Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  And oh, I was going to have such a dark and dangerous gem of a bookshop that customers would search it out from faraway, for the treasures they might uncover in it.

  Two of my daydreams, in the humdrum dreaming-days of the mobile library.

  Nice ladies came in and borrowed romantic novels. Out-of-work middle-aged men came in, their clothes smelling of dogs and cigarettes and the cheap alcohol they got from the Co-op. Swotty school-children came in to borrow enormous, brick-sized novels about vampires and wizards. And I was scribbling in my notebook, about the saxophone I’d someday learn to play, the telescope I’d need next winter to explore the frosty night skies, the maps of the coastal walks I’d do next summer, the taxidermy which might be fun. But the two ideas which got fixed and found more and more space in my swarming scribbles were the book I’d write and the bookshop I’d have.

  Foolishness. Of course, neither of them would ever happen. How could they? They would need the kind of time and money I could only dream of having.

  Until, ping.

  No, not ping. Harder and heavier than a ping. Not a clang, not a ping, something in-between. How to describe it? I could hear it so clearly in the echoing hollows of my eardrums, in my memory. The impact of the wing-mirror of a Triumph sports-car PTO 725G on the back of Chloe’s head, at 3:17 on Saturday 3rd April.

  A gift. What had I done to deserve it?

  Nothing. Rosie would even say it was my fault. But here I was, Oliver Gooch, on a Monday morning when I used to go to work, with time to play shop. And over there, in another corner of the room, still conveniently hidden by boxes of books I hadn’t yet sorted and catalogued and arranged on their shelves, the computer I was going to write my book on.

  Yes, the same nice Indian doctor who’d first of all said that Chloe would be alright, who’d declared a month later that she might be brain-damaged for life, had told us we might be eligible for compensation. Tests on the driver of the hit-and-run car had found she’d had a few too many gin and tonics, and we could claim monies for an injury caused by a criminal act. We did claim. There was a substantial pay-out.

  Ping. I had money and time. And the sweetest, nicest little daughter to keep me company, to smile agreeably at everything I said and never utter a disparaging word.

  ‘Let’s light the fire. Hey, this is going to be nice... what do you think, Chloe? Do you want to help me?

  She didn’t really help. She couldn’t. But she was there and close and warm and smiling, yes, like a Labrador puppy would’ve been, nuzzling her face towards mine as I arranged a fire-lighter and a few little coals and applied the match. She watched with such a wonder on her face as the flame licked and curled and coaxed the coals alight, and then I added bigger bits of coal and topped it with a log of the silver birch.

  Yes, a wonder. The bark sizzled and hissed the perfume of a birchwood faraway in Siberia or Alaska, of deep snow and an ooze of resin and maybe even a tiger or a bear... but actually from a garden-centre in Long Eaton, a smokey suburban town in the midlands of England. Soon the room was warm and fragrant, and me and Chloe, together we could shuffle books and move boxes and open a packet of chocolate biscuits, and, behind the dark-brown voices of Radio 4 drifting down to us from the kitchen, we could hear the traffic going by outside. People going to work. Other people, not me.

  ‘Time for a break, Chloe, we don’t want to wear ourselves out, do we?’

  I’d opened a box of paperbacks and tipped them out. Nothing really special or unusual, but they would bulk out the shelves and fill up some spaces and sooner or later I’d be going to fairs and car-boot sales and house-clearances and auctions and finding the material which was going to make the shop different. That was what it would need. Or else we’d be just another a funny old bookshop in an old church, and it might take something a bit more different than that to have customers coming in.

  And so we sat by our fire. By now it was light outside, a grey glinting metallic light from the black road and the swishing stream of cars and the bare tall trees.

  ‘Let’s take a look, Chloe. Remember? Mr. Heap gave me this box. Nice old Mr. Heap, he kept it for us, for me and you and for our shop. Shall I open it, or do you want to?’

  We opened it together. The firelight fell on the dark velvet and then the white satin inside, and I picked out the odd little object between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

  Was it bone? Was it horn? When I held it closer to the flames and we stared at it more closely, I could see that it was a tooth.

