Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  The dogs, meanwhile, were straining at their leashes. Not to investigate the figure on the bench. But to get away from it.

  Lovely, really, this tableau. Pretentious, that word. It was a picture, one of those famous oil paintings where the sky is as important as, or even more important than, the rest of the subject-matter. A Turner? A Constable? Or more modern maybe, a Barnfather? An enormous silvery-grey, mackerel sky, with the billowing steam clouds of the power-station. Bare trees, poplar and willow and then a bristle of fir. A sudden whirl of starlings from the poplar. I’d thought they were leaves, the last leaves of autumn hanging on and freezing hard on the iron-black branches – but no, they detached themselves and were birds, they were a hundred starlings which rose and swirled and shimmered this way and that and fell to the ground in perfect formation.

  A picture, yes, with the inconsequential figures of people and their dogs, as though the artist had added them as an afterthought, deliberately small, to accentuate the hugeness of the world and their paltry place in it.

  The starlings had settled. They had no interest in the petty piece of drama which was unfolding nearby. The crow? Yes, it might have been a part in it. Because, as the Dalmatian man approached the figure on the bench again and made to touch it, or at least to move the turned-up collar of the coat and see the face hidden behind it, a crow burst out. It came out from beneath the coat. Difficult to see, from where we were watching. It had been doing something, between the collar of the coat and the tugged down brim of the hat, and now it struggled out.

  Who might know what it had been doing there? But it burst from the body on the bench, like a bit of death, as though to announce that a death had occurred.

  Chloe was galvanised into action, in a way I hadn’t seen since last spring. She stood up and away from me, where we’d been snuggling down with our soup. And she made a noise, a real noise, for the first time. A crow noise. Quite distinctly, so clear and harsh in the freezing air that the three people and their dogs turned to look across the fields to see where it was coming from, she made the cawing, croaking, guttural sound of the crow.

  And it beat towards us. It came fast and low, swerving with a little stutter of its wings, and it clattered into the high branches of the willow beside the frozen pond.

  It perched above us. It wiped its beak on the branch, and a few crumbs of whatever dead and frozen thing it had been eating fell onto the ice.

  Minutes later, while we watched and ate our sandwiches and drank the rest of the soup from our flask, an ambulance and a police car came into the park. So far away that we couldn’t hear what was going on. There were a few flashes of photography and the policemen were asking questions and writing into their notebooks, and then the dead and frozen figure was lifted into the ambulance.

  We skated a bit more, after they’d all gone away. But my feet were hurting. Chloe, still smiling, winced at the chafing of her ankles, the rubbing of her toes. Her lips were blue. We’d stopped for too long, and the cold was in us.

  I could hardly undo her laces, my fingers were so numb, so the boy helped me to untie them. He undid mine too. We limped home. As we left the park and looked back to where we’d been skating, we could see the crow in the willow, on a branch overhanging the place where we’d been sitting. I watched Chloe’s face. I thought for a moment she was going to summon it again, to make that cawing noise which signified that she was changing. She was changing, she might be coming back, as Rosie might say...

  But she didn’t. She opened her lips and closed them again, once and twice and three times, and she stared across the frozen fields with such a fixity of expression that I knew she was staring at the bird. But she didn’t make a sound. Perhaps she knew she didn’t need to.

  Indeed, when we trudged painfully and wearily along the Derby Road and arrived back at our church, the bird was already there. Chloe bent to the shells of the snails which littered the pavement. The shards were like splinters of mother of pearl, they shone in the wintry light and their edges were razor sharp. She picked some of them up and wondered at them; she tested them on the ball of her thumb. And before I could tell her what they were or where they’d come from, she looked upwards, to the very top of the tower. Where the crow was sitting on the battlements. Then, only then, she made a little cawing noise, and she smiled, and I took her inside.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ROSIE AND I would differ on the aesthetics of what we saw that night.

  Aesthetics, tableau... sometimes these odd words come out and sound wrong, a bit jarring. Alright, so I’d only been a mobile librarian for Erewash borough council, and before that I’d got a gentleman’s degree from Leicester University, done two terms’ teaching history in a prep school and found out I couldn’t even manage a classroom of a dozen posh little eight-year-olds. And alright, so I got out and got the job as a mobile librarian. But I read a lot of books, and so yes, I could use words like tableau and aesthetics, couldn’t I?

