Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Heaps?’ I said. ‘I used to come here a lot, for books and things, when Mr Heap was...’ She glanced up at me and smiled wanly, as she cut and folded the wrapping around my chosen figures. ‘I mean, I thought the shop was closed, but you still have the name on the window and...’

  ‘My grandfather,’ she said. ‘Did you know him?’ She smiled a rather winsome smile as she caught my expression. ‘Oh dear, you don’t approve? Oh I know a lot of people loved his funny old shop, well, generations of his customers. And of course we did too, me and my sister and the rest of the family, we all loved grandpa’s shop and he was a local figure in the city from way back...’

  She’d almost finished wrapping my presents, she was doing ribbons and stuff and going to town. She gifted me another of her smiles.

  ‘Don’t you like it, the new shop? Oh you must do, or you wouldn’t have come in. Alright, so it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought I’d give it a whirl and see how it goes. And so yes, I’ve left grandpa’s name on the window. I thought he’d like me to do that. Me and my sister, we loved him so much.’

  She slid the beautifully wrapped parcel towards me.

  ‘There, thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re my one and only sale of the day, my first customer, my first customer.’ Her eyes were glistening with excitement and gratitude. ‘Grandpa would be pleased. Thank you.’

  I took the parcel. I rummaged in my wallet for some cash and found that my taxis and beer and steak and kidney pie had left me short, so I proffered a bank card. She fumbled with it, it was all new to her, this business thing. As she was processing the card and passing me the receipt to sign, I couldn’t help adding, because I was almost overcome by her sincerity, her womanliness, and the way she’d shared a confidence far beyond the usual exchange of commerce, ‘Your grandfather, and your sister, can I offer my condolences?’

  I was going out of the door. She called after me, quizzically, ‘How did you know about my sister?’ And she was looking at the receipt in her hand and her face was changing, it was a strange and terrible change, as distressing as the change I’d seen in Rosie’s face just a few hours ago. Her beautiful face became ugly. The gentle nostalgia in her voice turned into hatred and bitterness. And she cried from the shop doorway, as I avoided the snarling of the vagrant’s dog and hurried down the street, ‘Gooch? Gooch? Who are you? What do you mean by coming here and...?’

  Bus station. A glare of lights and a stink of diesel. Hailed a taxi, tumbled in, told the driver to take me to the Queen’s Medical Centre. Realised just in time, before we set off, had no cash. Bundled out again, driver swearing. Next bus to the hospital in forty-five minutes. Sensing trouble ahead, thinking fuck it anyway, sloped into an overlit bar for a horrid, fizzy pint. Eased it down with a vodka sloshed in, a poor man’s cocktail called a Dog’s Nose. Trouble getting into the bus, let the driver help himself to the change from the palm of my hand...

  Got to the hospital, walked a mile or two through corridors before finding the ward where I’d last seen Rosie and Chloe. Got hassled, twice, by security guards on account of my unsteady gait. Rosie and Chloe weren’t there. A very fat West Indian nurse told me they’d already gone home. She recoiled from my breath. Who was I? she asked, impertinent.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  SUBTERFUGE. ANOTHER GOOD word. It crept into my mind, from somewhere, maybe from my writing and the research I was doing to help my writing.

  Deception, musty little secrets. Like, the vicar had hidden his brandy among the hymn books, where none of his parishioners or pesky choirboys would find it. Like, I’d got a bottle of vodka tucked into the cabin of The Gay Lady, under the mildewy life jackets we never used. And now, over the following days and nights and weeks, I was deceiving Rosie. Chloe? Not so sure, despite her vacuous look, her ingenuous demeanour, sometimes she caught my eye with a sudden unnerving steeliness, as if she knew everything I was doing and not doing and wasn’t hoodwinked at all.

  Me in the vestry. In the dog-house. A madhouse? Rosie had adjourned upstairs, into our bedroom. She was no better. In fact she was worse. The laxity in the muscles of her face was a kind of dying, she said, melodramatically. She said that she felt as if her body was sagging into a morbid stupor, somewhere between atrophy and rigor mortis. At least I thought she was saying that. Her mouth had distorted so much and her dribbling was so copious that it was hard to tell what she was saying. She had taken herself upstairs to bed, to be alone with her disfigurement, as if she had the plague and was sequestered from the rest of the world. Not quite alone. She had her mirror. And I took her all the food and drink she felt like toying with and spilling onto the sheets.

