Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  There was firewood to be found, too, in the sheds of the mouldering old slate quarries of Nantlle. Here the bird could indulge another of its predatory instincts. I took Archie up to the mines one dismal day at the end of November. When the cormorant baulked at the bottom of the slate steps which climbed to the abandoned workings, I bent without thinking and picked it up under one arm. It was strange, I thought, I had never touched the bird before, always avoiding contact, always manoeuvring it with tugs of the rope or gestures of the boot. This time, Archie submitted to me and sat still in the crook of my arm as I walked up and up the grey slabs which wound between heaps of discarded shards. In a few minutes, we were a hundred feet above the village. From this vantage point, I could see up the valley towards the summit of Snowdon, smothered in its own private blanket of drizzle. On the lake, a flock of gulls was sprinkled like the ash of a forgotten cigarette. To the north, the sea spangled under a patch of sunlight. I put Archie on the ground again and led it over the miners’ track to the empty buildings of the quarry. The place had been deserted by its community for thirty years. It was peopled by the gentle ghosts of the village. In the sheds and the offices were the ordinary relics of the miners: a rusty kettle in a back kitchen; the china cups and saucers of innumerable tea-breaks; the skeleton of a typewriter, with a sheet of yellowing paper in place, as though its owner had been called away from beginning his letter; pencils and rotten elastic bands in the offices; abandoned tools in the warehouses, some with the initials of the owners marked in the wooden handles; the manager’s telephone on his desk, black and ugly as a charred bone. The rain through the roof had rotted the floor-boards. Jackdaws had stubbornly dropped their twigs into the chimneys, persisting in their folly until the debris filled up the grates and overflowed onto the planks. I tiptoed through the empty rooms. Plaster blew from the walls, as fine as flour. Somewhere a door was banging in the wind, hammering its irregular beat, the ghost of an obsolete miner. A rat fled along the corridor.

  And it was the rats which sent a shudder of excitement through the cormorant. Archie bristled like a tom cat, clattered to the end of the rope. The bird flapped its wings and croaked the sea-crow threats. So I tied the leash to a window-frame in order to allow Archie plenty of scope for hunting, while I set to work collecting firewood, the splinters of abandoned pallets, old boards which I could split with my hatchet. In the next room, I could hear the patter of the cormorant’s feet on the floor, its manic cries. I went to the door to watch. It was only a game, it seemed, for the rat which emerged from the skirting was big and brave. Archie had no intention of closing with it. The rat stood on its hind legs, like a pocket grizzly bear, swayed and snickered. The cormorant beat the air with its wings, sending up a cloud of dust. The rat and the cormorant continued their threatening displays until honour was satisfied, and the rat slid back into the darkness. Archie rearranged a few dishevelled feathers. But the bird was curious, it trembled with the thrill of the confrontation and went from room to room as far as the rope would allow, hissing at the holes in the skirting boards. The rats were a challenge. They made the dabs seem tame.

  In spite of my growing confidence with Archie, Ann maintained a wary distance. She wanted nothing to do with the bird, leaving its cleaning and feeding and exercise entirely in my hands. Harry could now walk steadily around the house and showed a lively curiosity in any ornaments, books, pots and pans which his stubby fingers could reach. Ann was forever impressing on me the importance of keeping the boy away from the cormorant. Just because it consented to being stroked and even occasionally being picked up by its guardian did not mean that it would respect the tender little toddler. I knew this, I had seen Archie accelerate to the end of its leash in pursuit of small children on the beach at Caernarfon. Whenever the boy went into the garden, I had to manhandle him, struggling, away from the cormorant’s cage. Harry would learn, we hoped, to count the big black bird among the hazards of his baffling new world, but for the time being he headed straight towards the cage at the slightest oppor­tunity. And at such moments, the child’s face became clouded over, his features seemed blurred in the over­whelming desire to reach out for the cormorant. Harry’s chuckles were ugly as I swung him back into the kitchen, chuckles which were answered by the rasping cries of Archie.

