Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  Father and mother and child stared at the bird. Harry suddenly hissed loudly, forcing the air like steam. He reached out his right hand and touched the window-pane. With the passage of a heavy cloud, the garden was in darkness. When the sky became clear again, when the cage was washed with moonlight, Archie had gone.

  There was no statue, no skeleton. No cormorant.

  Harry turned from the window. He walked between us as though we were invisible to him, into his own room, and clambered onto the cot. We followed and saw the child tug the blanket over him. In a second, he was sound asleep.

  He slept soundly until morning.

  Ann and I did not.

  III

  Ann was a formidably determined young woman. When she declared that she was leaving with Harry, going to the safety of her mother’s for at least a fortnight so that the boy would forget the cormorant, there was nothing I could do or say that would change her mind. I argued that Archie would be completely secure behind strong wooden bars, that I could clean and feed the bird without releasing it, that I would never take it out for exercise except when the child was asleep upstairs. None of this was enough. Harry’s moonlit communion with the cormorant had shaken her. For a few minutes, possibly longer if the child had been at the window before we had awoken, Archie had been more important to Harry than we were. He had watched and signalled to the cormorant, oblivious to our presence in the room. Ann said she would go back to the Midlands for two weeks and return to Wales for Christmas. In that time, I would be able to make suitable arrangements in the bird’s routine, make the cottage a safer place for our son.

  I drove Ann and Harry down to Caernarfon, where they were booked on the coach to Derby. In spite of my efforts with water and sponge, I could not disguise the smell of the bird in the little van. I swept out the dry droppings and discarded feathers, wiped the windows which were smeared by the bird’s breath and tongue. But the van smelt of Archie. It had pecked holes in the plastic upholstery, pulled out beakfuls of foam rubber, leaving the seats pock-marked, pitted with yellow craters. Under the matting there was sand. A few strands of seaweed clung to the seat belts, there were fish scales like sequins which had come from the cormorant’s feet. Ann rode in silence, with her face near to the open window. She held on to Harry, in the absence of a child’s seat; I felt the tacit criticism, that I had adapted the van to accommodate the bird but never thought to fit a seat for the safe keeping of our son. Harry also sat silent, round-eyed, his nostrils twitching at the strong scents. Throughout the twenty-minute journey, he made no sound. He was alert to the presence of the cormorant.

  In the main square of Caernarfon, we awaited the arrival of the express coach. It was a mild, damp afternoon. The lights came on in shop windows and banks, there were slippery leaves on the pavements from the young syca­mores. Over and around the walls of the castle, the gulls circled, screaming. There was a mantle of droppings, like early snow, on the statues of Lloyd George and Sir Hugh Owen; the stone figures shook their fists furiously at the birds. Harry squirmed in Ann’s arms. She was glad that he was aroused from his trance, once again just a fidgeting toddler. He pointed and shouted at the people in the bus queue. Some of them smiled, others looked away, em­barrassed. When the coach drew up, I kissed Ann on the mouth, wanting her to stay so much that I would have killed that wretched bird if she had asked me to. I was engulfed by my love for her; just for a moment it obliterated everything else. Harry wriggled away when I tried to kiss him, putting up a chubby fist and slapping me on the lips. They boarded the coach. As it pulled out of the square, Ann’s face was close to mine through the perspex. The child was staring over my head. For a second, again there was the mesmerised glitter of dreams on his face. Harry gaped into the distance, his mouth fell open, his right hand came up and was planted on the window. The bus moved out. I shivered at the final impression of the child. Harry was pointing, gesturing wildly over my head, vainly trying to make his mother see, as the bus disappeared around the corner. When I turned, there was nothing which should have fascinated the child so much: no fire engine, no brass band, no soldiers in uniform. Only a few pedestrians on a glistening pavement, no-one familiar. Except . . . no, a grey figure, the figure of an elderly man vanishing into the warmth of a shop. I found myself shivering again. I followed the man, stopping at the shop window. And with a shrug, I saw a complete stranger, a greying stranger, rather blurred in the smoke of a dying cigar.

