Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  And as it thawed, it moved. I was in no state to understand these movements. Archie’s head creaked and fell forward from its sleep in the feathers of the breast. The head slid over the newspapers, the beak opened, and the room was touched with the smell of eels. Archie’s neck uncurled, just as the heads of bracken uncurl under warm sunlight. With a click, the good wing sprang away from the body and began to spread across the table. The broken wing remained still. The entire body seemed to grow. It leaned to one side and stretched luxuriantly, like a man awakening from a satisfying sleep. And with every movement, I willed the bird to blink an eye and look around. The eyes stayed shut. I stroked the cormorant’s head and dried off the drops of water with a towel, patting the bird gently and whispering all the time, ‘Wake up, Archie, you’re warm now . . . soon get you dry again . . .’ But, when Archie’s body had melted, it lay still. There were no more twitches of feathers or yawns of the sea-smell from that beak. I was beginning to see, among the steam of the kitchen and the vanishing shreds of my nightmares, that the cormorant was dead.

  That was when Ann came in. I was standing very still by the kitchen table, in my shirt sleeves and Wellington boots. The bird was stretched on the wet papers. She was suddenly there beside me. Her nose wrinkled at the smell. But she squeezed my arm for a second before going past me to the back door. In a moment, as I remained still and silent, she had thrown open the door and turned off the oven. She came back to me, linked one arm around mine and put her hand on my stomach. The steam was thinning, billowing into the yard. She pressed herself against me, felt how cold and wet I was with sweat and steam. I stood still and stared at the cormorant. It was all clear to her.

  ‘Archie’s dead,’ she said.

  I looked down at her. She had her coat and her boots on for crossing the snow-covered street. Her hair shone. She smelled of toothpaste.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The snow drifted into the cage, the roof collapsed.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Let’s put it outside, shall we?’ she whispered, tightening her grip on my arm. ‘We can’t do anything else now.’

  I was thawing. More familiar pains were returning to my body: my head ached from the sherry and the beer, there was a strain in my chest after the exertions of vomiting. And the shin had started to throb again. ‘Have you come back?’ I kissed her forehead. ‘Where’s Harry?’

  ‘He’s alright with Mrs Knapp for a while. Now take the bird out.’ She added, ‘Take the bird out. And yes, I’ve come back.’

  I lifted the limp body of the cormorant from the table, put it inside the white wooden crate and covered it with straw. I took it through the kitchen door, set it down for the time being in the shallower snow I had cleared in the yard.

  An iron-grey sky. There would be more snow soon.

  Ann knew when she had the ascendancy, and she exploited it in the knowledge that it might not always be hers. The cormorant was gone. There was a void. She led me into the living-room. While she prepared boiling water, antiseptic and bandages in the kitchen, I had some minutes to work on the debris of my night alone: the blankets, bottles and glasses, books and Christmas cards which were scattered across the floor, the gouts of shit which was the cormorant’s signature. I moved slowly about the room, bending to gather a handful of pine needles or a few black feathers. I replaced the books, took the blankets upstairs, collected the evidence of my drinking bout. Ann sat me down on the sofa, gently drew off my boots and socks, wriggled me out of my trousers. She had a basin of steaming water. With cotton wool, she sponged away the dried blood which had congealed all over my shin and ankle, down to my foot, in between my toes. It all came off. I lay back with my eyes closed. The gash itself was revealed. With tweezers, she lifted the flap of skin, having melted the scab with plenty of hot water, saw the whiteness of the bone beneath, applied the antiseptic directly into the wound. She ignored my shouted oath: there had been a surfeit of those in the previous twenty-four hours, they no longer meant any­thing. Now the shin was clean, she bandaged it with sweet-­smelling gauze and crepe. She kissed my foot then ran upstairs for some socks and jeans.

  ‘There’s a brave boy. That didn’t hurt, did it?’

  I was not allowed to rest. Taking me by the hand, Ann tugged me into the kitchen again. The back door was still open. When I went to close it, she just said, ‘Leave it, let’s have some more air in here.’ And we tackled the Christmas dinner dishes. Hardly a word was spoken. There was too much bustle in the little room for words. I had no time to think of the pain in my foot or the absence of Archie. She thrust into my hands a succession of plates and bowls and cutlery, saucepans and gravy boats. My arms immersed in soapy water, I cleaned the dishes. The window steamed up, I took off my spectacles, it was snug even with the door open to the yard. We turned in the confined space and brushed together, hip against hip, her hair across my face, her breasts loose and heavy on my arm. Our eyes met. She did not smile, but she winked the wink she had always saved for me in the reverential hush of a staff meeting or across the bedlam of the playground.

