Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  A white mouse. It appeared from the sleeve of a beautiful child beside a crackling fire. It dropped onto the floor and it ran. And as it ran, there was a clattering of something big and clumsy in a corner of the room, which knocked over a pile of books and scattered them... and it was a bird, a big black bird with a jabbing beak which was after the mouse.

  Big black bird. Tiny white mouse. Giggling golden-haired girl. A scriptwriter couldn’t have done it better.

  Chloe, by a miracle of dexterity or sleight of hand, snatched the mouse off the floor and vanished it into her clothing. The bird sprang at her hands and then fell backwards, awkward and defeated, like a pantomime villain the audience would love to hiss... and when it shuffled itself together again and limped away, when it made a shameful exit and disappeared among the boxes of tattered and slightly foxed, remaindered paperbacks, the unhappy man gave a funny chortling laugh and pulled a five-pound note from his pungent pocket.

  I gave him his change and he went out chuckling, with a paperback Poe, a collection of stories or poems or whatever it was. My first sale.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘BUT DON’T YOU get it, Rosie? It’s perfect... alright, so it’s another of those ridiculous coincidences you get in Hardy or Dickens or whoever, but who cares? It happened and I can use it to help the shop. Edgar Allan Poe and his raven, or his scruffy old crow in this case...’

  I’d been lying to my wife. She’d come home, sniffing at the air in the tower as soon as she’d stepped through the front door, and I’d given her the good news first, that I’d had some browsers in the shop and sold a book. My hurried version of the story – I wanted to tell her quickly and get some of the truth out before flannelling around the rest of it – was that, just as a man was poking around and looking at the books, some of those pesky pigeons had blown into the hallway, pecking around for the biscuit crumbs we’d left there... and just as I was shooing them out, a raggedy old crow had tried its luck too, except that, just as the pigeons had gone fluttering out, the crow had hopped into the vestry. Not a big deal – I was saying in a deliberately off-hand way – in fact it kind of added to the atmosphere and you should’ve seen how Chloe’s face had lit up. Anyway, the upshot was that the customer had thought it was quaint and he’d bought a book, you know, Poe and the crow and all that. Oh, and by the way – I was adding as Rosie started heading up the stairs towards the kitchen – that must be the whiffy smell throughout the tower, not Mouse after all, but maybe the birds or specifically the bird in the vestry.

  At which point, she’d turned round, at the top of the stairs and frowned down at me. ‘What do you mean, in the vestry? You got it out, didn’t you? Or is it still in there? What are you saying, is it still in there or what?’

  She started downwards again, and I blocked her way, at least for a moment. ‘Well yes, no, I’m not sure,’ I was blustering. ‘I mean, I think it might’ve been in there yesterday, and maybe even overnight, my fault for leaving crumbs around by the open door. And so the smell must’ve drifted up the stairs, even as far as our bedroom...’ She brushed past me and into the vestry, where Chloe was sitting as meekly as her mouse in the diminishing firelight. I put in, ‘Alright, so it might be still in here, I don’t know, but don’t you get it? It’s perfect, it’s...’

  She bundled the girl into her arms, hugged her close, at the same time staring into the sooty shadows of the room and inhaling long, disapproving breaths through her nose. She didn’t say much more, but I could almost hear her brain whirring in a fury of disgruntlement and... and something else, something had piqued her brain when I’d said that Chloe had reacted to the presence of the bird. The notion was snagging in her mind, pricking her like the tiniest splinter of a thought. She was looking oddly at me, a curious mixture of emotions moving across her face as softly as the firelit shadows, so that I couldn’t tell if she was going to react by accusing me of further negligence in the care of her daughter or respond to the half-baked idea that having a crow in the shop could be good for business. I’d lied, by omission: she had no idea that the bird had been in the clock-tower, that Chloe and I had been up there, that the bird had been flapping around on her duvet in the middle of the night on its way down through the kitchen and into the hallway... and now she was searching my eyes for the truth I’d withheld.

  At last, as she turned and hurried up the stairs with Chloe, she said, ‘Well, get it outside, Oliver. It stinks. And you too, you stink, you look a mess, you need a shave and a shower. Or is that supposed to be perfect as well?’

