Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Cold... brrrr... hey Chloe?’ There were openings in the face of the clock, some of the panes of glass must have broken, so that, as well as the shafts of wintry light which shot the darkness, there were piercing drafts of icy air. ‘Brrr, not much warmer in here than outside... are you alright?’

  She smiled at me, excited to have clambered into the top of the tower, and she was pottering around and poking into the grubbiest corners. The floor was powdered with a thick layer of dust and strewn with leaves which had blown in; and a jumble of twigs, a debris of dried-up splinters of branches, a curious grey matting of animal fur, wool and feathers, scraps of old newspaper. Unmistakably, nesting material. The child was kneeling to it, picking it up and sniffing, and I had to move quickly to stop her from even touching it with her tongue.

  ‘Hey, no Chloe, that’s dirty, I knew we’d get dirty up here. What do you think it is? A bird? Back in the summer, maybe the birds have come in and tried to make a nest...’

  I crossed to the central-heating system. I’d come up to check it, to make sure none of the pipes had split with the ferocious freezing in the night. But it all seemed fine, everything was lagged and insulated, all brand-new and guaranteed as part of the conversion. I tapped at the dials on the boiler, although I had no idea what the readings should be. I put my ear to the tank and heard a satisfying burble of hot water.

  A sudden scuffle in the dust. The mouse again. As I turned to see what was happening, I saw the creature wriggle out of Chloe’s sleeve and plop onto the floor. For a moment it just sat there, as amazed by the strangeness of the room as the girl had been, and then it skittered away from her, sometimes silent in the soft powder, then scratching and wriggling through dry leaves and twigs, scurrying across the room and questing with its little pink snout.

  ‘Hey Mr. Mouse, where are you off to? Leave him, Chloe, he’s just exploring, that’s all.’

  She was springing along beside the mouse, and each step she took raised such a puther of dust that the shafts of freezing daylight were clouded with it. I covered my mouth, the girl was giggling and spluttering at the filthy blizzard she’d raised, and the mouse, so perfectly pristine and unused to such a wintry haboob, was turning round and round in ever decreasing circles. Until at last, it found the courage to break away. It shot across the room and disappeared underneath the water tank.

  Chloe was straightway there, on her hands and knees and groping into the darkness. Before I could stop her, she was pulling out handfuls of stuff, the accumulated fluff and fur and feathers which had blown there through the autumn and winter. With one hand over my mouth, I bent to her and encircled her waist with my other arm, and just hoicked her up and away and back into the middle of the room.

  ‘What on earth have you got? Hey come on Chloe... hey what a mess...’

  Little angel. She was no trouble. I hugged her close, and her face was a picture of smiles and laughing eyes, the bobble-hat askew on her cobwebby curls. But she was waving her prize in a tightly clenched fist, and she wouldn’t drop it.

  Not the mouse. A crow.

  She had it by the neck. It was a rag of filthy black feathers. As she swung it around her head, its heavy black beak clacked open and shut. The wings shook out a shower of dust, and the tough plumage bristled and rustled like the wreckage of a broken umbrella. She swung it more wildly, the dangling black claws clattered like castanets. And then she let go. It arced through the air, through a whirlwind of dust, and crash-landed on the floor.

  I put her down too. There was a silence, as the daylight cleared and we could see and breathe more easily. As Chloe bent towards the bird, I knelt beside her and held her firmly, gently, so she wouldn’t try to pick it up again. I wasn’t cross, she wasn’t mean or obstreperous like the old Chloe, she was as sweet as ever and merely exercising her unselfconscious childish curiosity... dead bird, pick it up, whirl it around, throw it. No cruelty or malice. And so we eyed the remains of the creature, as a hush gathered around us.

  A little sound. Mouse. We turned and saw it nosing timidly from beneath the water tank. Despite the mess in the room and the horridness of the place where it had been hiding, it was as perfect as ever. It seemed to shine with perfection, gleaming impossibly, as it picked its way towards us. It came to the bird. It sniffed and sneezed. Surprising how loudly a mouse can sneeze, in the icy air of an old church tower...

