Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  No, I didn’t stay long. Even with the fire and the alcohol, I knew I couldn’t bear a night down there, sitting and toasting my face and my chest while my back was freezing.

  I heard the crow fluttering somewhere, not so much a flutter as a rustle and bristle of its wings as it settled into a dark corner of the room. For an ugly moment I felt a surge of such hatred for the bird that I jumped up to grab something big and heavy to throw at it, and there I was, with a copy of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe poised high above my head. But when I found the crow snuggling in the arms of Maid Marian, I lowered the book slowly, ashamed, and resumed my maudlin contemplation of the fire.

  jsdpkjdpjs cmvnow eritcdkwohjedlfu ckyou;s]a dadcos llklqitfuc kin g okdkcmvmstung mep kthat swh y [kl per neekmg[pwcmm axsjpmfk fkppkkp

  With a last look at the screen I switched off the computer.

  And I switched off the lamp, deliberately averting my eyes from the tooth in case it set my mind whirling with doubts and curses. Upstairs, the kitchen was in darkness. Our bedroom was in darkness. I could smell from the fragrant steam in the bathroom that Rosie and Chloe had showered, although I didn’t turn on the light to see their sooty towels or the rime in the bath. I could make out their mounded bodies in the double bed, and I knew from the unnatural silence that they weren’t sleeping, they were holding their breath in a pretence of sleeping while I shuffled past them. Without so much as splashing my face or rinsing my teeth, I moved into Chloe’s room and slipped into her bed. In my sweat. In a state of naked filthiness.

  Doubts and curses. Burrowed under the bedclothes, I kissed my own shoulder. I tasted myself, smelled myself, and I could taste Rosie on my skin as well. I could smell Chloe too.

  I whispered, ‘Goodnight, Oliver Gooch. Goodnight, Rosie. Goodnight, Chloe.’ And just as I closed my eyes and plummeted into an abyss of sleep, I had a flash of the computer screen again. fuck you dad cos it fucking stung me that’s why.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘YOU’LL NEED THE 7B,’ I said to Rosie, pretending to study the timetable posted on the bus-stop.

  We all knew it was the 7B. It was the Nottingham bus, it went through Long Eaton and Toton, on to Chilwell, past the army depot and Chilwell Manor Golf Club, through the middle of Beeston and past the university and the Queen’s Medical Centre, along Lenton Boulevard and into the city centre. Stopping at Broadmarsh, very convenient for the shopping or sight-seeing in the middle of town.

  I was going to recite the whole thing for Rosie. Just stopped myself. We were all three of us standing at the top of Shakespeare Street, and I was so sick with unhappiness that I just wanted to say anything, anything to fill the bitter silence which hung around us, even a blithering recital of the 7B’s route into Nottingham.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It goes through Long Eaton and Toton, on to Chilwell, past the depot and the golf course, through Beeston and past the university and the hospital and into the city centre. Stopping at Broadmarsh. Yes, I know. But we’re getting off at Chilwell, we’re going to stay with Auntie Cissy. Aren’t we, Chloe? You used to love Auntie Cissy, didn’t you, and her nice old house? Didn’t you, Chloe?’

  So Rosie filled the silence. We stared at each other, terribly distanced by our anxiety and bewilderment, and yet realising, through some weird telepathy of local bus routes, that we were still on the same wavelength. This morning, taking advantage of the extra time I needed in the shower and the kerfuffle I made of stripping Chloe’s bed, she had got herself and Chloe packed and ready to go by the time I came down to the kitchen. The two of them were wrapped up warm. They’d already had porridge and toast and tea, they had a little suitcase each. They looked so perfectly prepared and snug in their coats and gloves and novelty bobble-hats that it was inconceivable they were leaving me in such turmoil. They looked so nice. As though they were going on holiday. They were going to sit upstairs and at the front of a splendid double-decker bus as it swayed along and swished through the overhanging branches of the wintry trees, they were going to be happy together.