  Rosie was very frightened. For me, it was more like a sickness in my belly. Like when a doctor might say you’d got cancer, but still there’d been no pain. I got an inkling of something – how can I put it? – of some future fear. A horror which was waiting for me. Waiting.

  We woke in the middle of the night. Rosie woke me. The bedroom was terribly cold. All the warmth of our central heating was somehow funnelling through and out and being replaced by the wintry air from outside. Not just cold. It was ice. The bedroom was an ice box, where dead things might be stored on hooks.

  ‘Go and look...’ Rosie was whispering to me. Although her body was hot, as she leant close and hissed at me, I could see the plume of her breath, silvery in the darkness. ‘Go and look, please, I don’t like it. Go and get Chloe, and bring her into our bed.’

  The sick feeling, it started when I padded into Chloe’s room and saw that her bed was empty. I saw, but, disbelieving what I saw, I crossed the room and felt at the emptiness of her bedding, felt the place where she should have been lying. I was naked, Rosie and I had made love despite our falling out, or maybe because of it and the need to make up. There was a bitter draft through Chloe’s bedroom, and I looked up with a dismal apprehension in every part of my shivering body when I saw that the ladder was down and the trapdoor to the clock tower was wide open.

  Chloe, oh fuck, Chloe, where are you? I went up there. In all the shadows of the clock tower, where I thought I’d never felt so cold, there was no little girl. I scuffed through the dust and debris on the floor, shuffling my bare feet through the twigs and leaves and history of a hundred winters, and I whispered for Chloe, oh Chloe. But she wasn’t there.

  Starlight? Oh god, for a heart-stopping moment I thought that the trap-door to the roof was open. A glimmer of moonlight? A movement of a figure up there, high on the lonely battlements?

  But no, it was not, it was closed and the bolt was closed. The gleam in my eye was from the broken pane in the clock face beside me, a car had swished past on the road below. The relief I felt, that wherever the girl was she had not gone up and onto the roof, was almost overwhelming. It filled my body with a gush of warmth. My knees trembling, I went down the ladder into Chloe’s bedroom, pulled down the trapdoor and stowed the ladder.

  So where was she? And why was the bedroom still so icy cold?

  Rosie was hissing at me again as I padded past our bed. ‘Is she there? Where is she? Oh god it’s so cold...’ And the sibilance of her words, the hiss of her breath, it seemed to add to the iciness of the room. And she followed me, swaddling herself in a dressing-gown, slinging another one at me and around my shoulders.

  So cold? Yes, the door down to the kitchen was wide open. It looked like a yawning pit of darkness, so black and empty, a void. Chloe? I called down there first, fearful of treading the stairs, fearful in my own house. Why had she done this? I knew, before I went down and down into the darkness and switched on the light in the kitchen, that I would find the other door wide open, the door going down and down again to the hallway
of the church and the vestry.

  There was no one in the kitchen. No Chloe. Only a black hole, from which an icy draft was seeping and swirling... the very taste and smell of the world outside, on the coldest January night on record.

  Why? Chloe, where are you? She had opened the trapdoor to the clock tower, and the icy dark had crept down into our bedrooms. And then she had gone and opened the doors through the kitchen and down to the hallway. So that the winter was in the tower, from top to bottom.

  There was a light in the vestry. Only a little light. Rosie and I trod towards it and we stood in the doorway.

  Chloe? It’s alright, Chloe. Don’t be afraid. It’s me. And your Mummy. I was hearing the words in my head, although I didn’t say anything.

  The girl was sitting at my desk. Rather lovely, really. So that the fear I felt in my stomach was a dull ache of dread, not a lancing pain. It was lodging there, it was accreting, it was a growth. It spoke of a future pain. Right now, I just stood and stared and I could see a kind of dreadful loveliness.

  Chloe was sitting at my desk, at the computer I was going to write on. There was no light on the screen, she hadn’t switched it on, she didn’t know how to. The crow was sitting on the top of the monitor. And the girl was writing on the keyboard. Or she was pretending to. Her fingers ran deftly here and there, pausing, stopping, starting again. And she was frowning and puzzling into the darkness of the screen, as if appraising the words and phrases and sentences she was composing.

