Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  This time, I swung the boat into the city... into a mysterious, dripping world which only a handful of people would ever see.

  While hundreds of commuters swept overhead in their neat, warm cars, on the bridges and flyovers into the centre of Nottingham, we saw an underworld they didn’t know existed. The canals beneath a modern city – secret tunnels and echoing caverns, a tumble of frozen undergrowth, the derelict forests of nettle and wort and fireweed; stone archways, groins and quoins and other architectural curios; odd little doors, locked and never opened since Victorian times.

  Chloe sat on the front of the boat. And there was the tiniest change in her, I could almost detect a hint of her old defiance, as she dangled her feet precariously close to the slimy walls of the chasms we entered, as she glanced at me, as though challenging me to reprimand her, and then lowered her eyes. We coasted through dark green shadows, where I stilled the engine and we waited and listened as the real world of business and commerce and work hurried over our heads.

  Her old self, she would never have sat and listened like that. Now she was rapt. She listened to the silence.

  Not quite a silence. A rat plopped into the water. Pigeons fluttered in their secret, fetid places. A man, in a huddle of old newspapers, drunk perhaps and probably dying, groaned and muttered and lay still. Drip, drip, drip. A million, a billion drips, each one a second in the life of the city, hidden away and yet only a few yards from its blinkered, oblivious inhabitants.

  ‘Chips? And beer for me...’ We were in Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, the oldest pub in England.

  From here, as long ago as the 12th century, rag-tag parties of foot-soldiers and so-called knights swaggering on their horses would set off for the Crusades. Chloe ate chips from a basket. She dipped them in salt and tomato sauce and nibbled them with her front teeth, like a rodent, like the vole we’d seen shivering in the tumbledown thistles on the canal-side or the mouse she’d secreted somewhere about her person. I drank a pint of dark, sweet ale from a brewery in Kegworth, only a few miles away. We both peered out of the window, at the beetling cliff of the castle, into which the pub had been built eight hundred years ago, and at the frosty cobbles on which the hooves of the Crusaders’ horses had rung before they’d set off to a distant land of disease and death and never come home.

  ‘Chips for you, beer for me... cheers, Chloe. Right now Mummy will be toiling away and thinking we’re toiling as well. So cheers, here’s to us and our little secret.’

  She looked at me sideways, and again, unnervingly I saw her mother’s look in her eyes. Worse – no I shouldn’t use that word or allow the idea into my shallow, callow, lightweight excuse for a brain – I thought for a terrifying millisecond that she was going to speak. Oh god, I gulped on my beer, which Chloe had paid for with the clang on her head. I flinched from the sudden directness of her, and looked out of the window at the sunlit day of my not-having-to-work that she’d paid for.

  Please don’t speak, I inwardly begged of her, please don’t speak, not now. Don’t spoil a perfect day by opening your mouth and saying something, by saying anything. Please, not now.

  She didn’t speak. She smiled like an angel and ate another chip. I took another swig at my beer and pondered the... what was it? The dichotomy, the conundrum, the enigma? Whatever it was. I pondered the paradox that Rosie prayed every waking moment for Chloe to come back, and yet I was dreading her return.

  It would start to get dark. An afternoon in January. The temperatures hadn’t risen more than a degree or two above freezing for three weeks or more, even in the brightest of winter mornings, and at night, every night for nearly a month, they’d plummeted to minus eight or ten. So now, only three o’clock and a fug of smokey, warm bodies in the pub, I could see how the light was dulling outside. The very moment the sun was off the castle wall and the cobbled yard, you could sense them, feel them and smell them, the creeping grey fingers of ice and the cloak of darkness they were tugging with them.

  Chloe made an odd little sound. She stood up suddenly and did it again. I held my breath. It was almost a word. It was the closest to a word she’d said since last April.

