‘What’s that?’ I managed to interject, when her voice quivered so much with anger that she had to pause to control it. ‘Rosie, what’s that on your face? What have you done? And I thought you’d got a meeting, you said you’d be late back...’
Wrong thing to say. It sounded like I’d been caught out, like we’d been planning to sneak back home without telling her where we’d been.
‘We did have a meeting, yes,’ she retorted, ‘but Colonel Brooke cut it short. One of the science teachers made a remark about the creationist stuff and tried to start an argument, so the Colonel just closed the meeting and...’ She shook her head, as if a hornet was buzzing in her hair and she was trying to get it off her. ‘Anyway, anyway, that’s got nothing to do with anything. I come home and it’s all dark and empty and I come inside kind of concerned, a bit worried because you hadn’t said you might’ve gone out and...’
‘Your face, what’ve you done?’ I tried to get close to her. I used Chloe’s body, pushing her forward, to inveigle myself closer, to bring the three of us back together again. ‘Have you seen it, in the mirror? You’ve got a cut or something...’
She backed away. She was still in her outdoor clothes, all bundled up like me and Chloe. She hadn’t been upstairs yet. She must’ve just come in a few moments before us. She dabbed at her left cheek with the back of her glove.
‘No, I haven’t seen it. I know it stings, god knows what disgusting germs it’s got in it. I thought you said you’d got the filthy thing out of here...’
Oh. It was dawning on me, the reason for all the panic. I felt the familiar sick plunging of my stomach, as I moved in on her, not allowing her to back away this time. I held both her hands down and away from her face. She had a cut on her left cheek, and the skin around it was reddening from the impact of whatever had made the wound.
‘So I came in and felt around for the light,’ she went on. ‘I was freezing, fumbling around, and I don’t know why, I couldn’t find the switch straightaway... and then I heard something creeping around in here, like a rat or something. I even thought for a silly moment that it was you and Chloe and you were playing a trick on me by waiting with the lights off and trying to spook me, and then it was flapping at my hands and my face and I screamed and by the time I found the switch it had...’
Her voice broke. Her anger was dissolving into hurt, into tears. I took her in my arms and held her close, and I felt her body shuddering against me. Chloe was hugging the two of us, her arms wrapped around our waists. I was saying into Rosie’s ear, which was red hot on my lips despite the coldness of her cheeks, ‘I’m sorry sorry sorry, my love. Let’s get you upstairs. Let’s all of us go upstairs and get your face washed and put something on it like some antiseptic or something. We’ll all get changed and warmed up and get a drink and then I’ll come downstairs, and I promise this time I’ll...’
‘You’ve been drinking already, I can smell it,’ she hissed. ‘You know I don’t like you taking Chloe into pubs and... and then I come home and no one’s here and I’ve been at work all day and you’ve been drinking in town with Chloe and...’
‘Alright alright, Rosie. We just went into town, our usual thing on the boat and...’
She pulled herself away from me. She took a huge breath, held it for a long time and wiped away her tears with both gloves.
‘It isn’t me, Oliver, it isn’t me I’m bothered about, you know that. I don’t mind working while you’re playing around. I don’t even really mind if I come home into a silly old church and there’s a bloody great bird waiting inside it and it bloody attacks me and tries to peck my eyes out. It’s Chloe I care about. Don’t you think she’s had enough already, without this? It’s dangerous. If it went for her and hurt her, I’d never...’
‘You’d never what? You’d never forgive me?’ I put on a bit of a huff myself. ‘I said I’d get it out and I will. It’s a scraggy old crow, that’s all. You must’ve startled it in the dark and it flapped into your face. I’m sorry, I’ll get it out, of course I will.’
‘I’m not sure if it’s still in here,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s either gone into the vestry or it went out of the door before I turned the light on. I don’t know.’
So, at last she stomped up the stairs with Chloe. Before they reached the top and disappeared into the kitchen, the girl swivelled her head back to me and – What else would she do? – she smiled.
