Wakening the Crow (7 page)

At this, the young man glanced up at me, as though he’d found the angle he needed to make something of his story, something gratuitously sensational to bring it alive. For a moment I thought he was going to hurry outside with his camera, to photograph the spot where the skull of the unfortunate man might have smashed on the pavement.

‘The books?’ I quickly went on. And as I strolled from shelf to shelf, with my eyes half-closed for mysterious effect, I murmured the names like a spell, the names of the immortals, forever and unforgettably enshrined in the pantheon... ‘Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, MR James... Wilde, Dickens, de Quincy, Rider Haggard...’ and was surprised when I opened my eyes and caught a glimmer of impatience on the young man’s face, a surreptitious peek at his watch. ‘And of course, the modern masters of the genre, King and Koontz, Barker and Bradbury and Blatty and er...’

He closed his notebook very gently. He screwed his face into a painfully apologetic frown and stood up.

‘Sorry, no offence but... but can’t I find all of these books in all of the bookshops in town? I mean, I don’t even have to go into Nottingham, I can get all of them, the so-called classics, in Long Eaton and Beeston and Ilkeston. I can rummage in any of the charity shops and find a tattered old copy of
Frankenstein
or
Dracula
or
Turn of the Screw
or
Jekyll and Hyde
or whatever. And the newer stuff, in Smiths and Waterstones, the big outlets. Can’t I?’

He paused, and his earnest, journalistic face lit into a boyish smile, alive with excitement.

‘Poe,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that why I’ve come to talk to you? Show me the tooth.’

I
SWITCHED ON
the lamp, bent it over the velveteen table and stood back. There was a gust of wind outside, or else a bus or a truck had just gone by, because all three of us turned at a sudden skittering sound in the hallway and a flurry of leaves blew in.

He bent over the display I’d so carefully set up. Because the room was so dim and the night outside seemed to wrap itself so meanly, so grimly around the church, the velvet box and its bed of white satin shone all the brighter.

And the tooth.

Joe Blakesley, cub-reporter from the Nottingham Evening Post, leaned close and he stared. And he stared. He held his breath and he stared. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet, not even a whisper, hardly a gasp, barely a breath, that it was almost lost in the flutter of the flames and the stirring of autumn leaves across the floor.

‘How wonderful. How marvellous. Oh God,
dentem puer
, from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe...’ His voice was lost, in a puff of smoke from the blazing Birchwood, in the holiness of the hiss of resin.

Not wanting to disturb his reverie, but seizing the moment to give him the details he might need for his article, I stood behind him and recited the information I’d gleaned from the precious handwritten slip of paper. He nodded and nodded, hardly looking up from the tooth, as if to indicate he knew already that Poe had spent a few years of his boyhood in England, he knew the names, the facts, he’d done his homework about the Manor House School and Dr Barnsby and... and when I mentioned where the tooth had come from, the name of Mr. Heap seemed to freeze him for a second, he inhaled sharply as if by doing so he would commit the name to his memory.

And what was Chloe doing? Oh lord, heaven forbid I should ignore her or worst of all neglect her for a precious millisecond, she was standing beside him on tip-toe and fixated on the tooth as much as he was... but also, at the same time, she was pushing something towards him on the purple velvet, trying to catch his attention with the glint and the razor-sharp edges of their diamond brilliance, she was nudging her diamonds of shattered windscreen under the focus of the angled lamp.

Too late. He didn’t see them. Just as I took two strides forwards, to pull her away from the display and grab the pieces of glass in the palm of my hand, there was another flurry of wind in the hallway.

More than a flurry. More than a whispering commotion of autumn leaves. A soft but sudden explosion of sound.

We all turned to see what it was. ‘Hello my love, are you home?’ I blurted, and for a moment I thought it was Rosie, home early, and my stomach lurched with dismay. Chloe gave a shout of recognition.

But no, it wasn’t her mother. Something, someone or something was in the church hallway. In and out so fast, it was no more than a shadow. A rag of shadow blown in and out by the night.

Me and Chloe, we were framed in the doorway as the reporter whirled round. Some instinct triggered in his investigative brain made him reach for his camera. Pop, pop, pop... he fired off three flashes of dazzle-blue light.

