Wakening the Crow (2 page)

But on Saturdays I had Chloe.

Saturday, 3rd April, and I’d parked in the middle of Breaston, a village about ten or twelve miles east of Nottingham, on the old Derby road. Breaston, with a modest, perfectly unassuming church in its own close, the Bull’s Head across the way, a Co-op and a fish ‘n’ chip shop, a primary school and a community centre... just the neatest and nicest of English villages which never a tourist would need to visit.

‘What’s so great about saxophones anyway?’ She’d been niggling at me, with a whining, wheedling edge on her voice. ‘You got your head stuck in that book and you’ll never learn to play a saxophone anyway. What is a saxophone anyway?’

So yes, I’d been ignoring her. I wouldn’t say neglecting her. In fact I’d already sent her across to the pub with a five-pound note and she’d come back with a huge bottle of lemonade and an assortment of crisps and nasty cheesy crackers.

And then a wasp flew into the van. We’d been parked an hour, and not a single person had come to the library although we were there at my scheduled time on my scheduled day. But then a wasp came in.

Chloe flapped at it, screaming horribly and hysterically as though she were a surfer in the jaws of a great white shark. Her bottle fizzled into her lap. Crisps and cheeselets, a bag burst open. Only a wasp, but Chloe was screaming. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. To escape her swiping and yelling, the wasp dived into the top of her shirt and burrowed down, to find a bit of peace and quiet from her unnecessary violence. And then it stung her, in what it must have thought was the safety of her armpit.

She peeled off her shirt. Though I say it myself, she was a pudgy, rather horrid little girl. She was squeaking and snivelling as if the puncture wound she’d received from the wasp would actually kill her, she might pop and go whizzing around the inside of the library and out of the door and die in the car park, wrinkled up like the rubbery remains of a party balloon. I couldn’t help laughing at her. Fatherly, I fumbled at her pants, which were drenched and sticky with lemonade, and she recoiled with a sneer of disgust. So when she caught the wasp and extracted its poor crumpled frame from under her arm, she grabbed the book from under my nose and pressed the insect onto it... and there, on top of a diagram of the saxophone I was daydreaming of learning to play one day, she started to pull off the wings of her attacker and flick them one by one out of the open door.

At which point I asked her what she was doing, and why. She answered, ‘Fuck off, Dad, you can see what I’m doing. Because it fucking stung me, that’s why.’

And then she flung the remains of the wasp out of the door, flung the book onto the floor, and flung herself outside as well. ‘Fuck you, Dad, and keep your hands out of my pants... I’ll tell Mum, I’ll tell her...’

Best to ignore her, I thought. She was a spoilt, fatty kid, grazing and gorging and whingeing when she had hundreds of nice books to choose from.

I retrieved the saxophone book, wiped off the crumbs and dabbed at the ooze of fluid she’d squeezed from the body of the wasp. Just as I ducked to the floor to try and grab her bottle before all of the liquid spilled out, I heard an engine revving loudly and I sat up and looked out of the window.

It all happened in a second or two.

There was Chloe, smearing at her tears of anger and frustration and huffing away from my van in the direction of the Co-op... oddly half-nude, a cherub with baby tits. A car came out of the pub’s back-yard, a neat little Triumph, dark blue with wire wheels and the soft-top folded down, and a good-looking young couple in it. Squabbling... I could see in an instant, they’d had a few drinks and a row in the Bull’s Head and hustled out into the sunshine, still snarling and spitting at each other.

The woman was driving. She was turning to the man to say something and then squirming away from a hurtful retort. And there was Chloe, as the woman accelerated so sharply the tyres squealed, Chloe, squatting down and rubbing at her eyes with one hand, holding her wounded armpit with the other.

No, the car didn’t hit her. Not exactly.

Just in time, the woman saw Chloe and swerved to miss her. Didn’t quite miss. The wing mirror, protruding from the car on a chromium-plated stalk, slapped the little girl smartly and very hard, flat on the back of her head.

That was all. The impact made a sharp metallic ping. Chloe wobbled for a moment and fell very slowly forwards, onto both her knees and even more slowly face down into the ground. There she lay, very still.

The car stopped. Only for a second or two. There was another snarling moment, the man and the woman literally at each other’s throat. With a crunch of gears, she floored the throttle and the car went snaking around the corner and roared into the distance.

