlined through the frosted glass. The cormorant cried and lifted its tail. A stream of yellow shit spattered across the furniture. I whirled at the bird.

  ‘Bugger off, you bloody revolting creature, for Christ’s sake! What’s the matter with you?’

  Wet and furious, I flung out an arm at the bird’s face and caught it on the side of the beak. Archie toppled from the back of the sofa, onto the lamp which it had knocked off the table. There was a welt of blood on my hand from the impact with the cormorant’s bill. The towel came loose. As I tucked it in at the waist, smearing the blood across my stomach and over the pink towel, the bird gathered itself. The head was snaking, it flailed the dagger beak. More books came tumbling down and a log collapsed from the fire onto the hearth as Archie moved over the carpet. I lashed out with my bare foot, but the bird seized a corner of the towel and sprang away with one powerful beat of its wings. Shaking with cold and uncontrollable rage, I stood there, stark naked, dripping wet, streaked with blood. The cormorant retreated to the far shadows of the room, to worry the towel as though it were dealing with a conger eel.

  ‘Filthy bird! Fuck off or I’ll kill you …’

  The front door opened behind me.

  Ann and Harry stepped into the room.

  IV

  ‘Christ almighty …’

  That was all Ann said as she stood at the front door. She threw down her suitcase and reached out for Harry. He was staring into the dark, a frown dissolving from his face, his mouth beginning to form a vacant smile. The flicker from the flames of the tumbling logs was all the light, it picked up the wet whiteness of my nudity and the blood across my belly. In a far corner, something was moving under the table, some black thing was struggling with a pink and red opponent. There was the smell of fish.

  ‘Upstairs, Harry, come on …’

  She abandoned her case and disappeared up the stairs, the boy in her arms arching and convulsing in his efforts to see more of the cormorant. I recovered my wits. Moving the luggage so that it blocked the bottom step, I followed Ann into the deeper darkness. The bird was left in the living-room to finish its battle with the bath towel.

  ‘Ann, what are you … ?’

  ‘For God’s sake, put some clothes on!’ She spat at me like a cornered otter. ‘What the hell are you doing down there? What’s the bloody bird doing in the house? I come in, and there you are in a darkened room, stark naked, prancing around with a bloody cormorant . .

  I found some clothes and dressed. I was still wet. Ann drew the curtains of the bedroom and turned on the light. Harry sat on the bed, wideeyed, watching me dress. There was blood on my hand: it welled up from a blue graze and stained the clean shirt which I put on over my wet and blood-smeared stomach. Ann flung off her raincoat and began to unbutton the little boy’s anorak.

  ‘Look, Ann, I had no idea you were . .

  ‘So what?’ she hissed, without looking at me. ‘By the look of things, it’s a good job I came back a bit early. Someone ought to keep an eye on you. Leave you on your own for a week and God knows what obscene things you get up to!’

  The boy’s coat was taken off. She rubbed his hair gently with her hands and a few drops of rain flew onto the carpet. I stood still. I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to touch my wife and kiss her. Something rose in my throat when I looked at her tending to Harry, when I saw the angry colours of her face. I moved to her.

  ‘Ann, look, I can explain everything. It was just unfortunate that you should . .

  ‘Get down there and sort it out then! Or are we going to sit up here and let the bird have the run of the sitting-room?’ She turned to the child. ‘Now, little Harry, we’ll go downstairs and get nice and warm and dry in a few minutes. When your naughty daddy has spanked that nasty bird . .

  But the boy seemed oblivious to his mother’s tender words. His eyes were fixed on my bleeding hand, he was alert to the shadowy movements of the creature below.

  I went down the narrow staircase. I was going to have no nonsense from Archie. Already that day, with my ordeal in the water and the sinister scrutiny of our reunion, I had had enough of the bird’s mischief. Prepared for a confrontation, I stepped over the suitcase at the foot of the stairs. I found the light switch. In the sudden brightness, it seemed that the room was not so chaotically upset as it had appeared in the dancing glow of the flames. The cormorant had returned to its place in front of the fire, leaving the towel in the corner.

