Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  Ice. Moon. Stars. To left and right the fields were a smouldering of frost. White... no, they were silvery grey, and there were horses standing like statues, frozen and monumental, huge shuddering figures cast in steel, and cattle, steaming. My breath, the boy’s breath, every breath was a word, a wonderful word which took shape and then was lost in a whisper of ice. I blew a cloud into the air and for a moment it was an owl, quartering over the fields, white and holy and deadly pale... but then it was the crow. Me and the boy and the crow. We were gliding through a silent, shivering world.

  And then I was home.

  Home? No. I still couldn’t think of it as home. But I was back in the firelit shadows of the vestry and I was writing. The boy, he had his finger on the page and was prompting me to write, I could smell him, I could see the black rime under his nail as he pointed at the words he wanted me to write. The crow was there, on top of the screen. With its quizzical, impatient look, it was watching me write.

  Until the inspiration dried up, or the muse was tired of me. Delete. Delete. Delete. I tried to stop him, but he was uncannily strong. His fingers were thin and white, he was only a waif, he was a homesick, undernourished boy from a horrid little boarding-school, but he was too strong for me. Once he had done with me, he would pluck out the tooth and put it back in its box, he would lick around his mouth to suck and swallow the blood, and despite all my efforts to stop him he would click delete delete delete until everything I’d written was gone.

  One night I awoke on the top of the tower.

  Always the moon and the stars, and ice. I was on the battlements and overlooking the sleeping town and the frozen white fields of the park. Me and the boy, we were picking the snails out of their crevice in the wall. I could feel his fingers against mine as we reached into the hole together, his fingers were so cold and bony and strangely prehensile, and I heard a tiny kiss of suction as I pulled a snail out, only the slightest, sweetest resistance of its moist rubbery foot. Me and the boy, giggling like kids on the roof of the tower, our breath pluming into the air, while the rest of the world was fast asleep. Taking it in turns, we would toss the snails over the battlements and watch them fall and smash on the pavement below. For the crow, of course. The bird was whirling around our heads in excited anticipation. And then it would plummet past us, tumbling in the air like a falcon, open its wings just in time and float to the ground as light as thistledown. To peck at the silvery spatters of juice and flesh.

  And then writing. The book open on the desk beside. The boy and the crow. My coat around my shoulders, a blazing fire, a glass by my hand, filled and refilled until my throat and chest were burning and my head was in a giddying turmoil.

  So giddy that I was never aware of what I was writing.

  I was an automaton, writing what the boy guided me to write. I had an exhilarating sense of it, that it was a torrent of feverish and dangerous ideas which miraculously took shape as words. But each time, at the end of the dream, when the boy’s smile became a sneer of exasperation and contempt and he would feel into his mouth with his fingers... then me, yes even before he could loosen the tooth and pull it out, I would feel such self-reproach and disappointment that I would press delete delete delete until I’d erased everything I’d written. Because I knew it wasn’t me, it wasn’t mine, it couldn’t have been mine but only the thoughts and ideas the boy had lent me.

  ‘WHO IS THAT? Is that you, Rosie?’

  I was in the tiny washroom, stark naked. I’d woken to a dim grey light in the vestry, a light I hadn’t seen for weeks. Something was different, something had changed.

  I rolled out of my blankets and sat up. The fire had died completely, but somehow the air in the room was warmer, it didn’t snap at me as it had done every morning since I’d been living downstairs. I listened, I held my breath, I blinked around me, and I knew straightaway what was happening.

  It was raining. The tyres of the commuter cars were swishing through rain. It was pattering against the windows and streaming down the glass.

  Thaw. The crackling frosts and bitter cold of the past month had gone.

  I’d creaked off my bed and stood up. Warmer, yes, and a stale fug of air in the room. I’d made for the washroom, fuddled by such a hangover that I couldn’t wait to strip off my clothes completely and splash my face and all my body with as much chilly water as I could from the little wash basin.

  And then, through the splutter I was making and the water in my ears and dripping through my hair, I heard something... or someone.

  I stood as still as possible, stopped breathing. Listened. I called out, ‘Who is that? Is that you, Rosie?’