  Ann invited a number of her new friends from the village to see the cottage and the baby. Whenever I had the chance, sometimes to Ann’s obvious irritation, I would proudly mention our unusual pet, and in the backyard our visitors might manage an outburst of appalled laughter at the sight of Archie. So that was the cormorant, a bird like a caricature of goose and crow, the likes of which Ann’s friends had never ever seen, even on the screens of their televisions. It was mischievous, I knew, but I told Ann that the creature was a permanent feature of our life in the village and it did no harm to show it to the neighbours. I did not meet people so easily. I was either bent over the typewriter, feeding Harry in Ann’s absence, or out in the van with Archie. To the neighbours, I must have seemed rather an outlandish figure. They heard the clacking of the typewriter even through the thick walls of the terrace. Over the garden fence, I would be seen with the hose, directing the spray onto the droppings which spattered the slates. They would hear me sometimes talking to the bird, swearing loudly at the tangle of rope, they saw me emerge from the cottage with my ragged pet and lift it by the neck into the back of the van. Children and cats were warned not to stray into the Englishman’s garden. Only the gulls dropped down and cried into the face of the creature in its cage. I realised how odd all this must seem and smiled at the apparent eccentricity. I knew that I was only an escaping schoolteacher who had run from the routine of the suburban Midlands to bash out another ordinary textbook. But meanwhile I would enjoy my role as the man with the cormorant. Archie watched me with an enigmatic eye.

  In the afternoons, when Ann’s visitors were her young friends from the pub kitchen, who would come for endless cups of tea and the comparison of different brands of baby foods, I excused myself and went out with the bird. There was ratting to be done in the quarry offices, firewood to be gleaned from the seashore. The women raised their eye­brows and shrank to the corners of the room as I came through from the yard with Archie under my arm. The cormorant obliged with a snaking of its neck, the issue of fish breath. Usually I could make it through the front door before Archie lifted the stiff feathers of its tail and shot the shit onto the pavement. The women squealed and put their hands to their faces. And then, at last, we could drive away in the peace of the little humming van, into the plantations for easy pickings of pine splinters, or towards the coast. Now Archie could be trusted to sit in the passenger seat beside me. The bird peered through the windscreen. It thrust its head into the slipstream and sucked in the rushing cold air. I always slowed down drastically when we were passing a cyclist, to give him or her the full benefit of seeing the jabbing face of the cormorant at close quarters. There was once the pleasure of unseating an elderly gentleman, who bellowed in horror before toppling from his bicycle into a bed of nettles. Archie and I laughed all the way to Caernarfon. Horses and dogs were also fair game. Archie beat its wings at the window, the great sea-crow on the way to its hunting ground. Any other beasts, on four legs or two, were best to quail before the cormorant. Only I could approach Archie without its frenzied threats.

  *

  The weather softened as December arrived. There was talk of Christmas on the radio, and decorations in the pub. I returned from one outing with the bird, with a shapely little fir tree surreptitiously dug from the plantation. In the evening, at nine o’clock, Ann came home. I had had a good session at the writing, Harry was bathed and fed and ready for bed. There was a lovely fire and a number of logs warming on the hearth, waiting their turn to fuel the flames. Everything was in order. Ann awarded me a congratulatory kiss for my efforts. The cat leapt up from its buzzing sleep and scrabbled its claws on the side of an armchair, so I sent it through to the kitchen. And while
the child sat starry-eyed on the sofa, agog at the brilliance of light and colour, we decorated the tree. There were mugs of soup, I lit a cigar, the tree became a fairy-tale tree and the room glowed. When it was done, the boy slipped from the couch and went unsteadily to the tree. While we watched, breathless and silent, Harry stood and reached out a hand to touch the fresh green needles. He put his face to them, sniffing like a dog. Then he turned, with a smile of ecstasy on his face, a glistening bubble at his mouth and his eyes lit with excitement. It was his Christmas tree, he knew it. Ann felt for my fingers and squeezed them hard. A scratching at the door reminded us that only the cat was missing the festivity, evicted from its customary territory in front of the fire. The smile on Harry’s face froze for a split-second, worked itself into a lop-sided grin. With a hoarse cry, he staggered towards the door.

