The raven heaved himself up and staggered out from his nest. He felt fuzzy and out of sorts. His wings were stiff, and he wheeled ungracefully for a few spans, hoping the weatherhen couldn’t see. When he’d got himself straightened out, he cast about for the source of the crying.
It was the little girl.
She was down there, the one from this afternoon, the one who’d called him a maggot. She sat on the edge of her brother’s plot, only just filled in, looking down the length of her legs. Her skinny shoulders shook with each sob.
Perched on the little brick wall, watching her, was a ghost. The raven sighed. Great. He really didn’t like it when the dead took it upon themselves to roam about freely in the land of the living, as if they’d never even left. They were so flimsy and shifty, and their shapes played tricks on his eyes. Worse, they were the biggest moaners he’d ever met.
‘Just don’t know when to give up,’ he said to himself, swooping low.
The ghost looked up and saw the raven. It was a boy, older than the girl by a few years. ‘Can you help me?’ he asked the raven. ‘That’s my sister. I don’t know what to do.’
‘You can’t do anything,’ the raven said. ‘You’re dead.’
‘Maybe you –’ began the boy, but the raven knew what was coming.
‘You can get that idea out of your head. I can’t do anything. I’m just a bird.’
‘You could talk to her,’ the boy said. ‘I know you can. Please. Tell her you saw me and that I forgive her. I don’t want Mackenzie moping around like this. Tell her to get up and go home.’
‘Absolutely not,’ the raven said. It was an unspoken rule among his kind – and one the raven strictly adhered to – that birds must never let on they could speak and understand humans. At least, humans who were alive. What a circus it would become then. If humans knew that birds could hold a conversation with them, and not just in chirrups and squawks, then there would surely be no rest for the raven. He’d be as easy a target as an earwig without a pincer.
Besides, you would have to be the raven’s equal in human intelligence for him to maintain any sort of worthwhile conversation.
The boy looked at his sister. ‘We had a fight, just before I . . . you know.’
‘Died,’ said the raven.
The boy cleared his throat. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We had a fight over whose turn it was to do the stupid washing up, and then I went out for a walk, even though it was dark and I shouldn’t have. But I was so mad. And then the car came and I didn’t notice it because I was still mad, see, and then . . .’
He paused, and the raven had the discretion to look away.
‘Anyway, I died when we were in the middle of a fight. A stupid fight, over dirty dishes. Mackenzie thinks it’s her fault, what happened. I can tell. So I just wanna let her know that it wasn’t, and that I’m not mad, only I’m not really getting anywhere. Because, well, because . . .’
‘Because you’re dead,’ said the raven.
‘Yeah,’ said the boy, ‘because I’m dead.’ He stared down at himself and his lip started to quiver, and the raven wasn’t having any of that.
‘You know the groundskeeper relieved himself, when he was filling in your grave,’ the raven told him. ‘He did. Right in the middle of the job. Dropped his pants and away he went.’
For a moment the boy looked horrified. But then he grinned, just a little bit, and the raven felt it much more appealing than the tortured look he’d been going for before.
‘That’s quite funny, actually,’ said the boy. ‘Mackenzie would have liked that, I reckon. Had a few laughs. Least I’ll have the greenest patch of grass in the whole cemetery.’
The raven sniffed. ‘I’ll have it be said that I didn’t approve. Disgusting. No respect.’
‘Aww, it’s a bit funny,’ said the boy, and he giggled.
The raven didn’t understand him. He would have no one relieving themselves over his dead bones, thank you very much. To do that kind of thing was shameful. If someone was dead they should be left in peace. The raven had heard something of that very nature spoken in his church – let the dead rest in peace. Not rest in pee. Besides, it just gave ghosts something else to whine and groan about.
It was a hard slog, sometimes, having a connection to the dead. Sure, it was a noble quality, and it went back years and years, steeped in lore: Never look a raven in the eye, for it will steal your soul and fly away with it; you should always cross yourself when seeing a raven, for they will carry your image into the land of the dead, where death will mark you. On and on it went, the whole mythology about ravens and the dead. He was a bird of distinction. Heritage. Books had been written about him.
