Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

I shivered.

  ‘What was he looking at? Did you see anything, anybody he could have recognised?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling. He’s only a toddler. They don’t recognise people, there were just crowds of people, shoppers, pedestrians . . .’

  I added nothing, remembering the child’s frantic gestures from the coach in the square in Caernarfon, my own puzzled pursuit of an elderly stranger.

  ‘And once we got home again, I mean to Mum and Dad’s, he went back into his shell. Like someone had switched off his electric current. He sat on my knee like a ventriloquist’s dummy, except that I couldn’t make him perform. Mum and Dad got a bit huffy about it, because he wouldn’t go near them and wouldn’t show them how he could walk.’ Ann sighed. ‘So, what with all that and being cross-examined by the neighbours about you and the cottage and the village, I just wanted to come back.’ She giggled and nestled up to me. ‘And if they’d come in and seen you cavorting in the nude with your bloody cormorant, all firelit and gory, lost to the world in some smutty fetish . . .’

  But I was not listening. I felt cold.

  ‘Come on, my little Harry,’ I said. ‘Bedtime for you.’

  The boy stirred in my arms. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, coming awake. He looked around the room and frowned, as though he was seeing it for the first time. His eyes were cold as pebbles. Harry squinted at Ann and then at me, dismissed us as total strangers, turned his hot little face towards the fire and sniffed the air like a dog.

  ‘What’s up, Harry?’

  The child ignored Ann’s question. He wriggled from my lap and set off in the direction of the Christmas tree. There was something which he wanted, which he must have. Again I found myself shivering. In the toddler’s tender frame, the angle of his sparkling blond head and the unsteadiness of his gait, there was an incongruous element: the ice which formed behind his eyes.

  ‘What are you looking for, Harry? Come on, show your mummy.’

  Harry bent for a moment at the foot of the tree, then he turned around with his prize. His face was ablaze, with a grin like a gash, his eyes were splinters of ice. And he lunged at me and Ann, jabbing at us with his weapon.

  It was a feather, a long, black feather, shot through with green and wet with shit.

  Ann squealed and turned her face away, fending off her son with random swipes of a cushion.

  ‘Let’s have it, Harry!’ I said, much more loudly than I had intended.

  My voice quavered. In a second, I had the feather in my hand.

  ‘Nasty old thing, dirty old feather. You don’t want that, Harry. Let’s put it on the fire.’

  But it took all of Ann’s efforts to restrain the child as I dropped the feather onto the flames. He wrestled and kicked, he clawed and spat and bellowed. Dry-eyed, Harry gazed at the fire as the feather was consumed. And when it was gone, in a whiff of pungent smoke, he looked at me and croaked some incoherent oath, as if he were wielding a curse in my direction. I had had enough. It was time for bed. I took him from Ann, who was holding him close to her, and delivered an old-fashioned slap across his backside.

  ‘Have a proper cry, Harry,’ I said, laughing to see him dissolve into real, spontaneous tears. It was a relief to watch him become a child again.

  The three of us went upstairs. Harry was suddenly sleepy, as though the tears had spent the remains of his energy. Once he was in bed, Ann and I kissed him on his hot cheeks. The light went out and we came down once more to the fireside. I gave Ann some sherry, poured myself a glass of beer; a bit of music; the lamp switched off; the coloured stars on the Christmas tree glinting in the glow of the flames. So I began to recount my successes with Archie, the triumphant return from the beach with the trophies of the hunt. I did not mention anything which might worry her, I said nothing of my ducking or our furtive observer.

