Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Subterfuge. It was harder to cover up my drinking. I had my bottle in the vestry, tucked away behind the hymn books in the cupboard, and there was always a bottle in the boat. I might suck a mint when I went up to see Rosie, but that really didn’t work. It was a dead give-away. So, if it was proving futile to try and disguise my drinking, it might be better to think of a way to deflect her criticism of it. How? maybe by persuading Rosie to have a drink as well.

  She was in a state upstairs, quarantined in her bed, in a kind of self-imposed purdah. The doctor had made encouraging noises about how quickly people recovered from this condition, and mentioned patients and indeed friends and relatives who’d made a complete recovery within a month. It was fairly common, rather distressing, but there was a very good chance that Rosie would get better and be restored in a matter of time, with care and rest and physiotherapy such as massage of the facial muscles and a regime of exercises.

  But Rosie was getting worse. I went to her bedside with food and drink, many times a day, and found her weeping into her mirror. The side of her face had dropped more and she was finding it harder to speak clearly. Despite my ministrations, I would find her smudged and stained with the drinks I’d taken her – her nightdress in disarray and blotched with tea and orange juice, her sheets all rumpled and damp.

  I sat with her and tried to brush her hair. She recoiled with a quivering snarl.

  ‘God you stink... it’s that pullover, for god’s sake, and your breath, are you drinking down there?’

  Her words were slurred into a blurry incoherence, the vowels loose and the consonants sliding this way and that off her tongue. As she heard her own voice, the tears of dismay ran hot and fast again and her eyes were red. Her anger at the state of her face ignited her resentment, fuelled her bitterness against me. She railed at me. Of course it was my fault, and, like me, she could rewind the whole thing, trace it back and back like a horribly tangled and knotted ball of knitting and, whichever way you looked at it, it was going to end up as my fault.

  ‘What are you drinking down there? And why don’t you ever change out of that stinking old pullover and those pants? Yes I know you’ve been in the shower, but aren’t you ever going to shave? And what’s with the hair? You look like a tramp and whenever you open your mouth you smell like a tramp as well.’

  ‘May be you could do with a drink, Rosie.’ It just came out, a little stroke of genius. ‘Alright, so you’re upset, I can understand all the stress and you not wanting to go out and see anyone. Alright so it’s cool you staying up here with Chloe and trying to get yourself better, but do you want to try a glass of wine? It might help to settle your nerves and...’

  In my mind I was adding, it might take some of the heat off me as well, get half a bottle of red inside you, get you a bit more relaxed and a bit less murderously manic... good drinker’s ploy, persuade the tut-tutter and the eyebrow-lifter to join you in a glass or two.

  And it worked. Rosie liked a drink. It was one of the reasons we’d got on so well and so quickly when we’d met. Our first date: a few pints in a Yates’s Wine Lodge, a bottle of wine with spaghetti Bolognese in a bistro on Weekday Cross, a cuddle in a taxi and then we were splendidly in bed in her flat by Canning Circus.

  This time, she demurred, but unconvincingly. ‘Don’t be stupid, Oliver, with all the antibiotics I’m taking, and I’m supposed to be going back to the hospital the day after tomorrow to see the doctor again. What are you trying to do, trying to keep me up here or what?’

  I ignored that one, although it was so close to the mark that I hesitated at the door and caught a knowing look on Chloe’s face. And when I came back from the kitchen with a nice Algerian, a corkscrew and two glasses, she snarled at me again, ‘You’re a bastard, Oliver, and you’re so bloody obvious,’ before slurping a messy mouthful.

  As long as she was drinking, and if I could keep her comfortably topped up, I could spend more of my own time in the bookshop. With the computer. With a coffee and brandy. With Chloe, whenever she came down to see what I was up to. And with the crow.

  We were working well as a team, in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. Every day there would be a few customers, or visitors, or nosey-parkers, enough to make it feel worthwhile being there and open. I was selling a few books. Chloe took her customary place at the fireside. She played with the mouse, which would obligingly appear from her sleeve, run across her shoulders and in and out of her golden tresses whenever anyone came in. The fire crackled and spat and exhaled the perfume of silver birch into the room. Music and coffee. The tooth, of course the tooth, which was the centre of attention and seemed to hum with a kind of latent energy. After all, it was the tooth which held us in its sway. It was an essential link in the chain of events which had brought us all to this place, at this time.

