Wakening the Crow

by Stephen Gregory

  To make sure I didn’t try again, she made me put the box down and she lifted another one on top of it. ‘You can sort through the old books tomorrow or another day, a nice clean job once we’ve done all the dirty work.’ She must have caught a forlorn look on my face, because she gave a sigh of mock exasperation as if she was dealing with a reluctant teenager, and said, ‘Alright then, maybe it’s time for a break. Why don’t you go upstairs and make us both a cup of tea? Say a proper hello to Chloe, and bring her down with you. It’s clean enough now, I didn’t want her in here when it was so disgusting with soot and dust.’

  ‘You go up,’ I suggested. ‘Tell you what, you go up and make tea and I’ll run across the road for a bit of cake or something?’

  She smiled the softest, sweetest smile. But in her eyes there was a gleam of something, some female intuition. Suspicion.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You make the tea. I’ll do a bit more down here.’

  ‘You look good, Rosie,’ I said, thinking to distract her, and I moved to take her hands again. ‘What did they say at the clinic, about your face?’

  ‘I was going to call into the local surgery,’ she answered, ‘near Auntie Cissy’s house, but we were on the bus into Nottingham one afternoon and I decided on impulse to jump off at the Queen’s Medical Centre. Yes, me and Chloe were on the bus, enjoying the ride upstairs on the top deck, and I suddenly decided to maybe kill two birds with one stone.’ She hesitated and smiled enigmatically, as if her turn of phrase might jog a guilty little memory in me. ‘And we were lucky, because I had five minutes with the doctor, you know the same one who treated Chloe last year and who treated me. I told him I’d been doing a bit of physio with Auntie Cissy, exercising the muscles and drinking lots of water, and he reckoned I was making a steady recovery.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. I tried to peck her on the cheek, but the phrase, the very connotation of the words made me stop in mid-air. ‘And what did he say about Chloe? Hey, why don’t you tell me when you’ve made a cup of tea? I’ll build up the fire, I’ll nip over to Azri’s for a couple of croissants and...’

  No good. I went upstairs.

  Chloe was at the kitchen table. She was colouring a picture of a cat. Not colouring, she was blocking the whole of it in black, pressing so hard that the stick of charcoal she was using kept snapping and splintering and she had to reach for more from the box. She was so intent that she hardly moved, she hardly glanced up at me when I bent to kiss her. When I did so, she writhed away and snapped another stick of charcoal.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ I said, trying not to sound sarcastic, as I stood away from her and put the kettle on. ‘That’s pretty, a beautiful pussy cat, all black and... well, all black.’

  As if to challenge the very blackness of Chloe’s vision, the mouse jumped out of the pocket of my coat and onto the table. I hadn’t known it was there, it must have been burrowing asleep in a handful of used tissues. It was a fortuitous moment, or at least I thought it was just then. It scampered across the colouring book, superbly white against the ugliness of the child’s cat, and, with a chuckle of pleasure, she snatched it up.

  Good timing. The kettle boiled. I quickly made two mugs of tea – opening a tin of condensed milk I found in a cupboard because all the real milk had gone off while I’d been a vagrant downstairs – and it was easy to usher Chloe out of the kitchen and downstairs. She had Mouse. She obviously loved Mouse more than she loved her Daddy. Holding the creature to her face and cooing at it as though she’d missed it terribly, she pottered down the stairs in front of me and into the hallway.

  Into the vestry. Rosie was crouched by the fire. Her face was reddened, from her proximity to the flames which she’d built to such a roaring blaze that the back of the chimney was alive with sparks. Reddened, but her eyes were bright and somehow cold. Cold, despite the heat of the fire.

  ‘Rosie? Are you alright? Here’s tea. And here’s Chloe. And we found Mouse, he was in my pocket.’

  Something had been lost from Rosie. In the few minutes I’d been upstairs. The warmth I’d seen in her, which I’d thought I might rekindle with judicious meekness and many mumbling apologies, was gone. Odd, and disquieting. Just as the thaw had come, and the chill of ice had changed into a swishing of warm rain and blustery wind, Rosie had a breath of frost upon her.

