CROW

—STEVE LOCKLEY—

“There’s that bird again, Dad!” Danny was pointing frantically at the large black bird sitting on the fence post nearest the large oak as we drove towards it. The road bent to the right as we approached and I signalled to turn into the lane that led to our house, even though there was no sign of any other traffic on the road. It was habit.

“Will it be there again tomorrow?” he asked. He was only six and always full of questions that I could never answer with any certainty.

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll have to see won’t we?”

I gave the bird another glance as I turned the car, catching sight of its beady glass eye watching. It blinked and I noticed the scar beneath its eye for a moment and in my mind I was transported back to a time when I was little older than Danny.

*    *    *

“Is that a rook, Granddad?” I asked. We were standing at my grandfather’s back door looking out into the garden that he spent so much time looking after.

“Now what have I told you about rooks and crows?”

“If you see a rook it’s a crow. If you see crows they are rooks,” I repeated, even though I hadn’t really understood it at the time. He was teaching me that the crows were solitary birds while a rook kept its own kind close by. “It’s a crow then.”

“That’s right,” he said ruffling my hair. The bird perched on the handle of a spade that had been left when Granddad had been working earlier, an angry scar beneath one eye. “It’s waiting for me.” 

I didn’t understand what he meant, not then, and not for a long time afterwards, but eventually I understood what he was saying. He knew and yet he had accepted it without showing any trace of fear. The bird had been a sign as far as he was concerned; a sign that he didn’t have much longer to live, but he had been ready. It wasn’t the same for everyone though.

*    *    *

When I saw the bird for a third time I knew that there was something strange about it. Danny was becoming obsessed with the crow. He would sit in his bedroom for hours watching out of the window convinced it was out there, waiting for him. He wasn’t afraid of that, he was excited, but then I remembered Granddad saying the same things. I remembered the bird with the scar beneath his eye and, even though I knew it could not possibly be the same one, not after all this time, I could not help but think that somehow it was. 

“Come away from your window,” I said when I found him there again. “Let’s play a game.”

“What kind of game? We could play football in the garden.”

“Not football,” I said. I tried to think of an excuse but the truth was that I didn’t want us to be outside always in sight of that staring eye; the eye with the scar beneath. I already knew that it would be haunting my dreams and the less I saw of it the better. Although it reminded me of Granddad, it was his death it brought to mind, not his life.

“Aw, come on Dad, you never want to play football anymore.” There was more than a touch of a whining in his voice but I knew he was right. I knew I should be encouraging him out into the fresh air and getting him to run around rather than sitting in front of a TV screen to play video games with him. It didn’t make it any easier though. In the end I relented and suggested that we take a trip to the park rather than stick to the back garden. It seemed a pointless trip, but I could not bear the thought of being in the garden while that bird watched over us.

I tried to distract Danny as we drove past the fence post. I didn’t want him to see it again. I knew that if he started talking about it I would end up telling him about my grandfather no matter how hard I tried to keep the secret to myself. He didn’t know about the bird and there was no reason why I should worry him. If it had come looking for me then there was no point in anyone else knowing about it. If it was true there was nothing anyone could do to help, and if it was all a load of nonsense, then I did not want to panic them only to look foolish. I only knew that my granddad had believed it.

As we ran around the park, enjoying the open space it offered, Danny kicked the ball as hard as he could with no fear of breaking a window and incurring anyone’s wrath. We ran, we slipped and fell, we laughed and wrestled, enjoying the kind of time we did not get to have often enough. For an hour or more I completely forgot about the bird and enjoyed some of the simple pleasures of life.

It was not until we were heading home that I started to the think about the crow again. It would be sitting on its fencepost again, waiting for me, keeping its beady eye on the lane until I returned. 

“It’s not there,” Danny said. His disappointment lifted my own spirits and I felt the joy flooding through me, but it only lasted for a moment. Something swept in front of the car, a black shape that hit the windscreen hard and left a smear of blood and feathers on the glass. I slammed on the brakes and the car swerved hard to the left. I struggled to retain control of the car as Danny screamed but I tried not to show my own fear. The car slewed as one of the wheels touched the grass verge and the tree arrived far too quickly for me to do anything about it.

The airbags exploded from the dashboard on impact, but the car lurched again and tipped onto its side. The engine spouted steam and smoke while the wheels continued to spin with no resistance for a moment until the engine died. I tried to turn around to face Danny, frantically calling his name. I saw that the tree had pushed the rear passenger door inwards, crumpling too much of the car.

