Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  And in the evening, when twenty-four hours had elapsed since the opening of the crate, our mountain cottage seemed to have recaptured the peace and cosiness which the arrival of the bird had destroyed. Ann came in from work. It was raining again. She was breathless and a little flushed from her short bicycle ride, there were jewels of fine drizzle in her hair and on her eyelashes. When she smiled, I saw the pale blue opacity of her teeth, I kissed her and tasted her clean, metallic tongue. She went upstairs to take off her coat and to see that Harry was asleep. In the living-room, the fire was banked up with coal and a white, bitter-smelling log of horse chestnut. Everything was clean and warm. The cat lay curled on a cushion, its head lost in the thick fur of its body, its sleep a safe oblivion. I had been working on the textbook, with the pool of light thrown onto my typewriter by the table lamp. All was at peace. Ann came down, having brushed her hair until it burned in many different reds and browns, the colours of the autumn which the night outside had hidden. We sat on the rug, close to the flames of the fire, and again we kissed. The fire spat. There was a flurry of wet wind on the window. Together, we gently collapsed and lay in the soft cocoon of our cottage. And soon, when the fire was low and the lights it had shone so brightly had begun to fade into ochre, when the embers sighed and tumbled inwards to be swallowed in their own secret furnace, we went upstairs to bed.

  We awoke to the screaming of gulls.

  It was just light. Ann shoved me and sat up in bed, instantly alert to the cries of the baby. She heard Harry, but his weak noises were blurred in the frantic chorus outside our bedroom window. In a moment, she had gone to his room and picked him out of his cot, returning with him to the warmth of the double bed. I reached over, rubbing my eyes, and pulled open the curtains.

  The backyard was a snowstorm of gulls. They wheeled in a maelstrom of white and grey and black. Their cries broke in the cold morning air, a hundred voices of the sea and the blowing spray, focused on the small expanse of garden. The gulls dropped into the yard, rose again on the strength and elasticity of their wings. They came close to the window, the herring gulls circling with throats distended to issue their bullying laughter. The black-headed gulls threw out their bilious cries. And among the gulls’ cacophony, there came the repeated croaks of the cormorant, as though it had summoned the gulls and was ordering their riotous con­gregation. We watched from the window. Harry chuckled and thrust his hands forward. His cheeks became flushed, he shouted something in a rasping tone. I put on some trousers and an old pullover, stepped into my slippers and went downstairs. Through the kitchen window I saw the gulls swirling like a blizzard around the cage, then up to our bedroom, their wings beating against the glass. I heard Ann’s shriek, heard her tug the curtain closed again. I heard Harry’s ugly shouts.

  The cormorant stood with its chest pressed against the wire, its neck extended and the murder-beak jutting through. It had outstretched its wings and hooked them somehow onto the wire, gripping there like some pre­historic bird with clawed fingers. Archie stood erect, croaking and hissing, a black, malignant priest in a multi­tude of angels. I put on a coat, quickly found some cat food. There was an old, threadbare blanket in the airing cupboard, which I took out and threw over my arm. Then I stepped into the yard.

  First of all, the gulls recoiled from the garden, evaporated up and over the surrounding trees. Archie was silent. Still the cormorant hung on the wire. But, with a series of hoarse cries from that horny beak, the gulls returned and dived around my head with a crescendo of screams. They rained their soapy droppings on the slates and on my shoulders. The birds came down until I felt the buffeting of their wings. The air was filled with the smell of brine and fish. I lurched forward, shoving the plate of food into the cage. The cormorant turned, tore itself from the wire, leaving behind a few black feathers. It came for my hands. But I withdrew as the beak came close. I put the blanket over the front of the cage and secured it with a number of slates. Archie was silent again, distracted by the meat, and soon the gulls dispersed. The cormorant was gone. There was no longer anything in the backyard to summon their hysterical presence.

  This was Archie.

  Ann shuddered at the sight of the cormorant, its demonic arrogance. She held Harry to her breast and twisted his face towards her own. But the child flung a sidelong glance in the direction of the cage, beating the air with his fist. Brilliantly flushed, his eyes glittering with ice, he was suffused with the malice of the sea-crow.

