Only Harry remained wide-awake.
He came round from his toys behind the sofa, stood on the rug in front of the fire. He looked at the four adults, one after the other. The fierce-looking stranger was asleep, making a whistling noise through his beard. The lady was asleep too. His mother was asleep. Harry looked at me. I watched him through flickering eyelids. Again our eyes met, and he smiled his grown-up smile. He turned to the tree, took a handful of the needles and put them in his mouth. Then he blew them onto the carpet. It was lovely, close to the fire. For a while, he just looked into its magic places, all the different shapes and colours, faces, animals, birds. He put his cheeks nearer to the flames, withdrew them at the blast of heat. There was such a groaning inevitability about the way he turned from his study of the fire to look again at me, such deliberation in his straightening up and his reappraisal of the slumbering adults, that I felt myself weighted down, sucked irresistibly into the softness of my armchair. And, just as I had known of the cormorant’s intention even before it withdrew its beak from the stranger’s caresses, as I had watched it strike and been unable to speak, again I was frozen into inaction by the shape of the smile on Harry’s face. There was nothing I could do. I simply watched him from my armchair. His smile showed that he knew I would do nothing to stop him. The room was quiet, the house was silent. Only the regular breathing of the sleepers, a fall of embers from the fire. Harry stood on the hearth-rug. He was listening. His little body quivered in the strain of listening. He sniffed the air. He sniffed again, more than anything else in the world like a rat in a sewer, the nostrils twitching, the lips a-tremble.
With a final dismissive glance in my direction, he stepped over the splayed-out legs of the sleepers and went to the living-room door. He opened it, standing on tip-toe and stretching up to the handle. I heard him go into the kitchen.
I closed my eyes. I knew what Harry was doing.
In the kitchen, he halted. Completely still. Listening, listening. Sniffing the air. He walked the few steps to the back door. Stretched up. Opened it.
Harry stepped into the backyard. It was dark and very cold. Everything was still. He waited in the utter stillness.
Something was moving in the darkness.
A black thing was moving among the enveloping blackness of the yard. The thing creaked and hissed. Harry looked and listened and sniffed, went towards it, deeper into the dark.
He was lost in the shadows.
*
Someone was shaking me. It was Ann.
‘Come on, sleepy head,’ she said, tugging my elbow. ‘Come on, rouse yourself.’
I sat up and leaned forward. It was cold, there was a fearful draught from somewhere. Five o’clock. The fire had burned right down, the room was gloomy. My tongue felt woolly, too big for my mouth. I had a thick head.
‘Oh dear,’ I said very quietly. I said it again, rubbing my forehead.
Mr Knapp awoke with a start and stared around the dark room, as though for a moment he could not remember where he was. His wife was the last to emerge from sleep, as slow as a beached porpoise.
‘Stoke up the fire,’ said Ann. ‘I think some good strong tea is needed.’
She got up and went to the door.
‘Are you there, Harry?’ she called out vaguely, expecting an answering cry from behind the sofa or from near the tree. Shutting the door and shuddering at the chill which was coming through from the kitchen, she turned back towards the fire.
‘Poor little Harry, have we been ignoring you on Christmas Day? It’s naughty daddy’s fault, with all his brandy . . .’ She cuffed me on the shoulder. ‘You naughty man, sending us all off to sleep.’
She sat down again.
‘Harry? Come on, Harry, are you there?’
Then she sprang to her feet. In a second, she reached the switch and put on the light. Mr Knapp groaned and covered his eyes. Ann was through the room like a panther, behind every piece of furniture, glancing under the tree.
‘Oh Christ . . .’ and she went up the stairs three at a time. Then she was down again. ‘Oh Christ, the door . . . he’s gone out!’
I was on my feet, quite unsteady, listening to the rumbling of surf inside my head. But I was right behind Ann as she burst into the kitchen. She turned on the light, gasped at the sight of the open door. The room was bitterly cold.