  I DIDN’T REALLY stink. It was the baggy pullover and the greatcoat I’d been wearing to keep warm in and out of the church doorway and in the shop. Underneath it, I was my fragrant, manly self, showered and deodorised. But yes, I could sense how people recoiled from me in the charity shops in Long Eaton High Street, even the veteran volunteers who were used to the smokey, beery smell of their unemployed customers. I hadn’t shaved, I knew I needed a haircut but I wasn’t going to have one, and I’d got my bookshop outfit on, the pullover and greatcoat. Chloe was wrapped in many layers and topped off with the bobble-hat, so that she looked like one of Santa’s elves who’d been left behind after Christmas. We’d had a brisk, frosty walk downtown, and I had a list of things I needed.

  Photocopies. I got a big blow-up of the Nottingham Evening Post article and its photos of the tooth and the old handwritten document of authenticity, as I liked to imagine it to be, and a hundred small copies of the document, postcard size. While we had a coffee and cake on the market square, an elderly gent in his old-fashioned cobbler’s and key-cutting shop (the only business which had survived the coming of the supermarkets on the edge of town) was making a rubber stamp for me. And in the animal welfare shop, where I’d been rummaging for any kind of magnifying glass, I’d found, even better, a kind of plastic lens designed to help short-sighted geriatrics to read books and magazines.

  An even brisker walk home – because the morning was so bitter but also because I was so boyishly excited to get back and get open – and soon we were kneeling at the hearth, crackling up the fire, boiling the kettle and putting out the sign.

  And the crow?

  We both knew, from the smell and from the way the white mouse wiggled its whiskers out of Chloe’s sleeve and disappeared again, that the crow was somewhere in the vestry. I sprinkled a few crumbs. And the bird came out. It ate up the crumbs, it sprang onto my desk and admired itself in the reflection of the computer screen. It shook out its wings and splattered a green-white mute onto the floor. As though to announce, we were ready and waiting for customers.

  A few gainsayers and poo-poohers, yes.

  A very old gentleman came in, shrunken like a mummy inside his dark suit and oversized shirt, so quivery that a puff of smoke from the chimney might have blown him over. Fortunately, the bird made itself scarce, as he looked around the hallway and started snivelling into a white handkerchief. He tried to resist me, screwing up his face and spitting feebly at the smell of my clothes, but then he allowed me to sit him down in the vestry. Screwing up all his indignation, he told me he’d been a Sunday school teacher at the church when he was in his twenties, been married in it, had his children baptized in it and played the organ at decades of harvest festivals and carol services, and last year his wife’s funeral service had been held there. He dabbed at the tears in his eyes and gazed into the hallway, as though he could, by a tremendous feat of mind over matter, conjure his memories back into reality: himself and his wife, young and beautiful on their wedding day and those very stone flags strewn with confetti; babies, decades of Easter and Christmas celebrations and a lifetime of Sundays; more recently, his wife’s funeral, her coffin being wheeled on a trolley across the same stone flags.

  At last he twisted his face at me. His mouth writhed and was ugly. ‘And now, this...’ he hissed through his teeth, ‘in my church. What is it? Some kind of shop, selling dirty books. It isn’t right. It isn’t right. It’s wrong.’

  He sto
od up, pushing away my attempts to steady him, and teetered out of the church.

  A man with a briefcase came to ask if I had a licence, said I’d have to get one, running a small business, something something. Depressingly, I supposed because of the economic climate of unemployment and hard times, there were odd bods who came in to sneer. At the tooth. To say it wasn’t even a tooth, it was a bit of bone or even melamine, or it was the tooth of a dog, in any case it was a fake and no more real than King Arthur’s footprints at Tintagel or the shroud of Turin or whatever... and one very scary middle-aged man, literally broiling with hatred for all the world and the injustices which had been dealt him, who told me in a voice trembling with anger that he’d been to The Who’s so-called last-ever concert in Southampton way back in the 80s and bought a commemorative programme which was going to be priceless, and then of course they’d been touring ever since and were still doing concerts nearly thirty years later and his programme was worthless... like the tooth, a hoax, a trick, a crock of shit, just a fucking scam... he went out of the church and into the outside world, on fire with anger, looking for somewhere else to vent it.

