The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Don’t take his coat off.’ It was Ann’s teacher voice. ‘Let’s all go out in the snow. It’s so lovely and clean out there. Get your boots on …’

  I was soon wrapped up in my jacket and scarf and gloves. Ann fixed Harry’s hood so that his face was tightly framed with fur. She put on a hat whose flaps folded over her ears and buttoned under her chin. I felt the fleeting regret which sent a tremor through my belly: that her throat, with its marble shadows and the quivering of a hot pulse, should be covered up. I would undo those buttons myself when we came in from the snow, and see that the throat was still warm.

  So, to the cleansing by snow …

  The three of us, encased in our winter clothing, staggered out of the front door. In the middle of the road, the snow was shallowest where there was nothing against which the drifts could form. We went crunching through the silent village. I had Harry in my arms. Ann’s hand was snuggled in my pocket, like a hibernating vole. Passing the pub, we heard the cries of the persistent revellers, the few who had walked from their houses in the village. I grimaced at the smells of beer and smoke. Ann noticed and squeezed my .arm. ‘Naughty man,’ she said. The bench on which I had been sitting in the previous night’s drizzle was almost buried in the snow. We continued by, turning through a gap in the stone wall of the roadside and wading into the drifted snow of the woodland. I put Harry down. The child was light enough to negotiate the snow without sinking more than a few inches, and, with an expression torn between horror and delight, he made his first tentative steps over the smooth crust. When he fell, his tiny gloved hands vanished into the drift and his face was forced on the snow. He rolled over, spitting. There were crystals in the fur of his hood and spangled in his lashes. Harry was going to cry, but he looked up at our expectant faces and laughed instead. Ann’s hands flew to his cheeks to brush away the flakes, but he fought himself upright and continued his exploration. In his boots, mittens and padded suit, the child strutted up and down the sugary hills of snow. More than a dozen yards away, he would turn to see us, to check that we were included in his brand new universe. Yes, there we were, sitting together on the cold dry boulders of the wall.

  ‘Hey, young Titus!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t go too far or I’ll be forced to send your mother out looking for you!’

  Harry spun around at the voice, grinned and clapped his hands. The snow flew from his gloves and settled like tinsel on his red cheeks.

  Onwards through the plantation. When we reached the top of the hillside, we could see all the way along the valley and glimpse the grey turrets of Caernarfon castle. Somehow, the whiteness gave an unusual clarity to the day, in spite of the leaden sky. As the road wound into the distance, full of snow but clearly distinguished by its lining of walls and hedges, it snaked between the hills, appearing and disappearing. Trees and telegraph-poles stuck up like the bristles of a hedgehog. All things which were not woolly with snow were black or grey: there were no colours in the landscape. I set Harry down from his vantage point on my shoulders, and he discovered the cones and needles of the fir trees, digging his mittens deeply into the snow. He snarled at the cold which soaked his fingers. Then we waded over the ridge, with the village just below us. A spiral of grey smoke was rising from the chimney of our cottage, all the roofs were white, the row of houses was the decoration on a Christmas cake. Further along the ridge, we looked down into the gardens, simply squares of a uniform whiteness, very clean. Everything was clean. We could hear the rumbling of the stream, but the water was shrouded in its tunnels and chambers of ice. The air grew suddenly colder with the advancing of the afternoon, the sky began to frown. Gripping me by the hand, Ann led the way down an opening in the forest, where the snow was not so deep between the black trees. Darkness soaked into the day, soaked and spread like the blooming of ink on blotting paper; it seemed to issue from the trees, was exhaled from the sky, from the ground itself, seeping upwards through the blanket of snow. And before we could reach the road again, we saw the streetlights flicker: blossoms of orange flowers in a monochrome garden. Half-past four. Without speaking, we made our crunching way past the pub, watched our own footsteps set off into the woods. Harry too was silent. The village was cast in gold by the lamps on the pavements. Every sound was muffled.

  The cottage windows gazed at the passers-by, wideeyed and tearful. The sky went blue-black with a snap, and the stars were there, as brittle and bright as broken glass.

  Home again.

  I set about refuelling the fire with two logs of horse chestnut, thinking too about the flaps of Ann’s hat, the heat of her throat after the cold walk. I began to undo the buttons of Harry’s coat. But the day was still Ann’s, she maintained the advantage.

