Raven Summer

  Max doesn’t deny it. He stands up and heads off home.

  I go into the house, into the kitchen with STUPID still scrawled on me. Dad’s there with a coffee in his hand. He’s staring out into the fields.

  He jumps like I’ve woken him up.

  “Imprinting!” he says.

  “What?”

  “There’s this thing called imprinting. You can do it with lots of birds. But the raven’s best of all. You get an egg just before it hatches. You make sure you’re right there when it hatches. You make sure you’re the first living creature the young bird sees. You stay with it. You give it its first food. And it attaches itself to you. It falls in love with you. It thinks you’re its mother, its father. And it’ll be yours forever. It’ll follow you anywhere.”

  His eyes are wide and shining.

  “So …?” I say.

  “So don’t you see? Maybe the raven that took you to the baby had been imprinted. Maybe it was following someone, not leading you at all.”

  “Someone? The walker with the red hat, you mean.”

  “That’s it! Maybe it was the walker with the red hat that was really leading you.”

  I stare at him. Could it be true?

  “And yes!” he says. “Yes! Maybe the walker with the red hat was the mother! You said it was maybe a woman. She didn’t want to show you herself where the baby was. She wanted her raven to lead you there and then she ran off!”

  Could it be true?

  “So where is she now?” I say.

  “Dunno.”

  “And who’s the father?”

  “Dunno. Some barmy Northumbrian farmer. Something like that.”

  He stares into space, then at me.

  “What’s that?” he suddenly says.

  He’s pointing at my chest. I look down at the word in blood.

  “Blood,” I say.

  “Your blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whole books have been written about it, Liam,” he says. “In the past, lots of old country folk had imprinted ravens of their own.”

  I think back to the walk through the village. I see the raven, I see the walker with the red hat. Could it be true?

  “It seems like magic, but it’s absolutely natural. It’s like what we’re doing with Alison. We feed her, we look after her. She behaves as if we’re her parents and we behave as if we’re her parents, but we’re not.”

  He stares again, like he’s trying to work it all out.

  “So are you writing about it?” I say.

  He laughs, then he purses his lips.

  “Maybe,” he says. “You know I can’t talk about a story I’m in the middle of.”

  He punches the air.

  “Imprinting!” he says. “It’s so obvious. The woman with the red hat was the mother. The father’s a daft old farmer.” He grins. “What a story!”

  Mum comes in as we’re standing there. She has the baby in her arms.

  Dad goes up close. He widens his eyes and leans right down over the baby’s face.

  “Hello, little lovely,” he says. “I am your father. You are my child.”

  He kisses her, then he leaves.

  “Yes!” he says as he climbs the stairs. “That’s the answer!”

  “What’s the answer?” says Mum.

  I shake my head.

  She points at my chest.

  “And much more interestingly, what’s that?”

  “Blood,” I say.

  She gets her camera out.

  2

  Mum frames the weirdest-looking photographs and takes them to her gallery. They love them, they say they’re things of beauty. They hang them up for sale. We all go to see them, and it’s so strange, looking at bits of myself hanging up in public view. Mum’s simply called them Landscape 1, Landscape 2, etc.; and they don’t look human at all. A couple of them have already been sold. Soon we’ll be hanging in strangers’ houses, weird and nameless and unrecognizable.

  She photographs more and more. She photographs Alison’s perfect skin. She takes Alison out in her buggy along the tracks and across the fields. Photographs cracked bark and cracked earth and sluggishly flowing water. Grasses and fungi. Dead moles hanging in a line on a fence. A pair of magpies strangled with wire. A rabbit with its throat ripped out. Three dried-out toads nailed to an oak tree. She photographs the living things and the dead things and the things that have never lived at all. She photographs the huge wild landscapes of Northumberland, the strange curved patterns of the rock art. The Roman Wall, the fortified farmhouses, the castles and bastles and peel towers and watchtowers, all the remnants of ancient vicious wars. The battlefields at Heavenfield and Flodden Field, where the grass blows in the breeze and tourists ramble and crops grow and sheep graze above hundreds upon hundreds of the dead. The beautiful vicious jets streak over her and through many of her pictures.