  ‘Not finished yet . . .’

  There was no flicker of a smile.

  ‘Light the fire, dust and hoover the living-room. I’ll inspect it in a quarter of an hour, so make it good. And I’ll do the bathroom.’

  I fetched coal and wood, baffled for a moment as to the whereabouts of the shovel. Ann didn’t see me go out to the cage, tip-toeing in my slippers through the snow and past the abandoned crate. I heard her muttering in the bathroom: perhaps my efforts with the bleach had not been thorough enough to erase all the evidence of my sickness. I felt better moving around, breathing deeply when I knelt at the hearth, busy with newspapers and kindling wood. A tall, rather surprised-looking flame rose among the nest of coal. Disguised under the drone of the hoover, I attempted a line or two of song, and there was Ann at the doorway, watching me and listening. She nearly smiled. In the fragile silence which succeeded the machine, she checked the carpet for pine needles, ran a finger along the mantelpiece.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said to the quivering flame. ‘The place was a real mess after yesterday.’

  She smiled.

  The cottage was newly cleaned. Harry was in good hands for a short while. Under a growing drift of snow, Archie was freezing stiff for a second time. The best and safest place to be for the two of us that morning was bed. Ann led me up the stairs and into our bedroom. The bed was untouched: that was almost the saddest thing, that nobody, no loving couple had shared the bed on Christmas night. For an hour I was her invalid, a bruised and damaged man who needed her care, her warmth. She slowly undressed me, careful to avoid contact with the fresh dressing on my leg, and she tucked me up in bed. Then she undressed. She would let me do nothing. I was her man. She was going to love me while I lay there, I could simply rest and be quiet. Lifting the sheets, she slipped into the bed. With every part of her body she made love to me, applying herself to me as though she were a priceless lotion with which my wounded body should be anointed. As I lay still, she coated me, she oiled me, she bathed me with herself, until I knew again each silken surface and scented shadow and had them imprinted on my skin. And when I turned to her, to put my hands on her, she only said, ‘No . . .’, breathing the word into my hair. Before I slept, however, she rolled on top of me, so that her breasts felt heavy on my chest, and she asked me suddenly: ‘Tell me, my love, did you kill the cormorant?’

  I looked past her, at the ceiling. I remembered more of the previous evening, in disjointed sequences, like random flashes of old newsreel. Someone had helped me back from the pub . . . all those drinks which were bought for me. Why had Archie been released into the cottage? Who had put the poker in my hand?

  I thought for a minute and answered.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  Ann turned her head, looked away, as though she wanted to allow me more le
eway for my reply. But I repeated, with absolute, unshakeable certainty, ‘I don’t know.’

  Then we slept, still and silent, enfolded in each other’s limbs, oblivious to the tumbling snow.

  *

  When I awoke, I was alone, cold and frightened. But the space beside me was still warm. Sitting up, I strained every muscle to hear or feel some movement in the cottage. A surge of panic overtook me, my head was full of suffocating fog, and I sprang from the bed. Before I could struggle into my clothes, there was the sound of the front door opening and closing, the scuffling of footsteps on the mat. It was Ann, back again from across the street, with Harry. When I tumbled down the stairs in a disarray of untidy clothes, the boy beamed from his mother’s arms and flung out his hands towards me. His little face was cold and ruddy after the short journey. When I kissed him, it was delicious, like the first electric sip from an ice-laden gin and tonic. Together we fell onto the sofa, amid squeals of giggling, more tickling and the tingle of kisses.

  ‘Don’t take his coat off.’ It was Ann’s teacher voice. ‘Let’s all go out in the snow. It’s so lovely and clean out there. Get your boots on . . .’

  I was soon wrapped up in my jacket and scarf and gloves. Ann fixed Harry’s hood so that his face was tightly framed with fur. She put on a hat whose flaps folded over her ears and buttoned under her chin. I felt the fleeting regret which sent a tremor through my belly: that her throat, with its marble shadows and the quivering of a hot pulse, should be covered up. I would undo those buttons myself when we came in from the snow, and see that the throat was still warm.

  So, to the cleansing by snow . . .