  Somehow, if the bird was ever going to be an accepted part of the household over the course of another four or five years, then both Ann and Harry should share the interest, be involved in its welfare. It was simply not feasible to have it imprisoned in the yard for months on end, like some festering prisoner in a dungeon, something to be fed and watered, something ugly from which a woman would recoil in horror. I heard my own voice, calmly persuasive, but an image kept recurring as I spoke: that picture of Harry advancing on us with the black feather, Ann flinching from the ugliness of her own son. The voice continued. I told her that Archie just happened to be in the room when she came in, because we had both come back from the beach very cold and wet (and this was true), so I had allowed the bird to warm itself by the fire while I was in the bath (which was also true). It was unfortunate that Ann’s arrival at the door had thrown the cormorant into another of its tantrums. She listened carefully to my account of our fishing expeditions and smiled at the novelty. Since we were stuck with the bird, not without some very attractive advantages such as the cottage and Harry’s inheritance, it would indeed be foolish to gripe about it for the coming few years. Two intelligent young people should be able to control it and even mould its presence into a worthwhile addition to our bucolic lifestyle. Maybe Harry could benefit from such an unusual com­panion, my voice was smoothly saying. Together, we could take a more positive attitude towards Archie, learn some­thing, understand something from it. We loved the cottage and had settled down well in the village. Surely it was right that we should have to work to keep our new life.

  I sensed my advantage as I talked. Ann was listening. It had been my greatest asset as a teacher, the ability to sound utterly reasonable, apparently to speak sense. This is not such a common talent among schoolteachers. So I planted a long kiss on Ann’s upturned throat. My hands went to her breasts, undid the buttons of her blouse, slid behind her back to the fastening of her bra. In front of the fire, she was released from her clothing, chuckling as I hurled each item into the corners of the room. I quickly stripped. Lying together on the rug, we surveyed the flamelit room: her knickers had caught on the light shade, the bra swung gently from the typewriter, there were clothes strewn across the furniture. So I kissed her eyelashes, her chin and her throat, and continued to kiss her from her throat to her knees. She was sculpted in white marble, made warm by the blaze. It threw her into shadows and caverns of reds and blacks, places so scarlet and hot that my tongue could taste the heat. She turned on me so that her heavy breasts lay on my chest, she swung the nipples across my lips and danced them on my face. I kissed her until she squealed. She slid and worked herself onto me, to move and work until she could only howl and collapse helplessly on my chest. I kissed her entire body again, as though at any time I might lose her, so that each kiss would reinforce my ascendency over her. She closed her eyes and relaxed under the balm of my kissing. She could not have seen what I was doing. Her body was marked with the blood from my hand. Every tender touch against her throat and face, over her breasts and silken stomach, among the heat of her thighs, each caress branded her with blood. I smeared her marble body. My whispered endearments numbed her into a stupor. Soon she was asleep in the falling colours of the fire, stained with the wounds inflicted by the cormorant.

  All of this, so Archie might be forgiven.

  *

  There dawned one of those crisp December mornings in the mountains, when the air is full of the scent of the fir trees, so cold that it scalds the nostrils, humming with sunlight under a sky of unblemished blue. Christmas was just three days away. When I stepped into the garden, I breathed deeply and looked up to see a pair of buzzards wheeling and diving far above me. Their plaintive cries floated like thistledown. I squinted into the sunshine, lost the buzzards in the bright­ness. A raven croaked from the hillside. The sheep were steaming in the warmth of the direct rays, basking in the heat after a bitter night. It was strange: I could stand in the yard and enjoy the glow of the sun on the back of my dressing-gown, yet plumes of cold blew from my mouth and nose. What a day . . . a go
od day not to be driving into the car park of a big comprehensive school, a good day not to be taking a double period of drama with thirty-five cynical adolescents, a perfect day not to be on duty in the cacophony of the school cafeteria. I inhaled fiercely and felt the hairs on the insides of my nostrils burning with cold, loved myself for being supernaturally lucky, went inside to the smell of frying bacon. Ann was in the kitchen, warm and sleepy in her dressing-gown. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and kissed her hair.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ she said in her teaching voice. ‘Keep an eye on Harry, will you, he’s in the living-room.’

  The boy came tottering into the kitchen at that moment, holding two trophies of his early morning exploration: a pair of underpants and a bra.

  We all laughed.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Harry, what splendid presents!’

  Ann was not expected in the pub that day, indeed until after the New Year. I proudly displayed the shopping I had already done for Christmas and earned myself a kiss for my efforts. The cottage was tidy and clean once more, the family was reunited. My suggestion that we should all go out was greeted with instant approval.

