The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘There’s nothing there, Tycho!’ Zoë cried. ‘There’s nothing there! Wait, Tycho! Wait!’

  The bird fluttered to the foot of the tree. Panting, ruffled, it hopped into the corner and hid.

  ‘Time you got ready for bed, little madam!’ Harry said, resorting to conventional paternal authority. ‘There’s lots of hot water for you. A quick shower and off to bed. Your own bed, that is, Miss Bossy-Boots! And that’s another Christmas Day all wrapped up!’

  The girl obeyed. Under the shower, with the soap shining on her little body, with her helmet of hair quite white in the spray of water, she spluttered, ‘Off to bed in my own bed, Daddy! But can I come and get into yours, if I wake up in the middle of the night? Can I?’ For this was what she often did, sleepwalking to him and crawling into his bed, to be there when he woke in the morning . . . very small and very hot, her head damp against his shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He dried her with a warm towel. Seeing her in her pyjamas, tucked into bed with a Christmas bear, he loved her with a love like a flame he could feel in his belly. She was his Zoë, who baffled him with her fey, unearthly wisdom, who was quite beyond him, who was bright and alight and out of reach, like the sparks he was only beginning to see through the telescope. His Zoë. He would love and cherish her for ever. His eyes tingled as he leaned down to kiss her goodnight.

  Just then, she asked a new question, staring fixedly over his shoulder at a point on the ceiling of the cabin. ‘Daddy, how did Mummy die?’

  Harry sat up, blinking. Unblinking, the girl stared past him. Unblinking, the jackdaw peered from under the tree. It bounded across the floor and sprang up to the telescope, where it settled with a shuffle and a scratch. Zoë ignored the bird. She asked again, ‘How did Mummy die? Did something kill her?’

  Harry’s mind went blank for a moment. Until he saw before him, as harsh and as glaring as an overexposed photograph, as though Zoë herself were projecting the image onto a screen inside his head . . . the horror of Lizzie’s death. It was as vivid as the real horror, so real that his nostrils stung with the stench of burning blood and scorching skin.

  He heard himself saying, woodenly, ‘She died when she was having you. You were born and she died, almost at the same time. There wasn’t enough life for both of you. You took it all. . . .’

  The horror faded, folded and vanished. He looked down again at the child. She was staring straight at him. Silently, she was laughing.

  Chapter Nine

  That same Christmas night, Harry was woken by the bird.

  Usually, once the lamps were out, once he’d gone to bed and the cabin was lit only by the glow of the stove, Tycho would settle to sleep, the beak and the eyes hidden under one wing. Harry woke to hear the jackdaw springing from one end of its perch to the other. The fire had burned down. He’d been asleep for several hours; in the darkness, he guessed the time at one or two o’clock in the morning. The boat was motionless, beached. Apart from the curious agitation of the jackdaw, there was no other sound or movement.

  Then he heard Zoë beginning to stir, and he saw her in the dim light of the dying fire. She pushed back the blankets of her bed and swung herself to a sitting position. The bird gave a single muted, metallic cry. It bristled its black feathers.

  ‘Be quiet, Tycho!’ the girl whispered. ‘You mustn’t wake Daddy!’

  She stood up, stretched, and seemed to peer across the cabin. Harry watched her, trying to maintain the regularity of his breathing so that his wakefulness wouldn’t disturb or frighten her. She was asleep, he thought; she was sleepwalking to him, to creep into the security and warmth of her daddy’s bed.

  But she didn’t come. She reached to the foot of her own bed for a jumper and pulled it on, tugging it over her head. A moment later, she’d clambered into a pair of trousers, putting them on on top of her pyjamas.

  ‘Quiet, Tycho!’ she hissed, because the bird was shivering with excitement to see her tiptoe towards it. It shot a mute which ran like milk the length of the telescope. The little girl stepped into her boots, knowing exactly where they were; she knew the position of everything in the room.

  ‘Now!’ she breathed. She pointed her face directly at her father’s face. She stiffened as she listened as hard as she could. He lay and watched her, continued his rhythmic breathing.

