It went very nicely into my coffee. I turned up the music. I could smell myself. No, not really myself, I could smell my favourite pullover and the big coat I’d slung over my shoulders because of the icy draft from the door. Brandy and coffee and the comforting rankness of my own clothes; the music, the spit of the fire as it tried its best to combat the cold from outside; the brandy. I had to keep the door open, of course, and yes, there’d been people pottering in and out for the past few days or a week or more, since the not-so-grand opening of Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. I’d sold a few books, one or two customers had wanted their photograph taken with me and the shrine, and I’d stamped their purchases and slipped in their complimentary bookmark, with Dr Barnsby’s handwritten affirmation that the tooth had indeed come from the mouth of a young, probably homesick Edgar Allan Poe.
Today, on this morning, I had two people come in, and I toasted each one with another splash of brandy into my coffee. The first was a man in blue dungarees and boots with steel toe-caps, with a pencil behind his ear. Very nice and non-confrontational, he was from the furniture warehouse next door in the body of the old church, and asking if I’d either turn down the music or put something good on. I turned it down, and he accepted a crafty slurp of the vicar’s brandy. The other was Tony Heap. He loomed into the shop from the big silvery car he’d parked outside and introduced himself as Tony Heap. He didn’t want to talk, he said, he’d just been passing and he’d seen the sign and he’d stopped on an impulse to take a look.
Loomed. He was even bigger now, in the daylight, than I’d thought when I’d first seen him bending to his father’s plot on the crematorium and when he’d knelt to the fire in his father’s shop. Then, on both occasions, he’d been nothing much more than a bulky figure in a dark, winter’s overcoat, no more than a shape, a presence, a greying, middle-aged man in the grip of grief. Now, in the chilly daylight, as he strode from his car and into the shop, he was purposeful and businesslike, just taking a look, as he put it so brusquely, and his manner was slightly off-putting, overbearing, as though, because his father had given me the tooth for whatever mischievous reason, it was somehow still his, it was in his family and he had a responsibility to come in and see that it was being well looked after.
He bent over the makeshift shrine. I held my coffee mug to my face, in both hands, hunched over it and inhaled the perfume of the brandy, suddenly felt that I was hiding my face behind it and didn’t need to, set it down on my desk and stood up straight. It was my shop, he was in my home and these were my books around me. It was my tooth, insofar as it could ever be someone else’s tooth, other than Poe’s. And so, to assert myself a little, I started forward, as he bent even closer to read the photocopied transcript of the tooth’s provenance.
He was already fingering the jewels of glass which Chloe had put there. Without really looking at them, he was touching them with the fingertips of his left hand. Indeed, when he straightened up and looked around the shop, at all the books and the bright fire, he was holding one of the pieces between his thumb and forefinger and playing with it, quite absent-mindedly.
‘It’s alright, yes alright. I think my father might’ve liked what you’re doing,’ he murmured, as though I needed his approbation. He suddenly winced, glanced at what he was holding and put it down. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers with it. He thought he’d cut himself on the glass, because the handkerchief was smeared with red when he put it back in his pocket.
And so he went out to his car and drove away. The damaged front nearside wheel... it was only a scrape, it would do as a spare, whenever he might get round to having it changed. Back in the shop I added the last of the brandy to my coffee, turned up the music again and switched on the computer. Started writing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
NOT A COACH party, but not bad, and a bit more coverage for the shop in the local newspaper – a school visit, a teacher and a group of kids doing their coursework on Edgar Allan Poe.
Rosie, bless her soul, had fixed it up. Despite her resentment about what had happened with the crow, she’d seen how hard I’d tried to make the shop nice again and she’d heard me tapping away like crazy at the keyboard, and she was still loyal to my pet project.
She’d come back later that day and told me what the doctor had done about the wound on her face. He’d cleaned it thoroughly and taped a gauze pad across her cheek, and he’d given her a tetanus jab. He’d said yes, there was a chance that it might have been infected, there was a risk from being pecked by any bird, even by a pet parrot, let alone a carrion crow which scavenged every kind of... well, carrion, in different stages of decay and decomposition. But the jab should do the trick, he’d said, so keep it clean and covered for a few days, and she should pop in again if it was sore or weeping or seeping, or whatever.
She and Chloe had had a nice morning in the lovely warm shops in the high street. They’d both had a haircut, had a pasty on the square and listened to the Salvation Army band, which was raising funds to help the homeless, especially people who might be sleeping rough at this time of the year and in the coldest temperatures in living memory. She’d let me peep behind the gauze pad, where the wound was glistening red, stained yellow with ammonia. And yes, she’d done a turn around the shop before they both went upstairs, and like Tony Heap, she’d signalled her approval.
‘Nice,’ she said softly. ‘Cosy and nice, good job.’
It was late afternoon and getting dark outside, so the vestry looked welcoming with the firelight and the glow of the shrine and the hundreds of books on the shelves, the music I’d mellowed and turned down over the course of the day.
