The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  And another figure: Uncle Ian.

  He stood there, as he had been at the graveside of so many family funerals: the grey melancholy face which I had never really looked at, which perhaps nobody had ever really looked at, an old-fashioned raincoat buttoned over his dark suit, sturdy legs encased in their pinstripe, and those highly polished shoes, big and stout, with snow-poppled toe-caps. Ian was smoking a cigar. He kept it cupped inside his right hand, the blue smoke escaping from between his fingers. When I looked at him over the yard, with the crate between us, there was only the overwhelming impression of the greyness of the figure: a robust figure, the shoes, the cigar, a grey cloud where the face should be.

  Still no sound. Still no movement from the white wooden crate.

  Ian transferred his cigar from his right hand to his lips. The trickle of smoke was a blur in front of his face. Both of his hands went to the buttons of his raincoat. When the coat was undone, the fingers opened the flies of his pinstriped trousers. And, stepping forward a pace, Uncle Ian began to piss into the straw of the box.

  A grey man, lost in blue smoke, blurred in the rising steam of urine and a chaos of snow.

  I began to move. Looking down from a great height, for I had grown suddenly and viewed the scene from some distance, I watched my hands fumbling at the zip of my trousers. There was blood on my fingers, blood on the leg of my trousers. The worm appeared and shuddered at the sudden cold. A big snowflake landed on its head, sizzled and vanished. I took a forward step, joined my uncle at the side of the crate. Facing one another, we mingled our piss and steam among the blades of straw.

  I woke up very soon afterwards. With a yell of horror, I found myself sitting on the sofa in the cottage living-room, trembling with nausea. For, in the dream, the straw had begun to stir under the persistent pressure of hot urine. The occupant of the bedding could no longer endure the bitter spray, but burst upwards into the cold and the snow. Out of the crate, straight into the twin jets of piss, there sprang the bright blond head of Harry.

  For a long time I remained on the sofa and sat with my head in my hands. It had only been a dream. Harry was no longer in the cormorant’s crate, I had rescued the boy myself with the help of Mr Knapp. That much was clear. So much of what had happened over the previous night was just a confusion in my mind. There was no distinction in my memory between dream and reality. I got up painfully and slowly, drew back the curtains, saw that it was morning. The whiteness of snow on the road and the pavements just outside the living-room was dazzling. No vehicle had passed through the village that night. The snow was flawless, the air still. In the bathroom, I rinsed my eyes and my mouth before steeling myself to clean the bath. Kneeling where I had knelt the night before, I clenched my teeth and rinsed the enamel. I sprinkled a little bleach and wiped it out with a cloth until it smelled better. There was still the business of my wounded shin to deal with; it was numb, the whole leg had stiffened, there was no pain. I went into the kitchen with the intention of finding the antiseptic, and cotton wool with which to clean the gash, but stopped at the window to look into the yard. It was full of snow, not just covered as a flat field or a road might be covered, but packed with a sparkling drift, forced full of snow as a goose is forced full of grain to make its liver swell. No trace of the shrubs and bracken was left, the snow was so deep it had frozen in a lovely curving wave the width of the garden right to the top of the fence. To get to the stream, a man would need a shovel. In the corner, Archie’s cage was choked with snow. It had blown through the mesh of the wire and the weight on the corrugated iron was too much, for the shelter had collapsed under the strain. I went into the living-room for my coat, came back into the kitchen and put on the green Wellington boots, opened the door and stepped out.

