He made to go out. He paused at the door and turned back to me.
‘It’ll come to you one day. You’ll see your babies grow up and go away, and then maybe you’ll be left on your own. And what will you do then, alone in your tower?’
I tried to take his arm and steady him. He brushed me off, as he’d done before, and he leaned towards the fire and stretched out his hand to the girl. He was going to touch her hair. His long bony fingers, the fingers which had plied the organ in this church for decades, hovered over her head.
She was alright with that. She didn’t flinch. But the crow launched itself from the top shelf, where it had been silent and invisible since the man came in, and flapped into his face.
‘What on earth...?’ The man exclaimed, and with an impatient hand he knocked the bird to the floor. He didn’t seem perturbed, he could see what it was and it was only a bird which must have blown into the vestry. And as it clattered around his feet, sculling about with its wings outstretched, he eyed it with a mixture of disgust and pity and said, ‘What on earth is it doing in here, the wretched thing?’ His lips made a funny, writhing smile, and he added, ‘Like me, I suppose, a poor old thing come in from the cold, for a bit of company.’
He was alright. Or maybe not. His bravado couldn’t quite disguise the little shock he’d had, because he was quivering even more than before. His sudden movement, the instinctive swatting at the creature fluttering in his face, had left him all trembly, as brittle as a bundle of wintry twigs.
‘Here, sit down... please...’ I was trying again to take his arm and steer him back to my seat, or at least stand him still for a moment so he could get his breath. At the same time, I saw Chloe reach for the bird and pick it up. She held it firmly but gently in both hands, so that its wings were folded against its body, and she sat in her queenly place by the fire with the crow on her lap. It hissed. It opened its beak as wide as it would go, and it made a hoarse, gasping noise.
‘Alright, alright, I’m going,’ he hissed back at it. He was certainly game. He straightened up, literally pulled himself together. ‘Alright,’ he mouthed back at the crow, ‘so this is your place by the fire, with your little princess. I wasn’t going to hurt her.’ And he wobbled into the hallway. There, he steadied himself. He paused and he looked around. Then, as though he knew that he would never come back, that this would be the last time he would stand in the church he’d known so well and for so long, he marched out of the door.
Was it the cold that hit him? I went outside to watch where he went. Even me, a bluff thirty-something-year-old, heaty with firelight and brandy, I felt the cold catch in my throat. It was bitter. Freezing hard. And the old man had barely stepped a few yards from the church before his knees buckled and he went down.
He hit his head on the pavement. His teeth fell out, shattered from their plate and spilled like pearls. He was fine, he was fine, he was trying to say the words and sit up, as I ran and knelt to him. I took off my coat and folded it into a pillow for him, laid his head onto it. Blood trickled from his nose and from his left ear.
An ambulance came. The paramedics were brisk and efficient and had him on a stretcher in no time. He was a tough old bird, one of them said, deliberately loud so that he could hear her. She was sweeping up the teeth with a dustpan and brush and sliding them into a plastic bag. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing with her brush at a crack in the pavement. ‘He’s broken it with his head.’ It made the old man smile. Me too. He lifted a hand and feebly waved at me, as they closed the door and drove him off.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
T
OSSING SNAILS OFF
the top of my tower. That was what I was doing, and when I said the words aloud, ‘Tossing snails off the top of my tower,’ they sounded very strange, like a clue for a cryptic crossword puzzle. I liked the assonance too, and the alliteration. All in all, I felt rather clever. I was on the roof, on probably the most beautiful morning since the dawn of time, inhaling the deliciously cold air and dropping snails onto the pavement below.
It was only nine o’clock and I’d already had a mug of coffee with a generous slosh of brandy in it. I was, of course, unshaven and tousled, and enjoying a curious mixture of emotions – joy, at the crystalline perfection of the day, smugness, as I watched the masses in their silly tin cars queuing to get into town and to their stultifying jobs, guilt and self-reproach and self-pity, of course, and sadness. I was lobbing snails over the battlements and then leaning over to see where they landed.