  Was it the sneeze? Or was it the movement of the child as she leaned down and let the mouse run onto the palm of her hand?

  The bird moved.

  My imagination, or the dust in my eyes, or the blurring of the grey light?

  Chloe flinched away from the bird and closer into my arms. It moved again. One of its wings straightened and shuddered. A contraction of the muscles, a reaction to the shaking and whirling and the impact onto the floor... a momentary relaxation of rigor mortis?

  But then it opened its eyes. It opened its beak and hissed. It exhaled a long hissing breath. And as the two of us edged away and back towards the open trap-door, the crow dragged itself across the floor, trailing one of its wings at first and then shivering and shuffling it back into place... and by the time it reached the wall it was more or less on its feet and with one sudden bound, a bundle of filthy frozen feathers which had been thawed and shocked alive again, it was gone.

  Through a broken pane in the face of the clock. A tumble of black feathers, it launched itself out into the air and was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  THE TOOTH. IT stung me into action. Stung? Maybe not, the word was an uncomfortable reminder of how all this, the change in our lives, had begun. No, the tooth charged me with enthusiasm and excitement, and the following day, downstairs in the vestry, I did more than I would otherwise have done in a month of playing shop, to use Rosie’s disparaging expression.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said, when I took her down to show her, when she’d come home late from work. ‘You’ve done a lot. Did Chloe help you at all? I mean, I hope you’ve been trying to involve her and not just leaving her on her own in the corner with the mouse...’

  I just said yes, as she took a turn around the room to inspect my achievement. I could’ve groused at her, that she couldn’t bestow a bit of praise without adding a note of doubt about my commitment to our daughter, but I let it pass. I’d unpacked all the books and arranged them on their shelves, packed away all the cardboard boxes, arranged myself a desk and chair in the corner with the computer humming, its screen glowing. The fire was lit and crackling, a birch log on a bed of coals. ‘Hey, it looks good. It’s starting to look like a bookshop, ready to open for business. And this? I guess this is the shrine...’

  ‘Shrine, yes, I suppose so. What do you think? Pretty exciting...’

  I’d been down the road to one of the charity shops in Canal Street, and come back with a bedside table, a bit of midnight-purple velveteen material, a lamp on a stalk you could angle this way and that; and in the next-door cyber-cafe I’d photocopied the precious hand-written note and blown it up to a kind of readable poster size. Now, the first thing you’d see on entering the room was a brightly illuminated display: the lamp bent over the purple velvet, the jewellery box on it... the tooth on its bed of white satin. Beside it, the hand-written note, for customers to read and marvel at.

  ‘Poe’s tooth,’ I said to Rosie, as she leaned closer to look at it again. ‘A tooth from the mouth of the boy Edgar Allan Poe, a baby tooth he lost while he was here in England as a boy, in 1818. He was sent from America by his wealthy step-father, and he attended a boarding-school in Stoke Newington, the Manor House School. The note’s written by the headmaster, a Dr Barnsby, and it records the date when the boy’s tooth came out or was pulled out, and the one penny that the headmaster conveyed to the boy as some kind of token...’

  Rosie had straightened up and was looking at me with a mock-incredulous look on her face.

  ‘Why did the teacher keep the tooth? I get the stuff about a penny being a lot in those days, and I suppose th
at, if the headmaster was a reasonably genial type he might go through the nonsense of giving pennies to little boys in his charge just to make the school a kind of less scary, more homely kind of place. But why did he keep the tooth, and how did it get to be in that funny old shop in Nottingham, and then why did...?’

  ‘I don’t, Rosie, I don’t know.’ I waved away her questions. ‘No one knows. I guess I could go to the trouble of having the tooth analysed for its age, and then getting some expert to analyse the slip of paper and the ink on it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s as real as any relic, to use that word again... you know, like the fingernail of Santa Maria de Compostela, or a fragment of the Holy Cross, or even a bottle of the Beatles’ bathwater. Who cares, if it helps with the bookshop or who knows, it might even help me to start writing a book? It isn’t the reality of the thing that matters. It’s the belief it inspires.’