  ‘All of us,’ I said. ‘All four of us.’

  A momentary pursing of the lips, then, ‘Yes, alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some sandwiches and things for a picnic, you get Harry organised. And the bird, of course . . .’

  I washed and dressed and did the same for Harry while Ann was busy in the kitchen. Then the child was occupied in the living-room with some of his noisy toys, Ann was in the bath, and I went out to the van. I sponged down the seats and the matting and made sure that the barrier which separated the back compartment from the passengers was quite secure. Fragments of fish, seaweed and feathers were all swept out into a plastic bag. I wiped the windows and sprayed a cloud of disinfectant into the van before slamming the doors closed. I went to fetch Archie. Ann came out of the bathroom with just a towel round her. At my warning shout, she scooped up the boy and took him upstairs, as a precaution, while I came through the front room with the cormorant. It was a good start to the expedition: the bird stalked up to the van, with a gentle coaxing from the leash (especially tightened around its ankle), and flapped into the back when I opened the doors. It sneezed like a cat at the smell of the spray, but settled down in the fresh straw which I provided. I had the collar in my pocket, I had checked and re-checked the new knot in the leash. Archie was ready. I was determined nothing should go wrong to spoil the beginnings of a new understanding of the cormorant.

  It was the closest that Ann and Harry had been to Archie. They sat in the front seat, every muscle tense for the first few miles, with only the wire mesh between them and the bird. When it came close and poked its beak through the holes, Ann whispered, ‘Bloody hell,’ and turned to look out of the window. Harry chuckled, blew a bubble, and went to bat at the beak with his hand. Ann restrained him.

  ‘Be a good lad there, Archie,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Nearly there now.’ And to Ann, I added, ‘The bugger’s in a good mood today. Just relax, it can tell if you’re frightened. It can’t hurt you here, and I’ll keep it right away from you and Harry when we get to the beach.’

  She made a brave smile, touched my hand.

  We arrived at the castle in the bright sunlight of midday. The car park was practically empty. The air was perfectly still, the tide quite high but going out. I found myself looking round and inspecting the few pedestrians, and I threw a surreptitious glance along the grey blocks of the battlements. People would be at work or queueing in the supermarkets for the rest of their Christmas shopping. Ann and Harry got out of the van. While they were admiring the swans, twenty of them which were sailing grandly among the yachts and cruisers, I opened up the back and brought out the cormorant. Tying it to the rear bumper, I organised coats and extra pullovers for my wife and son, then locked the doors. Harry was not impressed with the swans: they were too clean and respectable, perhaps. He wriggled in Ann’s arms to turn and stare at Archie. Together we watched as the bird loosened its muscles, stiffened by a night in its crate and its confinement in the van. Feathers flew. The glittering air sang with the whistle of black wings. Archie stretched to the tips of its feet and lashed out its aching sinews. The gulls came from the castle walls, fell close by and wheeled away, screaming at the menace of the cormorant. Here was something, in the castle car park, attached to the bumper of a small van, which was more than the everyday sea-crows on the brown waters of the estuary. It came and went in the company of a man, not his slave, for they had seen him retreat from the wild beak, but in the company of people. It was more than the cormorants along the shore, much more than the swans which preened themselves in their muddy reflections, immeasurably more than the biggest of the black-backs or the oldest raven. The gulls swooped down to see. They recoiled from something they could not understand.

  Ann and Harry, the latter insisting on walking unaided, followed at a safe distance as I went over the bridge with the bird.

