Wakening the Crow (11 page)

And the crow helped. I helped. Chloe helped. We were a team.

The bird had an easy job. Whenever anyone came in, it flapped to the highest bookshelf and peered down from it, as though judging from the demeanour of the person how appropriate it might be to make a dramatic entrance. And then it would snort through its bristly carrion-crow nostrils, just enough to make the customer look around and up to see where the sound was coming from, and before he or she could even gasp with surprise it would leap away from the shelf and, with a couple of beats of its shabby, dusty black wings, it would settle on the back of a chair, or even more picturesquely on top of the computer screen.

Me, I was unkempt. Rather smelly. And I would sit at the computer, a distracted, glowering, troubled figure, especially if the crow was perched nearby and ducking and bobbing like a demented Richard III or a bedraggled Rasputin. For extra effect, I could be either rattling furiously at the keyboard in an outpouring of genius or stabbing with two fingers in terrible literary constipation, whichever came over me as I grew into the role.

And Chloe? Having sat by the fire, off and on throughout the day, her face was mottled and blotchy, her eyes were reddened and her cheeks were smutty. Her tousled blonde hair gleamed in the light of the flames. She ran a tiny white mouse from one hand to the other. She smiled, and a smear of blood was on her teeth. Perfect. She was an urchin, a silent, sooty angel.

Chapter Seventeen

‘A
ND YOU’VE STARTED
writing? Well, wonders never cease. Soon you’ll be telling me you’re learning to play the saxophone or peering through a telescope at the night sky or, what was the other thing? oh yes you’re setting off to do the coast-to-coast walk from St. Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay...’

I aped a smile at her. ‘And taxidermy, my dearest Rosie, don’t forget taxidermy. Yes, I’m going to do all of those things. Hey, don’t be mean, there’s nothing wrong with having a few plans and ambitions. Don’t knock my little schemes and daydreams.’

We weren’t rowing or wrangling, it was just our usual exchange of snidey banter. Oddly, her asides were a bit more frequent, now that the shop was running and I’d done a bit of business. Perhaps it was because I’d stopped shaving for a while, or it rankled because I was making a paltry contribution to the family economy and threatening her status as sole bread-winner. So I parried clumsily, ‘Hey, I know you used to work for those fancy dentists in town, Dowling & McCorrister, charging their rich clients extortionate fees to do their kids’ braces and veneers and all that stuff... and now you’re strolling the groves of academe with Colonel Brook, and God said let there be light and so on... and me, I’m just a dabbler, a dilettante. But yes, I’ve started to write.’

She bethought herself. ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m really happy that the shop’s actually happening and it’s fun. What are you writing? Go on, tell me about it...’ And she kissed me full on the lips, stretching up so that her weight was on me and I had to step backwards to avoid overbalancing. So the kiss was very short, and she misunderstood my movement. She turned away, with a tiny shrug of disdain, as though I’d deliberately recoiled from her. ‘Alright, well tell me about it when I get back. I may be a bit later than usual. Colonel Brook’s holding a meeting after school this afternoon and he’s asked me to take the minutes.’ She went out.

Another lie. Well, it was partly true, about the writing. I’d been sending e-mails to a few old colleagues from my days with the borough council, not exactly blogging but spreading the word about the shop and the tooth and forwarding the newspaper article to anyone who might have missed it. Writing a book? Well no, although, in a flurry of hammering at the keyboard whenever a customer came in, I’d suddenly found I could rattle a few thoughts for a story, just by looking around the shop and at the bird and Chloe and catching a glimpse of my own eccentric reflection. No need to look any further for a story, even if I only kept a journal of the weirdness of the past nine or ten months, of the changes in our lives and where we lived and what we were doing. So yes, I’d been writing, not on paper, but into the mysterious workings of the computer. And sometimes, if I was stuck for the next sentence or a link or a dying phrase, I only had to reach for a book from the nearest heap and it was stuffed with the things, every shelf was groaning with other people’s hare-brained ideas. Fuck, if I couldn’t find something to write now, in this place, after all that was happening to me and surrounded by hundreds of thousands or even millions of superbly-crafted words, then whenever would I?

Well, not today.

Something about the room was wrong. Even the crow, as soon as we opened up and put out the sign and started to light the fire, even the crow didn’t like it. It had been huddling in the vestry all night, but now it sprang into the hallway and out of the front door and was gone. It took off, effortlessly, as though all this time it had been pretending to be a pitiful wretch, and beat across the playing fields of Derwent College. I watched it, me and Chloe watched it, we saw how it swerved through a flock of gulls and spooked them into a panic-stricken mob, and then swerved away again. Chloe too, back in the vestry, although her smile was as constantly bland as ever, had a different, bilious look in her eyes.

It was a glorious morning. Cold, yes, freezing hard although the sun was so bright. And it was the steely brightness of the sun which made the shop seem oddly unwelcoming. It glinted through the lancet windows, yet the glint was harshly metallic. The fire, although it tried its best to look cheery with its friendly puffs of blue smoke, although it sounded merry with its crackle and wheeze and pop, it looked pale. It couldn’t compete with the sunlight. The whole room, at its best in a swaddle of dark shadows, with the fire aglow and the books snuggling on their shelves, was kind of shabby.

I looked around it and at Chloe. I knew I was making excuses, about the sunlight and the firelight and all. Yes yes, I’d used the words myself, I was a dabbler and a dilettante and I’d always procrastinate if there was an easier option. Now I blurted, ‘Hey Chloe, let’s go out, shall we? It’s too nice to be festering in here with all these musty old books and this poor little fire. Hey, don’t look at me like that, like your Mummy... yes I know I was going to start writing, but what do you think? A morning on the boat, and then some chips in the Trip? Robin Hood and the shops and back on the bus? And we’ll be back before Mummy’s finished her meeting with the god-squad. She’ll never know. We can tell her we were here all day. Alright?’

The boat was on Sawley Marina. The water was a sheet of grey ice, crazed and fluted where it had thawed and re-frozen a thousand times over the past few weeks. But when I started the engine and the propeller churned, I could swing the bow away from its moorings and we broke free. The ice was a crust. We sliced easily through it and the still, black waters of the canal.

The Gay Lady
– it was only a little cruiser, twelve-foot or something, wooden on top with a fibreglass hull, a tiny cabin at the front with a couple of bunks in it, a puny two-horse-power outboard motor slung on the back. At the front, on the back... alright, so boating was something else I’d been dabbling in and I didn’t use the correct terminology. But the three of us had had fun on
The Gay Lady
on long hot summer afternoons and long, balmy evenings, chugging along the Trent & Mersey through Shardlow, past the breweries of Burton-on-Trent and drinking in Branston, almost as far as Lichfield. We were hopeless, we butted and bashed at other boats and scraped every bridge we came to. But it was idyllic... coot and moorhen, the stately heron, me and Rosie struggling with the locks while onlookers at the riverside pubs jeered and hooted and shouted ribald, deliberately unhelpful advice. We’d seen a kingfisher, and an otter, and in the twilight we’d seen fox and badger. In the remains of the summer since the accident, we’d seized every moment of joy together with an eagerness bordering on desperation. And our fumbling mishaps on board the silly little boat had been an escape from our anxieties.

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.