  And she had Chloe. Chloe stayed upstairs with her mother, not as a nurse or any kind of useful attendant, because she was, by definition, useless. She stayed up there to provide a fuzzy feeling of company, to be a warm and genial body at her bedside and in her bed... and because, I was sure, Rosie wanted to keep the child more and more away from me.

  So alright. Alright. I could be me, downstairs in the vestry. In the dog-house, since my shameful, shambolic return from town, late and foolishly drunk, when she’d been discharged from hospital. The cuddly toys hadn’t done much good. Rosie and Chloe were already in bed by the time I’d got off the bus and blundered into the church and up and up through the empty kitchen and into the bedroom. Lying back on her pillows, Rosie was distraught, high on a cocktail of antibiotics and Chilean merlot, in a tangle of sheets all smudged with the wine she’d been trying to drink. She’d snarled at me, all fangs and gums and unmanageable tongue. Chloe, beaming demurely beside her, was an appalling, tragicomic touch. When Rosie had ripped open the gift wrapping, revealed the ridiculous figures and hurled them at me, Chloe straightaway retrieved them and started cuddling them on her side of our bed.

  ‘Don’t you like them, Rosie?’ I’d had the audacity to ask her.

  And she’d retorted, ‘I don’t like you.’

  So I was banished. I went out of the bedroom, down through the kitchen, down to the hallway and into the vestry.

  Moonlight. Lovely, through the lancet windows. I sat at my desk, still in my coat, and admired my bookshop in the wash of silver and a stripe of orange from the streetlamps on Derby Road. Now and then the headlights of a passing car played across the crowded shelves and the ceiling of the vestry.

  I sat and pondered the day. Was it only a day, or was it a week or a fortnight? Waking in the darkness with a stricken Rosie, and the taxi drive to the hospital... the good news and the bad news... I could hardly believe that all of this, and then my morning in the heady perfection of wintry sunshine and the churning of ice on the canal, that it could all have happened today, on this day, this same day. Oh, and the bitter-sweetness of the beer in the pub, my tumble on the twilit cobbles, and Heaps... Heaps?

  The day had been a turbulent dream, fraught with anxiety, bright with joy, tinged with the curious, unfathomable shadows of nightmare.

  The cold began to creep between my shoulder blades. I set about making myself more comfortable. The fire was soon crackling fiercely in the hearth, and all the brighter because the room was so dark. Without switching on a lamp, I turned on the computer, not to write, but simply for the gentleness of its light. It was a reassuringly unwavering glow, as still as the moon. I went to the cupboard and took out the bottle I’d hidden; not the same one that the minister had put there, which I’d finished a few days before, but the one I’d already replaced it with. I knew I could always say, if Rosie found it and brandished it accusingly at me, that I hadn’t known it was there; it was a naughty secret left behind by the last occupant of the vestry. So, brandy in my mug, I sat by the fire and watched the headlamps go swishing across the ceiling. Until, by midnight, the traffic had all gone and the road outside was completely silent, and I’d seen the moon rise into the sky and disappear from view.

  My head was nodding. I added more logs to the fire, moved myself back to my desk and laid my forehead on my arm. I caught the
smell of beer on my sleeve, where I’d wiped my mouth and beard, and traffic and smoke and other people, the contrasting perfumes of the city. The computer screen had long ago dimmed, it was a rectangle of darkness with a pinprick of red at the corner to show that it was still switched on. I was suddenly so tired by everything that had happened, and befuddled by all the alcohol I’d consumed, that I fell into an abysmal sleep.

  I didn’t dream. My mind had been so crammed with the images of the day that, in sleeping, at last it blanked them out. No dream of Chloe, although when I’d been re-charging the fire before moving away from it, I’d sensed for a fleeting moment that I was in her favourite place, that my big, untidy, smelly body was in her space and I could feel her in me. No dream of Rosie, no guilt or restless anxiety, because it was she who’d sent me away and I could almost feel, by putting a different spin on things, that I was aggrieved, that I was the wounded party. So I slept in sweet oblivion...

