Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Oh god... where’s her shirt?’ Rosie’s first question as we marched down the corridors of the hospital on either side of the child’s trolley.

  ‘In the library van,’ I answered.

  ‘Where’s the library van?’

  ‘In Breaston. That’s where it happened. She got stung by a wasp and she...’

  ‘A wasp? She got stung by a wasp? Oh god...’

  It didn’t take long for a nice Indian doctor to examine Chloe and get her into X-ray. He too was reassuring, suggesting she was concussed, she was young and strong and if the X-ray was alright she’d wake up with a cracking headache and in the next few days she’d have the most amazing black eyes we’d ever seen, like a panda. A young policeman took me into an interview room. I recounted everything in the most meticulous detail and he wrote it all down in his note-books. Rosie was there too, interjecting, her interrogation more fierce and accusing than his.

  A wasp? So if Chloe took off her shirt and she was upset, why did I let her just run out of the van? Didn’t I try to comfort her, take a look at the sting, put something on it? Why didn’t I take her across to the Co-op and get some kind of ointment or cream to put on the sting? Why did I let her just run out of the van, without her shirt on, into the road, by the pub carpark, with a couple of drunks coming out and not even stopping, the bastard hit-and-run drunk drivers...?

  The policeman put his hand on her arm. He made shushing noises. He’d noted how vigilant I must have been, he was impressed by the exactness of my statement, he was sure her husband had been perfectly attentive. Yes, there’d been an accident, but fortunately the impact had been relatively slight and...

  She swatted his hand off her arm, as defensive as Chloe had been with the wasp. She was asking him if they’d got the car and the hit-and-run drivers I’d described so precisely, when another policeman opened the door. With an upward jerk of his head, a flash of anxious eyes in my direction, he beckoned his young colleague to come outside.

  We followed. We pushed past the police, who’d gathered into a tight knot so they could talk into their walkie-talkies, we pressed ourselves to the walls of the corridor as another emergency came in and two more trolleys hurtled by, the dead-or-alive casualties of another momentary carelessness... and we hurried back to the doctor, who, as he’d predicted, had the good news that Chloe had suffered no real damage to her skull, she was badly concussed and would very likely be fine in a matter of days.

  So. Overwhelmed by relief, we sat with Chloe in an observation ward and she lay there as though blissfully asleep. The nurses had cleaned the blood from her nose, and Rosie had bathed her daughter’s forehead with a cool cloth and brushed her lovely blonde hair. Outside our room, where the three of us were swaddled in a cotton-wool world of thankfulness and exhausted anxiety, the business of A & E went on. There was a flurry of activity, the arrival of yet another ambulance and trolleys rattling past our door, the drama of life and death barely inches from where we were sitting. We didn’t really care. We were safe. Chloe was safe.

  ‘Hey, wake up now. We’re here.’

  Now, nine months later, I was on the bus with Chloe. She’d fallen asleep, all her weight slumped against me, in a fuddle of warmth and weariness after a day out in the bitter January cold. She groaned and wriggled and opened her eyes. When she looked up and straight away her face formed her new Chloe smile, all sweetness and fragile innocence since the day of her accident, for a moment I thought she was going to speak. She opened her lips, she fixed me with her level, penetrating stare, and for an unnerving split-second I braced myself for what she might say. But she didn’t speak. I felt a shudder of guilty relief. As the bus slowed and stopped, I helped her to her feet with her bobble-hat stuck on top of her head and we jumped down onto the pavement.

  DERWENT COLLEGE, THE massive stone pillars of its gate, on the Derby Road, in Long Eaton. We had a short walk to our new home, to the church at the top of Shakespeare Street.

  Chloe was wide-awake again. After the cosiness of the bus, we were both jolted awake by the shock of the cold, still freezing and promising another night of the hardest frost. It was pitchy-dark, and yet only five in the afternoon, and the road was busy with a never-pausing, never-slowing line of traffic coming out of town.

  ‘Hey Chloe, let’s go...’ I took hold of Chloe’s hand and tried to tug her away from the bus-stop, along the slippery pavement. She resisted. ‘Hey let’s go, we’re going to freeze out here... what you got?’