“Danny!” I tried to turn to look at him but a spasm of agony shot up my leg. There was no reply, but eventually I managed to shift enough to be able to see his limp and lifeless body. Then there was nothing but a dizzying blackness punctured only by the cries of people trying to help, and the scream of metal as someone tried to cut me free. I heard reassuring voices trying to tell me that everything would be alright but I knew that it wouldn’t be. No matter how much I hoped and prayed, I knew Danny was badly hurt. His name was still on my lips when the pain became too great and a blackness washed over me.

In my dreams I felt someone holding my hand, but no matter how hard I tried I could not move a single finger to let whoever it was know that I knew they were there. I wanted to be able to open my eyes and see Danny sitting there bearing no more than a scratch, but I knew it was Alison’s hand that held my own. Sometimes I heard her voice drifting in and out but there was no way of knowing what was real and what was dream, though sometimes I could hear the beep, beep, beep of monitors and the click of a clock.

I was alone when I opened my eyes and had to blink hard against the light. I turned my head hoping to see someone beside me, but there was no-one. Instead I saw the shape sitting on the windowsill outside my room; the black bird that had been waiting for me close to home. As soon as it saw me it took to the wing in a blur of feathers. It had almost taken me, but not quite. 

“Welcome back to the real world,” said a nurse as she came bustling in. I tried to speak but my lips were dry and cracked. “Don’t you worry yourself, the doctor will be here in just a minute to take a look at you. I promised your wife I would give her a call when you woke up. She’s been here nearly all the time but I made her go home to get some rest.” It came out as a non-stop stream of words, sounds to fill the silence.

“Danny?” I said at last despite the dryness in my mouth.

“The doctor will talk to you when he gets here.” She was avoiding answering the question and I knew that meant there was bad news. I prayed he was not badly hurt, that he wasn’t lying in another bed somewhere with wires and tubes attached to him in a worse shape than I was, but if that had been the case then she would have told me.

“Just tell me,” I demanded trying to sit up but far too weak to manage it alone. The doctor arrived before I was able to push her to the point where she would have no choice but to tell me what I was dreading to hear. She handed the doctor the chart which he gave little more than a cursory glance at. 

“You’ve been very lucky,” the doctor said eventually, moving to the side of the bed.

“But what about Danny? How is he?”

“I’m afraid that there was nothing we could do for your son.”

He didn’t have to say that. He could have said that he was seriously ill. He didn’t have to say anything. He could have left me with a little hope for just a while longer but he didn’t. He told me the truth; the plain unadulterated truth and I knew that there was nothing else he could have told me no matter how much I had wished for it.

How could I have been so wrong about the bird? I had assumed that it was there for me, not for my son. It had been hard enough to think of the life he would lead without me to be part of it, but what was the point of mine without him. My tears were hot as they flooded from my eyes. I would stay in control for now but had no idea how long I might be able to hold them back.

“I’ll come back and see you again soon,” the doctor said. “We’ll talk some more then.”

I wasn’t really listening to what he said anyway. I knew the cage that held the blankets off my legs meant there was damage there even if I could not feel the pain. But what was the point if there was no-one to kick a football with? 

The police came to see me, keen to know what had happened in the accident. They explained that they had already examined the car and found nothing wrong mechanically. Nothing that could explain anything.

“I understand this is difficult, but can you tell me what happened?” The policeman sat in the chair beside my bed, his notebook open and pen poised. The nurse had already warned him not to take too long and that I shouldn’t be stressed.

“We had been to the park,” I said. “And we were on our way back home.”

The policeman checked an earlier page and got me to confirm my address. “You were almost home then?”

“A couple of hundred yards from the turning I suppose.”

“Can you tell me what speed you were travelling at?”

“Forty I guess, something like that.”

“A little fast if you were going to have to turn soon.” It was more of a comment than a question, but I felt that I had to defend myself.”

“The speed limit is fifty, I had already started to slow down,” I said though in truth I could not remember if I had. I had driven that road so many times that it felt as if I was driving on automatic pilot. Maybe that had been the problem; maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the road. But that wouldn’t have made any difference to the bird hitting the windscreen.

“There was a bird,” I said. “It hit the windscreen and I panicked.” I had almost forgotten the bird had been the cause of the action and not just a spectator in my son’s death. It had not been an accident; the crash had been forced on me.

“A bird?” The police man said it in such a way that it sounded as if it was loaded with disbelief. “What kind of bird was that, sir?”

“A large black bird. We’d seen it quite a few times around the garden and on a fence post near where I came off the road.”

“We?”

“My son Danny saw it first. I hadn’t even noticed it at first, but it had been there for days, maybe a few weeks.”

“So this bird... It just flew into your windscreen?”

