The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Bugger!’

  I rubbed the shin vigorously with both hands. There was blood on my trousers and sock. Archie waited, spreadeagled in front of the crate, ready to defend its territory.

  Ann moved closer to the wire mesh, from where she could see behind the cormorant to the overturned box and the threads of straw which had fallen from it. As I advanced again and the bird angled down its writhing neck to aim low and avoid my grabbing hands, she saw into the thick bedding of the crate. There was Harry, snug and warm in the cormorant’s nest. The little blond head stirred in the straw. His face looked out, calm and serious.

  ‘Harry, Harry! Come out of there! Come to mummy!’ The tears fell faster.

  Mr Knapp was shouting. ‘The kid’s in the bloody crate!’ He ran into the cage behind me, ducking through the loose section. ‘I’ll sort out the bloody bird … you get the boy!’

  Pushing me to one side, he raged towards the cormorant. It flailed the beak and caught the dangling end of the bandage, flapped backwards into the corner with the unravelling red and white strip. With an incoherent bellow of anger, he bore down on the bird. He hopped forward and held up the other foot as his only weapon. Twice, three times the beak struck the thick rubber sole, bounced off. There was a length of bandage from his hand to the bird, wound around his outstretched leg and around the cormorant’s neck, like a bizarre Christmas decoration, a ribbon of white splashed with red. Keeping Archie at bay in the corner, he yelled over his shoulder, ‘Get the crate! Harry’s in the crate!’ But I could only move slowly, as though my limbs were weighted down. My mind was nearly stopped, something pressed on me and made everything slow. The voices in my head were deep and distorted, as incomprehensible as the voice on a tape recorder which is playing too slowly. Somewhere, someone’s finger was pressing on the record, making the voices grind and limp. There was no sense in them. In the crate? Why should Harry be in Archie’s crate? What did this man mean: in the crate? I felt a shove in my back and moved forward. There was Ann by my side. Her face was very close to mine, her mouth was moving, opening and closing, she was shouting but I couldn’t hear … only the rumble of voices, as though I were underwater and the only sound was the thunder of waves breaking overhead. I watched my own hands as they gripped the edges of the crate, I was a spectator, the hands lifted the box upright, there were my wife’s hands too, next to mine, they were half lifting and half dragging the crate out of the cage. Still the crashing of surf, the grumble of underwater voices. Outside the cage … the man was hopping to the door, with the black cormorant stuck like a leech to his leg, some filthy bloodsucking bat fixed on his flesh, leather wings, leathery feet, an unblinking eye, that beak … outside the cage. I found I was surfacing, it was lighter, my head cleared the surf …

  Ann was moaning. ‘Harry, Harry, Harry, my little Harry …’

  She had lifted him out of the straw-filled box. She stroked his blond hair and picked off the threads of straw which stuck to his clothes. Then her hand wiped her own eyes, dabbed at her streaming nostrils. ‘Let’s have you inside.’ She went in, with Mrs Knapp.

  Mr Knapp was fixing the door of the cage. ‘The crate,’ I said weakly, ‘What about its crate? Archie will be cold tonight if it hasn’t got its crate in the cage …’

  The man stared at me, muttered something which I couldn’t hear, and bent to examine his torn and bloodstained trousers. There was blood on his hand again. The bandage was in the cage, draped like a scarf around the cormorant’s neck.

  ‘Look at your leg,’ said Mr Knapp. ‘Let’s go in.’

  And so to the living-room for an examination of wounds. The two women were unhurt. Mrs Knapp was numb with the inability to understand and feel. She sat before the fire, quite numb. All those cries, and the swearing, her husband soaked to the skin and streaked with blood; the child lying still in a white wooden crate. And that desperate bird. It was like one of those daft plays she sometimes watched on television, a lot of swearing, and women crying. Ann was quivering still, with anger and shock. Her eyes were swollen. She washed her face in the bathroom and combed her hair. But she looked as though she would explode again at any time into another torrent of tears, as though she would have to stand up and pace the room to ventilate her pent-up rage. Lying back in the armchair, with Harry sitting still on her lap, she took a series of deep breaths which set the butterfly dancing on her throat. There had been the awful splashing of Mr Knapp in the black water of the stream, the calmness of Harry’s face as he looked at her out of the straw of the cormorant’s crate: the idea of the child walking through the kitchen, into the yard, to unfasten the door of the cage and step inside … to clamber into the box and snuggle down among that stinking straw. She roused herself and shook the boy. ‘Why, Harry? Why, why, why?’ But her hissing questions were ignored. Harry stared at her and blinked very slowly, like a lizard.

