D - The Remorse of Matter

Dan (which was short for Danbert, not Daniel - this becomes
important later on) lived on a caravan park in Truro and had a hatred
of ravens that bordered on pathological. Ravens are members of the crow
family, which is ironic in a way because Dan was a member of the Crow
family. Dan Crow, Danbert Nathaniel Crow. That was his name. Rooks are
members of the crow family, too, but when they reach adulthood they
lose the feathers at the base of their bills, leaving a patch of naked
grey-white skin. Blackbirds aren't. The common blackbird in England is
a member of the thrush family. Crows are naturally gregarious birds,
which - given Dan's pronounced social deficiencies - provided
additional counterpoint, but Dan didn't know that crows were
gregarious, or what gregarious meant; he couldn't even tell ravens from
rooks. In retrospect, it would be more accurate to say that Dan had a
hatred of crows, but he called them all ravens, regardless of
genus.

Dan's uncle that he didn't know about had left England as a young man
to go travelling and ended up in Guerrero State, Mexico, working on a
coffee plantation just north of Acapulco de Ju?rez. At night he hit the
casinos and helped stash coke inside crates of sugar cane. He shot two
men and the weighted bodies got dumped out in the rush and drag of the
Pacific. He lost a lot of money at craps and blackjack, and port
officials started demanding ever larger bribes to look the other way.
Feeling the pressure, his back against the wall, he offset the mounting
stress with blow, quit sleeping, didn't eat too much either. He grew a
little skittish. Eventually he developed full-blown delusional
parasitosis. Convinced he was infested with shiny black beetles, he sat
in the front room of an apartment that belonged to a guy called Miguel,
scraping and clawing at his chest and back and forearms. He could feel
them crawling about under his skin, could feel eggs hatching and pupae
writhing. As the setting sun swooned to traffic light red, voices
bleeding through the warm Latin night, he tore his clothes from his
body, doused them in petrol and set them on fire in the sink. His arms,
also spattered with petrol, caught alight in the process, as did the
mould-fringed cupboards above the sink and ultimately, the entire
apartment. Miguel returned from buying a quart of bourbon and a couple
of cartons of cigarettes to find his home a smouldering husk, albeit
one purged of insects. Carumba.

There was a tinny white plastic radio in the caf? where Dan worked, up
on the shelf next to the chip forks and the pickled onions, and
whenever Going Loco Down in Acapulco came on - which wasn't often - he
had no reaction at all, because he had never been told about his uncle.
That day, an afternoon early in summer it was, he was working with a
guy called John, surname Hammond. A different John Hammond signed the
Four Tops - Renaldo Benson, Lawrence Payton, Levi Stubbs and Abdul
Fakir - to Columbia in 1960, where they recorded Ain't That Love. It
was a flop. In the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors, Levi Stubbs
provided the voice for Audrey II. Caf? John was wearing a black T-shirt
with 'FEEEEED ME SEYMOUR!' emblazoned across the front above a
multi-tendriled man-eating plant. Dan had watched Little Shop of
Horrors on ITV two days earlier. He looked a bit like Rick Moranis, but
with shorter hair. There was a little shop next door to the caf?, but
it sold newspapers and sweets, and the biggest plant in it was a
parched fern.

Two days earlier, the day that Dan had watched Little Shop of Horrors
on ITV, before he had left the caf?, a woman with lavender-rimmed
spectacles and wrinkled, pouting lips had come in and complained about
the misuse of apostrophes in the menu. The caf? was all turquoise
wipe-clean tiles inside, the menu written in black magic marker on a
piece of glossy card blu-tacked to the wall.

"Who wrote that menu?"

Dan, glances at menu, then: "Uhh&;#8230;"

"Who wrote it? D'you know?"

"I think it was the other guy who works here."

Pause. "He's not here today."

"Where is he?"

"It's his day off&;#8230; I think he's up his Nan's."

"Well, you tell him," squints at menu over spectacles, frowns, "look at
that. Didn't you go to school?" Dan looks puzzled. "Did you go to
school?"

"Yeah."

Pointing at menu: "What's that?"

Pause. "I don't know."

"What's that?"

"The menu."

"No, look. Chip's - 80p? Chip's? Who's Chip?"

"They're 80p."

"Chip's what? Is it his 80p?"

Pause. "They're 80p. It's just chips."

"Are you listening to me? There's no apostrophe." Dan's mouth all glued
shut. On the radio, the Four Tops sing Going Loco Down in Acapulco.
"What's the matter? Is your mouth glued shut? It's a plural. There's no
apostrophe. What's this? Extra bean's - 50p? Mushy pea's - 65p?
Well?"

"Sorry."

"Are you going to change it?"

Looks at menu. "Yeah."

"Well, go on then."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I haven't got a pen."

"Well, you can't just leave it there like that, full of errors. That
won't do your business any good, will it?"