  II

  In the fortnight which followed, I began to find that I could exercise more control over Archie. The bird became accustomed to the man who came each morning with food, and it no longer made its snaking thrusts at my hands. Instead, it watched from the far corner of its cage while I opened the hatch and eased the iron plate through the wire, before it walked like a duchess towards the meat. Archie ate with a flurry of bolting gulps, taking a beakful and then stretching up its head to ease the food into the gullet. I saw the meat slipping downwards, a bulge in the throat, working and moving like a live thing. Every afternoon, it was time to hose out the cage with a fine spray of water. All the accumulated droppings sped across the slates in foaming milk, pieces of straw and discarded fish, the walnut-sized pellets of indigestible matter, it all washed out of the cage and into the nettle beds of the little garden. Archie spread its wings and held its face up to the flying water. It stood under the shower with its beak open, allowing the water to course over its tongue and its half-closed eyes, down its oily breast. The cormorant shook off the water with a vigorous beating of its wings. It shivered from top to toe, like a wet dog, and the droplets flew across the backyard in a confetti of blues and greens and silver.

  But the bird could not stay inside its cage for ever. Sooner or later, it would be time to bring it out and let it have some exercise. Now that it was used to its new breadwinner, I began to foresee the time when Archie would even go free, as it had begun to do for Uncle Ian, and still return for its food. First of all, it would suffice to bring Archie out on a leash. One crisp November afternoon, while Ann was at work and Harry was sound asleep upstairs, I decided to attempt to exercise the bird. I gave it a small dish of cat food, only a couple of beakfuls, to distract it long enough for me to secure it on a length of rope. As the cormorant bent to the meat, I approached. I had put on my Wellington boots and a pair of gardening gloves as protection against the beak. The meal was placed near the hatch, to bring the bird within range. It was disconcertingly easy: Archie obligingly placed one foot into the noose which I had put onto the floor in front of the plate, and, from the safety afforded by the barrier of chicken-wire, the rope was gently pulled tighter until the knot was snug around the bird’s ankle. Archie hardly glanced up from the plate. It continued to swallow each morsel with familiar speed, as though at any moment the remaining food would be confiscated. I waited for it to finish. At the final gulp, Archie turned towards me, stared and blinked, yawned a long, creaking yawn, a gentle kiss of fish breath. I opened the hatch.

  Archie waddled out into the yard. It was a cold, clean afternoon, lit by a watery sun. The sky was blue and empty of gulls. I left the rope slack, and the bird stalked into the garden, pushing its head among the long grass. It glanced up at the sky and shook out its wings, but it folded them again carefully, pushing away a few feathers with the preening of its beak. I allowed Archie to lead me further from the cage, towards the stream which ran past the foot of the garden. At the sight of the water, the cormorant increased its pace. There it stood on a slippery boulder and watched the tumbling brook. In a calmer pool, it trod boldly down and floated like a duck, paddling its feet to maintain position in the current. It put its head under the water and tugged at the weed. The stream brought along a clustered spawn of bubbles, leaves from the oak and ash which lined the water, twigs and acorns which the bird inspected and sieved with its inquisitive bill. Archie floated low in the current, the water ran across its back like mercury. The bird relaxed and f
illed itself with the half-remembered rhythm of tides.

  I sat down on a dry boulder a little way upstream and wound the rope a few times around my wrist, allowing a little slack so that Archie could move about the slower pool and venture into the swifter currents.

