King Crow

by Michael Stewart

  Hornbills are really fascinating. They are the only bird that has the first two neck vertebrae fused together – I imagine because of their enormous bills. There are loads of myths and superstitions about them. In Borneo, they believe that the birds transport the souls of the dead to God or to the devil. There’s another tribe who believe that seeing the bird means a storm is brewing. Most of these superstitions, it has to be said, put the birds in a very bad light. It seems they get the blame for everything. They can’t put a foot right.

  We are split into two groups by a man with a loud voice and a moustache – he wears this bizarre outfit, red and dark blue with a picture of a red crown and a big E and an R underneath. He reminds me of the Queen’s men in the cartoon Alice in Wonderland. And then just ordinary shoes – not old-world style. Regular black shoes you get at Timpson’s – the sort my uncle would buy for one of the interviews that never result in a job but which he’s encouraged to go to by the job centre. My uncle says they double as funeral shoes. The man with the loud voice and a moustache is talking to us. His movements are very stiff and his voice, very deliberate – I imagine he was a sergeant in the army.

  Another man appears in the same ridiculous costume and he takes the first group, the one with Ashley in. I was standing close to Ashley thinking this would get me in the same group, but the man went, —one, two, one, two... Tapping us on the head and giving us each a number. I was a number two but for some reason he missed Ashley off the list and he has gone with the ones. The men in ridiculous costumes are called Yeoman Warders.

  —Where are the ravens? I ask the man. He looks affronted, then addresses the crowd.

  —This one’s keen, he says, smiling at them all. Then he turns to me. —You’ll get to see them when we go inside the grounds.

  We are standing on a bridge, which goes over what was a wet moat but is now just grass. He’s telling us the history of this and pulls his face when he talks about all the sewage it carried. The towers loom and there are wrought-iron gates and spikes. Some of the spikes were used to display human heads, like a trophy cabinet. We walk through one of the turrets, along a cobbled alley and go inside one of the towers.

  There are various contraptions used for torturing people. There’s one called a Scavenger’s Daughter, which doesn’t look that bad really. It’s an A-frame metal rack. The head of the victim is strapped to the top bit of the A, the hands and legs at the lower bit. So you are in a sitting position. I can think of worse things, but the man makes a face again – and says it was excruciating. There’s the rack, of course, but everyone’s already seen this in films, although one of the girls makes a joke about Hayley Walsh needing it. Hayley Walsh is short and fat – the others laugh. Hayley looks away and pretends not to hear, but her eyes are filling up.

  The man tells us about executions with particular relish. We go past Traitors’ Gate. The water is a sage green colour and I like the lattice pattern of the wrought iron. Everything takes a long time, the crowd takes forever to get from one thing to another.

  —This is known as the Bloody Tower.

  Susan, the girl with the breasts pushing out of her blouse, says, —why’s that then?

  He’s talking about two brothers now who were murdered. His eyes pop out and everyone laughs. I think about the ravens. I’m getting butterflies.

  —Walter Raleigh, Guy Fawkes, Rudolf Hess were all here. Even the Krays, he says. —Have you all heard of them? Some nod, although not Hayley Walsh, she still seems upset about the rack joke. I watch Susan. I like the way her hips curve out and I wonder how smooth her flesh is between her legs.

  I sit down and start sketching. I draw Susan with her legs open, with a sort of gateway at the end with a fine lattice pattern. The group move off again and I have to catch up with them. We meet up with the other party, but there’s no Ashley. There are also no ravens, not that I can make out. There are quite a few crows, and I keep getting excited thinking they are ravens. And there are gulls. I like gulls, particularly their shrieking voices that echo. The teacher is looking around, concerned.

  We are over by the chopping block near the white tower, which looks fantastic. Old bone.

  —This is where Anne Boleyn was beheaded, he tells us. She wasn’t beheaded with the axe he is holding, but with a sword. It’s great here. The grass is really green, and I wonder whether it’s because of all the blood that’s seeped through the soil. It probably makes good fertilizer, lots of iron and other nutrients. The Yeoman Warder tells us one of the last things Anne Boleyn said to the constable of the tower was, —I hear the executioner is very good and I have a little neck. He makes his voice go high when he says this. Everyone laughs.