  Mr Knapp dressed his wounds. His wife watched him, speechless. He rolled up his wet trousers above the knee. There were four or five gashes on one leg, the leg he had proffered as a target for the cormorant, none of them very deep: holding his foot up to the bird, he had deflected the blows with his shoe. He dabbed them with disinfectant. A fresh bandage was put around his hand, once the bleeding was staunched. Since midday, his broken finger had turned blue. Once the holiday was over, it would need the attention of a doctor. The single jab which Archie had delivered to my shin was the most severe wound of the evening. It had struck where the flesh was thinnest, right on the bone. My trousers and my sock and shoe were covered with blood. I started to clean the opening, but when I saw that the bone was exposed under a loose flap of skin, I shivered and stopped. I just laid the skin back again, closed my eyes. It hurt.

  Harry seemed unaffected. Once Ann had swept him off to the bathroom to sponge away the smell of the straw and the pungent slime of the cormorant, the little boy seemed to shed the uncanny vigilance of the inquisitive rodent and become a child again. He sat down on the hearth-rug, sweet-smelling in his bright pyjamas, and busied himself with his toys. There was firelight in his hair, the shadows of the flames on his cheeks. He looked up at us, four bewildered adults, and smiled an innocent smile. There was nothing on his face or in his manner which recalled his union with Archie. Only, the golden power of the fire seemed to envelop him.

  The Knapps stood up and suggested that they should go. They had had an enjoyable and eventful Christmas Day, a lovely meal, perhaps a little too much to drink in the afternoon: something of a fright that evening, but fortunately no real harm had been done. She buttoned up her coat and made her speech of thanks while her husband waited in silence. He looked faintly ridiculous, his trousers wet, the clumsy bandage leaking again, and his expression of ferocious bafflement. With a nod, Ann took Mrs Knapp into the kitchen, holding Harry to her breast. I rose stiffly from my armchair.

  ‘I’m very sorry about your hand,’ I said, ‘and about all that panic this evening. I’m glad you were here though. Thank you for your help.’

  I was going to repeat my earlier invitation to the fishing expeditions, but hesitated, deciding that it might not be the appropriate moment. Maybe when the finger was mended.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ replied the wounded man. ‘I don’t envy you having that thing in the backyard, I must admit. Bloody poisonous, in my opinion. Amazing that it didn’t go for the boy, when you stop to think about it. Lucky lad, your Harry.’ He added, ‘Get that leg sorted out quickly. It needs a good clean, for a start.’

  The women came back into the living-room. I could tell from Ann’s expression, the pinched brow, that they had had a short but conclusive woman’s talk. Mrs Knapp made a little sign to her husband, to which he responded with a similar twitch of the head. Such are the codes perfected between husband and wife. She spoke directly to me.

  ‘Ann’s decided to come over the road and stay with us tonight, with Harry, of course.’ The woman cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know whether you’re at all interested in my opinion, but there it is anyway.
I think you should get rid of that bird as soon as possible. If you didn’t have a baby boy,’ and she raised her eyebrows in a gesture towards Harry, who was staring owlishly at her from his mother’s arms, ‘then it might be different. But it’s just not …’ Her speech dried up. After a deep breath, she continued. ‘So Ann and Harry are coming over the road with us tonight. Give you time to get that bird sorted out, or something.’ To her husband, ‘All right, dear? We’ve got the spare room. It’s all ready.’

  I began to speak. ‘Look, Ann, what’s the … ?’

  But she silenced me with her outburst and the flaring of colour in her cheeks. Her eyes crackled.

  ‘No! I’m frightened! I’m going to be sick if I stay anywhere near that thing any longer …’ She was barely able to control the shaking of her voice. ‘Please, love, I can’t talk about it. I’m going to …’

  And she ran upstairs with Harry.

  ‘So whose bloody idea was this? Eh? What’s all this whispering in the kitchen? Eh? Come on, Mrs bloody Knapp, who suggested it?’

  ‘Calm down, my lad,’ interrupted her husband. ‘No need to use that tone. We’re all shocked, my wife as well.’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ I shouted, turning to the stairs just as Ann came down. She and Harry had their coats on. She was carrying the boy with one arm and a small case in the other.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ I was saying. ‘The boy’s alright, isn’t he? Not a scratch on him! So where do you think you’re going?’

  She pushed past me to the front door.

  ‘Please can we go now?’ she said to the Knapps. They went out. Ann turned back to me. ‘Can’t you see anything? Haven’t you seen anything? Think about it, my love, think about it all. Not just what happened this evening. I’m frightened. I don’t understand it …’

  She kissed me quickly and stepped to the door. It closed. I heard her footsteps on the pavement, over the road, the key in the front door of the Knapps’ house, their door opening, shutting.

  Silence.

