The Cormorant Page 12

  I don’t know how long I sat there in the drizzle. But the air was a tonic, after its first assault. I drank it in as gratefully as I had drunk the sherry and the beer. Only a few hundred yards from the front door of the cottage, but I didn’t think I could safely negotiate the distance. When I tried to stand, it was as though the ground beneath my feet began to move on rollers, a fiendish kind of escalator or conveyor-belt which I couldn’t keep pace with. So I sat down again and tried to focus my eyes on some distant object, the number plate of a parked car, concentrated on reading it until it swam away. In any case, what was the great hurry to get home? There was no-one there, no Ann, no Harry. And at this, I felt a sudden rush of unhappiness, as traumatic and debilitating as a punch in the stomach. It brought the immediate stinging of tears. At last, I thought, now you can do it, now you can cry. Christmas fucking Day, so pissed that you can’t even get to your own front door, with blood on your socks, a shin cut to the bone and probably wriggling with the nameless maggots that cormorants pick out of their feathers, abandoned by your wife and son … The tears came, thick and hot. I tasted the salt in the corners of my mouth and the running of my nose. The only handkerchief I could muster from my pocket was covered with dried blood. I threw it into the puddles with a snort of disgust and wiped my nose on the sleeve of my coat. Like a bloody vagrant. A roadside vagrant, overwhelmed by tears.

  Behind me the door opened and closed. I sat upright and turned away my face, ashamed of the tears. Even that sudden movement brought a wave of nausea. To control it, I stared hard at another number plate, forced it into focus with a mighty effort of squinting, read it aloud, shut my eyes and recited the sequence two or three times. I looked again and checked that I had learned it by heart. People scuttled past me to the shelter of their cars. Lights came on, engines started, off they went with their tyres hissing on the wet road. I stopped crying. When I glanced along the street into the village, I saw that all the lights in the Knapps’ house were off. In the aftermath of sorrow and self-pity, anger against the cormorant began to grow. If only I could mobilise myself and get to the cottage, I would sort it out once and for all. Archie must go, Ann and Harry were more important. I would wring its neck and toss the corpse into the stream, let it hurtle downstream to its beloved estuary along with so much other household rubbish. We’d abandon the cottage and go back to the suburbs of Derby … oh Christ, the numbing chores of school, the suburban semi, the television, the lawnmower, Saturday sodding football in the park …

  Again there was movement around me as people began to leave the pub.

  ‘Alright, son?’ from one enquiring voice.

  ‘That leg’s a mess,’ from a woman this time.

  ‘Oh that?’ It was my own voice, thick with drink. ‘That was when I was attacked by my pet cormorant, phalacrocorax carbo … ’

  There was somebody standing next to me, not speaking. When the others had gone and the sounds of their car had faded away, the figure remained. I sniffed and averted my tear-stained face. I didn’t want any well-meaning banter or, even worse, the commiserations of another maudlin drunk. I got to my feet and clutched the back of the bench. The conveyor-belt started, I had to lurch forward a few steps to stay on it. There seemed to be a hand at my elbow, very strong so that I instinctively leaned on it and felt its support. The escalator surged and I accelerated to keep up, comfortably aware of the strength beside me. Once in motion, practically upright, it was best to carry on.

  ‘Only just along the street,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Little cottage on the right, nearly there now.’

  I stepped out, swayed violently towards the road. The hand buoyed me up, restraining me from falling over the kerb. Looking down at the pavement, I watched the slabs go racing along under my feet, so fast that I felt nothing, like walking on cotton wool. One bloody foot and the bloody mess of my trousers, the other shoe clean, especially clean for Christmas Day. And through the blur of my bewhiskered vision, the heavy shoes of my Samaritan, very sensible and sturdy, the polished toe-caps poppled with rain drops. The pavement swooped up at me, I touched it with my fingers, could feel its wetness. A close-up of the big shoes and then again I was heaved to the vertical.

  ‘This is it . .

  But the door was already pushed open. Lights flicked on. I was dropped into an armchair, lying back with my eyes closed.

  ‘Oh Christ . .

  I had to sit up very quickly as the blackness behind my eyelids began to spin, erupting in different colours. With my head in my hands, I peered between my fingers at the living-room carpet. Somebody was putting another log onto the embers of the fire, turning on the lights of the Christmas tree. My head swam, everything was a blur of blue smoke. The footsteps went into the kitchen. Dimly, through the maelstrom of confused sounds which howled inside my mind, I heard the shooting of the bolt on the back door. Immediately there was a bitter draught through the room, the curtains whispered. But the footsteps returned, the draught remained, I felt a hand on my head for a tiny second, gentle as the landing of an autumn leaf. I heard the heavy shoes go to the front door and finally go out. The door closed. There was silence.

  It was much too late for anyone to hear my blurted cry of gratitude. Minutes passed after the closing of the door. But I remembered to call out, I heard my own voice.