  I drove back to the cottage in the mountains. I had already decided that, in the absence of Ann and Harry, I could spend the fortnight trying to soothe the spirit of the bird rather than simply confining it more strictly. First of all, it would be freed from its cage, to wander on the length of its leash within the yard and garden. Archie had never shown the slightest inclination to fly: indeed, I doubted whether it was capable of doing so. Probably there had been more lasting damage as a result of its oiling in the Sussex Ouse than anyone had realised. Although it spent a great deal of energy in the boisterous flapping of its wings as a means of threatening a potential hazard, the bird never looked like leaving the ground. Therefore, even on the end of a length of washing-line, the cormorant could not go beyond the limits of the garden. It was unable to flap onto the fences which separated the yard from the neighbours’ gardens. But Archie would be free to explore as far as the stream and swim in the pool at any time. There was no cat or child at risk. Perhaps the bird would surprise one of the rats which visited from the nearby farmyard.

  Furthermore, I had determined that Archie would accompany me without the leash on our outings to the coast or to the quarry. I was sure that the bird would stay close. It remained dependent on me for its feeding, relying on the plates of cat food even after an afternoon’s fishing for dabs.

  So, that evening, in the darkness, I removed one of the panels of wire mesh from the cormorant’s cage. It would be able to come and go at will, to return to its bedding of straw when the cold began to grip in the late afternoons. Archie emerged, blinking at the light from the kitchen window. I put down the tin plate and went back into the cottage. The cormorant was at large in the garden, just as it had been when the cat had gone into the gloom and met the stabs of a weighty beak. Later, before I went up to bed, I checked that Archie was secure. It was breathing evenly under a heap of straw. And in the light of early morning, the gulls came. I pulled close the curtains and slept, with the tumultuous cries surging at my window like the surf on a shingle beach. I would not be a party to the cormorant’s magnetism. When I awoke again, the gulls were silent, as though they had been dismissed.

  I took the bird to the quarries at Nantlle that afternoon, for its first taste of real freedom. Perhaps I should admit that I was looking forward to the two weeks on my own, to see what could be made of the cormorant. The quarries would be better than the beaches for the initial attempt at giving Archie its head: there would be no distracting people. I carried it up the winding staircase of slate and deposited it on the grassy track on top of the grey mountain. On the way, Archie had waved its bill uncharacteristically close to my face, so I was relieved to put the bird down. I was nervous, and possibly my apprehension was transmitted to Archie. When I bent to untie the slip knot from around the cormorant’s ankle, it snaked at my hands, reddening the skin with a nudge of the beak. There was no blood drawn, but an aching contact of bone on bone, the sort of dazzling pain which is felt from a blow on the fleshless surface of the shin. I swore, put up my arm to fend off the bird’s face, stood up and stepped smartly aside when the knot was free, seething and rubbing my fist. Very angry, I strode away towards the empty buildings. As I coiled up the rope, I walked and listened for the sound of the pursuing bird. Archie stretched the tattered wings before springing along behind me. When I turned to look, the cormorant was coming, calling breathlessly lest it lose sight of the green wellingtons.

  I went from room to room with my hatchet, determined to behave as though there was no bird. I worked at
the floorboards and skirting, carting it back to the manager’s office where the telephone sat in one corner. There, I chopped the wood into smaller pieces suitable for kindling and easily packed for the return trip down the steps. I had a rucksack which I filled with the fuel. Deliberately shutting out any thought of Archie, I concentrated on the job until I had amassed enough wood to make the expedition worth­while. The light was fading fast. In the shattered old buildings, the gloom fell like a curtain of purple velvet. There was no sound of the cormorant. I stood still and listened. Somewhere, a door was banging in the wind. A few twigs fell into the grate, the ruin of a jackdaw’s nest. Otherwise, there was silence.