  ‘Leave his coat,’ she said to me, as I knelt with the child on the hearth-rug. ‘We’re going out for a bit longer yet.’

  Harry had resumed his mesmerised scrutiny of the flames which trembled around the white wood. He stared into the fire as though he and the yellow tongues of light were the only living things in the room.

  ‘Into the backyard,’ she continued. ‘We’re still not completely clean.’

  Her expression silenced the beginnings of my questions.

  ‘Is there a drop of petrol in that spare can? Get it from the car …’

  The kitchen light flooded the backyard with brightness as it fell on the covering of snow. There was no sign that anyone had been out there that day. My work with the coal shovel had been obliterated. One corner of the crate was visible. Ann carried Harry outside and put him down in the snow. When I came back with the petrol can from the van, she was shovelling the snow from around the cormorant’s crate. Harry blinked in the light, rather dazed by the cold and the surrounding darkness and the spectacle of his mother’s digging in the drifts. She stood back with the shovel in her hand, her face aglow with the effort, very lovely in the snow-filled garden. Once more, the crate was exposed. I put down the can, stepped forward and shifted the crate away from the wall and into the centre of the clearing. She glanced at the can.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said briskly, and carried on without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Matches …’ I said, ducking back into the kitchen.

  Through the window I watched her, the tumbling of golden fuel from the mouth of the can onto the white wooden box. Outside, I took the can from her. I poured the petrol into the straw. Shuddering convulsively, I shut out the dazzling image of the previous night’s dream. Harry was watching from the kitchen door, a bland smile forming on his mouth. The straw was silent and still. I did not reach down into it.

  ‘Pick the boy up. Keep well away.’

  So, to the cleansing by fire.

  I struck a match, allowed it to flare up between my cupped hands, and tossed it into the crate. It went out. Again. Again it fizzled in the wet straw. But, the third time, the fire began.

  One moment the yard was white in the glare of the kitchen light, and then it flamed into a furnace of reds and golds and yellows. The fuel in the crate went up in a mighty whoosh of fire. Blades of straw flew out with the torrent of golden sparks. The box burned with a silver fire of its own, the flames running from bottom to top and fighting like a nest of lizards. The flimsy wood buckled and split. Out spilled the straw, a crackling ant-hill of writhing heat. The crate lost its shape, became a ball of flames as the sharp lines of wood were consumed. I watched with my hand to my forehead as a shield against the glare, the fingers of my other hand locked in Ann’s. She also stared, and held fast to Harry. He was impassive at first, as though the explosion of colour after the blacks and whites of the forest was an unspeakable blasphemy to which there was no appropriate reaction. But when the straw fell out and the box was no longer a box but a thing alive with fire, he wailed and convulsed against his mother’s breast. Both his hands were flung towards the blaze. His eyes bulged and he shouted in a language of strange words. He wrestled like a weasel in her arms. The purple sky and the bitterness of the air retreated from the flames, but Harry lu
nged towards them. The fire was his. He wanted it, he raged for it.

  What happened then seemed to last for ever, but was probably over within a minute. The garden was rocked by the explosion of the petrol can which was ignited by the trickle of burning straw. In that second, white fire came spewing across the yard towards us, rolling over the ground and over our feet like water. We leapt away, but the garden was full of the shrieks of the flames, there was silver fire in our eyes and in our ears. The air contracted around us. I remember only the hurtling noise of the explosion and the brilliance of light. And a vision of Harry, escaping from his mother’s arms.

  He dropped to the ground, cat-like among the blaze. With a shout, he sprang forward, across the pools of shallow fire, over the dancing puddles of spilled petrol, and immersed himself in the flames of the white wooden crate. Engulfed by the fire, the little figure was tearing and rummaging at the remaining panels of the box. As I waded after him, he tossed handfuls of burning straw into the air, plunged into the bottom of the crate. Into the fire I followed him, but he was a shrinking shape among the heat. There were tongues of flame on my trousers, sparks in my hair and beard. Involuntarily, I retreated in a series of ungainly leaps. My hectic hands beat at my clothes. Beside me, Ann was immobile, staring with dead eyes into the searing blaze. Again I went into the fire, again my body was beaten back, my hands a-flutter at the pain of burning skin. We could only watch, mesmerised into apathy. As the flames diminished, the blackness of the garden grew around us. There came a sigh from the shrinking lake of fire, there was no definition of shapes amid the lessening blaze. No crate, no cormorant, only the incandescent figure of a little boy. He was changing, in colour and outline, as he continued to scrabble into the seat of the fire. In the centre of the orb of billowing flame, the child too was shrivelling, molten, blackened, issuing twisted plumes of smoke as he folded and collapsed like an exhausted candle. He crumpled into the hottest remaining core of the blaze, his figure replaced by a mushrooming pall of vapour, pungent with the stench of scorched flesh. The air crackled, fizzled and hissed with the explosion of many blisters. Gaping like the mouth of a sightless fish, the fire sucked. It fell inwards on itself. Its muffled implosion was the belch of a glutton.