  When she spoke, despite the fire, there was a mist of ice on her lips.

  ‘What does it mean, Oliver?’ – fuck you dad. cos it fucking stung me thats why... and the utterly lost ... life and death are equally jests – ‘What does it mean?’

  I stared at her, not understanding what she was saying. The child was kneeling beside me, running the mouse through her fingers. The fire was unusually bright. At the very core of it there was a dazzling whiteness, as though it might burn my eyes if I stared too long.

  She saw me wincing from the brightness, and when she spoke it was barely a whisper.

  ‘It’s the tooth. I put it into the fire. And don’t worry your poor foolish head about the stuff you wrote. I’ve deleted it all. And the tooth, it’s all gone.’

  I STARED AT her, disbelieving, and not really comprehending the words she’d said. I took three steps across the room to the display table and the desk beside it.

  ‘What are you saying, Rosie? I don’t get it.’ And I was staring into the empty velvet box and poking through the few bits of broken glass, and then peering among the keys of the keyboard, where the bright white tooth from Chloe’s mouth was still lodged between the c and the d and the f and there were other diamond-bright fragments of the shattered windscreen.

  ‘Where is it, Rosie? It was here, I tried to get it out but I couldn’t it. It fell into the keyboard and got stuck and...’

  ‘I saw it,’ she said. ‘I was re-reading what you’d written and deleting it, and I saw the tooth. My fingers are smaller than yours, I got it out easily. And I’ve thrown it into the fire.’

  ‘The fire? What? The tooth? You mean the boy’s tooth?’

  I pushed past her. My mind was blank. No anger. Just a blank of not understanding.

  In my clumsiness, I knocked over one of the mugs of tea I’d just delivered, and it sizzled onto the heat of the hearth. My legs brushed against Chloe, so she rolled away backwards and the mouse escaped from her fingers. I seized the poker and started jabbing it into the heart of the flames, where the brightness was so intense it flared onto my retina, and I was half protesting and half laughing.

  ‘So why did you do that, Rosie? What were you thinking about? and anyway, what’s the point? I can always find it when the fire goes out. It isn’t going to burn, you must know that, surely, I mean about teeth and stuff and...’

  I stood away from the heat, which she had stoked like a furnace. We were still almost sane. Melodrama and madness, they were still avoidable. I stood away, trembling, holding the poker like a sword, took an enormous breath and fixed a big, clumsy smile on my mouth.

  ‘So why, Rosie? I never said I believed in it, did I? But you must’ve done, or you wouldn’t be making such a theatre of trying to destroy it. Am I right?’

  I tried to laugh, but it was a dry, ugly sound.

  ‘Of course it won’t burn entirely,’ she said, and the smile on her mouth was as fragile as mine. ‘The enamel is almost indestructible, of course I know that. But when it’s degraded it becomes friable, and so it can be ground into powder, it can be crushed and ground into dust. And that’s what we’re going to do, me and you and Chloe watching, when the fire goes out.’

  I tried another laugh. I was looming over her, holding the poker.

  ‘So what do you think, Rosie? Is it cursed? I thought I was supposed to be the gullible one, but you’re making a drama out of destroying a little bit of bone like it’s the monkey’s paw or something.’

  We stared at one another. There was a kind of madness in her eyes, or perhaps it was reflected from mine. But there was love and hope as well, it could go either way. It seemed that our whole life together was in the
balance. We were close to madness, we were near the brink, but there was still a chance we could step away from it. We could’ve have burst out laughing, the two of us, and then hugged and kissed and laughed and wept. I had a flash of a great idea, yes, that in less than a minute we could be upstairs and in bed together and making hot, healing love.

  I took another big quivering breath. I fixed my smile ever more firmly. I set down the poker. I put out my hand to touch her face, in a gesture of abject submission and reconciliation.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rosie,’ I was saying. ‘I love you and I love you and I love you and I’m so sorry.’ And when she lifted her hand to my face, I thought for a miraculous moment she might reciprocate with a tender touch and everything would be alright.

  But then...

  MOUSE SKITTERED ACROSS the floor.

