No, not the crow. A man. He was setting up the sign I’d knocked over. He straightened it, adjusted the angle of it, re-adjusted it until it was perfectly as he wanted it, and then he dusted his hands together. He marched into the church, signalling at a group of a dozen teenage boys to follow him.
‘No one here, by the look of things,’ he said, as I hurried in with Chloe. ‘He can’t expect to do much business, if he doesn’t keep an eye on the sign outside and then there’s no one around when people come in.’ Louder, to his boys, he said, ‘Well, gentlemen, while we’re waiting for service, take a look at the books. Remember we’re thinking about genre and themes. We’re going to talk about artwork and concept and blurb. We’re looking for the authors we’ve talked about, the classics of the genre, and especially Poe, for your coursework.’
I moved past him, to my desk, and still standing, pretended to check something on the computer. Without taking my eyes off the screen, I said, ‘Is it Colonel Brook? Ah yes, I’m just checking the appointments in my diary, my wife phoned me to say you were coming.’ And then I turned to him and held out my hand. ‘I’m Oliver Gooch. You didn’t give me much notice, but luckily I don’t have any other visits booked for this afternoon. Welcome to Poe’s Tooth Bookshop.’
He shook my hand. He was smaller than I’d imagined, and much younger, in his fifties. From Rosie’s accounts of her employer’s autocratic style, I’d expected a crotchety, whiskery old gent, but he had the look of a barrister or the manager of a football club. Dark suit, good shoes, not handsome, but oozing self-confidence. He had a kind of worldly swagger. He’d stared at me, flicking his eyes over my shabby shoes and my baggy old clothes to my beard and long, untidy hair. And now I found myself staring at him, as he drifted away and rejoined his boys. I wondered if he’d seen active service, had ever killed anyone with those manicured hands, and if so, what had made him a creationist and how he’d become the principal of a crammer in Long Eaton. I wanted to ask him these things. I wanted to suggest to him that he should write it all down in a book, but then I thought that, unlike me, he probably already had done.
The boys took it in turns to study the tooth. They did everything he suggested they did, they copied the transcript word by word and his translation. Without any reference to me, he briefed them about the boy Poe, who’d spent some time in England at a school in Stoke Newington, only adding at the end of account that, this evening, they should do their homework and find out as much as they could online. He had complete control of them. They were cowed by him.
‘We’re doing an anthology of stories, for their English lit,’ he told me, ‘and one of them is Hop-Frog, by Poe, you know, the one where the court jester, a kind of hunchback or cripple, gets his revenge on the king by burning him alive. The boys have to write an appreciation of the story for their coursework, so I hope you don’t mind them browsing around, it’ll give them more of a feel for the genre, to see some of the authors on your shelves that we’ve been talking about, and of course the tooth. It’s a remarkable opportunity for them, really, to contemplate the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and marvel at this little bit of him, his tooth, at the same time.’
What was truly remarkable, I was thinking, was that he, such a man of the real world, uttered not a single word of doubt about the origin of the tooth. The sign outside said Poe’s Tooth Bookshop, and the blurb on the shrine said the tooth in its velvet-lined case had come from the mouth of Edgar Allan Poe. That was enough for him. Perhaps that was why he’d been a successful soldier and risen through the ranks – he’d accepted ideas and orders without question. Oh, and God created the world in seven days, it said so in Genesis, it was there in black and white, so that was a given as well. Belief, I thought. It was the belief that mattered.
All of this time Chloe had been sitting by the fire. Colonel Brook had glanced down at her and said what a lovely daughter we had, and by the way, how lucky he was to have my wife helping in the office. One or two of the boys, daring to pause in their diligent searching among the books and risk a rebuke from their teacher, had caught Chloe’s eye too and elicited her angelic smile. She’d got the albino mouse out of her sleeve and was running it from hand to hand. It was a charming picture, almost literally. She was charming the boys away from their study, and even the steely colonel was watching her. She let the mouse drop off her palm and onto the floor, where it went nosing into the dust at the side of the hearth.
A rather beautiful thing happened. As the mouse nuzzled into a dense cluster of cobwebs, there was a sudden fluttering movement from deep inside it. The cobwebs themselves seemed to vibrate as something cocooned within them stirred into life.