  We watch the news about Iraq and the absence of news about Greg Armstrong. Bodies are stretchered away from bombed-out marketplaces, hauled out of devastated buses. Screaming parents carry their butchered children. They lift them into blankets and baskets. Men and women scrabble at bloodstained rubble in search of their loved ones beneath. Dad yells at the screen. Get the troops out! Blair! Bush! Suicide bombers! Terrorists! He thumps the air in frustration. They’re all savages! They’re all the bloody same!

  Mum cries as she watches. She says, Yes they are all the same. All of them are people, just like us. She says it’s happened always and everywhere. She says it happened here in the times of the border wars and the sheep raids, in the moors and fields and castles that bring the ramblers and the tourist coaches. Here was a place of terror and slaughter and death. And it could happen again if the circumstances are right, if the savages among us are let loose. There are savages everywhere, waiting their chance.

  “We have to nurture the parts of us that aren’t savage,” she says. “We have to help the angel in us overcome the beast.”

  She holds Alison close and says that every body is like a baby’s body, no matter how grown-up the person seems to be or tries to be. The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. She hugs me and she hugs the baby. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important. She takes us out into the fields and lanes. The trees are turning, birds are leaving, the days are shortening, darkening. She says that the tiniest corner of the countryside can stand for the whole world, no matter how peaceful and how isolated it might seem to be. It is gorgeous and strange and terrible and filled with throbbing life and awful death all at once. She goes to Rook Hall again and again. She photographs its walls, its rubble. There’s a notice attached to the hall now. It’s headed ABANDONED CHILD. There’s a true photograph of Alison, and details of her discovery. There’s a telephone number. Anyone with information should call it. Mum turns over stones, seeking for clues. She stands dead still, as if there might somehow be an answer to the mysteries in the atmosphere and air. Alison sits in the buggy and watches the flitting birds and gurgles and giggles with delight.

  3

  Mum says we should have Alison christened.

  “You’re joking!” says Dad.

  It’s dark outside. The baby’s asleep upstairs. Dad’s scribbling in a notebook.

  “It’s mumbo jumbo,” he says. “And when was the last time you stepped foot in a church?”

  “At your dad’s funeral, but what’s that got to do with it?”

  Dad slaps his notebook shut.

  “Do you know what christening’s about? It’s about saying that little kids like Alison are born with sin and evil in them. It’s about washing away the evil in their souls. Now, tell me this: do you believe that Alison was born with evil in her?”

  Mum shrugs. She sips her wine. Dad continues.

  “And it’s also about dedicating her life to God. Now, it’ll come as a sur
prise to me if you believe in any God at all. So you’d be dedicating an innocent little child to a nonexistent phantom. And if I’m not mistaken, we didn’t get him christened, did we?”

  He points at me.

  “And do you feel evil?” he asks me. “Do you feel like your sins haven’t been washed away?”

  I laugh.

  “I feel like a perfect little angel, Daddy.”

  “Oh, aye?” he says.

  “I know all that,” says Mum. “But it’s also about marking her arrival in the world. It’s about welcoming her here.”

  “And for all we know,” says Dad, “she might already be christened. She might be a Buddhist or a Moslem or a Seventh-Day blooming Adventist or a Tenth-Day Birk or some other wacky mumbo-jumbo sectist.”

  Mum sips her wine.

  “How can she be anything?” she says. “She’s just a little girl, and I think we should say, Welcome to our world.”

  Dad groans, shakes his head, heads upstairs.

  “Have you seen how big his bum’s getting?” she says.

  She giggles.

  “It’s a writer’s hazard. He’s hardly moved for weeks. So what do you think about the christening?”

  I shrug.