  He strained on tiptoe to reach the handle, could not quite stretch his fingers high enough, howled over his shoulder for one of us to help.

  ‘Calm down, Harry,’ Ann said, as she got up from the sofa. ‘It’s hardly an emergency. Mummy’s coming . . .’

  The scratching continued. Cursing the cat’s claws and the inevitably marked paintwork, she went to the door. Harry reached up again, failed to touch the knob. I could not tell whether he was weeping or laughing, there was only a series of blurred shouts. Ann swept him up and dumped him back on the sofa. She opened the door, squealed and stepped backwards.

  The cat came into the room, tottering like a drunk. It lurched into the side of an armchair, rolled on its side with claws flailing at the fabric. With another desperate effort, as Ann recoiled and I stood up in dismay, the cat collapsed on the hearth rug. Its face was a mask of blood. With every rasping breath, bubbles of mucous blood blew from the mess where the mouth had been. There were no eyes, only a cowl of scarlet, glistening wet in the firelight. Blood simmered deep in the throat. Only the blubbering move­ment in the middle of the mask betrayed the existence of the cat’s nostrils, there was only blood in a gout where the cat’s face had been. The animal fell on the rug. A long sigh came from the throat, it relaxed suddenly until a series of spurts of urine flowed, strong at first then falling to a trickle over the belly. The cat lay still. But a whisper broke from its chest, its body shuddered. The cat lay still.

  The room was silent.

  Until a log split open with a snap among the flames of the fire. And Harry’s chuckles rang out. His face was brilliant with exhilaration, ablaze with pleasure. He beat his little hands together.

  Ann sprang forward and picked him up. She hurried upstairs with him, her cheeks wet with tears. Harry swivelled his head wildly as he disappeared from the room.

  I swore at length, before I picked up the cat on the coal shovel and moved through into the kitchen. The back door was ajar, the cat had just come in from the yard. The kitchen light lit up the yard and the garden. I left the shovel by the door and went outside. The hatch on the side of Archie’s cage was flapping loose. The cage was empty. The cormorant’s leash trailed down the garden towards the stream. I took up the rope but I did not pull. Running it through my hands, I followed it away from the lights of the cottage, until a resistance was felt in a jerking movement, like the fighting of a fish on an angler’s line. This time, I began to tug, tugging at first, then sending the rest of the rope in a whiplash curve, disappearing in the gloom.

  Archie came out of the shadows.

  The cormorant was all black. It stood up straight and faced me. In the darkness, Archie was all black, its wings held out in a mockery of benediction. The bird came at me in two leaps, brandishing the heavy beak, punishing the night shadows with the power of its wing beats. There was blood on its bill. The broad feet shone red. Among the ruffled feathers of its breast were smears of sappy gore where it had begun to clean its face. I kicked out with my slippered foot and the bird flapped backwards, long enough for me to take up some slack around my wrist and reel it in, retreating to the lights of the kitchen. Archie resisted, skidded forward on slippery feet. As I fumbled with the hatch, the cormorant struck hard at my hand. Swearing, lashing out, I caught the bird’s throat, lifted it up sharply and held it away from me at arm’s length. The feathers flew about my head, the winter night stormed around me in the narrow confines of the backyard, I opened the hatch wide and flung the cormorant inside like a bundle of rags. My hand was bleeding. I secured the cage with more than my accustomed thoroughness and went back into the cottage.

  Slipping the dead cat into the dustbin, I covered it with cold ashes from the previous day’s fire. There was nobody in the living-room. I could hear Ann’s low, musical voice in the bedroom above my head, the answering chuckles of the boy. Before she could come downstairs, I went to work on the stains of blood and urine which the cat, in its death throes, had left on the hearth-rug. Still wet, they shifted easily with vigorous rubbing. The scents of soup, sizzling wood and the needles of pine were gone, obliterated by the ammoniac whiff of disinfectant. The room seemed shabby: the fire was fading, there were brown-ringed bowls and spoons left lying on the carpet, my cigar had gone out, stale and neglected. There was no warm woman or child, no cat. I put some coal on the fire and chucked the butt of my cigar into the grate. When Ann came down, she was a different woman. She was stone, she was ice. She shed no tears for the cat, her cat which she had taken in years before, before she had met me. Ann was drained from her performance with Harry, disguising her nausea for the sake of the child. Unable to speak, she sat in silence and stared at the fire.