  The sky was iron-grey, heavy with more snow. For the time being, however, it had stopped snowing. I shivered and stamped my feet. Pulling on the boots, I had scraped my shin. I thought I could feel a new trickle of blood going down into my sock. There was no proper shovel to hand, but the little one I used to take in the coal for the fire was sticking up from the shallower snow by the back door. It would do. I waded into the garden until the snow was too deep and heavy to move through, then I dug with the shovel to make myself a path. Up to my thighs I stood and dug, tossing back each load of snow, extricating one booted foot from the drift and plunging forward. In time, I reached the cage. To open the doorway I had to dig deeply, right to the floor of the yard. Then I scrambled inside. Even into the furthest and best protected corner, the snow had penetrated. I continued to dig, bent double under the broken roof, and the shovel rapped on the side of the crate which was buried in the insidious drift. Working faster, I felt the sweat forming on my back. I wiped away the droplets which were beginning to cling to my glasses. Faster I dug, more hoarsely I whispered, ‘Archie, Archie, Archie …’ in the rhythm of my strokes with the shovel. ‘Archie, Archie, Archie …’ and the snow flew from my blade with each word I hissed. Until the crate was cleared. Without investigating inside, I flung down the shovel and started to drag the box backwards to the doorway of the cage. Through the deeper snow I half lifted and half dragged the white wooden box, stumbling in my clumsy boots with their filling of snow and oozing blood. Straw fell out when I lurched against the packed drift. And all the time I could hear myself coaxing the cormorant to the warmth and safety of the cottage. I whispered, I urged. ‘Come on, Archie, nearly there now … a few more steps, get you warm soon … you’ve been colder than this before in that bloody estuary … come on, Archie …’

  Then the way was open. I staggered through the back door with the box in my arms and put it down on the kitchen floor. Straightening up and throwing off my coat, I switched on the stove, shut the door to the living-room and the door to the yard. I would soon warm up the tiny kitchen.

  The table was a shambles of debris from our Christmas dinner. Nothing had been washed up or tidied away. There were pots and pans with the remnants of vegetables and the encrusted leftovers of sauces, all the plates and cutlery, glasses of different shapes and sizes; the carcass of the turkey, more than half the trifle, which had proved too much after the main course: the assembled disorder of a splendid feast. Most of this I moved into the sink and onto the draining-board, the food disappeared into the fridge. My movements were becoming better co-ordinated, although my head reeled in the increasing steam. When the table was clear, I put down a couple of sheets of newspaper. Then I turned to the crate, reaching unhesitatingly into the depth of straw, brought out the bird and placed it on the table.

  Archie was frozen solid. Its neck and wings were stiff as iron, the broken wing folded awkwardly and showing white a splinter of bone. There was a little pliancy in the rubbery feet, otherwise the cormorant felt hard and brittle, as though it would shatter into many pieces if it were dropped on the floor. I held the bird again in my hands, looked at it this way and that. But it was frozen in just the position which it had assumed on retreating from the shower of urine, into its wet bedding. The neck was folded to enable the cormorant to press its face into its breast feathers, the beak was partly hidden under one wing. Eyes closed. One wing snugly tucked away, the other awry. Whichever way I held it, Archie remained frozen in sleep, a fragile relic of the cormorant. Dead for many hours.

  In my befuddled condition from a night of nightmares and nausea, my head and tongue thick with drink, with the aching numbness of my leg, I was unable to assess the situation clearly. Tenderly, I held the cormorant. I saw the broken bone which jutted from among the feathers of the wing, and I remembered the blow I had struck there with the poker. The tiny shards of ice which had formed in the velvet plumage around Archie’s face and neck and throat were stained yellow, frozen urine. Wherever the icicles remained on the bird, they were yellow and green, shot through with the bitter piss. I held the cormorant close to me, hoping perhaps to infuse some life through the warmth of my hands. But Archie was stiff beyond the powers of any warming.

  I drew the table closer
to the stove. When I opened the oven door, a blast of hot air filled the kitchen, steaming the window and my glasses. The snow thawed from my boots and formed a puddle on the floor. I watched the transformation of the bird. Close to the heat from the oven, lying on the newspapers on the table, Archie started to thaw. The sparklets of ice disappeared. Within all the secret channels of the cormorant’s throat and deep down in the dark chambers of the breast, the ice was breaking. Between every feather, the tough primaries where the ice had grown in splinters, the down on which the ice was just a bloom, there was an easing of tension as though each quill breathed a sigh and became pliant again. The iron melted in every joint. As the newspaper turned grey with the water which dripped from the bird, Archie resumed its blackness; under the light of the kitchen bulb, in the enveloping steam, it flaunted the subtle iridescence of its plumage. There were blues and purples among the black, but above all there was green. The dead cormorant relaxed on the table in a glitter of metallic colours.