  Taking up the rucksack and the length of washing-line, I went out of the manager’s office and into a long corridor which gave onto a number of other doors. Now it was very dark. It was a mistake to work too long and mistime the passage of dusk in the December afternoon. I wished I had brought a torch with me, but felt that I knew my way around the abandoned building. Stopping sometimes to listen, I stepped slowly from room to room. With the rucksack on my back, I could feel with both hands at the frames of the doorways, find my way into each little office or kitchen. I instinctively ducked to avoid hitting my head on any sagging lintel, calling softly for the bird and clicking my fingers. A rat sent up the dust from an empty room. It was silent again. But when I felt another rat brush past my legs, scrabbling with its feet to get a purchase on the smoothness of my wellingtons, I must have jumped in alarm. I heard my own voice cry out sharply just before I cracked the top of my head on a jutting slate. The darkness was filled with an explosion of shooting stars. Both hands went to my skull, the fingers feeling for blood. A prodigious pain . . .

  And outside, among the rusted wheels of the quarry, the mounds of unwanted slate, only the second-hand lumin­osity of the street lights in the village below gave any definition to the relics of the mine. A breeze moved the heads of the dry nettles. The willowherb trembled.

  I stood still in the enveloping shadows, waited for the fireworks in my head to subside.

  And then there was a sound.

  From along the corridor, the tread of footsteps.

  ‘Archie?’

  Something shifted the remains of a rotten floorboard, back in the manager’s office which I had left behind. My head throbbed and another flare went off before my eyeballs. I turned carefully and faced along the corridor.

  ‘Archie? Come on, Archie . . . come on . . .’

  I strained to see into the gloom. Something was moving towards me, picking its way among the debris. Not the pattering of rats, a weightier tread, irregular and halting over the uneven floor, working its way closer and closer.

  ‘That’s it, Archie . . . come on . . .’ I hissed into the shadows.

  And the footsteps came on.

  Heavier and heavier, crushing the dried-up splinters, scuffing the layers of dust. Louder and louder, the footsteps increased their pressure and volume somewhere within the spangled recesses of my skull. Involuntarily, as they bore down the corridor, I screwed my eyes tightly shut, saw another shooting star blaze across the darkness, and I stepped to one side . . .

  The footsteps went past me, slowly, inevitably, over the rubble of plaster, along the corridor, fading and fading until once more there was only a rumbling, electric silence.

  I remained still. I was frozen in stillness.

  Until the cormorant cried from the yard outside.

  I shuddered myself awake and burst from the building. There was Archie, shaking a cloud of dust from its wings.

  I breathed deeply the freshness of the night. I sucked in the cold air. I gulped and sucked and gasped, to erase from my nostrils the clinging scent of a dead cigar.

  *

  From that time, there was no question that Archie could be trusted to follow me without the leash.

  I stumbled past the bird and along the rough, grassy track to the top of the flight of slate steps. Down I went in the treacherous darkness, down the steps as quickly as possible without waiting or turning for the cormorant. At the bottom, I tore the rucksack from my back, flinging it with the hatchet into the van, and I leapt into the driver’s seat. My hands on the steering wheel were moist and clenched; the knuckles stood up white in the glare of the street lamps. There was no traffic through the village, nobody walking the pavements. I sat in the van under the orange lights. Above me there loomed the mountain of slate, tufted with the feathery silhouettes of rowan. In the daylight, a colony of herring gulls scavenged there. Now, in the wet blackness, it was silent and still. I breathed deeply and studied the backs of my hands, the dust from the quarry offices, the sweat of my race down to the van, the wounds inflicted by Archie. The crown of my head was thudding.

  The village slept.

  And then the tapping on the door.

