Wakening the Crow (24 page)

It had arms and legs and a head, it was like a charred skeleton of a human figure.

Rosie stared at it, aghast. She whispered, ‘So there you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ and carried it away from the fireplace and across the room.

I switched on the lamp which shone on the tooth. The smoke blew through and around the beam, a fume of blue mist. The crow was nowhere to be seen, fortunately. It must have flopped onto the floor and found a discreet place to keep out of the way, as Rosie sat at the desk where Chloe had been writing.

Chloe and I stood beside her. There was a surreal calm. It could have been shouting and madness and a hellish nightmare, but Rosie somehow settled a motherly order on the strangeness of the situation. She didn’t rail and rant about her Maid Marian, who’d gone missing and been found stuck up the chimney. She examined the figure, which was so thickly caked with soot that it could have been a ghastly human relic, the body of a child recovered from a terrible fire. She glanced up at me. For a moment, as I shivered like a lunatic in my filthy nakedness, with my hair and beard awry, she might have thought that I had jammed the doll up there.

But no, I could tell from the deep anxiety in her eyes that she knew I hadn’t. Who else could have done it?

She looked sideways at Chloe.

‘Oh my poor darling,’ she murmured. ‘My poor baby, what have you been up to? Where do you get such silly ideas from? From your Daddy? From his silly books?’

She looked across to the lamp, its circle of smoke filled light. To the tooth. It nestled on its bed of velvet and assumed the focus of the room, of the tower, of the moment. It drew all our eyes to it.

‘What do you think it is, Chloe?’ she whispered. ‘Is it just an old bit of bone? Or is it the tooth of a little boy, a boy who grew up strange and sad and had lots of mad ideas? I suppose your Daddy is right... it doesn’t matter what it really is, it’s the belief, it’s what you believe that matters.’

She stood up. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs and get under the shower? Daddy can clean up his mess tomorrow. He’ll have plenty of time.’

Her calmness was uncanny. It frightened me in a way I couldn’t fathom. It made my stomach sick with apprehension. As she manouevred Chloe away from the desk, she tossed the horrid rag of the doll into a corner of the room. It landed, and there was a scuttling movement in the shadows.

Rosie heard it. She knew what it was. With a big breath, she managed to control her fear and anger. At the same time, she must have nudged the desk enough to bring Chloe’s writing back onto the screen.

‘And what’s this?’ she asked. ‘Has Daddy been doing a bit of writing? Anything original? Or is it like the beard and the hair and the smelly old coat and the getting pissed and... just a lot of copying?’

She leaned to the screen and squinted at it. I put in quickly, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Chloe, she was playing, that’s all.’ And as usual, trying to counter her sarcasm, ‘It’s all her own work.’

‘She wrote this?’ Rosie leaned even closer. ‘What does it mean?’

She peered at the screen. She was reading it. I was about to laugh out loud. Couldn’t she see it was nothing but random letters and spaces? But when she recoiled from it and turned to look at me, her face, already distorted by the wound on her cheek, was a mask of contempt.

‘You tell me, Oliver, what the hell do you think it means? Did she write this, or is it one of your sick ideas? Where did this stuff come from?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I retorted. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s just her bashing on the keys. What do you mean what does it mean?’

Rosie was dragging the girl across the room. She was hissing under her breath. It was sick and I was sick and she was getting out of here and taking Chloe and...

They were gone, up the stairs.

I
DIDN’T STAY
a lot longer in the vestry. I was naked and covered in soot. There was nothing in the room I could improvise as a blanket or a rug, otherwise I would have thought about swallowing the rest of the bottle, lighting the fire as big and blazing as possible – now that the chimney had been unblocked – and trying to sleep in front of it. But still, two out of three ain’t bad, as someone had once said, so before I dared to tiptoe up to the bedroom and negotiate a snarling Rosie, I opted for the bottle and the fire... kindling a tremendous crackle of flames and crouching over it like a caveman, and swigging the rum until my throat was burning too.

No, I didn’t stay long. Even with the fire and the alcohol, I knew I couldn’t bear a night down there, sitting and toasting my face and my chest while my back was freezing.

