Wakening the Crow (15 page)

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 reinforce 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.

It went very nicely into my coffee. I turned up the music. I could smell myself. No, not really myself, I could smell my favourite pullover and the big coat I’d slung over my shoulders because of the icy draft from the door. Brandy and coffee and the comforting rankness of my own clothes; the music, the spit of the fire as it tried its best to combat the cold from outside; the brandy. I had to keep the door open, of course, and yes, there’d been people pottering in and out for the past few days or a week or more, since the not-so-grand opening of Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. I’d sold a few books, one or two customers had wanted their photograph taken with me and the shrine, and I’d stamped their purchases and slipped in their complimentary bookmark, with Dr Barnsby’s handwritten affirmation that the tooth had indeed come from the mouth of a young, probably homesick Edgar Allan Poe.

Today, on this morning, I had two people come in, and I toasted each one with another splash of brandy into my coffee. The first was a man in blue dungarees and boots with steel toe-caps, with a pencil behind his ear. Very nice and non-confrontational, he was from the furniture warehouse next door in the body of the old church, and asking if I’d either turn down the music or put something good on. I turned it down, and he accepted a crafty slurp of the vicar’s brandy. The other was Tony Heap. He loomed into the shop from the big silvery car he’d parked outside and introduced himself as Tony Heap. He didn’t want to talk, he said, he’d just been passing and he’d seen the sign and he’d stopped on an impulse to take a look.

Loomed. He was even bigger now, in the daylight, than I’d thought when I’d first seen him bending to his father’s plot on the crematorium and when he’d knelt to the fire in his father’s shop. Then, on both occasions, he’d been nothing much more than a bulky figure in a dark, winter’s overcoat, no more than a shape, a presence, a greying, middle-aged man in the grip of grief. Now, in the chilly daylight, as he strode from his car and into the shop, he was purposeful and businesslike, just taking a look, as he put it so brusquely, and his manner was slightly off-putting, overbearing, as though, because his father had given me the tooth for whatever mischievous reason, it was somehow still his, it was in his family and he had a responsibility to come in and see that it was being well looked after.

He bent over the makeshift shrine. I held my coffee mug to my face, in both hands, hunched over it and inhaled the perfume of the brandy, suddenly felt that I was hiding my face behind it and didn’t need to, set it down on my desk and stood up straight. It was my shop, he was in my home and these were my books around me. It was my tooth, insofar as it could ever be someone else’s tooth, other than Poe’s. And so, to assert myself a little, I started forward, as he bent even closer to read the photocopied transcript of the tooth’s provenance.

He was already fingering the jewels of glass which Chloe had put there. Without really looking at them, he was touching them with the fingertips of his left hand. Indeed, when he straightened up and looked around the shop, at all the books and the bright fire, he was holding one of the pieces between his thumb and forefinger and playing with it, quite absent-mindedly.

‘It’s alright, yes alright. I think my father might’ve liked what you’re doing,’ he murmured, as though I needed his approbation. He suddenly winced, glanced at what he was holding and put it down. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers with it. He thought he’d cut himself on the glass, because the handkerchief was smeared with red when he put it back in his pocket.

And so he went out to his car and drove away. The damaged front nearside wheel... it was only a scrape, it would do as a spare, whenever he might get round to having it changed. Back in the shop I added the last of the brandy to my coffee, turned up the music again and switched on the computer. Started writing.

Chapter Twenty-Three

N
OT A COACH
party, but not bad, and a bit more coverage for the shop in the local newspaper – a school visit, a teacher and a group of kids doing their coursework on Edgar Allan Poe.

Rosie, bless her soul, had fixed it up. Despite her resentment about what had happened with the crow, she’d seen how hard I’d tried to make the shop nice again and she’d heard me tapping away like crazy at the keyboard, and she was still loyal to my pet project.

