Wakening the Crow (21 page)

‘I think it would be in very bad taste,’ I said, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, a bit presumptuous.’

I felt a bristling of annoyance, it was like a rash or a flush of blood in my chest and into my neck.

‘You’ve no idea, have you?’ I went on. ‘So, why do you think you can just go making things up? If you’d asked me first of all if you could write about how me and my wife came to be here, in this tower, about what happened to us and our daughter to bring us here and how I came by the tooth, I might’ve thought about it for a few seconds. And then I would’ve said no, because the whole thing’s so odd and disturbing and yes, tragic, that first of all you wouldn’t have believed it and secondly I’m going to write it all myself one day.’

I could feel the heat rising into my throat and colouring my cheeks.

‘So no, thank you but no,’ I finished off. ‘Do your obituary for the nice old gentleman. Just because there’s a crow hopping about in here, and the tooth of Edgar Allan Poe, and the old guy happened to keel over and bang his head outside his own church, it doesn’t mean there’s a curse.’

He shrugged, he got up and did a final sweeping appraisal of the room before he moved towards the door. He was not at all fazed by my blustering. He was young, and I remembered the time in my own late teens and twenties when I couldn’t give a shit and couldn’t be rattled by other people’s testiness or ill humour, when I didn’t care whether I’d caused offence or not.

‘The crow, yes,’ he murmured, amused by my reaction, ‘yes, I was going to ask about the crow. And your lovely daughter too, why she just sits there smiling and silent and she doesn’t go to school? But no need, it didn’t take me five minutes to look through our files and find out what happened to her. Oh, and the people in the car which hit her. And your wife, I asked around and I found out she works at Brook’s Academy, and when I phoned them they said she was off work right now, had a kind of stroke or something?’

He was going outside, swaddling himself in his coat and deliberately eccentric scarf.

‘So, Mr Gooch, I’m sorry if I riled you a bit, with my ridiculous idea about the curse. But funnily enough, your denial of any such thing is kind of more revealing than if you’d agreed with it. You know what I mean?

I followed him outside. He was smug. He had a tiny triumphant smile on his mouth, as if he’d baited me and I’d swallowed the bait and he’d pulled me in. He’d already done a bit of homework. He knew more than I’d thought he did.

‘Don’t worry,’ he was saying, as he turned away, ‘I’ll just do the obituary.’ His feet crunched on the shells shattered onto the road, he rubbed the top of his head. ‘If I do get another story out of this, it won’t be anything about a curse or whatever. You can do that yourself. You’re living it, you’re living in it. But I might do a little spooky thing about snails dropping out of the sky, you know,
X-Files
or
Twilight Zone
or whatever...’

He’d gone. His words were ringing in my head.

I was living the curse? I was living in it? Who was cursed? Me, Oliver Gooch, or my daughter Chloe Gooch? No, it was nothing like the monkey’s paw. Long before I’d been given the tooth, I’d got the things I’d wished for: the money and leisure I’d craved, an angelic daughter. If I was living in the curse, I was very comfy too, in my swaddle of guilt. I was the lord of my tower, and my lady wife was miserably numb in her chamber, I was imprisoning her up there, keeping her pickled...

So fuck off, Joe Blakesley. You think you know stuff, but you don’t. You think you’re a super-investigative journalist, but there are things you’ll never find out, things you’ll never dig out of your files. The curse I’m living in is real, you don’t need to make it up. I’ve been walling myself up inside it, like in another of Poe’s stories, with alcohol and deception and duplicity and the compliance of my daughter. And one day she’ll blink and we’ll get out. But is that what I want? And the tooth? Get rid of it, old man Heap got rid of it, he gave it to me. The bird, the tooth, they’ve got to go...

In a blur of indignation, I went back towards the door of the church. I paused to move the sign. Annoyingly, the reporter had turned it a little bit, when he was going to take a photo, so I put it back exactly where I wanted it. And then I saw something in a crack in the pavement. The paramedic had joked that the old man had broken the stone with his head, and I’d wondered for a moment if this was the spot where that workman had landed when he’d fallen and died during the building of the church. Whichever it was, or whoever it was whose skull had left its mark, there was a small white object stuck there.

It was a tooth. I picked it out and held it to the sunlight.