  And as it thawed, it moved. I was in no state to understand these movements. Archie’s head creaked and fell forward from its sleep in the feathers of the breast. The head slid over the newspapers, the beak opened, and the room was touched with the smell of eels. Archie’s neck uncurled, just as the heads of bracken uncurl under warm sunlight. With a click, the good wing sprang away from the body and began to spread across the table. The broken wing remained still. The entire body seemed to grow. It leaned to one side and stretched luxuriantly, like a man awakening from a satisfying sleep. And with every movement, I willed the bird to blink an eye and look around. The eyes stayed shut. I stroked the cormorant’s head and dried off the drops of water with a towel, patting the bird gently and whispering all the time, ‘Wake up, Archie, you’re warm now … soon get you dry again …’ But, when Archie’s body had melted, it lay still. There were no more twitches of feathers or yawns of the sea-smell from that beak. I was beginning to see, among the steam of the kitchen and the vanishing shreds of my nightmares, that the cormorant was dead.

  That was when Ann came in. I was standing very still by the kitchen table, in my shirt sleeves and Wellington boots. The bird was stretched on the wet papers. She was suddenly there beside me. Her nose wrinkled at the smell. But she squeezed my arm for a second before going past me to the back door. In a moment, as I remained still and silent, she had thrown open the door and turned off the oven. She came back to me, linked one arm around mine and put her hand on my stomach. The steam was thinning, billowing into the yard. She pressed herself against me, felt how cold and wet I was with sweat and steam. I stood still and stared at the cormorant. It was all clear to her.

  ‘Archie’s dead,’ she said.

  I looked down at her. She had her coat and her boots on for crossing the snow-covered street. Her hair shone. She smelled of toothpaste.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The show drifted into the cage, the roof collapsed.’

  ‘Oh . .

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Let’s put it outside, shall we?’ she whispered, tightening her grip on my arm. ‘We can’t do anything else now.’

  I was thawing. More familiar pains were returning to my body: my head ached from the sherry and the beer, there was a strain in my chest after the exertions of vomiting. And the shin had started to throb again. ‘Have you come back?’ I kissed her forehead. ‘Where’s Harry?’

  ‘He’s alright with Mrs Knapp for a while. Now take the bird out.’ She added, ‘Take the bird out. And yes, I’ve come back.’

  I lifted the limp body of the cormorant from the table, put it inside the white wooden crate and covered it with straw. I took it through the kitchen door, set it down for the time being in the shallower snow I had cleared in the yard.

  An iron-grey sky. There would be more snow soon.

  Ann knew when she had the ascendency, and she exploited it in the knowledge that it might not always be hers. The cormorant was gone. There was a void. She led me into the living-room. While she prepared boiling water, antiseptic and bandages in the kitchen, I had some minutes to work on the debris of my night alone: the blankets, bottles and glasses, books and Christmas cards which were scattered across the floor, the gouts of shit which was the cormorant’s signature. I moved slowly about the room, bending to gather a handful of pine needles or a few black feathers. I replaced the books, took the blankets upstairs, collected the evidence of my drinking bout. Ann sat me down on the sofa, gently drew off my boots and socks, wriggled me out of my trousers. She had a basin of steaming water. With cotton wool, she sponged away the dried blood which had congealed all over my shin and ankle, down to my foot, in between my toes. It all came off. I lay back with my eyes closed. The gash itself was revealed. With tweezers, she lifted the flap of skin, having melted the scab with plenty of hot water, saw the whiteness of the bone beneath, applied the antiseptic directly into the wound. She ignored my shouted oath: there had been a surfeit of those in the previous twenty-four hours, they no longer meant anything. Now the shin was clean, she bandaged it with sweet-smelling gauze and crepe. She kissed my foot then ran upstairs for some socks and jeans.

  ‘There’s a brave boy. That didn’t hurt, did it?’

