Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Only a shadow, even darker than the darkness which was gaping around our shoulders. Or a vagrant, an urchin, so desperate to flee the imminent deadliness of the night that it must dare the deeper darkness of an unhallowed church. It had come for something, and gone out again. Unmistakably, in the photo, the shadow of the crow was there.

  THE OTHER PIECE? AN obituary. I read it quickly and the following afternoon I went to the crematorium at Bramcote.

  Out of curiosity, maybe, wondering at the connection between me and the deceased, wondering what it might be. Rosie had asked why the old man had given me the tooth. No real reason, I supposed, on an impulse he’d handed it to me because it was a curio and I’d expressed an interest in his odd collection of books. Mr. Heap: the obituary referred to him as an antiquarian, a bibliophile, who’d had a business in the oldest part of Nottingham for more than fifty years. Indeed, he’d been active in the campaign to commission and erect the statue of Robin Hood, and he’d been present at its unveiling in 1952. Widowed years ago, he was survived by his sons and grandchildren.

  The crematorium stood on an exposed hillside, overlooking the oak woods of Bramcote and the sprawling, comfortable suburbs. It was as cold as ever, but the brightness of the afternoon sunshine cast a silvery loveliness on the frosted grass. Chloe was with me, of course. We were both so bundled up in our coats and hats and scarves that no one could have recognised us, even if they’d wondered who we were. In any case, a family saying their final goodbye to a beloved father or grandfather would hardly notice me and my daughter, as we watched them arrive in a line of enormous black cars, as the coffin was brought off the hearse and wheeled on a trolley into the chapel.

  We didn’t go inside. The dazzle and glitter of the sunlight was a joy. Despite the snap of ice in the air, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. The sky was a delicate pale blue, without a wisp of cloud, it had the fragile opacity of a starling’s egg. The funeral cars kept their engines running, the drivers in their sombre uniforms sitting inside with the heaters on, and a shimmering white fume arose from the exhaust pipes. We heard the music from the chapel – The Lord’s my Shepherd – the tremulous voices of grieving women and the growling of bereaved men.

  Not long. I could feel Chloe starting to shiver, her hand gripping mine more and more tightly inside her woolly glove. I hugged her close, pulling her body against my legs so she could press her face into my coat, and I inwardly groaned at the prospect of Rosie’s interrogation if she came home this evening and found Chloe feverish with a cold... so where did you go today? On the park with the ducks and the swans? No? Did you go into town, to have a look around the nice warm shops and have a nice hot chocolate or something? No? You went where? The crematorium? What do you mean, the crematorium? For heaven’s sake Oliver, you took Chloe for a nice afternoon at the crematorium?

  Four o’clock. Getting dark. The afternoon was closing around us, the grip of the frost was tighter as the sun dipped away and the evening sky was darker and lower. Darker, so that the glow from inside the chapel and the lights of the cars were suddenly bright. The exhaust smoke was whiter, billowing like steam. And as the music of an organ rose and fell with its pitiless poignancy, the family of Mr. Heap, deceased, started to come outside. Grey smoke plumed from the chimney of the incinerator.

  The family processed across the car park, escorted by the minister, who was going to show them where the ashes would eventually be placed. He took them to the garden of remembrance, where the yews and the privet were meticulously cut into deferential, unassuming shapes, where there were already hundreds of crosses and plaques on the grass. We followed at a discreet distance. If anyone had asked me why we were there or who we were, I was ready to say that I’d been a regular visitor to Mr. Heap’s marvellous little shop and wanted to pay my respects. But no one asked me, no one glanced at us. The faces of the middle-aged sons with their wives, the grandchildren in their twenties, were lit only by the last rays of the midwinter sun and the glow from inside the hearse. A few tears, yes, but not of sadness as much as resignation, that a very old man who’d been loved and respected had passed away, after a long and honourable life... tears shining in nostalgic eyes, on cold white cheeks, a tear glistening on the tip of a reddened nose.

  They stood and stared at the ground. What else could they do, where else could they look? One by one, they bent and placed a flower or a card, a memento or token.

  Not many tears, until...