  I imagine her bent over the chopping block, but apparently she sat upright. The swordsman cut her head off with a single swipe. Still no ravens. I keep thinking I’ve seen them, only for them to be crows. I ask the Yeoman Warder again. He tells me there’s a Ravenmaster whose job it is to look after them. I’ll be able to spot him, he says, because he has a little raven sewn into his sleeve. Then he pats me on the shoulder, a bit too hard for it to be friendly.

  I spot Ashley by the wall in the opposite direction. He is looking over the other side. And then I see it, perched on the rim of a bin, stooped over, hunched, a huge cloak the colour of oil, its beak like the head of a pickaxe. It’s a raven. This close up, there’s no mistaking it for a crow. It seems to be about three times the size and its beak is huge, its plumage slicker, more iridescent. It looks wonderful and I get a chill right down my back. It sticks its head in the bin and pulls out a half-eaten sandwich. I stare in wonder at its beauty.

  —That’s a big crow, Susan says.

  —It’s a raven, I say. —They live here.

  —How do you know that?

  —If the ravens leave the tower, Britain will disappear into the ocean.

  —Bollocks! says Ashley, as he walks up behind me. He clips me round the ear and smiles. Susan doesn’t pay him any attention. She seems to be interested in what I am saying.

  —It was a raven that showed Cain where to bury Abel.

  She doesn’t seem impressed. —Why don’t they just fly off?

  —Their wings. They’ve been clipped.

  I’ve lost her, she’s walking off. Ashley follows, mock-skipping. He pretends to grab her arse, then winks at me. I watch her skirt rise and fall. I watch her calf muscles tense and relax. In my mind I put my hand on her bum and she lets me leave it there.

  I spot a Warder with a raven sewn into his sleeve and I ask him if he is the Ravenmaster. I get talking to him. He feeds them on beef he gets fresh every day from Smithfield Meat Market. He tells me there are eight ravens and he tells me all their names. He says there were nine but Grog, the ninth, went AWOL and was last seen outside an East End pub.

  —That one’s Thor, he says, and he’s sixteen.

  Same age as me. But the oldest raven ever was called Jim Crow and he lived to 44.

  We go into the White Tower. The Warder tells us it was built in 1078 by William the Conqueror. There are hundreds of swords and axes and cannons and every kind of weapon on display. We’ve only got a bit of time left though, the teacher says, and he tells us to meet him by Tower Green in an hour. I decide to make my way to the gift shop.

  There’s all kinds of tat in there. Plastic luminous ghosts with a ball and chain around them, plastic skeletons wielding swords, Yeoman figurines made out of cheap plaster, a Beefeater pencil, a Union Jack tie, a Tower of London visor, heraldic spoons, a cannonball key ring, but there’s a sizable book section and I rifle through it. Lots of books on the history of the tower, even a book on Jack the Ripper. Then I find it, a hardback book with a picture of the king of the crows on the front: The Raven, by Derek Ratcliffe. I open it and read the first paragraph:

  The place of the raven in myth, legend and history is long established, and this book describes the bird’s fall from grace as a valued scavenger in medieval cities to a persecuted outcast in the modern wilds...
>
  There are chapters on every aspect of the bird, even maps at the back with breeding sites indicated. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Ashley. He picks up a souvenir guardsman pen and pockets it. He takes a policeman’s helmet pencil sharpener and nabs that too. He looks around for other things to steal.

  —You getting that? he says, pointing to the book.

  —No money, I say.

  He just shrugs. Then he gives me a nudge. He picks up the book and has a quick look round. The two women behind the counter are talking to each other and not looking at us. I open up the top of my bag and he slides it in. He taps me on the back. It feels good – like we’re a team. He leans into me.

  —Now you do me a favour.

  He leads me out of the shop and towards the wall I saw him leaning over earlier on. He doesn’t seem to be able to find what he’s looking for.