To get to the roof of the tower, I’d had to negotiate the bedrooms and make the right noises at Rosie. I was going to check the boiler, I told her, because it had been another freezing night and I needed to make sure the lagging on the tank was sufficient and there hadn’t been any burst pipes. She was snuggling in bed with Chloe and the medieval soft toys. After her first reaction, when she’d hurled them so hard at me they’d bounced off my chest and onto the floor, she seemed to have warmed to Robin and Marian and the goose-girl. Several days of my plying her with wine, and the occasional Southern Comfort and maybe here and there a Bacardi and Coke or just a little surreptitious tipple of brandy into her tea, and she’d only stirred from her bed as far as the bathroom and back. She couldn’t speak much. She didn’t move much.
I was feeding the crow. Of course it got plenty of biscuit crumbs and bits of cake when Chloe and I were ensconced in the vestry, but this morning I’d had the urge to do something a bit different with its breakfast and remembered the snails. So I’d clambered up to the tower. On the way, I’d carefully closed the trapdoor out of Chloe’s bedroom, I didn’t want her following me, I wanted a bit of real space of my own. And from the clock-tower or the belfry, as I’d wrongly called it when we’d first moved in, I’d gone up the funny, jutting stone steps and emerged on the roof.
The snails were in their impenetrable crevice. So they thought, if snails thought. This time, instead of a crow jabbing with its beak and prising them out, it was me. I could just about squeeze my fingers into the crack and pull them out, one by one. I loved the sweet resistance, the way the snail clenched its juicy foot on the stone inside the cave and tried to hang on, and then the lovely sucking, succulent sound: a wet kiss, as the suction-pad came away and the snail surrendered. And then, even more delicious, I would lean out from the battlements, pausing to enjoy the glittering view of fields and ice and a huge blue sky, and I would choose a mischievous moment... when a pedestrian was passing the door of the church, or when a particularly posh car was going by... and drop the snail.
Smash. Shatter it on the pavement in front of a shuffling pensioner and see him recoil from its impact. Smash it on the bonnet of a Jag or a Merc and watch the driver stop and get out and huff and puff and stare disbelievingly at the sky. But the point of the exercise, apart from my childish pranks, was to see the crow come hopping out of the church and relish its breakfast. It would spring past the feet of wondering passers-by. It dared the stop-start traffic, in and out of the cars and buses and even the cyclists who were beating the queue into work, and it picked the morsels of flesh from the broken shells.
Joe Blakesley? Was it him? I thought he might come back, or he might call me. I recognised him, even from this height and angle. He must’ve been having a coffee in Azri’s, maybe he’d been preparing his questions and wondering how best to tease out his story, because I saw him crossing Shakespeare Street from the little cafe and heading towards my sign on the pavement.
He paused at the sign, right below me. He took out his camera, to take a photograph of it.
Crack
. I got him smack on the top of his head. The snail hit him fair and square and bounced into the road, where it was crunched by a green Suzuki. He leapt aside, as though he’d been hit by a sniper’s bullet. Rubbing his scalp, he reeled and almost fell over and he swivelled his head to see what had hit him. He saw the snail, the slimy wet place where its flesh had been smeared onto the tarmac, he saw the shards of the shell. And he peered up at me. Too slow, I recoiled behind the battlements. He’d seen me.
And so I hurried downstairs.
‘You alright, Rosie?’ I threw the question at her as I passed the foot of our bed, not really expecting a reply. She was asleep again, after the tea and toast I’d taken her. ‘You coming, Chloe?’ I continued down and down, and I knew she’d be right behind me, once she’d bundled on some pants and a pullover and made sure the mouse was safely tucked away somewhere on her person.
The reporter was inside the vestry when I got down there. He was sitting at my desk and he was picking splinters of the shell from his hair. There was blood on his fingertips. Before I could finish what I was saying, he was waving away my spluttered apologies and at the same time I had a moment to reach for the computer and switch off the monitor, in case he was nosey enough to touch the mouse and see what I’d been writing.
‘Yes, very funny, very funny,’ he was saying. ‘My first reaction, for a split-second anyway... was, you know, I’d got one of those paranormal kind of stories, like fish or frogs or whatever falling out of the sky. Until I looked up and saw you grinning from the top of the tower. Yes, very funny, and then I saw the crow in the road and yes yes very funny.’
He’d finished feeling at his scalp. Like a chimpanzee, he fetched something out of his hair and examined it minutely, and even more simian, he actually tasted it with his tongue. Grimacing, he wiped it on the edge of my desk. ‘Escargots,’ he muttered, ‘alright if they’re fried up with lots of garlic, but not so nice raw, especially when they’ve just been smashed on the top of your head.’