  ‘Come!’ she said. The bird reached her shoulder in one easy spring, landing with open black wings which extinguished the fire­light on her hair. The black claws gripped. With the jackdaw balancing on her, she moved silently up the steps and was gone, the door closed behind her. She left a shiver of cold air where she and the bird had been standing.

  Harry followed her. By the time he was on deck, barefoot, wearing nothing but an old shirt, the girl was already halfway down the iron ladder on the sea wall. She worked herself back­wards, her feet and hands quite sure on the slippery rungs, down and down onto the boulders of the foreshore. There she paused. She wiped her hands against her thighs. Somewhere in the dark­ness, the bird also moved, with a beat and a waft of sooty wings, with a cracking of its powerful legs. Harry could see very little. He heard the crunch of Zoë’s boots among the shingle, the bubbled explosion of seaweed, and he sensed her making her way from the wall. His eyes were bleared with sleep, unaccustomed to the gloom; but, without hesitating to put on boots or trousers, he pursued his daughter down the ladder and onto the beach.

  There, the darkness seemed to lift. Having painfully negotiated the barnacles, the treacherous unevenness of the boulders and the weed, finding himself more comfortably barefoot on the level, hard sand, he saw that the pitchiness of the night was diluted by a reflection from the sky onto the mudflats. There was no moon. The stars were hidden behind a cover of cloud. But the estuary seemed to gather and hold what light there was, and he could see the outline of the child quite clearly ahead of him. Even the jackdaw was visible, a fluttering shadow on the night-gleam of the sands. He felt neither the cold around his bare legs nor the aching of cold in his feet, as he stepped after Zoë and the bird which circled her. Once, she stopped and spun to face him, poised for listening, so that he also stopped . . . but he couldn’t make out her expression before she turned away and continued to walk faster and further from the boat.

  ‘Here, Tycho!’ she cried. ‘We’re here!’

  Harry was close enough to hear her. The clouds were suddenly split, like an old sail, and there was a wash of night-light which caught the child’s cap of silvery hair. She was kneeling. The bird fell raggedly beside her, spiralling down and disappearing into her shadow. Harry crept forwards, as silently as possible, placing each footstep firmly on the ribbed sand. He heard her whisper, ‘Come on, Tycho! See what you can do!’

  Zoë knelt among the wreckage of the dead horse. Around her, jutting from the mud, the ribcage was a palisade of black bones. She tugged at a segment of vertebra, which resisted until the gristle disintegrated, and she held it aloft. Quickly a pool formed and filled the hole she’d made. She dropped the bone with a splash. A frail and tiny figure, she knelt in the remains of the horse, pulling aside the spars of the skeleton, dismantling it. She worked faster, more breathlessly, apparently exasperated, until suddenly the bird reappeared and flapped heavily upwards. It wheeled up and up. The girl tilted her head as though to follow its laboured flight.

  ‘Tycho! Tycho!’ she cried, her voice shrill. ‘Come down, Tycho! Come and show me!’

  And the bird, like a crow with a mussel which it wants to crack on the rocks below, hovered before dropping something from its beak, a thing which fell with a slap on the sand where the horse was embedded. Tycho followed its prize downwards. Before the bird could land, Zoë had scrabbled in the brown bones and was on her feet again. In the light from the torn clouds, Harry could see the exultation on his daughter’s mouth. There was a spark in her eyes.

  She strode towards him, straight past him, so close that he could smell her clean hair and hear her breathing. The jackdaw’s wings wafted at his face. But, for t
he girl and the attendant bird, he didn’t exist. He wasn’t there that night. There was only the shattered horse from which the sea had retreated, and the search among its ruins.

  ‘Zoë?’ He repeated the word, but the child marched onwards without pausing or turning, unerringly in the direction of the Ozy­mandias. The bird flew ahead of her, chiming. Harry’s cry – ‘Zoë! Zoë!’ – the single sibilant word he called until the girl was almost gone, was lost on the wet sands. He forced himself into action, for he was standing numb and stupid, looking from the figure of the disappearing child to the remains of the dismembered skeleton, and he set off at a run, skirting widely past Zoë so that he could reach the foreshore before she did. He overtook her; he scrambled across the rock pools and the weed, hobbled over the high-water line of driftwood and jellyfish and plastic bottles, and, clambering onto the gravel track which followed the edge of the shore, he sprinted as hard as he could along its grassy verge. Out of breath, his head clearing enough for him to realise the oddity of racing through a Christmas night in nothing but a flapping shirt, he stepped from the sea wall and stood panting on the deck of the boat.