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Ian. Thank you …’

  This time, when I closed my eyes, the blackness was steady.

  So I slept.

  When I woke up, the fire had gone out and the room was cold. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. The main light and the lights of the Christmas tree were on: the sudden brightness hurt my eyes. I sat up in the armchair. There was a throbbing pain in my shin, it was pulsing hotly, and my head was singing. What I needed was to fetch a couple of blankets from upstairs and bed down again on the sofa with all the lights off: the swiftest return to oblivion. I had been woken, however, by my thirst and the urgent desire to piss. Standing up, with my hands over my forehead against the glare of the light, I found, not surprisingly, that I was still very drunk. The movement brought a rushing sound in my ears as though a dam had burst within my skull, the pulse in my legs speeded up, but I seemed a little steadier on my feet. I could remember a few things about the previous evening: drinking at the bar, sitting outside in the drizzle, a fractured image of the journey home. When I was sober again, I might try to piece it all together. Meanwhile, if I didn’t get to the bathroom quickly, I was going to wet myself. Taking a deep breath, I turned to the door.

  Archie was perched on the back of my armchair.

  I peered at the cormorant through my fingers. It was sleeping, its wings folded, its face and beak buried in the feathers of its breast: a piece of modern sculpture, not out of place in the room with its prints and books and rugs, a green-black angular study of the bird asleep, forged from steel and burnt to its dark colours, twisted metal, twisted and scorched to make this effigy of the cormorant. The feet were folded over the back of the chair and the tail was a prop. Archie looked vulnerable in its sleep: not a hunter or a stabber or an arrogant squirter of shit. Simply a bird, lost in dreams.

  I waited, completely still, lest the cormorant should wake. The door to the kitchen was open, and the draught which came into the living-room told me that the back door into the yard was wide open too. Footsteps … I remembered the footsteps, someone moving in the room while I lay inert in my drunkenness. But why? What was I supposed to do next? My drunkenness swept over me again. It was all too complicated. Who had arranged all this? And who assumed that I would merely play my part?

  It made me angry. I was cold, my head hurt, my mouth was full of cobwebs, the leg was squirming with worms … and there, calmly perched on the living-room furniture as though it were a household pet, was the vile Archie which had terrorised my wife and son into fleeing on Christmas Day.

  I bent down to the fire, stood up again. With the poker in my right hand.

  Two steps forward.

  The right arm up
raised.

  The bird peacefully asleep.

  The poker sang as it swung through the air.

  Archie stirred inside a dream, alerted by the singing of the poker. It was already falling backwards from the armchair, the wings were beginning to unfold and the feet were slipping from the perch, a fraction of a second before the blow landed. The poker connected with the cormorant’s shoulder, the bird was flung onto the carpet with a dull thwack and a cloud of dust, the sound of a stick against an old pillow.

  Archie was awake.

  I lurched after it, wielding the poker. I was shouting, but again it was the distant distorted voice which I had heard in the pub. There was the bird on the floor behind the sofa. The wing I had struck just as the cormorant had begun to fall away was outstretched, black and tattered, smashed. I lunged forward with the poker, ready to strike. Archie scrambled away from me, dragging the broken wing and rowing along the carpet with the other. It unleashed a torrent of guttural sounds, snaked its head with the dag-ger-beak open. Around the room we went, drunken man and wounded bird, and the poker fell again and again on the chairs and the floor, whistled through the air and struck the table and the tree, sent the books tumbling from their shelves, lifted the dust from the cushions, brandished like the baton of an inspired conductor. I heard my voice repeating the tired old oaths. The room was filled with dust, the flailing progress of the poker. I listened wearily to the voice, the rushing of surf inside my head. There were books, Christmas cards, decorations and sherry bottles on the carpet, feathers and green shit, and everywhere the air was heavy with the cries of the cormorant. I drove it to the door and tried to stamp on the trailing wing, to pin it down and hold it still for the delivery of a fatal blow, but the bird was in the kitchen, over the cold floor and into the yard. I stood at the doorway, shivering from my exertions and the icy air from the garden, watched Archie go scuttling into the upturned crate which still lay outside the cage. With difficulty, the bird manoeuvred itself into the box and turned its head to pull in the injured wing with its beak. It burrowed far into the straw. Then it was still.

  Big flakes of snow were drifting through the darkness, settling on the slates of the backyard. I looked up at the sky and down at the poker in my right hand.

  The sounds in my head subsided. In my pursuit of the bird, I had forgotten something, something I could postpone no longer. Dropping the poker with a clang onto the kitchen floor, I walked straight out into the yard, to the wooden crate. I set it upright and stared into the straw. There was a little rustling movement as though the straw itself was breathing, and I could see some black feathers buried in the bedding. The snow settled on the ground and stuck for a second on the warm dampness of the straw. I straightened up, undid the zip of my trousers. I was bursting. Flipping out the worm, I waited an instant before aiming a powerful jet of piss into the crate.