Chapter Two

I
T WAS VERY
warm on the bus back home. When we’d first clambered on, at the Broadmarsh bus station in the middle of Nottingham, we’d been so cold we’d huddled together on a cosy seat at the back and felt a lovely thawing in our hands and faces. By the time we were passing the castle, its enormous cave-riddled boulder glowing in yellow floodlights, Chloe had pulled off her bobble-hat and I was undoing the buttons on my coat. Her blonde hair smelled of the cold and the smoke of the city. I kissed her nose, pretended to grimace at the iciness of it, and she smiled and suddenly sneezed. Through Beeston and Chilwell, past the golf course and the army depot, past Attenborough and Toton, we were almost too warm, basking in the hot air blowing from the vents beneath the seat.

And it got dark. January, deep mid-winter, and freezing dark by five o’clock in the afternoon.

I watched Chloe. She sat beside me and she just stared and smiled into her own reflection in the window. And my thoughts returned to that day in April, when she’d been so changed.

As always, since that time and every moment of her new life and my new life since it had happened, I felt a stabbing of guilt. No, a gnawing, as if the blame I’d attached to myself was eating me, like a cancer deep inside my belly. So yes, I’d deliberately ignored my daughter, when she’d tumbled tearfully out of the library van. But then – PTO 725G, and 3.17 – something chemical in my brain, when I witnessed the accident through my window, had made me imprint the car’s registration number on my memory, made me glance for a millisecond at the clock and log the exact time... some extraordinary instinct for self-preservation which made me think that, by noting these details, I’d be accounted responsible and cool-headed and my momentary negligence might be overlooked.

I’d run outside. People were running out of the Co-op. The landlord hurried out of his pub. I knelt next to Chloe and turned her gently onto her side. She was unconscious. A little breath bubbled from her mouth. There was a gush of blood from her right nostril.

An ambulance was there in no time, and the paramedics had Chloe and me inside it and racing out of the village minutes later. They were reassuring, I’d described what had happened: no, she hadn’t been knocked down by a car, she’d been struck by the wing-mirror of a car going no more than ten or maybe twenty miles per hour... and they said she might be alright, she’d had a bang on the back of the head and no other injuries. We sped out of Breaston village. With the siren wailing and the blue lights flashing, we barely paused for any other traffic, only a momentary hold-up in Long Eaton, for a back-up of cars and police and some kind of incident outside the gates of Derwent College. I’d called ahead to Rosie. She was waiting at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham when we arrived at the entrance to A & E.

‘Oh god... where’s her shirt?’ Rosie’s first question as we marched down the corridors of the hospital on either side of the child’s trolley.

‘In the library van,’ I answered.

‘Where’s the library van?’

‘In Breaston. That’s where it happened. She got stung by a wasp and she...’

‘A wasp? She got stung by a wasp? Oh god...’

It didn’t take long for a nice Indian doctor to examine Chloe and get her into X-ray. He too was reassuring, suggesting she was concussed, she was young and strong and if the X-ray was alright she’d wake up with a cracking headache and in the next few days she’d have the most amazing black eyes we’d ever seen, like a panda. A young policeman took me into an interview room. I recounted everything in the most meticulous detail and he wrote it all down in his note-books. Rosie was there too, interjecting, her interrogation more fierce and accusing than his.

A wasp? So if Chloe took off her shirt and she was upset, why did I let her just run out of the van? Didn’t I try to comfort her, take a look at the sting, put something on it? Why didn’t I take her across to the Co-op and get some kind of ointment or cream to put on the sting? Why did I let her just run out of the van, without her shirt on, into the road, by the pub carpark, with a couple of drunks coming out and not even stopping, the bastard hit-and-run drunk drivers...?

The policeman put his hand on her arm. He made shushing noises. He’d noted how vigilant I must have been, he was impressed by the exactness of my statement, he was sure her husband had been perfectly attentive. Yes, there’d been an accident, but fortunately the impact had been relatively slight and...

She swatted his hand off her arm, as defensive as Chloe had been with the wasp. She was asking him if they’d got the car and the hit-and-run drivers I’d described so precisely, when another policeman opened the door. With an upward jerk of his head, a flash of anxious eyes in my direction, he beckoned his young colleague to come outside.