  ‘What is it, Chloe? Is it Mouse? Where is he?’ She was feeling around her tummy and up and down her arms for the creature, which eventually emerged at her wrist and she caught it very gently. Alright, so the sound she’d made, which had paralysed me for a moment with my glass a few inches from my lips, had been just a squeak, a tiny eek or eeeh. A mouse-like expletive she’d made to echo the fidgeting of the mouse inside her clothes. As I swallowed the last of my beer, she did it again, the almost-word, and she was wandering away from our table in the direction of the doorway. I put down my glass and followed her.

  The dark. It seemed to ooze from the caverns of the castle-boulder and from the cracks between the cobbles. Four o’clock, or was it later? Had we stayed longer in the pub than I’d meant to, because of the coddling cosiness of it and the sweet, strong beer? As I hurried along, fumbling with my coat buttons and scarf and huffing on the steep climb towards the gatehouse, I saw Chloe ahead of me. She was unusually agile on the slippery stones, she’d been a pawky kid and yet now she was swifter than before. She turned and glanced at me, a teasing gleam in her eye. The dark, she was burrowing into it... the shadows lowered around her where the sun had never touched all day, as she swerved into the alley to Robin Hood’s statue.

  There, I expected her to pause, as she always did, to hug his stout bronze legs or even tingle her tongue on his thigh. It would give me time to catch up with her. But this time, she didn’t stop. Flinging me another glance, as though challenging me to keep up, she was off again and disappearing into a further alley, on our usual route through the old part of the town and back to the bus station.

  Lost her. Oh god. ‘Chloe! Wait! Let me catch up!’ I stumbled through the gloom, where the only light was from the upstairs windows of the solicitors and accountants in their oak-panelled offices. So dark... darker than usual in this alley, empty and forbidding, where before there’d always been at least a glimmer of light and even the welcoming glow of a fire. I stopped, to catch my breath and orientate myself, because the place seemed different, something was missing, there was a black hole where there’d always been a...

  I heard Chloe. She made that sound again. ‘Chloe! Where are you? I can’t see you. Stay where you are, don’t move, Daddy’s here.’

  Through the wheeze of my own breathing, I heard her tiny eeeh – the mouse-vowel, not quite a word. I moved towards it and then I could hear her breathing too and smell the warmth of her mouth and her body. ‘Hey you naughty girl, don’t go running off, especially here in the dark. I was worried, and Mummy would be really cross. Hey!’

  She was gone again. I’d been close enough to touch her. But she spun away. Not far this time. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom of the narrow alleyway, of course I knew where we were, and when I saw her slip into the yawning black mouth of a doorway and vanish, I understood where she’d been heading.

  Closed. The door was closed and there was a notice on it. The golden lettering of the name on the window was tarnished, not by age, because it had already been there for decades, but sadly by the lack of light from inside the shop. Heaps. No longer trading. Leaving a hole, a darkness, in this corner of the city.

  Eeeeh. Chloe said it again. No, she didn’t say it. She made the sound. I whispered to her, ‘Yes, Heaps,’ as though that was what she’d said. ‘Do you remember Mr Heap? What a pity we won’t see him anymore. He was a funny old man, wasn’t he? And he had some funny old things in his shop, didn’t he?’

  I made to hold her in my arms. Something in the poignancy of the moment and the sad emptiness of the place made me move to her and put my arms around her. Why had she run so determinedly to this doorway? Not even pausing at the statue, not even waiting for me to catch up, but leading me inevitably closer and closer until here we were, the two of us, snuggled in the entrance of the shop we’d visited so often? Just out of habit, h
er childish footsteps following the route we’d always followed, in a teasing game of hide-and-seek. Now, I squeezed her towards me, and she hugged me too. For a moment, an image flashed into my mind, of the derelict man we’d glimpsed from the boat that morning, in the dripping caverns beneath the city bridges, and I thought that the stab of ice between my well-padded shoulder blades would be nothing compared to the lingering death he would endure. It made me whisper to her, my mouth in her warm hair, ‘Let’s go home, Chloe. Come on and we’ll catch the bus and we’ll be back before Mummy.’

