Wakening the Crow (12 page)

Lost her. Oh god. ‘Chloe! Wait! Let me catch up!’ I stumbled through the gloom, where the only light was from the upstairs windows of the solicitors and accountants in their oak-panelled offices. So dark... darker than usual in this alley, empty and forbidding, where before there’d always been at least a glimmer of light and even the welcoming glow of a fire. I stopped, to catch my breath and orientate myself, because the place seemed different, something was missing, there was a black hole where there’d always been a...

I heard Chloe. She made that sound again. ‘Chloe! Where are you? I can’t see you. Stay where you are, don’t move, Daddy’s here.’

Through the wheeze of my own breathing, I heard her tiny eeeh – the mouse-vowel, not quite a word. I moved towards it and then I could hear her breathing too and smell the warmth of her mouth and her body. ‘Hey you naughty girl, don’t go running off, especially here in the dark. I was worried, and Mummy would be really cross. Hey!’

She was gone again. I’d been close enough to touch her. But she spun away. Not far this time. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom of the narrow alleyway, of course I knew where we were, and when I saw her slip into the yawning black mouth of a doorway and vanish, I understood where she’d been heading.

Closed. The door was closed and there was a notice on it. The golden lettering of the name on the window was tarnished, not by age, because it had already been there for decades, but sadly by the lack of light from inside the shop. Heaps. No longer trading. Leaving a hole, a darkness, in this corner of the city.

Eeeeh. Chloe said it again. No, she didn’t say it. She made the sound. I whispered to her, ‘Yes, Heaps,’ as though that was what she’d said. ‘Do you remember Mr Heap? What a pity we won’t see him anymore. He was a funny old man, wasn’t he? And he had some funny old things in his shop, didn’t he?’

I made to hold her in my arms. Something in the poignancy of the moment and the sad emptiness of the place made me move to her and put my arms around her. Why had she run so determinedly to this doorway? Not even pausing at the statue, not even waiting for me to catch up, but leading me inevitably closer and closer until here we were, the two of us, snuggled in the entrance of the shop we’d visited so often? Just out of habit, her childish footsteps following the route we’d always followed, in a teasing game of hide-and-seek. Now, I squeezed her towards me, and she hugged me too. For a moment, an image flashed into my mind, of the derelict man we’d glimpsed from the boat that morning, in the dripping caverns beneath the city bridges, and I thought that the stab of ice between my well-padded shoulder blades would be nothing compared to the lingering death he would endure. It made me whisper to her, my mouth in her warm hair, ‘Let’s go home, Chloe. Come on and we’ll catch the bus and we’ll be back before Mummy.’

A light. We both froze. Not literally, although the surprise could almost have scared us to death.

Suddenly there was a light in the shop, and a flickering movement across it. Someone was inside.

Chloe pressed her hot little face to the window. I peered in too. The strike of a match, the flutter of a flame which caught a crumpled sheet of newspaper in the hearth. A man was kneeling there and lighting a fire. With his back to us, a bulky figure in an overcoat, he layered splinters of wood on top of the burning paper and watched while the flames licked around them. Beside him, its blade gleaming in the firelight, there lay a hatchet and the remains of a bookshelf he’d split into pieces. He applied more and more of the wood, until there was a bright, roaring blaze.

Chloe’s face was lit with the excitement of it. Before I could stop her, she started patting at the window with her gloved hands.

The man turned and frowned, he raised a hand to his eyes to try and see where the sound was coming from, and then he straightened up. I tried to pull Chloe away, as if we might slip down the alley and be gone before the man came to the door. Too slow. Chloe was giggling and patting on the glass and all of a sudden the man was there.

He seemed very big. He blotted out the fire he’d just lit. He loomed at the window, a huge shadow, and he saw the two of us, a man and a child, huddling in the doorway. He turned a key in the lock. It made a dry, grating sound. The door opened.

Chapter Eighteen

E
VEN IN THE
half-light, there was an instant of immediate recognition. Me, I’d already had an inkling, when I’d seen him kneeling with his back to me, of the only time I’d ever seen him before. Now, as he stood in the open doorway and appraised us, especially the way he looked at Chloe, it was clear that he knew who she was.

