The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  Uncle Ian died. He was on the boat one evening in June, moving briskly with a rising tide from the wide waters of Piddinghoe towards the rip under Southease bridge. He must have had pains in his chest since leaving the moorings at Denton island, possibly after a struggle to start the outboard motor. When he collapsed onto the floor of the boat, he gripped at his seizing chest and struck his head on the petrol tank. And, as he lay convulsing for just a few seconds, the cormorant sat and watched. Only the slow blinking of its eyes showed that any muscle stirred in its green-black frame. The bird stared into the face of the dying man. When the man lay still, his chest clenched in the rigour of death, when a dribble of saliva glistened on his chin, the cormorant dropped from its perch on the boat’s cabin and landed with its wide, wet feet on his belly. The boat caught in the iron limbs of the bridge, held there by the tide and the busy thrusts of the propeller. A heron briefly raised its head from fishing and turned an eye of frost on the butting vessel. The cattle snorted and returned to the lush grass of the water meadows. That evening, another boat stopped alongside the little cruiser. They found the man, dead, on the floor. The cormorant flapped heavily away to avoid the threatening boots of the boarding party, but it followed the boats downriver to the rank and frothy waters of the moorings.

  Ian was dead. And his cheeks were pitted from the blows of the cormorant’s beak. His lips were torn. The tender tissues of his gums were split. One eye remained intact.

  When they had taken the body away, the bird heaved itself onto the deck of its master’s boat. It was seen through the rest of the evening and that warm summer’s night, hunched on the top of the cabin. It only blinked and cleaned a few morsels of soft flesh from its beak.

  This was the bird that we inherited.

  We had been in the cottage for a week when the cormorant was delivered, that October evening. We had leapt at the opportunity of leaving our work in the Midlands. The sale of our house there gave us the financial freedom to have the cottage quickly surveyed and a few repairs carried out. Basically it was sound. A builder replaced a number of slates on the roof and some of the wiring was seen to. Soon, with our books and prints and brightly coloured rugs, the little place was cosy and warm. The village nestled under the cloud-covered summit of Snowdon, on the road between Caernarfon and Beddgelert. There was a shop, a post office and a pub. I stocked up with logs and coal; the fire gilded our living-room with its scented flames and sent up a tall feather of smoke into the autumn air. I was content to stay at home throughout the day and devote my time to the writing of my history textbook, exasperated as I had been in my experience as a teacher by the unsuitability of the material. Furthermore, I could manage Harry, our boy of eleven months, in the intervals of my work. Ann straight away found work in the pub, helping with the preparation of bar snacks at lunchtime and in the evenings until about nine o’clock. People in the village were friendly, but wary at first. We knew it would take time to make real friends there, by the nature of the mountains and the wet plantations. Being English was not a disadvantage, contrary to our expectations. The pub, the shop and the post office were all in the hands of English couples who had fled the northern cities of England to find a cleaner and less frantic way of life in the Welsh hills. There was no novelty in our being English; we were simply another young family who had come to settle in the village.

  The news of the death of Uncle Ian was a surprise to us. But our inheritance of the cottage seemed to be a miracle, such a thunderbolt of good fortune that the matter of the cormorant was practically ignored as an eccentric novelty perpetrated by my uncle, as a joke. We set our minds on quitting school and beginning a new life in Wales. I had a notion of what the bird would be like: it would be gawky and angular, a sort of black sea-goose, I gathered from a handbook, with an extraordinarily healthy appetite for fish. Well, it could stay in the backyard, on the end of a leash perhaps, or potter around and scavenge like a farmyard goose. We bought fish for the cat anyway, so it would be no trouble to double the ration and feed the cormorant at the same time. It was a sure sign of our complacency in receipt of the cormorant that we had opened the white wooden crate in our living-room and expected some kind of placid, domestic fowl to emerge and be driven quietly out through the back door. The image of the sea-raven, hunched and black and indelibly marked with the stink of mud and fish, the slow-blinking cormorant which had set its beak to the cheeks and gums of its saviour … this had been forgotten in the euphoria of moving into our rural retreat. The turmoil of the bird’s first appearance by the flaming lights of the fire had upset our picture of domestic bliss. It came from its box as ugly and as poisonous as a vampire bat.