  While I dropped onto the beach and was busy fixing the collar to the cormorant’s throat, they continued further along the sea wall to the steps which the boy could negotiate. The shingle shore was a treasure trove for Harry. Time and time again, he fell on his knees with a gurgle of delight on spotting some object which was irresistible to his teeming imagination. There were cuttlefish, the leathery eggs of the rays; stones with stripes and hoops and spots, stones which were riddled with holes or studded with barnacles; necklaces and headbands of seaweed; numerous old shoes, the skeleton of a black umbrella; green bottles, blue bottles, clear bottles and those whose glass had been scoured to swirls of milky clouds by the friction of the sands; the waterlogged corpses of gulls and pigeons, the bright orange beak of an oyster-catcher, the foot of a swan; a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, a briefcase of good leather, locked up and containing all manner of scandalous secrets; more bejewelled boulders and emerald weed . . . the worn-out spars of shipwrecks, the flotsam and jetsam of innumer­able complicated lives. Ann stayed with the boy, relieving him firmly of the least acceptable trophies but letting him comb the beach for more treasures. She sat on a dry rock and felt the December sun fall on her hands and on her face. She tasted the salt on her lips. Quite nearby, I was standing up to my ankles in the water, the line streamed out to sea and there was the black shadow of the cormorant, motionless for a second on the sparkling tide before it dived below the surface. Ann gasped. It was beautiful. Archie was suddenly different, moving across the gentle swell and diving like a knife into the green depths. The cormorant dropped its hooliganism and went hunting; its filthy manners were nothing but an affectation. We had known boys and girls in school who had been the same, who adopted the armour of the gross and the crass, who spat and puked and blew their noses on the curtains to disguise a sensitivity which had once been highly prized. Archie performed. In the water, the cormorant was healthy, vigorous, clean.

  ‘Go on, Archie!’ Ann was calling out.

  And when it surfaced, with a silver fish wriggling in its beak, she jumped up from her rock with a little cry. She called to me as I was drawing in the rope, and waved wildly.

  ‘Wonderful!’ she yelled, and I could see the welling of tears in her eyes. It had been just the same at school.

  I pulled in the bird, snatched the fish from its beak and put it in the pocket of my jacket. In a moment, the puzzled cormorant was once more breasting the waves and heading out into deeper water. There was a burst of applause from behind me. I spun round, as though I had been stung by a wasp, and there was Ann, delighted at the success of our hunting expedition. Harry winced at the sound of clapping, dropping his armful of treasure onto the beach. I returned to the fishing, while Ann soothed her sobbing son.

  In an hour, father and son had accumulated more prizes than we could carry. My plastic bag was full to bursting with eels and dabs, all struggling to prolong their lives by gaping their sticky mouths int
o the sunlight. Their bodies, writhing together in the bag, had made a mucous lather in which the fish would drown. We persuaded Harry to leave all but the most precious of his collection: he decided to keep a string of seaweed pearls and a pink shampoo bottle. From a discreet distance, Ann and Harry watched Archie enjoying the fruits of its work. I tipped the entire contents of the bag onto the sea wall, where the fish blew bubbles and convulsed on the dry concrete. Harry’s mouth fell open in astonishment. He mimicked the cormorant’s rasping croak, lunging forward with eager hands. Here were far better toys than anything he could find on the seashore, jumping, skittering toys. Ann restrained him. Having removed the collar from the cormorant’s throat, I fed the eels to the bird one by one, stunning some of them first for the benefit of the weary hunter, but offering the others live for Archie to overpower and swallow, for the benefit of Ann and Harry. For Ann, Archie had reverted to its loutish manners; away from the water, it was ungainly and crude. But she was thrilled by such gluttony. The eels slid down Archie’s throat, the pulsating bulge descended as the cormorant released a belch of steam into the cold. Harry stared, with the solemnity of expression which only the very young and the ancient can achieve.

  Archie was replete. We all went back to the van. I put the bag of dabs on the floor by the driver’s seat and tied the bird to the bumper. Still the car park, under the walls of the castle, was quite empty. It was perfect for us to sit on the harbour side and eat our picnic. We watched the efforts of one dishevelled swan to rejoin the big group of swans in the face of nearly twenty hostile beaks. Ann called to the birds, her teaching voice again, as though she were sorting out some playground bullies. We both laughed at our old school charades, the feigning of outrage or surprise when laughter would have been appropriate. The bullying swans ignored her. I shouted to their victim: ‘What’s the matter now, Pilbury? Stop blubbing, for heaven’s sake! Get stuck in there, let’s see a bit of backbone!’ The swan drifted off, pecking at a few displaced feathers. There was a Pilbury in every playground.