  Ann sank to the ground. Unconscious, asleep, she fled the horror of the funeral pyre, safer, perhaps, in a world of dreams.

  For myself, uncertain of what I should have been doing, utterly dazed and dazzled by the fire, I trod stupidly among the embers. I kicked away a few relics. My feet shuffled through blackened wood and charred cloth. They turned over the blistered bones of bird and boy. I found the shovel in my hands once more. From the corners of the garden I brought snow and sprinkled it on the remains. They sizzled. Smoke rose where the flames had been. Working faster, I came again and again with shovelfuls of snow, my eyes blurred with tears and the bitterness of ashes. All the air was heavy with the reek of burning.

  Until the blackness of the fire was hidden with a mantle of immaculate white.

  EPILOGUE

  With the coming of the thaw, the garden was emptied of snow. The stream was black and vicious with the melting of ice. I sat in the cottage and shuddered at the shrieking of the gales. In January and February, the mountains had groaned under the weight of snow, each night had stalked up the valley and suffocated the hillside with its chaotic darkness, until the rains came and the days were grey with the soaking they received. The country drowned. The fields sucked at the legs of the livestock. Mud, more rain, a quagmire of mists and drizzle: forever the sound of water, from the sky, from the roaring gullies, from the roadsides, and flying from every blackened branch and blade of grass. A landscape of greyness and water. The winter spent itself in March by assaulting the windows of the cottage and throwing soot down the chimney. A few slates flew off the roof. Water crept under the doors. The building dug its claws into the land, gripped and waited. The relics of winter faded.

  Nothing remained of the cormorant, not a speck of ash or the grain of a singed feather. Harry was gone. Ann was still unconscious when they came to take her from me; her destination, in a welter of flashing blue lights and powerful sirens, was never clearly explained. Alone in the cottage, I stared into the fire, gripped the arms of my chair and flinched at the tumult of storms. I waited.

  But, with the end of March, once more the sun appeared, splashing a little watery colour onto the mountainsides. Like a great big dog which has come running up the beach after its frolic in the surf, the mountains shook themselves and sent a final shower of rainbow spray into the valleys. Then they relaxed. A little steam rose from their backs under the touch of the sun. Still the stream bellowed. But there was a prickling of green on the hedgerows, sparks of yellow in the grass, the daffodils and primroses.

  It was spring.

  The sunshine beckoned me into the garden. I would stride over the slates and sniff the air, stand and watch the hectic water of the stream. Alone in the garden. Until the gulls came …

  They descended on me like the snow which had choked the garden at Christmas. I sniffed the tingling air and braced myself with my feet apart, simply stared into the sky and waited. No sounds, no cries or whispers.

  But the gulls came.

  At first a solitary bird came skimming over the plantation and peered down at the garden. Its laughter rang hollow against the hillsides. Until another gull appeared, and another, and the hysterical mirth increased. I stood still, my face upturned. And my sky became a blizzard of the whirling white birds. They dived towards me, their throats gulping with the effort of screams. Their wings made the air quiver. A patter of droppings rained on the slated path and settled like tears on my cheeks. I never raised my hands to wipe the tears away: I let them trickle to the corners of my mouth.

  Then, when the turmoil was too much and in my head there was nothing but the snowstorm of gulls, I could dismiss them. I simply dropped the butt of my cigar and ground it out with my heel on the slates of the garden. The birds wheeled upwards. They wept a little and were gone.

  The snows had vanished, for the time being. In the garden it was spring again.

  Spring again, for the time being.