‘Go on . . . go and look!’ She was transfixed, urging me past her. ‘Please, go and look! I’m . . .’
She was quivering. The muscles in her face were all moving, her hands fluttered like terns at the corners of her mouth. Before I could galvanise myself, dispel the cobwebs of sleep from around my eyes, she began to sob, her face twisted with fear, tumbling tears through every line in her cheeks.
I went out. The light from the kitchen lit the yard and some parts of the garden. With a quick look at the cormorant, which was standing quite still by its crate, I dashed past the cage and down to the stream. I bellowed at the torrent of black water. ‘Harry! Harry! Are you there, Harry?’
There was Ann’s voice at the door, cracked with bewilderment and horror. ‘Find him, find him! Is he there? Oh, find him, please, please . . .’
The Knapps were in the kitchen, peering through the window. I came back up the garden, halted and searched through every bush and brake of bracken, kicking aside the tangles of fuchsia. I must have been sleeping still. There was a whistling in my ears. Ann was there too. She tore out great clumps of honeysuckle which had grown over the fence and onto the ground. She was crying very loudly. Mr Knapp ran past us to the stream. I nearly shouted out to him, to stop him, but my mouth formed the words and there was no sound. He went splashing into the water, pushing aside the overhanging branches of the trees. Through her sobs, Ann was yelling, ‘Come on, Harry! Where are you, Harry? Oh fucking Christmas . . .’
Dripping wet from his thighs downwards, Mr Knapp came up to the light again.
‘Can’t see anything by the stream. Got a torch?’ He shouted to his wife. ‘Run and get that torch from the shop! Run, woman!’ But before she could move, there came a commotion from the cormorant’s cage. Whereas Archie had been standing still, seemingly dazzled by the sudden glare from the kitchen and confused by the shouting, now it clapped its wings and launched itself at the wire. Hissing like a nest of vipers, it forced its head through the mesh, scrabbled on the wire with its black feet. Mr Knapp shook his bandaged fist at it. ‘And you can stay away from me!’ he stormed. Turning back to his wife, ‘Get the torch, what’s the matter with you, woman?’
And I intervened. I had been staring at the bird, at the cage.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Wait. We don’t need a torch.’
The cage door was open. The section of mesh, which I could remove and replace when taking Archie out of the cage or putting it back in again, was loose. Ann was holding her breath. I went into the cage. The cormorant retreated from the wire and stood by its crate, the white box which was still on its side since the bird’s rude awakening that morning, stuffed with straw. Archie bristled and came forward, head held low, the beak brandished like a razor in the hand of a drunk. This time there was no retreat: the bird shot at my ankles with the speed of a snake, and the beak cracked on my shin. In a second, it was by the crate again. The cormorant spread its wings across the tumble of straw.
‘Bugger!’
I rubbed the shin vigorously with both hands. There was blood on my trousers and sock. Archie waited, spread-eagled in front of the crate, ready to defend its territory.
Ann moved closer to the wire mesh, from where she could see behind the cormorant to the overturned box and the threads of straw which had fallen from it. As I advanced again and the bird angled down its writhing neck to aim low and avoid my grabbing hands, she saw into the thick bedding of the crate. There was Harry, snug and warm in the cormorant’s nest. The little blond head stirred in the straw. His face looked out, calm
and serious.
‘Harry, Harry! Come out of there! Come to mummy!’ The tears fell faster.
Mr Knapp was shouting. ‘The kid’s in the bloody crate!’ He ran into the cage behind me, ducking through the loose section. ‘I’ll sort out the bloody bird . . . you get the boy!’