The mouse burrowed deeper. Until, from the hole it was making in the matted cobwebs, a butterfly emerged.
The colonel and his boys couldn’t help gathering around to look – at the most perfect little girl, her face reddened by the firelight and her blonde hair artfully tangled, at the white mouse and the butterfly. It was a peacock, it had been hibernating in the secret otherworldliness of the cobwebs; dormant, dreaming butterfly dreams, surviving the winter in a state of torpor. Until it had been nuzzled awake.
Chloe cupped it in her hands. It was a poor, desiccated husk of the lovely creature it had been last summer. But it was precious, and Chloe held it gently and blew between her fingers, as though she would breathe new life into it. I glanced around at the schoolboys and saw the wonder on their spotty, downy faces. Colonel Brook was gazing fondly, as though he’d seen the girl before somewhere, in a refugee camp or a ruined city on one of his tours of duty. And I thought they would all remember this moment for a long time, beyond the homework and the coursework and the relentless cramming, beyond the grotesque, gratuitous violence of Hop-Frog.
Chloe looked up at her admirers and she smiled. It was a miracle. She had breathed on the butterfly and now it was stirring bravely within her hands, as though the spring had arrived and it was alive with a new vigour. When she opened her hands, it clung to her fingertips and opened its wings. It shook off the dust of the cobwebs and was beautiful again.
And then she blew harder. As hard as she could. The butterfly was too weak to resist. She blew it off her fingers and into the fire.
In another moment it was consumed by the flames. It beat its wings, a flaring, golden, miraculous creature, like something from myth. It whirled around and around, ablaze. And then it was gone. Disappeared in sparks up the chimney, or collapsed into dust on the fire? Impossible to tell which. It was gone.
There was an uneasy silence. The visit was over. One of the boys took a group photograph of the students and their teacher and me against the background of the books and the hearth, with the shrine of the tooth prominently displayed. The colonel said he could write up an article; he knew someone at the
Nottingham Evening Post
. It would be a bit of publicity for the shop, and of course for Brook’s Academy as well.
The boys trooped outside, clutching their notebooks, armed a bit better for their exams. They cast a final, wondering look at the girl who was sitting by the fire, at the way she smiled as she picked up the mouse and kissed the top of its head. Colonel Brook bought a copy of the collected stories of Edgar Allan Poe, with its complimentary bookmark, for the school library.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘W
HAT’S UP,
R
OSIE
? Let me look at you? Maybe you should stay at home today. I’ll ring Colonel Brook and tell him.’
She looked different. Yes, we’d drunk a bottle of red wine the previous evening, maybe not a good idea, after her injection and the antibiotics she’d taken. When her alarm went off in the pitch darkness, and it rang and rang and she didn’t move, I fumbled for it and knocked it onto the floor, where it bumbled and buzzed like a huge fat insect, something like a cockchafer, which had crash-landed and crippled its wings. At last it stopped. I switched on the bedside lamp.
‘Rosie? You alright? What’s up?’
Something was wrong with her, something was different.
Although the crow had gone, it had changed us all. It had come to us, only a few hours after I’d come home with the tooth. The tooth was a dead thing. Once a part of a living human being, a piece of Poe, now it was only a discoloured fragment of bone. But the crow, in its passing through the tower, had been alive. It had touched us all with the spirit of Poe, and all three of us were changed.
Me, I’d been writing. And drinking. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror I’d hung inside the vestry cupboard, I saw a shambling, rather disgraceful figure. A long black coat, a frayed shirt sticking untidily out of it, I was grizzly, unshaven, and my hair was longer than it had been for a decade, coiling around my ears and onto my collar. My eyes looked tired, there were dark shadows around them, but a strange spark of mischief gleamed within them, a spark which I myself found unnerving; a restlessness, an anxiety, which manifested itself more noticeably in a tic... I would look at myself in the mirror and catch myself blinking. There was something crawling across my eyelid like an ant and making it flicker, every few seconds. No, nothing there, except a tiny spasm in the muscles of my face. When I touched the place with a dirty fingernail, I saw that my hand was trembling. I would grin at myself, see something wolfish, a leering on my mouth, then reach deeper into the cupboard for the bottle of whiskey I’d been hiding there, take a long pull and feel the heat of the liquor in my throat and in my chest. Marvellous, miraculous, it was helping me to write. And after I’d stuffed the bottle back in its secret place, winked at myself in the mirror and whirled back to my desk, I could hardly wait to get writing again.