  Until two things woke me.

  A log tumbled out of the hearth. There was a clatter, a shower of sparks, a fiery avalanche which scattered across the stone flags of the floor. When I opened my eyes, I saw the flickering of flames cast onto the bookshelves. I heard the unexpected sound and caught the smell of smoke in my nostrils. The other thing – the whole room was cast in a ghostly pale light, and when I sat up and blinked around me I saw that the computer screen was glowing. Something or someone must have nudged the mouse, or maybe it was me, I’d touched it with my elbow when the fall of the fire had disturbed me.

  Cold. I rubbed my eyes. My face was cold, my nose was icy. I peered across to the fire. Chloe? A small dark presence in the shadows? Or was it simply the shape of the space she had occupied? Creaky in my bones, I stood up and shuffled towards it. Chloe? I felt with my stiffening fingers at the place where she might have been. No one, of course. I kicked the fallen embers back to the edge of the hearth.

  And I was bursting to piss. Too desperate to consider the possibility of hurrying up to the bathroom, I found myself struggling with the door of the church and going outside.

  The world was bathed in moonlight, so white and bright it cast strong black shadows – the enormous stripe of the tower behind me, every streetlamp and tree along the side of the road, my own shadow as sharp as a silhouette. I followed it, because it seemed as desperate as I was, tugging me urgently over the road and to the privet hedge on the further side. Where I unzipped my fly, just in time, and pissed longer and hotter than I could ever remember.

  The steam rose in a pungent cloud. The droplets clung to the frozen hedge and its stubbornly evergreen leaves. A shower of animal heat, they dripped into the blackened undergrowth, where everything else was dead and cold. I couldn’t stop pissing. Even when I heard the creak of the church door behind me and I turned my head to look. Even when I twisted my head so hard over my shoulder that I saw sparks. Even when I thought I saw a movement in the shadow of the tower and called out, ‘Chloe? Is that you, Chloe?’

  There was no one. The shadow was a bar of black, anything which moved into it would be swallowed entirely. I’d left the door of the church open. I was going to hurry back. But when I zipped up my fly again and enjoyed the relief for a few moments, something in the quietness of the night made me pause.

  Not just quietness. The world was utterly silent. Not a car, not a person, the town and its suburban streets were asleep. And the moonlight was lovely, a perfect full moon in a cloudless sky. Even the cold was delicious, because of the stillness. I could hear myself breathing, that was all. When I licked my lips, I could hear the clicking of my own tongue. No other sounds.

  I studied my shadow. It was wonderfully obedient. It did everything I wanted it to do, unlike the posh little kids I’d tried to teach, unlike my know-all wife, unlike my truculent daughter – until a bang on the head had made her nicely compliant. Every slightest movement of my arms and hands and fingers it mirrored onto the pavement. It even caught my tousled hair and the tufts of my beard. I swayed and shimmied and made the strangest of signals with my arms, and it did my bidding.

  More than that. I suddenly realised, with a lurch of fear in my belly, that I’d stopped with my hands by my side, and the shadow was still moving.

  One of its hands was moving. It was making a gentle, insistent movement.

  I felt the hair prickle on my scalp, I took an involuntary breath, to cry out, but then I saw it was another shadow which I hadn’t noticed, smaller and less distinct, which had crawled out of the hedge and blurred into mine.

  The crow. All but dead, revived by a fume of warmth. So black and misshapen, it was hard to tell if it was real or a flaw in the moonlight.

  I bent and picked it up. No resistance, no need to resist, it had come to me. It felt like a dead thing. It had no weight in it, no substance beyond a rag of frozen feathers. I carried it across the road and back into the church.

  COINCIDENCE? I CROUCHED over the crow, and examined it in the firelight. An absurd coincidence, that it had emerged from the hedge as I was standing there? No, I rewound it all, at rapid speed, and saw in a blur of images how everything was connected.