  He’d beaten her to it, just. He could hear her footsteps as she approached the ladder, the rhythmic gonging of her boots on the rungs, her breathing coming closer and closer. The jackdaw landed beside him. Moving very quickly now, careless of the noise he made, he tumbled down the steps into the cabin. In seconds, he’d thrown a bit of kindling wood into the stove, to make some light as much as for the heat, and he snuggled under the blankets of the bed. There he lay. He struggled to steady his breathing. He faced the fire and awaited Zoë’s arrival.

  The bird came in first. It settled with hard claws on the telescope and straight away leaned into the lens to peck at its own reflection. It folded and refolded its wings around its body, like a man trying on a raincoat.

  Zoë was there a moment later. She stepped out of her boots at the foot of the stairs, careful, even in her sleep, to leave them exactly where she’d found them. ‘Shhh now, Tycho!’ she whispered. ‘Wait! Just wait!’

  Barefoot, she climbed onto the easy chair beside the telescope, and she felt the air near the ceiling of the cabin. Her hand waved and hung, finding nothing but space; for a second it fingered the beam, where a groove in the wood provoked her gasp and a high-pitched giggle, and then it brushed the bristles of the tree. She held the topmost branch with one hand, she fumbled in the pocket of her trousers with the other. She dangled a thing that squirmed and arched itself, something wet. Nimble, unhesitating, she twisted the tentacles of the brittlestar among the needles and stepped down from the chair, leaving the creature twitching on the Christmas tree.

  ‘Not yet, Tycho!’ she hissed sternly, because the jackdaw had sprung to her shoulder. ‘Not yet! Get down!’

  She knocked the bird to the floor, where Harry couldn’t see it. She took off all her clothes, jumper and trousers and pyjamas too, and in the new warmth, where the kindling was ablaze and lighting the cabin with golden flame, she ran her hands the length of her body. She was thin and hard and perfectly white: even the fire could not colour her. Only her hair and her eyes caught the sparks. She smiled, and she stared straight at her father. She stepped to the bed, his bed, and slipped into it.

  There was a long silence. The jackdaw was back on the tele­scope, motionless, hunched, unblinking. The fire had settled, after the crackling ignition of the twigs. The little girl’s head was close to Harry’s, and, as he breathed, her hair stirred like anemones in a rock pool. She seemed to sleep immediately, pressing herself hard and hot against him, because her eyes were closed and her breath­ing was heavy and regular. He stared at the ceiling, at the groove she’d touched with a squeal of pleasure, and he watched the brit­tle­star writhing on the tree. Their Christmas star, he thought, which Zoë had found, which might guide them through another year.

  Zoë had stopped breathing. Her body was tense. The jackdaw had stopped breathing, too. Harry held his breath and waited for something to happen.

  Then the child spoke, expelling the words with all the breath she had inside her. ‘Now, Tycho! Have it! Have it!’

  The jackdaw sprang into the air. It crossed the cabin with two beats of its wings. And its beak, the beak that Harry had meticulously remade, hammered at the brittlestar. The bird hung on the tree, a tattered black star, obscene among the tinsel and trinkets. It scrabbled on the needles with its sharp claws. It clacked harshly, hoarsely, dissonant as a broken bell. The home-made beak broke into the body of the brittlestar.

  Until the child cried out, ‘Enough, Tycho! Enough!’ Straight away the jackdaw fell to the floor, from where it leaped effortlessly to the telescope. There, with eyes like beads of blood, it preened its breast. It wiped a morsel of fish-flesh from its beak.

  Harry didn’t move. He’d been frozen by running half-naked on the cold sands. He’d been stunned by the spectacle of the child in the bones of the horse, stunned by the heat of the child’s body on his, by the firelight and the dancing shadows . . . by the lunacy of the bird, the ragged black star which had tarnished all the gewgaws on the Christmas tree.

  All this had paralysed him. He was on the edge of nightmare. He knew that, if he moved, he would be in it.

