Wakening the Crow (25 page)

A
ND SO
I stayed in my lair, my dungeon, at the bottom of the tower. Me and the crow.

Oh, and the mouse. The mouse, forgotten, abandoned, running like a lunatic on its wheel. White mouse, in a beam of silvery moonlight.

I suffered a curious reaction to Rosie’s leaving me. Childish, maybe, like a sulky boy. I decided to leave her. And since she was already gone and had taken my daughter with her, the only way I could leave her was to sequester myself in my own place and eschew the home we’d made together.

In other words, it came upon me to inhabit my own little world in the bookshop. The neat, newly converted kitchen and the bedrooms above it were the places we’d shared, as man and wife and father and mother, with our darling child. Alright, if they wanted to clear out, then so did I.

It only occurred to me when it was already dark, by the evening of that day in the sooty bookshop. There’d been people, not crowds of course, but odd-bods throughout the morning and the afternoon, enough to keep me downstairs and not wanting to miss anyone by nipping up for lunch or anything. At noon I’d run across to Azri’s for a coffee and a burger, ostentatiously unfolding the notes from my pocket and pretending to fidget while I waited and told him I had to hurry back to the shop because I had customers waiting. By the time it was dusk and twilight and the frost seemed to clang onto the pavement outside the church door, a harder and steelier frost than ever before, I’d already had a few invigorating mouthfuls of the rum in the vestry cupboard and slipped out for another bottle. Next to Azri’s there was a convenience store, only a nook of a shop but bright and neat and filled to the ceiling with everything one might possibly need; the sort of treasure-trove of food and drink and comfort that a survivalist might stash in case of apocalypse. I got rum. On impulse, although I knew there was bread upstairs in the kitchen of the tower, I got bread. And milk, and coffee, and chocolate. And I came out with a bulging bag of stuff, as though I’d heard there might be a bomb tonight and I needed to hibernate.

Yes, by the time I’d crossed the road and was back into the vestry, where the fire was the best it had ever been after a long day of diligent refuelling, I’d decided to sulk it out. Rosie and Chloe had gone away. They’d quit the marital home and right now, at this very moment, they would be snuggling in Auntie Cissy’s living room with cups of tea and glasses of sherry and
Countdown
or
Deal or No Deal
or some other afternoon quiz-show. So me, I’d get out too.

I only made one foray upstairs to get what else I needed. And that was when I heard something...

I was in the kitchen. On the table I’d got kettle, toilet paper, towel, toothpaste. And I was about to go up to the bedroom and bathroom and I heard... the swish of the traffic on the icy road? The bubble of hot water in the immersion heater? I was halfway up the stairs to the bedroom and I stopped, to try and work out what it was.

It couldn’t be the crow. It was down in the vestry, it was dozing in front of the fire with its breath wheezing through bristly nostrils, its wings outstretched, like a cormorant drying itself in the wind after a dizzy, dashing, submarine hunt. No, above my head there was a rhythmic, scratching sound. Relentless. Indefatigable. Mad.

Chloe had forgotten the mouse.

Poor, abandoned, orphan rodent. Maybe Rosie had rushed her too much, while I was showering off all my soot and stripping the bed and Rosie had been hurrying Chloe to get ready and packed so that Daddy wouldn’t emerge and try to dissuade them or stop them or. Whatever, Rosie must’ve bundled Chloe out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen so quickly that the mouse, or Mouse, as it had been rather unoriginally named, had been left behind.

In a beam of silvery moonlight. I stepped into the bedroom and there it was. It was running so hard its little heart might burst.

I looked around the room. Our bed, carefully made-up, but empty. Robin Hood and the goose-girl naughtily entwined, as though they were taking advantage of Maid Marian’s mysterious absence. Chloe’s room, empty, the bed stripped. I didn’t switch on any lights, I didn’t need to, because a shaft of moonlight fell through the window and onto the mouse. Silvery – a sliver of silver. Was it running after the girl? Was it chasing a moonlit horizon? Would it run until it reached the end of the world and simply dropped off the edge?