  Glory be, for the believers, for whom, as I’d said to Rosie, it wasn’t the reality of the tooth which was important, but the belief it inspired.

  Like my Beatles bathwater. I’d bought a bottle and it had been precious to me, it was my bit of George, my favourite. And when he died, I searched and searched everywhere and found it, strangely half-gone, mysteriously evaporated although the lid was still tightly screwed on, and no more than a swill of grey scum. The day he died, I held the bottle in my hand and felt the warmth in it still, as though George had just got out of his bath and pulled the plug and here it was, a few drops of his bathwater. And I’d cried.

  Belief. Believe. There were people coming into the shop who believed, or at least they wanted to believe. Not many, but a few, they bent over the tooth in its satin-lined, purple velvet box, on its presentation table, under the lamp, and they peered at it through the magnifying lens. They held their breath. Their eyes glistened. And so, when they bought a book, I stamped the inside page with my new rubber stamp, Poe’s Tooth Books, and slipped in a bookmark with the very words which Dr Barnsby had written to record that he’d kept a tooth from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe and slipped a penny under the little boy’s pillow... and the customer, the believer, went out into the cold simply glowing with the heat of inspiration.

  And the crow helped. I helped. Chloe helped. We were a team.

  The bird had an easy job. Whenever anyone came in, it flapped to the highest bookshelf and peered down from it, as though judging from the demeanour of the person how appropriate it might be to make a dramatic entrance. And then it would snort through its bristly carrion-crow nostrils, just enough to make the customer look around and up to see where the sound was coming from, and before he or she could even gasp with surprise it would leap away from the shelf and, with a couple of beats of its shabby, dusty black wings, it would settle on the back of a chair, or even more picturesquely on top of the computer screen.

  Me, I was unkempt. Rather smelly. And I would sit at the computer, a distracted, glowering, troubled figure, especially if the crow was perched nearby and ducking and bobbing like a demented Richard III or a bedraggled Rasputin. For extra effect, I could be either rattling furiously at the keyboard in an outpouring of genius or stabbing with two fingers in terrible literary constipation, whichever came over me as I grew into the role.

  And Chloe? Having sat by the fire, off and on throughout the day, her face was mottled and blotchy, her eyes were reddened and her cheeks were smutty. Her tousled blonde hair gleamed in the light of the flames. She ran a tiny white mouse from one hand to the other. She smiled, and a smear of blood was on her teeth. Perfect. She was an urchin, a silent, sooty angel.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘AND YOU’VE STARTED writing? Well, wonders never cease. Soon you’ll be telling me you’re learning to play the saxophone or peering through a telescope at the night sky or, what was the other thing? oh yes you’re setting off to do the coast-to-coast walk from St. Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay...’

  I aped a smile at her. ‘And taxidermy, my dearest Rosie, don’t forget taxidermy. Yes, I’m going to do all of those things. Hey, don’t be mean, there’s nothing wrong with having a few plans and ambitions. Don’t knock my little schemes and daydreams.’

  We weren’t rowing or wrangling, it was just our usual exchange of snidey banter. Oddly, her asides were a bit more frequent, now that the shop was running and I’d done a bit of business. Perhaps it was because I’d stopped shaving for a while, or it rankled because I was making a paltry contribution to the family economy and threatening her status as sole bread-winner. So I parried clumsily, ‘Hey, I know you used to work for those fancy dentists in town, Dowling & McCorrister, charging their rich clients extortionate fees to do their kids’ braces and veneers and all that stuff... and now you’re strolling the groves of academe with Colonel Brook, and God said let there be light and so on... and me, I’m just a dabbler, a dilettante. But yes, I’ve started to write.’

  She bethought herself. ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m really happy that the shop’s actually happening and it’s fun. What are you writing? Go on, tell me about it...’ And she kissed me full on the lips, stretching up so that her weight was on me and I had to step backwards to avoid overbalancing. So the kiss was very short, and she misunderstood my movement. She turned away, with a tiny shrug of disdain, as though I’d deliberately recoiled from her. ‘Alright, well tell me about it when I get back. I may be a bit later than usual. Colonel Brook’s holding a meeting after school this afternoon and he’s asked me to take the minutes.’ She went out.

