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 blood-stained 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 half 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 blood. 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 cra
shing 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.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the drizzle. But the air was a tonic, after its first assault. I drank it in as gratefully as I had drunk the sherry and the beer. Only a few hundred yards from the front door of the cottage, but I didn’t think I could safely negotiate the distance. When I tried to stand, it was as though the ground beneath my feet began to move on rollers, a fiendish kind of escalator or conveyor-belt which I couldn’t keep pace with. So I sat down again and tried to focus my eyes on some distant object, the number plate of a parked car, concentrated on reading it until it swam away. In any case, what was the great hurry to get home? There was no-one there, no Ann, no Harry. And at this, I felt a sudden rush of unhappiness, as traumatic and debilitating as a punch in the stomach. It brought the immediate stinging of tears. At last, I thought, now you can do it, now you can cry. Christmas fucking Day, so pissed that you can’t even get to your own front door, with blood on your socks, a shin cut to the bone and probably wriggling with the nameless maggots that cormorants pick out of their feathers, abandoned by your wife and son . . . The tears came, thick and hot. I tasted the salt in the corners of my mouth and the running of my nose. The only handkerchief I could muster from my pocket was covered with dried blood. I threw it into the puddles with a snort of disgust and wiped my nose on the sleeve of my coat. Like a bloody vagrant. A roadside vagrant, overwhelmed by tears.
Behind me the door opened and closed. I sat upright and turned away my face, ashamed of the tears. Even that sudden movement brought a wave of nausea. To control it, I stared hard at another number plate, forced it into focus with a mighty effort of squinting, read it aloud, shut my eyes and recited the sequence two or three times. I looked again and checked that I had learned it by heart. People scuttled past me to the shelter of their cars. Lights came on, engines started, off they went with their tyres hissing on the wet road. I stopped crying. When I glanced along the street into the village, I saw that all the lights in the Knapps’ house were off. In the aftermath of sorrow and self-pity, anger against the cormorant began to grow. If only I could mobilise myself and get to the cottage, I would sort it out once and for all. Archie must go, Ann and Harry were more important. I would wring its neck and toss the corpse into the stream, let it hurtle downstream to its beloved estuary along with so much other household rubbish. We’d abandon the cottage and go back to the suburbs of Derby . . . oh Christ, the numbing chores of school, the suburban semi, the television, the lawnmower, Saturday sodding football on the park . . .
Again there was movement around me as people began to leave the pub.
‘Alright, son?’ from one enquiring voice.
‘That leg’s a mess,’ from a woman this time.
‘Oh that?’ It was my own voice, thick with drink. ‘That was when I was attacked by my pet cormorant, phalacrocorax carbo . . .’
There was somebody standing next to me, not speaking. When the others had gone and the sounds of their car had faded away, the figure remained. I sniffed and averted my tear-stained face. I didn’t want any well-meaning banter or, even worse, the commiserations of another maudlin drunk. I got to my feet and clutched the back of the bench. The conveyor-belt started, I had to lurch forward a few steps to stay on it. There seemed to be a hand at my elbow, very strong so that I instinctively leaned on it and felt its support. The escalator surged and I accelerated to keep up, comfortably aware of the strength beside me. Once in motion, practically upright, it was best to carry on.
‘Only just along the street,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Little cottage on the right, nearly there now.’
I stepped out, swayed violently towards the road. The hand buoyed me up, restraining me from falling over the kerb. Looking down at the pavement, I watched the slabs go racing along under my feet, so fast that I felt nothing, like walking on cotton wool. One bloody foot and the bloody mess of my trousers, the other shoe clean, especially clean for Christmas Day. And through the blur of my bewhiskered vision, the heavy shoes of my Samaritan, very sensible and sturdy, the polished toe-caps poppled with rain drops. The pavement swooped up at me, I touched it with my fingers, could feel its wetness. A close-up of the big shoes and then again I was heaved to the vertical.
‘This is it . . .’
But the door was already pushed open. Lights flicked on. I was dropped into an armchair, lying back with my eyes closed.
‘Oh Christ . . .’
I had to sit up very quickly as the blackness behind my eyelids began to spin, erupting in different colours. With my head in my hands, I peered between my fingers at the living-room carpet. Somebody was putting another log onto the embers of the fire, turning on the lights of the Christmas tree. My head swam, everything was a blur of blue smoke. The footsteps went into the kitchen. Dimly, through the maelstrom of confused sounds which howled inside my mind, I heard the shooting of the bolt on the back door. Immediately there was a bitter draught through the room, the curtains whispered. But the footsteps returned, the draught remained, I felt a hand on my head for a tiny second, gentle as the landing of an autumn leaf. I heard the heavy shoes go to the front door and finally go out. The door closed. There was silence.
It was much too late for anyone to hear my blurted cry of gratitude. Minutes passed after the closing of the door. But I remembered to call out, I heard my own voice.
‘Thank you, Un
cle Ian. Thank you . . .’
This time, when I closed my eyes, the blackness was steady.
So I slept.
*
When I woke up, the fire had gone out and the room was cold. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. The main light and the lights of the Christmas tree were on: the sudden brightness hurt my eyes. I sat up in the armchair. There was a throbbing pain in my shin, it was pulsing hotly, and my head was singing. What I needed was to fetch a couple of blankets from upstairs and bed down again on the sofa with all the lights off: the swiftest return to oblivion. I had been woken, however, by my thirst and the urgent desire to piss. Standing up, with my hands over my forehead against the glare of the light, I found, not surprisingly, that I was still very drunk. The movement brought a rushing sound in my ears as though a dam had burst within my skull, the pulse in my legs speeded up, but I seemed a little steadier on my feet. I could remember a few things about the previous evening: drinking at the bar, sitting outside in the drizzle, a fractured image of the journey home. When I was sober again, I might try to piece it all together. Meanwhile, if I didn’t get to the bathroom quickly, I was going to wet myself. Taking a deep breath, I turned to the door.
Archie was perched on the back of my armchair.
I peered at the cormorant through my fingers. It was sleeping, its wings folded, its face and beak buried in the feathers of its breast: a piece of modern sculpture, not out of place in the room with its prints and books and rugs, a green-black angular study of the bird asleep, forged from steel and burnt to its dark colours, twisted metal, twisted and scorched to make this effigy of the cormorant. The feet were folded over the back of the chair and the tail was a prop. Archie looked vulnerable in its sleep: not a hunter or a stabber or an arrogant squirter of shit. Simply a bird, lost in dreams.
I waited, completely still, lest the cormorant should wake. The door to the kitchen was open, and the draught which came into the living-room told me that the back door into the yard was wide open too. Footsteps . . . I remembered the footsteps, someone moving in the room while I lay inert in my drunkenness. But why? What was I supposed to do next? My drunkenness swept over me again. It was all too complicated. Who had arranged all this? And who assumed that I would merely play my part? It made me angry. I was cold, my head hurt, my mouth was full of cobwebs, the leg was squirming with worms . . . and there, calmly perched on the living-room furniture as though it were a household pet, was the vile Archie which had terrorised my wife and son into fleeing on Christmas Day.
Stephen Gregory Page 12