"I'll make a new one later."

"Why not now?" Dan responds with dazed, bovine gaze. "Honestly."

The woman had left, looking piqued at the insolent indolent boy behind
the counter. Dan hadn't bothered to take the menu down, but every time
he saw it he felt sad because he knew it was wrong. John hadn't written
the menu. Dan had done it. He had been proud, but after the lavender
glasses woman harangued him, he didn't like it anymore.

"D'you know what my little niece said to me this morning?" There was a
girl, about seventeen, who came in every day around half twelve and got
a Mars bar, a can of Pepsi and some chip's. Her name was Lucy. Lucy had
broken piano key teeth and grinned a lot to show them off. John was
serving her. Dan was wiping down Formica tabletops and fantasising
about killing ravens.

"What's that?" asked John, smiling. He was twenty-six, two years older
than Dan, and had his ear pierced.

"She told me to fuck off." John handed her a can of Pepsi from the
fridge. "She come into my room and told me to fuck off."

"How old is she?"

"Two. I couldn't believe it. It was about eight-thirty and I was in
bed, and she come in my room and I said get out, and she said fuck off.
I couldn't believe it. I said who taught you that? She said I heard my
Daddy saying it. I said you go wash your mouth out." Lucy giggled and
grinned. "I locked her in the cupboard. She was crying and crying but I
don't care. I said it serves you right for swearing."

"Too right," said John. The till ka-chinged and coins shunked. He
magpied Lucy's change out of the black compartments.

"She was saying I won't do it again and I said I'll tell your Mummy if
you do. In the end I let her out and give her a Snickers."

"You've got to smack 'em just there," said John, leaning over the
counter, raising the flat of his hand and gently lowering it into the
nape of Lucy's neck. "Like karate chop 'em right there." He slowly
demonstrated a second time, then stood back. "It doesn't leave a mark,
but it'll put 'em to the floor. That's how you hit women."

Dan had never killed a raven, though he'd tried. He owned a .177
break-barrel air rifle and a Black Widow catapult he bought from an
army surplus store. In a field up on the hill you could see the rush
and drag of the Atlantic. The day was overcast. Dan had parked his red
Citroen in a muddy lay-by next to the gate. He took a round-head shovel
and a Eurohike rucksack from the boot, slung the rucksack over his
shoulder. Holding it with the handle planted in his right armpit, he
tramped into the field, pretending he'd twisted his ankle and using it
like a crutch. It wasn't a very good crutch. The head kept sinking into
the soft earth, and he'd have to suspend the act while he tugged it
out. He had big, flat pieces of hardboard and rolls of bin-liners in
the boot, too.

The hedgerow was dense and sprawling, fringed with a knotty skein of
brambles. A twisting oak burst from its centre, throwing out leaves and
branches in all directions, as if fumbling for balance. Both tree and
hedge were replete, fairly pregnant with ravens. Dan stood ten, maybe
twelve yards back, fists on hips. Quietly, he regarded the chittering
community, drawing air in through his nostrils, releasing it through
clenched wet teeth.

He dropped the shovel. It landed in the grass with a thump. He emptied
out the rucksack next to it; a small wooden mallet, a pair of gardening
gloves, some tent pegs, a measuring tape and a ball of string. Lowering
himself onto his knees, he picked up the mallet and began tapping the
first of the tent pegs into the ground. The wind picked up around him
as he worked.

Once, when cleaning up after the sign on the door had been flipped from
Open to Closed, Dan found a book under one of the seats. It was a
hardback, light blue. The dust jacket was missing and the spine was
cracked and worn. Dan cradled it in his left hand and let the pages
fall open. He flicked through a couple, just frowning, not really
taking anything in. He stopped and tried to read a whole paragraph,
running the tip of his index finger along the lines. The typeface was
small and the page had a yellow stain on it. The paragraph he picked
went:

'Heat and light are the remorse of matter. When we are in a state of
self-remembering, elements in our body experience remorse, not a
feeling of inferiority but a kind of sorrow for what we are, combined
with aspiration, and a light dawns on us; we can observe something in
ourselves that had been hidden in darkness.'

"What's that?" said John, emerging from the stock room with a rustling
armful of McCoys. Dan snapped the book shut.

"Dunno. It was under the chair." He took it over to the counter and
stuck it in the drawer under the till, with the biros, rubber bands,
and sticky labels. No one ever came to collect it.

Dan used the tent pegs and mason's string to mark out a trench four
yards long and four feet two inches wide that ran parallel to the
hedgerow. He put on the gardening gloves, picked up the shovel and
started digging immediately, peeling back the turf and tossing it into
a heap. It was about four in the afternoon. Some of the ravens swooped
and circled overhead. Dan hadn't brought his air rifle or his catapult,
so he lowered his head and dug faster.

