Wakening the Crow (17 page)

‘And what’s this on your face?’ the doctor said. He took off the gauze pad. ‘A bird? What do you mean, a bird? What kind of bird? Let me see. Is it infected?’

G
UILT... A DOUBLE-EDGED
emotion. Shakespeare did the ‘sweet sorrow’ of parting, and all sorts of poets and pop singers have caught the oxymoron or whatever, ‘love hurts’, the exquisite pain of love and all that. But has anyone done guilt?

Rosie had a scan. She wailed at the claustrophobia of being inside the narrow tube, as it clanged and banged and vibrated so hard it sounded as if the big-end had gone or something. Me and Chloe, we sat at the end of the tube. I held one of Rosie’s feet and caressed it with all the love and tenderness I had within me, and Chloe gently cradled the other foot. Not long afterwards, Rosie was sitting up in bed in a bright, breezy ward and we were sitting beside her and holding her hands. One side of her mouth had folded downwards, her eyebrow and eyelid had fallen so much she couldn’t see out of that side. She was trying not to cry. And the doctor came in with a print-out from the scanner and told her that she hadn’t had a stroke. So that was marvellous news, she was alright.

Well no, she wasn’t quite alright. Not uncommon, but rather unfortunate. The nerves on one side of her face, the side which the crow had pecked, had suffered a trauma and caused the muscles to weaken and drop.

She didn’t want me to stay. The doctor wanted to admit her and observe her for the rest of the day, to monitor the symptoms. Rosie pulled herself together, after I’d hugged her and reassured her as best I could that it was a temporary thing, that the doctor had said it would right itself with relaxation and a bit of physiotherapy after a matter of weeks... She pulled herself together and stopped crying. She took so many enormous breaths that her buxom body seemed to swell almost to bursting. She wiped her reddened eyes and swabbed at her blubbery, misshapen lips. And she managed to tell me, although her words were slurred, that she’d be alright with Chloe, that Chloe would stay with her and keep her company in the ward, and she wanted me to go out, she wanted me to go into town or something or go home and open the shop. In any case, just get out and leave her a bit of space and get out.

She started crying again, very softly, like a child. And me, feeling utterly wretched and useless and entirely to blame, I slunk out of the room.

Strange and wonderful, and really inexplicable. The guilt thing.

I’d pressed the doctor to say whether or not the wound on her face had triggered the trauma, and he’d said, with a kind of grudging reluctance, that yes, he thought it had. I stumbled out of the hospital in a blur of self-reproach and self-loathing. Into a glorious day.

All of my senses were heightened, almost to a kind of ecstasy. The sun was brighter, the cold was colder. The world was a glittering place. So, Oliver Gooch, banished from his wife’s bedside because his negligence had left her with a brain-damaged daughter and a disfigured face. I would relish the beauties of this day as never before.

A taxi to the marina, a couple of tugs at the outboard motor, and I was nosing
The Gay Lady
away from her berth and the noises of the city.

A weekday morning, still only nine o’clock, and there was no one else on the canal. The surface of the water had frozen again overnight, and now the bow of the little boat crunched through it, turning the ice into a foaming, silvery slush. In minutes, we were through the new housing estates of the Meadows and into open country, gleaming with frost. Steam rose from horses and cattle, their hot breath puthered as white as the clouds from the distant power station. Lapwings lifted from the fields in languid, buoyant flight. A heron, standing so still by the weir that it might have been dead, the blood in its veins chilled into crystal. A fox, limping through a stand of derelict thistle and pausing in the sunshine, to warm its bones after a bitter night. A kestrel, hovering in a dazzle of sunlight. I thought I’d seen an otter in the wake of the boat, and I didn’t mind if I had or I hadn’t, because the idea itself was so delicious.

I plied the canal to Shardlow. I was alone, and relishing every moment of my solitude. The air had never tasted so good.

My wife was in hospital. She was probably crying. She would be lying in her bed, flat on her back on a mound of pillows, and she would be clutching her mirror in her right hand. She would steal a look every few minutes, she would bring the mirror to her face and frame herself in it. And she would cry, the tears would run so hot and heavy that her eyes would be swollen with them, reddened and puffy. She would see the left corner of her mouth drooping and drooping more each time she looked, until her teeth and gums were exposed and the saliva spooled uncontrollably out. She would feel her cheek, already weeping from the wound on it, completely numb, so that, when she touched it with her fingertips it was a dead person’s cheek.

