Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  I bent down to the fire, stood up again. With the poker in my right hand.

  Two steps forward.

  The right arm upraised.

  The bird peacefully asleep.

  The poker sang as it swung through the air.

  Archie stirred inside a dream, alerted by the singing of the poker. It was already falling backwards from the armchair, the wings were beginning to unfold and the feet were slipping from the perch, a fraction of a second before the blow landed. The poker connected with the cormorant’s shoulder, the bird was flung onto the carpet with a dull thwack and a cloud of dust, the sound of a stick against an old pillow.

  Archie was awake.

  I lurched after it, wielding the poker. I was shouting, but again it was the distant distorted voice which I had heard in the pub. There was the bird on the floor behind the sofa. The wing I had struck just as the cormorant had begun to fall away was outstretched, black and tattered, smashed. I lunged forward with the poker, ready to strike. Archie scrambled away from me, dragging the broken wing and rowing along the carpet with the other. It unleashed a torrent of guttural sounds, snaked its head with the dagger-beak open. Around the room we went, drunken man and wounded bird, and the poker fell again and again on the chairs and the floor, whistled through the air and struck the table and the tree, sent the books tumbling from their shelves, lifted the dust from the cushions, brandished like the baton of an inspired conductor. I heard my voice repeating the tired old oaths. The room was filled with dust, the flailing progress of the poker. I listened wearily to the voice, the rushing of surf inside my head. There were books, Christmas cards, decorations and sherry bottles on the carpet, feathers and green shit, and everywhere the air was heavy with the cries of the cormorant. I drove it to the door and tried to stamp on the trailing wing, to pin it down and hold it still for the delivery of a fatal blow, but the bird was in the kitchen, over the cold floor and into the yard. I stood at the doorway, shivering from my exertions and the icy air from the garden, watched Archie go scuttling into the upturned crate which still lay outside the cage. With difficulty, the bird manoeuvred itself into the box and turned its head to pull in the injured wing with its beak. It burrowed far into the straw. Then it was still.

  Big flakes of snow were drifting through the darkness, settling on the slates of the backyard. I looked up at the sky and down at the poker in my right hand.

  The sounds in my head subsided. In my pursuit of the bird, I had forgotten something, something I could post­pone no longer. Dropping the poker with a clang onto the kitchen floor, I walked straight out into the yard, to the wooden crate. I set it upright and stared into the straw. There was a little rustling movement as though the straw itself was breathing, and I could see some black feathers buried in the bedding. The snow settled on the ground and stuck for a second on the warm dampness of the straw. I straightened up, undid the zip of my trousers. I was bursting. Flipping out the worm, I waited an instant before aiming a powerful jet of piss into the crate.

  At first the silence persisted. The straw hissed and fizzed under the yellow stream, a cloud of steam rose into the cold night air. And the relief . . . I thought I had never pissed with such strength, such pressure, such heat. Then the bedding began to heave. From out of the straw, Archie wriggled its head and neck, but the broken wing was trapped and the bird was only able to weave the beak in protest, gasping a few faltering croaks. I bellowed with laughter and took a step back. As the cormorant sat up in the crate, its head and neck writhing from side to side, I directed the hot piss straight into its face. There was plenty of it. It flew into the bird’s eyes and ran down the sleek feathers of its throat. As Archie coughed, it swallowed the bitter juice, spat it from its beak and nostrils. The hoarse cries were cut off by the jet, it was all the bird could do to keep its head moving in and out of the spray. Until it gave up dodging, surrendered to the humiliation and remained still, its head erect, eyes and beak closed tight, while I walked round the box twice, three times, aiming the diminishing flow. Finally, when it had stopped, I summoned a number of spurts as a kind of encore. I came close and shook the droplets onto the crown of the cormorant’s head, tiny yellow-green drops which trembled among the wet feathers like emeralds. Finished. There was no more. Without opening its eyes, Archie subsided into the box, disappeared among the steaming straw. A little shuffling, then silence, as though there was no cormorant at all in the depths of the white wooden crate.