“That’s what I said. It came out of nowhere. Maybe it was flying towards the fence post where we used to see it.”

The policeman wrote down every word I said without speaking. I knew how bizarre the story must have sounded to him, even though it was the truth. I felt as if I should try to tell him more; about how the birds had been there wherever I looked, about how I knew what it meant, about how it had been there when my grandfather died, about how I had been convinced that it had been there for him. Not for Danny. Never for Danny. I fought to hold back the tears, turning away from the policeman as he looked up from his notebook for a moment. I couldn’t look him in the eyes to see that he did not believe me. I wanted to sit up and scream at him that I was telling the truth but I had lost all the strength and could barely lift my head from the pillow. Instead all I could do was look at the window.

“We’ve examined your car and can’t find anything mechanically wrong with it.” I knew he had already told me this before, but it was his way of telling me that the car was not to blame.

“Of course not. I said I lost control of the car when the bird hit the windscreen.”

“We examined the windscreen too, or at least what was left of it after your car had been cut to get you out. The glass was shattered because of the impact anyway, but most of it held together. There was no sign of any blood.”

“Of course not. The airbag worked.”

“I meant on the outside.”

I looked back at him and he was still looking at me, waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“If you had hit a bird at that speed we could have expected to see blood and feathers in the glass, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. We even searched the area in case you had hit any kind of animal, but there was no sign of any bird, dog, cat, nothing.”

“But it was there,” I said. “It hit the windscreen.”

“Maybe it flew close, you swerved to try to avoid it? I can understand that it must all have happened so quickly.”

He was giving me a way to change my story but I knew what had happened. He was trying to make me say that I had chosen to swerve to avoid hitting the bird, that it was my fault I had lost control, my fault that I hit the tree. It was my fault that Danny was dead.

“I know what happened,” I insisted, my voice growing a little louder than I had intended and bringing the clatter of a nurse’s shoes in my direction.

“I think that’s enough for now,” she insisted.

The policeman didn’t argue with her. She had the kind of voice that made it absolutely clear that she was not going to take any nonsense. 

“Thank you,” I said as she fussed over me once the policeman had gone. I owed her a huge debt of gratitude. I had no idea how much more of his questioning I could have taken before it became too much for me and said something I might regret.

“Just doing my job,” she smiled. I knew she was doing more than just that and I was grateful.

“Thanks anyway.”

“I know it’s none of my business,” she said. “But if you want to talk I’m here.”

“You might not want to hear what I have to say.”

“I doubt that very much. I know there would have been no way that you would have taken chances with your son.”

And so I told her. I told her about the bird, my granddad and what had happened on that drive home. She didn’t laugh; she didn’t treat me as if I had lost my marbles. All she did was listen and hold my hand when I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. She didn’t judge me or condemn me. She just listened and that was all I needed. I thought that by saying it all out loud it would seem ridiculous, but the nurse did not seem to think so.

“They call it the Corpse Bird back home,” she said, her Welsh accent becoming a little more pronounced. “It knows when someone is going to die.”

“You believe me then?” I thought I had been going crazy, that somehow I had convinced myself that the bird had been there for me, not my poor little Danny. Not him.

“Of course I believe you, love. If you saw the bird then there was no accident, was there? It was going to happen no matter how hard you tried. It was waiting.”

“But I was sure that it was waiting for me.”

“Well who knows if the bird is sure whose death he is waiting for? He just knows that there would be someone leaving this world.”

“And you really believe all this? You’re not just humouring me? You’re a nurse. You can’t believe in this kind of thing. Can you?”

“Why not? You wouldn’t laugh if I said I believed in God now would you?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it? We all believe different things don’t we? They say the black bird comes for us all in the end.” She reached forward to plump up my pillows a little. I tried to lean forward to lift my head to make things easier for her and felt the pain reach out through every part of my body. It made me feel more alive.

“You want me to sort out some more pain relief?”

“I’m OK,” I lied.

“No you’re not, you’re hurting and you don’t have to suffer.”

“Don’t you think I’m going to suffer for the rest of my life?” I already knew that I was going to relive that day over and over again for the rest of my life; every moment, every word that had been spoken between us, but sooner or later I would start to forget. I would find it harder to remember the hour we had spent fooling about with a football, the moments when we had laughed and all I would remember would be that damn bird and hearing the silence from the back of the car.

I caught sight of movement in my peripheral vision and saw the bird again, perching on the windowsill looking in at me. I didn’t say anything to the nurse but I suspected she saw the smile on my face. She followed my gaze but by then the bird had taken flight again. Maybe she had guessed what I had seen but said nothing. Maybe she had even seen it herself. 

The black bird comes for us all in the end.