  Poe’s Tooth. Dentem puer. All of the time I spent at the keyboard of my computer I had Poe’s collected stories open beside me. They were my inspiration. Hop-Frog, The Masque of the Red Death – they had a resonance beyond the mere proximity of the relic in its velvet-lined box. Was it me, was I imagining it, or maybe it was the drink which conjured a tenuous connection between the things which were happening to me and my family and the macabre fantasies on the page? But when I read and re-read the last few paragraphs of Hop-Frog and sensed the relish in the description of a man in flames, I would glance over to Chloe and remember the exquisite pleasure in her eyes when she’d blown the butterfly into the fire. As for The Masque of the Red Death, was I thinking of Rosie, sequestered and disfigured in her tower?

  Tenuous, yes, alright, but it wasn’t just me. Colonel Brook had got his piece into the local newspaper. The main thrust of the article was a plug for the academic rigour and extra-curricular activities of Brook’s Academy, but there was a good photograph of me and the schoolboys assembled around the tooth. The colonel had described the tooth and its claim to authenticity, informing readers that Poe had been a schoolboy in England in the early 1800s. And in an oddly oblique last paragraph, he’d mentioned Hop-Frog, the story his boys were studying, and said that ‘the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe is surely alive and well and at large in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop’.

  It was another fillip for the shop. So that was twice the shop had featured in the local press, and business was picking up. People came by and said they’d read about me and the tooth in the paper – only one or two a day, but they were customers, who bent and peered at the tooth and frowned or gasped or tutted and then bought a book, with its complimentary bookmark. They would stare at me and Chloe and the mouse. And there was the crow as well, still convalescing, which might flop from the highest shelf and crash-land onto the floor just as I was clinching another sale. All good value. It made me wonder how I might generate some more publicity.

  I did, and it happened like this.

  I was writing, one gloriously gloomy afternoon, I was bashing at the keys and mining from the rich seam of Poe’s imagination. I’d been diligent in my attention to Rosie. To put it another way, I’d got her cosy with a nice little South African red, I’d left her the bottle and a big round glass and not forgetting a box of tissues for wiping her chin, and she was happy. No, she wasn’t happy, but she was comfortably morose, so I knew I could leave her for a while and get back down to the shop. As I was slipping out of the bedroom and I glanced back at her, I saw her sinking deeper into her big soft pillows and her face askew. I felt such a surge of love for her that I almost went back and held her in my arms and rocked her gently, reassuringly, and whispered into her ear that it was going to be alright, she was going to be alright. I loved her and I would always look after her ...

  Almost. But then I saw the baleful look in her eye. She glared at me over the rim of her glass, and so I started downstairs. She was calling after me, something like, ‘Is there a bad smell in here? What can I smell? Is it the mouse? Can you get Chloe to clean out the mouse or...?’ And I was halfway down the stairs to the kitchen and calling back, ‘Yes it’s the mouse, don’t worry we’ll do it
, we’ll do it, don’t worry.’

  So I was writing. To be more exact, I’d been sitting by the fire with Chloe and enjoying the heat on my face, the warmth of a mug of brandy. I’d been watching the flames licking around the logs I’d just put on, watching the flicker of light on the girl’s hair and the mouse in her hands, when I’d heard a footfall in the hallway. A customer? In a moment I was on my feet and sat at my desk and hammering at the keyboard. I was the troubled writer, toiling at my craft.

  Someone came into the vestry. I glanced up, pushing my long, tangled hair from my brow, and I frowned, as if I’d been disturbed from a moment of intense creativity.

  It was the very old gent. He stood in the dark hallway. He paused there, not because he’d been impressed by my silly act, but because the place had a special significance for him and he wanted to savour it. He was such a slight, fragile figure. His clothes were too big for him. They were the same clothes he’d worn when he was a well-made man, and he had shrunk inside them. And he teetered even more than before, because this time he was carrying a heavy bag in his right hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘But I suppose your shop is still open. Your sign is still outside.’

