The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  She’d lifted the vase. She crossed the cabin with it, avoiding the obstacles of telescope, bed, chair and stove, and pushed her way through the curtain which screened her part of the cabin. Hidden from view, she called out, ‘Show Aunty Helen the kitten, Daddy! I’m putting these roses with my other things.’ They could hear the child arranging and rearranging the trophies in her collection.

  Harry took the kitten from its basket. He and Helen sat on the bed together, feeling the heat of the fire on them, and she cooed over the antics of the tiny creature. In a fortnight, it had become cutely mischievous, a bundle of fur which sprang at the woman’s hands, pouncing at the bright-red varnish on her nails. Harry snuggled to the woman’s side; she smelled so good and warm. Zoë was behind her curtain, humming to herself. The jackdaw was outside.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ Helen said, holding the animal to her face. ‘Imagine what was going to happen to him! Where did you get the name from, Harry? It’ll suit him one day – it’s got a kind of roguish, swashbuckling sound, hasn’t it?’

  Without saying anything, he smiled and stood up from the bed. He took a book from the shelf, found the page he wanted and handed it to Helen. She quickly read the poem. With a shiver, she closed the book and put it down. ‘You and your poems!’ she said. ‘That’s pretty horrible, “scraggy wee shits . . .” But I can see what you mean. After all, the farmer said he was going to drown the wretched thing.’

  She leaned to Harry and breathed into his mouth. She touched his teeth with the tip of her tongue.

  ‘You and your bloody poems!’ she whispered. ‘Reading all kinds of bizarre messages into them! What with the cello and the telescope, and now the kitten! Well, at least we’ve saved Seamus from poetic fulfilment, or whatever you thought you were doing with the other poem.’

  She shifted herself to him, pressing her body on his. ‘It’s a pity Zoë can’t vanish for a while, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I didn’t come just for a cup of tea, you know. . . .’ Her mouth was sweet and wet on his mouth.

  ‘Maybe she can,’ he managed to reply. He withdrew from her embrace and called softly to the child. ‘Hey, Zoë, what are you doing? Why don’t you go outside? The tide’s right out. You and Tycho might have some luck on the beach. . . . I was out there earlier on, and saw a whole lot of mermaid’s purses at the foot of the sea wall. Some of them have got the tiny dogfish inside them, not yet hatched. You’d soon find them, not far from the bottom of the ladder.’

  Zoë emerged from behind the curtain, sucking her fingers. She smiled and held out her hand to him.

  ‘Blood!’ she said. ‘Those roses have got sharp prickles, haven’t they? They might be dead, but they still sting!’ She put the wounded fingers into her mouth again. Speaking around them, she said, ‘I’ll go and see if Tycho’s all right. We’ll go on the beach a bit. Give me the kitten, Daddy, and I’ll put him away for you. He can have a little lick at this, if he wants.’

  Darting between the man and the woman, her face alight, Zoë offered her hand to the kitten, which sprang to it and rasped at the saliva and blood with its sandpapery tongue. She scooped up the animal and hugged it to her, the first time she’d shown it any sort of tenderness since it had been on board the Ozymandias.

  ‘Come on, Seamus, come with Zoë,’ she said, nuzzling her face into its fur. ‘You can come into my corner if you like, and see all the things I’ve collected. See the roses. . . .’

  A moment later, she’d taken away the kitten, disappeared behind her curtain with it, reappeared with her coat and skipped up the steps of the cabin. There was a gust of cold air when she’d left. Her footsteps rang on the deck and her voice was high and clear as she called for the jackdaw. Then there was silence. Harry and Helen slipped off their shoes and moved closely together on the bed.

  ‘You’re a funny pair, aren’t you?’ the woman whispered. ‘You and Zoë, with your odd collections. You with your poems and your stars, collecting them like relics in a dusty museum; Zoë with her bones and her dead roses. What are we going to do with you?’

  She slipped her hand inside his shirt, running the razor edges of her nails over his chest. Just then, the silence in the cabin was broken by the faintest of scrabbling sounds, no louder than the flutter of the fire, like the skittering of mice behind a skirting board. Helen cocked an ear, lifted her face from his so that her hair swung fragrantly on his lips.