  —What is it?

  —Never mind, just keep a look out.

  He leans over the wall again. I see a black car move across the car park with tinted windows and Ashley watches it too, its slow approach. It pulls up as close to the wall as it can get. A man gets out and walks across so that he is directly underneath Ashley. He gives Ashley the nod. Ashley takes out the bag from his inside pocket I saw him put there this morning and he hovers it over the man. The man holds out his hands ready to catch the bag. Ashley is about to drop it and the man uses hand signals to urge him on, but then he smiles back in defiance at the man.

  Anger flashes across the man’s face. Ashley teases the man with the bag, pretending to drop it and then dangling it again. The man points to Ashley and draws his index finger across his neck. He points again and mouths ‘You’re dead’. Ashley sticks two fingers up at the man. I spot the teacher walking over and I warn Ashley. He sees him just in time and stuffs the bag back inside his pocket.

  —What are you doing? the teacher says.

  —Just enjoying the scenery, Sir.

  We join the rest of the group at Tower Green.

  —Why did you do that?

  Ashley looks at me and smiles, —Cos I’ve had an idea.

  Rooks

  I keep having this dream where I’m caught in quicksand but am always rescued at the last minute. Sometimes, in the dream, I’m genuinely scared for my life, but other times it’s humiliation that’s the main feeling. It’s similar to a dream I used to have when I was still in primary school, where I would fall into shit. Sometimes it was a sewer, or a latrine and I thought I was going to drown. Often there would be a pretty girl close by I was eager to impress, or sometimes a boy I was keen to get in with. I don’t really think dreams mean anything.

  But I do have one dream over and over that is actually real. I dream I can fly and the thing is, I think I have flown before. No, I don’t think, I know. I have flown. It’s quite hard to do and you need to concentrate a lot, but in the end you just reach up and as long as you have the balls to stick with it, then up you go. It’s only when you bottle it, that’s when you come crashing down. For years I believed I was the only one who could fly but now I think I’ve found someone else. Something about his stance and the distance there is between us and the others. Also, his eyes. He has that same look in his eyes birds have. A bird is never in any doubt about its purpose. I think this person knows I can fly. He’s recognised in me what I’ve recognised in him.

  I do dream a lot about birds, and I suppose that’s because I think a lot about birds. Particularly the rook. It is often mistaken for the crow, but is really quite different. It is slightly smaller and has a patch of bare grey-white skin around its bill. The voice is similar to the crow but sometimes a rook can sound almost human. There’s a big rookery in the cemetery just up the road. They are a noisy bird and tend to wake me up quite early in the morning. They jag and clatter, like spilling the cutlery drawer on to the floor. You’d expect this harsh sound to annoy but in a strange way it soothes. It’s the sound of the earth.

  The cemetery is just one of a number of improvements on Ordsall. I saw a mosher this morning with a black hooded top, black baggy jeans and those spiky rubber rucksacks moshers have, and I saw that as a good sign. You don’t get any moshers in Ordsall because it would be too risky. Occasionally, you’d get a mosher moving in, but within weeks, sometimes days, they’d have changed their hair and clothes to fit in. It never really felt safe to go anywhere in Ordsall.

  I’d go to the general store opposite Salford Lads’ Club now and again but only if it was light and if I saw a gang of boys I’d bolt back. There was a long street with red brick terraces but a lot of them were boarded up and it was a no man’s land walking down that street. You’d be almost at the shop, then you’d see five or six kids, maybe one on a bike, a dog roaming loose, a white, a grey, a checked hooded top, chewing gum, blowing bubbles and popping them – bang, bang, bang, like a gun going off, and I’d just turn round and speed back.

  The thing about Weaste, there’s more open space, you don’t feel hemmed in and cars and old people come past. The Metrolink slices right through it, two lines cutting Weaste in half and creating lots of space. Above the tramlines, tram wires go all the way down Eccles New Road.

