The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Yes!’ she said, following his eyes. ‘And that bloody bird too! It’s hardly conducive to uninhibited sex, having that thing as a spectator. Bloody voyeur!’

  At least this time the jackdaw had been fairly passive, remaining on its perch and silently preening while they’d stripped and lain down and spent their lust. ‘It doesn’t seem so interested today, thank goodness,’ Harry said. ‘Maybe it’s because of the warm weather and the stillness after the winter. It’s not so excitable.’

  ‘Nor are we,’ said Helen. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the weather. The bird’s just bored with watching us, that’s all.’ She spoke over her shoulder. ‘Sorry, Tycho. Not much of a show today, was it?’ The jackdaw croaked, expelling an arcing mute which dripped from the telescope and onto her clothes. ‘Oh, shit!’ the woman whispered, hiding her face in Harry’s throat.

  They lay together a little longer, without talking. He watched the bird. It watched him. The previous week, it had been so agitated at Helen’s arrival and the subsequent flurry of undressing that he’d tried to catch it and throw it out of the cabin. Helen, naked, shielding herself with a pillow, had retreated fearfully to one corner, while Harry, also naked, had pursued the bird and tried to trap it in a blanket. At first it had been funny. Helen had laughed until tears ran down her cheeks to see the man’s thin, white body leaping and twisting after the tumbling black rag of the jackdaw. He’d grown angry. His erection had faltered. As the bird became hoarsely hysterical, it shed feathers, it croaked until its voice was cracked, and the room was rank with its spurted droppings. The woman’s tears of laughter turned to tears of helplessness. . . .

  When at last the bird was caught and bundled onto the deck, Harry and Helen had collapsed together on the bed, careless of the messes they lay in, and they’d gripped each other hard until their anger was replaced by passion.

  They were alone, truly alone, because of the frantic removal of a shabby crow and because the vigilance of a sightless child was temporarily avoided. This was the pattern of their lovemaking. It was chilly, daylit sex: sober, timetabled, shadowed by a beady spectator.

  There was a frost in the air when Helen came the next time. By then, February had fooled the country into premature growth. Among the cladding of ivy, where already there was a luxuriant greenness of dock and sticky willie, Harry bent to inspect the tiny blue flowers of speedwell, to see the primroses’ buttery yellow. The still air was scribbled with clouds of gnats. From the bicycle, his shadow was long, swaying before him down the lane. The hedgerows were ablaze with gorse, climbing with a new growth of nettles and foxgloves. The mistle thrush chattered, though not a blackbird sang, nor was there yet the bravado fanfare of the wren. The warm sun urged the farmers into activity: fields were ploughed, with a rejoicing of gulls in the tractors’ wake; hedges were cut, chewed into neatness by noisy, hungry machines; everywhere there hung the sweet tobacco smell of silage.

  Still, as Harry pedalled from Caernarfon back to the Ozyman­dias, having left Zoë at school, he could taste the frost. The sky looked dry and hard.

  Helen was sitting in the Daimler. The window hummed open. She simply said, ‘Get the bird out first, will you, Harry? Then I’ll come inside. I’ve brought a present for you and Zoë. It’s a sort of antidote to the crow.’

  Soon, she saw the jackdaw flung onto the deck, where it extricated itself from the folds of a blanket and hopped to a perch on the sea wall. Carrying a big bunch of flowers in one hand, holding a wicker basket in the other, the woman stepped into the cabin. Her nose wrinkled.

  ‘Jesus, Harry! This place is getting a bit high, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed. ‘What with the mess the bird makes, and all that stuff as well. She’s bloody taking over, Zoë is! What a stink!’

  The telescope and the floor around it were white with drop­pings, although Harry had made desultory efforts with news­papers to keep the corner tidy. He seldom used the telescope; it was a machine to be tinkered with, adapting it to his own limita­tions rather than exploring its potential. In any case, the jackdaw had established squatter’s rights on it, and on the easy chair too. The other ‘stuff’ offending the woman’s sensibilities was Zoë’s growing collection of trophies from the seashore, the prizes she carried home from her walks on the beach, which she kept and processed in the cabin before taking them as offerings to her mother’s grave. Around her own bed, the child had draped a curtain of seaweed, shining and green where it was fresh, black and pungent where it had been hanging for a week or two; bluebottles droned drunkenly from it and butted the windows. Among the inoffensive and beautiful relics she’d put at her bedside – pebbles, shells, feathers and the clean, white skulls of seabirds – there were pieces of the horse’s skeleton, saturated to the consistency of wet biscuit, whose crumbs stank of the most fetid mud in the estuary.