  I stopped laughing. The worm went into hiding.

  ‘Archie,’ I said.

  The snow by now had whitened the slates of the yard.

  ‘Archie . . . ?’

  I shook the snow from my hair. Louder I said, ‘Archie . . . ?’ until I was kneeling in the snow at the side of the box, whispering, whispering, ‘Archie . . . Archie . . . Archie . . .’

  I stood up, wet and crumpled, dragged the crate into the corner of the cage. I flung down some clean straw and the remains of an old blanket. If it wanted to, the bird could crawl out and fix itself some dry bedding. I went inside, stood for a minute in the cold kitchen and watched the snow thaw from my shoes and run onto the floor.

  ‘Archie, Archie, Archie . . .’ I was whispering, but the voice grew louder and louder, became a shout as I burst into the bathroom. I vomited explosively into the bath and knelt there, retching until I thought that my chest would burst.

  My forehead on the cool enamel.

  The cold whiteness of the gathering snow . . .

  VI

  While I was sleeping on the sofa in the living-room, the blizzard outside grew and grew and engulfed the land. It wrapped its heavy white arms around the mountains and squeezed. The forests whimpered under the pressure of the polar bear’s hugging. The hills surrendered the definition of their contours, the sides of scree, the gullies thick with the skeletons of bracken, the fields strewn with boulders and scored with the tracery of the dry stone walls. All this was erased by the deadening blanket of snow. Derelict barns filled up with the blowing drifts, the spoils of abandoned quarries became white things, soft things, where before they had been black warts on the countryside. The wind forced the snow into every corner of the plantations. The trees groaned with the weight which settled until it became too much and was dislodged by the next gust of the blizzard. Then the snow gathered on the forest floor, crept among the roots and rabbit burrows, so the trees felt their grip on the ground beginning to weaken. The air rang with the splinter­ing of branches. Tall pines, whose roots were shallow in the meagre soil of the rocky hillside, leaned in the wind and fell. Every part of the valley grew heavy with snow. It deafened the streets of every village: the streets were deaf under the whirling whiteness, gardens and houses were blinded, the striding pylons became dumb. The drifts were moulded like meringue, they grew like cobwebs against the sides of the stone walls, into the hedgerows, between roofs and chimneys, shrouding the black water of streams. No-one was outside that night. Animals sought shelter in their burrows and lairs or were huddled tightly together in the comparative warmth of the outhouses. The bear hugged. The world changed. It continued to snow long after the wind had dropped, so the drifts were reinforced. Trees sighed under the increase of their burden. All was still beneath the bearskin blanket.

  And I dreamed of the blizzard.

  It was purple dark in the backyard. The only light came through the window of the kitchen. I was standing amid the maelstrom of snowflakes, huge soft flakes, as big and as hectic through the air as hummingbirds. They beat around my head before sticking on my hair and beard. Everything was silent. In spite of the power of the wind and the whirlpool of snow, there was no sound. I stood in the yard and allowed the blizzard to envelop me. In front of me was the white wooden crate of the cormorant. It was upright, filled to the top with straw. There was no sign of movement, nothing to indicate that there was anything alive inside the crate. It could well have been a box stuffed with straw, nothing
else. The snow was settling briefly on the straw and melting fast. A black and purple sky from which the snowflakes tumbled; the flakes lit up white and yellow by the single bulb in the kitchen; the shadows very dark among the tangle of fuchsia and ferns and down to where the stream must have been. Centre stage: me and the crate.

  And another figure: Uncle Ian.

  He stood there, as he had been at the graveside of so many family funerals: the grey melancholy face which I had never really looked at, which perhaps nobody had ever really looked at, an old-fashioned raincoat buttoned over his dark suit, sturdy legs encased in their pin-stripe, and those highly polished shoes, big and stout, with snow-poppled toe-caps. Ian was smoking a cigar. He kept it cupped inside his right hand, the blue smoke escaping from between his fingers. When I looked at him over the yard, with the crate between us, there was only the overwhelming impression of the greyness of the figure: a robust figure, the shoes, the cigar, a grey cloud where the face should be.