  Pretending to write. Aping it. Cocking her head artfully at the screen, wincing and shaking her head, trying again, rewriting rewriting, aping the very toil and frustration of writing.

  All the time, the crow hunched over her. Like the girl, it was quite unaware of us. It was too busy, preoccupied, watching her write and leaning into the screen to check what she’d written, shaking its head in disapproval and urging her on, with odd, dry, nibbly clicks of its beak. It shuddered its wings, opening and folding them like a dusty old professor adjusting his cloak. And she would pause in her writing, to glance up and into its eyes, as if it were her mentor, her inspiration, her muse.

  The light in the room, it was the shrine of Edgar Allan Poe’s tooth.

  As Rosie moved forward with great deliberation and stealth and enfolded the child in her arms, the crow leapt away. It disappeared somewhere. It was gone. No crow. As though it had never been there and had been no more than a weird imagining – me and Rosie awakening from the strangest of naked, overheated dreams into an icy reality. Chloe was asleep. Rosie was terribly afraid. Her daughter, so soft and vulnerable in her cuddly cotton pyjamas, was asleep, and yet she’d been wandering the tower, opening the doors at top and bottom, looking for something, summoning something, entreating some dark and dangerous living thing to come indoors and be with her. And it had come. In sleep, in a world which utterly excluded her mother and her father, she had conjured a scraggy old crow.

  ‘My darling, my darling... come on, my darling, come back to bed.’

  Rosie was easing the child to her feet. Easing, yes, no struggle or objection or defiance. Even in the thrall of a dream, Chloe was easy to manage. She smiled, she caressed the keyboard as though she must leave it with great reluctance. She waved a theatrical hand into the air where the crow had been, and she consented meekly to being led out of the vestry and into the hallway.

  I saw the fear in Rosie’s eyes. She was hating it. The fear was a pain in her. As they paused together at the foot of the stairs, I saw their faces in the light from the vestry and the light which fell down the stairs from the kitchen. Rosie? There was a nakedness on her. Her anxiety had erased everything else – her wisdom, her knowledge, her understanding of the real world. There was nothing on her face but fear for her child. And the mark. Where the crow had caught her with its beak, there was a livid red mark.

  They went upstairs. I turned to the shrine, to switch off the lamp. I didn’t care where the crow was, it could roost in any of the boxes of books it chose, on any shelf, in any corner. It was somewhere in the room and I didn’t care. The shrine? There was Poe’s Tooth, a poor little fragment of something or other, or maybe nothing at all. A bit of bone. An excuse for a relic.

  And something more. Chloe must have put them there, on the bed of white satin. For herself, because they were pretty? Or for the crow, which would collect and display such nondescript jewels?

  Diamonds of glass, from a shattered windscreen, pure and clear, except where a smear of blood despoiled their perfect beauty. And the mother-of-pearl loveliness of the snail shells. She had arranged them under the lamplight, with the tooth.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  IN THE MORNING we got the crow out. It made quite a spectacular exit. Rosie insisted that she must see the bird out, she must witness it with her own eyes and know that it was gone.

  She wasn’t going to work. She’d called Colonel Brook and told him she had a doctor’s appointment and might be in later, maybe break-time or lunch. Before going to bed she’d been dabbing the cut on her cheek with antiseptic, the whole of the bedroom and Chloe’s bedroom smelled like a clinic, and she’d been up a couple more times in the night to wash out the wound with soap and water and apply more antiseptic. She’d said it was aching. So in the dark of early morning, she’d phoned the school and said she’d be late.

  Spectacular, the way the crow left the tower...

  The three of us had tip-toed down to the vestry, where Rosie stood in the doorway and sniffed and curled her lip and held a handkerchief tightly to her nose and mouth. Yes, it was the unmistakable pungency of a bird, quite unlike rats or mice, and the rancid whiff of its droppings. The room was ripe with it. No sound at all, at first. But then a furtive fluttering in a far corner.