Hop-Frog, the Masque of the Red Death, Murders in the Rue Morgue, I had the collection on my desk, beside the keyboard and the glimmering silvery screen. The little lamp was bent over the tooth and its accompanying treasures – the diamonds of glass and the snail-shells. The feather of the crow I’d stuck into a pot on my desk, stood up like a quill and adding to the perfect illusion that I was a writer: a gaunt and troubled writer with whiskey breath and dirty nails and quivering fingers. That my brain was crawling with ideas as myriad as the ants on my eyelids. An illusion? Not really, it contained a certain truth. Crouched over the keyboard, I would steal a glance at the book which was open beside me and continue to write.
Chloe was changing. She had found the crow. Briefly, she had made it hers. It had come to her across the icy fields of the park. She had summoned it with a croaking in the back of her throat, and it had beat towards her with the crumbs of a dead man’s skin on its beak. In her dreaming, when she’d sat where I was sitting and caressed the keys as though she were writing, it had watched over her. She’d seen it tossed into the air and cartwheeling onto the road, and she’d tried to find the place where it had crawled away to die. Yes, it was a kind of awakening, her response to the crow, which, as far as Rosie was concerned, must be good, it must be better than her torpor of smiles.
Me, I wasn’t so sure. I watched her and I waited. She was always watching me. She, more than Rosie, was aware of my weakness, my petty deceptions and the half-truths I told myself. And it made me anxious. One day she would blink herself awake and she would speak. I dreaded what she might say.
And now Rosie. Hardly discernible at first. She looked blurry and dazed, but then who didn’t, waking with the shock of the alarm clock at six o’clock on a January morning, with a red wine hangover and a dry mouth and the prospect of struggling off to work in an office? Chloe was in the bed with us. I hadn’t remembered how or why it had happened, but at some point in the middle of the night she must have whined or moaned and inveigled herself into the snuggly space between her Mummy and her Daddy. She too, rubbing her eyes to wake up, looked queerly at her mother.
‘What? Hey, stop staring, you two.’ Rosie buried her face in the pillow. ‘I feel bloody terrible and I know I look terrible... you don’t look so great yourselves. Leave me alone.’
Her voice was different too. Not just the wine. There was a disconnect, was that the kind of word they used these days? Something in the working of her tongue and lips which wasn’t quite right. She heard it too, because I felt her body stiffen as she tried again and I could tell she was listening to a kind of dissonance in her own voice. She said, ‘Yes, you could do that for me. Oliver, call the school and let them know I’m not well enough to come in.’
I got up. I guessed she would be better, sound better, when she’d wet her mouth with a nice, sweet cup of tea.
But she wasn’t and she didn’t. And she didn’t just wet her mouth. She sat up and tried to smile, when I returned to her bedside. It was a lop-sided smile. And she cried. She cried softly at first, with a dim sense of dismay, until she was sobbing huge, uncontrollable sobs. Because she’d tried to drink the tea and found that she couldn’t, without dribbling it copiously from the corners of her lips.
Unusually masterful, I had the three of us dressed and into a taxi about fifteen minutes later.
What a coincidence. It was the same Indian doctor who’d seen us at A & E at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, who’d examined Chloe after her accident all those months ago. And funnily enough, when the three of us went into his office after a rapid and expensive ride to the hospital, he seemed less interested in Rosie than in beaming foolishly at Chloe and patting her on the head as if she were a beagle puppy.
No, not funny. I said to him rather sharply, no, my daughter hadn’t recovered from the blow to her head, as he’d so confidently reassured us she would, she was as distant and doolally as ever. But in the meantime, would he mind taking a look at my wife, because I was worried she might be having a stroke?
Rosie had stopped crying. She’d covered her mouth with a handkerchief all the way from home to the hospital. When the doctor asked her to remove it, she did so and started blubbing again at the same time. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a window, her distorted mouth, and her shoulders heaved with sobbing.