  During a night of tears and recriminations, a long, sleepless night when the name of Uncle Ian came in for repeated vilification, we began to face up to that seemingly innocuous clause in the will which stipulated that the cormorant would be a part of our life in the cottage, or else the cottage would be forfeited. The next morning, before the baby could be brought downstairs, I manhandled the crate out of the living-room and put it down carefully in the yard. For all the sound and movement which was evident from within, the bird could have been dead. But that was wishful thinking on my part. In any case, there was some ludicrous clause which forbade us from disposing of our charge by releasing it or killing it; its death on the first day of our responsibility would have looked somewhat suspicious if we were to attempt to construe it as an accident. Undoubtedly, the bird was alive in the fetid straw of the box. Its smells simmered through the panel of perforations.

  Ann came down the stairs, still smudging the tears of disbelief from her face. She set about the living-room with water and disinfectant. While she washed the paintwork and sponged vigorously at the curtains, the furniture, the pictures, the books and our precious rugs, I was busy in the yard with my hammer and nails. I hastily erected a sort of cage in one corner, a ramshackle structure of chicken-wire and woodwork, with a section of corrugated iron on the top to afford some weather protection. Into this, I tipped the cormorant. I pushed in the crate, having loosened the lid again, knocked it over with a wary foot and shook out the contents into the new cage. There was a bundle of damp straw, that was all. Nothing stirred. I had seen the same sort of thing in zoos: rows of big cages, each with its informative little sign, and nothing but a bank of straw at the back, in which, if the signs were to be believed, some exotic and possibly savage beast was snoozing. But not a flicker of life. So, after I had closed down the walls of chicken-wire with a series of nails, I took a cane from the shed and tentatively pushed it into the cage and into the mess of straw. One moment the straw lay silent and still. Then it exploded in a chaos of black wings and spitting cries. The cormorant erupted from sleep, flung itself at the wire. Its jabbing bill came through, it hung for a second, scrabbling with its fleshy feet, its wings outstretched on the wire, like some gas-crazed soldier on a French battlefield. I yelped and jumped back. I watched in horror as the bird fell to the ground and began to strut backwards and forwards across the floor of its confines, until it became calmer. It pecked a little at the ground, threw some of the straw in the air and found some nameless morsel hidden among it. I watched the workings of the bird’s throat. Something slid down into the mucous darkness. At least the cormorant was behind bars.

  Ann came into the yard and looked at the bird from the back door. She was holding Harry in her arms. He was agog at the spectacle of the cormorant, throwing out his arms and wriggling like a trout. The bird froze for a moment, slowly opened up its wings into a black shroud and croaked. It came to the wire. Snaking its neck, it hissed a long, malodorous hiss and brought up a pellet of half-digested matter which lay steaming in the weak sunshine. Harry gaped at the offering and tried to get free from Ann. Something told her that this was not suitable viewing for her baby boy. Without speaking, she turned back into the kitchen, with Harry swivelling his little blond head for a last glimpse of the cormorant.

  I opened a tin of cat food and managed to s
hove it under the wire, on a tin plate. The bird devoured the meat before standing on the plate and releasing one long jet of yellow shit where the food had been a minute before. I found myself fascinated by the cormorant’s manners. I knew of football supporters and pop stars whose behaviour in railway carriages and expensive hotels was lovingly reported in the lightweight press and who were alleged to be like this, wonderfully oblivious to accepted standards of decency and cleanliness. But this bird made an art of being vile. It was somehow endearing, such candour. I turned away from the kitchen window, in case Ann should see my expression and disapprove of my smiles. Uncle Ian must have felt the same about the bird. I fed it again and supplied it with fresh water, forgot about my writing for the rest of the day as I strengthened the cage and effected a sort of hatch which would make feeding easier. I stayed close to the cormorant in the backyard, going into the cottage to look after the baby while Ann was out, but returning to watch the bird. It waddled around the cage, panting. When it had drunk deeply from the bowl, it put its face down into the water and snorted through its fur-covered nostrils. The bird held up its wings and flapped them until a few black feathers dropped onto the slate floor. By the afternoon, the cage was spattered with droppings, to which the sprinklings of down and dust and straw had stuck and through which the bird went slapping with its wide feet. I saw that frequent hosing would have to constitute part of the new routine initiated by the arrival of the cormorant. But if I could establish some kind of relationship, simply by being the regular supplier of food and water, perhaps the new member of the family would not cause too severe a disruption of our lives. I watched the bird for the first afternoon and allowed it to watch me. Maybe it could become a manageable entity. Harry must be kept away from it, and then its unpredictable temper and lack of hygiene would not be a hazard.

