Crow Of Thorns

by Richard Mosses

  “I'll get the papers drawn up for next time. Nothing else will change, I promise.” She gets up. “Here's some money.” When I don't take the notes, she puts them on the table. “And the car keys.” She drops them on top of the money. “Take them to McDonalds and the cinema. I'll see you later.”

  Kathryn leaves the room. I stare at the space she filled just a moment before.

  Chapter 4

  Back at the tent city there are a lot of people hanging out by Albert's tent, which has been sealed up with police tape. There are a number of yellow rectangles around it, like death has crept into the grass. No one had come to take the body away and the wait has turned into a vigil. People have been coming to pay their respects all day, telling stories. A small shrine has formed, with meagre offerings.

  I join them. Maybe it will help me with my own loss. Silk and Malky aren't here, but Janice is about. Brutus must still be chained up elsewhere. A half-bottle of rough vodka is being passed from hand to hand. I think twice then take a mouthful.

  A woman standing next to me says, “Did you know him?” She brushes a stray hair back behind her ear. It has become a ritual invitation. It's no surprise to see a stranger. The tent city has a core, but some people come and go.

  “We used to say hello to one another,” I say. “He helped me out. More than I ever thanked him for.”

  “Do you know where they took the body?” She wrinkles her nose.

  I thought everyone knew by now. “That's why we're here. Waiting for someone to come for it.”

  “Jesus Christ.” She shakes her head. “The whole fucking system is falling down.”

  I nod. “I live in one of these tents. You don't need to tell me.”

  “The police called, told me to come and get his stuff. I didn't even know he was living here.”

  The penny drops. “You're his daughter?”

  “Granddaughter.”

  “Sorry. He never said. We all figured he was like us.”

  “Too pig headed and proud.”

  “That too.” I didn't have to sleep here before. Now I do. “I'm Nik,”I say, and offer her the bottle.

  “Rachael.” She takes a swig.

  A flutter of dark wings and a crawk, and the crow of thorns glides in and lands on the roof of Albert's tent. An estate vehicle painted white drives slowly towards us. People make way for it but no one tries to shoo the crow away. I decide to ignore it like everyone else, then I realise that I'm the only one who can see it.

  Something is really wrong with me, something that can't be blamed on an empty stomach or the vodka. So much for therapy.

  “It's alright, Boss.” The crow turns its head to one side, dark eye catching the headlights of the car. “The sooner you accept this, the easier it will be.”

  “That's easy for you to say.”

  Rachael frowns “What? I didn't say anything.”

  “Sorry.” I try for a smile, just about manage it. “I was just running through a conversation in my head and that popped out. My wife asked me for a divorce today.”

  “She lives here too?”

  “No, at her mother's. We've been separated since I started living here. You know how it is. Pig-headed and proud.”

  Rachael nods her head. “Look, I know this is kind of random, given we've just met. But would you come with me to the morgue or wherever they're taking him?”

  She looks over my shoulder as a stretcher is taken out of the back of the estate, wheels concertina-ing onto the grass. Two men begin to get into bunny suits and masks.

  “Okay… sure.” Clearly I'm non-threatening. Corbie takes flight as one of the men cuts into the tent and it collapses. “Look this isn't going to be good. You can sit in my tent for a few minutes while they work. We can pick up Albert's stuff later, at the morgue.”

  “Okay.” Rachael looks green. She takes another swig of vodka and passes it back to me. I try to wash away the sweet rot clinging to the top of my palette. We need a stronger solvent. I pass the bottle back to the crowd then we walk away, Corbie gliding after us over the eaves.

  I unzip the flaps and hold out a hand. Rachael stoops and crawls in.

  “You got all the mod cons here.” She waves a hand toward my small pile of stuff.

  “The tent was a gift from a charity. There are solar cells built into the fabric, even a crude heat pump in the floor that gives enough power for some light, or even a battery recharge in an emergency. Washing and other toiletries are reserved for the executive en suite bathroom. Sometimes, in summer, it even reaches above freezing. We're lucky, though, they used to lock the toilet block at night when they shut the park.”