  I thought about Uncle Ian: a grey, anonymous man, embedded in a grey, anonymous school, a man whose features I had never really noticed. We had met so seldom, usually at a graveside, with our carefully polished shoes side by side in the soil, hearing the customary graveside words and the drumming of earth on a coffin of new wood. I knew little about him. He had been a teacher, but his heart was never in it; he was irritable with his boys and curt with the other members of staff. He had never married. He must have spent the long evenings after school in his musty flat, just a hundred yards from the Channel coast, where the spray spattered the window frames until orange tears of rust stained the building, where the salt gathered like frost on the panes of glass. In the holidays, he rubbed and painted the boat on the mudflats behind Denton island. When the rain came or it was too cold to work, he would sit alone inside the cabin, with his cigars and a bottle of beer. The swans came and demanded feeding, soaking the crusts of a sandwich in the water of a tidal pool before drawing them down and down the emaciated columns of their necks. He might flick them the butt of a cigar and watch them recoil, nauseated. It was Ian’s little joke. And in his final year, he had the cormorant to occupy him over a bitter Sussex winter. Whatever love he had stored up and barely touched in the recesses of his soul, he must have spent on the bird. He restored it to rude health. Somewhere within Uncle Ian, under the greyness of his disappointments, behind his gruff and apparently wilful gracelessness, there must have been a reservoir of love, as good as new, never sullied by the pitfalls of human companionship. The one time he had reached into this untapped fund, the cormorant had answered with such passionate kisses as tore away the flesh of his cheeks, his lips, his gums. The fresh soil had rained also on the wood of Ian’s coffin. I was at the graveside, with my shoes in mud. The rain trickled into the sparse hairs of my beard and poppled my glasses. My hands shook with the cold until I felt for the warmth of Ann’s fingers. Uncle Ian had thought of us in his last few months. Archie had come from Sussex to the mountains of Wales, like an orphan, lost and hurt in the company of strangers. It was a strange gift. Ours was a bizarre duty.

  The roar of a low-flying jet broke the peace of the autumn afternoon. At the buffeting noise, the cormorant sprang from the water as though an electric charge had been passed through it, landing on the grassy bank of the stream in a disarray of wet feathers. For a moment, Archie scrabbled to get a foothold and lay on its breast, unable to find a purchase with its unsuitable feet. The jet howled on its way and left behind a thunder of bruised air. The bird stood up. It blinked and came at me like a farmyard gander, the head held low, the beak agape, hissing. For Archie, the breach of its calm in the cold pool must be attributed to the presence of a man: the noise was a man-noise and the man was a threat. I jumped to my feet and retreated before the determined bird, cracking the length of rope and sending a loop like a wave along it, which finally snapped against the cormorant’s belly. This, and the size of the green wellingtons, was too much for Archie; backing off, it began to shake itself. A shower of icy water flew from its slick black plumage. I tugged the bird towards the wire cage. Again, it was a simple task to lure Archie into captivity with the replenished plate of cat food. Leaving the line attached to the bird’s ankle for future use, tying it through the mesh onto the kitchen drainpipe, I securely closed the hatch. Archie was back in the cage and no damage was done. I looked forward to telling Ann when she came in from work.

  It became increasingly easier to take Archie into the garden and down to the stream for his afternoon exercise. I enjoyed the hours I spent with the cormorant, and the bird began to treat me as though I were an acceptable part of its environment. I sat with my boots in the water and felt the teeth of the cold gnawing on my toes, through my feet and into my ankles. It was a marvel that Archie was content to float there, half submerged, to explore the depths of its pool without being affected by the temperature. At night, the bird returned to the white wooden crate in which it had been delivered, snuggling down into the pit of straw. There was once a visit from the executor of the will, one of my cousins. He was a suave young executive, disappointed not to have benefited under the will; it was quite clear that he would have been glad to find either that the cormorant was being neglected by the fortunate couple who had inherited the cottage or that the bird was proving to be a really intolerable addition to our family. In fact, he saw that Archie was thriving, growing into a sleek and haughty creature. Our routine had comfortably accommodated the bird. We did not mention the uproar caused by Archie’s first emergence from the box, nor the congregation of gulls. I smiled behind my hands to see the cormorant on its best behaviour: it lunged like a wild cat at the man in the city suit when he put out a hand to inspect the cage; it hung on the wire in a spasm of rage. As a peace offering to the astonished visitor, a steaming pellet was delivered after a second’s laboured retching, and a squirt of shit nearly reached the city shoes. Archie was on top form. I winked at Ann, who was watching from the kitchen window, but she turned away, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