‘And you’re writing. That’s marvellous.’ She’d heard me hammering at the keyboard. ‘No, don’t tell me what you’re doing. No, don’t show me yet. Just keep going and then print out whenever you want to, whenever you want me to read anything.’
I got a big kiss. Another one from Chloe. All good.
And the middle of the following morning, when Chloe and I were all alone and mooching in the bookshop, I’d heard the phone ringing and ringing up in the kitchen.
Rosie’s voice, calling from work. I was too breathless to say anything much at first, after hurrying upstairs, I just grunted yes and yes and yes when she asked if we were in, was everything alright, was Chloe alright... and, sorry short notice, but was I alright with Colonel Brook coming to the shop with some of his students. Yes now, yes soon, maybe lunchtime, was that alright?
I would’ve been alright, yes. Excited and apprehensive, I went down the stairs two at a time, thinking to get the place just perfect for our unexpected visitors. Rosie had had time to add that she’d been chatting to the Colonel at breaktime and mentioned her husband’s bookshop, and he, in typically no-nonsense military fashion, had just said, there and then, that he’d like to take one of his English classes on a visit . Yes, today, at lunchtime, why not? And so I needed to hurry downstairs and straighten a few things, choose some appropriate music, cheer up the fire and station Chloe picturesquely beside it.
Except that she wasn’t there.
Before I’d even crossed the hallway to the vestry, I caught a glimpse of her in the very corner of my eye. I skidded to a halt and did a double-take. There she was, she’d gone outside – and oh god – she was in the road. With a dazzling flash of memory – the last time I’d neglected her long enough for her to wander into traffic – I dashed out of the church door.
Crash.
A thumping collision, a tumbling impact onto the ground. Me, I ran straight into my sign on the pavement and fell headlong. By the time I was on my feet again, Chloe had reached the other side of the road and was ferreting around in the privet hedge, head-first, reaching deep inside with an outstretched hand.
Oh fuck, oh god, she was safe. Winded by my fall, I had to wait for a line of cars in both directions before I could get to her and hoick her out. I stood her up and dusted her off, because her pullover and hair were prickly with twigs.
‘Chloe, my love, oh Chloe...’
I was too relieved to be annoyed with her. She’d gone out of the church and through two streams of traffic, oblivious, while I’d been breathless on the phone in the kitchen.
‘Chloe, please please please don’t... don’t just piss off on your own. I’m supposed to be looking after you, aren’t I? Your Daddy’s looking after you, alright? If anything happened to you, I don’t know what we’d...’
All kinds of pleas and injunctions were rattling in my head, but by the time they reached my tongue they’d petered into nothing. She was pointing over my shoulder, back towards the church doorway, and in the muddle of my mind I immediately thought it was something to do with the crow she’d been rummaging for, that in some further conceit in its story it would be there, re-invented, reincarnated, born again, and...
No, not the crow. A man. He was setting up the sign I’d knocked over. He straightened it, adjusted the angle of it, re-adjusted it until it was perfectly as he wanted it, and then he dusted his hands together. He marched into the church, signalling at a group of a dozen teenage boys to follow him.
‘No one here, by the look of things,’ he said, as I hurried in with Chloe. ‘He can’t expect to do much business, if he doesn’t keep an eye on the sign outside and then there’s no one around when people come in.’ Louder, to his boys, he said, ‘Well, gentlemen, while we’re waiting for service, take a look at the books. Remember we’re thinking about genre and themes. We’re going to talk about artwork and concept and blurb. We’re looking for the authors we’ve talked about, the classics of the genre, and especially Poe, for your coursework.’
I moved past him, to my desk, and still standing, pretended to check something on the computer. Without taking my eyes off the screen, I said, ‘Is it Colonel Brook? Ah yes, I’m just checking the appointments in my diary, my wife phoned me to say you were coming.’ And then I turned to him and held out my hand. ‘I’m Oliver Gooch. You didn’t give me much notice, but luckily I don’t have any other visits booked for this afternoon. Welcome to Poe’s Tooth Bookshop.’
He shook my hand. He was smaller than I’d imagined, and much younger, in his fifties. From Rosie’s accounts of her employer’s autocratic style, I’d expected a crotchety, whiskery old gent, but he had the look of a barrister or the manager of a football club. Dark suit, good shoes, not handsome, but oozing self-confidence. He had a kind of worldly swagger. He’d stared at me, flicking his eyes over my shabby shoes and my baggy old clothes to my beard and long, untidy hair. And now I found myself staring at him, as he drifted away and rejoined his boys. I wondered if he’d seen active service, had ever killed anyone with those manicured hands, and if so, what had made him a creationist and how he’d become the principal of a crammer in Long Eaton. I wanted to ask him these things. I wanted to suggest to him that he should write it all down in a book, but then I thought that, unlike me, he probably already had done.
The boys took it in turns to study the tooth. They did everything he suggested they did, they copied the transcript word by word and his translation. Without any reference to me, he briefed them about the boy Poe, who’d spent some time in England at a school in Stoke Newington, only adding at the end of account that, this evening, they should do their homework and find out as much as they could online. He had complete control of them. They were cowed by him.