I heard the crow fluttering somewhere, not so much a flutter as a rustle and bristle of its wings as it settled into a dark corner of the room. For an ugly moment I felt a surge of such hatred for the bird that I jumped up to grab something big and heavy to throw at it, and there I was, with a copy of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe poised high above my head. But when I found the crow snuggling in the arms of Maid Marian, I lowered the book slowly, ashamed, and resumed my maudlin contemplation of the fire.

jsdpkjdpjs cmvnow eritcdkwohjedlfu ckyou;s]a dadcos llklqitfuc kin g okdkcmvmstung mep kthat swh y [kl per neekmg[pwcmm axsjpmfk fkppkkp

With a last look at the screen I switched off the computer.

And I switched off the lamp, deliberately averting my eyes from the tooth in case it set my mind whirling with doubts and curses. Upstairs, the kitchen was in darkness. Our bedroom was in darkness. I could smell from the fragrant steam in the bathroom that Rosie and Chloe had showered, although I didn’t turn on the light to see their sooty towels or the rime in the bath. I could make out their mounded bodies in the double bed, and I knew from the unnatural silence that they weren’t sleeping, they were holding their breath in a pretence of sleeping while I shuffled past them. Without so much as splashing my face or rinsing my teeth, I moved into Chloe’s room and slipped into her bed. In my sweat. In a state of naked filthiness.

Doubts and curses. Burrowed under the bedclothes, I kissed my own shoulder. I tasted myself, smelled myself, and I could taste Rosie on my skin as well. I could smell Chloe too.

I whispered, ‘Goodnight, Oliver Gooch. Goodnight, Rosie. Goodnight, Chloe.’ And just as I closed my eyes and plummeted into an abyss of sleep, I had a flash of the computer screen again.
fuck you dad cos it fucking stung me that’s why.

Chapter Thirty-One

‘Y
OU’LL NEED THE
7B,’ I said to Rosie, pretending to study the timetable posted on the bus-stop.

We all knew it was the 7B. It was the Nottingham bus, it went through Long Eaton and Toton, on to Chilwell, past the army depot and Chilwell Manor Golf Club, through the middle of Beeston and past the university and the Queen’s Medical Centre, along Lenton Boulevard and into the city centre. Stopping at Broadmarsh, very convenient for the shopping or sight-seeing in the middle of town.

I was going to recite the whole thing for Rosie. Just stopped myself. We were all three of us standing at the top of Shakespeare Street, and I was so sick with unhappiness that I just wanted to say anything, anything to fill the bitter silence which hung around us, even a blithering recital of the 7B’s route into Nottingham.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It goes through Long Eaton and Toton, on to Chilwell, past the depot and the golf course, through Beeston and past the university and the hospital and into the city centre. Stopping at Broadmarsh. Yes, I know. But we’re getting off at Chilwell, we’re going to stay with Auntie Cissy. Aren’t we, Chloe? You used to love Auntie Cissy, didn’t you, and her nice old house? Didn’t you, Chloe?’

So Rosie filled the silence. We stared at each other, terribly distanced by our anxiety and bewilderment, and yet realising, through some weird telepathy of local bus routes, that we were still on the same wavelength. This morning, taking advantage of the extra time I needed in the shower and the kerfuffle I made of stripping Chloe’s bed, she had got herself and Chloe packed and ready to go by the time I came down to the kitchen. The two of them were wrapped up warm. They’d already had porridge and toast and tea, they had a little suitcase each. They looked so perfectly prepared and snug in their coats and gloves and novelty bobble-hats that it was inconceivable they were leaving me in such turmoil. They looked so nice. As though they were going on holiday. They were going to sit upstairs and at the front of a splendid double-decker bus as it swayed along and swished through the overhanging branches of the wintry trees, they were going to be happy together.

I knew they weren’t. But Rosie was determined they were going. She’d said – in the kitchen, before we all trooped downstairs and out into the bright, frosty morning – that they would stay with Auntie Cissy for a week or so, and I would have time to get sorted. Get the vestry cleaned up. Get myself straightened out. Decide if the bookshop and all its theatrical-gothic nonsense was more important than my family. Stop drinking. Get rid of the bird. As for the tooth... well, decide if it was just a bit of bone and throw it into the hedge, or, if I was really such a sucker to believe in stuff like that, take it to Bramcote crematorium and dispose of it decently.

The bus was coming. The 7B. We all hugged each other. I could tell in the strength and warmth of Rosie’s arms that she could almost have changed her mind at the last moment, and we could’ve gone back into the tower together for more toast and tea.