  She was staring at me, and then a glance at the tooth, her eyes drifting to the flames of the fire and across to the computer where Chloe was blinking absent-mindedly into the screen.

  ‘Rosie,’ I went on, to try and keep her attention a moment longer, ‘you confirmed that it’s a real tooth, from a real child, a something bicuspid or whatever you said. And the note says it’s a tooth from a boy called EA Poe, at the Manor House School in 1818, identified by a teacher called Dr Barnsby. I only have to spread the rumour and see if it generates a bit of interest...’

  She moved to me and enfolded me in her arms. ‘It’s all good,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘You know me, Oliver, you know what I want most and what would make me really happy again. When I come home and find you and Chloe warm and safe together, I don’t really care what else you’ve been up to. I love you. And I love Chloe so much and I yearn for her so much it hurts, it hurts me inside.’

  Still holding me, she pulled her head away and looked me in the eyes. Her own eyes were gleaming with tears.

  ‘Belief, yes. Poe’s tooth is good, my dear Oliver. It’s got you fired up and busy with the shop and everything. So let’s all believe in it, the tooth of Edgar Allan Poe, me and you and Chloe, if it’s going to make us happy together and give us something to hold onto...’

  Time to go upstairs again, back to the kitchen and eat and then get Chloe ready for her bed. I put a fireguard in front of the flames, in case a spark flew out as they died down. I turned off the computer. Rosie took Chloe by the hand and led her out of the warm room, into the bigger, colder space of the church hallway. I switched off the lamp, and for a moment the three of us stood silent and still in the darkness. A draft of the January night air was blowing under the great oak door.

  ‘I was wondering, the other thing I was going to ask...’ Rosie’s voice was soft and oddly disembodied. It trembled a little, with the cold. ‘I was wondering, why did the old guy, Mr. Heap, why did he give the tooth to you?’

  Chapter Nine

  CHLOE CAME TO us in the night, again.

  Not asleep, nothing odd or unnerving. Rosie had put her to bed after her supper and a bath, and I’d followed afterwards to read a page or two of a story to her. As always, she’d stared up at me, all sweetly tucked up, in the same way that any child might stare at her father while he was reading. Except that her eyes never wavered from my mouth. They hardly even fluttered to meet my eyes, but she was watching my lips with a slightly puzzled expression on her face, as if – if she was thinking anything at all – as if she was wondering why on earth this man she dimly recognised was murmuring such a meaningless mumble of sounds.

  I read to her, until Rosie came back up with a glass of milk and some biscuits to leave on Chloe’s bedside table, and we kissed her goodnight and turned off her light.

  Chloe came to us again, later. Nothing odd.

  We both woke up to hear her plaintive mewling noises, the noise she made when she’d woken up hot and bothered or restless and she wanted to elicit a response from us. And we dutifully did what we usually did. Rosie went through to her room and soothed her with kisses and caresses, and if she wouldn’t settle, she would bring her back to our room. Sure enough, as I waited in a blurry muddle of memories of the dream I’d been having, Rosie was leaning over me, with Chloe, and I could smell their warm and perfumed bodies as Rosie was whispering, ‘Come on, my sweetie, come into Mummy’s bed, come into bed with Mummy and Daddy, and then maybe Daddy will...’

  Not maybe. It was a certainty. After a few minutes cuddling with Mummy and Daddy, Chloe was breathing softly and easily and falling sweetly asleep. And, not a baby or a toddler any more but a bonny seven-year-old, she’d got her knees pressed hard into the small of Daddy’s back... so that I muttered, ‘Alright, sleep tight, I’ll just...’ and I slipped out of the bed, trying to dispel a resentful image of cuckoos and nests and so on, and into the next room, into Chloe’s still-warm and snuggly bed.

  That was what usually happened. The difference this time, I didn’t sleep.

  I lay there and listened, although I heard nothing, not a flutter of feathers or a skitter of claws. I listened and I thought of the crow and how wretched it had been, how it had come back to life and sculled like a hopeless cripple across the floor before launching itself out of the window. I lay very still and I listened, but there was not a sound. Probably, all but dead, it had fallen to the pavement far below and perished there, frozen to the ground. No matter. In the utter silence I stared at the ceiling, and then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

  The ladder. The ladder on the ceiling. The shape of it seemed to shine on the inside of my eyelids. It wouldn’t go away.