  I was not allowed to rest. Taking me by the hand, Ann tugged me into the kitchen again. The back door was still open. When I went to close it, she just said, ‘Leave it, let’s have some more air in here.’ And we tackled the Christmas dinner dishes. Hardly a word was spoken. There was too much bustle in the little room for words. I had no time to think of the pain in my foot or the absence of Archie. She thrust into my hands a succession of plates and bowls and cutlery, saucepans and gravy boats. My arms immersed in soapy water, I cleaned the dishes. The window steamed up, I took off my spectacles, it was snug even with the door open to the yard. We turned in the confined space and brushed together, hip against hip, her hair across my face, her breasts loose and heavy on my arm. Our eyes met. She did not smile, but she winked the wink she had always saved for me in the reverential hush of a staff meeting or across the bedlam of the playground.

  ‘Not finished yet …’

  There was no flicker of a smile.

  ‘Light the fire, dust and hoover the living-room. I’ll inspect it in a quarter of an hour, so make it good. And I’ll do the bathroom.’

  I fetched coal and wood, baffled for a moment as to the whereabouts of the shovel. Ann didn’t see me go out to the cage, tiptoeing in my slippers through the snow and past the abandoned crate. I heard her muttering in the bathroom: perhaps my efforts with the bleach had not been thorough enough to erase all the evidence of my sickness. I felt better moving around, breathing deeply when I knelt at the hearth, busy with newspapers and kindling wood. A tall, rather surprised-looking flame rose among the nest of coal. Disguised under the drone of the hoover, I attempted a line or two of song, and there was Ann at the doorway, watching me and listening. She nearly smiled. In the fragile silence which succeeded the machine, she checked the carpet for pine needles, ran a finger along the mantelpiece.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said to the quivering flame. ‘The place was a real mess after yesterday.’

  She smiled.

  The cottage was newly cleaned. Harry was in good hands for a short while. Under a growing drift of snow, Archie was freezing stiff for a second time. The best and safest place to be for the two of us that morning was bed. Ann led me up the stairs and into our bedroom. The bed was untouched: that was almost the saddest thing, that nobody, no loving couple had shared the bed on Christmas night. For an hour I was her invalid, a bruised and damaged man who needed her care, her warmth. She slowly undressed me, careful to avoid contact with the fresh dressing on my leg, and she tucked me up in bed. Then she undressed. She would let me do nothing. I was her man. She was going to love me while I lay there, I could simply rest and be quiet. Lifting the sheets, she slipped into the bed. With every part of her body she made love to me, applying herself to me as though she were a priceless lotion with which my woun
ded body should be anointed. As I lay still, she coated me, she oiled me, she bathed me with herself, until I knew again each silken surface and scented shadow and had them imprinted on my skin. And when I turned to her, to put my hands on her, she only said, ‘No …’, breathing the word into my hair. Before I slept, however, she rolled on top of me, so that her breasts felt heavy on my chest, and she asked me suddenly: ‘Tell me, my love, did you kill the cormorant?’

  I looked past her, at the ceiling. I remembered more of the previous evening, in disjointed sequences, like random flashes of old newsreel. Someone had helped me back from the pub … all those drinks which were bought for me. Why had Archie been released into the cottage? Who had put the poker in my hand?

  I thought for a minute and answered.

  ‘I don’t know …’

  Ann turned her head, looked away, as though she wanted to allow me more leeway for my reply. But I repeated, with absolute, unshakable certainty, ‘I don’t know.’

  Then we slept, still and silent, enfolded in each other’s limbs, oblivious to the tumbling snow.

  When I awoke, I was alone, cold and frightened. But the space beside me was still warm. Sitting up, I strained every muscle to hear or feel some movement in the cottage. A surge of panic overtook me, my head was full of suffocating fog, and I sprang from the bed. Before I could struggle into my clothes, there was the sound of the front door opening and closing, the scuffling of footsteps on the mat. It was Ann, back again from across the street, with Harry. When I tumbled down the stairs in a disarray of untidy clothes, the boy beamed from his mother’s arms and flung out his hands towards me. His little face was cold and ruddy after the short journey. When I kissed him, it was delicious, like the first electric sip from an ice-laden gin and tonic. Together we fell onto the sofa, amid squeals of giggling, more tickling and the tingle of kisses.