The two of us. And behind us, a rag of shadow, a blur of movement in the darkness. I thought I’d seen it. And Chloe had seen it, with a gurgle of surprise. Then it was gone. Gone with a glimmer of silver it had snaffled from the cold stone slabs.

‘Marvellous... it’s all I need, more than I need, some great snaps and a great story.’ He, Joe Blakesley, was bundling his way out of the vestry, into the hallway and out of the church door. ‘Poe...’ he was saying to me, although his voice was muffled in the winding and winding of his long red scarf around his face, ‘... it’s all you need... just get Poe, any old books and articles and stuff and the tattiest old paperbacks and stuff you can find... it’s all you need...’

Chapter Eleven

J
OE
B
LAKESLEY HAD
two pieces in the
Nottingham Evening Post
, in the same edition, a few days later. After nearly a year with the paper, a few weddings and making the editor’s coffee in the mornings, he had two pieces in one edition.

Rosie was impressed by the article.

‘Poe’s Tooth? Is that a good name for a bookshop?’ She shrugged and admitted that yes, it might be. She read it all aloud, as we sat side by side in bed, with Chloe snuggled between us. It wasn’t long, it was hardly a feature, it was a modest piece on page nineteen, squeezed between a report on the opening of a new dialysis clinic in Beeston and another on the vandalism of a footballer’s BMW. But there were a couple of thumbnail photographs of me and Chloe at the fireside, me and the display of books, and, most importantly, a close-up of the relic after which the shop would be named; rather a blurry shot, dazzled by the overhead lamp, so the reporter had transcribed the handwritten note, verbatim, with his own translation.

‘“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...’’’ Rosie had laid out the newspaper onto the bedcover, across her lap and mine, with Chloe all but smothered beneath it. With a grimace, affecting a mock-portentous voice, she was re-reading the headline. ‘Oh dear, a bit corny, isn’t it? But the article’s good, I like it, I like it... a new bookshop to be called Poe’s Tooth Books is about to open... yes, well done, my darling, I like it.’

She leaned towards me and we kissed. Chloe disappeared completely, under the newsprint and the blankets. There was another photograph, me and Chloe looking utterly startled, our faces pallid and oddly misshapen, like a couple of victims... a father and daughter retrieved from the bottom of a canal, maybe, or rescued from the ruins of a collapsed building. We were framed in the doorway of the vestry. Behind us, the blackness of the church hallway was a mouth, agape, leaning forward to swallow us. ‘Scary, look at the two of you. Hey Chloe, come out of there and take a look, you’re famous...’

She emerged, tousled and hot. She pawed clumsily at the photograph, without any understanding of what it was except a fragment of material which her Mummy and Daddy had crumpled on top of her. If she was going to react at all, I thought without daring to say what I was thinking, she might sneer and snidely remind us that she was famous already, she’d been in the paper before, last year, and not on page nineteen but on the front page with a big photo. ‘Hey, be careful, Chloe,’ her mother was saying, ‘don’t tear it, your Daddy’ll want to keep this and get it framed and put it up in the shop for all of his customers to read...’

The girl stopped batting at the paper, although the noise of her fists on it had seemed so crisply percussive. For a moment, she inclined her face to the photo. She fixed her eyes on it and she held her breath. And me and Rosie, as we’d done hundreds of times before, several times a day and every day for nine months, we held our breath too, in anticipation, in hope, in a state between joy and fear, that the moment had come... the moment when Chloe would emerge from her dream-like silence and speak, and be herself and be with us once more, as she had been before.

She didn’t speak. After a long, literally breathless moment, we all exhaled. Chloe smiled airily again, as if her head was full of air, as if her poor little dented brain was nothing but an airy space.

‘No, it isn’t the best photo of you I’ve ever seen,’ Rosie said, disguising her disappointment with a breezy non-sequitur. ‘Looks like you’ve seen a ghost. Is that it, behind you? Spooky... hey, you can see it, flapping around in the hallway...’

Only a shadow, even darker than the darkness which was gaping around our shoulders. Or a vagrant, an urchin, so desperate to flee the imminent deadliness of the night that it must dare the deeper darkness of an unhallowed church. It had come for something, and gone out again. Unmistakably, in the photo, the shadow of the crow was there.