  I was left alone in a silent house, with the lingering image of Harry’s face over Ann’s shoulder as they went out: the face of a cherub, scarred with a manic grin.

  Christmas Day. Six o’clock in the evening.

  Outside, darkness and the start of another soaking of fine drizzle. Dirty snow.

  Inside, a room full of all the gew-gaws of a Christmas at home: the fire, the tree, the toys, the sherry, the decorations. But all spoiled by two incongruous elements: the absence of people, the pervasive stink of antiseptic.

  I turned off the main light of the room and put another log on the fire. I turned off the lights of the Christmas tree. Filling my glass with sherry, I sat down on the rug and waited for the flames to flicker around the dry wood. I wondered for a moment whether I was going to cry. I did not.

  Presently, the fresh log was ablaze. Three times I refilled my glass. In the firelight, I examined again my wounded shin. The blood on my trousers was dry, the fabric lined with a black crust. Blood was still oozing from the gash. My sock and shoe were sticky. The flap of skin was stuck down in the congealing scab. I knew that the silver glimmer of bone lay just beneath. It had stopped hurting. Quite soon I would have the courage and the will to clean the wound and anoint it with the stinging disinfectant, after another drink perhaps. More sherry, less pain. What a brilliant discovery, I thought. It made me smile. So I could still make something of the remaining hours. Bugger the tree, the hysterical wife and her bloody inquisitive child, bugger the Knapps, bugger that bird. Another glass of sherry. Pulling up my trouser leg again, I poured a few drops onto the scab. It stung, but I heard myself laugh with a braying sort of laugh as I rolled backwards to lie on the hearth-rug. Why did the sherry work as an anaesthetic at one end and sting like a scorpion at the other? It was magic, the kind of magic I didn’t want to understand. Some philistine like bloody Mr Knapp would know the answer, or my clever very sensitive wife. The women thought they knew everything: they had their whispered debates in the kitchen, like a coven of witches, only to emerge as coherent as a school of bottle-nosed dolphins. And there was Mrs Knapp suddenly taking charge, calm and efficient like a staff nurse from one of her mid-morning soap operas. My voice sang out in an imitation of her ludicrous advice: ‘I think you should get rid …’ A toast was in order, this Christmas Day. I raised my glass to the flames and admired the jewels of light which sparkled from the sherry. Better stand up, do it properly, but I staggered before the hearth, unsteady on my feet. And there, with blood on my hands from the exploration of my wound, I proposed the toast.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury: be upstanding. To Ann, my supersensitive wife, much cleverer and more sensitive than I could ever be. To Harry, who can’t keep his pestering fingers to himself. To the bloody Knapps, one of them pounding the endless trails of the forest, the other stranded like a mermaid washed up in front of the telly. And, of course, to Archie, the mighty hunter, the vampire bat, the sea-crow, phalacrocorax carbo … Ladies and gentlemen, a toast: may they all be undone. God save the Queen.’

  Draining my glass, I toppled back on the rug. Again, as I looked into the flames of the fire, I wondered whether I was going to cry. Not quite. Not yet.

  The bottle was empty. The last drop clung for a second to the rim, before falling onto the oozing shin. This time, it did not sting. I got up by pulling myself onto the arm of the sofa, sat there until I was confident that I could negotiate the next stage of the operation, stood up abruptly and went to the front door. I took my coat from the peg and put it on. There was my wallet in the pocket, and a box of matches. That was all I needed. Why should I sit in the cottage on Christmas evening, with nothing to look at but the embers of the fire, nothing to talk to but the collective spectre of my old staffroom, nothing left to drink? I would celebrate. There remained a few hours of Christmas Day.

  Between the cottage and the pub, I walked slowly and sucked in the cool air. It was drizzling, nothing more. Glancing up at the windows of the Knapps’ house as I went by, I saw the movement of figures behind the curtains, the flicker of a fire or, more likely, their television. I snorted, turned up my collar and walked on. Outside the pub, the road was lined with cars. Shouts and laughter drifted to me and past me, vanishing in the light rain which speckled my glasses. Snowdon was invisible. The stream grumbled under the bridge, came out on the other side of the road with the whoosh of an express train. Much too rough for Archie. But I would bring Harry one afternoon and show him the foaming torrent. He’d like it. I looked through the windows of the pub before going in. It was crowded, I would have to wrestle my way to the bar, through the smiles and the smoke and the season’s greetings. Mercifully, the Christmas carols were muffled by the noise. When I opened the door, a wave of sound broke over my head.

