Wakening the Crow (10 page)

Chloe and I settled in, that first morning, and she sat by the fire and let Mouse scurry around her shoulders and down the front of her woolly pullover and through her sleeves, let it explore the warm and snuggly labyrinth of her chubby, cherubic body. It emerged from time to time at one of her wrists, sat on the palm of her hand panting, as though exhausted by the suffocating heat of its journey, and then disappeared again into another sleeve.

A man came in. For a bizarre moment, I was so surprised that I was going to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing just wandering in and snooping around... and then the reality of the shop came back to me and I was suffused with such a welling of warmth through my head and my body that I could almost have fainted. He didn’t say much. He didn’t need to. He was my first customer. No need to describe him, he was a nondescript guy in a coat and a hat and it didn’t matter who he was, I could’ve hugged him and kissed him, I was so happy to have him in the vestry of my old church, in Poe’s Tooth Bookshop. In reality, he was a time-waster, he was listening to the music, he was looking funny at Chloe, he wasn’t at all interested in the books or the tooth. But when he’d gone, without speaking a word or buying anything, I picked up Chloe in my arms in a huge Siberian bear-hug and we whirled around the room in a madcap Cossack dance inspired by the fragrance of the fire, because someone had come in... we were open!

There was a tiny, tiny scratting sound. I was changing the music, and in the quietness, in the lull, when the logs had collapsed into a shower of sparks and a billow of blue smoke, both of us heard a sound in the corner of the room. We looked at each other. We knew that the bird had come into the shop. Me and Chloe. We’d smelled it when we’d first come in, when we’d busied ourselves lighting the fire. We’d heard it. Mouse had smelled it and heard it, whenever it had poked out its pink little questing snout from the tunnels of Chloe’s clothing, it must have sniffed the smell of the bird. Even a mouse, especially a mouse, even a poor, pale, domesticated albino, it must have scented the danger in the air.

Carrion crow. Death, in a raggedy black cloak. All of that morning, we’d seen not a glimmer of a feather, not a reptilian gleam of beak or claw, but we’d known that the bird was there. In the night, when I’d bundled it down the stairs from the kitchen, it must have sought sanctuary in the vestry... where a century of ministers had shaken the dust from their cloaks and hung them on big brass hooks and warmed their legs in front of the fire. As soon as Rosie had gone out of the door, without a squeal or a shriek, I’d known that the bird must’ve gone into the vestry.

It emerged, dead on cue.

I think it was Chloe who did it. With Mouse. A man came into the shop in the afternoon. He was very big and fat and he smelled, his clothes smelled of smoke and beer and of being unwashed – the same clothes he’d worn since before Christmas, when the cold weather had taken a grip on the days and nights and the winter seemed like an ice-age, not just a season which would inevitably pass by and give way to spring. He scanned around the room. He was poor and lonely and unhappy, but he conjured a little smile on his cold, wet lips, as though he hadn’t smiled for a long time, because he liked the fire and the room and the sweet little smiling girl. He peered and pondered at the lamplit tooth, and at me. I hadn’t shaved for a few days and I was scruffy and huddled in my baggy old pullover and coat and fidgeting at the computer as though I was some kind of tortured and tormented writer toiling on my novel. He seemed to like it all. And just as he was lifting a book from the shelf and turning it over to read the blurb on the back, there was a commotion which made all of us stop and turn and look.

A white mouse. It appeared from the sleeve of a beautiful child beside a crackling fire. It dropped onto the floor and it ran. And as it ran, there was a clattering of something big and clumsy in a corner of the room, which knocked over a pile of books and scattered them... and it was a bird, a big black bird with a jabbing beak which was after the mouse.

Big black bird. Tiny white mouse. Giggling golden-haired girl. A scriptwriter couldn’t have done it better.

Chloe, by a miracle of dexterity or sleight of hand, snatched the mouse off the floor and vanished it into her clothing. The bird sprang at her hands and then fell backwards, awkward and defeated, like a pantomime villain the audience would love to hiss... and when it shuffled itself together again and limped away, when it made a shameful exit and disappeared among the boxes of tattered and slightly foxed, remaindered paperbacks, the unhappy man gave a funny chortling laugh and pulled a five-pound note from his pungent pocket.

I gave him his change and he went out chuckling, with a paperback Poe, a collection of stories or poems or whatever it was. My first sale.