  ‘Right, Archie, you bugger, you’re going out into the yard. Come on …’

  I advanced, with a heavy cushion in my left hand, with the right ready to fly at the bird’s throat, the best and safest hold. But Archie waddled sedately past me towards the door and waited there for me to open it. I turned the handle, the door swung open. With a haughty nod, an adjustment of the wings in the manner of a bride about to begin her progress up the aisle, Archie swept out of the room. I quickly followed, eager to take advantage of the cormorant’s cooperation, and ushered it into the backyard, through the opening of the cage. The bird disappeared into the crate, buried itself among the straw. The cage was secured. I scampered in from the lightly falling rain and locked the back door behind me.

  ‘Jesus …’ A long sigh of relief.

  Ann was already in the living-room, at work on the long squirt of shit. Harry watched the operation from near the Christmas tree. Without speaking, I picked up the books and the table lamp, whose bulb was not broken, repaired the fire and swept up the ash from the hearth.

  ‘Come to me, Harry,’ I said, and the little boy scrambled into my arms. I kissed him on the forehead and smelled the bright, clean hair.

  ‘What’ve you been up to then? Been a good boy for your mummy?’

  ‘More than we can say for you,’ said Ann. She came to the sofa and sat down next to me. ‘I love you, I love you,’ she whispered, looking away towards the fire as though these were words she could not safely say to my face. ‘You silly man . . And she collapsed gently backwards, to lean against my shoulder. My arm went around her waist. Without moving my head, I could inhale the scent of the woman and the warmth of the child.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said into the cloud of her hair. ‘It’s all so stupid, isn’t it?’ I turned her round to face me. Harry wriggled on my knee and put up a chubby hand to his mother’s mouth. ‘But what are you doing here? Why are you early? How did you get up here from Caernarfon?’

  There was no mystery attached to Ann’s unexpected return. A week with her parents in Derby was more than enough: she was missing her husband. She wanted to get back to the cottage and to the hills, away from the Midland suburbs. Of course, it was nice at first to be in the bosom of the family and to see some old friends, but, time and time again, she had had to reiterate the story of our unusual inheritance; and then, there were furtive looks exchanged between her listeners, who obviously doubted the truth of the tale. Why should she suddenly flee her husband and the remote Welsh village? What was the matter with the relationship? What kind of goings-on took place up in the mountains? These questions went unasked, but Ann had sensed a shiver of delicious scandal through the company of friends and neighbours, people who had raised their eyebrows months ago on first hearing of our plans to move to Wales. They thrilled to hear about the disappointme
nts and disillusionments of rash youngsters: it made their suburban lifestyle seem more acceptable. So Ann determined to come back as soon as she could. That morning, quickly packing her single case, she thanked her parents for their hospitality, kissed them both lightly on the cheeks (mother was squeezing out a pearly tear), and took the coach from the centre of Derby to Caernarfon. And a taxi into the hills, thinking she would spring a surprise on her lonely husband.

  ‘And what about Harry? Was he alright?’

  She hesitated, touched the boy’s cheek. He was tired. Soon he would go up to bed.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose he was alright. Only, he wasn’t exactly the life and soul of the party. So Mum, of course, thought there was maybe something wrong with him, maybe we weren’t giving him a very good diet, all the right vitamins and so on. Implying that perhaps I wasn’t a particularly wonderful mother, like she was …’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t he show off his walking, reaching out for all your mother’s priceless ornaments? I imagined he’d create havoc in the midst of all that twee suburban style.’

  Again she paused. On my knee, Harry was closing his eyes. He had fallen forward against my chest, his thumb in his mouth.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I could hardly stir him off my knee. He wouldn’t go to Mum or Dad, just turned away from them and stuck his face in my neck. It was weird. He’d sit for hours as we were chatting, almost like a little adult, as though he was listening politely to our conversation but was too shy to join in. I couldn’t interest him in anything in the house, he didn’t want to explore or to break anything. Couldn’t care less about their cat.’ She frowned, searching for the right words. ‘You know, if he’d been a grown-up, you would’ve said he was boring, just sitting there, glazed, vacant …’

  ‘All day? What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Well, no,’ continued Ann. ‘The funny thing was that he perked up whenever I took him out, to the shops or into the park. He’d be sitting there like a doll, on the bus, or if I’d plonked him on the trolley in a supermarket, and then he’d suddenly come alive, as though he’d had an electric shock or something. Pointing wildly through the window, slapping his hands on the glass, forcing my face round to look at somebody or other. Or practically standing up on the trolley, so that I’d have to plonk him down again, waving his arms, shouting, jabbing his fingers … always pointing into the distance, into the crowd.’