  Still no sound. Still no movement from the white wooden crate.

  Ian transferred his cigar from his right hand to his lips. The trickle of smoke was a blur in front of his face. Both of his hands went to the buttons of his raincoat. When the coat was undone, the fingers opened the flies of his pinstriped trousers. And, stepping forward a pace, Uncle Ian began to piss into the straw of the box.

  A grey man, lost in blue smoke, blurred in the rising steam of urine and a chaos of snow.

  I began to move. Looking down from a great height, for I had grown suddenly and viewed the scene from some distance, I watched my hands fumbling at the zip of my trousers. There was blood on my fingers, blood on the leg of my trousers. The worm appeared and shuddered at the sudden cold. A big snowflake landed on its head, sizzled and vanished. I took a forward step, joined my uncle at the side of the crate. Facing one another, we mingled our piss and steam among the blades of straw.

  I woke up very soon afterwards. With a yell of horror, I found myself sitting on the sofa in the cottage living-room, trembling with nausea. For, in the dream, the straw had begun to stir under the persistent pressure of hot urine. The occupant of the bedding could no longer endure the bitter spray, but burst upwards into the cold and the snow. Out of the crate, straight into the twin jets of piss, there sprang the bright blond head of Harry.

  For a long time I remained on the sofa and sat with my head in my hands. It had only been a dream. Harry was no longer in the cormorant’s crate, I had rescued the boy myself with the help of Mr Knapp. That much was clear. So much of what had happened over the previous night was just a confusion in my mind. There was no distinction in my memory between dream and reality. I got up painfully and slowly, drew back the curtains, saw that it was morning. The whiteness of snow on the road and the pavements just outside the living-room was dazzling. No vehicle had passed through the village that night. The snow was flawless, the air still. In the bathroom, I rinsed my eyes and my mouth before steeling myself to clean the bath. Kneeling where I had knelt the night before, I clenched my teeth and rinsed the enamel. I sprinkled a little bleach and wiped it out with a cloth until it smelled better. There was still the business of my wounded shin to deal with; it was numb, the whole leg had stiffened, there was no pain. I went into the kitchen with the intention of finding the antiseptic and cotton wool with which to clean the gash, but stopped at the window to look into the yard. It was full of snow, not just covered as a flat field or a road might be covered, but packed with a sparkling drift, forced full of snow as a goose is forced full of grain to make its liver swell. No trace of the shrubs and bracken was left, the snow was so deep it had frozen in a lovely curving wave the width of the garden right to the top of the fence. To get to the stream, a man would need a shovel. In the corner, Archie’s cage was choked with snow. It had blown through the mesh of the wire and the weight on the corrugated iron was too much, for the shelter had collapsed under the strain. I went into the living-room for my coat, came back into the kitchen and put on the green Wellington boots, opened the door and stepped out.

  The sky was iron-grey, heavy with more snow. For the time being, however, it had stopped snowing. I shivered and stamped my feet. Pulling on the boots, I had scraped my shin. I thought I could feel a new trickle of blood going down into my sock. There was no proper shovel to hand, but the little one I used to take in the coal for the fire was sticking up from the shallower snow by the back door. It would do. I waded into the garden until the snow was too deep and heavy to move through, then I dug with the shovel to make myself a path. Up to my thighs I stood and dug, tossing back each load of snow, extricating one booted foot from the drift and plunging forward. In time, I reached the cage. To open the doorway I had to dig deeply, right to the floor of the yard. Then I scrambled inside. Even into the furthest and best protected corner, the snow had pene­trated. I continued to dig, bent double under the broken roof, and the shovel rapped on the side of the crate which was buried in the insidious drift. Working faster, I felt the sweat forming on my back. I wiped away the droplets which were beginning to cling to my glasses. Faster I dug, more hoarsely I whispered, ‘Archie, Archie, Archie . . .’ in the rhythm of my strokes with the shovel. ‘Archie, Archie, Archie . . .’ and the snow flew from my blade with each word I hissed. Until the crate was cleared. Without investigating inside, I flung down the shovel and started to drag the box backwards to the doorway of the cage. Through the deeper snow I half lifted and half dragged the white wooden box, stumbling in my clumsy boots with their filling of snow and oozing blood. Straw fell out when I lurched against the packed drift. And all the time I could hear myself coaxing the cormorant to the warmth and safety of the cottage. I whispered, I urged. ‘Come on, Archie, nearly there now . . . a few more steps, get you warm soon . . . you’ve been colder than this before in that bloody estuary . . . come on, Archie . . .’