  Rachael sits down on top of my sleeping bag. “How can you live like this? Aren't there homeless shelters or something?”

  I crawl in next to her. It's a two-man tent but we're still close. Her perfume reminds me of fresh apples and summer grass. “They're all full. So are the hostels. From what I hear they're worse than this – sleep with your back to the wall kinds of places. I had benefit for a while, but there's a cap on claims after the first year. In any case the money went to feed and clothe my two kids. I had to sell my house, my cars, and ninety-nine per cent of my stuff to pay my debts. I refused to go bankrupt. The silver lining… I now have a job, no debts, I support my family, and I live here. No rent, no facilities.”

  “But why stay here at all? You could have stayed with your family. No need to be a hero.” She's angry and her eyes are moist.

  “There's no way I can give you a satisfying answer. I've tried.” Her glare challenges me to try again. I dig deep, ignoring the nonsense about pride, about wanting to stand on my own feet, to fix what I broke myself, or even something feeble about the mother-in-law. I shrug. “Shame, mostly. Cowardice. Humiliation. I couldn't look in my wife's eyes, my kid's, without seeing a judgement, an accusation of failure. This is my punishment.”

  “Idiot. Didn't you realise that you've been punishing them too?”

  Something dislodges inside me, like a heavy weight shifting. “I used to have bad insomnia. I was afraid I would lose everything. One day someone told me the only cure was to think through the worst that could happen. So what if you lose your job, you'll still have your health – that kind of thing. I never for one minute thought it would be like this. But you're right. I shouldn't be here. None of us should.”

  I cough, catch my breath and cough again. Must be the bad air.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah. Guess something went down the wrong way. Let's get you to the morgue.”

  We hail a taxi from the top of Byres Road to the Saltmarket. Rachael winces when she looks at the meter, but she pays anyway.

  “I have a car, but it's sitting dry since what was left in the tank got siphoned out. Couldn't afford to put petrol in it anyway.”

  “What do you do?” I say, pulling my coat tight against the thin wind coming off the Clyde.

  “Primary teacher.” She shrugs.

  I clear some phlegm from the back of my throat and lead her to the wooden door. I'd heard they had planned a new mortuary at the Southern General. Guess it didn't work out. This place has been used for centuries. People were hung on the Green over the road, a short journey from the old High Court next door. I ring the bell and we wait in silence.

  The door opens and a woman wearing blues nods and invites us in. She shows us to a small waiting area where there are only four seats. “We'll be ready for you in a minute.” She brushes hair behind her ear, smiles briefly and leaves.

  We wait for nearly twenty. I'm about to go and find someone when the woman returns.

  “Sorry about that. They brought everything in the tent for some reason. We had to check it all, just in case.” She looks how I feel. A bone-deep weariness has crawled into me.

  “Just in case of what?” Rachael stands up.

  “If it had turned out to be a suspicious death something in there may have been relevant to the enquiry. Are you ready to formally identify the body?”
Her tone is soft, unthreatening. I forgot the people who work here are trained doctors. Good bedside manner for the dead.

  “So what was it?” Rachael says.

  “What was what?” the doctor says.

  “If it wasn't suspicious, what did he die from?”

  “Oh, right. We're putting it down to hyperthermia.”

  We follow her down the hall and into a side room. There's a large pane of glass between us and the steel slab. On top of the slab is a body draped in a green sheet. A man with a white beard and glasses walks over to the body and angles something hanging from a large light.

  “If you look at the monitor, please.” The woman indicates an ancient CRT TV bolted up high in our room. It shows the covered face. The man pulls back the sheet to show a skull with a thin veneer of flesh that just about looks like Albert. “Do you recognise this person?”

  Rachael stares at the monitor. “He's so thin.” Her voice breaks. “Yes. That's my Grandfather, Albert Morrison.” Her composure starts to slip. I pass her my unused hanky.