Pushing me to one side, he raged towards the cormorant. It flailed the beak and caught the dangling end of the bandage, flapped backwards into the corner with the unravelling red and white strip. With an incoherent bellow of anger, he bore down on the bird. He hopped forward and held up the other foot as his only weapon. Twice, three times the beak struck the thick rubber sole, bounced off. There was a length of bandage from his hand to the bird, wound around his outstretched leg and around the cormorant’s neck, like a bizarre Christmas decoration, a ribbon of white splashed with red. Keeping Archie at bay in the corner, he yelled over his shoulder, ‘Get the crate! Harry’s in the crate!’ But I could only move slowly, as though my limbs were weighted down. My mind was nearly stopped, something pressed on me and made everything slow. The voices in my head were deep and distorted, as incomprehensible as the voice on a tape recorder which is playing too slowly. Somewhere, someone’s finger was pressing on the record, making the voices grind and limp. There was no sense in them. In the crate? Why should Harry be in Archie’s crate? What did this man mean: in the crate? I felt a shove in my back and moved forward. There was Ann by my side. Her face was very close to mine, her mouth was moving, opening and closing, she was shouting but I couldn’t hear . . . only the rumble of voices, as though I were underwater and the only sound was the thunder of waves breaking overhead. I watched my own hands as they gripped the edges of the crate, I was a spectator, the hands lifted the box upright, there were my wife’s hands too, next to mine, they were half lifting and half dragging the crate out of the cage. Still the crashing of surf, the grumble of underwater voices. Outside the cage . . . the man was hopping to the door, with the black cormorant stuck like a leech to his leg, some filthy bloodsucking bat fixed on his flesh, leather wings, leathery feet, an unblinking eye, that beak . . . outside the cage. I found I was surfacing, it was lighter, my head cleared the surf . . .
Ann was moaning. ‘Harry, Harry, Harry, my little Harry . . .’
She had lifted him out of the straw-filled box. She stroked his blond hair and picked off the threads of straw which stuck to his clothes. Then her hand wiped her own eyes, dabbed at her streaming nostrils. ‘Let’s have you inside.’ She went in, with Mrs Knapp.
Mr Knapp was fixing the door of the cage.
‘The crate,’ I said weakly, ‘What about its crate? Archie will be cold tonight if it hasn’t got its crate in the cage . . .’
The man stared at me, muttered something which I couldn’t hear, and bent to examine his torn and bloodstained trousers. There was blood on his hand again. The bandage was in the cage, draped like a scarf around the cormorant’s neck.
‘Look at your leg,’ said Mr Knapp. ‘Let’s go in.’
And so to the living-room for an examination of wounds. The two women were unhurt. Mrs Knapp was numb with the inability to understand and feel. She sat before the fire, quite numb. All those cries, and the swearing, her husband soaked to the skin and streaked with blood; the child lying still in a white wooden crate. And that desperate bird. It was like one of those daft plays she sometimes watched on television, a lot of swearing, and women crying. Ann was quivering still, with anger and shock. Her eyes were swollen. She washed her face in the bathroom and combed her hair. But she looked as though she would explode again at any time into another torrent of tears, as though she would have to stand up and pace the room to ventilate her pent-up rage. Lying back in the armchair, with Harry sitting still on her lap, she took a series of deep breaths which set the butterfly dancing on her throat. There had been the awful splashing of Mr Knapp in the black water of the stream, the calmness of Harry’s face as he looked at her out of the straw of the cormorant’s crate: the idea of the child walking through the kitchen, into the yard, to unfasten the door of the cage and step inside . . . to clamber into the box and snuggle down among that stinking straw. She roused herself and shook the boy. ‘Why, Harry? Why, why, why?’ But her hissing questions were ignored. Harry stared at her and blinked very slowly, like a lizard.
Mr Knapp dressed his wounds. His wife watched him, speechless. He rolled up his wet trousers above the knee. There were four or five gashes on one leg, the leg he had proffered as a target for the cormorant, none of them very deep: holding his foot up to the bird, he had deflected the blows with his shoe. He dabbed them with disinfectant. A fresh bandage was put around his hand, once the bleeding was staunched. Since midday, his broken finger had turned blue. Once the holiday was over, it would need the attention of a doctor. The single jab which Archie had delivered to my shin was the most severe wound of the evening. It had struck where the flesh was thinnest, right on the bone. My trousers and my sock and shoe were covered with blood. I started to clean the opening, but when I saw that the bone was exposed under a loose flap of skin, I shivered and stopped. I just laid the skin back again, closed my eyes. It hurt.