‘I thought you would come,’ I said.
Chloe appeared in the doorway and took her place at the fire, but it wasn’t lit yet and she huddled there, shivering, straight out of a warm bed. Like a puppy, she’d followed me downstairs, ready to do whatever we were doing, having breakfast or going out on the boat or just staying in the shop. She didn’t mind which, and she didn’t seem to mind the dead cold ashes of the previous night’s fire.
‘I was kind of expecting you,’ I went on. ‘After what happened the other day, I guessed you might want to do a story or something or.’
‘An obituary.’
In just a few weeks since I’d first met him, he’d changed from cub-reporter, wet behind the ears and deferential even to me, to a snappy, hard-nosed hack.
‘I’ve been assigned to write an obituary. What did you think I was going to do? Another nice little plug for Poe’s Tooth Bookshop?’
He softened again, bethought himself.
‘But alright, I couldn’t help making an excuse to slip out of the office and come out here and, I don’t know, just drop in for a coffee and a chat.’
I lit the fire. We had a coffee. He’d brought a couple of croissants from Azri’s. We shared them, him and me and Chloe, and we threw crumbs for the crow. The room was still very cold and would take a while to warm up, so, after he’d pretended it would be out of the question to have a brandy as well, he allowed me to rummage in the cupboard for the bottle and splash it generously into his mug.
I could see his eyes darting about. He was writing a feature in his head, if only he might persuade his boss to run it. The tower, the room, the girl, the crow... the snails landing on his head as if they’d been whirled up in the vortex of an alien space craft and dropped onto Long Eaton, of all places. As the fire crackled and I saw his face flush with the alcohol in his coffee, I had a real surge of affection for him, almost love, for this young man who was so like the urgently inquisitive writer I might have been, I could’ve been, I should’ve been. His hungry eyes flitted across the display of Edgar Allan Poe’s tooth, they puzzled at the jewels of glass which lay scattered about it and they saw how a litter of snail shells had already been left there, like offerings at a pagan shrine.
‘He died, you know,’ he said rather hoarsely, after he’d tried and failed to refuse a second and a third little splash of brandy. ‘Mr Leonard Vaughan, who would have celebrated his 91st birthday later this week, passed away after a fall etc etc. The organist and choirmaster at Shakespeare Street Anglican Church since 1948, much loved, a stalwart of harvest festivals and carol services for more than fifty years etc etc. It’s going to be a nice simple, respectful obituary, about him and his family and his life. Did you know he’d been in North Africa during the war, the desert rats and all that? and then a successful local businessman and a magistrate and... extraordinary, when you look at a feeble old man and think of all the things he’s done.’
Sad. That was why I’d been sad on the top of the tower. Mixed into my silly mischief with the snails, my self-pity and general shittiness, not to mention the exhilaration I still felt at watching other people going to work while I was in my scruff, I was thinking about the old gent. Yes, even me, feckless and lightweight and glaringly obvious Oliver Gooch, I wasn’t impervious to sadness. I knew he’d died – an hour after he’d been taken in the ambulance, I’d called the hospital to ask how he was getting on and they’d told me. The books he’d brought me were still in their bag, on the desk. I hadn’t even looked at them yet. While the young man quaffed his coffee, while Chloe warmed her smile at the fire, I reached for the books and had a look.
Nothing special in themselves. As he’d implied, they were the kind of classics you might find in comfy suburban homes all over the country. But some of them had been stamped inside them, or had beautifully embossed plates pasted onto the flyleaf, to mark them as gifts and prizes from long-ago christenings, Sunday school, confirmation, communion, the rites of passage of the old man himself and his children. So yes, they were special. They’d been special to Mr Leonard Vaughan and his family, whose voices had rung in these very walls, whose music had celebrated dozens of happy and sad events in this church.
‘But then I was thinking,’ the young man said, ‘I was thinking I might write a kind of feature and show it to the editor, a bit more about your shop and the tooth, and the angle would be...’ He hesitated, as though he was about to divulge something inappropriate. ‘Something about a kind of curse. It doesn’t have to be true, I can just make it up, something along the lines of the tooth bringing bad luck, you know like the curse of the mummy’s tomb or the monkey’s paw or whatever...’ He raised his eyebrows at me, over the rim of his mug. ‘What do you think? Of course, if you don’t like the idea I’ll drop it straightaway.’