  When we lived in Broughton there was an area where all the Haredi Jews lived. You’d see them, father and son, son with long curly sideburns and a black bowler hat, dad in a black skirt with tassels either side, white tights, black shoes and a black coat. Or sometimes they’d have a white shawl with three black stripes along it, then on his head, well, they wear these funny hats that make them look like they are balancing a big black furry hatbox on top. Must take some guts that, but very few of the gang members would start trouble with them, not even the runners on BMXs. Even so, the Haredi Jews applied to the council for permission to have a wire around their area. A wire to keep out evil spirits. The council turned them down. My mum said they should have asked for razor wire not spiritual wire.

  People say Broughton’s rough, but I liked it. There are some nice old buildings and at the top, the cliff – great for birds. I never felt that threatened walking around Broughton, I always thought that if the Jews could get away with it, so could I. To them, I was probably just another scally. It amused me to think of it like that.

  You never got drivers in Ordsall. You can’t drive around the estate because of all the blue metal barriers and bollards and big boulders set in concrete. I could see why the council had done it, to stop the joy-riders, but it also stopped the police from patrolling, so it became a police-free zone. Walkways connected up the drives, groves, crescents and avenues – narrow walkways that penned you in. We lived in Nine Acre Court, a high-rise on the edge of the park. You could see Salford Quays from our front window. The Lowry Centre, hotels and museums, shopping and eating places. It was only walking distance but we never went there, just getting to the general store over the road from Salford Lads’ Club was enough of a journey.

  But in Weaste it feels different. Cemeteries are very good places to find birds and I’m delighted that Weaste Cemetery is so big and leafy. Thousands of gravestones, hundreds of trees and hundreds of birds. Why are cemeteries such good places for birds? I think because there are lots of worms. Why are there lots of worms? The reason there are lots of worms in cemeteries is because there is a lot of worm food. As the wooden caskets rot and split, the earth enters and with it, the worms.

  Starlings, rooks, and crows seem to particularly enjoy gorging on the flesh of worms. There are so many worms in the rich soil, it’s just a case of dipping your beak in. The worms feed on the decaying bodies of people and they become fat and sluggish, making it easy for the birds to feast on them. If you’re a sparrowhawk it’s a good place to hang out too.

  I walked through the rows and rows of gravestones: in loving memory of Samuel Davies, Isaac Witter, Maude Speck, Phoebe Schofield, Sarah Slack, George Arthur Yardley, Charles Cooper... Could be a relative of mine, I thought. How ordered it all was. Good to see in death there is order. I thought about my own tombstone, I’d just l
ike a big black stone with a skull and crossbones on and then underneath: Paul Cooper is dead. His rotting body lies beneath this stone and is being feasted on by worms, which in turn will be eaten by blackbirds and magpies – just the way it should be.

  I’ve got a box full of bird skulls under my bed. The rook is one of my particular favourites. It’s a shame that the skulls of tits and finches are too delicate to preserve. I’ve tried it a few times, but they tend to turn to dust. I tried putting them in matchboxes and wrapping cling-film around them, but give it a year or two and they generally crumble. The first tit skull I got was quite lucky. I was watching some blue tits on the nuts, when a magpie flew down and, like a pair of scissors, snipped off the head of one of the tits. The tit just stayed clinging to the nut bag, without its head.

  I got some maggots, put them in a plastic tub with the head, and put a lid on it. With bigger skulls you can bleach them, but not with a tit skull. It took ages for the bugs to pick it clean, but it just turned to dust within a few weeks. Nothing smaller than a starling – that’s my rule now. I used the headless body of the tit to entice raptors. I impaled it on a nail I knocked into the table.

  The door opens as I’m pressing the blue-tacked corners of a sketch down.

  —I’m going out, she says.

  She is dressed up with lots of make-up on. She looks around at the room, noticing the changes. —Are you settling in then?

  I nod and she smiles at me.

  She looks around the room again and then says, —Are you alright Paul?

  —Yeah.

  —I mean, you’re not in any trouble?

  —Not this time mum.

  —And school’s ok is it?

  —Yeah.

  She lingers on the threshold clutching the door handle.

  —It’s better than the old school.

  —Is it?