  “Don’t really care,” I say.

  “I’ll go and see the vicar tomorrow, then. Any idea what his name is?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  She peers at me.

  “We could get you done at the same time, if you like,” she says.

  “No thanks. I’ll just stay evil.”

  4

  It happens at St. Michael and All Angels. The little chapel is in a field on a ridge above the village. It’s a Sunday afternoon. You can see for miles, all the pastures and empty moors of Northumberland stretching north. A few farmhouses. The scattered villages—Chilton, Wark, Bellington, Otterburn. The castles—Highton, Swinburn, Simonhope, Chase—tucked away in valleys and copses. The ruins of Rook Hall, and a dozen other ruins crumbling into the earth. The wilderness of moorland to the north, the dark bulges of the Cheviots far off, the limits of vision before Scotland starts. Sheep lie dozing in the little graveyard. Rooks caw. Motorbikes roar on the military road. A train clatters and hoots down in the Tyne Valley. The low-flying jets, again and again and again.

  Joe Tynan comes with a camera crew from ITV. Friends from the village and from Newcastle are there. Max and his big family are there. Jack Scott and his crowd are there. Social workers. WPC Jenkins and PC Ball, without their bulletproof vests this time. Doreen the paramedic. How could they not come? they all say. They couldn’t stay away. And here come Phil and Phil, and Crystal and Oliver. They laugh and cluster about us and lean close to Alison and they bill and coo and smile and smile.

  Crystal’s hair is gelled into loops and curls. Her green eyes shine in her face that’s caked with white makeup. She’s wearing safety pins in her ears, woven multicolored elastic bands around her neck.

  “I knew we’d meet again,” she says. “It’s the baby. She’s the link. And it’s all just fate. Do you believe in fate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes things are meant to happen. You were meant to find the baby. The baby was meant to lead you to me and to Oliver. What happens next is meant to happen.”

  She laughs.

  “Or maybe it’s all just nonsense. And nothing’s meant at all. And things happen just because they happen. Can I write to you?”

  “Write to me?”

  “Just e-mails. Just to keep in touch.”

  She scribbles an e-mail address on a piece of card and gives it to me.

  “We’re one family,” says the vicar when the service starts. “We’re drawn together by a child who was abandoned, who was lost. But she’s also any baby, every baby. She’s every single one of us.” He glances shyly at Dad. “I will, if I may, quote the poet William Blake.” Dad groans quietly. The vicar recites:

  “Into the dangerous world I leapt,

  Helpless, naked, piping loud.”

  He pauses.

  “Isn’t that all of us,” he says. “Into the dangerous world we leap. All of us are waifs and foundlings. And all of us need love. Love, and family, and trust in God.”

  Dad groans. The vicar lowers his voice.

  “Do I dare,” he whispers, “make the connection between this child and Jesus in his manger?”

  “Please, no,” breathes Dad.

  The vicar opens the service book.

  “Perhaps not,” he says. “But I leave the thought to linger. Now, let us welcome this precious child into our world.”

  We take the baby to the font. The vicar pours water on her. He drives all evil out. Mum’s friend Sue is godmother. Dad’s agent, Nick Stone, is godfather. We all promise to protect her, to bring her up in faith, to resist the devil and all his works.

  Our hymns echo off the walls and out into the surrounding spaces.

  Jesus bids us shine

  In a pure clear light

  Like a little candle

  Burning in the night.

  In this world of darkness

  We must shine,

  You in your small corner,

  And I in mine.

  5

  Afterwards there’s a party in the house and the garden. Dad sits on a garden bench with Nick Stone drinking whisky. I stand and listen. Dad’s telling Nick about imprinting, about ravens. He says imprinting must happen with humans, too. The very first seconds of life must be crucial to all of us. So where does that leave foster parents? Is it too late for imprinting, even when the child is still a baby? And what about older kids, like the lad from Liberia?

  “So are you writing about this?” says Nick.