  Then the way was open. I staggered through the back door with the box in my arms and put it down on the kitchen floor. Straightening up and throwing off my coat, I switched on the stove, shut the door to the living-room and the door to the yard. I would soon warm up the tiny kitchen.

  The table was a shambles of debris from our Christmas dinner. Nothing had been washed up or tidied away. There were pots and pans with the remnants of vegetables and the encrusted leftovers of sauces, all the plates and cutlery, glasses of different shapes and sizes; the carcass of the turkey, more than half the trifle, which had proved too much after the main course: the assembled disorder of a splendid feast. Most of this I moved into the sink and onto the draining-board, the food disappeared into the fridge. My movements were becoming better co-ordinated, al­though my head reeled in the increasing steam. When the table was clear, I put down a couple of sheets of newspaper. Then I turned to the crate, reaching unhesitatingly into the depths of straw, brought out the bird and placed it on the table.

  Archie was frozen solid. Its neck and wings were stiff as iron, the broken wing folded awkwardly and showing white a splinter of bone. There was a little pliancy in the rubbery feet, otherwise the cormorant felt hard and brittle, as though it would shatter into many pieces if it were dropped on the floor. I held the bird again in my hands, looked at it this way and that. But it was frozen in just the position which it had assumed on retreating from the shower of urine, into its wet bedding. The neck was folded to enable the cormorant to press its face into its breast feathers, the beak was partly hidden under one wing. Eyes closed. One wing snugly tucked away, the other awry. Whichever way I held it, Archie remained frozen in sleep, a fragile relic of the cormorant. Dead for many hours.

  In my befuddled condition from a night of nightmares and nausea, my head and tongue thick with drink, with the aching numbness of my leg, I was unable to assess the situation clearly. Tenderly, I held the cormorant. I saw the broken bone which jutted from among the feathers of the wing, and I remembered the blow I had struck there with the poker. The tiny shards of ice which had formed in the velvet plum
age around Archie’s face and neck and throat were stained yellow, frozen urine. Wherever the icicles remained on the bird, they were yellow and green, shot through with the bitter piss. I held the cormorant close to me, hoping perhaps to infuse some life through the warmth of my hands. But Archie was stiff beyond the powers of any warming.

  I drew the table closer to the stove. When I opened the oven door, a blast of hot air filled the kitchen, steaming the window and my glasses. The snow thawed from my boots and formed a puddle on the floor. I watched the trans­formation of the bird. Close to the heat from the oven, lying on the newspapers on the table, Archie started to thaw. The sparklets of ice disappeared. Within all the secret channels of the cormorant’s throat and deep down in the dark chambers of the breast, the ice was breaking. Between every feather, the tough primaries where the ice had grown in splinters, the down on which the ice was just a bloom, there was an easing of tension as though each quill breathed a sigh and became pliant again. The iron melted in every joint. As the newspaper turned grey with the water which dripped from the bird, Archie resumed its blackness; under the light of the kitchen bulb, in the enveloping steam, it flaunted the subtle iridescence of its plumage. There were blues and purples among the black, but above all there was green. The dead cormorant relaxed on the table in a glitter of metallic colours.