  Another lie. Well, it was partly true, about the writing. I’d been sending e-mails to a few old colleagues from my days with the borough council, not exactly blogging but spreading the word about the shop and the tooth and forwarding the newspaper article to anyone who might have missed it. Writing a book? Well no, although, in a flurry of hammering at the keyboard whenever a customer came in, I’d suddenly found I could rattle a few thoughts for a story, just by looking around the shop and at the bird and Chloe and catching a glimpse of my own eccentric reflection. No need to look any further for a story, even if I only kept a journal of the weirdness of the past nine or ten months, of the changes in our lives and where we lived and what we were doing. So yes, I’d been writing, not on paper, but into the mysterious workings of the computer. And sometimes, if I was stuck for the next sentence or a link or a dying phrase, I only had to reach for a book from the nearest heap and it was stuffed with the things, every shelf was groaning with other people’s hare-brained ideas. Fuck, if I couldn’t find something to write now, in this place, after all that was happening to me and surrounded by hundreds of thousands or even millions of superbly-crafted words, then whenever would I?

  Well, not today.

  Something about the room was wrong. Even the crow, as soon as we opened up and put out the sign and started to light the fire, even the crow didn’t like it. It had been huddling in the vestry all night, but now it sprang into the hallway and out of the front door and was gone. It took off, effortlessly, as though all this time it had been pretending to be a pitiful wretch, and beat across the playing fields of Derwent College. I watched it, me and Chloe watched it, we saw how it swerved through a flock of gulls and spooked them into a panic-stricken mob, and then swerved away again. Chloe too, back in the vestry, although her smile was as constantly bland as ever, had a different, bilious look in her eyes.

  It was a glorious morning. Cold, yes, freezing hard although the sun was so bright. And it was the steely brightness of the sun which made the shop seem oddly unwelcoming. It glinted through the lancet windows, yet the glint was harshly metallic. The fire, although it tried its best to look cheery with its friendly puffs of blue smoke, although it sounded merry with its crackle and wheeze and pop, it looked pale. It couldn’t compe
te with the sunlight. The whole room, at its best in a swaddle of dark shadows, with the fire aglow and the books snuggling on their shelves, was kind of shabby.

  I looked around it and at Chloe. I knew I was making excuses, about the sunlight and the firelight and all. Yes yes, I’d used the words myself, I was a dabbler and a dilettante and I’d always procrastinate if there was an easier option. Now I blurted, ‘Hey Chloe, let’s go out, shall we? It’s too nice to be festering in here with all these musty old books and this poor little fire. Hey, don’t look at me like that, like your Mummy... yes I know I was going to start writing, but what do you think? A morning on the boat, and then some chips in the Trip? Robin Hood and the shops and back on the bus? And we’ll be back before Mummy’s finished her meeting with the god-squad. She’ll never know. We can tell her we were here all day. Alright?’

  The boat was on Sawley Marina. The water was a sheet of grey ice, crazed and fluted where it had thawed and re-frozen a thousand times over the past few weeks. But when I started the engine and the propeller churned, I could swing the bow away from its moorings and we broke free. The ice was a crust. We sliced easily through it and the still, black waters of the canal.

  The Gay Lady – it was only a little cruiser, twelve-foot or something, wooden on top with a fibreglass hull, a tiny cabin at the front with a couple of bunks in it, a puny two-horse-power outboard motor slung on the back. At the front, on the back... alright, so boating was something else I’d been dabbling in and I didn’t use the correct terminology. But the three of us had had fun on The Gay Lady on long hot summer afternoons and long, balmy evenings, chugging along the Trent & Mersey through Shardlow, past the breweries of Burton-on-Trent and drinking in Branston, almost as far as Lichfield. We were hopeless, we butted and bashed at other boats and scraped every bridge we came to. But it was idyllic... coot and moorhen, the stately heron, me and Rosie struggling with the locks while onlookers at the riverside pubs jeered and hooted and shouted ribald, deliberately unhelpful advice. We’d seen a kingfisher, and an otter, and in the twilight we’d seen fox and badger. In the remains of the summer since the accident, we’d seized every moment of joy together with an eagerness bordering on desperation. And our fumbling mishaps on board the silly little boat had been an escape from our anxieties.