  “Kind of,” says Dad. He laughs. “I’m writing about a barmy farmer and a country lass and their secret child. Oh, and their raven.” He winks at me. “Liam understands, don’t you, son?”

  “Do I?” I say.

  “But what about the book you were writing?” says Nick.

  “I’ll go back to it,” says Dad.

  “But what about your schedule?”

  Dad shrugs.

  “I’ll get back to it,” he says.

  Nick sighs.

  “And another thing,” says Dad. “What happens if your first parents are taken away and replaced by a monster? Will you love the monster and follow the monster? And can you get back to the first imprinting?” He ponders. “But that’s probably a different story.”

  “So you’re writing two books?”

  “Or maybe three.”

  “You got a title?” says Nick.

  “Nope.”

  Nick sighs, smiles at me, swigs his whisky. I move on.

  Mum passes the baby from one guest to the other. They bill and coo and say how beautiful she is and what a treasure she is. Mum takes visitors to see her paintings and photographs. I see her whispering in a corridor with Jack Scott. He’s in jeans, a red shirt, his hair’s short and sharp. She laughs with him, low and soft. I turn away just as they’re about to kiss.

  Phil and Phil have both lost weight. Philip drinks white wine and nibbles carrots and celery sticks.

  “I’m a changed man,” he announces. “Just had me whatdeyecallit and I’m fit as a lop!”

  “Your ECG,” says Philomena.

  “And soon we’re off to California,” says Phil.

  “California?” says Mum.

  “Aye. It’s what we’ve always wanted: San Francisco, San Diego, Sacrawhatdeyecallit.”

  “Sacramento,” says Philomena.

  “Aye. Not yet, they say. But we’ll be gone soon. Straight to San Fran. Then the Chevy all the way down Highway One.”

  At dusk I go down the garden with Max and Oliver and Crystal. The tent’s there, by the fire pit.

  “We sleep out in it,” I say.

  Crystal runs her fingers across the canvas. She says it’s beautiful. She laughs.

  “You’re a dreamer, aren’t you,” she says. “You’re a wild boy
, Liam.”

  We light a fire in the fire pit and sit by it on logs and stones. Soon there’s a gap of darkness between the party and us.

  Oliver’s in a new foster home now. So’s Crystal. They see each other at weekends. They sit together, lean against each other. Oliver puts his arm around her.

  “This is a strange land,” says Oliver. “When I thought of England, the pictures in my head were of Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Bath, the fields of Kent. Not this space, not all these empty places.”

  An owl screeches somewhere close by. A few bats are out, flickering through the limits of the firelight—late flights before they go back into hibernation. Crystal hums a tune as she leans against him. She leans forward to stir the fire with a stick.

  “They’ve said they think he’ll be safe,” she says.

  “In Liberia?” I say.

  “Aye, in Liberia.”

  “I will die,” says Oliver. “I will be slaughtered.”

  “Slaughtered?” says Max.

  “Like a beast. Like my mother, my father, like my sisters, my brothers.”

  Crystal stirs the fire again. The sparks rise and dance. The fire simmers, crackles, creaks.

  “Some stories are beyond belief,” she says. “But they’re the truest and oldest stories of them all. Tell them, Ollie.”

  He pauses. He collects his thoughts.

  “They came one morning,” says Oliver. “A troupe of them with rifles and axes and clubs.” He waves away the sparks that rise. He sighs. “Some of them were children, just like me, children with weapons in their fists, children with murder in their eyes. Can you believe that?”

  He pauses. He waits.

  “Can you?” says Crystal.

  Her eyes glitter in the firelight and her hair and her face glow.

  “You have to believe it,” she says. “Any one of us could be a murderer if they got us early enough. The murderer in all of us is just below the skin.”

  Max sighs.

  “Who’s they?” he says.

  “They,” says Crystal, “are the beasts of the world. They are the ones that were turned into beasts by the beasts that went before.”