  The bird: it would be about eighteen months old, if Uncle Ian had rescued it from the river in its first winter. By now, it was three feet long from the tip of its tail feathers to the end of its beak. It was by no means utterly black when looked at in the sunlight and when it was behaving calmly, although I had thought of it as uniformly coal-black in the midst of its lunatic fits in the living-room, on the previous evening. In fact, it was shot though with browns and greens and blues as the sun caught it on its back and wings, the iridescence of oil and the stale river. There was a lighter patch on its breast, which the handbook said was the mark of an immature bird: this would disappear and the cormorant would become completely sooty. Its beak was an impressive weapon of heavy horn, three inches in length, brown and smooth, hooked at the tip. The bird stalked around on its webbed feet, putting them down with a slap in the water and in its own many-coloured squirts of shit. It held itself upright, like a goose, hissed with its bill open and made a nasal croaking. The cormorant was a Heathcliff, a Rasputin, a Dracula. Or maybe it was just a sea-crow, corvus marinus, as the name suggested, just a scavenging, unprincipled crow. The name came to me in a flash: Archie. I would call the cormorant Archie. It was harsh, like the sound the bird repeatedly croaked. There was something cocky and irreverent about it.

  And in the evening, when twenty-four hours had elapsed since the opening of the crate, our mountain cottage seemed to have recaptured the peace and cosiness which the arrival of the bird had destroyed. Ann came in from work. It was raining again. She was breathless and a little flushed from her short bicycle ride, there were jewels of fine drizzle in her hair and on her eyelashes. When she smiled, I saw the pale blue opacity of her teeth, I kissed her and tasted her clean, metallic tongue. She went upstairs to take off her coat and to see that Harry was asleep. In the living-room, the fire was banked up with coal and a white, bitter-smelling log of horse chestnut. Everything was clean and warm. The cat lay curled on a cushion, its head lost in the thick fur of its body, its sleep a safe oblivion. I had been working on the textbook, with the pool of light thrown onto my typewriter by the table lamp. All was at peace. Ann came down, having brushed her hair until it burned in many different reds and browns, the colours of the autumn which the night outside had hidden. We sat on the rug, close to the flames of the fire, and again we kissed. The fire spat. There was a flurry of wet wind on the window. Together, we gently collapsed and lay in the soft cocoon of our cottage. And soon, when the fire was low and the lights it had shone so brightly had begun to fade into ochre, when the embers sighed and tumbled inwards to be swallowed in their own secret furnace, we went upstairs to bed.

  We awoke to the screaming of gulls.

  It was just light. Ann shoved me and sat up in bed, instantly alert to the cries of the baby. She heard Harry, but his weak noises were blurred in the frantic chorus outside our bedroom window. In a moment, she had gone to his room and picked him out of his cot, returning with him to the warmth of the double bed. I reached over, rubbing my eyes, and pulled open the curtains.

  The backyard was a snowstorm of gulls. They wheeled in a maelstrom of white and grey and black. Their cries broke in the cold morning air, a hundred voices of the sea and the blowing spray, focused on the small expanse of garden. The gulls dropped into the yard, rose again on the strength and elasticity of their wings. They came close to the window, the herring gulls circling with throats distended to issue their bullying laughter. The black-headed gulls threw out their bilious cries. And among the gulls’ cacophony, there came the repeated croaks of the cormorant, as though it had summoned the gulls and was ordering their riotous congregation. We watched from the window. Harry chuckled and thrust his hands forward. His cheeks became flushed, he shouted something in a rasping tone. I put on some trousers and an old pullover, stepped into my slippers and went downstairs. Through the kitchen window I saw the gulls swirling like a blizzard around the cage, then up to our bedroom, their wings beating against the glass. I heard Ann’s shriek, heard her tug the curtain closed again. I heard Harry’s ugly shouts.