  I shivered.

  ‘What was he looking at? Did you see anything, anybody he could have recognised?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling. He’s only a toddler. They don’t recognise people, there are just crowds of people, shoppers, pedestrians …’

  I added nothing, remembering the child’s frantic gestures from the coach in the square in Caernarfon, my own puzzled pursuit of an elderly stranger.

  ‘And once we got home again, I mean to Mum and Dad’s, he went back into his shell. Like someone had switched off his electric current. He sat on my knee like a ventriloquist’s dummy, except that I couldn’t make him perform. Mum and Dad got a bit huffy about it, because he wouldn’t go near them and wouldn’t show them how he could walk.’ Ann sighed. ‘So, what with all that and being cross-examined by the neighbours about you and the cottage and the village,

  I just wanted to come back.’ She giggled and nestled up to me. ‘And if they’d come in and seen you cavorting in the nude with your bloody cormorant, all firelit and gory, lost to the world in some smutty fetish . .

  But I was not listening. I felt cold.

  ‘Come on, my little Harry,’ I said. ‘Bedtime for you.’

  The boy stirred in my arms. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, coming awake. He looked around the room and frowned, as though he was seeing it for the first time. His eyes were cold as pebbles. Harry squinted at Ann and then at me, dismissed us as total strangers, turned his hot little face towards the fire and sniffed the air like a dog.

  ‘What’s up, Harry?’

  The child ignored Ann’s question. He wriggled from my lap and set off in the direction of the Christmas tree. There was something which he wanted, which he must have. Again I found myself shivering. In the toddler’s tender frame, the angle of his sparkling blond head and the unsteadiness of his gait, there was an incongruous element: the ice which formed behind his eyes.

  ‘What are you looking for, Harry? Come on, show your mummy.’

  Harry bent for a moment at the foot of the tree, then he turned around with his prize. His face was ablaze, with a grin like a gash, his eyes were splinters of ice. And he lunged at me and Ann, jabbing at us with his weapon.

  It was a feather, a long, black feather, shot through with green and wet with shit.

  Ann squealed and turned her face away, fending off her son with random swipes of a cushion.

  ‘Let’s have it, Harry!’ I said, much more loudly than I had intended.

  My voice quavered. In a second, I had the feather in my hand.

  ‘Nasty old thing, dirty old feather. You don’t want that, Harry. Let’s put it on the fire.’

  But it took all of Ann’s efforts to restrain the child as I dropped the feather onto the flames. He wrestled and kicked, he clawed and spat and bellowed. Dry-eyed, Harry gazed at the fire as the feather was consumed. And when it was gone, in a whiff of pungent smoke, he looked at me and croaked some incoherent oath, as if he were wielding a curse in my direction. I had had enough. It was time for bed. I took him from Ann, who was holding him close to her, and delivered an old-fashioned slap across his backside. ‘Have a proper cry, Harry,’ I said, laughing to see him dissolve into real, spontaneous tears. It was a relief to watch him become a child again.

  The three of us went upstairs. Harry was suddenly sleepy, as though the tears had spent the remains of his energy. Once he was in bed, Ann and I kissed him on his hot cheeks. The light went out and we came down once more to the fireside. I gave Ann some sherry, poured myself a glass of beer; a bit of music; the lamp switched off; the coloured stars on the Christmas tree glinting in the glow of the flames. So I began to recount my successes with Archie, the triumphant return from the beach with the trophies of the hunt. I did not mention anything which might worry her, I said nothing of my ducking or our furtive observer.