Yes, everything was a jest for her. Other people’s tears and anger, their grief and bitterness, their bereavement, their resignation to the tragedy of their lives, yes even their imminent freezing to death in a dank, dripping canal tunnel – she simply smiled at it all. And I smiled back at her. I couldn’t help it. We were in cahoots. Her smile hid all kinds of secrets, truths and half truths I’d withheld from her mother. That it was Chloe who’d discovered the bird and shaken its poor frozen skeleton back to life; it was Chloe who’d teased me up into the clock-tower again and chased the terrified creature round and round until it flopped down through the trap-door and onto her Mummy’s bed. And the fact that Chloe welcomed its presence in the bookshop and seemed to recognise the part it might play there. Rosie knew nothing of all this.
I turned on the lights in the vestry and went in to look for the crow. The room smelled strongly of the bird, and its mutes were splashed here and there and in one particular corner where it had made itself snug. But the bird was nowhere to be found. I was going to turn off the lights and head upstairs, but I paused for a few moments and bent to the relic.
The tooth of a boy. An old man had given it to me; a thing he’d hated, which he’d wanted to destroy and get rid of. What was it? A bad luck charm, or just a bit of mischief?
And now the crow. What was it? A starveling, sheltering from the winter, or another little piece of Poe?
Chapter Nineteen
WHICHEVER IT WAS, the bird didn’t go away.
I was on the roof of the church tower. The old gent wouldn’t have been pleased, if he’d seen me from his nearby house and read my thoughts: I mean, the very wizened gent who’d objected so forcefully to my opening a horror bookshop in the church. I was on the roof and wondering if it might be possible to string a washing line up there.
I’d put a wash on, against Rosie’s advice. As she’d said before, how on earth was I thinking of getting the stuff dry, the sheets and pillow cases from our beds and even a great big duvet cover I’d stuffed into the machine? Put it in the airing-cupboard and the whole place would be steamed up, or take it to the hot air driers at the launderette along Breedon Street... anyway, she huffed as she busied herself and stepped out into the frosty morning, it was up to me, I was the house husband and child-minder, it was up to me to manage the domestic chores.
And then, over tea and cornflakes with Chloe, I’d had my little brainwave. Turning up the radio so she might not hear what I was doing, I’d left her in the kitchen – oh god, the keenness of the guilt I felt at leaving her alone with so many potential hazards – and I slipped into her bedroom, pulled down the silver ladder and was up into the clock-tower only a few seconds later. I closed the trapdoor behind me. I climbed a steep flight of steps, no more than a series of stone blocks protruding from the wall, and emerged through a higher trapdoor onto the very roof of the tower.
Like being on top of a castle. Massive mock battlements, with mock arrow slits, a bristling fortress of black stone. It was a watch tower overlooking the whole of the town, across the playing fields of Derwent College and the wide expanses of the park. The sky was lightening on a clear, freezing cold morning. Faraway, on the horizon, the cooling towers of the power station were already pluming clouds of steam into a grey sky. It was lovely, a breathless, crisp, dry morning, and the forecast predicted a sunny winter’s day. But, reminding myself of the reason I’d clambered up there, I realised that the temperature probably wouldn’t get above two or three degrees, and even if I rigged up some kind of line the bedding would hang there limply all morning and afternoon and still be i
cy-damp when Chloe got back. Never mind, me and Chloe could potter along to the launderette later and get the job done. So, trying to expunge from my feckless mind an image of the trouble she might get up to alone in the kitchen, I turned slowly round and round and appraised the space up there. First of all, far from feeling bad about annoying the old man by stringing our washing from the top of his beloved church, I felt a schoolboyish tingle of mischief at the thought of it. Also, I was thinking how great it would be in the summertime, to come up with drinks and even a barbeque and enjoy our bird’s eye view of all we surveyed.
I leaned over the battlements. It was a giddy height, there was a formidable drop to the pavement below. I was peering down, and my thoughts went straightaway to the fatal fall of that workman. I’d forgotten his name, the man who’d died during the construction of the church a hundred years ago. I was imagining, for some ghoulish reason, his trajectory and speed and even the sound of the wind in his clothes as he’d fallen, and guessing the spot where he’d landed... when something fell past my head.