Empty. Just me and the mouse. ‘Alright, so it’s just you and me,’ I was whispering, but I might’ve been talking to myself because it just kept on running. ‘Just me and you, alright? Rosie left me, I thought she loved me through thick and thin, for better or for worse etc etc, but she left me. And Chloe left you. When it came to the crunch and they were off to Auntie Cissy’s cuddly cosy living room, she forgot all about you, didn’t she? So it’s just me and you, alright?’

I couldn’t persuade it to stop. I had to reach into the cage and lift it off the wheel and slip it into my shirt.

I went down the stairs with Chloe’s mattress and duvet. Shut the bedroom door behind me. The marital, family bedroom: closed until further notice.

Went down to the kitchen. Somehow, with great care and slightly drunken sleight of hand, down and down to the hallway of the church with mattress and duvet and kettle and towel and whatever, without falling headlong and breaking my poor silly neck on the flagstones.

Run away from home. I was somehow further away from home than Rose and Chloe were. Me and the crow and the mouse, by the fire. I felt like I’d run away, like some kind of hobo, I’d gone feral, I was on the road with my crow and my mouse and my bottle of rum and we’d lit a fire... under a motorway bridge or in a derelict building or a barn or the tower of an old church or...

Cheers. I’d put down the mattress and the duvet. I had a marvellous blaze. A masterpiece of ruddy and amber flames, blue as well, as the bark crisped and curled from the fragrant silver birch. I didn’t know when my wife and my daughter might come back. I didn’t know when I might go home. In the meantime, I didn’t need to. I was smugly and snugly self-sufficient, with money in my pocket and the prospect of another day’s business tomorrow, and my post-apocalyptic store just across the road.

Chapter Thirty-Two

T
HE BOY.
I saw him.

Puer. I did some Latin at school. I could decline the word puer, boy. Puer puer puerum, pueri pueri puerum... by, with, or from a boy. So they gave me a Latin class when I thought I might try to be a teacher. Boys. And a few girls. They did their Latin exercises from a crummy little text book, and then they came up to my desk and I marked them as they stood close to me. The smell of small boys, unmistakable and uniquely sweaty and... and a girl, a girl called... can’t remember her name, but she leaned very close with a different smell as I marked her horrid, blotted book and her ridiculous sentences. I never touched her. I swear. But she would swing her skinny little legs against my leg, fiddle her foot onto mine, and then one day when I made to push her away she squealed and pouted and accused me.

So I didn’t stay long. Couldn’t. I protested, but realised fast and full of futile indignation that protesting my innocence was taken as guilt. My word against hers. They believed her.

The boy. I’d seen him in a dream, when he’d come up through the trapdoor onto the roof of the tower and his mouth was full of blood. And I saw him again. Skating.

It was a glorious day, perhaps the most glorious day since the last most glorious day a few weeks ago. I’d woken in my fireside bed, stretched magnificently under my duvet and realised I’d slept like a king. The embers were still glowing, it took only a moment to rekindle them with a log or two and there was a breakfast blaze. While the kettle was boiling for coffee, I was stripped naked for an icy top-and-tail in the tiny wash-room, and dressed again. How joyful, to be out on the pavement, a wintry dawn at eight o’clock, holding my steaming mug in both hands, inhaling the delicious, smokey, suburban air and watching the slaves go by. They sat fuming in their traffic jam, crawling to their offices and workshops in town. They stared at me from inside their cars, and I grinned back at them.

I sold a few books. I had a customer or two before I’d even rolled up the duvet and leaned the mattress into the corner. I got croissants from Azri. It was a blissful morning of utter selfishness and loneliness and I listened to
Abbey Road
, hadn’t heard it for such a long time and it made me cry and I switched it off in the end –
and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make
– because it made me think of Rosie and Chloe and our home I’d so perversely left and locked up, upstairs, just above my stubborn, sulky head.

Blinking tears, I thrust the mouse into my shirt, threw on my coat, herded the crow outside and brought in the sign. Closed the shop.

Skating. The fields of the park were sheeted with ice. It was a dazzling world, huge and empty and perfectly flat. I marched along the footpath, between the tall black poplars and the frosted rhododendron, and then the emptiness of the park was breathtaking. Acres of ice and a vast blue sky. In the further distance, the town was a blurry dark line on the horizon, the cooling towers billowing steam. Lovely, the way the ice creaked and squeaked under my feet as I crossed towards the distant figure of the boy. He was sitting where he’d been sitting before, and I thought, yes, although just then there was no one else about. It must have been worth his while because I could see how the ice was scored with lines and curves and scratches and gouges, freshly made.