  Somehow I found my way to the bar. I had the impression that, rather than having to elbow and jostle through the barrier of people, they moved aside, I seemed to cleave them apart and there I was, leaning on the soggy beer mats, looking down at a number of filthy ashtrays and beer glasses. The eyes of the drinkers who were sitting in the lounge were drawn to me, sucked along by the draught of cold air which followed me from the door. My coat was damp with drizzle, my spectacles immediately steamed up. The eyes arrived at my bloodstained trousers. Someone was pointing, I heard the whispers: ‘Jesus, look at his foot as well … Does he know? … Leave him alone, of course he knows …’ My drink stood on the bar, I paid for it and drank half the pint in a couple of gulps. Then I belched loudly, tried hard for a minute to summon a fart by clenching the buttocks and the stomach muscles: nothing. Meanwhile, I drained the rest of the beer and ordered another. Quite a successful belch just then, deep and resounding, a belch that Harry Belafonte would have been proud of. I contrived to display the gory foot to its best advantage. Bending down, I hitched up the trouser leg to the knee and had the satisfaction of hearing one or two gasps from the onlookers. The bleeding had stopped. The entire shin was caked in b
lood. I dropped the trouser leg and returned to my drink. My industry was rewarded with the fart, only a squeak, but enough to attract the sneers of a pretty girl who was standing nearby. The beer was slipping down well. Business at the bar was furious, I was trapped there by an everchanging wall of customers. There were faces very close to mine, they grinned and breathed within a few inches of me. Some of these people spoke to me, wishing me a Happy Christmas, but my tongue refused to respond so I simply nodded. I heard somebody mention Ann, and Harry’s name was whispered. For a while, I thought I could hear myself speaking, but it was like listening to a poor recording of my own voice, it seemed distant, disembodied, as one’s voice sounds different through the machinery of a tape recorder. I watched a hand move slowly towards my glass and lift it up, realised it was my own hand, and the glass came closer to my lips. The girl behind the bar, very attractive but terminally Welsh, refilled the glass and helped herself to money from my wallet. It was suddenly noisier, there was a rush of noise as though one of those bloody jets was hurtling overhead, then it faded away. Laughter and shouts, the clattering of glasses, some singing, the muted tinkle of the carols, the pinging of the till: the sounds came and went, gently and regularly, like surf on a shingle shore. Someone knocked against the shin, I heard a voice, the voice from the tape recorder, say ‘Bugger . . quite loudly, and there was a stab of pain. And then all the voices in the bar joined in a crashing wave. The hand brought the glass once more to my mouth, and I demolished another pint. Before I could extricate my wallet from my pocket, the replacement was foaming in front of me, and this time the barmaid waved away my money with a gesture towards the crowd. I turned slowly, shifting my stiffening leg carefully among the feet of the other revellers, and I nodded vaguely in the direction the girl had indicated. But it was impossible to make out and recognise the individual faces: there was only a cloud of smoke which drifted around the heads and shoulders of a babbling throng. Facing the bar, I found that the crowd had squeezed even closer, so that my essential prop, the spot where my elbow had been wedged for support, was out of reach. I could only just wriggle my hand through to fetch my pint. The loss of blood was affecting me more, the rushing in my ears unsteadied me a bit and I gripped a nearby arm, a strong one fortunately, for it held me up although I lost a quarter of my drink. Forcing my way back to the bar, I lodged myself against a wooden pillar. That was better: security of tenure, and the sweet scent of a girl’s neck a few inches from my face. And there was my glass, miraculously full to the brim once more, the barmaid signalling into the crowd. Jesus, this was a feast … and I waved an arm to show my appreciation of the benefactor. The pall of smoke billowed to the ceiling, trickles of smoke from so many lips and mouths, a surging mass of faces in front of me, all of them grey and wreathed with smoke. But somewhere among them, a generous soul, the anonymous donor of my Christmas beer. I waved again. I heard my voice, muffled with smoke, and turned to the safety of the bar. It was noisy, everything heaved around me, the girl’s neck drew close and then receded, my glass was weaving about in front of my lips, it was so bloody hot too … I drank most of the beer in one long draught: once the glass was fixed to my mouth it seemed sensible to keep it there instead of going to all the trouble of retracing the route to the bar and to the lips again with all the twists and turns of one of those heat-seeking missiles … then the hand released the glass, I heard it smash on the floor. For a second, I had the clear impression of the girl’s neck rushing towards my face and striking me hard on the bridge of the nose, and I was toppled from the bar among a jungle of legs and feet and the shards of my beer glass. Shouting, a lot of shouting. But essentially it was quieter and cooler down there, as though I had ducked my head below the crashing surf to a less chaotic world. I would have stayed there longer, except that some meddling do-gooders were lifting me and manhandling me towards the door. A delicious taste of fresh air … my head reeled and there was a splendid fireworks display for a moment … and I was sitting outside the pub on a damp wooden bench.