An object, round and black like a pebble. So close that I felt the movement of it past my hair. I watched it fall. It hit the pavement exactly where I’d guessed the man’s head would have struck. It didn’t shatter, as a pebble might’ve done. It burst, with a kind of rubbery squelch.
Of course there was no one else on the roof. There was a sudden fluttering of the air around me, and there was the crow... circling above me; it folded its wings and fell to the battlements, where it settled no more than six feet away from me. It tidied its feathers with a few deft pokes and nibbles of its beak and it cocked its head at me.
‘Alright,’ I said, and I cocked my head curiously back at it. ‘Alright. I’ve been reading about you. So you think you’re clever, do you? And what are you up to now?’
I’d Googled carrion crow, Corvus corone, one of the most intelligent of birds, with an ability to use tools and tactics to scavenge food, a capacity for imitating sounds, an inclination to collect bright objects, and, unusually among almost all other birds, an ability to recognise faces. Yes, that was what it said on the websites. Unlike nearly all other species, the carrion crow might learn to feel comfortable with humans, to learn and know a particular face or a voice.
‘So what brings you back up here?’ I asked softly, politely. ‘Me? Or were you hoping to see Chloe? Sorry, she’s not...’
It dropped off the battlements and onto the roof itself. Where it hopped to the furthest corner, bent close to the base of the wall and pecked very hard into a crack in the stone, where some of the pointing had perished and fallen out. Before I could ask what it was looking for, it came away with a round, black object like the other one it had dropped to the pavement. With a couple of raggedy beats of its wings, the bird floated up and up and over the edge of the battlements, from where it dropped its prize. This time, after we’d both followed the fall and smash of the thing onto the pavement, the crow whirled down and down after it.
Snails. I bent to the cleft in the stone and found it was full of snails, dozens of them, their coiled, brown and black shells heaped together, like a cache of jewels secreted by a thief or a miser. Hibernating, were they? I pulled one out, it came away with a little resistance, a tiny kiss of suction, and indeed the foot of it was moist, alive. Alive, at least for the time being. The snails had found a – I was going to say an impenetrable shelter for the winter, a veritable fortress where they could survive the freezing days and nights in a seemingly endless dream, a slumber, a torpor. Except that it wasn’t impenetrable. The crow had found them. And its dagger beak would pick them out, one by one, drop them onto the stones far below, and float nonchalantly down to enjoy the meat from the shattered shells.
How did snails find themselves at the top of a church tower? I wasn’t going to ponder that one for too long. I had one in my hand, it was real, it was alive, I could see it with my own eyes. Maybe, one day, along with the saxophone and the stars and stuffing dead animals, I might have time for the study of snails. Right now, I lobbed it over the battlements, watched it smash on the pavement below, and saw the crow springing towards its mucous remains.
Chloe, of course I hadn’t forgotten about Chloe. That would be a ridiculous notion. But before I started down again to see if she’d survived my absence, I enjoyed another sweeping gaze over my domain and caught a dazzling gleam from across the park. A tantalizing, tempting dazzle.
The sun was up. The playing-fields were smoking with frost. It was a sparkling morning. And I knew straightaway what Chloe and I would be doing, once we’d finished a warming breakfast and got thoroughly wrapped up...
She was alright. But she’d been missing me. My absence hadn’t gone unnoticed.
When I opened the trapdoor from the clock tower – thinking to slip down the ladder and through the bedrooms and materialise in the kitchen as though I’d been there all the time – her face was an inch below the trapdoor. Smiling, of course. Maybe it was my guilty imagination, but there was a look in her eye. That look. Where had I been? What was I doing? She’d come looking for me, climbed the ladder, and I guessed she was just about to push the trapdoor open.
‘Hey Chloe, I just had to... I had to go and...’ I heard myself blustering, trying to frame excuses, as though she were Rosie. ‘Let’s go back down, shall we? I got a great idea for a day out. But we’ll need to wrap up really warm. Sorry, but I just had to...’
Me, the owner of a unique, historic property, the proprietor of an unusually intriguing bookshop... me, blustering excuses to a brain damaged seven-year-old.