  Chloe jumped up and tried to catch it. The mouse quailed under her outstretched hand. It tried to escape her, by scrambling up the side of a cardboard box and on top of it. The only sound in the room, apart from the crackle of the cremating fire, was the mouse’s claws on the cardboard.

  But then there was an answering commotion from inside the box.

  Such a violent commotion that the boxes on top of it - the boxes Rosie had put there to thwart my attempts at sidling outside - wobbled and shook.

  Something mad and manic was trying to get out.

  Chloe reached for the mouse. The boxes toppled onto the floor. The box at the bottom fell open.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  AND SO OUR lives were changed. By a mouse. By a crow.

  The crow came out of the box like a maddened thing. The doll fell out. It looked like a dead child. It was charred, like the body of a child recovered from a terrible fire.

  And the room, which had almost achieved a semblance of normality, with a father and a mother and their child sipping tea by a beautiful fire, was thrown into madness.

  The child was chasing the mouse. Rosie sprang to her feet, yelling, ‘You bastard, Oliver! You lying lazy bastard!’ Mad with anger, mad with me and the bird. And me too, I lost the calmness I’d tried so hard to hold onto, and the three of us were thrown into a sudden chaotic motion.

  It was only a minute. But it felt like an hour. Or a lifetime. In less than a minute, the destruction of the lifetime we might have had together.

  The crow flapped across the floor and into the air, thrashing its wings so hard that soot billowed and clouded the whole room. Rosie was shouting, I was shouting, Chloe was laughing, utterly blithe, utterly lost in the blurring of joy and tragedy and quite oblivious of the difference.

  ‘Out! Out! Out! I’ll bloody kill you!’ Rosie was shouting, the words distorted by the panic in her voice and the enfeeblement of her lips.

  I had picked up the poker again and I was waving it. I was jabbing it furiously into the fire, I was jabbing for the tooth and then reeling away from the heat and joining Rosie in her pursuit of the crow, in a kind of reaction to my being unmanned and feeling hopelessly, horribly, that my life was being torn away from me and out of my control and the things I loved were flying away, and I needed to grab something, some weapon, some thing, some manly dangerous thing to wave and threaten and strike with, like a man like a man...

  The crow was on the table. As it beat across it, knocking over the lamp with a crash and an explosion of the bulb, it picked up a glitter of glass and tossed it aside, it caught a corner of the velvet box and threw it onto the floor, and then it was on the keyboard again, skittering its claws across the keys this way and that, as though it wanted to add some more of its literary gems to the nonsense it had already written.

  Rosie had a book in her hands, the biggest and heaviest she could find – the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. She raised it and smashed it down.

  Where the bird had been. Like a wraith, it was there and then it was gone.

  The book crashed onto the keyboard. The bird was already in mid-air, a filthy black shadow. Not real. A piece of imagination, a fragment of nightmare. A figment of bad dreams and horrid ideas fomented in the mind of a frightened and lonely little boy.

  The boy? We all stared at him.

  Me and Rosie and Chloe, we all saw him and stared at him, because he was standing beside the desk, where the collection of his monstrous, poisonous stories had been hurled at the bird. I could smell him. I could smell the cold stale smell of his breath, the stale smell of his unwashed body and his hair. He stood where he’d been my teasing, mocking muse for all the nights of my nightmares.

  His breath was a cloud of ice. The crow reappeared in it. The boy exhaled and conjured the bird from within himself, as though he’d created it with the breath of his inspiration. And the bird was on the keyboard where he had urged me to write, where the bird had written more and more meaningfully than I had ever done.

  Mocking. Yes, mocking me and taunting us...

  The crow pecked into the cracks in the keyboard. For a moment it stood there, gleaming purple and black in the breath of the boy. It had Chloe’s tooth in its beak. It tossed it into the air and caught it again and swallowed it down.

  Rosie stepped forward.

  ‘No!’ she yelled. ‘No! Not that! I don’t care what you are or what you do, but not that!’

  She’d already lost a part of her Chloe, she would not relinquish anymore. Not even an unwanted tooth. She reached for the bottle of rum I’d put beside the computer. With a steely look of death in her eye, she set herself to swing at the bird and smash it, destroy it, kill it forever.