  Why would I be pissing into the privet on Derby Road, outside the front door of my own home, except that I’d been banished downstairs? Why had I been banished? What had caused the affliction to Rosie’s face? Where had the crow come from? Why had I been given the tooth? What had caused the death of the young woman? How had she happened to hit my daughter with her car? Everything was linked. This bird, a poor wreckage of a creature I placed carefully onto a sheet of newspaper in front of the fire, was a link in the chain. Back to me.

  It lay very still. I had laid it on its breast, with its head on its side, in a kind of recovery position. Its beak was open, but it didn’t seem to be breathing. One of its wings was open, and I’d arranged it very gently so the feathers were separated and might dry in the warmth of the fire, but the other remained tightly wrapped to the side of its body. The black, scaly legs and feet, the sharp black claws – they were cast against the white paper, like the limbs of some prehistoric raptor.

  Maybe the bird was dead. It had been sleeping in the grip of ice, sipping at the air with its beak, scenting the very last moments of its existence through its bristly nostrils. And then the steam of my piss had disturbed it. I had awoken it from the brink of death, enough to drag itself out of the hedge and into the shelter of my shadow. But now it was dead.

  One last chance. In a final attempt to revive it, I grabbed for the bottle to dribble some brandy onto its beak. I didn’t need to. As I leaned over it and watched, in morbid fascination, the bird started to creak alive again.

  It was the warmth from my own body. The droplets of my urine on its feathers, which shimmered like emeralds on a sheen of blackness, seemed to steam in the heat of the flames and soak into the body of the bird. Where the crow had been dull and matt beneath the dirt of the hedgerow, there was a new purple gloss on its plumage. It was thawing. The frozen wing clicked away from the body. It opened and spread until it was as widely splayed as the other, the long primary feathers stark against the newsprint. The legs twitched. The feet unclenched and shuddered in a spasm of wiry tendons, and the claws made a sudden scrabbling with their needle-sharp tips.

  A new lease of life? Or the throes of death? The crow sneezed. It sneezed again and again, and every pathetic explosion of air seemed to wrack its chest so hard it must surely burst. I leaned to its head and breathed on it, the heat of my living breath. The next time it sneezed, the effort was so great it lifted the beak from the newspaper and touched my lips. The kiss of death.

  No, the crow was alive. The sneezing fit was over. It lay calm and still, and the firelight played on its warming feathers. The ice had melted. The shimmer of green jewels had all gone.

  And this time, when I sensed that someone was watching me, when I felt the prickle of the hair on my scalp and turned to stare into the blackness of the doorway, she was there.

  Chloe, in her pyjamas. Barefo
ot on the cold stone. Her blonde hair catching the firelight.

  She smiled and came forward. She was cuddling her little goose-girl. Warm and lovely, she had slipped out of her mother’s bed and come downstairs, as though in a dream, drawn by some kind of miracle. She let me fold her into my arms. She gazed down at the crow and a bubble of saliva shone on her lips.

  ‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ I whispered into her ear. ‘Don’t tell her anything.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  MUMMY STAYED UPSTAIRS. Chloe spent a lot of the time with her, and I popped in, whenever I was allowed, with necessary supplies. Sometimes I might potter in with tea and biscuits and find her sitting up in bed with Chloe, with Robin and Marian and the goose-girl arranged between them. She might ask me where I’d been sleeping, because she knew I hadn’t come back and crept into Chloe’s room, and I just shrugged and said downstairs, in the kitchen, it was fine, it was warm enough and I slept alright with my head on my arm, on the kitchen table. That was a little lie, not a big one, and it was meant to make her feel better, in case she was regretting what she’d said. She knew I was in and out of the bathroom, to use the toilet of course, and to shower and change my clothes. Despite my disreputable appearance in my baggy corduroy trousers and disgraceful pullover and the gothic-desperate-struggling writer’s coat, I did take a shower every day. So the outfit I wore in the bookshop was part of an illusion, which Rosie saw with her own eyes. She didn’t comment on it, that every time I emerged from the bathroom nice and clean and put on fresh underclothes, I then clambered back into the same old stuff I wore every day. She didn’t know about the crow, it was easy to keep her uninformed as long as she stayed where she was.