And so we were in the shop, together. Chloe had just walked in, before either he or I had said anything. She wandered in, in the state of utter obliviousness she inhabited, as if the shop was open as usual and it was somewhere we always went on our visits to town. So the man stood aside to let me follow her. He shut the door. Still neither of us had spoken. We stood at the fire and looked at each other, and then, self-conscious, he knelt to the flames to add more fuel.

I looked around the room. The shelves were bare. It was almost completely empty, apart from a few remaining boxes of books, a litter of newspapers. Indeed, I could see from the marks on the dirty yellow walls where some of the original, old shelves had been torn down, and I realized that this man had been using them for firewood.

‘I’m the oldest son,’ he said into the fire. ‘I’ve been clearing the shop. We had a clearance sale, a pity you didn’t know about it, you might’ve found some of the kind of stuff you could’ve used in your place...’ He angled his grey, middle-aged face up towards me, where he was kneeling in front of the flames, and I saw the weariness on it, the residual weariness of pain and bitterness. ‘Oh yes, I read the local paper and I saw the piece about your bookshop and the tooth. I wondered where it had gone. I guess you bought it, or maybe my father gave it to you, shortly before he died...’

He bent to the fire again, and his voice was vague and gruff in the crackle of the flames. ‘... the tooth, he always hated it, he used to mumble about how it was like that story of the monkey’s paw, it was some kind of bad luck charm. He spouted a lot of mumbo-jumbo about it when the accident happened, that it was cursed and he’d dig it out and smash it up or throw it away, but then he couldn’t find it. So yes, I saw your thing in the paper, Poe’s Tooth Bookshop, and of course your name’s a bit unusual, I’d heard it before.’

He stood up. He looked across the room at the little girl, who’d been waiting for him to move aside so she could go to the fire and stare into it. She did so now. Her face was blank, an empty canvas, it showed not a flicker of understanding of words or ideas, it showed not a hint of emotion or feeling, only the infuriating perfection of that smile. The man gazed upon her. His own face was a mask of puzzlement. He saw a lovely, apparently healthy, apparently intact child. And yet he knew she was not intact, that a part of her had been lost and might never come back.

‘So,’ he murmured, ‘so this is Chloe Gooch. Hello, Chloe, yes, I recognise you from your photo in the newspaper. It’s nine months now. It was 3rd April, wasn’t it, a date your Daddy and I will always remember.’

He knelt to her, and she allowed him to take both her hands in his. He looked straight into her eyes, and when he saw the utter void in them his own eyes misted with tears. ‘Chloe Gooch,’ he whispered, ‘are you there? What are you thinking? Can you remember anything? One day, this year or next year or in twenty years, when you wake up from your daydream, will you tell me why it happened? Will you tell me?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, because I saw him then as I’d seen him before: a heavy, manly figure, kneeling, and his shoulders beginning to shudder with sobbing.

I helped him upright again. His face was shining with tears, he made no attempt to wipe them away. The girl stared up at him, and her smile was almost insufferable. I wanted, and I guess this man wanted, to wipe it from her mouth, or at least to turn her away and point the smile somewhere else, where it would cause no pain.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I was saying, ‘I was there, I saw it all, not the time before or the time after, but the moment, the moment which altered Chloe. Your own daughter, I don’t know, I don’t know what she was thinking, why she didn’t stop, what happened afterwards when they drove away...’

The man controlled his tears. He pulled himself together, he gathered strength from some secret reserve deep within him. He took out a big, white handkerchief and rubbed it over his face.

‘My daughter, your daughter,’ he said, ‘their lives coincided for one second. One second, that’s all. Your daughter is lost, but one day she’ll come back to you. Mine is gone forever. Perhaps Chloe will tell us all, sooner or later, why it happened.’

Lost. His father had used the same word about Chloe. The fire was burning brightly. He’d already disposed of nearly all the curios and treasures and junk that his father had accumulated over the years, and now, to keep the place warm while he was doing the final clearance, he was stripping the very shelves from the walls and burning them. Soon, perhaps today or in another few days, the shop would be completely empty and then it might be sold or let and somebody else would try their luck – a hairdresser or a tattooist or a masseur.

‘Lost,’ I said to him. ‘What was it your father was saying to me, the last time we were here, just before he gave me the tooth? Something about the lost, the utterly lost... I can’t remember...’