The paramedic with her busy dustpan and brush must have missed it, after all it had been dark in the late afternoon, confused by the flashing lights of the ambulance and its puthering exhaust fumes. As I moved back to the doorway, I marvelled at the whiteness of the tooth, how purely perfect it had remained after more than forty years in the organist’s mouth. I supposed it was made of porcelain or something, and every night it had been cleaned in a solution and left to soak in a glass on the marital bedside table. I could picture the two of them, Mr and Mrs. Vaughan in the bedroom of their semi-detached house in Trowell Grove, snuggling up and exchanging gummy kisses. The tooth was pristine. It could’ve been new.

Where to put it? When I went back into the vestry to make sure Chloe was alright, I was thinking I should call the hospital and tell them, maybe it was a legal requirement, maybe it was illegal to knowingly retain a piece of a recently deceased person. Chloe stood up from the fire, which was blazing brightly and warming the room. She’d been holding the crow on her lap, and the mouse was peering from her sleeve and disappearing again, instinctively wary of the bird and its heavy black beak. Just then, it seemed the obvious thing for me to do, to place the tooth onto the display, another gift at the shrine of Edgar Allan Poe, with the blood-stained glass and the fragments of snail-shell.

Chloe, curious, came to look. She picked up the tooth and smiled at it. She put it to her mouth, as if she would taste it, and I said quickly, ‘No no, don’t, that’s not nice,’ and tried to take it from her.

But she stepped back and withheld it from me. She held it close to her smile. Its whiteness matched hers. Of course, I suddenly realised, because the tooth was hers.

‘So that’s where it went to. Was it the crow who took it out there? What do you want to do with it, Chloe? Do you want to show it to Mummy, and then we’ll put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy to come? No?’

She didn’t answer, of course, not in words. She put it where I was going to put it. By Poe’s tooth.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
WAS WOKEN
by screaming.

I lay on my back with my eyes wide open and I thought the screams were a part of my dream. The room had been very dark when I’d slipped into bed, so dark and silent that I’d done everything in my powers to keep it so – by tiptoeing, by holding my breath, by slipping between the sheets so softly that not a sigh or a whisper of my nakedness on the cool white cotton would be heard.

But now the room was not so dark. And not silent. I leapt out of the bed and tumbled across the room to see what on earth was going on.

A scene of gothic madness. Bedlam would have been like this.

I called out, ‘Rosie! Rosie! What are you doing, Rosie?’ But she couldn’t have heard my voice. Because she was writhing on the bed and screaming.

I’d been in Chloe’s bedroom, I’d sneaked in when I knew Rosie was unconscious after a nightcap of tawny port. After my banishment to the kitchen and the nether world of the moonlit vestry, I needed a bed. Now, naked, I’d blundered into our bedroom, where Rosie was in the throes of a terrible nightmare.

Chloe was crouching beside her. If it weren’t for the inane fixity of her smile, I would’ve said she was paralysed with fear. She was clutching her goose-girl. The Robin Hood figure as well, he was sprawled across her pillow.

Rosie... in the dim light of the bedside lamp, she was writhing on the bed. No words, at least no words I could recognise. Her mouth was wide open and red. It was a dribble of port and... a kind of sangria, fermented in the coils of her gut and bubbling back, a bitter bile in her throat and on her tongue and spewing past her traitorous lips.

‘Rosie!’ I was stumbling forward and trying to take hold of her, but her flanks were slippery with sweat.

I fell on top of her. She was writhing underneath me, and it was extraordinary and disturbing for me, and no doubt for the onlooking Chloe, to see how I was aroused, my nakedness erect on her hot, pneumatic body. She couldn’t really speak. Even when I’d quietened her and she lay heaving and her eyes rolling like a mare stuck in a ditch, she was muttering and cursing and rubbing at her face. She was a mess. And the bed too. I thought maybe she’d woken in a fit or a seizure, or she was having the stroke we’d suspected before.

My mind was racing. I knew she’d fallen asleep drunk, of course I knew, because it was me who’d helped her to slurp down the port in a considerable quantity to make her comfortable, and I knew I’d had my share too. So, if and when she ever calmed enough to be manageable, it would still be quite a feat to get the befuddled two of us, and the bemused Chloe, dressed and into a taxi to hospital again.