  When one of the middle-aged sons and his wife turned to the next plot, where there was already a plaque in the grass, and they pressed their palms onto it, I could see how their shoulders began shuddering with grief. Not for the old man, whom they’d loved so much and would dearly miss, but for someone else, who’d been untimely and cruelly taken away.

  Sobbing, the couple were helped to their feet. It was suddenly terrible. It had been reverent and calm. Now it was terrible. More than sadness: sorrow. More than sorrow: despair. And more than that: pain and anger. The family limped and stumbled back to the cars, they made strange mumbling, mewing noises into their handkerchiefs, and they were driven away.

  A long silence. Darkness, and an overwhelming sense of the cold. When the family had gone, the place where we found ourselves standing was devoid of any life or warmth. Only a vacuum, which the bitterness of a January night hurried to fill up.

  It was too dark to read the plaques on the lawn. Next to the new plot, the plaque which had provoked such an outburst of grieving was still warm, from the hands which had pressed on it. Chloe knelt and touched it too. I searched her face for a reaction. She was smiling. She had no inkling, of course. For her, as the old man himself had remarked, life and death were equally jests.

  Footsteps behind us.

  As we were standing up and about to move away from the frozen grass, there was a crunch of footsteps on the gravel, the flash of a torchlight, and a calm, authoritative, sympathetic voice.

  A man, apologetic. Wanting, as discreetly as possible, to tell us it was time to leave the premises. Were we relatives of the deceased, were we family or friends of Mr. Heap? He was so sorry and could he express his condolences?

  He angled his torch at the place where we’d been kneeling. Even that, the way he played the beam onto the plaque we’d been touching, was carefully respectful, not wanting to intrude at a time of great sadness. Sad, yes, the passing-away of Mr. Heap, an old gentleman who’d given so much to the community, to the city of Nottingham. And last year, when was it? Last spring... the torch caressed the plaque and illumined the date on it... there’d been a terrible a car accident.

  Me and Chloe, we walked away, our feet crunching, our breath pluming in the man’s torchlight as he escorted us to the gate of the crematorium. He was asking, were we alright? We could get a bus to Long Eaton, yes the 7B, from the bus-stop on the other side of the road, thank you, good night and take care... he was thanking us for leaving and letting him lock up and go home, his voice was so kind, trained in the business of bereavement.

  My mind was a jumble of thoughts, as we waited at the bus-stop and Chloe squeezed my hand with hers. Connections. PTO 725G, diamonds of glass, the tooth of Edgar Allan Poe.

  Chapter Twelve

  OF COURSE I’D known about the accident. Everyone in the area knew about it. As well as featuring on the front page of the Nottingham Evening Post, it was reported on local television news.

  ‘A seven-year-old girl has been injured in a hit-and-run incident, in Breaston village. A few minutes later, the car involved, travelling very fast along the Derby Road towards the centre of Long Eaton, apparently swerved out of control and struck the pillars at the entrance of Derwent College. The driver, Mrs. Angela Henson, 24, and her husband Mr. Andrew Henson, 29, were rushed to the Queen’s Medical Centre, where they both died of their injuries. Chloe Gooch, the child involved in the hit-and-run incident, sustained a head injury from which she is expected to make a full recovery.’

  Of course I’d known about it.
All I’d seen in a matter of seconds, like a clip from a movie, was the attractive couple in a nifty sports-car... a pretty blonde woman and a good-looking man, so typically glamorous that they could have been actors playing a part in a TV soap, accelerating past the camera and snarling angrily at each other at the same time. If the director had shouted Cut! at that moment and they’d stopped and got out, everything would’ve been fine. But it wasn’t a soap, it was real life. And in real life they didn’t stop. A child was brain-damaged, and five minutes later a young married couple were smashed into the windscreen of their nice little car.

  It was like a cancer in my belly. Me, so engrossed in the nonsense about saxophones that I’d sent Chloe to the pub for crisps and fizzy drinks. Me, so exasperated with her and the wretched wasp that I couldn’t help laughing when she pulled off her shirt and ran outside... me, ignoring her when she snapped at me, you can see what I’m fucking doing, because it fucking stung me that’s why, and I thought it was funny...