  ‘What’s that noise? Mice in the bilges?’ she asked. ‘Seamus is going to earn his keep one day. . . .’

  The woman shrugged and bent her mouth to Harry’s throat. He strained to hear, but Helen’s breathing so close to him and the friction of her clothes against his made it impossible to tell where the noise was coming from. There’d never been mice on the Ozymandias. Perhaps it was the patter of wagtails on the deck. He ignored it.

  Helen’s breathing became louder. She moaned when he wriggled his hand inside her blouse. She was on top of him, all her weight was on him, and he was giddy with her scent. Nevertheless, he was aware of the scrabbling sound, which was louder now and faster. The mouse, if that was what it was, was somewhere in the cabin, scratching with its tiny claws for the biscuit crumbs which Zoë must have left at her bedside. Harry managed to clear his face from Helen’s hair. While she groaned, while his fingers teased her nipples, he listened.

  They both looked up at the next noise. Something had fallen over in the corner behind Zoë’s curtain. There was a tumble and a thud as some sort of object was dislodged.

  ‘What is it, Harry?’ the woman whispered, her face flushed. ‘Is it the kitten? Didn’t Zoë say she’d put him away in the basket?’

  They lifted themselves reluctantly from the bed. Together they tiptoed across the cabin and peered through a gap in the curtain. There were dead roses on the floor, and droplets of water on the bedside table. The earthenware vase was shuddering, so that the remaining roses trembled and rustled. Thrashing and writhing among the stems, a string of black, wet fur snagged on the thorns.

  Harry darted forward, Helen beside him. For a second they peered into the stagnant water. They saw the surface bubbling, heard the scrabble of claws on the inside of the vase. They watched the spasms and twitches of that string of fur. They felt the flying droplets on their cheeks . . . until Harry picked up the vase and emptied its contents onto the floor of the cabin.

  Too late. The kitten had been jammed in head first, with only its tail above the surface of the water. Now it lay still, shining like a wet glove, glossy and dead.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ That was all Helen said. She knelt in the pool of water and touched the animal’s slick, black and white fur. When she turned it over, water pumped from its mouth . . . water and blood. She looked up at Harry as though she was going to say some­thing else, ask a question, but a tap at the window of the cabin drew her eyes from his. They both glanced up to see that Zoë was there, squatting on the deck to press her face to the glass. She rapped with her knuckle. Tycho was there as well, tapping with its beak.

  The child was grinning, with a gash of a smile on her mouth. Her eyes were glittering. She stood up. Harry and Helen, transfixed by the stares of the child and the bird, listened as her footsteps ran the length of the boat, and they caught her tinkling cry when she summoned the crow. They heard her feet clanging on the rungs of the ladder, from the top of the sea wall onto the shore.

  Helen stood up too. Her flush was gone. White-lipped, trem­bling, she adjusted her clothes and put on her shoes. She got ready to leave, in silence, breathing deeply to control her nausea. Her only gesture was to pick up the poetry book which Harry had shown her, to hold it for a second and frown, before slinging it, as hard as she could, at the other books on the shelf. He watched her, barefooted in the pool of water in which the roses and the kitten had died. Helen didn’t say another word. Harry was speechless, too: he watched from the deck as the big silver car hurtled up the lane, and he clenched his hand on the dead animal.

  It was very cold on the estuary, sheltered from
the Irish Sea only by the distant dunes. He could hear the roaring of the surf on the further side. A tremendous shiver took hold of him, shook him from the crown of his head to the base of his spine. He saw Zoë, who’d fled across the mudflats, with Tycho in conspiratorial attendance; there they were in the gathering twilight, far out on the exposed sands. In a spontaneous gesture of rage and helpless­ness, that the child was beyond his understanding and control, he flung the body of the kitten as hard as he could away from the boat, across the boulders and weeds of the foreshore, where it splashed into a shallow pool. It was a gesture of disgust and defiance. He would not be beaten by Zoë. He would not be gnawed to empti­ness by the energies of the child, as Lizzie had been. Zoë would not eclipse him. . . .