  Chapter Five

  ‘A RELIC, YES. That’s exactly what it is ... and alright, it may be no more real or true than the so-called knuckle-bone of some saint or another, but it’s a relic, with a bit of spurious provenance or whatever they call it. And so yes, it’s pretty weird and it’ll add a nice shiver of excitement to the shop, whenever I open it up and try to get people to come in...’

  I’d been looking forward all day to Rosie coming home and showing her the tooth. Later in the afternoon, I’d been out with Chloe to the nearby convenience store and I’d got a bottle of red wine. So that, when Rosie trudged wearily up the stairs and into the kitchen, our dinner was cooking and the bottle was open and breathing, the table was set... and, very thoroughly and carefully, I’d already got Chloe bathed and powdered and into her pyjamas and swaddled in a dressing-gown, her hair glowing golden, her skin fragrant and pink, and, most importantly, her teeth sweetly brushed and we were ready to show off the place from which her wobbly tooth had popped out.

  ‘No, we can’t find it,’ I’d lied to Rosie. ‘It kind of, well, popped out when she was rushing downstairs, chasing the mouse, and when she jumped onto the bottom step she kind of gasped and must’ve spat the tooth out.’

  I didn’t say that Chloe had fallen over. I said that I’d looked all over the hallway and couldn’t find the tooth and it must have skidded across the floor and slipped into a crack between the flagstones.

  We were eating together, the pasta I’d cooked, and we were drinking big glasses of the red wine. Chloe had already eaten and we’d put her upstairs into bed. The kitchen was very warm. Outside it was freezing harder than before. Rosie had showered and changed after her day at work, and her face was flushed with wine. She was wearing the big soft cotton shirt she wore in bed, or at least which she wore when we first slipped into bed and snuggled up before I helped her to wriggle out of it. I eyed her through my glass and saw that her throat and neck were flushed too and I saw how her breasts lifted and tautened when she raised both hands to her hair and shook it loose. I was relaxed and relieved. I knew she was pleased with the meal and the wine and the care with which I’d cosseted Chloe... and even the loss of a tooth from her precious angel’s precious pink gums was alright.

  She pushed aside her empty plate, took another swig of wine and licked her lips.

  ‘So what’s the protocol? I mean, with the tooth-fairy and all that?’ she said, pondering the issue with mock-seriousness. ‘The tooth’s come out, but we’ve lost it, so she can’t put it under her pillow and expect to find a sixpence in the morning, can she?’

  I frowned, assuming the gravity of the situation. ‘I don’t know, but I remember when one of my baby-teeth came out and I was playing football and I swallowed it... I still found a sixpence under my pillow the next morning. So I guess the tooth-fairy is allowed to use his own discretion in matters like this? Remind me, when we go up, and I’ll put a little something there.’

  ‘And so,’ she said, ‘what is it, this relic you’ve been dying to show me...’

  Not bothering to clear the plates and dishes from the table, we’d just switched off the lights and gone upstairs with our glasses and the rest of the wine. I’d tiptoed into Chloe’s room and slipped a newly-minted one-pound coin beneath her sleeping head. And then Rosie and I were tumbling into our own big bed. The heat of it was almost overwhelming, the enfolding warmth of the church tower and our awareness of the crackling of ice outside our windows, the tumbling heat o
f our bodies and the buzz of the wine in our heads. We seemed to sink into our deep soft pillows as we lay close and clinked our glasses, and then I opened the black velvet box I’d been waiting to show her.

  She reached for her specs from the bedside table. All of a sudden, despite her otherwise nakedness and the tousle of her hair, she assumed her previous authority as a dentist’s assistant.

  ‘A tooth, yes, it’s a human tooth. Quite old, I would say, from the yellow and brown discoloration. It’s from a child, yes, it’s what we call a primary or deciduous tooth, what the layman would call a baby tooth.’ She angled it this way and that and held it so close to her glasses that it almost touched the lens. ‘I would say it’s from the upper-left quadrant, I’m remembering Palmer’s notation, the chart we use to designate individual teeth. It has two cuspals or points, so it’s the tooth just behind the front-left canine. Yes, I’d say it’s the upper-left first bicuspid.’

  I was bursting to ask her. ‘Is it possible to say whether it’s from a boy or a girl? I mean, is it possible to tell the difference between a boy’s tooth and a girl’s?’