  A light. We both froze. Not literally, although the surprise could almost have scared us to death.

  Suddenly there was a light in the shop, and a flickering movement across it. Someone was inside.

  Chloe pressed her hot little face to the window. I peered in too. The strike of a match, the flutter of a flame which caught a crumpled sheet of newspaper in the hearth. A man was kneeling there and lighting a fire. With his back to us, a bulky figure in an overcoat, he layered splinters of wood on top of the burning paper and watched while the flames licked around them. Beside him, its blade gleaming in the firelight, there lay a hatchet and the remains of a bookshelf he’d split into pieces. He applied more and more of the wood, until there was a bright, roaring blaze.

  Chloe’s face was lit with the excitement of it. Before I could stop her, she started patting at the window with her gloved hands.

  The man turned and frowned, he raised a hand to his eyes to try and see where the sound was coming from, and then he straightened up. I tried to pull Chloe away, as if we might slip down the alley and be gone before the man came to the door. Too slow. Chloe was giggling and patting on the glass and all of a sudden the man was there.

  He seemed very big. He blotted out the fire he’d just lit. He loomed at the window, a huge shadow, and he saw the two of us, a man and a child, huddling in the doorway. He turned a key in the lock. It made a dry, grating sound. The door opened.

  Chapter Eighteen

  EVEN IN THE half-light, there was an instant of immediate recognition. Me, I’d already had an inkling, when I’d seen him kneeling with his back to me, of the only time I’d ever seen him before. Now, as he stood in the open doorway and appraised us, especially the way he looked at Chloe, it was clear that he knew who she was.

  And so we were in the shop, together. Chloe had just walked in, before either he or I had said anything. She wandered in, in the state of utter obliviousness she inhabited, as if the shop was open as usual and it was somewhere we always went on our visits to town. So the man stood aside to let me follow her. He shut the door. Still neither of us had spoken. We stood at the fire and looked at each other, and then, self-conscious, he knelt to the flames to add more fuel.

  I looked around the room. The shelves were bare. It was almost completely empty, apart from a few remaining boxes of books, a litter of newspapers. Indeed, I could see from the marks on the dirty yellow walls where some of the original, old shelves had been torn down, and I realized that this man had been using them for firewood.

  ‘I’m the oldest son,’ he said into the fire. ‘I’ve been clearing the shop. We had a clearance sale, a pity you didn’t know about it, you might’ve found some of the kind of stuff you could’ve used in your place...’ He angled his grey, middle-aged face up towards me, where he was kneeling in front of the flames, and I saw the weariness on it, the residual weariness of pain and bitterness. ‘Oh yes, I read the local paper and I saw the piece about your bookshop and the tooth. I wondered where it had gone. I guess you bought it, or maybe my father gave it to you, shortly before he died...’

  He bent to the fire again, and his voice was vague and gruff in the crackle of the flames. ‘... the tooth, he always hated it, he used to mumble about how it was like that story of the monkey’s paw, it was some kind of bad luck charm. He spouted a lot of mumbo-jumbo about it when the accident happened, that it was cursed and he’d dig it out and smash it up or throw it away, but then he couldn’t find it. So yes, I saw your thing in the paper, Poe’s Tooth Bookshop, and of course your name’s a bit unusual, I’d heard it before.’

  He stood up. He looked across the room at the little girl, who’d been waiting for him to move aside so she could go to the fire and stare into it. She did so now. Her face was blank, an empty canvas, it showed not a flicker of understanding of words or ideas, it showed not a hint of emotion or feeling, only the infuriating perfection of that smile. The man gazed upon her. His own face was a mask of puzzlement. He saw a lovely, apparently healthy, apparently intact child. And yet he knew she was not intact, that a part of her had been lost and might never come back.

  ‘So,’ he murmured, ‘so this is Chloe Gooch. Hello, Chloe, yes, I recognise you from your photo in the newspaper. It’s nine months now. It was 3rd April, wasn’t it, a date your Daddy and I will always remember.’