  Chloe was right behind her. She seemed to blur into the body of the boy. Just as he faded and disappeared, just as Chloe assumed the very shape of him and the space in which he’d been standing, Rosie swung the bottle up and over her shoulder.

  Bang. It hit Chloe right between the eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  SHE DIDN’T CRY out. She didn’t fall over. She stood very still for a moment, her eyes wide open and very puzzled. Then she teetered slightly, and before either of us could catch hold of her, she sat down heavily on her bottom.

  We were both of us there, kneeling to her. Rosie was mewing over her, with her arms around her body. I bent close and peered at her forehead where a bump was already growing.

  ‘Oh Chloe, I’m so sorry, so sorry my darling, my darling so sorry...’ Rosie was cooing into her hair.

  She’d put the bottle onto the floor, and I saw it rolling slowly and beautifully in front of the fire, the rum inside it glowing golden in the light of the flames. I was muttering nothings into her ear as well, as she sat there and stared into a space between us, as she blinked and frowned and licked her lips.

  And then she did a strange and unexpected thing. She shook her head, like a child awakening from a bewildering dream. She felt into her hair – no, not at the place where the bottle had struck her – she felt at the back of her head, as though it was the wounded place. She stared suddenly up at me, and her eyes were cold. She blinked again, recognising me. She started to get up...

  ‘Chloe? What are you doing?’ Rosie was quick to say. ‘Just stay still, stay where you are, don’t start jumping up and...’

  Not quick enough. Chloe was on her feet.

  She sprang away from me. With a snarl of contempt, she recoiled and started yanking at her clothes.

  In a moment she’d torn off her pullover and was wriggling her t-shirt up and over her head and hurling it aside, and she was standing in the firelight, naked from the waist up. She clawed at her body, nubbing her little tits and scoring welts on her belly with long raking strokes of her nails. And she hissed at me, the first words she’d uttered for nine months.

  ‘Cos it fucking stung me, that’s why! And fuck you Dad! Keep your hands out of my pants. I’ll tell Mum, I’ll tell her...’

  CHLOE WAS BACK. I thought she was coming for me, like a wild cat. No, she went for the bird.

  It had flopped onto the floor as Rosie raised the bottle above it. It must have skulked into a corner as we were tend
ing to the girl. Now it rose from the shadows of the floor, blacker and sootier than ever before, bigger and more threatening, as though it had gathered strength from the compliant limbs of the doll. It writhed up and out of the darkness and into the light of the grey wet morning as though it had a purpose. It confronted Chloe.

  She sprang at it, reaching for it with both her hands and uttering a half-hissing half-screeching guttural cry, as though she knew it had her tooth in its craw and was working it into the toxic juice of its gut.

  The crow – it avoided her with a clumsy feint, it tumbled from the desk where it had gathered itself and spread its wings in a defiant, mock-heraldic pose, and it thrashed past her, and past us, and plunged to the heat of the hearth in a raggedy confusion of feathers. It landed there, sudden and swift as a hawk, and just as terrible. Its claws were onto the mouse, it stamped and stamped and then it stabbed with its beak and tossed the creature into the fire.

  The mouse ignited. No smouldering and smoking and blooming into flame. No, the heat was so intense that the mouse simply burst into a stink of fire and was gone, consumed in a second and crinkling into a ribbon of black stuff.

  Me and Rosie, appalled, we cringed from the horridness of the spectacle.

  Not Chloe. Half-naked, painted by the flames like a storybook savage, she flung herself forward. For her tooth? To avenge the mouse? To exact some retribution from the spirit of the crow?

  Before we could intervene, she was so close to the fire that I could smell the heat of it on her skin, and she was grasping for the bird, her little hands and chubby childish fingers closing again and again on thin air as it fluttered and flapped in the smoke which puthered from the cremation of the mouse. And then, perversely, because I knew with a horrible certainty that if Chloe had closed on the bird she would have torn it into pieces and fed it into the fire, it poised for a daring moment in front of the flames and deliberately thrust itself in.