  ‘I don’t think it is possible, no,’ she answered, looking at me quizzically over the top of her glasses. ‘Children start losing their baby-teeth anytime around six years old, until they’re maybe twelve or thirteen. I seem to remember that girls tend to lose them and replace them with their adult teeth a bit earlier than boys do.’

  ‘And there’s this,’ I said, my voice hoarse with excitement. ‘Hey, I’m not saying that your super-scientific information isn’t interesting, because it is and it just helps to confirm this other thing... but look, inside the box, underneath the satin stuff, I found this.’

  It was a slip of paper, folded many times. It was yellow with age, freckled and blotched. When I unfolded it, very gently, trying not to let my hands shake too much, the inside of the paper was whiter, as though it had seldom been opened and exposed to the light, but the lines of the folds were brown. On it, there were a few words of faded copper-plate hand-writing.

  ‘You read it, Rosie. Just read it aloud, whatever you think it says. I’ve been re-reading it all day. I know what I think it says. Go ahead...’

  She squinted at the writing and read it, hesitating, pausing.

  ‘Dentem puer... ex eapoe... unum denarium... 29th oct 1819... barnsby md... Manor House School.’

  ‘It’s in Latin,’ I said, and I teased the piece of paper from her fingers. ‘It’s in Latin and...’ and the words seemed to tumble from me in one breathless rush, ‘it says that this is the tooth of a boy, dentem puer, and a teacher, a man called Dr Barnsby, barnsby md, who was the headmaster of a boarding-school for boys called the Manor House School in the early 1800s, he kept a record of the penny, unum denarium, the penny he gave to the boy for the tooth he’d lost... yes, like the tooth-fairy, but keeping an account because... well, I guess because a penny was quite a lot in those days and if he was running a school with fifty or eighty or a hundred little boys he’d want to keep a record for his accounts and...’

  She was looking at me sideways. She took off her specs. She swallowed a mouthful of wine from her glass and then held it to my lips for me to drink too. As she reached to the bedside table to put the glass down, her breasts lifted and the warm scent of jasmine rose from her body.

  ‘And Rosie, he was here, in England...’ I was saying, although my tongue was loose with the wine and my excitement. ‘Edgar Allan Poe, he was here when he was a boy in around 1818 or so, and he went to a school called the Manor House School and the headmaster was a man called Dr Barnsby and he...’

  She silenced my mouth with hers. At the same time, she snapped shut the little velvet box with the tooth and the slip of paper inside it and pushed it deep down into the bedclothes.

  Chapter Six

  DARKNESS. WE BOTH woke very suddenly.

  It could have been midnight, not long after we’d made love and fallen into an exhausted sleep. It could have been the small hours: two or three o’clock in the morning and the streets frozen into silence. It could have been seven o’clock, and Rosie’s alarm about to rouse her, grumbling and groaning, for another day at work.

  A deep darkness. And yet softened by the glow of a golden streetlamp, outside on the corner, near the doorway of the church.

  Someone, something, was moving in our room.

  ‘Chloe?’ I sat up. Rosie was already sitting up. She was staring into the shadows. I caught the gleam of her eyes and the glisten of her open mouth. ‘Chloe, my darling... what are you doing?’

  She was standing at the foot of our bed. In her cotton night-dress, her hair tumbling to her shoulders, she seemed to be staring at us, as now, we both sat up and stared at her. She wasn’t smiling. She had the puzzled, petulant look on her face of the old Chloe. She had her eyes on us, but no, I realised that she didn’t really see. She was asleep. Asleep, and listening. Every wire and fuse in her body and her bewildered little brain was a-buzz with the energy of listening.

  ‘Hey baby...’ Rosie slipped out of our bed and moved around to her. ‘Hey baby, let’s get you back into bed... or do you want to come into bed with Mummy and Daddy?’

  But Chloe squirmed away from her. As she did so, the two of us, me and Rosie, we held our breath and listened too, as if we could tune into the wavelength of the restive child. And we heard it, we seemed to hear what the girl was hearing, and we glanced at each other with a tiny gasp of relief.

  ‘It’s only Mouse,’ Rosie whispered. ‘It’s Mr. Mouse, that’s all. Let’s go and see what he’s doing and tell him it’s bedtime and he’s got to go to bed and go to sleep...’