T
HE OTHER PIECE
? A
N
obituary. I read it quickly and the following afternoon I went to the crematorium at Bramcote.

Out of curiosity, maybe, wondering at the connection between me and the deceased, wondering what it might be. Rosie had asked why the old man had given me the tooth. No real reason, I supposed, on an impulse he’d handed it to me because it was a curio and I’d expressed an interest in his odd collection of books. Mr. Heap: the obituary referred to him as an antiquarian, a bibliophile, who’d had a business in the oldest part of Nottingham for more than fifty years. Indeed, he’d been active in the campaign to commission and erect the statue of Robin Hood, and he’d been present at its unveiling in 1952. Widowed years ago, he was survived by his sons and grandchildren.

The crematorium stood on an exposed hillside, overlooking the oak woods of Bramcote and the sprawling, comfortable suburbs. It was as cold as ever, but the brightness of the afternoon sunshine cast a silvery loveliness on the frosted grass. Chloe was with me, of course. We were both so bundled up in our coats and hats and scarves that no one could have recognised us, even if they’d wondered who we were. In any case, a family saying their final goodbye to a beloved father or grandfather would hardly notice me and my daughter, as we watched them arrive in a line of enormous black cars, as the coffin was brought off the hearse and wheeled on a trolley into the chapel.

We didn’t go inside. The dazzle and glitter of the sunlight was a joy. Despite the snap of ice in the air, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. The sky was a delicate pale blue, without a wisp of cloud, it had the fragile opacity of a starling’s egg. The funeral cars kept their engines running, the drivers in their sombre uniforms sitting inside with the heaters on, and a shimmering white fume arose from the exhaust pipes. We heard the music from the chapel – The Lord’s my Shepherd – the tremulous voices of grieving women and the growling of bereaved men.

Not long. I could feel Chloe starting to shiver, her hand gripping mine more and more tightly inside her woolly glove. I hugged her close, pulling her body against my legs so she could press her face into my coat, and I inwardly groaned at the prospect of Rosie’s interrogation if she came home this evening and found Chloe feverish with a cold... so where did you go today? On the park with the ducks and the swans? No? Did you go into town, to have a look around the nice warm shops and have a nice hot chocolate or something? No? You went where? The crematorium? What do you mean, the crematorium? For heaven’s sake Oliver, you took Chloe for a nice afternoon at the crematorium?

Four o’clock. Getting dark. The afternoon was closing around us, the grip of the frost was tighter as the sun dipped away and the evening sky was darker and lower. Darker, so that the glow from inside the chapel and the lights of the cars were suddenly bright. The exhaust smoke was whiter, billowing like steam. And as the music of an organ rose and fell with its pitiless poignancy, the family of Mr. Heap, deceased, started to come outside. Grey smoke plumed from the chimney of the incinerator.

The family processed across the car park, escorted by the minister, who was going to show them where the ashes would eventually be placed. He took them to the garden of remembrance, where the yews and the privet were meticulously cut into deferential, unassuming shapes, where there were already hundreds of crosses and plaques on the grass. We followed at a discreet distance. If anyone had asked me why we were there or who we were, I was ready to say that I’d been a regular visitor to Mr. Heap’s marvellous little shop and wanted to pay my respects. But no one asked me, no one glanced at us. The faces of the middle-aged sons with their wives, the grandchildren in their twenties, were lit only by the last rays of the midwinter sun and the glow from inside the hearse. A few tears, yes, but not of sadness as much as resignation, that a very old man who’d been loved and respected had passed away, after a long and honourable life... tears shining in nostalgic eyes, on cold white cheeks, a tear glistening on the tip of a reddened nose.

They stood and stared at the ground. What else could they do, where else could they look? One by one, they bent and placed a flower or a card, a memento or token.

Not many tears, until...

When one of the middle-aged sons and his wife turned to the next plot, where there was already a plaque in the grass, and they pressed their palms onto it, I could see how their shoulders began shuddering with grief. Not for the old man, whom they’d loved so much and would dearly miss, but for someone else, who’d been untimely and cruelly taken away.