  Somehow, if the bird was ever going to be an accepted part of the household over the course of another four or five years, then both Ann and Harry should share the interest, be involved in its welfare. It was simply not feasible to have it imprisoned in the yard for months on end, like some festering prisoner in a dungeon, something to be fed and watered, something ugly from which a woman would recoil in horror. I heard my own voice, calmly persuasive, but an image kept recurring as I spoke: that picture of Harry advancing on us with the black feather, Ann flinching from the ugliness of her own son. The voice continued. I told her that Archie just happened to be in the room when she came in, because we had both come back from the beach very cold and wet (and this was true), so I had allowed the bird to warm itself by the fire while I was in the bath (which was also true). It was unfortunate that Ann’s arrival at the door had thrown the cormorant into another of its tantrums. She listened carefully to my account of our fishing expeditions and smiled at the novelty. Since we were stuck with the bird, not without some very attractive advantages such as the cottage and Harry’s inheritance, it would indeed be foolish to gripe about it for the coming few years. Two intelligent young people should be able to control it and even mould its presence into a worthwhile addition to our bucolic lifestyle. Maybe Harry could benefit from such an unusual companion, my voice was smoothly saying. Together, we could take a more positive attitude towards Archie, learn something, understand something from it. We loved the cottage and had settled down well in the village. Surely it was right that we should have to work to keep our new life.

  I sensed my advantage as I talked. Ann was listening. It had been my greatest asset as a teacher, the ability to sound utterly reasonable, appare
ntly to speak sense. This is not such a common talent among schoolteachers. So I planted a long kiss on Ann’s upturned throat. My hands went to her breasts, undid the buttons of her blouse, slid behind her back to the fastening of her bra. In front of the fire, she was released from her clothing, chuckling as I hurled each item into the corners of the room. I quickly stripped. Lying together on the rug, we surveyed the flamelit room: her knickers had caught on the light shade, the bra swung gently from the typewriter, there were clothes strewn across the furniture. So I kissed her eyelashes, her chin and her throat, and continued to kiss her from her throat to her knees. She was sculpted in white marble, made warm by the blaze. It threw her into shadows and caverns of reds and blacks, places so scarlet and hot that my tongue could taste the heat. She turned on me so that her heavy breasts lay on my chest, she swung the nipples across my lips and danced them on my face. I kissed her until she squealed. She slid and worked herself onto me, to move and work until she could only howl and collapse helplessly on my chest. I kissed her entire body again, as though at any time I might lose her, so that each kiss would reinforce my ascendency over her. She closed her eyes and relaxed under the balm of my kissing. She could not have seen what I was doing. Her body was marked with the blood from my hand. Every tender touch against her throat and face, over her breasts and silken stomach, among the heat of her thighs, each caress branded her with blood. I smeared her marble body. My whispered endearments numbed her into a stupor. Soon she was asleep in the falling colours of the fire, stained with the wounds inflicted by the cormorant.

  All of this, so Archie might be forgiven.

  There dawned one of those crisp December mornings in the mountains, where the air is full of the scent of the fir trees, so cold that it scalds the nostrils, humming with sunlight under a sky of unblemished blue. Christmas was just three days away. When I stepped into the garden, I breathed deeply and looked up to see a pair of buzzards wheeling and diving far above me. Their plaintive cries floated like thistledown. I squinted into the sunshine, lost the buzzards in the brightness. A raven croaked from the hillside. The sheep were steaming in the warmth of the direct rays, basking in the heat after a bitter night. It was strange: I could stand in the yard and enjoy the glow of the sun on the back of my dressing-gown, yet plumes of cold blew from my mouth and nose. What a day … a good day not to be driving into the car park of a big comprehensive school, a good day not to be taking a double period of drama with thirty-five cynical adolescents, a perfect day not to be on duty in the cacophony of the school cafeteria. I inhaled fiercely and felt the hairs on the insides of my nostrils burning with cold, loved myself for being supernaturally lucky, went inside to the smell of frying bacon. Ann was in the kitchen, warm and sleepy in her dressing-gown. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and kissed her hair.