  I knew they weren’t. But Rosie was determined they were going. She’d said – in the kitchen, before we all trooped downstairs and out into the bright, frosty morning – that they would stay with Auntie Cissy for a week or so, and I would have time to get sorted. Get the vestry cleaned up. Get myself straightened out. Decide if the bookshop and all its theatrical-gothic nonsense was more important than my family. Stop drinking. Get rid of the bird. As for the tooth... well, decide if it was just a bit of bone and throw it into the hedge, or, if I was really such a sucker to believe in stuff like that, take it to Bramcote crematorium and dispose of it decently.

  The bus was coming. The 7B. We all hugged each other. I could tell in the strength and warmth of Rosie’s arms that she could almost have changed her mind at the last moment, and we could’ve gone back into the tower together for more toast and tea.

  But she didn’t. She blinked at me through teary eyelashes. I felt my eyes stinging too. Her voice was hoarse as she undid herself from me and said, ‘Me, I’m going to get my face checked up again. I’m going to call into the clinic at Chilwell. When I come back I’ll be as beautiful as ever.’ She tried to smile. ‘I’m so sorry, Oliver, you’re weak and lazy, but it isn’t really your fault, is it? Is it?’

  They clambered on board with their cases and up the steep, narrow stairs. I had a moment to move to the front of the bus and see them high up there. Rosie was looking down at me, although she didn’t respond when I waved. And Chloe, she had her face pressed hard against the glass, she was quite oblivious of me and was staring up and up into the sky, up to the top of our tower. She was pointing at something, she was grabbing her mother’s arm and trying to make her see, pointing and staring and...

  The bus moved off. I stood there, alone. Instinctively I glanced up to see what the child might’ve been looking at. I narrowed my eyes into the cold, clear sunlight, but it was too bright, the sun was too low and I could see nothing.

  WHO WAS IT who said, where there’s muck, there’s money?

  I brought a mug of coffee downstairs and lit the biggest, crackliest fire of all time. It roiled sweetly up the chimney, just what I wanted to draw away as much of the soot as possible. I put on Led Zeppelin, full volume. To clear the decks and make myself some space, I threw open the church doors as wide as possible, shoved the sign outside and all the untidy boxes of books I hadn’t sorted yet. And I rolled up my sleeves to clean the vestry.

  It was a horrible, stinking mess, like some prehistoric cave. The blaze of the fire was great, but the pall of smoke, the shelves of gloomy books and the doomy, relentless music made the place feel like a pantomime set, some kind of dungeon or the lair of an ogre. It reeked of the rum I’d swigged and spilled last night. I started sweeping and dusting, with a handkerchief tied across my mouth and nose. I lost myself in my toils, trying to forget myself in the effort of cleaning. The place wasn’t fit to open for business, no way. I reckoned it would take a day or two before it might be ready for customers.

  Wrong.

  When I staggered outside for air, with my mug of coffee in one hand and my brush in the other, so blinded by soot that I blundered into the sign and knocked it over, there were people. They were rummaging in the boxes of books. They were standing in the sunlight, wrapped in their thickest winter clothes, rapt in the tatty paperbacks they’d picked out. Not a lot of people, but three or four. No, maybe eight or ten. As I blinked around me and tugged the handkerchief off my face, as I set the sign up again, I saw how the soot was fuming out of the church door. And the music, Communication Breakdown, such a peal of pure and untrammelled desperation that the fusty old church had never heard before.

  Someone said, ‘Are you open? Or are you just clearing out?’ And I was about to reply, no, sorry I’m not open, I’m doing a bit of stock-taking, or something like that... but they were starting to move inside.

  I followed them in. For a few moments I just stood at the door and watche
d, as they felt their way around. The fire had sucked some of the smoke away, and I’d billowed a lot of the soot outside. Still, every inch of every surface was covered with black dust, and the sweet, stale smell of yesterday’s alcohol lingered in the air. But no matter, I had people in the shop. The flames were licking hungrily up the chimney. The music, too loud for talking, was perfect for losing oneself in an underworld of dangerous and uncompromising books. When I realised what was happening, that I was well and truly open for business, I switched on the lamp and pointed it onto the display, and everyone looked around to see where the beam of light was coming from and where it was shining.

  Poe’s Tooth. It was powdered with soot. Soot swirled in the lamplight. I bent to blow it away, but then I stepped back. One by one, the people in the room came forward to see the tooth and read the slip of paper which said what it was.