  Rosie and Chloe? I could hear another pattering sound, not the rain on the windows. Unmistakably, it was sound of the keys of the computer.

  ‘Rosie, are you back? Hang on, I’m in here...’

  And I’d burst out of the wash room, with just a hand towel pressed against me. My head, my belly, was churning with a mixture of feelings – a rush of joy that they were back, unannounced, sooner than I’d expected, and a nausea of anxiety, an unaccountable sensation of dread.

  But there was no one. The door was closed. The hiss of the traffic was loud and rhythmic. It was gloomy, the rain on the windows gave the room a dim, submarine look. The pattering of the computer – as I stared towards it, I saw a shadowy movement and the silvery glow of the screen.

  The crow. It was fidgeting across the top of the desk, fluttering to the display and back again, and every time it skittered over the keyboard it rattled its claws on the keys.

  The joy faded from me. The anxiety too. Replaced by a wave of guilty relief which made me shiver in my bare, wet skin. A shiver of anger.

  ‘Bloody filthy thing!’ I dropped the towel and strode across the room, almost tripping headlong on the bedding in front of the fire. ‘Bloody get off there.’

  It had been onto the display table and pecking at the relics. When I regained my footing and glanced at what it had been doing, I saw that the iconic tooth was missing, the fragments of windscreen glass were scattered about, and just then, as though to taunt me with the absence of my daughter when for a split-second I’d thought she was back again, it had Chloe’s tooth in its beak.

  ‘Bastard, get off there, will you?’ I went huffing towards it, waving my arms. And when it rattled the keys of the computer again and I saw a screenfull of jumbled letters, my outrage and jealousy were ridiculous. ‘Fuck off there, will you? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  A crow was writing on my computer. A crow had my daughter’s tooth in its beak. I clapped my hands at it, and a shower of water flew from my hair. As the bird flopped away and onto the floor, it dropped the tooth onto the keyboard. And I could see that the boy’s tooth was there too, and some of the pieces of glass. I sat heavily at the desk. Naked, dripping wet, I fumbled at the keyboard to try and pick out the teeth and the glass from among the keys, but it was difficult. My fingers were cold and clumsy, and the silly little things were stuck into the cracks between the letters.

  I tried to catch the yellowy old tooth between thumb and finger, with a blaze of irritation at the irony of Edgar Allan Poe losing one of his teeth between the o and p of my keyboard, and as I fumbled and inadvertently pressed, a flurry of letters ran across the screen, adding to the nonsense the crow had left there.

  opopoppopopo oppppppppop

  And my daughter’s tooth, white and fresh, I tried to pick it out from the crevice of c and d and f but it was stuck and...

  ffcddcfcfcfccccfccccc

  I scrolled up. Nothing of mine, of course, except a few of the pretentious ramblings I’d committed to posterity when I’d been posing at my desk for the customers. Not a word of the tumultuous stuff I’d written with the boy. All deleted. But there, on the screen, the collected works of Chloe Gooch, my brain-damaged daughter, and the crow.

  It was just a blur in front of my eyes.

  Chloe had written gjpeojwopeifms efu ckyo udad w[eio cos prjqo it ffu ck
ingjd [pj[pkj[p stu ngme th ats [qpdjj whyj jdpklq pk pioscvnmp...

  The crow had added pispejkf dfbn qutt erly feklost pdpkfg lif e pandt s [gdea th are hjjkequ ally rwiojidnb,x ckjest smp[...

  My contribution was oppoppoopopop poopooppp and fdcccccdfffcffdccccdccdscfccc.

  That was the sum of our literary collaboration.

  The book lay open beside me. It mocked my laziness, my inadequacy, my pretention. The boy had opened the pages and pointed at the words with his skinny fingers, his dirty nails, and I’d simply copied. Like an ape. Like an automaton. Like a silly drunk. I stared at the pages and flipped forwards and backwards through them, and I remembered now, with a flaring of light across my brain as bright and searing as magnesium, what the boy had had me write. I’d copied whole paragraphs, whole stories, word by word.