  The cormorant stood with its chest pressed against the wire, its neck extended and the murder-beak jutting through. It had outstretched its wings and hooked them somehow onto the wire, gripping there like some prehistoric bird with clawed fingers. Archie stood erect, croaking and hissing, a black, malignant priest in a multitude of angels. I put on a coat, quickly found some cat food. There was an old, threadbare blanket in the airing cupboard, which I took out and threw over my arm. Then I stepped into the yard.

  First of all, the gulls recoiled from the garden, evaporated up and over the surrounding trees. Archie was silent. Still the cormorant hung on the wire. But, with a series of hoarse cries from that horny beak, the gulls returned and dived around my head with a crescendo of screams. They rained their soapy droppings on the slates and on my shoulders. The birds came down until I felt the buffeting of their wings. The air was filled with the smell of brine and fish. I lurched forward, shoving the plate of food into the cage. The cormorant turned, tore itself from the wire, leaving behind a few black feathers. It came for my hands. But I withdrew as the beak came close. I put the blanket over the front of the cage and secured it with a number of slates. Archie was silent again, distracted by the meat, and soon the gulls dispersed. The cormorant was gone. There was no longer anything in the backyard to summon their hysterical presence.

  This was Archie.

  Ann shuddered at the sight of the cormorant, its demonic arrogance. She held Harry to her breast and twisted his face towards her own. But the child flung a sidelong glance in the direction of the cage, beating the air with his fist. Brilliantly flushed, his eyes glittering with ice, he was suffused with the malice of the sea-crow.

  II

  In the fortnight which followed, I began to find that I could exercise more control over Archie. The bird became accustomed to the man who came each morning with food, and it no longer made its snaking thrusts at my hands. Instead, it watched from the far corner of its cage while I opened the hatch and eased the iron plate through the wire, before it walked like a duchess towards the meat. Archie ate with a flurry of bolting gulps, taking a beakful
and then stretching up its head to ease the food into the gullet. I saw the meat slipping downwards, a bulge in the throat, working and moving like a live thing. Every afternoon, it was time to hose out the cage with a fine spray of water. All the accumulated droppings sped across the slates in foaming milk, pieces of straw and discarded fish, the walnut-sized pellets of indigestible matter, it all washed out of the cage and into the nettle beds of the little garden. Archie spread its wings and held its face up to the flying water. It stood under the shower with its beak open, allowing the water to course over its tongue and its half-closed eyes, down its oily breast. The cormorant shook off the water with a vigorous beating of its wings. It shivered from top to toe, like a wet dog, and the droplets flew across the backyard in a confetti of blues and greens and silver.

  But the bird could not stay inside its cage for ever. Sooner or later, it would be time to bring it out and let it have some exercise. Now that it was used to its new breadwinner, I began to foresee the time when Archie would even go free, as it had begun to do for Uncle Ian, and still return for its food. First of all, it would suffice to bring Archie out on a leash. One crisp November afternoon, while Ann was at work and Harry was sound asleep upstairs, I decided to attempt to exercise the bird. I gave it a small dish of cat food, only a couple of beakfuls, to distract it long enough for me to secure it on a length of rope. As the cormorant bent to the meat, I approached. I had put on my Wellington boots and a pair of gardening gloves as protection against the beak. The meal was placed near the hatch, to bring the bird within range. It was disconcertingly easy: Archie obligingly placed one foot into the noose which I had put onto the floor in front of the plate, and, from the safety afforded by the barrier of chicken-wire, the rope was gently pulled tighter until the knot was snug around the bird’s ankle. Archie hardly glanced up from the plate. It continued to swallow each morsel with familiar speed, as though at any moment the remaining food would be confiscated. I waited for it to finish. At the final gulp, Archie turned towards me, stared and blinked, yawned a long, creaking yawn, a gentle kiss of fish breath. I opened the hatch.