  Straight away he regretted his impulse. Somehow, Zoë had sensed what he’d done, because he heard her cry and saw how she sent Tycho wheeling skywards with a wave of her arm. The jack­daw was despatched. It beat quickly towards the boat, towards the pool where Harry had hurled the kitten.

  Too horrible. . . . He hurried below, racked with cold and the fear of an imminent nightmare. He couldn’t watch, as the bird dropped like a rag. It applied its beak, the beak that Harry had made, to the tiny corpse.

  Chapter Twelve

  The spring passed into summer. Zoë had alienated Helen. The woman didn’t return to the Ozymandias after the murder of the kitten. Sometimes Harry saw her by chance in Caernarfon and they would pause for a talk over a drink or two in the Black Boy, but she didn’t visit the boat. Helen’s reference, many months before, to the cuckoo chick which ousts the competition from the nest in order to monopolise all the energy around it, seemed to have been apt. The woman couldn’t share that little room with the child: the con­fines of the cabin were too narrow; there wasn’t enough space and air for her and Zoë.

  Harry was feeling the same kind of threat himself, not only in the boat but on the wide expanse of the estuary. There was nothing that Zoë hadn’t claimed for herself. He felt squeezed by her, even in the vastness of the sand flats and under the towering sky: a feeling he’d first experienced on the night of the child’s birth, when Lizzie, gasping for breath in the exertions of labour, had snatched the air from him, gulping so hard that he could barely breathe for himself. Remembering that time, he thought he understood what had been happening: the imminence of Zoë’s birth, which quenched Lizzie so utterly that the young woman was destroyed, had drained him even then. Now seven years later, the child was marshalling her strength by sapping his. She’d murdered her mother, as surely as she’d murdered the kitten. Harry knew this. He watched the bright, blind child throughout that summer and determined to resist her.

  One incident marked Zoë’s seventh birthday and the seventh anniversary of Lizzie’s death, which might otherwise have passed unnoticed in the hot, slow days of another hot, slow summer.

  Zoë continued to enjoy her relationship with Tycho, their solidarity excluding Harry; and the gulls would fall to her, as they’d done in the earliest months of the child’s life, when they’d screamed around her cot on the deck of the boat and had one day delivered the jackdaw to her. Tycho was the only smut in the snowstorm of gulls. Often, if the man and the child were walking on the seashore track or cycling to and from the town, they were followed by the gulls, the droppings like sleet on their shoulders. Zoë stared upwards, laughing. The jackdaw beat in the blizzard of birds.

  They walked to the churchyard on Zoë’s birthday. Harry car­ried flowers; Zoë brought a razor-shell so sharp that she’d cut her fingers in prising it from the foreshore. She knelt at the graveside. When she traced the letters of her mother’s name, she didn’t leave tears, but a smearing of her blood. Harry put down his flowers among the dry, black seaweed that the summer sun had crisped, among the crumbs of crabs and cuttlefish. He sat in the long grass while the child disappeared to the corners of the churchyard, ex­ploring with the crow.

  It was a day like the day when he’d buried Lizzie. The sun was on his back. The sycamores were dense with leaf, white with dust, and above them a lark was lost in the infinite blue. On the estuary, the sails of dinghies and windsurfers were as brilliant as butterflies on buddleia. The little church was a hot rock, a meteor that had fallen and been embedded there; the gravestones were the splinters of its impact.

  Zoë had a special gift for the grave. She ran towards her father, calling shrilly, holding out some treasure she’d found. It was indeed a treasure, quite unexpected this far from the ebb of the tide.

  ‘A brittlestar, Daddy!’ she shouted. ‘A brittlestar! Tycho was pecking at it, over there, in the nettles! Look at it! Look!’

  Astonished, he took the creature from her fingers, which were dirty with blood and grass stains. The brittlestar was broken, with only two of its arms intact on the disc-body, and so dry that these remaining tentacles disintegrated to dust in his clumsy fingers.

  ‘Good girl, Zoë!’ he whispered to her. ‘We haven’t seen one of these for a long time, have we?’

  His words were clumsy too, after seven years with the blind child, but she’d grown used to this blunder from him and from her contact with children and teachers at school; she simply smiled, and she licked at the blood on her hand.