  And bones. Zoë was a collector of bones. That simple grave in the nearby churchyard gave her collecting a kind of focus: there were bones under the ground, and the child brought more bones that she’d found on the shore, bones which the sea had fetched up. Her mother’s grave had become a shrine, or a reliquary.

  Harry had seen it happening over the years, noticed the awe with which Zoë approached the headstone, and how her wonder­ment, spontaneous at first, had gradually become more studied. She assumed the air of a priestess. She laid her offerings with a great and otherworldly reverence. She repeated and refined her questions as though they and the appropriate responses were an important part of the ritual.

  Yes, Zoë was the guardian of the bones. In this way, once more, she excluded her father. He’d seen the development of this absorp­tion. Now it extended to the boat, where they lived so closely together. The Ozymandias was the anteroom to the shrine.

  ‘You’re right, Helen,’ he said lamely. ‘She has spread out a bit, hasn’t she? Kids are like that. Didn’t you collect all sorts of odds and ends when you were little? It’s just untidiness, after all.’

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ Helen replied. ‘I didn’t collect horrible things like that.’ Shuddering, she sat on the bed, without taking off her coat. ‘Bones and seaweed and bloody bird shit all over the place!’ When he sat beside her, she recoiled from him. ‘And you don’t smell so good, either,’ she added.

  ‘The roses are lovely,’ he said. ‘The scent helps in here.’

  He’d put the flowers in a big earthenware jug, the one which he and Lizzie had used for carrying warm water onto the deck to wash their hair, in the old days before the installation of the shower.

  ‘They’re gorgeous, Helen!’ he said. ‘You’re right, they’re an anti­dote to Tycho’s messes. What’s in the basket?’

  ‘Well, actually this is the present I was talking about,’ she replied, ‘not the roses. The roses are just a temporary relief from the stink. This is supposed to be a bit more permanent, to give Zoë a healthier interest than that revolting crow of hers. Have a look. If you think it’s a bad idea, just say so and I’ll take it back.’

  A kitten was nestling in the straw inside the wicker basket. Harry lifted it out. It was a black and white scrap which lay on his open hand, tiny and helpless.

  ‘I got it from the farmer who delivers eggs to me,’ Helen explained. ‘He was going to drown it otherwise. What do you think? It’s a bit more lovable than that bloody bird, isn’t it? If Zoë took a fancy to it, you could get rid of the crow and she’d hardly notice it was gone. Then you could clean out the bones too, and all this morbid paraphernalia which seems to go with her interest in Tycho. Well?’

  Tycho was at the window. It rapped with its home-made beak. It pressed the bulb of its eye to the glass, watching the man and the woman while Zoë was absent. It remained there and peered in, tapping sometimes, blanking the window with ragged, out­spread wings, while Harry and Helen made love. Even as they lay together, in a spasm of indifferent coupling, the woman was distracted by the jackdaw, and her gaze moved from the man’s face to the corners of the cabin. When she settled on him, she rose and fell mech
anically, as though she were trotting a predictable horse. He came. She didn’t. She was goose-pimpled throughout.

  Dressing quickly, she said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be here again this week. Maybe I can make it next week. I don’t know. Since I can’t come here at night any more, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to.’ She spoke the words in a rush, feigning briskness as she bent for stockings and shoes, without looking at Harry. ‘I’ll come by some time and see if the kitten’s a success.’

  She was soon gone. He remained on the bed, the blankets hardly disturbed. The sea smell of weed was too strong for the fragrance of roses, obliterating the woman’s perfume too. It absorbed the sea scent of sex.

  Harry had already christened the kitten before collecting Zoë from school that afternoon. He went to his poetry shelf again, reminded of something he’d read. There was a poem by Seamus Heaney about kittens being drowned in a tin bucket – ‘scraggy wee shits,’ the poet called them. Taking the kitten out of the basket, seeing it spit and sneeze as it squinted through newly opened eyes, he thought what a scraggy wee shit it was and what a narrow escape it had had. So he named it Seamus. And of course, he didn’t explain to Zoë how he’d come by this name.