  The weeks passed. Autumn in the mountains, with its scent of pine resin and the damp decay of oak leaves, changed to winter. The air clenched its fists. There was a period of dry, crackling cold. Morning was a silent world of frost, when each clump of bracken was as brittle as glass, as sharp as a razor. In the afternoon, the sky turned darker quickly, discolouring like an old bruise. The cormorant waited in the corners of its cage, waited as though its bones would crack under the strain of the creaking frost. I piled up the straw and the bird sought refuge in it. I was tempted to stay inside and play with Harry, who was beginning to walk a few tottering steps. Ann came in each evening, and her kisses were the kisses of ice: her cheeks, her nose and even her metallic tongue were beaded with ice. We heaped up the grate with more coal and more logs as the night outside squeezed the cottage. Before it was bedtime, the little boy was encouraged to walk up and down the length of the hearth rug, collapsing at the end of each successful journey into the arms of his mother. But his concentration was sometimes broken by the crackling of the logs. He whirled round at the explosion of sparks and put up a hand to the smoke which was blown back down the chimney. Then he would sit down heavily, bemused by the fire. I had to lift him away from it, as his fingers went out in the direction of the flames. There was something more than a child’s ordinary attraction to the fire: Harry’s face became clouded over, he was lost to us for a second or two.

  The time came to take the bird out with me on my searches for firewood. I set up a partition in the back of the van, as the owners of dogs have for their pets, and drew the cormorant along on its leash before urging it, with a threatening movement of the boot, to hop up into the vehicle. Again, it was wonderful how easy it was to manoeuvre Archie with the help of a plateful of cat food as the persuasive factor; apparently, it would sublimate any other desire to the call of its appetite. With the bird ensconced in the back, I drove down the Caernarfon road towards the coast. There were looks of dismay from the drivers of following cars as Archie flattened itself against the rear window, wings outspread, the mighty sea-crow raging against captivity. Stopping near the castle, I opened up the car and tugged out the cormorant, which collapsed at first on its chest in the puddles of the harbour car park. I led the bird firmly across the swing bridge, keeping it close to my green boots and shouting in advance to warn away curious pedestrians. Children, especially, evinced an extraordinary desire to offer themselves as targets for Archie’s beak: there was something in the whiteness of their hands and the chubby legs of toddlers which brought a glint to the cormorant’s eye. By the time we reached the beach, we had attracted a small but enthusiastic following. But there, among the seaweed and the rock pools, wi
th the authentic smell of the sea, the salt in every sniff of the air, Archie was oblivious to its admirers. The bird went to the end of the rope and stretched itself until the sinews sang. It opened up the wings like the remains of an ancient gamp, buffeted the breeze from the Menai Straits. Archie croaked. It sent up a flock of oyster-catchers in a whirling cloud of black and white. The cormorant croaked again and conjured a fragile mist of dunlin. The old heron beat away towards the flatter beaches of Anglesey, a pair of crows set off to their place on the walls of the castle. Untangling the entire length of rope, I attached the other end to the weathered wood of the groyne. The cormorant was afloat in a matter of seconds, moving from the beach like a semi-submerged submarine, dark and sleek. I gathered armfuls of driftwood. Archie dived and surfaced with dabs from the sandy floors of the straits, its hunting instinct revived. The aching cold crept into another November afternoon, twilight fell over the shoulders of the castle and settled on the black water. Lights sprang up like fireflies all over the old town. I took the wood back to the car and returned for Archie. It was easy to draw the bird into the shore and over the seaweed-slippery rocks of the beach. Archie was tired. It lay in the back of the van, burrowed into the straw, barely moving as I drove from Caernarfon into the mountains of Snowdon. Full of dabs and sea air, the cormorant tumbled into its wooden crate, disappeared among the warm bedding. The driftwood was laid to dry in a basket in front of the hearth, breathing out the fumes of seaweed.

  Many times, we spent the hours of the winter afternoons among the boulders of the beach. The cormorant learned to follow me, in pursuit of the green wellingtons. The rope remained around Archie’s ankle, but it seemed, on those evenings when the scent of wood fires from seaside cottages mingled with the sweat of the falling tide, that the bird knew the value of staying close, as it had stayed close to Uncle Ian even as a dead man.