  ‘A long way from the sea, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How could it have got here? What do you think, Zoë? A brittlestar in the undergrowth of our churchyard!’

  He knew she knew the answer. He submitted to her wisdom. She led him from gravestone to gravestone, even to the deepest thickets of the cemetery and the heaviest shade of the sycamore.

  ‘Seashells,’ she said, pointing with eerie accuracy. ‘All over the place. They’re mussels, aren’t they, Daddy? And they’ve all been dropped by the birds. By the crows mostly. Tycho himself might have brought some of them.’

  She leaned her father on the wall which surrounded the church and the graveyard, where his eyes were drawn to the glitter of water, the horizon of dunes, to Anglesey and the glare of the open sea. The tide was well in, but on the foreshore, where the waves left rolls of weed, where jellyfish and other dead things were fetched up, there were stones, graded into boulders and pebbles and shingle.

  ‘Are there any crows now, Daddy?’ the little girl asked. ‘On the beach? Are they working?’

  A number of carrion crows were swaggering among the rocks and seaweed. They jemmied into every crevice with their weighty, black beaks, searching for a morsel. And up they floated, with a spring of their muscular legs and a shake of their sooty wings, so that from a height of ten or fifteen feet they could drop a mussel and smash it on the boulders. Then the crows fell down, like huge, spiralling cinders, to prise open the shattered shells.

  ‘They come up here too,’ the child said. ‘When it’s very windy they get blown this way, over the field, to use the stones in the churchyard. Listen, Daddy! What’s happening now? What is it? Is it a black-back? Here it comes!’

  A herring gull flapped from the foreshore, pearly in the sun­light. It laboured for a few heavy beats of its wings before gliding effortlessly across the hedge and low over the meadow. It held something black and wet in its beak. Approaching the bank of sycamores, the gull flung itself skywards, gained the height to clear the trees, and made an arcing pass over the roof of the church. It released the object it was carrying. With a clatter and a bounce, the mussel skidded down the old, uneven slates and fell silently into the grass of the graveyard. Immediately, the gull was back to claim its prize . . . but, as it swooped between the headstones, it saw the man close by and swerved away with an ugly croak.

  Zoë, with the help of Tycho, found the mussel and picked it up. It was split. Yellow and pink flesh oozed through the broken shell. She dropped it onto a slate slab.

  ‘See, Daddy?’ she said. ‘Whose grave is this one? Are there bones here too?’

  ‘Henry Albert Griffiths,’ he read. ‘Candlemaker of Caernarfon. He died in 1783, about two hundred years ago. Yes, Zoë, Mr Griffiths’s bones are here, under this stone. For a
ll these years, the gulls and the crows have been eating their breakfasts off him. One of them must have dropped the brittlestar. Let’s leave it with Mummy, shall we? With my flowers and your razor-shell?’

  They were shattered, desiccated, the remains of the brittlestar. Zoë shrugged at her father’s suggestion, but humoured him by sprinkling the crumbs of the creature on the grave. He watched her, and he remembered the meteorite that had fallen close by, on this very day, seven years before. So, he thought, there were still some shards to be found.

  Zoë grinned at him, as though she knew what he was think­ing. She put down the cold, dead thing and led him from the church­yard, guiding him with the pressure of her hot, strong hand.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘And Frank?’ she asked him one evening. ‘Won’t he come any more either?’

  It was November. The summer had passed. Zoë had continued to prove that she knew the seashore as well as her father did, or better. Yet there remained one thing he could still monopolise, which was beyond her piercing intelligence: a black, metallic thing he’d neglected for months, which was now encrusted with the accum­ulated droppings of a jackdaw. For Zoë, the telescope was out of reach. Harry took comfort in this. At least there was something he could claim for himself, which she could never usurp.

  Now, as a winter’s night enfolded the Ozymandias and they were snug inside the cabin, he sat before the open stove and pondered the machine: spattered white, stuck with feathers and a down of dust, it was in a filthy condition. For this, he found himself thinking once more, the cello was put to the flames. And again, as always, his thoughts ran from the burning of the cello to the poem that had provoked it; from there, to the groove in the beam where his beloved Lizzie had swung. The child sat beside him. The heat of the fire fell on her bright face.