  Hop-Frog. Murders in the Rue Morgue. Masque of the Red Death. Berenice. Yes, Berenice. I’d written it out verbatim, and thrilled at the exhilaration of writing it, as though it were mine, as though the ideas and the words were mine! Now, blinking at the pages, it all came back to me, that I’d spent hours and hours of nights and nights in a giddy helter-skelter of plagiarism, and I’d loved it. Through the agency of the tooth, in the dream-time I’d spent with the boy, I’d been Poe. I’d written his stories. With the same kind of despair and loneliness in my heart that he might have felt, with the same ache of cold between my shoulder blades that he might have endured, with the same miserable abuse of alcohol that he’d inflicted on himself, I’d been him.

  Word after word after word. And then, delete delete delete.

  I stared at the screen long enough for it to go blank again. Then I stared at my own dim reflection. A naked, shivering, middle-aged man, utterly lost, for whom life and death were equally jests.

  The door of the church opened. A draft of windy, wet weather blew into the hallway. And with it, Rosie and Chloe.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘ROSIE... WOW, YOU look great.’

  I managed to get the words out before she could say anything. In fact, she was speechless for a few seconds, as she stared aghast at me and at the state of the room. Chloe came tottering towards me and unselfconsciously hugged my chilly nakedness.

  ‘Really, Rosie, you look good,’ I went on. ‘And you’re back. And how was it, with Auntie Cissy? And did you see the doctor? And...’

  She crossed the room towards me. ‘Oliver? Oh Oliver, what on earth...?’

  Yes, her face was better. She still wasn’t herself, she wasn’t the Rosie I’d met and wooed and married. With her slightly drooping, disgruntled mouth, she could’ve been Rosie’s older sister, gazing at me in disbelief and disapproval. But the rain on her cheeks and lashes was lovely. I wanted to take her and hold her close, because I was genuinely thrilled to have her home again. But when she hurried towards me, hissing with disappointment, it was only to pull her daughter away, as if I were a rabid dog. But then her expression softened, when she remembered that I was only a man, the man who’d wooed her and married her, and she stared at me with great puzzlement.

  ‘Oh Oliver, you hopeless, careless, thoughtless man. You’ve had time, haven’t you? I gave you time, so what have you been doing? Look at you, look at this place. It’s just the same. No, it’s worse, the stink and the soot and everything. And you... you’ve been sleeping on the floor and you stink of drink and...’ And as I stood away from the desk and swung the overcoat off the back of the chair and around my shoulders, she went on, ‘And so I come back and find you sitting naked in a room with no lights and no fire, like a caveman or something... and empty bottles and rubbish and... and what’s this? What’s your excuse? You’ve been writing or something or...’

  She shoved past me and nudged the computer. The screen lit up. She bent and peered at it.

  ‘What is it? What does it mean? It’s just a lot of rubbish.’ And then something, some combination of letters must have caught her eye, because she leaned so close to the screen that her nose was touching it and then she recoiled as if she’d been burnt. ‘For heaven’s sake, Oliver, did you write this? Are you mad? Have you gone mad?’

  And she was back into the hallway, with Chloe, and halfway up the stairs to the kitchen before I could hardly blink. She paused long enough to call to me, her voice hoarse with breathlessness, ‘I don’t like you, Oliver, I really don’t like you. But I love you and I want to help you, to help us. Get some clothes on, light the fire, and I’m coming back down...’

  Then she was gone, banging upstairs into the kitchen and the living room and bedrooms I’d abandoned not long after she’d abandoned me.

  Calm, I tried to stay calm. I took a few long, deep breaths. I knew Rosie well enough, after eight years of marriage, to understand that her anger was manageable, that she herself knew how to manage it. She was a mother-hen, she was a busybody, she got things done, that had always been her forte; now, she was fed up with the whole situation, but she was shortly going to tumble back downstairs and focus her resentment onto the job in hand, not directly onto her feckless husband. Which was good. I was ready to go along with it, meek and repentant. So, before she reappeared, I did the two things she’d instructed me to do, I threw on some clothes (and the big old overcoat, as usual), I built a blaze in the fireplace, and I did a third essential thing too.

  ‘Right, you filthy bastard, I don’t care if you’re a reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe or the fucking Dalai Lama, you’re going out... out, out, out!’