Chloe would be there, but no comfort at all. Where was the comfort in a child who just smiled, who gazed at her mother’s altered face and chuckled like a simpleton?

Guilt? It was a lancing pain in my chest. It gnawed at my belly. And it heightened my senses, so that every nerve in my body sang with the joy of the day.

I stilled the boat beneath the motorway bridge. I counted a minute and wondered how many vehicles had passed over my head in that time, three lanes going one way and three lanes the other, at seventy miles an hour. Hundreds of cars and trucks must have hurtled by. I saw a tiny movement on the bank, where the water was dripping from the concrete slabs of the bridge and plopping into the canal. And there was a vole, sitting and watching me, cleaning its face with its paws. When our eyes met, it stopped preening and shook itself with such vigour that the droplets flew from its fur. Just the two of us, we were alone and stationary in the dim, green place we’d found, while the rest of the world hurried by in opposite directions. Oliver Gooch, guilty, and the blameless vole.

Lunchtime. The beer in the Trip was better than ever. A pint from a brewery in Ilkeston, and a half of this and a half of that, and another half of this and that from the little breweries in Papplewick and Lenton and Eastwood, and they slipped down a treat, with the landlady’s own steak and kidney pie. It was very warm in the pub. My belly was full and my head was comfortably muzzy. I sat where I always sat with Chloe, and when the landlord asked me where the little girl was today, I told him she was staying home with her Mum, who wasn’t so well right now. He winced, such a negligible expression of disquiet that he wouldn’t have thought I’d noticed, when I decided to finish my feast with one last pint of a guest beer from Mansfield. Perhaps it was the state of my pullover, or the way I’d slung my big old pungent coat across the back of my seat, or the dishevelment of my beard and hair, which made him pause before pulling the beer for me.

I returned to my place by the window. The beer went down smooth and slow. When I left the pub, tugging on my coat, I was a bit unsteady, swiping at my mouth with the back of my hand.

Shit, and the cobbles were like ice. As always, in this bleakest of winters, I’d misjudged the time and it was unnervingly, loomingly dark. I slithered once, twice, the shadow of the castle seemed to bulge at me so big and black that it was a part of the sky.

Was it dusk or twilight? In January, in England, in the narrow streets of the oldest part of Nottingham, these niceties were dispensed with. Day became night, in a sudden snap of frost. One of the cobbles shifted under my foot. I sat down heavily on my backside and felt my ankle tweak. A shiver of pain, which made me sick in my stomach. I heard a muttering, a tut-tutting, and I was aware of someone standing nearby, not near enough to come and help me to my feet but watching, a spirit of disapproval. Was I a down-and-out, a drunk? No, I was Oliver Gooch, proprietor of a bookshop so famous that it had featured in the
Nottingham Evening Post
. I got up, regained my balance and a semblance of dignity and shambled forward, far enough to sit by the flower bed at the statue of Robin Hood.

Chloe? Chloe, where are you? Shit, I told you not to go running off
. My stomach lurched until I remembered that I was on my own. Oh my god, I was without Chloe, such an unusual state of affairs that I’d forgotten she wasn’t around. Or to put it another way, for a blissful few hours I wasn’t holding my breath in case, in case... no, not blissful, because the price of this day was the disfigurement of my wife. Guilt, glorious guilt, all the sweet and positive new things in my life were tainted with it, and at the same time, enhanced.

No, of course I hadn’t forgotten about Rosie. I was sorry, terribly sorry, and pained by what had happened. I had to get back to her as soon as I could, to get her and Chloe home and safe in our tower.

Heaps? How could it be? The little shop was a glow of warm, welcoming light. Heaps? The word was still there, the golden letters on the window. I stood and blinked and re-read the name. As I trod carefully forward, feeling the pain in my ankle and sensing the nausea it might induce, I paused and stared.

Two things made me stop. First, there was a bundled figure in the doorway, nothing to do with the shop but still a typical and troubling feature of life in a big city: she was a girl, I thought, or a woman, I could see her pointy white face with a stud in her lip and her nose and her eyebrow, and her dog was growling at me. I couldn’t really see the dog, they were just a bundled up body of human and animal and newspaper and a blanket, snuggled together for all the warmth they could afford one another, and they had found their place for the night. I took a breath and swept past them into the shop. The dog didn’t bite me. The girl didn’t reach out a quivering hand and ask me for money.