‘We’re doing an anthology of stories, for their English lit,’ he told me, ‘and one of them is Hop-Frog, by Poe, you know, the one where the court jester, a kind of hunchback or cripple, gets his revenge on the king by burning him alive. The boys have to write an appreciation of the story for their coursework, so I hope you don’t mind them browsing around, it’ll give them more of a feel for the genre, to see some of the authors on your shelves that we’ve been talking about, and of course the tooth. It’s a remarkable opportunity for them, really, to contemplate the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and marvel at this little bit of him, his tooth, at the same time.’
What was truly remarkable, I was thinking, was that he, such a man of the real world, uttered not a single word of doubt about the origin of the tooth. The sign outside said Poe’s Tooth Bookshop, and the blurb on the shrine said the tooth in its velvet-lined case had come from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe. That was enough for him. Perhaps that was why he’d been a successful soldier and risen through the ranks – he’d accepted ideas and orders without question. Oh, and God created the world in seven days, it said so in Genesis, it was there in black and white, so that was a given as well. Belief, I thought. It was the belief that mattered.
All of this time Chloe had been sitting by the fire. Colonel Brook had glanced down at her and said what a lovely daughter we had, and by the way, how lucky he was to have my wife helping in the office. One or two of the boys, daring to pause in their diligent searching among the books and risk a rebuke from their teacher, had caught Chloe’s eye too and elicited her angelic smile. She’d got the albino mouse out of her sleeve and was running it from hand to hand. It was a charming picture, almost literally. She was charming the boys away from their study, and even the steely colonel was watching her. She let the mouse drop off her palm and onto the floor, where it went nosing into the dust at the side of the hearth.
A rather beautiful thing happened. As the mouse nuzzled into a dense cluster of cobwebs, there was a sudden fluttering movement from deep inside it. The cobwebs themselves seemed to vibrate as something cocooned within them stirred into life.
The mouse burrowed deeper. Until, from the hole it was making in the matted cobwebs, a butterfly emerged.
The colonel and his boys couldn’t help gathering around to look – at the most perfect little girl, her face reddened by the firelight and her blonde hair artfully tangled, at the white mouse and the butterfly. It was a peacock, it had been hibernating in the secret otherworldliness of the cobwebs; dormant, dreaming butterfly dreams, surviving the winter in a state of torpor. Until it had been nuzzled awake.
Chloe cupped it in her hands. It was a poor, desiccated husk of the lovely creature it had been last summer. But it was precious, and Chloe held it gently and blew between her fingers, as though she would breathe new life into it. I glanced around at the schoolboys and saw the wonder on their spotty, downy faces. Colonel Brook was gazing fondly, as though he’d seen the girl before somewhere, in a refugee camp or a ruined city on one of his tours of duty. And I thought they would all remember this moment for a long time, beyond the homework and the coursework and the relentless cramming, beyond the grotesque, gratuitous violence of Hop-Frog.
Chloe looked up at her admirers and she smiled. It was a miracle. She had breathed on the butterfly and now it was stirring bravely within her hands, as though the spring had arrived and it was alive with a new vigour. When she opened her hands, it clung to her fingertips and opened its wings. It shook off the dust of the cobwebs and was beautiful again.
And then she blew harder. As hard as she could. The butterfly was too weak to resist. She blew it off her fingers and into the fire.
In another moment it was consumed by the flames. It beat its wings, a flaring, golden, miraculous creature, like something from myth. It whirled around and around, ablaze. And then it was gone. Disappeared in sparks up the chimney, or collapsed into dust on the fire? Impossible to tell which. It was gone.
There was an uneasy silence. The visit was over. One of the boys took a group photograph of the students and their teacher and me against the background of the books and the hearth, with the shrine of the tooth prominently displayed. The colonel said he could write up an article; he knew someone at the Nottingham Evening Post. It would be a bit of publicity for the shop, and of course for Brook’s Academy as well.
The boys trooped outside, clutching their notebooks, armed a bit better for their exams. They cast a final, wondering look at the girl who was sitting by the fire, at the way she smiled as she picked up the mouse and kissed the top of its head. Colonel Brook bought a copy of
the collected stories of Edgar Allan Poe, with its complimentary bookmark, for the school library.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘WHAT’S UP, ROSIE? Let me look at you? Maybe you should stay at home today. I’ll ring Colonel Brook and tell him.’
She looked different. Yes, we’d drunk a bottle of red wine the previous evening, maybe not a good idea, after her injection and the antibiotics she’d taken. When her alarm went off in the pitch darkness, and it rang and rang and she didn’t move, I fumbled for it and knocked it onto the floor, where it bumbled and buzzed like a huge fat insect, something like a cockchafer, which had crash-landed and crippled its wings. At last it stopped. I switched on the bedside lamp.
‘Rosie? You alright? What’s up?’
Something was wrong with her, something was different.
Wakening the Crow Page 12