  He knelt to her, and she allowed him to take both her hands in his. He looked straight into her eyes, and when he saw the utter void in them his own eyes misted with tears. ‘Chloe Gooch,’ he whispered, ‘are you there? What are you thinking? Can you remember anything? One day, this year or next year or in twenty years, when you wake up from your daydream, will you tell me why it happened? Will you tell me?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, because I saw him then as I’d seen him before: a heavy, manly figure, kneeling, and his shoulders beginning to shudder with sobbing.

  I helped him upright again. His face was shining with tears, he made no attempt to wipe them away. The girl stared up at him, and her smile was almost insufferable. I wanted, and I guess this man wanted, to wipe it from her mouth, or at least to turn her away and point the smile somewhere else, where it would cause no pain.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I was saying, ‘I was there, I saw it all, not the time before or the time after, but the moment, the moment which altered Chloe. Your own daughter, I don’t know, I don’t know what she was thinking, why she didn’t stop, what happened afterwards when they drove away...’

  The man controlled his tears. He pulled himself together, he gathered strength from some secret reserve deep within him. He took out a big, white handkerchief and rubbed it over his face.

  ‘My daughter, your daughter,’ he said, ‘their lives coincided for one second. One second, that’s all. Your daughter is lost, but one day she’ll come back to you. Mine is gone forever. Perhaps Chloe will tell us all, sooner or later, why it happened.’

  Lost. His father had used the same word about Chloe. The fire was burning brightly. He’d already disposed of nearly all the curios and treasures and junk that his father had accumulated over the years, and now, to keep the place warm while he was doing the final clearance, he was stripping the very shelves from the walls and burning them. Soon, perhaps today or in another few days, the shop would be completely empty and then it might be sold or let and somebody else would try their luck – a hairdresser or a tattooist or a masseur.

  ‘Lost,’ I said to him. ‘What was it your father was saying to me, the last time we were here, just before he gave me the tooth? Something about the lost, the utterly lost... I can’t remember...’

  Chloe and I moved outside. The alley was pitch dark. The light from the fire in the shop was barely a glow through the dusty window. Heaps. I wondered when this man, the eldest son, would try to remove those faded golden letters, his father’s name which had been there for so long. And how... scrape them off? A painful, tedious, distressing task.

  He loomed in the doorway. We didn’t shake hands, it seemed somehow inappropriate that we might mark the solemnity of our relationship by touching. We stepped into the darkness, me and Chloe, all wrapped up against the cold, with nothing more than a clumsy wave, a hand uplifted in recognition of the strange, unexpected meeting we’d had.

  But then he called something after us. I stopped to hear what he was saying. He reached for my hand and gripped it hard.

  ‘It’s Poe,’ he was blurting out. ‘It’s from one of his stories, �
��even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made...”’

  His grip was even stronger, and there was a note of pleading in his voice.

  ‘The tooth...’ he was saying. ‘Forget about what I was saying, please. Forget about my father’s nonsense, a bit of mischief, that’s all. If it’s working for you, and it seems to be so far, then all’s good, all’s good...’

  He let go of my hand, turned abruptly and went back into the shop. Chloe was tugging me away, as though she was the one in charge and wanted to hurry me to the bus-station. My last glimpse of the man, he was standing at the fire and staring into it, exactly where I’d last seen his father.

  NOT HAPPY. NOT happy at all. Rosie was waiting for us in the hallway, when I pushed open the door and we went in.

  It all came out in a furious torrent. She hardly gave me a chance to say anything. Where had we been? She’d come back expecting to find us busy in the shop. Well, not busy of course, but in the shop and me writing and Chloe safe and sound, and where had we been? I tried to tell her we’d been to town, on the boat and into the shops and back on the bus, but she was upset, scared, her eyes wild and... something was wrong, more than our absence and our lateness.