We followed. We pushed past the police, who’d gathered into a tight knot so they could talk into their walkie-talkies, we pressed ourselves to the walls of the corridor as another emergency came in and two more trolleys hurtled by, the dead-or-alive casualties of another momentary carelessness... and we hurried back to the doctor, who, as he’d predicted, had the good news that Chloe had suffered no real damage to her skull, she was badly concussed and would very likely be fine in a matter of days.

So. Overwhelmed by relief, we sat with Chloe in an observation ward and she lay there as though blissfully asleep. The nurses had cleaned the blood from her nose, and Rosie had bathed her daughter’s forehead with a cool cloth and brushed her lovely blonde hair. Outside our room, where the three of us were swaddled in a cotton-wool world of thankfulness and exhausted anxiety, the business of A & E went on. There was a flurry of activity, the arrival of yet another ambulance and trolleys rattling past our door, the drama of life and death barely inches from where we were sitting. We didn’t really care. We were safe. Chloe was safe.

‘Hey, wake up now. We’re here.’

Now, nine months later, I was on the bus with Chloe. She’d fallen asleep, all her weight slumped against me, in a fuddle of warmth and weariness after a day out in the bitter January cold. She groaned and wriggled and opened her eyes. When she looked up and straight away her face formed her new Chloe smile, all sweetness and fragile innocence since the day of her accident, for a moment I thought she was going to speak. She opened her lips, she fixed me with her level, penetrating stare, and for an unnerving split-second I braced myself for what she might say. But she didn’t speak. I felt a shudder of guilty relief. As the bus slowed and stopped, I helped her to her feet with her bobble-hat stuck on top of her head and we jumped down onto the pavement.

D
ERWENT
C
OLLEGE, THE
massive stone pillars of its gate, on the Derby Road, in Long Eaton. We had a short walk to our new home, to the church at the top of Shakespeare Street.

Chloe was wide-awake again. After the cosiness of the bus, we were both jolted awake by the shock of the cold, still freezing and promising another night of the hardest frost. It was pitchy-dark, and yet only five in the afternoon, and the road was busy with a never-pausing, never-slowing line of traffic coming out of town.

‘Hey Chloe, let’s go...’ I took hold of Chloe’s hand and tried to tug her away from the bus-stop, along the slippery pavement. She resisted. ‘Hey let’s go, we’re going to freeze out here... what you got?’

She was bending to the hedgerow, a wiry wall of holly and privet up to the very pillars of the college gate. Darkness and light, the deadliness of January and the orange and yellow and spangling headlamps of the passing cars... the beams of the traffic caught a glitter of reflections, like jewels, in the bottom of the holly hedge.

‘Pretty,’ I said, ‘is it frozen, is it ice?’ And to humour her, to allow her one more special, little girl’s moment to add to all the special moments of our day-out, we bent together to see the treasure she had discovered.

Broken glass. One of the students, returning to his digs after an illicit evening in town, must’ve dropped a beer bottle and kicked it into the hedgerow. No, it was clear glass, fragments of a shattered windscreen, crazed into angles and facets and diamond brightness. A council workman, too lazy to sweep it up and into a bin, had shovelled it out of sight, back in the summer when the holly was dense. And the black plastic splinters of a car’s number plate. An accident, back in the springtime...

‘Careful, Chloe... no...’

But before I could stop her, she reached into the glass and grasped it in her hand. She held the jewels on her open palm, stared at them in wonder, and then squeezed them so hard that prickles of blood stood out on her skin.

I knew what it was. Chloe couldn’t have known. She squeezed again, with all her strength, and then opened her palm and shook the bloody jewels out.

Chapter Three

S
OME OF THEM
must have stuck to her skin, because, a day or two later, I found them in the pocket of her coat when I was putting it into the washing machine.

Seven o’clock on a Monday morning. Rosie was leaving for work.

It was still dark outside. Not snowing. Too cold for snow. It was warm and cosy in our new home, there was toast and marmalade and coffee and Radio 4 and I was going to stay home with Chloe. So Rosie, buttoning herself into her coat, wrapping a scarf around her neck, pulling the flaps of a weird Peruvian hat over her ears and about to set off into the bitterness of a January morning and walk twenty minutes to work... Rosie had the unmistakable aura of martyrdom about her.