She’d come back later that day and told me what the doctor had done about the wound on her face. He’d cleaned it thoroughly and taped a gauze pad across her cheek, and he’d given her a tetanus jab. He’d said yes, there was a chance that it might have been infected, there was a risk from being pecked by any bird, even by a pet parrot, let alone a carrion crow which scavenged every kind of... well, carrion, in different stages of decay and decomposition. But the jab should do the trick, he’d said, so keep it clean and covered for a few days, and she should pop in again if it was sore or weeping or seeping, or whatever.

She and Chloe had had a nice morning in the lovely warm shops in the high street. They’d both had a haircut, had a pasty on the square and listened to the Salvation Army band, which was raising funds to help the homeless, especially people who might be sleeping rough at this time of the year and in the coldest temperatures in living memory. She’d let me peep behind the gauze pad, where the wound was glistening red, stained yellow with ammonia. And yes, she’d done a turn around the shop before they both went upstairs, and like Tony Heap, she’d signalled her approval.

‘Nice,’ she said softly. ‘Cosy and nice, good job.’

It was late afternoon and getting dark outside, so the vestry looked welcoming with the firelight and the glow of the shrine and the hundreds of books on the shelves, the music I’d mellowed and turned down over the course of the day.

‘And you’re writing. That’s marvellous.’ She’d heard me hammering at the keyboard. ‘No, don’t tell me what you’re doing. No, don’t show me yet. Just keep going and then print out whenever you want to, whenever you want me to read anything.’

I got a big kiss. Another one from Chloe. All good.

And the middle of the following morning, when Chloe and I were all alone and mooching in the bookshop, I’d heard the phone ringing and ringing up in the kitchen.

Rosie’s voice, calling from work. I was too breathless to say anything much at first, after hurrying upstairs, I just grunted yes and yes and yes when she asked if we were in, was everything alright, was Chloe alright... and, sorry short notice, but was I alright with Colonel Brook coming to the shop with some of his students. Yes now, yes soon, maybe lunchtime, was that alright?

I would’ve been alright, yes. Excited and apprehensive, I went down the stairs two at a time, thinking to get the place just perfect for our unexpected visitors. Rosie had had time to add that she’d been chatting to the Colonel at breaktime and mentioned her husband’s bookshop, and he, in typically no-nonsense military fashion, had just said, there and then, that he’d like to take one of his English classes on a visit . Yes, today, at lunchtime, why not? And so I needed to hurry downstairs and straighten a few things, choose some appropriate music, cheer up the fire and station Chloe picturesquely beside it.

Except that she wasn’t there.

Before I’d even crossed the hallway to the vestry, I caught a glimpse of her in the very corner of my eye. I skidded to a halt and did a double-take. There she was, she’d gone outside – and oh god – she was in the road. With a dazzling flash of memory – the last time I’d neglected her long enough for her to wander into traffic – I dashed out of the church door.

Crash.

A thumping collision, a tumbling impact onto the ground. Me, I ran straight into my sign on the pavement and fell headlong. By the time I was on my feet again, Chloe had reached the other side of the road and was ferreting around in the privet hedge, head-first, reaching deep inside with an outstretched hand.

Oh fuck, oh god, she was safe. Winded by my fall, I had to wait for a line of cars in both directions before I could get to her and hoick her out. I stood her up and dusted her off, because her pullover and hair were prickly with twigs.

‘Chloe, my love, oh Chloe...’

I was too relieved to be annoyed with her. She’d gone out of the church and through two streams of traffic, oblivious, while I’d been breathless on the phone in the kitchen.

‘Chloe, please please please don’t... don’t just piss off on your own. I’m supposed to be looking after you, aren’t I? Your Daddy’s looking after you, alright? If anything happened to you, I don’t know what we’d...’

All kinds of pleas and injunctions were rattling in my head, but by the time they reached my tongue they’d petered into nothing. She was pointing over my shoulder, back towards the church doorway, and in the muddle of my mind I immediately thought it was something to do with the crow she’d been rummaging for, that in some further conceit in its story it would be there, re-invented, reincarnated, born again, and...