  The three of us, encased in our winter clothing, staggered out of the front door. In the middle of the road, the snow was shallowest where there was nothing against which the drifts could form. We went crunching through the silent village. I had Harry in my arms. Ann’s hand was snuggled in my pocket, like a hibernating vole. Passing the pub, we heard the cries of the persistent revellers, the few who had walked from their houses in the village. I grimaced at the smells of beer and smoke. Ann noticed and squeezed my arm. ‘Naughty man,’ she said. The bench on which I had been sitting in the previous night’s drizzle was almost buried in the snow. We continued by, turning through a gap in the stone wall of the roadside and wading into the drifted snow of the woodland. I put Harry down. The child was light enough to negotiate the snow without sinking more than a few inches, and, with an expression torn between horror and delight, he made his first tentative steps over the smooth crust. When he fell, his tiny gloved hands vanished into the drift and his face was forced on the snow. He rolled over, spitting. There were crystals in the fur of his hood and spangled in his lashes. Harry was going to cry, but he looked up at our expectant faces and laughed instead. Ann’s hands flew to his cheeks to brush away the flakes, but he fought himself upright and continued his exploration. In his boots, mittens and padded suit, the child strutted up and down the sugary hills of snow. More than a dozen yards away, he would turn to see us, to check that we were included in his brand new universe. Yes, there we were, sitting together on the cold dry boulders of the wall.

  ‘Hey, young Titus!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t go too far or I’ll be forced to send your mother out looking for you!’

  Harry spun around at the voice, grinned and clapped his hands. The snow flew from his gloves and settled like tinsel on his red cheeks.

  Onwards through the plantation. When we reached the top of the hillside, we could see all the way along the valley and glimpse the grey turrets of Caernarfon castle. Some­how, the whiteness gave an unusual clarity to the day, in spite of the leaden sky. As the road wound into the distance, full of snow but clearly distinguished by its lining of walls and hedges, it snaked between the hills, appearing and disappearing. Trees and telegraph-poles stuck up like the bristles of a hedgehog. All things which were not woolly with snow were black or grey: there were no colours in the landscape. I set Harry down from his vantage point on my shoulders, and he discovered the cones and needles of the fir trees, digging his mittens deeply into the snow. He snarled at the cold which soaked his fingers. Then we waded over the ridge, with the village just below us. A spiral of grey smoke was rising from the chimney of our cottage, all the roofs were white, the row of houses was the decoration on a Christmas cake. Further along the ridge, we looked down into the gardens, simply squares of a uniform whiteness, very clean. Everything was clean. We could hear the rumbling of the stream, but the water was shrouded in its tunnels and chambers of ice. The air grew suddenly colder with the advancing of the afternoon, the sky began to frown. Gripping me by the hand, Ann led the way down an opening in the forest, where the snow was not so deep between the black trees. Darkness soaked into the day, soaked and spread like the blooming of ink on blotting paper; it seemed to issue from the trees, was exhaled from the sky, from the ground itself, seeping upwards through the blanket of snow. And before we could reach the road again, we saw the streetlights flicker: blossoms of orange flowers in a monochrome garden. Half-past four. Without speaking, we made our crunching way past the pub, watched our own footsteps set off into the woods. Harry too was silent. The village was cast in gold by the lamps on the pavements. Every sound was muffled.

  The cottage windows gazed at the passers-by, wide-eyed and tearful. The sky went blue-black with a snap, and the stars were there, as brittle and bright as broken glass.

  Home again.

  I set about refuelling the fire with two logs of horse chestnut, thinking too about the flaps of Ann’s hat, the heat of her throat after the cold walk. I began to undo the buttons of Harry’s coat. But the day was still Ann’s, she maintained the advantage.

  ‘Leave his coat,’ she said to me, as I knelt with the child on the hearth-rug. ‘We’re going out for a bit longer yet.’

  Harry had resumed his mesmerised scrutiny of the flames which trembled around the white wood. He stared into the fire as though he and the yellow tongues of light were the only living things in the room.

  ‘Into the backyard,’ she continued. ‘We’re still not completely clean.’

  Her expression silenced the beginnings of my questions.

  ‘Is there a drop of petrol in that spare can? Get it from the car . . .’