  He came in, so gently that not a whisper of dust was raised from the flagstones. I stood up from my desk and gestured him to take my seat, but he remained standing. He looked around the vestry, as he’d done before when he’d come to express his feelings about the closure of the church and our use of it. But this time he had a softer look in his watery eyes.

  With some difficulty he raised the bag he was carrying and put it onto my desk.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sorting some of my things. Our things. Since my wife passed away two years ago, I’ve had nothing much else to do. Me, on my own, in our big old house, with all the rooms we needed when the children were little. Now they’ve all gone and it’s empty, big and empty and... ‘

  He peered over to Chloe, who was sitting and watching him. She seemed to be holding her breath. I found myself holding my breath too. Despite his frailty, despite the hoarseness of his voice, as if he were only a husk who might crumble at any moment, he was impressive. He had been a man. He was still a man. I sensed, no, I knew, that he’d been more of a man than I would ever be.

  He pointed a quivering finger at the bag he’d put onto my desk.

  ‘Some books,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I was rude when I came in before. What does it matter about this old place? It’s just a pile of stones. Of course it has special memories for me, and these stones have special footprints on them, mine and my wife’s and my children’s.’ He tried to smile, although the wrinkles of his face were so dry, so cold. ‘But good luck to you,’ he said. ‘You’re young, you have a life and it’s up to you to make something of it. Do it here, if you want, in this building. It isn’t for an old man like me to tell you otherwise.’

  He turned away from me, where the tooth was illumined in its velveteen box. He glanced at it, not with contempt but with casual disinterest.

  ‘Poe’s tooth?’ he said. ‘Is that all it is? Let me tell you, young man, when me and my wife were newlywed, we went together on the bus into Derby and had all our teeth pulled out. A week later we went back and had our false teeth fitted. Look, that’s what we did in those days,’ and he clacked at me a perfect set of dentures, far too big for his shrunken chops, top and bottom clacking together like the choppers in the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He grinned them at me, grotesque. ‘But the books,’ he said, ‘you might be able to sell them or just keep them on your shelves, a few thrillers and things we’ve had in the house since the children were growing up... Sherlock Holmes, The Canterville Ghost, The Turn of the Screw, The Monkey’s Paw and all that. You’re welcome to have them.’

  He made to go out. He paused at the door and turned back to me.

  ‘It’ll come to you one day. You’ll see your babies grow up and go away, and then maybe you’ll be left on your own. And what will you do then, alone in your tower?’

  I tried to take his arm and steady him. He brushed me off, as he’d done before, and he leaned towards the fire and stretched out his hand to the girl. He was going to touch her hair. His long bony fingers, the fingers which had plied the organ in this church for decades, hovered over her head.

  She was alright with that. She didn’t flinch. But the crow launched itself from the top shelf, where it had been silent and invisible since the man came in, and flapped into his face.

  ‘What on earth...?’ The man exclaimed, and with an impatient hand he knocked the bird to the floor. He didn’t seem perturbed, he could see what it was and it was only a bird which must have blown into the vestry. And as it clattered around his feet, sculling about with its wings outstretched, he eyed it with a mixture of disgust and pity and said, ‘What on earth is it doing in here, the wretched thing?’ His lips made a funny, writhing smile, and he added, ‘Like me, I suppose, a poor old thing come in from the cold, for a bit of company.’

  He was alright. Or maybe not. His bravado couldn’t quite disguise the little shock he’d had, because he was quivering even more than before. His sudden movement, the instinctive swatting at the creature fluttering in his face, had left him all trembly, as brittle as a bundle of wintry twigs.

  ‘Here, sit down... please...’ I was trying again to take his arm and steer him back to my seat, or at least stand him still for a moment so he could get his breath. At the same time, I saw Chloe reach for the bird and pick it up. She held it firmly but gently in both hands, so that its wings were folded against its body, and she sat in her queenly place by the fire with the crow on her lap. It hissed. It opened its beak as wide as it would go, and it made a hoarse, gasping noise.