Chapter Twenty
ICE. IS THERE anything as perfect as ice? Formed and hardened into an unblemished sheet. Created in a crushing, crunching silence, in the deadly darkness of night after night. Polished by a merciless wind.
Nothing more exhilarating, than to be skating outdoors, on real, natural ice.
I’d seen it from the top of the tower. Indeed, on our previous visits to the park we’d seen how the remains of the autumn flood waters, no more than an inch or two deep, were freezing hard. Now it was perfect for skating. The ice was strong enough; it only squeaked and crazed and crackled underfoot, and underneath there was nothing but grass. The ponds of residual rainwater had frozen completely.
A resourceful boy, a would-be entrepreneur, had stationed himself beneath one of the willows which lined the paths across the park. He’d mustered all the skates he could, maybe from the rink that had shut down recently in town, he had about eight pairs for hire.
What a joy. Not only the sheer perfection of the day, which was windless, brilliant. The air was so cold it nipped the nostrils and burnt the throat. I’d found some skates which were too small for me but tolerable, and I’d bound Chloe’s feet into a pair which were too big but good enough for her to go wobbling and weaving across the ice. Marvellous, as we slithered and whooped and stumbled, although our skates were painful and our ankles buckled and bent and we sat down hard again and again. But also, because I couldn’t help remembering the time we’d tried it at the super, world-class rink in Nottingham.
Me and Rosie and Chloe, we’d spent a fortune on the skates and a lesson from a pro, had cokes and burgers and all the works. And Chloe, the old Chloe, had been horrid. Oh god, the moaning, the whingeing, the aches and pains... the number of times we’d waddled off the rink and tried pair after pair of lovely, new, soft leather boots with their gleaming, razor-sharp blades, and she’d done nothing but grizzle all afternoon in different combinations of fucking this and fucking that until Rosie had been so pissed off we’d just bundled ourselves out of there and home as soon as we could.
So now, in ill-fitting boots which were chafing like mad, she was a joy. Me and Chloe, hand in hand, we managed a few careering laps of the delicious ice. And even when we collapsed in a bone-jarring heap, when our skates hit a tuft of grass or we simply ran out of puff and toppled headlong, she was smiling and giggling, her face quite pink and hot with the fun of it all.
The new Chloe. Lost? A part of her had been lost? That was the way dear Rosie felt about her daughter. But for me, on that sparkling morning, it seemed that the girl had been born again, excised of all her niggling nastiness, and delivered anew, as pristine as the day.
It was only me and her, and of course the boy. It was a mid-week morning. Maybe in the afternoon he’d have a few more customers. We fumbled around the ice, and we stopped from time to time for soup from our flask, a bit of a jam sandwich I’d put together and chocolate. There were a few dog-walkers. Faraway, towards the rhododendron hedges which separated the park from the fine suburban houses of solicitors and accountants, a retired couple were exercising themselves and a red setter. The dog, gleaming coppery in the frosty sunshine, was pootling beside them. They met a man with a Dalmatian, paused to chat for a moment and then went on. At the same time, as Chloe pointed with her chocolate bar and tried to make me look where she was looking, we saw how the dogs lunged on their leashes at a bench they were passing, and they barked and recoiled in a momentary panic. There was a figure on the bench, sitting – a man or a woman, impossible to tell, because he or she was bundled so big and bulky and hunched in a coat, with a trilby tugged down. Indeed, as both the couple with the setter and the man with the Dalmatian struggled to control their dogs, as they lugged them away and then stopped and turned to stare back at the figure on the bench, it slowly leaned and toppled and lay down.
The man had tied his Dalmatian to a branch of the rhododendron. He was walking back to have a closer look. Chloe was following it all with great interest, which was good, I’d had my instructions months ago and nearly every day since then to stimulate her as much as possible. And now she was watching the distant figures and pointing and moving her mouth in silence, just making a little bubble of saliva which shone and burst and frosted her lips. The man called back to the couple, who had paused too. The woman was fumbling in the pocket of her overcoat. She found a phone and jabbed at it and pressed it to her ear.
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