  Bone against metal. The cormorant was there on the pavement, ringing its beak on the van door. Before I could get out and open up the back (for I did not want to share the cab with the bird), Archie was working to a panic of impatience. It beat the black wings. It reared up, goose-like, to rap on the window. Hoarse cries clanged along the empty street as the bird threw its tantrum. So I waited. I would not jump to attention for Archie, like a flunky, opening the doors of the car like a liveried chauffeur. Until a few lights began to appear in the upstairs rooms and porches of the terraced cottages, I waited and allowed the cormorant to exhaust its anger. Or was it afraid? Ashamed of my own retreat from the quarry, my overwhelming urge to reach the security of the van, I got out. As soon as the back doors were opened, Archie sprang up and folded its wings. We drove back, over the winding road from Nantlle, and stopped outside the cottage. Archie went unhesitatingly to the white crate, once I had attached the line to its ankle again. This time, the bird stood still, it allowed my hands on its feet, ignored my face close to its own. There was no threatening gesture of the beak. Archie disappeared into the box with a few seconds’ shuffling and the rearranging of its angular limbs.

  I too slept.

  Without doubt, Archie was dependent on me. The length of rope was not necessary on our expeditions. For the first time, the cormorant swam free on the Menai Straits as I collected wood on the shore. It set off from the beach in determined fashion, as though late for an appointment, swimming low in the water, the beak tilted slightly up­wards. Away from the land, it began to dive, shooting smoothly from the surface, clear of the water for a split-second, before vanishing without a ripple. Thirty seconds later, I saw the bird reappear. Through my binoculars, I watched the struggle with the dabs, the manner in which Archie tossed them this way and that before it was ready to begin swallowing. Then the working of the throat. Eels were brought writhing to the surface. They coiled them­selves around the cormorant’s bill, defying it to lure them into the rapacious gullet. A big eel wound itself with the snake-neck of its attacker, and Archie was forced to dive again to get free of its sinuous opponent. I watched and I gathered fuel. I trod among the seaweed-slippery rocks, the litter of dead crabs. Lights came on along the further shore of Anglesey. So I sat and saw the sun go down behind the trees of Newborough warren, the gulls rising from the dunes. Behind me, the castle was no longer floodlit in the evenings, for all the tourists had gone. It rose like a boulder from the harbour side, alive with the roosting of jackdaws and starlings, the hysterical laughter of gulls. They too became quiet. Archie came up on the beach, suddenly clumsy on the stones in comparison with its effortless diving, stumbling towards me through the twilit cold. It was holding something in its beak. Together we returned to the van. I put down my collection of wood.

  ‘What is it, Archie? What’ve you got?’

  The bird waddled forward and held up its bill to me. I instinctively withdrew my hands. In the half-light, I could not be sure what Archie was carrying, and I would never really trust the hooked beak. Archie craned forward again and put down a fish by my green wellingtons.
It was a dab, still alive and convulsing, its gristly body arched with cramp. I bent to pick it up.

  ‘Thank you, Archie. Thank you very much.’

  All the way home, the fish kicked on the floor of the van. Archie stood on the passenger’s seat, watched the hedge­rows lit in the headlamps, the trees which fled from the passing of the car. It blinked at the lights of oncoming traffic. Once again the vehicle smelt of the bird. There was weed on the mats, the slime of eels on the windows. Archie left its signature in shit on the upholstery.

  And in the house, only the second time since its arrival in the white wooden crate, Archie came into the living-room. I banked up the fire. I was still cold from the seashore, my feet ached when I took off my boots. The lights of the Christmas tree sparkled in their corner, the flames from the dry and salty log spat upwards to the chimney. Archie stood before the fire, its wings held out a little way from its chest, not stretching them, but draping them out like a fashion model in a Parisian cloak. I put down newspapers to avoid having stains on the rug. But the cormorant slept in the warmth, still standing, its wings mantled and its head turned downwards onto its breast. It slept, while the room was filled with the scents of the Straits. A little steam arose from its plumage and from my thick, woollen socks. My own head began to nod. In the warm room, Archie and I were asleep.

  When I awoke, the cormorant was no longer there. I sprang up and shouted, shivering suddenly from the memory of a dream and glancing at the dying fire. I must have been asleep for hours. In my dream, there had been a frantic pursuit down the slippery staircase of the quarry: something, some grey presence was behind me, there were heavy, relentless footsteps, the whiff of smoke in the dark air . . . But then I was awake, trembling a little in my stockinged feet before the embers in the grate. And Archie had vanished.