  She was bending to the hedgerow, a wiry wall of holly and privet up to the very pillars of the college gate. Darkness and light, the deadliness of January and the orange and yellow and spangling headlamps of the passing cars... the beams of the traffic caught a glitter of reflections, like jewels, in the bottom of the holly hedge.

  ‘Pretty,’ I said, ‘is it frozen, is it ice?’ And to humour her, to allow her one more special, little girl’s moment to add to all the special moments of our day-out, we bent together to see the treasure she had discovered.

  Broken glass. One of the students, returning to his digs after an illicit evening in town, must’ve dropped a beer bottle and kicked it into the hedgerow. No, it was clear glass, fragments of a shattered windscreen, crazed into angles and facets and diamond brightness. A council workman, too lazy to sweep it up and into a bin, had shovelled it out of sight, back in the summer when the holly was dense. And the black plastic splinters of a car’s number plate. An accident, back in the springtime...

  ‘Careful, Chloe... no...’

  But before I could stop her, she reached into the glass and grasped it in her hand. She held the jewels on her open palm, stared at them in wonder, and then squeezed them so hard that prickles of blood stood out on her skin.

  I knew what it was. Chloe couldn’t have known. She squeezed again, with all her strength, and then opened her palm and shook the bloody jewels out.

  Chapter Three

  SOME OF THEM must have stuck to her skin, because, a day or two later, I found them in the pocket of her coat when I was putting it into the washing machine.

  Seven o’clock on a Monday morning. Rosie was leaving for work.

  It was still dark outside. Not snowing. Too cold for snow. It was warm and cosy in our new home, there was toast and marmalade and coffee and Radio 4 and I was going to stay home with Chloe. So Rosie, buttoning herself into her coat, wrapping a scarf around her neck, pulling the flaps of a weird Peruvian hat over her ears and about to set off into the bitterness of a January morning and walk twenty minutes to work... Rosie had the unmistakable aura of martyrdom about her.

  ‘So have a nice day, you two,’ she said pointedly. ‘What are you going to do, a bit of playing shop, maybe a jolly outing? A bit of writing, I doubt it.’

  Rosie. Never a sylph when I’d first met her, now she was more than plump. Was it Titian or Raphael who’d painted women like her? She had a certain fullness of figure, and now, in many layers of clothing and that extraordinary hat, she looked... she looked extraordinary, not so much voluptuous as voluminous. Her pointy, pink mousy face was already flushed before she’d even set off... yes, she was still cute and certainly womanly, but there was a bit of busy-body Beatrix Potter about her. And the woundedness, of course.

  ‘Oliver, I don’t know why you’re putting a wash on, how do you think it’s going to get dry on a day like this? If you put it in the airing-cupboard you’ll steam up the whole place... anyway, up to you. Me, I’m off to work and back about five, I guess.’

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled of jasmine, a spray I’d bought her for Christmas. And then, leaving me aside, she leaned down to the child.

  She gathered Chloe into her body. She seemed to envelop her in the many folds of her clothing and the very being of her motherhood, as though she could go back in time and make her, once again, a physical part of herself – to start again, to protect her with her life, to keep her from all the harms and nonsensical accidents of the outside world.

  And sh
e whispered, as always, ‘My dear Chloe, where are you?’ Every day, she said it every day, like some kind of prayer, a mantra. ‘My Chloe, I miss you so much. When will I ever have you back again? Please, please come back to me...’

  Then she was gone, dabbing tears from her eyes, down the stairs and out into the midnight darkness of a January morning: Rosie, my wife, longing for the difficult, challenging, combative daughter who’d been taken from her and might never return... leaving me in a turmoil of my own doubts and suspicions.

  I heard the door close. I heard Rosie’s footsteps, down below on the pavement outside. I tried to silence the mad mutterings in my head, but I couldn’t. A notion which had crept into my consciousness over the past months, something mean and unworthy and shameful which I couldn’t keep out... I heard it now, ringing like the truth and daring me to deny it. I loved my daughter more, I liked her more, since she’d been changed by the accident.