Chapter Sixteen

‘B
UT DON’T YOU
get it, Rosie? It’s perfect... alright, so it’s another of those ridiculous coincidences you get in Hardy or Dickens or whoever, but who cares? It happened and I can use it to help the shop. Edgar Allan Poe and his raven, or his scruffy old crow in this case...’

I’d been lying to my wife. She’d come home, sniffing at the air in the tower as soon as she’d stepped through the front door, and I’d given her the good news first, that I’d had some browsers in the shop and sold a book. My hurried version of the story – I wanted to tell her quickly and get some of the truth out before flannelling around the rest of it – was that, just as a man was poking around and looking at the books, some of those pesky pigeons had blown into the hallway, pecking around for the biscuit crumbs we’d left there... and just as I was shooing them out, a raggedy old crow had tried its luck too, except that, just as the pigeons had gone fluttering out, the crow had hopped into the vestry. Not a big deal – I was saying in a deliberately off-hand way – in fact it kind of added to the atmosphere and you should’ve seen how Chloe’s face had lit up. Anyway, the upshot was that the customer had thought it was quaint and he’d bought a book, you know, Poe and the crow and all that. Oh, and by the way – I was adding as Rosie started heading up the stairs towards the kitchen – that must be the whiffy smell throughout the tower, not Mouse after all, but maybe the birds or specifically the bird in the vestry.

At which point, she’d turned round, at the top of the stairs and frowned down at me. ‘What do you mean, in the vestry? You got it out, didn’t you? Or is it still in there? What are you saying, is it still in there or what?’

She started downwards again, and I blocked her way, at least for a moment. ‘Well yes, no, I’m not sure,’ I was blustering. ‘I mean, I think it might’ve been in there yesterday, and maybe even overnight, my fault for leaving crumbs around by the open door. And so the smell must’ve drifted up the stairs, even as far as our bedroom...’ She brushed past me and into the vestry, where Chloe was sitting as meekly as her mouse in the diminishing firelight. I put in, ‘Alright, so it might be still in here, I don’t know, but don’t you get it? It’s perfect, it’s...’

She bundled the girl into her arms, hugged her close, at the same time staring into the sooty shadows of the room and inhaling long, disapproving breaths through her nose. She didn’t say much more, but I could almost hear her brain whirring in a fury of disgruntlement and... and something else, something had piqued her brain when I’d said that Chloe had reacted to the presence of the bird. The notion was snagging in her mind, pricking her like the tiniest splinter of a thought. She was looking oddly at me, a curious mixture of emotions moving across her face as softly as the firelit shadows, so that I couldn’t tell if she was going to react by accusing me of further negligence in the care of her daughter or respond to the half-baked idea that having a crow in the shop could be good for business. I’d lied, by omission: she had no idea that the bird had been in the clock-tower, that Chloe and I had been up there, that the bird had been flapping around on her duvet in the middle of the night on its way down through the kitchen and into the hallway... and now she was searching my eyes for the truth I’d withheld.

At last, as she turned and hurried up the stairs with Chloe, she said, ‘Well, get it outside, Oliver. It stinks. And you too, you stink, you look a mess, you need a shave and a shower. Or is that supposed to be perfect as well?’

I
DIDN’T REALLY
stink. It was the baggy pullover and the greatcoat I’d been wearing to keep warm in and out of the church doorway and in the shop. Underneath it, I was my fragrant, manly self, showered and deodorised. But yes, I could sense how people recoiled from me in the charity shops in Long Eaton High Street, even the veteran volunteers who were used to the smokey, beery smell of their unemployed customers. I hadn’t shaved, I knew I needed a haircut but I wasn’t going to have one, and I’d got my bookshop outfit on, the pullover and greatcoat. Chloe was wrapped in many layers and topped off with the bobble-hat, so that she looked like one of Santa’s elves who’d been left behind after Christmas. We’d had a brisk, frosty walk downtown, and I had a list of things I needed.

Photocopies. I got a big blow-up of the
Nottingham Evening Post
article and its photos of the tooth and the old handwritten document of authenticity, as I liked to imagine it to be, and a hundred small copies of the document, postcard size. While we had a coffee and cake on the market square, an elderly gent in his old-fashioned cobbler’s and key-cutting shop (the only business which had survived the coming of the supermarkets on the edge of town) was making a rubber stamp for me. And in the animal welfare shop, where I’d been rummaging for any kind of magnifying glass, I’d found, even better, a kind of plastic lens designed to help short-sighted geriatrics to read books and magazines.