  I ordered Rosie and Chloe back into the hallway. I opened the church door as wide as it would go. The wintry dawn was out there; a smokey dark shadow on the pavement and a gleam of ice on the road. A few cars were already going by, on the way into town, on the way to work. And it was easy really, I strode purposefully back into the vestry, determined to show Rosie that I was totally with her in this and as wounded as she had been by the outrage the crow had committed, and sure enough, with a few smart claps and then a few deft kicks at the cardboard boxes, I startled the bird into the open. It sprang out of hiding and past the fireplace, where I was straightaway after it and herding it towards the door, where it pottered past Rosie and Chloe, casting a grumpy glance in their direction, and the moment it got the scent of the morning in its bristly nostrils it was outside and onto the pavement.

  Rosie had time to say, ‘Thank God for that, now shut the door quickly and good riddance,’ before the crow launched itself into the air. The rudeness of its awakening must have shocked it into action. It took off, across the road, just as a smart silvery saloon car was going by.

  Whump. It hit the windscreen. Beak and claws and the negligible weight of bone, and a puff of feathers. It seemed to explode into the air with the impact, up and over the roof of the car as the driver instinctively jabbed at the brakes and swerved. And yet, when it landed a second later, it was intact again. No, not quite intact... trailing its left wing, it was a bashed and bedraggled and yet resilient creature which ran like a chicken to the further side of the road and disappeared into a privet hedge.

  The car? Its nearside front wheel hit the kerb. An expensive alloy wheel, it grated horribly and threw a spray of golden sparks onto the pavement. The car kept going. A very pissed-off man – some kind of lawyer or estate agent – would be inspecting the damage in the company car park in a few minutes’ time.

  ‘Bloody thing, it can’t even bugger off without causing trouble at the same time,’ Rosie was muttering, although she seemed satisfied that the bird had gone.

  Chloe was thrilled by the squeal of brakes, by the sparks, by the suddenness of the incident, but then, in a long lull in the traffic before a double-decker bus went groaning past, she stared after the crow. Rosie hauled her up the stairs. To re
inforce what she’d already told me when we got up that morning, she called back, ‘So I’ll take Chloe downtown with me, to the clinic and then the shops and maybe we’ll do lunch together, me and Chloe. Alright? It’ll give you some nice alone time with the shop. You’ll be able to...’

  I nodded emphatically at her. ‘Yes yes I get it, my love, I’ll have time to get it cleaned up and freshened up and everything.’ Adding, as they disappeared up into the kitchen, ‘and aren’t you forgetting something? me as well, all freshened up too, if I have time between the coachloads of tourists etc etc.’

  She didn’t hear my poor attempt at matching her sarcasm. Or maybe she did and just ignored it. Before I closed the church door I took advantage of another break in the traffic to hurry into the road. I bent and picked up a long black feather. There were more, a trail of them towards the hedge where the bird had disappeared. I picked them up. Maybe the wing was broken, and the crow, not much more than a skeleton already, barely surviving the hardest of winters, would just lie in the undergrowth and freeze and die.

  I shuddered at the thought of it. Eight o’clock in the morning, and minus three or four. The bird would be dead before I was sitting by the fire in the bookshop with my coffee and chocolate biscuits. By the time I’d erased every sign that it had ever been there, the room would be fragrant and warm, and the crow would be frozen stiff.

  Rosie and Chloe went out. So I had Peaches en Regalia, Frank Zappa, my choice, not the maudlin cod-poignancy of Year of the Cat. I had a crackling, spitting, feisty fire. I was tidying up and wiping around, swigging a mug of coffee. And when I started to take some of the books from their cardboard boxes and thought about stacking them, temporarily, into one of the vestry cupboards, I found a half empty or half full bottle of brandy which had been tucked behind a stack of old hymn books. In the dark cupboard beside the fire, with its big brass hooks, where the minister would’ve kept his cassock or cloak or whatever he called it... a bottle of brandy, to have a sip or two before he strode up the aisle and mounted the pulpit to start the Sunday service, to warm his throat for the sermon, to add strength and mellowness to his voice, to make him more eloquent. Or maybe afterwards, when he’d exhausted all his energies in the pulpit, encouraging his congregation to sing, exhorting them to put money on the collection plates, and then standing outside in the cold, and shaking hands and shaking hands and... when at last he could go back into the vestry, shut and lock the door, take off his cassock, warm his legs against the fire, take out the bottle and glug a great big slug or two.