  The kitchen light flooded the backyard with brightness as it fell on the covering of snow. There was no sign that anyone had been out there that day. My work with the coal shovel had been obliterated. One corner of the crate was visible. Ann carried Harry outside and put him down in the snow. When I came back with the petrol can from the van, she was shovelling the snow from around the cormorant’s crate. Harry blinked in the light, rather dazed by the cold and the surrounding darkness and the spectacle of his mother’s digging in the drifts. She stood back with the shovel in her hand, her face aglow with the effort, very lovely in the snow-filled garden. Once more, the crate was exposed. I put down the can, stepped forward and shifted the crate away from the wall and into the centre of the clearing. She glanced at the can.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said briskly, and carried on without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Matches . . .’ I said, ducking back into the kitchen.

  Through the window I watched her, the tumbling of golden fuel from the mouth of the can onto the white wooden box. Outside, I took the can from her. I poured the petrol into the straw. Shuddering convulsively, I shut out the dazzling image of the previous night’s dream. Harry was watching from the kitchen door, a bland smile forming on his mouth. The straw was silent and still. I did not reach down into it.

  ‘Pick the boy up. Keep well away.’

  So, to the cleansing by fire.

  I struck a match, allowed it to flare up between my cupped hands, and tossed it into the crate. It went out. Again. Again it fizzled in the wet straw. But, the third time, the fire began.

  One moment the yard was white in the glare of the kitchen light, and
then it flamed into a furnace of reds and golds and yellows. The fuel in the crate went up in a mighty whoosh of fire. Blades of straw flew out with the torrent of golden sparks. The box burned with a silver fire of its own, the flames running from bottom to top and fighting like a nest of lizards. The flimsy wood buckled and split. Out spilled the straw, a crackling ant-hill of writhing heat. The crate lost its shape, became a ball of flames as the sharp lines of wood were consumed. I watched with my hand to my forehead as a shield against the glare, the fingers of my other hand locked in Ann’s. She also stared, and held fast to Harry. He was impassive at first, as though the explosion of colour after the blacks and whites of the forest was an unspeakable blasphemy to which there was no appropriate reaction. But when the straw fell out and the box was no longer a box but a thing alive with fire, he wailed and convulsed against his mother’s breast. Both his hands were flung towards the blaze. His eyes bulged and he shouted in a language of strange words. He wrestled like a weasel in her arms. The purple sky and the bitterness of the air retreated from the flames, but Harry lunged towards them. The fire was his. He wanted it, he raged for it.

  What happened then seemed to last for ever, but was probably over within a minute. The garden was rocked by the explosion of the petrol can which was ignited by the trickle of burning straw. In that second, white fire came spewing across the yard towards us, rolling over the ground and over our feet like water. We leapt away, but the garden was full of the shrieks of the flames, there was silver fire in our eyes and in our ears. The air contracted around us. I remember only the hurtling noise of the explosion and the brilliance of light. And a vision of Harry, escaping from his mother’s arms.

  He dropped to the ground, cat-like among the blaze. With a shout, he sprang forward, across the pools of shallow fire, over the dancing puddles of spilled petrol, and immersed himself in the flames of the white wooden crate. Engulfed by the fire, the little figure was tearing and rummaging at the remaining panels of the box. As I waded after him, he tossed handfuls of burning straw into the air, plunged into the bottom of the crate. Into the fire I followed him, but he was a shrinking shape among the heat. There were tongues of flame on my trousers, sparks in my hair and beard. Involuntarily, I retreated in a series of ungainly leaps. My hectic hands beat at my clothes. Beside me, Ann was immobile, staring with dead eyes into the searing blaze. Again I went into the fire, again my body was beaten back, my hands a-flutter at the pain of burning skin. We could only watch, mesmerised into apathy. As the flames diminished, the blackness of the garden grew around us. There came a sigh from the shrinking lake of fire, there was no definition of shapes amid the lessening blaze. No crate, no cormorant, only the incandescent figure of a little boy. He was changing, in colour and outline, as he continued to scrabble into the seat of the fire. In the centre of the orb of billowing flame, the child too was shrivelling, molten, blackened, issuing twisted plumes of smoke as he folded and collapsed like an exhausted candle. He crumpled into the hottest remaining core of the blaze, his figure replaced by a mushrooming pall of vapour, pungent with the stench of scorched flesh. The air crackled, fizzled and hissed with the explosion of many blisters. Gaping like the mouth of a sightless fish, the fire sucked. It fell inwards on itself. Its muffled implosion was the belch of a glutton.