  ‘It was Archie, it got out of the cage,’ I said.

  She turned her face to me blankly, as though I had addressed her in a foreign language.

  ‘Your hand . . .’

  I had forgotten my hand as I cleaned up the room. Blood ran down my fingers into the edges of my nails, but it was drying, a blackening crust.

  ‘It got me when I was trying to stick it back in the cage. I’d better wash it . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it,’ and she stood up, drawing me with her into the kitchen. I let her put my hand under the tap and clean it with soap. There were two ragged cuts half an inch long which she dabbed with a stinging disinfectant. She ignored my wincing, she was looking through the window into the area of light, watching the cage for a sign of movement. I said nothing, just followed the direction of her eyes into the shadows of the backyard. She patted the hand dry. Turning back to the living-room, she said. ‘What about Harry?’

  ‘The bird’s locked up now. It can’t get out.’

  ‘The cat,’ she said. ‘Look at your hand. What about the boy?’

  I paused before replying.

  ‘We’re stuck with Archie for as long as we want to live in this cottage. The thing could be with us for five or six years . . .’

  ‘That’s six years of watching Harry keeps right away from it. Even in the cage, it’s not safe. He could open it already, you know how inquisitive he is, he has to touch everything. It’s natural. If we’ve got to keep the filthy creature, get it somewhere secure, away from the garden.’

  But we both knew that, under the conditions of Uncle Ian’s will, the cormorant must remain as part of the household, on the premises. The executor would certainly see to that. I could only assure Ann that I would reinforce the wire mesh of Archie’s cage or erect a second barrier to deter the child from approaching the cormorant.

  The tears came. She sobbed like a child for the death of her pet. When the tears dried up, she swore at the memory of Uncle Ian, a frustrated malicious pervert, she rained curses on the cormorant. Struggling to rise from the sofa, to storm through the kitchen and into the backyard, she reached for the poker as a weapon of revenge. I prised it from her fingers and replaced it by the fireside. She breathed deeply, some colour returned to her lips. I held her close.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll fix the cage. Don’t worry now . . .’

  We went upstairs. Harry was sound asleep, h
is cheeks rosy pink, his little blond head framed in the whiteness of the pillow. Outside, the night was still mild, a gentle December after the bitterness of the November frosts. All was quiet: no wind, no rain, no traffic, only the village which hugged itself to sleep under the slopes of Snowdon. We went to bed. Ann called out for the cat in the last seismic efforts of lovemaking. I watched the grimaces of her face in the half-light, saw the tears run into her mouth and onto the lines of her throat. She gripped me hard, I loved her with all my strength. She released a long sigh, a whisper broke from her chest. She shuddered and was still. Together we lay in the hot confusion of our sheets. With my hand I wiped a bubble of saliva from her lips, leaving a trace of blood from my injured fingers. Ann moved away, touching me unconsciously, like a young animal . . .

  *

  ‘Wake up, wake up! Look, it’s Harry . . .’

  I sat up with a start at Ann’s frantic whispers, and rubbed my eyes. A moon had risen, filling the bedroom with a strong blue light. We were wide awake and watching the little figure, pyjama-clad at the foot of our bed. The child was oblivious to us. Harry had come from his cot in the next room, walked to the window, to stare into the garden behind the cottage. He did not turn towards us, even with the commotion of our waking. With his hands on the sill, he leaned forward to peer down into the backyard. Moonlight bathed his face. His eyes narrowed a little at the gleam. Harry concentrated on his object in the yard.

  We crept up behind the child. Still Harry was unaware of us. We looked over him, at the blue-black garden, the purple shadows. The cage was lit by the light of steel.

  Archie too was awake. The cormorant stood in the full silver beams of the moon, head and beak erect, wings outstretched. Utterly motionless. Utterly black. Not a tip of a feather trembled. It was an iron statue, a scarecrow. It was a torn and broken umbrella, a charred skeleton.