The soil was gritty and had a lot of stones in. The tip of the shovel
kept clanking against rock. Sometimes Dan had to kneel down and scoop
them out by hand, while cement clouds mulled overhead. For about
fifteen minutes, it drizzled, patterning his pale yellow polo shirt
with dark blotches. The rain was welcome, sustaining. When he drove the
shovel into the earth it sheared through a blanched coke can.
Around eight, it started to get dark. He fetched a fat half-million
candlepower torch from the boot and kept digging. He grimaced as he
shovelled. His brow bled perspiration. He worked, worked, worked.

"You know," the man wore a thick woollen jumper he had been sick down,
"they used to think the world was flat but now theyth,
theyth&;#8230;" He coughed, snorted, listed with head askance and
forced out an oily expectoration onto the pavement. "They think,"
looking back up at Dan, "that it's round. And they think that the sun's
hot. Theyth, they think it's a big ball of fire, a big roasting ball."
He made the shape of a ball with his blackened hands. "In
fact&;#8230; in fact it's as cold as ice. There's no heat at all,
and all the light comes from inside us." A bottle of Merrydown cider
two-thirds imbibed lay angled against his left thigh, more down than
merry with its label torn and contents regurgitated.

Dan had seen the man around but did not know his name. He had a beard
and made your stomach clench when you saw him, because he had forgone
the rules. Dan turned away. Little Shop of Horrors was going to be on
ITV. He had seen it before but not for a while. He knew Steve Martin
was in it, but he had forgotten that Bill Murray appeared as Denton.
Incidentally, the drunken man's last name was Rook.

It was late, and Dan was digging, digging. He'd left the torch angled
towards him, switched on. The pain in his back had built to the point
where he thought it would be easier to go on than to straighten up. His
spine felt like it was hardening. Heat had entered his delts and traps
and flared until it scalded, burgeoned until it chilled like an arctic
gale. The work gnawed at him, gnawed at him, through sinew, cartilage,
bone, right through to the marrow. On he pushed. In his mind's eye he
knew such pictures, such pin-sharp vivid scenes. They soothed him,
tempered the darkness with their glow. The pointed tip and crimped
waist of a .177 Webley pellet striking the perched profile of a raven.
Phumph through the eye and the skull splintered ruins, phumph into the
swollen black-plumed chest and punctured lungs and wishbone snapped,
guts leaking viscous claret. Dan stamping on the twitching carcass,
grinding it into the hot road with the heel of his walking boot. Dan
clutching a struggling, quivering bird, holding it, waiting, waiting,
then twisting the head off its body, gripping each four-pronged foot
between index and middle finger and yanking it off.

It was the ravens making him do this. He could keep going because when
he was done he would kneel in his trench with camo netting draped over
his head and the muzzle of his air rifle pointing straight up at the
tree, straight into their sordid croaking nests, and squeeze the
trigger pfft, clack open the barrel, thumb another pellet it, clack it
shut, pfft, clack open, clack shut, pfft, clack, clack, pfft,
clack-clack-pfft, clack-clack-pfft, clack-clack-pfft and all the
fucking ravens in the fucking world fluttering flailing dead one after
another, waawk-thump, waawk-thump, waawk-thump. Dan was salivating. His
eyes flashed, his tongue snicker-snapped about his teeth and, briefly,
his pace quickened.

He saw the heaving dark morass of corpses with its bluish metallic
sheen, dripping from the maws of JCBs and 'dozers, being tipped
bump-rattle into roaring furnaces. It was the ravens the fucking ravens
making him do this. He was doing this for the ravens. He was doing this
for the ravens. Digging, digging, digging, a wraith clawing desperately
at the ground, locked in a race with the fleeting night.

* * *

When the sun rose, it settled first in beads of dew clasping grass
blades, and the rheumy sphere of a dead hare's eye. The creature lay
prone, ears splayed, fur patterned with mange. Female mites had
burrowed tunnels into the hare's skin, laying clusters of eggs before
dying. The newly hatched young sucked blood and lymph from the host,
secreting poison as they did so. The inflamed portions of skin had
become infected and in the early hours of the morning, the hare had
finally succumbed. In the last it had simply lain there, blinking, as
its respiration shuddered to a mucus-clogged halt.

In the shadow of a half-dug grave, Danbert - not Daniel - Nathaniel
Crow lay gazing upwards towards a sky that was not quite blue. His
breaths were shallow, and he could not move. He supposed that, after a
time, the feeling might return to his legs. He supposed that, if it did
not, then after a time a stranger might happen across the unfinished
trench and discover him. Lying there, on his back, the shovel crossways
atop his chest, Dan watched clouds through half-lidded eyes, and
beneath his nose there grew a gentle smile. The trench shielded him
from heat and light. Far above, a raven croaked and wheeled. Dan
saw.

Dan saw and felt love.