Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory

disapproving breaths through her nose. She didn’t say much more, but I could almost hear her brain whirring in a fury of disgruntlement and... and something else, something had piqued her brain when I’d said that Chloe had reacted to the presence of the bird. The notion was snagging in her mind, pricking her like the tiniest splinter of a thought. She was looking oddly at me, a curious mixture of emotions moving across her face as softly as the firelit shadows, so that I couldn’t tell if she was going to react by accusing me of further negligence in the care of her daughter or respond to the half-baked idea that having a crow in the shop could be good for business. I’d lied, by omission: she had no idea that the bird had been in the clock-tower, that Chloe and I had been up there, that the bird had been flapping around on her duvet in the middle of the night on its way down through the kitchen and into the hallway... and now she was searching my eyes for the truth I’d withheld.
    At last, as she turned and hurried up the stairs with Chloe, she said, ‘Well, get it outside, Oliver. It stinks. And you too, you stink, you look a mess, you need a shave and a shower. Or is that supposed to be perfect as well?’
     
     
    I DIDN’T REALLY stink. It was the baggy pullover and the greatcoat I’d been wearing to keep warm in and out of the church doorway and in the shop. Underneath it, I was my fragrant, manly self, showered and deodorised. But yes, I could sense how people recoiled from me in the charity shops in Long Eaton High Street, even the veteran volunteers who were used to the smokey, beery smell of their unemployed customers. I hadn’t shaved, I knew I needed a haircut but I wasn’t going to have one, and I’d got my bookshop outfit on, the pullover and greatcoat. Chloe was wrapped in many layers and topped off with the bobble-hat, so that she looked like one of Santa’s elves who’d been left behind after Christmas. We’d had a brisk, frosty walk downtown, and I had a list of things I needed.
    Photocopies. I got a big blow-up of the Nottingham Evening Post article and its photos of the tooth and the old handwritten document of authenticity, as I liked to imagine it to be, and a hundred small copies of the document, postcard size. While we had a coffee and cake on the market square, an elderly gent in his old-fashioned cobbler’s and key-cutting shop (the only business which had survived the coming of the supermarkets on the edge of town) was making a rubber stamp for me. And in the animal welfare shop, where I’d been rummaging for any kind of magnifying glass, I’d found, even better, a kind of plastic lens designed to help short-sighted geriatrics to read books and magazines.
    An even brisker walk home – because the morning was so bitter but also because I was so boyishly excited to get back and get open – and soon we were kneeling at the hearth, crackling up the fire, boiling the kettle and putting out the sign.
    And the crow?
    We both knew, from the smell and from the way the white mouse wiggled its whiskers out of Chloe’s sleeve and disappeared again, that the crow was somewhere in the vestry. I sprinkled a few crumbs. And the bird came out. It ate up the crumbs, it sprang onto my desk and admired itself in the reflection of the computer screen. It shook out its wings and splattered a green-white mute onto the floor. As though to announce, we were ready and waiting for customers.
    A few gainsayers and poo-poohers, yes.
    A very old gentleman came in, shrunken like a mummy inside his dark suit and oversized shirt, so quivery that a puff of smoke from the chimney might have blown him over. Fortunately, the bird made itself scarce, as he looked around the hallway and started snivelling into a white handkerchief. He tried to resist me, screwing up his face and spitting feebly at the smell of my clothes, but then he allowed me to sit him down in the vestry. Screwing up all his indignation, he told