Chloe and I moved outside. The alley was pitch dark. The light from the fire in the shop was barely a glow through the dusty window. Heaps. I wondered when this man, the eldest son, would try to remove those faded golden letters, his father’s name which had been there for so long. And how... scrape them off? A painful, tedious, distressing task.

He loomed in the doorway. We didn’t shake hands, it seemed somehow inappropriate that we might mark the solemnity of our relationship by touching. We stepped into the darkness, me and Chloe, all wrapped up against the cold, with nothing more than a clumsy wave, a hand uplifted in recognition of the strange, unexpected meeting we’d had.

But then he called something after us. I stopped to hear what he was saying. He reached for my hand and gripped it hard.

‘It’s Poe,’ he was blurting out. ‘It’s from one of his stories, “even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made...”’

His grip was even stronger, and there was a note of pleading in his voice.

‘The tooth...’ he was saying. ‘Forget about what I was saying, please. Forget about my father’s nonsense, a bit of mischief, that’s all. If it’s working for you, and it seems to be so far, then all’s good, all’s good...’

He let go of my hand, turned abruptly and went back into the shop. Chloe was tugging me away, as though she was the one in charge and wanted to hurry me to the bus-station. My last glimpse of the man, he was standing at the fire and staring into it, exactly where I’d last seen his father.

N
OT HAPPY.
N
OT
happy at all. Rosie was waiting for us in the hallway, when I pushed open the door and we went in.

It all came out in a furious torrent. She hardly gave me a chance to say anything. Where had we been? She’d come back expecting to find us busy in the shop. Well, not busy of course, but in the shop and me writing and Chloe safe and sound, and where had we been? I tried to tell her we’d been to town, on the boat and into the shops and back on the bus, but she was upset, scared, her eyes wild and... something was wrong, more than our absence and our lateness.

‘What’s that?’ I managed to interject, when her voice quivered so much with anger that she had to pause to control it. ‘Rosie, what’s that on your face? What have you done? And I thought you’d got a meeting, you said you’d be late back...’

Wrong thing to say. It sounded like I’d been caught out, like we’d been planning to sneak back home without telling her where we’d been.

‘We did have a meeting, yes,’ she retorted, ‘but Colonel Brooke cut it short. One of the science teachers made a remark about the creationist stuff and tried to start an argument, so the Colonel just closed the meeting and...’ She shook her head, as if a hornet was buzzing in her hair and she was trying to get it off her. ‘Anyway, anyway, that’s got nothing to do with anything. I come home and it’s all dark and empty and I come inside kind of concerned, a bit worried because you hadn’t said you might’ve gone out and...’

‘Your face, what’ve you done?’ I tried to get close to her. I used Chloe’s body, pushing her forward, to inveigle myself closer, to bring the three of us back together again. ‘Have you seen it, in the mirror? You’ve got a cut or something...’

She backed away. She was still in her outdoor clothes, all bundled up like me and Chloe. She hadn’t been upstairs yet. She must’ve just come in a few moments before us. She dabbed at her left cheek with the back of her glove.

‘No, I haven’t seen it. I know it stings, god knows what disgusting germs it’s got in it. I thought you said you’d got the filthy thing out of here...’

Oh. It was dawning on me, the reason for all the panic. I felt the familiar sick plunging of my stomach, as I moved in on her, not allowing her to back away this time. I held both her hands down and away from her face. She had a cut on her left cheek, and the skin around it was reddening from the impact of whatever had made the wound.

‘So I came in and felt around for the light,’ she went on. ‘I was freezing, fumbling around, and I don’t know why, I couldn’t find the switch straightaway... and then I heard something creeping around in here, like a rat or something. I even thought for a silly moment that it was you and Chloe and you were playing a trick on me by waiting with the lights off and trying to spook me, and then it was flapping at my hands and my face and I screamed and by the time I found the switch it had...’

Her voice broke. Her anger was dissolving into hurt, into tears. I took her in my arms and held her close, and I felt her body shuddering against me. Chloe was hugging the two of us, her arms wrapped around our waists. I was saying into Rosie’s ear, which was red hot on my lips despite the coldness of her cheeks, ‘I’m sorry sorry sorry, my love. Let’s get you upstairs. Let’s all of us go upstairs and get your face washed and put something on it like some antiseptic or something. We’ll all get changed and warmed up and get a drink and then I’ll come downstairs, and I promise this time I’ll...’