  But it wouldn’t go. I flapped it round and round the vestry, flicking the wet towel at it, herding it with my feet as though it was a farmyard goose, but the crow evaded me time and again and swerved away from the door. The wind gusted in, I’d thrown open the big front doors of the church, and a spattering of warm rain fell onto the flagstones. Outside, the road was gleaming in the headlamps of the passing traffic. I could see the lights of Azri’s cafe, the raindrops streaming on the cosy, steamed-up windows. I drove the crow closer and closer to the doorway, but it blinked and baulked at the fumey commotion of the real world and sprang past me again, back into the vestry.

  Calm, stay calm. I was determined we were going to have a lull, not a manic melodramatic climax. Rosie was furious with me, but she was going to vent her anger on soot and empty rum bottles and discarded pizza boxes and my dirty clothes, and I thought I knew how to handle her like that, to help her and keep things calm. The crow wasn’t helping. It simply shouldn’t be there. It had been top of my list of things to tackle, when Rosie went away. Now, I felt a bubble of panic rising in my chest as I heard the kitchen door opening and Rosie starting to come downstairs again.

  Oh fuck, the crow leapt away from me, towards its favourite, revolting corner of the room, and as it skidded on the top of an open cardboard box and fell inside it, I grabbed the charred Maid Marian doll and stuffed it on top of the bird and folded the box shut.

  I was carrying it outside, as Rosie stepped into the hallway.

  ‘What’s in there?’ she said. ‘If it’s old books, don’t put them outside, it’s raining and they’ll get all soggy.’

  Yes, her face had recovered somewhat, not completely; she had a trickle of saliva, like the trail of a snail, from the corner of her mouth. She’d had her hair trimmed into a sleek, swinging bob. She’d taken off her outdoor clothes, and now she was fragrant, her lips shining, she was shapely and plump in blue jeans and a red pullover. We stood and appraised one another. She looked warm and smelled lovely, but I was holding a cardboard box with a carrion crow inside it, so I couldn’t take her in my arms as I dearly wanted to do.

  Witless, I turned back into the vestry. Too late the words came to me. No they aren’t books, they’re bottles, I’ll put them out – but too late, by then I’d already bent to the floor and set the box down again.

  Briefly, she allowed me to take her hands and pull her towards me, so that I could feel her body against mine. She squeezed me so hard that I gasped. She whispered that Chloe was good and she’d be alright upstairs in
the bedroom with her colouring books for an hour or so... and then she perfunctorily pushed me off and strode past me into the vestry.

  Rosie dusted and swept a storm. She told me to do the same. I carried out the empty bottles and my other rubbish and left them for the dustbin men to collect. Not all the bottles were empty, there was one with a good few slugs of rum still inside it – a work in progress, I might have joked to Rosie if joking had been in order. It wasn’t, so I said nothing and just put the bottle discreetly behind the computer. No jokes, no music. I didn’t put on any music, as we’d done in the first days of getting the shop ready for business. It would’ve seemed frivolous, too sudden a return to normality, a premature assumption that I was forgiven and all might be well. No, far too soon. Right now, I was well and truly in the doghouse.

  So we toiled in a formidable silence. I thought, more than once, as she moved things and swept out the darkest corners of the room, that when she glanced at me she was about to ask me to confirm that the crow was gone. She didn’t ask. But I guessed that sometimes, when she shifted a box or pushed her brush tentatively behind a pile of old magazines, she was half expecting to flush it horribly into the open. And so I tried a stealthy move to carry the box with the crow outside, while Rosie’s back was turned. I was going to take it around the corner into Shakespeare Street and tip it onto the pavement, where it could either hop into the traffic and get run over or scuttle off into the hedgerow.

  But Rose spotted me. She was too much an eagle-eyed supervisor to miss a trick like that.

  ‘No, Oliver, no I told you, it’s still raining, they’ll just get spoiled.’ And forever the goody-two-shoes, she added sanctimoniously, ‘Books are precious, you should know that as a librarian and the owner of a bookshop. Even if they’re raggedy old paperbacks you don’t want, I can always find a home for them at school or in one of the charity shops in town.’