  Puer dentem. The tooth of a boy. The tooth of a sad little boy in a dismal boarding school, a long long way from home. No wonder he grew up so strange and full of mad, unhappy ideas. The people stared at the relic. With a dreadful cry, the crow emerged from the shadows and flapped onto its usual perch, on top of the computer. I bent to the floor and picked up the ghastly figure of the doll, blackened and charred from its murder in the chimney, and I sat it beside the hearth. And when at last the people continued their browsing through the filthy shelves, they would return to my desk, I would stamp their chosen books and give them a bookmark, and I would take the money they proffered.

  AND SO I stayed in my lair, my dungeon, at the bottom of the tower. Me and the crow.

  Oh, and the mouse. The mouse, forgotten, abandoned, running like a lunatic on its wheel. White mouse, in a beam of silvery moonlight.

  I suffered a curious reaction to Rosie’s leaving me. Childish, maybe, like a sulky boy. I decided to leave her. And since she was already gone and had taken my daughter with her, the only way I could leave her was to sequester myself in my own place and eschew the home we’d made together.

  In other words, it came upon me to inhabit my own little world in the bookshop. The neat, newly converted kitchen and the bedrooms above it were the places we’d shared, as man and wife and father and mother, with our darling child. Alright, if they wanted to clear out, then so did I.

  It only occurred to me when it was already dark, by the evening of that day in the sooty bookshop. There’d been people, not crowds of course, but odd-bods throughout the morning and the afternoon, enough to keep me downstairs and not wanting to miss anyone by nipping up for lunch or anything. At noon I’d run across to Azri’s for a coffee and a burger, ostentatiously unfolding the notes from my pocket and pretending to fidget while I waited and told him I had to hurry back to the shop because I had customers waiting. By the time it was dusk and twilight and the frost seemed to clang onto the pavement outside the church door, a harder and steelier frost than ever before, I’d already had a few invigorating mouthfuls of the rum in the vestry cupboard and slipped out for another bottle. Next to Azri’s there was a convenience store, only a nook of a shop but bright and neat and filled to the ceiling with everything one might possibly need; the sort of treasure-trove of food and drink and comfort that a survivalist might stash in case of apocalypse. I got rum. On impulse, although I knew there was bread upstairs in the kitchen of the tower, I got bread. And milk, and coffee, and chocolate. And I came out with a bulging bag of stuff, as though I’d heard there might be a bomb tonight and I needed to hibernate.

  Yes, by the time I’d crossed the road and was back into the vestry, where the fire was the best it had ever been after a long day of diligent refuelling, I’d decided to sulk it out. Rosie and Chloe had gone away. They’d quit the marital home and right now, at this very moment, they would be snuggling in Auntie Cissy’s living room with cups of tea and glasses of sherry and Countdown or Deal or No Deal or some other afternoon quiz-show. So me, I’d get out too.

  I only made one foray upstairs to get what else I needed. And that was when I heard something...

  I was in the kitchen. On the table I’d got kettle, toilet paper, towel, toothpaste. And I was about to go up to the bedroom and bathroom and I heard... the swish of the traffic on the icy road? The bubble of hot water in the immersion heater? I was halfway up the stairs to the bedroom and I stopped, to try and work out what it was.

  It couldn’t be the crow. It was down in the vestry, it was dozing in front of the fire with its breath wheezing through bristly nostrils, its wings outstretched, like a cormorant drying itself in the wind after a dizzy, dashing, submarine hunt. No, above my head there was a rhythmic, scratching sound. Relentless. Indefatigable. Mad.

  Chloe had forgotten the mouse.

  Poor, abandoned, orphan rodent. Maybe Rosie had rushed her too much, while I was showering off all my soot and stripping the bed and Rosie had been hurrying Chloe to get ready and packed so that Daddy wouldn’t emerge and try to dissuade them or stop them or. Whatever, Rosie must’ve bundled Chloe out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen so quickly that the mouse, or Mouse, as it had been rather unoriginally named, had been left behind.

  In a beam of silvery moonlight. I stepped into the bedroom and there it was. It was running so hard its little heart might burst.