  “Thank you. Let me take you back to the waiting area. I'll get you the completed death certificate and your grandfather's personal effects. Can I get you some tea while you wait?”

  Another hour seems to pass. I don't know what to say and Rachael stares at the mauve wall ahead of her, hanky in one hand, Styrofoam cup in the other.

  “If it hadn't been for you, he wouldn't be dead,” she says.

  “I don't see what I have to do with it.” I'm know I'm not responsible for the collapse of the finance sector, or her grandfather choosing to live in a tent in a park, but I feel a stab of guilt anyway.

  “You let him stay there. You should have told him to go home. You could have checked up on him.” Her eyes are hot while her cheeks are wet.

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “And run out on your mess? Seems like a regular habit.”

  I push down my anger, stand up and open the door as the doctor comes in carrying two large carrier bags and a backpack. “Sorry, I didn't see you there,” she says, as I brush past her and out into the cold. The raven is sitting on a railing waiting for me. “And you can piss off too,” I shout. The night air hits my chest. I double over and cough up a large radioactive glob into the gutter. This isn't good.

  I don't wait for Rachael. I'm not running away. I just don't feel like being a relative stranger's punching bag.

  I walk home and can sense the bird gliding along in my wake, but I don't care anymore. I'm too tired and cold to care.

  Back in my tent I think about calling Kathryn. It's late. Maybe I should leave it until tomorrow. I call anyway, and tell her I'm sorry, that I've been a fool, that I'll move back in. We don't need to do this. We can be a family again. The answering machine cuts me off.

  Between fits of coughing I manage to fall asleep.

  Sweat has soaked through my t-shirt and my sleeping bag feels damp. I have a raging thirst. My head is pounding and I can't breathe through my nose. My chest feels like a huge stone has been placed on it. I fumble around for some water, but the bottle is empty.

  I put on some clothes and immediately start shivering. I make my way to the toilet block and need to cool down again. I've had the flu before, but never like this.

  In a pained blur I go down to the Byres Road supermarket. I wait outside for it to open, like a junkie. Once inside, even the cheapest paracetamol is barely affordable. I dry-swallow two on my way round the aisles. I get enough dried soup for a couple of days, but I've almost no money left. I'll have to risk the water from the taps in the toilets. Maybe a little lead might help kill the bugs running through my body. My limbs already feel like they're made from it – alternating between molten and cold.

  My tent is more welcome than ever. I listen to the radio on my laptop and drift in and out of sleep, in and out of sweat. I'm sure the crow is in here with me, talking, but I can't make out what it's saying. Through the fog in my head it sounds like, “You're dyin.”

  “It's just the flu.”

  Is this what really took Albert, not the cold? I hadn't heard of any bugs going around. He's the first to get sick here. How long since anyone got typhus or cholera in Glasgow. Maybe it's bird flu from my new friend. I almost laugh, but it's more a gurgle in the back of my throat.

  “No. You have pneumonia.”

  “You're not a doctor. How do you know?”

  The bird stands on my chest, talons like little pin pricks, and says, “I'm a shaman. You will be too, if you want to live.”

  Chapter 5

  I'm standing, fully clothed. At first I think I've wandered out of the tent in a fever, looking for water – I'm so thirsty I could drain a river and still not be satisfied. A mist covers everything, and there's no sound. Is this another dream?

  I take a few steps but the fog is so thick I worry about walking off into someone's tent, or into traffic, or off the edge of a cliff. Something tells me I'm not in tent city, and this isn't a dream.

  “Where am I?”

  “Think of somewhere memorable, somewhere relaxin.” Corbie's rough crawk sounds like he's on my shoulder, but he's nowhere to be seen.

  The mist begins to clear, burned off by the noon-day sun. I'm on a rough beach next to a huge weathered tree trunk. Worn stones and broken shells cover the ground. Just ahead, a thick bar of fly-blown seaweed marks high tide. I turn around to where the dry grass starts and look to the top of the tall thin pines. The blue sky has a few light clouds and several distant gulls circle. The air is fresh, the sun is warm. I feel a smile growing.