  The child held the kitten to her face and sniffed it. She even licked it. She stared into a faraway distance, smiling with a bubble of saliva on her lips as she inspected the tiny creature. Finally, unable to bear her silence any longer, Harry said, ‘Well, Zoë? What do you think? Isn’t he cute? Do you want to take care of him? He’s so feeble and helpless . . . he’s only a week old, I think. Well?’

  ‘And the flowers?’ she asked. ‘Are they from Aunty Helen, too?’

  She inhaled the woman’s perfume, which must have been so strong to her. She put the kitten on the bed, where it crawled clum­sily on the blanket, snagging its needle-sharp claws.

  ‘Is that why Tycho had to go outside, Daddy?’ she asked. ‘Because Aunty Helen was here? That’s not fair! Tycho lives here, Aunty Helen doesn’t!’ The child made for the door of the cabin, saying over her shoulder, ‘Can Tycho come in, now that Aunty Helen’s gone? Now we’ve got a pet each, Daddy, haven’t we? You can look after Seamus, and I’ll look after Tycho. I wonder if they’ll be friends. . . .’

  She grinned dazzlingly and went out. Harry shivered. Despite her gleam of hair, although she burned so hot, Zoë left a swirl of frost in the air. And he thought, perhaps Helen had been right: this child drew all the heat, sucked all the energy. He shivered again, his body chilled, and he nestled the kitten to his face.

  Chapter Eleven

  Helen had meant the kitten to be more permanent than the roses. After all, roses are soon dead, and then they’re thrown out.

  In the meantime, Zoë had nothing to do with the animal. Harry fed it with milk and kept it away from the jackdaw, the two most important measures to ensure its survival. The little creature soon became adventurous, exploring the cabin with springs and pounces and a scrabbling of its claws; the jackdaw watched from its perch on the telescope, bending a baleful eye, cocking a zany head. Harry took Zoë to town, brought her back again, and, as they cycled the seashore track, the bird came too, matching its cries to the cries of the child. Tycho was in constant attendance. The jackdaw was a shadow of her.

  Frank came for his lessons, for his scanning of the stars through the increasingly dusty lenses of the telescope, for his evenings of slow, smoky conversation. The lure of the telescope wasn’t the only reason why his music lessons were sometimes suspended: he was uncomfortable under Zoë’s sightless but highly critical scrutiny. He tried to laugh with her when she laughed, when she snorted and giggled at his fumbles on the flute; she sighed when he bungled, and he smiled gamely. But her stare, so vacant and yet so keen, made him wince. So he would put down the flute with a self-deprecating shrug, and roll a joint instead. They would spend the rest of the evening, Harry and Frank, simply talking; or rather, it was Frank who talked about his travels in Afghanistan and Turkey, about the Yukon and the Amazon, while Harry listened and dozed.

  Zoë and Tycho watched the two men. When the girl fell asleep, the bird remained vigilant. Harry cuddled the kitten, where it hid its eyes from the eyes of the crow, and he hardly noticed when Frank stood up and left the boat. But he wondered, before he too was asleep, how many more times Frank would come to the Ozymandias, to endure the stare of the blind, unblinking child.

  Dewi persevered. For him, the cabin of the Ozymandias had been a haven, away from the jibes and jeers of school, and Harry was happy to see the youth relaxing, more inclined to talk and to enthuse unselfconsciously about the music. In the first four or five years after Lizzie’s death, Dewi had worked hard at the flute and made progress. He’d felt safe on the boat, because no one was watching him. . . .

  But now there were eyes on him after all. It was worse than school. The eyes never left him: even when the child was in bed, asleep, there was the bird on the telescope. Dewi continued to work with his teacher, but his concentration was gnawed away. The youth flinched from Zoë’s brilliant stare. He blazed like a beacon at the sound of her laugh. How much longer would he endure it? Who was this child, from whom nothing was hidden?

  So, Frank and Dewi might soon be gone. And the roses were dead.