But she didn’t. She blinked at me through teary eyelashes. I felt my eyes stinging too. Her voice was hoarse as she undid herself from me and said, ‘Me, I’m going to get my face checked up again. I’m going to call into the clinic at Chilwell. When I come back I’ll be as beautiful as ever.’ She tried to smile. ‘I’m so sorry, Oliver, you’re weak and lazy, but it isn’t really your fault, is it? Is it?’

They clambered on board with their cases and up the steep, narrow stairs. I had a moment to move to the front of the bus and see them high up there. Rosie was looking down at me, although she didn’t respond when I waved. And Chloe, she had her face pressed hard against the glass, she was quite oblivious of me and was staring up and up into the sky, up to the top of our tower. She was pointing at something, she was grabbing her mother’s arm and trying to make her see, pointing and staring and...

The bus moved off. I stood there, alone. Instinctively I glanced up to see what the child might’ve been looking at. I narrowed my eyes into the cold, clear sunlight, but it was too bright, the sun was too low and I could see nothing.

W
HO WAS IT
who said, where there’s muck, there’s money?

I brought a mug of coffee downstairs and lit the biggest, crackliest fire of all time. It roiled sweetly up the chimney, just what I wanted to draw away as much of the soot as possible. I put on
Led Zeppelin
, full volume. To clear the decks and make myself some space, I threw open the church doors as wide as possible, shoved the sign outside and all the untidy boxes of books I hadn’t sorted yet. And I rolled up my sleeves to clean the vestry.

It was a horrible, stinking mess, like some prehistoric cave. The blaze of the fire was great, but the pall of smoke, the shelves of gloomy books and the doomy, relentless music made the place feel like a pantomime set, some kind of dungeon or the lair of an ogre. It reeked of the rum I’d swigged and spilled last night. I started sweeping and dusting, with a handkerchief tied across my mouth and nose. I lost myself in my toils, trying to forget myself in the effort of cleaning. The place wasn’t fit to open for business, no way. I reckoned it would take a day or two before it might be ready for customers.

Wrong.

When I staggered outside for air, with my mug of coffee in one hand and my brush in the other, so blinded by soot that I blundered into the sign and knocked it over, there were people. They were rummaging in the boxes of books. They were standing in the sunlight, wrapped in their thickest winter clothes, rapt in the tatty paperbacks they’d picked out. Not a lot of people, but three or four. No, maybe eight or ten. As I blinked around me and tugged the handkerchief off my face, as I set the sign up again, I saw how the soot was fuming out of the church door. And the music, Communication Breakdown, such a peal of pure and untrammelled desperation that the fusty old church had never heard before.

Someone said, ‘Are you open? Or are you just clearing out?’ And I was about to reply, no, sorry I’m not open, I’m doing a bit of stock-taking, or something like that... but they were starting to move inside.

I followed them in. For a few moments I just stood at the door and watched, as they felt their way around. The fire had sucked some of the smoke away, and I’d billowed a lot of the soot outside. Still, every inch of every surface was covered with black dust, and the sweet, stale smell of yesterday’s alcohol lingered in the air. But no matter, I had people in the shop. The flames were licking hungrily up the chimney. The music, too loud for talking, was perfect for losing oneself in an underworld of dangerous and uncompromising books. When I realised what was happening, that I was well and truly open for business, I switched on the lamp and pointed it onto the display, and everyone looked around to see where the beam of light was coming from and where it was shining.

Poe’s Tooth. It was powdered with soot. Soot swirled in the lamplight. I bent to blow it away, but then I stepped back. One by one, the people in the room came forward to see the tooth and read the slip of paper which said what it was.

Puer dentem. The tooth of a boy. The tooth of a sad little boy in a dismal boarding school, a long long way from home. No wonder he grew up so strange and full of mad, unhappy ideas. The people stared at the relic. With a dreadful cry, the crow emerged from the shadows and flapped onto its usual perch, on top of the computer. I bent to the floor and picked up the ghastly figure of the doll, blackened and charred from its murder in the chimney, and I sat it beside the hearth. And when at last the people continued their browsing through the filthy shelves, they would return to my desk, I would stamp their chosen books and give them a bookmark, and I would take the money they proffered.