Magpies went churring through the bare branches. Gulls, hundreds of gulls, whirling so high in the blue that they might have been wisps of steam from the power-station. And my crow. It was the only crow in the whole of that enormous sky, it beat through air as I crossed the field and it settled in the branches above the boy’s head.

I chose some skates. The boy took my money, without looking at me, without even looking up. There was something furtive about him, he ducked his head and pretended to be busy with the money he’d made from his business initiative. I guessed that he was playing truant, he should have been in school, and so he didn’t want to engage in any small talk or even show his face in case some busybody queried what he was doing. I sat on the roots of the tree and put on my skates and didn’t say a word. I only saw an anonymous boy, wrapped in a coat, jingling a few coins in his mottled fingers.

And then I was skating.

For the first few minutes, it was an almost delirious pleasure. The purity and clarity of the air, the taste of it in my mouth and the fizz of it in my nostrils, as I found a rhythm and eased myself this way and that. The clean, cold sound of my blades, and, as I looked down, the myriad bubbles and the grasses crushed and frozen beneath the ice. Gaining confidence, I looked up and around me and even into the sky, and the world whirled about my head. At first it was good, so good it replaced every other notion or memory which had been troubling me. It wiped everything clear.

But then... I heard the crow beating closely above me. I saw the shadow of its wings on the ice.

And I was aware of someone else, another skater, somewhere behind me and following me. Mine were not the only blades scoring the frozen flood-waters on the park. I turned and nearly fell, and there was the boy.

He sped past me. I could smell his coat and the fusty, unwashed-boy smell of his hair. Head down, face averted, he went by in a rush of curious odour. The crow followed him. It seemed to detach itself from me and became one with him. Its shadow blurred into his. He weaved around me, so close I could feel the flurry of wind he created. And with the flurry of wind, he created an inexplicable feeling of unease. More than that. It grew in my belly like a physical sickness. It was dread, utterly alien in the loveliness of the morning and my childish abandon.

I stumbled. One of my skates caught on a tussock of grass protruding from the ice. And as I windmilled my arms and tried to keep my balance, I fell headlong and heavily flat on my face.

Winded, I lay still for a moment. I could hear the swish and the crackle as the boy continued to skate around me, my cheek was on the ice and my lips could taste it, I could see his blades cutting close to me – closer, closer, throwing a powder of ice into the air, so fine it fell on my lashes like spray. And I felt something moving inside my shirt. Before I could stop it, the mouse came creeping out of the collar of my shirt.

It scampered away from me. It paused and sniffed the air. It snuffled at the ice and seemed to wonder at the strangeness of it. Just as the boy came hurtling past. I cried out, but my voice was hoarse and I was still out of breath. Maybe the mouse was invisible to him, and in its perfect whiteness it was just another bubble trapped beneath the surface. So fast and so deadly true, one of his blades cut straight across it.

Before I could get up or pull myself close enough to see what had happened, the boy was there. Maybe he’d felt an impact. He skidded to a halt and dropped to his knees, and with his head down so that his face was almost touching the ice, he was examining the mouse.

‘Get off it,’ I was saying. ‘Just get out of the way and let me have a look, will you?’

When he kneeled up and aside, I saw the mouse. It was lying in a pool of blood which was spreading around it.

Appalled, I touched it with one fingertip. So warm, and it seemed unmarked. There was blood, and I’d been expecting to find it gruesomely decapitated or even cut in half. But the body of the mouse was intact. Indeed, reacting to the tiniest pressure of my finger on its belly, it suddenly wriggled away and ran. No longer a pure white albino, but splashed with pink, it ran across the ice.

I turned to the boy. He was still kneeling. He turned and grinned at me. Blood welled from his mouth. It dribbled from his lips and down his chin and splashed onto the ice.

I recoiled from him. The crow was beating around his head. And then, seeing the mouse exposed and defenceless on the expanse of ice, it feinted in mid-air and dived towards it.