  I followed, as Rosie very gently and slowly walked the child out of our bedroom and back into her own. Indeed, there it was, the mouse was in its cage, on its treadmill. I’d done everything I could to silence the turning of the wheel, with a drop of oil here and a smear of soap there, so that the busy little beast could run as many miles as it liked in the dead of night without keeping Chloe awake. But now, maybe because the world outside was stopped so utterly and locked into an icy stillness, the wheel was just audible. No more than a hiss and a click, but it must have woken the child.

  Rosie nodded at me, and I understood her nod, as she manoeuvred Chloe to her own bed. By the time she was tucked into the bedclothes, I’d reached into the mouse’s cage, persuaded it off the treadmill with a gentle nudge of my finger, and I’d locked the wheel. ‘Sorry, Mr. Mouse, it’s bedtime, ok? Some of us have got to go to work in the morning, ok?’

  But, then an extraordinary thing... or maybe not so extraordinary, in a building as old and unusual as our church tower. No more than a second after the mouse had been thwarted and stilled, and the two of us had kissed the girl and retreated to the door of her bedroom, she sat up again.

  Bolt upright. Eyes wide open. Staring at us but not seeing. Asleep. Listening. And not just listening, but hearing something.

  Something was moving, somewhere in the building.

  Over our heads, in the roof-space of the belfry, where maybe the pipes were contracting and creaking in the grip of ice? Or some benighted creature, seeking refuge from the certainty of death outside, was fidgeting and fluttering in the hope of staying alive until the dawning of a meagre daylight?

  Chloe had heard it. We all listened. Even the mouse seemed to be listening. The child stared up at the ceiling, where the sound seemed to be coming from. And then, all of a sudden it stopped.

  In a few moments she’d snuggled herself down and was properly asleep again. The mouse rustled into its woolly bed and was still.

  We went back to our own bed and lay there, listening to the silence.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘ANOTHER ADVENTURE, CHLOE. Are you ready? It’ll be dusty and dirty, but we can get you cleaned up before Mummy comes home, can’t we?’

  I’d got her bundled into her jeans and an old pullover, and I’d made her put on her red bobble-hat in case it might be cobwebby and spidery up there. She had
the mouse somewhere inside her sleeve. I was wearing my oldest pullover too, the one I always wore for going on the boat, so we both looked as though we were about to venture far out into the icy world. We weren’t. We were going to see if the boiler and the pipes were alright, in the roof-space above our bedrooms.

  We started in Chloe’s room. As part of the expert conversion, there was an aluminium ladder stowed high on the ceiling, so unobtrusive that it was almost unnoticeable except for a nylon cord which dangled down the wall.

  ‘Watch out and stand back, Chloe, it’s magic...’ and she gazed upwards, open-mouthed, so rapt that a tiny bubble of saliva sparkled on her tongue. I pulled gently on the cord and the ladder slid on silent runners away from the ceiling and down towards us and clicked into place in front of our faces. It was new. I think I’d climbed it once before, months ago when the builders were busy and I’d been nosing around to see what they were doing. I set Chloe onto the bottom rung, and as she pulled herself up to the next and the next, I was enfolding her with my arms and climbing with her, my whole body wrapped around her so that she couldn’t possibly fall.

  At the top, I reached above her head and pushed up a trap-door. All new, all neat, effortless, it swung up and away on a silent spring. I pushed her bonny bottom and she scrambled up, and I was there, right with her, a moment later.

  The belfry? I could’ve called it that to make it sound old and solemn and oddly gothic. But it had never had bells in it, although the enormous wooden beams of the roof looked mighty enough to have supported them. It was the clock-tower.

  A big dark space, perfectly square. Three blank stone walls, and on one of them there remained the inner workings of the clock face which looked south and across the town. A marvellous contraption of great black cogs with interlocking teeth, weights and pulleys and fulcrum, standing silent and still since the church had been closed. I’d meant to find out how it all worked and whether, one day, I might be able to set the clock going again; one day, me and Chloe would drop into the library in Long Eaton and I’d dig out the history of the building we’d bought. But now, the two of us just stood and gaped around us, at the sooty machine and at the shadowy beams over our heads. In one corner, quite incongruous, neat and compact, there was a shiny new water tank and a modern central-heating system.