  I opened my eyes and sat up. I swigged the milk that Chloe hadn’t touched. Reached for the biscuits. Hesitated, with one of them halfway to my mouth. Got out of bed and pulled on the cord, so that the ladder swung silently down and clicked into place.

  So cold. At the top of the ladder, when I pushed up the trap-door and eased my head and shoulders up into the clock-tower, the cold seemed to rush at me and pounce and squeeze around me like the jaws of a trap, as if it had been waiting for me. There was a little orange light from the streets of the slumbering town. Nothing was moving in the icy dark room. The workings of the clock were locked into their sleep of obsolescence.

  I crumbled the biscuits and tossed the pieces across the floor.

  THERE WAS NO sign of the crow, of course, when Chloe and I stepped out of the door of the church. Why would there be?

  Cold, again. Cold, still. Minus three or five or six? A flock of grey and black pigeons whirled around the top of our tower. In the bare trees along Derby Road, the old nests of the rooks were exposed, like strange dead fruits still clinging to the branches. Always a magpie churring and chuntering through the blackened twigs of the hawthorn hedges... and gulls, the resourceful inland gulls, a mob of them, tumbling and somersaulting and soaring in the wintry sky, so far from the sea and yet thriving and voicing the triumph of their success with a never-ceasing cackling and laughter. Yes, there were crows, an odd pair across the playing-fields of Derwent College. But the sheen on their wings and the swagger of their gait said that neither of them was the moribund wreck we’d discovered in the church tower.

  Rosie was at work. In the weeks following Chloe’s accident, of course the two of us had stopped work to look after her and try to settle ourselves in the aftermath of the shock. With the windfall of the compensation pay-out, we’d secured the church tower; but we would still need cash-flow, as Rosie put it, one of us would have to work, or maybe both of us part-time, and we would juggle everything around looking after Chloe. Rosie called Dowling & McCorrister, the dental practice where she’d been a highly-respected stalwart for years, expecting to be welcomed back after her traumatic time off. She wasn’t, she’d been replaced. Similarly, my cosy job in the borough council’s mobile library had been advertised, there’d been hundreds of applicants and the position was filled.

  What to do? Rosie got a job twenty minutes’ walk from our new home, as a headmaster’s secretary. Brook’s Academy was a dismal priv
ate day-school in a dismal cul-de-sac, five or six disconsolate teachers cramming sixty-odd pupils for exams they’d already failed once or twice, and so-called Colonel Brook was, according to Rosie, a crank, a creationist. I would stay at home and look after Chloe. And every morning, as she girded her loins and every other part of her comeliness to set off into the teeth of an arctic winter, Rosie would do two other things. She would whisper her prayer into Chloe’s ear, her poignant appeal to the little girl to come back, to come back... and she would issue me with the necessary instructions or suggestions or precautions, entreating me to take every possible care, and I would see in her eyes the shadow of doubt that I was trustworthy, the flicker of fear that I might not be.

  No sign of the crow. But I saw Chloe glance up at the tower, to the face of the clock, and then she angled her head slowly down and down and down to the pavement where we were standing, as though measuring the distance and trajectory of something falling. She saw me looking too. She just smiled, made a little chuckling noise, in the same way that she responded to anything, whether it be good or bad or nice or nasty, and together, hand in gloved hand, we set off for our walk across the park.

  As instructed, we talked. I talked.

  ‘So we got our packed lunch, our sandwiches and our flask... is it hot chocolate this time? We’ve got some extra crusts for the ducks, yes the swans too if they’re there, and the coots, yes the coots, we like the coots best of all. We’re wrapped up warm, gloves and woolly hats and wellington boots... but Chloe, Daddy doesn’t want to go out too long today ’cos he’s got things to do with the shop, alright? I’ve got a visitor coming this afternoon, to see the shop and everything...’