  I looked around the room. Our bed, carefully made-up, but empty. Robin Hood and the goose-girl naughtily entwined, as though they were taking advantage of Maid Marian’s mysterious absence. Chloe’s room, empty, the bed stripped. I didn’t switch on any lights, I didn’t need to, because a shaft of moonlight fell through the window and onto the mouse. Silvery – a sliver of silver. Was it running after the girl? Was it chasing a moonlit horizon? Would it run until it reached the end of the world and simply dropped off the edge?

  Empty. Just me and the mouse. ‘Alright, so it’s just you and me,’ I was whispering, but I might’ve been talking to myself because it just kept on running. ‘Just me and you, alright? Rosie left me, I thought she loved me through thick and thin, for better or for worse etc etc, but she left me. And Chloe left you. When it came to the crunch and they were off to Auntie Cissy’s cuddly cosy living room, she forgot all about you, didn’t she? So it’s just me and you, alright?’

  I couldn’t persuade it to stop. I had to reach into the cage and lift it off the wheel and slip it into my shirt.

  I went down the stairs with Chloe’s mattress and duvet. Shut the bedroom door behind me. The marital, family bedroom: closed until further notice.

  Went down to the kitchen. Somehow, with great care and slightly drunken sleight of hand, down and down to the hallway of the church with mattress and duvet and kettle and towel and whatever, without falling headlong and breaking my poor silly neck on the flagstones.

  Run away from home. I was somehow further away from home than Rose and Chloe were. Me and the crow and the mouse, by the fire. I felt like I’d run away, like some kind of hobo, I’d gone feral, I was on the road with my crow and my mouse and my bottle of rum and we’d lit a fire... under a motorway bridge or in a derelict building or a barn or the tower of an old church or...

  Cheers. I’d put down the mattress and the duvet. I had a marvellous blaze. A masterpiece of ruddy and amber flames, blue as well, as the bark crisped and curled from the fragrant silver birch. I didn’t know when my wife and my daughter might come back. I didn’t know when I might go home. In the meantime, I didn’t need to. I was smugly and snugly self-sufficient, with money in my pocket and the prospect of another day’s business tomorrow, and my post-apocalyptic store just across the road.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE BOY. I saw him.

  Puer. I did some Latin at school. I could decline the word puer, boy. Puer puer puerum, pueri pueri puerum... by, with, or from a boy. So they gave me a Latin class when I thought I might try to be a teacher. Boys. And a few girls. They did their Latin exercises from a crummy little text book, and then they came up to my desk and I marked them as they stood close to me. The smell of small boys, unmistakable and uniquely sweaty
and... and a girl, a girl called... can’t remember her name, but she leaned very close with a different smell as I marked her horrid, blotted book and her ridiculous sentences. I never touched her. I swear. But she would swing her skinny little legs against my leg, fiddle her foot onto mine, and then one day when I made to push her away she squealed and pouted and accused me.

  So I didn’t stay long. Couldn’t. I protested, but realised fast and full of futile indignation that protesting my innocence was taken as guilt. My word against hers. They believed her.

  The boy. I’d seen him in a dream, when he’d come up through the trapdoor onto the roof of the tower and his mouth was full of blood. And I saw him again. Skating.

  It was a glorious day, perhaps the most glorious day since the last most glorious day a few weeks ago. I’d woken in my fireside bed, stretched magnificently under my duvet and realised I’d slept like a king. The embers were still glowing, it took only a moment to rekindle them with a log or two and there was a breakfast blaze. While the kettle was boiling for coffee, I was stripped naked for an icy top-and-tail in the tiny wash-room, and dressed again. How joyful, to be out on the pavement, a wintry dawn at eight o’clock, holding my steaming mug in both hands, inhaling the delicious, smokey, suburban air and watching the slaves go by. They sat fuming in their traffic jam, crawling to their offices and workshops in town. They stared at me from inside their cars, and I grinned back at them.

  I sold a few books. I had a customer or two before I’d even rolled up the duvet and leaned the mattress into the corner. I got croissants from Azri. It was a blissful morning of utter selfishness and loneliness and I listened to Abbey Road, hadn’t heard it for such a long time and it made me cry and I switched it off in the end – and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make – because it made me think of Rosie and Chloe and our home I’d so perversely left and locked up, upstairs, just above my stubborn, sulky head.