  Corbie lands on the trunk beside me. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere near Fort William. I think that's it, over the water.” On the other side of the loch are houses, Ben Nevis towering over them.

  “Childhood holiday?”

  “Aye. We spent a week here in a wee cottage just up the road. I found a paperback of Ice Station Zebra.” I pick up a stick and prod at the ashes of someone's fire – the black soot ringed by burnt stones. “Why are we here? And how do you know about the pneumonia?”

  “I told you. I'm a shaman. I could tell just by lookin at your soul. In order to get better you'll have to begin your trainin. The Great Spirits are getting impatient with you, so they've made you ill.”

  “Great recruitment scheme they've got there. Conform or die.”

  “If it is any comfort it happens to most of us. No one volunteers for this.”

  “I feel really special. Just when I thought I was at the bottom, turns out I wasn't.”

  The raven makes a thick throaty sound and I realise it's laughing. “You're nowhere near bottom, yet.”

  I sit on the log and watch the water on the shore. The rhythmic lapping is calming. The light sparkles across the waves. “I'm a man of silicon and cities. These 'Great Spirits', who are they?”

  Corbie lifts his wings up a bit – some kind of bird shrug.

  I'm shocked. “You don't know? You're taking orders from them and you don't even know who they are?”

  “Why should I? They're ancient, subtle, alien. I've never met them. Archetypes would define them too strictly. Demean them even. We could call them Bear, Stag, Anansi, Odin, Tenjin and it wouldn't make a difference.”

  “Subtle as a brick if you ask me. What do you mean alien? Are they ETs? Am I an abductee?”

  “Maybe I should have said other.” A cold breeze runs up the loch, ruffling the bird's feathers. “We should get started. We don't have much time.”

  “Make a start on what?”

  “Find what's makin you sick. Usually there's a part of your soul missin. Maybe it got snagged somewhere. Or somewhen.”

  I laugh. “Now I know I'm really sick. Not only am being commanded by spirits, I'm hunting parts of my soul. This is some fever dream.” I mark ashen circles on the rocks with the stick.

  “If this was a dream you'd have little understandin and even less control.”

  Walking down to the water's edge, I stare at the stones at my feet
. Picking up a perfect flat one, I turn it over a few times, feel its smoothness. Then I hunch down and skim it out over the loch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven skips and it sinks down – a record. Never had more than five before.

  Great Spirits. I laugh to myself. Having rejected all that religious crap when I was thirteen, I hadn't given it much time since. When the dreams started Mum insisted I was a shaman. She and my dad had blazing rows about it. He was a down to earth engineer; it was all in my head. No spiritual reality for him intruding into his son's consciousness. I just needed a good head doctor. Maybe he was right. But they looked hard enough, tried all the therapies they could think of. Still the dreams would come. Until last night.

  Hallucination or not, perhaps this is just my body speaking to me, finding the mechanism to heal itself. “How do we find a piece of soul?” I say. “What does that look like?”

  “You're going to hate this, but you'll know it when you see it.”

  “I always find things in the last place I look. Maybe I'll find it there.”

  Corbie blinks. “That's smart thinkin, but a bit too smart.”

  “Well maybe if you stopped being so fucking obscure that might help.”

  The bird flaps its wings, glides onto my shoulder, and whispers in my ear. “I'm not tryin to be obscure. I'm tryin to help you work things out for yourself. There's no Internet here to help you find the answers.”

  “Isn't there?” This is my dream, isn't it? “Computer, where will I find a lost soul?” To my surprise, a window opens up before me with a list of search engine results running down the pane. My mind is doing a good job of improvising. The Island of Lost Souls, The Bell of Lost Souls, Lost Souls the movie, the band, the game, the book, the album, some porno site with Goth girls – the list goes on. None of it very useful in itself, but it triggers the right connections. “The Land of the Dead. Where else?”