  While Zoë was asleep, as lovely as an angel in his arms, Harry watched her and the fire and the jackdaw through all the hours of a troubled night. He saw the brittlestar dangle, a dead and broken thing which Zoë had used and then destroyed. He dared not sleep, in case the nightmare should come for him.

  Chapter Ten

  There was a false spring that February. The world basked in still, warm sunshine. All over the hedgerows, the ivy berries hung in heavy, blue-black handfuls, as tempting as sloes, whose symmetry was out of place in the untidiness of a countryside emerging from winter. Deep within their fortress of hawthorn, snowdrops flowered, pale and drooping: bridesmaids for a wedding unexpectedly called off. Daffodils stood up, too fast and too tall, and collapsed, crumpling their golden faces. The mistle thrush challenged from the top of the tallest tree. The robin sang a watery song. Inland, in the shelter of rolling fields, it seemed that spring had really come, where the sheep in their shaggy overcoats knelt and nibbled at new grass. The lapwings were a quick, metallic green in the sunlight. Jays went swashbuckling through the dense foliage of holm oak, whose leaves gave them cover and were an illusion of a faraway summer.

  Even on the shore, there was a stillness and a warmth which suggested that another winter was over. These were days when Harry Clewe cycled by the beach and through the lanes and it was marvellous to be alive, when he shook off his preoccupation with Zoë.

  In the mornings, he rode into Caernarfon with the child behind him on her pillion seat, to leave her at school. There, it seemed, she was hardly disadvantaged by her sightlessness. She had specialised help and was learning to read Braille. And then there was an opportunity for shopping in town, for joyful careering on the bicycle, for the prearranged meetings with Helen on board the Ozymandias.

  Once, their lovemaking had been prolonged and vigorous. There’d been a time, when Zoë was a baby, when Harry and Helen had abandoned the charade of the flute lesson with such alacrity that their clothes were strewn all over the cabin, when their skins were smooth with sweat in the flames of the fire. Through the long nights, fuelled with gin or red wine, oblivious of the tides, they’d ignored the cries of the baby and made love.

  It was different now. Theirs was a perfunctory coupling, only possible in Zoë’s absence. There was something almost surgical about it: they dealt with one another, they operated with efficiency and swiftness and then they were finished. Helen’s clothes were neatly folded on the easy chair. She remained as perfumed and powdered, as she lay on the bed and exhaled the smoke of a post-coital panatella, as she’d been on her arrival.

  ‘So,’ she said. They were side by side, on their backs, without touching. ‘I’d better get going.’ Neither of them moved. ‘You’ll be off to collect Zoë, won’t yo
u? And I’ve got things to do this afternoon.’

  Harry rolled over and spread the palm of his hand on her cooling belly. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. We don’t have the time that we used to, do we? You know how touchy Zoë is, about me and about you too. She’s very possessive about me – a perfectly normal thing, I suppose, for a child growing up without a mother. And living as we do, on the boat.’

  ‘I can’t tell whether she likes me or hates me,’ the woman said, putting her hand on top of his hand. ‘That little white face! That little smile! Those eyes! There’s no way of telling what she’s thinking. And, although she’s so small and so young, she seems to fill up the cabin, fill up all the space. There’s no air left for anyone else to breathe. She’s like a cuckoo chick, pushing everything else out of the way, consuming all the energy around her. . . .’

  Helen turned her face to Harry’s. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she went on. ‘She can’t see, but she has a kind of . . . I don’t know what to call it. A kind of vigilance about her, as though she’s waiting and watching and choosing her moment . . . I don’t know what for. She’s all tuned up, waiting. She’s already changed you, my love. She’s taken something from you. She has that kind of magnetism. It’s draining.’

  Harry said nothing. It had been like that with Lizzie, on board the boat, during the last weeks of her pregnancy. Suffocating, stifling . . . yes, draining, until all the air was sucked out of the sky, sucked out of the cabin, until it was harder and harder to breathe. He and Lizzie had been unusually close, unnaturally close. Their closeness had spawned the guilt which had haunted Lizzie to self-destruction. Harry said none of this to Helen, although sometimes he felt driven to confide in her. One day he would tell her everything. Now he glanced over her naked shoulder at the splashed and spattered telescope.