Harry seemed unaffected. Once Ann had swept him off to the bathroom to sponge away the smell of the straw and the pungent slime of the cormorant, the little boy seemed to shed the uncanny vigilance of the inquisitive rodent and become a child again. He sat down on the hearth-rug, sweet-smelling in his bright pyjamas, and busied himself with his toys. There was firelight in his hair, the shadows of the flames on his cheeks. He looked up at us, four bewildered adults, and smiled an innocent smile. There was nothing on his face or in his manner which recalled his union with Archie. Only, the golden power of the fire seemed to envelop him.
The Knapps stood up and suggested that they should go. They had had an enjoyable and eventful Christmas Day, a lovely meal, perhaps a little too much to drink in the afternoon: something of a fright that evening, but fortunately no real harm had been done. She buttoned up her coat and made her speech of thanks while her husband waited in silence. He looked faintly ridiculous, his trousers wet, the clumsy bandage leaking again, and his expression of ferocious bafflement. With a nod, Ann took Mrs Knapp into the kitchen, holding Harry to her breast. I rose stiffly from my armchair.
‘I’m very sorry about your hand,’ I said, ‘and about all that panic this evening. I’m glad you were here though. Thank you for your help.’
I was going to repeat my earlier invitation to the fishing expeditions, but hesitated, deciding that it might not be the appropriate moment. Maybe when the finger was mended.
‘Don’t mention it,’ replied the wounded man. ‘I don’t envy you having that thing in the backyard, I must admit. Bloody poisonous, in my opinion. Amazing that it didn’t go for the boy, when you stop to think about it. Lucky lad, your Harry.’ He added, ‘Get that leg sorted out quickly. It needs a good clean, for a start.’
The women came back into the living-room. I could tell from Ann’s expression, the pinched brow, that they had had a short but conclusive woman’s talk. Mrs Knapp made a little sign to her husband, to which he responded with a similar twitch of the head. Such are the codes perfected between husband and wife. She spoke directly to me.
‘Ann’s decided to come over the road and stay with us tonight, with Harry, of course.’ The woman cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know whether you’re at all interested in my opinion, but there it is anyway. I think you should get rid of that bird as soon as possible. If you didn’t have a baby boy,’ and she raised her eyebrows in a gesture towards Harry, who was staring owlishly at her from his mother’s arms, ‘then it might be different. But it’s just not . . .’ Her speech dried up. After a deep breath, she continued. ‘So Ann and Harry are coming over the road with us tonight. Give you time to get that bird sorted out, or something.’ To her husband, ‘All right, dear? We’ve got the spare room. It’s all ready.’
I began to speak. �
�Look, Ann, what’s the . . . ?’
But she silenced me with her outburst and the flaring of colour in her cheeks. Her eyes crackled.
‘No! I’m frightened! I’m going to be sick if I stay anywhere near that thing any longer . . .’ She was barely able to control the shaking of her voice. ‘Please, love, I can’t talk about it. I’m going to . . .’
And she ran upstairs with Harry.
‘So whose bloody idea was this? Eh? What’s all this whispering in the kitchen? Eh? Come on, Mrs bloody Knapp, who suggested it?’
‘Calm down, my lad,’ interrupted her husband. ‘No need to use that tone. We’re all shocked, my wife as well.’
‘Oh Christ!’ I shouted, turning to the stairs just as Ann came down. She and Harry had their coats on. She was carrying the boy with one arm and a small case in the other.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ I was saying. ‘The boy’s alright, isn’t he? Not a scratch on him! So where do you think you’re going?’
Stephen Gregory Page 11