And yet so many of his kind squandered that ability away. They had no idea, or just didn’t care. So much inborn ability, so much prestige wasted. Not including crows, of course. Crows were always trying to muscle in on raven territory, steal the mythology for themselves. The raven wouldn’t have a bar of it. Crows were disgusting. They sounded like stupefied frogs. Always twitching and carrying on while they were flying. Drab feathers too – none of the raven’s indigo tones. Stubby little beaks and tails and lacking any of the refinement of the raven’s superior wingspan. And, most importantly, a crow’s lesser size had a rather dramatic impact on their brain capacity as well. But the worst thing was there was never just one – they always came in a flock. Absolutely foul. If crows came near his church, the raven flicked lichen pellets at them until they flew away.
Crows, pigeons, ghosts moping about with unfinished business. Always bothering him. Luckily, hardly anyone was buried in his cemetery now, so the raven didn’t have to put up with too much of it. He just wanted peace. He just wanted to be left alone with his hymns and his church. That was all he asked for. It wasn’t so much.
Down on the ground, the little girl kicked up her feet in a rather ungainly display of temper. Even the ghost-boy flinched.
‘This stinks,’ she said. ‘God sucks. I hate him.’
The raven gasped. He was positive that was a sin. The raven had listened to Father Cadman’s sermons (it was inevitable, waiting around for the hymns to start), and he was pretty sure that when it came to superior beings, this God person was pretty high up. Much like himself. God was not a man to be hated, especially by sulky faced, obnoxious little girls.
Father Cadman liked to say, ‘we must have faith in the greater plan.’ The raven didn’t know exactly what this greater plan was, but when the priest said that, the raven always got chills. Father Cadman would start to quiver and little flames flickered in his eye and then his voice would get a tremor in it.
When he raised his arms to the roof of the church, the raven sometimes pretended he was the one being worshipped. Fitting really, because it was quite clear to the raven that he was a singular creature in every sense of the word.
The raven watched with interest as the ghost-boy tried to reach out to his sister and touch her arm. Every time his hand passed through the boy grew more determined and upset, until even his pallid cheeks had a bloom of frustration.
His sister got up, dusting the seat of her pants. ‘Well, I gotta go,’ she told the tuft of grass next to her white sneakers. They had silvery threads woven through the laces and, although he’d never tell her, the raven coveted them for himself.
‘Mum’s gonna kill me if she knows I’ve been out after dark. She’s worse than ever, you know, now you’re not here. Can’t even have a bath and she thinks I’m gonna drown. I’m not a baby.’ She kicked the ground and the loose dirt puffed up over her sneakers, dirtying the laces.
What a waste.
‘I’ll see you real soon, okay, Toddy?’ the girl told her brother. ‘Guess it won’t be a problem because you got nowhere else to go.’
Haven’t, thought the raven. Haven’t got anywhere else to go. Appalling English. I hope her brother’s not like that or it will do my head in.
‘All right, see you later then,’ said the girl again, and she shuffled her feet a bit more and set off through the churchyard, hands crammed into the pockets of her jeans.
Back at his grave the ghost-boy shifted, sliding for a moment in and out of the moon.
‘Toddy?’ said the raven.
‘Yeah,’ said the boy. ‘Todd Trebuchet. That’s my little sister, Mackenzie.’
‘So I figured,’ said the raven. ‘But Toddy?’
‘I’d like it real good, Mr Raven, sir, if you would help me,’ said the boy. His tone remained polite, but his face had started to crumple.
The raven liked being called ‘sir’, but it took more than that to win him over.
‘It’s out of my claws,’ he said. ‘If I went around helping every dead person, I’d never have time to live for myself. It’s impossible. I won’t be conned into it.’
‘Okay,’ said the boy, this Todd Trebuchet, hanging his head.
‘Good,’ said the raven, and he nodded. ‘Good. Well, I’d best be off then. Got things to attend to. Don’t go walking through walls or anything like that. It gives me a dreadful fright.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy. He didn’t raise his head.
The raven relented, just a little bit. ‘And stay away from those pigeons that hang about here,’ he warned. ‘They’ll give you an earache. And their personal hygiene is appalling.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy, but he seemed to have forgotten about the raven already.
The raven knew a thing or two about birds that hung about when they weren’t wanted. He located the closest gust of wind and veered away to his belltower, admiring his shadow on the ground below.
It was a bit peculiar, though. He didn’t know why he’d said that about the pigeons. It was almost like warning the boy, giving him a friendly heads-up. The raven didn’t usually bother with those sorts of feelings – empathy, consideration, concern. Nobody ever showed them to the raven. So he didn’t see why he should show them to anyone else.