  At first the silence persisted. The straw hissed and fizzed under the yellow stream, a cloud of steam rose into the cold night air. And the relief … I thought I had never pissed with such strength, such pressure, such heat. Then the bedding began to heave. From out of the straw, Archie wriggled its head and neck, but the broken wing was trapped and the bird was only able to weave the beak in protest, gasping a few faltering croaks. I bellowed with laughter and took a step back. As the cormorant sat up in the crate, its head and neck writhing from side to side, I directed the hot piss straight into its face. There was plenty of it. It flew into the bird’s eyes and ran down the sleek feathers of its throat. As Archie coughed, it swallowed the bitter juice, spat it from its beak and nostrils. The hoarse cries were cut off by the jet, it was all the bird could do to keep its head moving in and out of the spray. Until it gave up dodging, surrendered to the humiliation, and remained still, its head erect, eyes and beak closed tight, while I walked round the box twice, three times, aiming the diminishing flow. Finally, when it had stopped, I summoned a number of spurts as a kind of encore. I came close and shook the droplets onto the crown of the cormorant’s head, tiny yellow-green drops which trembled among the wet feathers like emeralds. Finished. There was no more. Without opening its eyes, Archie subsided into the box, disappeared among the steaming straw. A little shuffling, then silence, as though there was no cormorant at all in the depths of the white wooden crate.

  I stopped laughing. The worm went into hiding.

  ‘Archie,’ I said.

  The snow by now had whitened the slates of the yard.

  ‘Archie … ?’

  I shook the snow from my hair. Louder I said, ‘Archie … ?’ until I was kneeling in the snow at the side of the box, whispering, whispering, ‘Archie … Archie … Archie . .

  I stood up, wet and crumpled, dragged the crate into the corner of the cage. I flung down some clean straw and the remains of an old blanket. If it wanted to, the bird could crawl out and fix itself some dry bedding. I went inside, stood for a minute in the cold kitchen and watched the snow thaw from my shoes and run onto the floor.

  ‘Archie, Archie, Archie …’ I was whispering, but the voice grew louder and louder, became a shout as I burst into the bathroom. I vomited explosively into the bath and knelt there, retching until I thought that my chest would burst.

  My forehead on the cool enamel.

  The cold whiteness of the gathering snow …

  VI

  While I was sleeping on the sofa in the living-room, the blizzard outside grew and grew and engulfed the land. It wrapped its heavy white arms around the mountains and squeezed. The forests whimpered under the pressure of the polar bear’s hugging. The hills surrendered the definition of their contours, the sides of scree, the gullies thick with the skeletons of bracken, the fields strewn with boulders and scored with the tracery of the dry stone walls. All this was erased by the deadening blanket of snow. Derelict barns filled up with the blowing drifts, the spoils of abandoned quarries became white things, soft things, where before they had been black warts on the countryside. The wind forced the snow into every corner of the plantations. The trees groaned with the weight which settled until it became too much and was dislodged by the next gust of the blizzard. Then the snow gathered on the forest floor, crept among the roots and rabbit burrows, so the trees felt their grip on the ground beginning to weaken. The air rang with the splintering of branches. Tall pines, whose roots were shallow in the meagre soil of the rocky hillside, leaned in the wind and fell. Every part of the valley grew heavy with snow. It deafened the streets of every village: the streets were deaf under the whirling whiteness, gardens and houses were blinded, the striding pylons became dumb. The drifts were moulded like meringue, they grew like cobwebs against the sides of the stone walls, into the hedgerows, between roofs and chimneys, shrouding the black water of streams. No-one was outside that night. Animals sought shelter in their burrows and lairs or were huddled tightly together in the comparative warmth of the outhouses. The bear hugged. The world changed. It continued to snow long after the wind had dropped, so the drifts were reinforced. Trees sighed under the increase of their burden. All was still beneath the bearskin blanket.

  And I dreamed of the blizzard.

  It was purple dark in the backyard. The only light came through the window of the kitchen. I was standing amid the maelstrom of snowflakes, huge soft flakes, as big and as hectic through the air as humming birds. They beat around my head before sticking on my hair and beard. Everything was silent. In spite of the power of the wind and the whirlpool of snow, there was no sound. I stood in the yard and allowed the blizzard to envelop me. In front of me was the white wooden crate of the cormorant. It was upright, filled to the top with straw. There was no sign of movement, nothing to indicate that there was anything alive inside the crate. It could well have been a box stuffed with straw, nothing else. The snow was settling briefly on the straw and melting fast. A black and purple sky from which the snowflakes tumbled; the flakes lit up white and yellow by the single bulb in the kitchen; the shadows very dark among the tangle of fuchsia and ferns and
down to where the stream must have been. Centre stage: me and the crate.