  She’d been right. I would never learn to play the saxophone. The guilt in my belly, gnawing at me whenever I saw the doubt and fear in Rosie’s eyes... the guilt I felt when that shameful, recurring thought came cringeing and fawning and wheedling into my brain, like a craven cur skulking in the shadows... that I liked Chloe more as a simpering angel than I had when she’d been herself. How to atone? How?

  And the beautiful couple? Was that my fault too? I had a blurry fantasy that they’d seen Chloe come into the pub and stretch up to the bar and buy her crisps, that they’d said something to her or to the landlord, is she supposed to be buying stuff in here? Where are her parents? And the landlord had said that her Daddy was outside in the mobile library. Worse, in the same blur of wakefulness, in the darkest of fantasies one can only conjure in those deathless, desperate hours in the middle of the night, I heard the couple niggling about the rights or wrongs of the child coming into the pub on her own – and it was the very presence of the girl in the pub, whom I’d sent in there, which had sparked the row and sent them wrangling outside...

  Of course I’d known about their accident, the tragedy of their deaths. How many hours of how many nights had I spent thinking about it? But I’d had no idea that the young woman had been Mr. Heap’s granddaughter.

  A TOOTH FOR a tooth. Chloe’s tooth, Poe’s tooth.

  Rosie, ex-dental assistant, had remarked wryly on it. Coincidences like that only happen in books, she’d said. Was it Thomas Hardy – she was remembering from the lit. she’d done at school – was it Hardy who everyone said was too full of coincidences, unlikely and improbable things happening to keep his big fat novels rolling along? And I’d said, yes I thought it was Hardy, but he did it because his books were published chapter by chapter, as serials, like the episodes of a soap on the television, so he had to make it all punchy and full of incident. Or was that Dickens?

  But that was how it happened. I hadn’t made it up. The very same morning when Chloe and I’d been hurrying down to the vestry and I was going to take a good look at the tooth that the old man had given me, she’d stumbled and fallen and jolted out one of her own. Hers, a right lower canine, according to Palmer’s notation, had skidded across the flags of the church hallway, I’d followed the trail of bloody spittle as carefully as an aboriginal tracker, and found the tooth lodged so deeply in a crack in the stone that I couldn’t get it out.

  So there I was, a week or so later, on my hands and knees with a pair of pliers.

  Sunday morning. That’s why I was on my own, without Chloe hovering around me and staring and smiling, or else wandering into the bookshop to poke her fingers into the fire, or disappearing out of the church door and onto the pavement to be carried away by child-trafficking gypsies, or stepping into the road in front of a bus or...

  It was a blessed Sunday morning, and Rosie had gone out somewhere, with Chloe.

  The relief I felt was almost overwhelming. It shouldn’t have been, because, as I’d acknowledged a hundred times over the last nine or ten months, the burden of care I had with the born-again Chloe was nothing compared with the challenge she’d presented in her earlier incarnation as a rambunctious, insatiable tyke. But still, not having her around, for a delicious Sunday morning, was nice... not having to read the anxiety on Rosie’s face as she left for work, not having to memorise her daily instructions. I came down from the kitchen to the hallway, with a mug of coffee in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other, and I threw open the huge oak doors as wide as they would go.

  A bitterly freezing morning. It breathed a breath of icy air into the church.

  I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind if a whole thievery of ragged Romanian vagrants came by, or a stampede of buses. I wasn’t responsible. As I knelt to the floor with my pliers, I almost hoped, sneakily, that Rosie would come back with a wounded Chloe – nothing serious of course, no more than a grazed knee or a splinter or a nose-bleed – so that I could pull some disapproving faces of my own.

  Easier said than done, getting the tooth out. I couldn’t find it.

  The trail of blood was still there, very faint because, for a week of wintry days and nights, the wind from under the door had scored the flags with dust and frost and a flurry of fallen leaves. I followed the trail, but no tooth. I looked into every crevice, every crack, every cranny, every... whatever, the tooth had been there, I’d seen it, and now it was gone.