  I looked across the kitchen, where Chloe was silently engrossed in spreading butter and jam on another slice of toast. Even in that, she was smiling. And I saw myself in the mirror. My first ugly instinct was to flinch from my own eyes, but then I made myself look.

  You shit, Oliver Gooch. You got it easy now. Chloe gets a smart little whack on the back of the head, and you got it made. Admit it. It’s better now, yeah?

  ‘Better for me, is it, Chloe? What do you think?’ I didn’t expect her to reply. She didn’t. She was playing with her mouse.

  They’d told me and Rosie to talk to her, to keep on talking and involve her in conversation as though she understood everything we said, and one day, one miraculous moment, she might open her mouth and say something. And of course they enjoined us to engage her with picture books and drawing, with music and stories. Rosie had bought her a mouse. Because, a few weeks or a month after her accident, and she’d recovered marvellously from the blow on her head and was apparently sound in all her limbs, she still hadn’t whispered a word. She wasn’t the sly, defiant, occasionally foul-mouthed Chloe she’d been before. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t read. She just smiled. She blinked and she smiled, in utter, blank, angelic silence. She was lovely, in the same way that a soft and harmless Labrador dog is lovely, but she was altered completely.

  And so the doctors, the consultants, the specialists did all their tests on her and pronounced some kind of brain damage, unfortunately, which might be permanent, or she might – one day, with all the energy and stimulus we could apply as parents – she might snap out of it and...

  ‘What do you think, Chloe? Do you think anything? What’s going on inside your pretty little head?’

  She looked up from her toast and jam. The mouse had run inside her sleeve, I could see the bump of its body snuggling up and up. She smiled and she held a piece of toast towards me, something which the intact Chloe would never have done. I took it from her.

  ‘Thank you, Chloe, that’s nice. Yes, better for me.’

  Mumbling, my mouth stuffed full, I confronted myself in the mirror, on the opposite wall of the warm, friendly, nice and utterly unchallenging kitchen. I saw Oliver Gooch: hardly an oil-painting, pudgy and unshaven in sloppy pullover and baggy corduroy trousers, a youngish, middle-aged man with receding, thinning dark hair and an odd, questing snout... not a Titian, not a Raphael, more of a Rembrandt, one of those peasant potato-eaters.

  You shit. So what are you going to do today? A bit of writing? I doubt it. Play at shop? Take the angel for another jolly?

  I felt again into Chloe’s coat pocket. Pieces of glass, like rough-cut diamonds. The windscreen had shattered into hundreds of sparkling gems and some of them were here, on the palm of my hand. I put them onto the kitchen table. Bits of glass with blood. With Radio 4 and toast and marmalade.

  She flickered her eyes across them and up to mine.

  Then I felt into my coat pocket and took out the little velvet box that Mr. Heap had given me.

  ‘Hey Chloe, it’s not even seven-thirty, and we’ve already got tears and blood and broken glass. I wonder what else we’ve got here. Let’s go and play shop, shall we?’

  Chapter Four

  WE DIDN’T HAVE to go far. Down the stairs and across the hall, into the front-room. It would’ve been the vestry. We’d just bought a church.

  Oh god, the mouse. Our church mouse, called Mouse. Just as we started down the stairs together, it wriggled out of Chloe’s jumper and plopped onto the first step. As it sprang down and down ahead of us, Chloe gave a squeak of surprise and pursued it as fast as she could.

  ‘Hey careful, Chloe, slowly...’

  Too late. She’d bundled herself down, hopping on both her feet behind the mouse, and as it reached the bottom and crossed the flagstones of the hallway in a single white flash, she was there too. But she stumbled as she landed two-footed on the final step, she staggered and sprawled forward, face down on the floor.

  The mouse was gone. By the time I reached her, Chloe was gathering herself upright again, apparently unhurt, just shaking herself and about to continue her pursuit.

  ‘Hey, clumsy, for heaven’s sake take your time... what’s up?’

  She turned her face up towards mine, smiling through the blood which was welling in her mouth. ‘Oh lord, what on earth have you done? Let me see...’