  ‘Alright, alright, I’m going,’ he hissed back at it. He was certainly game. He straightened up, literally pulled himself together. ‘Alright,’ he mouthed back at the crow, ‘so this is your place by the fire, with your little princess. I wasn’t going to hurt her.’ And he wobbled into the hallway. There, he steadied himself. He paused and he looked around. Then, as though he knew that he would never come back, that this would be the last time he would stand in the church he’d known so well and for so long, he marched out of the door.

  Was it the cold that hit him? I went outside to watch where he went. Even me, a bluff thirty-something-year-old, heaty with firelight and brandy, I felt the cold catch in my throat. It was bitter. Freezing hard. And the old man had barely stepped a few yards from the church before his knees buckled and he went down.

  He hit his head on the pavement. His teeth fell out, shattered from their plate and spilled like pearls. He was fine, he was fine, he was trying to say the words and sit up, as I ran and knelt to him. I took off my coat and folded it into a pillow for him, laid his head onto it. Blood trickled from his nose and from his left ear.

  An ambulance came. The paramedics were brisk and efficient and had him on a stretcher in no time. He was a tough old bird, one of them said, deliberately loud so that he could hear her. She was sweeping up the teeth with a dustpan and brush and sliding them into a plastic bag. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing with her brush at a crack in the pavement. ‘He’s broken it with his head.’ It made the old man smile. Me too. He lifted a hand and feebly waved at me, as they closed the door and drove him off.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  TOSSING SNAILS OFF the top of my tower. That was what I was doing, and when I said the words aloud, ‘Tossing snails off the top of my tower,’ they sounded very strange, like a clue for a cryptic crossword puzzle. I liked the assonance too, and the alliteration. All in all, I felt rather clever. I was on the roof, on probably the most beautiful morning since the dawn of time, inhaling the deliciously cold air and dropping snails onto the pavement below.

  It was only nine o’clock and I’d already had a mug of coffee with a generous slosh of brandy in it. I was, of course, unshaven and tousled, and enjoying a curious mixture of emotions –
joy, at the crystalline perfection of the day, smugness, as I watched the masses in their silly tin cars queuing to get into town and to their stultifying jobs, guilt and self-reproach and self-pity, of course, and sadness. I was lobbing snails over the battlements and then leaning over to see where they landed.

  To get to the roof of the tower, I’d had to negotiate the bedrooms and make the right noises at Rosie. I was going to check the boiler, I told her, because it had been another freezing night and I needed to make sure the lagging on the tank was sufficient and there hadn’t been any burst pipes. She was snuggling in bed with Chloe and the medieval soft toys. After her first reaction, when she’d hurled them so hard at me they’d bounced off my chest and onto the floor, she seemed to have warmed to Robin and Marian and the goose-girl. Several days of my plying her with wine, and the occasional Southern Comfort and maybe here and there a Bacardi and Coke or just a little surreptitious tipple of brandy into her tea, and she’d only stirred from her bed as far as the bathroom and back. She couldn’t speak much. She didn’t move much.

  I was feeding the crow. Of course it got plenty of biscuit crumbs and bits of cake when Chloe and I were ensconced in the vestry, but this morning I’d had the urge to do something a bit different with its breakfast and remembered the snails. So I’d clambered up to the tower. On the way, I’d carefully closed the trapdoor out of Chloe’s bedroom, I didn’t want her following me, I wanted a bit of real space of my own. And from the clock-tower or the belfry, as I’d wrongly called it when we’d first moved in, I’d gone up the funny, jutting stone steps and emerged on the roof.

  The snails were in their impenetrable crevice. So they thought, if snails thought. This time, instead of a crow jabbing with its beak and prising them out, it was me. I could just about squeeze my fingers into the crack and pull them out, one by one. I loved the sweet resistance, the way the snail clenched its juicy foot on the stone inside the cave and tried to hang on, and then the lovely sucking, succulent sound: a wet kiss, as the suction-pad came away and the snail surrendered. And then, even more delicious, I would lean out from the battlements, pausing to enjoy the glittering view of fields and ice and a huge blue sky, and I would choose a mischievous moment... when a pedestrian was passing the door of the church, or when a particularly posh car was going by... and drop the snail.