An even brisker walk home – because the morning was so bitter but also because I was so boyishly excited to get back and get open – and soon we were kneeling at the hearth, crackling up the fire, boiling the kettle and putting out the sign.

And the crow?

We both knew, from the smell and from the way the white mouse wiggled its whiskers out of Chloe’s sleeve and disappeared again, that the crow was somewhere in the vestry. I sprinkled a few crumbs. And the bird came out. It ate up the crumbs, it sprang onto my desk and admired itself in the reflection of the computer screen. It shook out its wings and splattered a green-white mute onto the floor. As though to announce, we were ready and waiting for customers.

A few gainsayers and poo-poohers, yes.

A very old gentleman came in, shrunken like a mummy inside his dark suit and oversized shirt, so quivery that a puff of smoke from the chimney might have blown him over. Fortunately, the bird made itself scarce, as he looked around the hallway and started snivelling into a white handkerchief. He tried to resist me, screwing up his face and spitting feebly at the smell of my clothes, but then he allowed me to sit him down in the vestry. Screwing up all his indignation, he told me he’d been a Sunday school teacher at the church when he was in his twenties, been married in it, had his children baptized in it and played the organ at decades of harvest festivals and carol services, and last year his wife’s funeral service had been held there. He dabbed at the tears in his eyes and gazed into the hallway, as though he could, by a tremendous feat of mind over matter, conjure his memories back into reality: himself and his wife, young and beautiful on their wedding day and those very stone flags strewn with confetti; babies, decades of Easter and Christmas celebrations and a lifetime of Sundays; more recently, his wife’s funeral, her coffin being wheeled on a trolley across the same stone flags.

At last he twisted his face at me. His mouth writhed and was ugly. ‘And now, this...’ he hissed through his teeth, ‘in my church. What is it? Some kind of shop, selling dirty books. It isn’t right. It isn’t right. It’s wrong.’

He stood up, pushing away my attempts to steady him, and teetered out of the church.

A man with a briefcase came to ask if I had a licence, said I’d have to get one, running a small business, something something. Depressingly, I supposed because of the economic climate of unemployment and hard times, there were odd bods who came in to sneer. At the tooth. To say it wasn’t even a tooth, it was a bit of bone or even melamine, or it was the tooth of a dog, in any case it was a fake and no more real than King Arthur’s footprints at Tintagel or the shroud of Turin or whatever... and one very scary middle-aged man, literally broiling with hatred for all the world and the injustices which had been dealt him, who told me in a voice trembling with anger that he’d been to The Who’s so-called last-ever concert in Southampton way back in the 80s and bought a commemorative programme which was going to be priceless, and then of course they’d been touring ever since and were still doing concerts nearly thirty years later and his programme was worthless... like the tooth, a hoax, a trick, a crock of shit, just a fucking scam... he went out of the church and into the outside world, on fire with anger, looking for somewhere else to vent it.

Glory be, for the believers, for whom, as I’d said to Rosie, it wasn’t the reality of the tooth which was important, but the belief it inspired.

Like my Beatles bathwater. I’d bought a bottle and it had been precious to me, it was my bit of George, my favourite. And when he died, I searched and searched everywhere and found it, strangely half-gone, mysteriously evaporated although the lid was still tightly screwed on, and no more than a swill of grey scum. The day he died, I held the bottle in my hand and felt the warmth in it still, as though George had just got out of his bath and pulled the plug and here it was, a few drops of his bathwater. And I’d cried.

Belief. Believe. There were people coming into the shop who believed, or at least they wanted to believe. Not many, but a few, they bent over the tooth in its satin-lined, purple velvet box, on its presentation table, under the lamp, and they peered at it through the magnifying lens. They held their breath. Their eyes glistened. And so, when they bought a book, I stamped the inside page with my new rubber stamp, Poe’s Tooth Books, and slipped in a bookmark with the very words which Dr Barnsby had written to record that he’d kept a tooth from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe and slipped a penny under the little boy’s pillow... and the customer, the believer, went out into the cold simply glowing with the heat of inspiration.