  She was fine. She seemed to think it was all rather odd and amusing. She hadn’t knocked her mouth on the hard floor, she was just a bit breathless from the impact of landing flat on her tummy. But a loose baby-tooth she’d been wiggling with her tongue for the past few days had popped out, the gasping rough-and-tumble had jarred it out and started a sudden trickling of blood. By the time I’d swiped at her mouth with a handkerchief, she was wrestling away from my arms and skipping across the hallway and into the vestry.

  There she was, amongst all the boxes of books... in and out of the cupboards and cabinets, perfectly entranced by her search for her mouse, just now and then smearing at her face and licking her lips and pressing the tip of her tongue into the tender place where her tooth had been. I’d looked around for the tooth, following a spatter of red spittle which I dabbed into the handkerchief and stuffed back into my pocket, and found it... but it had slipped into a crack into the flagstones too small for my fingers, and I couldn’t get it out. I’d come back, I said to myself, I’d come back with something like a pair of pliers and try again. So I followed her into the vestry, where she’d pounced into a dusty corner and was cupping the little creature in her hands.

  ‘You got him. Is he alright, is Mr Mouse alright? And are you alright? What’s Mummy going to say when she comes home? Show me...’

  We sat on a couple of cardboard boxes and first of all she showed me the mouse. It was an albino. Its fur was strangely translucent, as thought you might see through it and into the myriad workings of its body. Shiny, tinged with a barely visible blush of pink. Red eyes. A pink nose, and such delicate pink ears you could see the tracery of veins. Pink tail and pink feet, altogether it was like a fairyland toy or an expensive, impossibly sweet chocolate. Chloe held it to her lips and kissed it. She left an imprint of her blood on its head. And then, as I put my forefinger on her chin and pressed to open her mouth, I could see the sweet young pinkness of her tongue and the clean, healthy cavity where her tooth had been.

  ‘You’ll do. When we go upstairs again we’ll give it a good rinse out, and Mummy will be happy...’

  I marvelled at her, and what had happened. The new Chloe, all bloody mouth and smiles and giggles and a white mouse with blood on it. So nice and chuckling with an oozy hole in her gum. What would the old Chloe have been like? A bawling nightmare.

  ‘We could light the fire, hey? On a frosty January morning, just the two of us and a lovely fire...’

  We’d bought a church. It was the recently defunct Anglican church at the top of Shakespeare Street, a mile from the town centre. No, not the whole building. As the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing, the commissioners had closed the church and sold it as two parcels. The b
ody of the building was now a furniture warehouse. We’d bought the tower.

  It was a new conversion. On the second floor we had our bedrooms and living-room, with views across the town and its leafy suburbs. The first floor was our kitchen-dining-room. And the ground floor...

  The doorway of the church opened into a spacious hallway, where the minister used to greet his flock, welcome his Sunday congregations and the weddings and funerals which had taken place in the building for the past hundred years. An entrance hall, where tears of joy and sorrow had been shed, whose stone slabs had been strewn with confetti, puddled with rain and snow, blown with blossom in springtime and autumn leaves...

  The vestry was off the hallway. It was small, with a high ceiling, tall clear lancet windows, lovely oak cupboards and shelves where hymnals and prayer books and church music had been stored, and a fireplace. A tiny washroom and toilet. The vestry, where the minister had prepared himself for his services, where he’d lit a fire on chilly mornings and readied himself in front of it.

  And it was going to be my bookshop. A specialist outlet of strange and occult and arcane books. The shop I’d daydreamed foolishly about having.

  Foolishly daydreaming...

  In all my years in the Erewash borough mobile library, I’d been dipping in and out of other people’s books, and scribbling my own half-baked ideas and plans and projects and beginnings of poems and stories. I’d spent my time plucking down other people’s pills and capsules of potted knowledge, opening and shutting books and finding their dusty imprint on my fingertips, on my mind, at the end of the day. Of course, sooner or later, I was going to write a book. I was going to write a novel, something so dark and disturbing and demanding of the reader, so odd and unusual and out of the ordinary, so extraordinary that it would carve its own little niche in the genre and be recognised as some kind of minor classic, not necessarily a big-seller, indeed shamefully overlooked, but...