Wakening the Crow Read Free Page A

into their walkie-talkies, we pressed ourselves to the walls of the corridor as another emergency came in and two more trolleys hurtled by, the dead-or-alive casualties of another momentary carelessness... and we hurried back to the doctor, who, as he’d predicted, had the good news that Chloe had suffered no real damage to her skull, she was badly concussed and would very likely be fine in a matter of days.
    So. Overwhelmed by relief, we sat with Chloe in an observation ward and she lay there as though blissfully asleep. The nurses had cleaned the blood from her nose, and Rosie had bathed her daughter’s forehead with a cool cloth and brushed her lovely blonde hair. Outside our room, where the three of us were swaddled in a cotton-wool world of thankfulness and exhausted anxiety, the business of A & E went on. There was a flurry of activity, the arrival of yet another ambulance and trolleys rattling past our door, the drama of life and death barely inches from where we were sitting. We didn’t really care. We were safe. Chloe was safe.
    ‘Hey, wake up now. We’re here.’
    Now, nine months later, I was on the bus with Chloe. She’d fallen asleep, all her weight slumped against me, in a fuddle of warmth and weariness after a day out in the bitter January cold. She groaned and wriggled and opened her eyes. When she looked up and straight away her face formed her new Chloe smile, all sweetness and fragile innocence since the day of her accident, for a moment I thought she was going to speak. She opened her lips, she fixed me with her level, penetrating stare, and for an unnerving split-second I braced myself for what she might say. But she didn’t speak. I felt a shudder of guilty relief. As the bus slowed and stopped, I helped her to her feet with her bobble-hat stuck on top of her head and we jumped down onto the pavement.
     
     
    D ERWENT C OLLEGE, THE massive stone pillars of its gate, on the Derby Road, in Long Eaton. We had a short walk to our new home, to the church at the top of Shakespeare Street.
    Chloe was wide-awake again. After the cosiness of the bus, we were both jolted awake by the shock of the cold, still freezing and promising another night of the hardest frost. It was pitchy-dark, and yet only five in the afternoon, and the road was busy with a never-pausing, never-slowing line of traffic coming out of town.
    ‘Hey Chloe, let’s go...’ I took hold of Chloe’s hand and tried to tug her away from the bus-stop, along the slippery pavement. She resisted. ‘Hey let’s go, we’re going to freeze out here... what you got?’
    She was bending to the hedgerow, a wiry wall of holly and privet up to the very pillars of the college gate. Darkness and light, the deadliness of January and the orange and yellow and spangling headlamps of the passing cars... the beams of the traffic caught a glitter of reflections, like jewels, in the bottom of the holly hedge.
    ‘Pretty,’ I said, ‘is it frozen, is it ice?’ And to humour her, to allow her one more special, little girl’s moment to add to all the special moments of our day-out, we bent together to see the treasure she had discovered.
    Broken glass. One of the students, returning to his digs after an illicit evening in town, must’ve dropped a beer bottle and kicked it into the hedgerow. No, it was clear glass, fragments of a shattered windscreen, crazed into angles and facets and diamond brightness. A council workman, too lazy to sweep it up and into a bin, had shovelled it out of sight, back in the summer when the holly was dense. And the black plastic splinters of a car’s number plate. An accident, back in the springtime...
    ‘Careful, Chloe... no...’
    But before I could stop her, she reached into the glass and grasped it in her hand. She held the jewels on her open palm, stared at them in wonder, and then squeezed them so hard that prickles of blood stood out on her skin.
    I knew what it was. Chloe couldn’t have known. She squeezed again,