  Strange. But never mind. I’d already said to Rosie that I hadn’t been able to find Chloe’s tooth. So I gave up the search and moved into the vestry.

  I stood in the chilly grey room and looked around me. Despite the cold, I felt a sudden welling of great joy and excitement in my heart. Tomorrow, Monday morning, me and Chloe – after Mummy had briefed us as rigorously as if we were fighter pilots about to set off on a dangerous mission and she’d gone off to work – we would go down to the vestry with our coffee and chocolate biscuits, we’d put on the lamps and we’d light the sweetest, brightest, crackliest of all fires, we’d put on some music... and then we’d go outside onto the pavement with the sign I’d had made.

  Poe’s Tooth Bookshop: Open.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘SLOWLY SLOWLY... HEY don’t worry... Rome wasn’t built etc etc...’

  Midday, and I hadn’t had a single customer. Rosie was consoling me. Her wifely way of doing it was to persuade me, against all my instincts, to leave the church door wide open and take me and Chloe across the top of Shakespeare Street, into Azri’s for a toasted teacake, and we could watch from there in case anybody came along. So we sat in Azri’s tiny, cosy, corner cafe – where Azri, some kind of Kurd, was obviously doing fine, with only six tables but serving customers non-stop morning and afternoon and a little gold-mine – and we peered through his steamed-up windows in case somebody, one person, happened into the church.

  No one came.

  ‘Hey, slowly slowly,’ Rosie was consoling me, ‘did you really think there’d be a mad rush of customers, like the January sales or something? Were you expecting busloads of Japanese tourists, like at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, or the Brontë thing at Haworth, or what-is-it 220B Baker Street? It’s a tooth, alright? So it might be the tooth of Edgar Allan Poe, or it might not be. It’s your first day, alright?’

  Unexpectedly, she had the day off. Colonel Brook had closed the school for his wife’s birthday; it seemed that he could run his dismal little school as he liked, he was a creationist, he was God, he could declare a day of rest whenever he felt like it. So Rosie had suddenly reappeared at home and we’d opened the shop together. She’d helped me to light the fire and make everything nice, with the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee and some welcoming music – she’d changed my Peaches en Regalia to her Year of the Cat – and by eleven o’clock, when we’d been snuggling by the fire and eating chocolate biscuits and tossing crumbs into the open hallway for the pigeons to eat and not a soul had come in, she’d suggested we adjourn across the road to Azri’s.

  We watched. A car stopped outside the c
hurch. I rubbed excitedly at the steam on the window. No one got out, the driver had pulled over to answer his mobile phone.

  Fifteen minutes later, a taxi slowed at the corner of Shakespeare Street. No one got out, the driver only opened his door and spat onto the road and pulled away again.

  Great excitement, when a tour bus hissed to a halt, and for a brilliant, fantasy-exploding millisecond I imagined fifty or sixty seriously academic Americans from a university in Kansas or Salt Lake City disgorging onto the pavement. No one got out, only the driver waddled across the road and breathlessly into Azri’s, where, at the counter right behind me, he bought a cappuccino in a plastic container and waddled back to his bus, off to Chatsworth, or Matlock, or Alton Towers, with his not-so academic passengers.

  Chloe bit into a toasted teacake. Maybe she hit on a dried-up raisin or something, but there was a gush of blood from her mouth and down her chin.

  ‘Oh my lord, poor baby,’ Rosie was saying, and she dabbed with the tissues that Azri proffered. Not enough tissue. The blood flowed copiously from the tender place where her tooth had been. It didn’t drip, it plopped and splashed onto her teacake and formed a curiously beautiful pool with the butter on her plate.

  ‘Poor baby... hey, keep still...’ And while Mummy was trying her best to staunch the blood, applying some of the skills she’d learned in her former employment, Chloe was batting at the steamed-up window of the café and gurgling with excitement. All because... as all of us peered across the road, a mob of pigeons had erupted from the church doorway, where they’d been foraging for the crumbs of our biscuits... a whirling of grey and white feral pigeons, pluming from the wide open door, as though something inside had startled them.