The other thing which had made me pause – the shop seemed to be full of people. I moved inside and it was surreal. The fire was the same, in the same place, of course, and blazing merrily. But the shop had been transformed into a magical world of dolls and puppets and figurines, some of them life-size or at least as big as children, which gave the whole space an illusion of crowdedness, of busyness, as if a mob of elves had swarmed in from the forest and come to toast their toes at the fireside.

A real human detached herself from the shadows. She was a woman too, but she might have been a different species, from a different planet, compared with the one shivering outside her door. At first, however, I didn’t note her face, only the waft of her warm and womanly perfume and an aura of expensive blonde hair. I was too busy appraising the wonders of her shop.

A medieval world, designed for the tourists who might come in the summer; the proprietor must have opened early in the year to get the feel of business and maybe conjure a bit of local publicity. All of the figures were ‘woodland folk’, from an idyllic long-ago time which had probably never happened: a merry band of men and women and children and dogs and geese and piglets, made of all kinds of materials – cotton and wool and suede – sewn and padded and costumed in extraordinary detail. Robin Hood, of course, he was the whole point, and this was a prime location, a stone’s throw from the statue and the gatehouse of Nottingham Castle.

I browsed the dolls and puppets. I picked them up. Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Little John. There was a villainous Sheriff of Nottingham and a weasly, sneering King John. Richard the Lionheart, returning from the Crusades to reclaim his throne. And knights on horses, and serfs and footsoldiers, and archers, monks, urchins and beggars and cripples. A collector, probably an American, might reach into his wallet and go home with the entire population of 13th century Sherwood Forest.

‘Shall I wrap them for you? Would you like them gift-wrapped?’

Her perfume was heady. Her hair was golden in the light of the fire.

I’d chosen three figures to take back with me, already fearing I’d be late and inappropriate when I got back to the hospital. Inappropriate, a good word, the last few beers had been inappropriate. I didn’t even know what time it was. My head was blurry, my ankle was hurting, I could smell the beer in my beard. I was in trouble. So I’d got a Robin Hood, that was me... a Maid Marian, for Rosie of course... and a bonny little goose-girl for Chloe.

‘Yes, please,’ I said. For the first time, I looked into her face. She was oddly familiar. More than that, I had, in the fug of my brain induced by the beer and my fall and now the warmth of the fire, an uncanny sensation that we’d met before, we knew each other, our lives had touched for a short but significant time.

‘Heaps?’ I said. ‘I used to come here a lot, for books and things, when Mr Heap was...’ She glanced up at me and smiled wanly, as she cut and folded the wrapping around my chosen figures. ‘I mean, I thought the shop was closed, but you still have the name on the window and...’

‘My grandfather,’ she said. ‘Did you know him?’ She smiled a rather winsome smile as she caught my expression. ‘Oh dear, you don’t approve? Oh I know a lot of people loved his funny old shop, well, generations of his customers. And of course we did too, me and my sister and the rest of the family, we all loved grandpa’s shop and he was a local figure in the city from way back...’

She’d almost finished wrapping my presents, she was doing ribbons and stuff and going to town. She gifted me another of her smiles.

‘Don’t you like it, the new shop? Oh you must do, or you wouldn’t have come in. Alright, so it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought I’d give it a whirl and see how it goes. And so yes, I’ve left grandpa’s name on the window. I thought he’d like me to do that. Me and my sister, we loved him so much.’

She slid the beautifully wrapped parcel towards me.

‘There, thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re my one and only sale of the day, my first customer, my first customer.’ Her eyes were glistening with excitement and gratitude. ‘Grandpa would be pleased. Thank you.’

I took the parcel. I rummaged in my wallet for some cash and found that my taxis and beer and steak and kidney pie had left me short, so I proffered a bank card. She fumbled with it, it was all new to her, this business thing. As she was processing the card and passing me the receipt to sign, I couldn’t help adding, because I was almost overcome by her sincerity, her womanliness, and the way she’d shared a confidence far beyond the usual exchange of commerce, ‘Your grandfather, and your sister, can I offer my condolences?’