  One afternoon, Harry cycled from Caernarfon with Zoë on the pillion seat. Tycho was overhead. This was the child’s domain, the wide estuary. The tide was out, the sky was tall, there was frost in the sky. She sat behind her father with her hands on his waist, and she scented the air, tasting the salt and sand on her lips. She heard the rush of wings when the starlings rose from the cowpats in the fields; smiling, she turned her sharp little face towards the sound. She heard the growling of shelduck on the mudflats, and she growled as deeply as her childish voice could manage. When the black-backs looked up from the dead thing they were dismembering, she met their dead, chill, yellow eyes with her own chill eyes. There were oystercatchers, as dapper as men in dinner jackets, whose fluted cries she could mimic. There was nothing on the estuary, to the distant dunes and beyond, that she hadn’t sensed and seen in the infinity of her imagination. She was a creature of the estuary, of the sea and the salt and the skies.

  Now, without speaking, transmitting her excitement by the pressure of her grip on Harry’s waist, she sat behind him on the bicycle and appraised her world. Tycho beat alongside.

  Minutes before they arrived at the mooring of the Ozymandias, Harry could see Helen’s car parked there. He didn’t say anything to Zoë, so it was extraordinary to feel the child bristling, to feel how fast her pleasure in the place and the frosty afternoon drained. She stiffened. She scented the air, sniffing like a setter. Harry helped her off her seat, and he could feel the cold in her brittle frame.

  ‘Aunty Helen’s here!’ he said cheerily. ‘I didn’t know she was coming today. She’s dropped in for tea, I suppose.’

  The child didn’t reply. She and the bird went on deck. Harry leaned the bicycle into the hedge and walked across to the car.

  ‘So, you’ve still got the crow,’ Helen whispered, squeezing his hand and kissing his cheek as they followed Zoë onto the boat. ‘I was hoping you might have got rid of it by now.’

  The woman smelled gorgeous. Her hair was dark and sleek. Her skin was flawless.

  ‘I just thought I’d come by and see how you were,’ she said. ‘I was watching you coming along on the shore, the two of you on the bike and that bloody thing circling around like a vulture. . . .’

  Stepping onto the deck, she called out to Zoë, and the child smiled, although she swerved from the woman’s kiss with a little snort and a shudder.

  ‘Can we leave Tycho outside, please, Zoë?’ Helen asked her. ‘You know I don’t like him. Please, while I come in for a cup of tea? I’m longing to see how the kitten’s getting on!’

  ‘Seamus is all right, so far,’ Zoë said, staring across the mudflats. ‘That’s what Daddy calls him. He’s Daddy’s pet, not mine. But thank you for the roses, Aunty Helen.
They’re lovely.’

  At her own mention of the flowers, Zoë grinned, her eyes glittering, as though the idea of them in their earthenware vase was suddenly something novel.

  ‘Yes, they’re lovely, Aunty Helen!’ she said again. ‘Come and see!’ She led the way into the cabin.

  Below, it was warm and comfortable. Harry had stoked the stove before cycling into town to fetch the child. But the room was steeped in the smells of the things that Zoë had brought in, the seaweed and driftwood, the mud-sodden bones. Helen’s perfume was the only sweetness. Instinctively, he leaned towards her as she took off her coat, and the movement of her clothes released a fragrance that made him giddy; he’d forgotten, in the fortnight since Helen’s last visit, when she’d made the gifts of the kitten and the roses, how much he wanted this soft, generous woman. He put his face to her hair, inhaling. His hands went to her waist and her breasts. Laughing, she pushed him away, because the child was gazing at her with hard, empty eyes.

  ‘But the flowers!’ Helen cried. ‘Oh, Zoë, I’d hardly say they were lovely! They’re dead, aren’t they? They want throwing out!’

  The child moved to them, past the mouth of the stove, and reached up her fingers to the smooth, rounded fullness of the vase. She caressed it, turning to her father and grinning, as though in mockery of the way he’d touched the woman.

  ‘But I like them like this, Aunty Helen,’ she said. ‘I like them dead. They smell nicer, I think.’

  ‘They want throwing out!’ the woman said. ‘There’s nothing worse than dead flowers!’ She glanced about the cabin. ‘Well? Where’s the kitten, then? What did you say you’d called him?’

  ‘Seamus,’ Zoë said. She was struggling to lift the vase of dead roses, with her arms around its body, toppling it towards her. She panted over her shoulder, as Harry went to help her, ‘I can manage, Daddy! Leave me! We’re not going to throw them away just yet. If you don’t like them any more, I’ll have them in my corner, by my bed. I like them like this!’