‘Rosie! Rosie, my lovely Rosie. Be calm, be calm, relax and breathe and breathe and breathe...’

She wasn’t lovely. She looked terrible. Her hair was a Medusa mess.

I reached for Chloe and felt her little body trembling. The smile was nothing, of course we’d known this for a long time. Beneath the blissful calm of her face, who knew what torture she was enduring? I laid my hands on her and tried to soothe her, and at the same time I saw the madness in her mother’s eyes and felt her reaching for the mirror, that wretched mirror which was always there, somewhere in the tousled sweat of her sheets and she would rummage for it and press it to her face so she could see how her youth and beauty had collapsed so utterly.

Cruel, truthful mirror. She was squashing it hard to her face. She was pressing it to her cheek with all her strength, as if she was trying to crush something, to erase, to annihilate some unwanted part of herself.

‘Rosie, Rosie, let me see, please...’ and I prised the mirror from her hands.

The wound that the crow had made. Yes, it was worse. In my ministrations, as I’d plied her with the numbing wine and spirit and helped her to the bathroom, I hadn’t really looked at the wound. I looked at it now. After all, it was that impact, beak into flesh, which had started it all, which had triggered Rosie’s calamity. I peered close. It was raw and wet. I caught a smell from it. Something off, something past its best. A dead thing. Worse, it wasn’t dead. When I pinned her down and grabbed the mirror away from her, when I gazed so close that my breath made her eyelids flutter, I could see something moving.

A worm? Worms? They were tiny and white. They had no faces. They didn’t need faces. They only needed mouths and stomachs, so they could burrow blindly into living flesh and feed on it.

I almost retched. I felt a squirming in my belly, I felt my gorge rise. In a moment I was off the bed and in and out of the bathroom and back again, and I stung the wound with antiseptic. Rosie writhed beneath me. Despite the dereliction of her face and the ugly sounds she was making, I felt the ridiculous, inappropriate arousal which must have been so bewildering to Chloe. Again and again, I dabbed the wound and its inhabitants with ammonia. It dribbled down her face and onto her sheets, with the stains of wine. I peered again, using her infernal mirror to angle the light and see the effect of my clumsy attempts at nursing. I saw an ugly place, a piece of my wife which had been fragrant and kissable, and I smelled a deadliness inside it, which the ammonia could not disguise.

As though in a nightmare, she was shoving me away with an unnatural strength. Something else, other than the discomfort of the wound, had woken her in distress. She turned her attentions to Chloe. Smearing at her mouth with her forearm, she managed to form some barely coherent words, as she sprawled across the bed and seized the girl by the wrists. Something like, ‘Where is she? Where she gone? I want her back I want her back. Who took her?’

Chloe was afraid, I could see the fear in her eyes, although she gleamed her smile back into her mother’s face. As gently as I could, I tried to prise Rosie’s grip from Chloe.

‘Rosie, Rosie, you’re frightening her, you’re frightening me. We’ll get her back, we’ll get her back. One day Chloe will come back and everything will be alright...’

‘No, no, not...’ Rosie was muttering, and she was suddenly more compliant in my arms, as though exhausted by her hysteria. She lay back, her hot naked body quite flaccid, only staring over the rumpled bedding and around the room for something lost, something which had been taken from her. ‘No no, where is she? I want her back again...’

I realised she didn’t mean Chloe. After all these months of yearning for the return of her daughter, that the girl might wake from the dream she was locked into, Rosie was looking for something else. I almost laughed out loud with relief.

‘Oh god, you mean your doll? Your Maid Marian? Don’t worry, we’ll find it... hey Chloe, let’s look shall we?’

Yes, Chloe had her goose-girl, which I’d meant to be her, and the manly Robin Hood, supposed to be me, was lying beside her. But Rosie’s winsome Marian wasn’t there. Not a problem, it must be hidden in the tumbled bedding. Chloe helped me to look, although she had a mysterious twinkle in her eye, and it was a good reason to get the bed stripped and remade. While I’d got Rosie into the bathroom and under the shower, we tugged everything off the double bed and bundled it up for washing, found clean linen from the cupboard, and when Rosie reappeared, wrapped in a big towel, her bed was crisp and cool and all in order. She was a bit better, she was calm. But her face was puffy, the wound was raw; and in her demeanour, in her very being, she looked beaten.