Wakening the Crow Read Free

her new life and my new life since it had happened, I felt a stabbing of guilt. No, a gnawing, as if the blame I’d attached to myself was eating me, like a cancer deep inside my belly. So yes, I’d deliberately ignored my daughter, when she’d tumbled tearfully out of the library van. But then – PTO 725G, and 3.17 – something chemical in my brain, when I witnessed the accident through my window, had made me imprint the car’s registration number on my memory, made me glance for a millisecond at the clock and log the exact time... some extraordinary instinct for self-preservation which made me think that, by noting these details, I’d be accounted responsible and cool-headed and my momentary negligence might be overlooked.
    I’d run outside. People were running out of the Co-op. The landlord hurried out of his pub. I knelt next to Chloe and turned her gently onto her side. She was unconscious. A little breath bubbled from her mouth. There was a gush of blood from her right nostril.
    An ambulance was there in no time, and the paramedics had Chloe and me inside it and racing out of the village minutes later. They were reassuring, I’d described what had happened: no, she hadn’t been knocked down by a car, she’d been struck by the wing-mirror of a car going no more than ten or maybe twenty miles per hour... and they said she might be alright, she’d had a bang on the back of the head and no other injuries. We sped out of Breaston village. With the siren wailing and the blue lights flashing, we barely paused for any other traffic, only a momentary hold-up in Long Eaton, for a back-up of cars and police and some kind of incident outside the gates of Derwent College. I’d called ahead to Rosie. She was waiting at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham when we arrived at the entrance to A & E.
    ‘Oh god... where’s her shirt?’ Rosie’s first question as we marched down the corridors of the hospital on either side of the child’s trolley.
    ‘In the library van,’ I answered.
    ‘Where’s the library van?’
    ‘In Breaston. That’s where it happened. She got stung by a wasp and she...’
    ‘A wasp? She got stung by a wasp? Oh god...’
    It didn’t take long for a nice Indian doctor to examine Chloe and get her into X-ray. He too was reassuring, suggesting she was concussed, she was young and strong and if the X-ray was alright she’d wake up with a cracking headache and in the next few days she’d have the most amazing black eyes we’d ever seen, like a panda. A young policeman took me into an interview room. I recounted everything in the most meticulous detail and he wrote it all down in his note-books. Rosie was there too, interjecting, her interrogation more fierce and accusing than his.
    A wasp? So if Chloe took off her shirt and she was upset, why did I let her just run out of the van? Didn’t I try to comfort her, take a look at the sting, put something on it? Why didn’t I take her across to the Co-op and get some kind of ointment or cream to put on the sting? Why did I let her just run out of the van, without her shirt on, into the road, by the pub carpark, with a couple of drunks coming out and not even stopping, the bastard hit-and-run drunk drivers...?
    The policeman put his hand on her arm. He made shushing noises. He’d noted how vigilant I must have been, he was impressed by the exactness of my statement, he was sure her husband had been perfectly attentive. Yes, there’d been an accident, but fortunately the impact had been relatively slight and...
    She swatted his hand off her arm, as defensive as Chloe had been with the wasp. She was asking him if they’d got the car and the hit-and-run drivers I’d described so precisely, when another policeman opened the door. With an upward jerk of his head, a flash of anxious eyes in my direction, he beckoned his young colleague to come outside.
    We followed. We pushed past the police, who’d gathered into a tight knot so they could talk