My fiction

THE CROW MESSIAH    

10.12.24

A short story in ‘The Zoo universe’

This short story is set in the world first established in the novel: ‘The Zoo: The Beast, The Boy and The Zoo (The Zoo Trilogy)’  Available from Amazon, Amazon UK and all Amazon markets around the world,

For John

THE CROW MESSIAH

I wish I had never come to know that I am a Jackdaw. I wish as well that I didn’t know that she was one either. None of that makes me happy.

If you go right back to the beginning, I didn’t even used to know I was anything at all. I didn’t even know there was an ‘I’, nor a ‘she’ for she and I to be anything in the first place.

And I think I was probably happy back then.  

But no…

Let me think. Let me cock my head on one side just for a moment and work it out. No, that doesn’t really make sense, does it..?

If there wasn’t an ‘I’ to be happy, then how could ‘I’ have been happy..?

Oh dear, I am getting all tangled up again by words again. Those bloody things!  See how my wings are flapping up and down, all by themselves? That happens a lot to me these days. It is as if this language thing we have been given, it is as if it wasn’t put together properly at all. Not properly for us Jackdaws at any rate. All that talking and hearing and thinking and chattering that the Humans do.  

And ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘we’. All the pronouns. You have to be really careful with pronouns.

The ideas, but even better the feelings, buzzing away inside your head?  Now there is a thing – they can be lovely.  So deep, so worth having, so completely and utterly…‘ jackdawish’.

But words..?

Nah, the words available to get the things in our heads out and across to others, they are quite hopeless sometimes. They are so stiff. When I make a nest I can bend the twigs back and forth. I can change their shape to fit exactly what I need. But that doesn’t seem to work with whatever the awkward stuff that words are made out of. The language thing is fine for day-to-day thoughts. But when I ask it to help with some really interesting feelings and ideas, language splinters and cracks right down the middle.

Useless.

Thank goodness for singing and songs instead. And for our own wonderful, soulful crow song in particular.

I know not everyone agrees that the sound Crows make can be said to be exactly ‘song’?  Well, that is only because they do not know how to listen to us properly.

In the old times I have to say I did quite like eavesdropping on the Humans. Our two types of animal have been tangled up with each other since the dawn of time. We have faced so many of the same problems as we slowly became what we are today, so I suppose it is not surprising we have ended up having a lot in common.

But it was not so much the mumbling that dribbles out of Human mouths that I liked: I preferred watching how their eyes swept back and forward as they chattered on. All those sly, deceiving, quick movements flickering across their little monkey faces. Other things too in the way they moved their bodies   (although god knows they are so slow and cumbersome) which can tell you a lot. For me, that was ‘language’ enough.  Back then, back before everything changed. Back before the Catastrophe.

No, if it had not been for the whole speech business, none of the rest of it would have gone wrong.

How shall I explain it to you?  Where shall I even start?  What shall I say?

Ah, I know…

In the beginning there was the Word.

***

I was in my first year since fledging and had only just properly got my adult plumage when the Great White Raven came. That at least was the name It took amongst the Carrion Crows, the Magpies, the Jays, the Chough, the Rooks, us Jackdaws and all the other tribes of our Crow nation. I know now though that It went under many other names, and that It took all kinds of different shapes when It went amongst the differing animals all across the Zoo.

The Carrion Crows and the Hooded Crows, that stuck-up crowd, they had always gone about as if they alone were the real deal. That they put us in the shade because, they were the real Crows; and the rest of us corvid types – usually smaller,  a little differently coloured, different ways of going about things – well, we were somehow not quite ‘Crow enough’.  

And I have to tell you, they really did not like us Jackdaws!  

Maybe that was because, although the smallest of all Crows, we do like to have good old strut about now and again. That was too much for them to put up with.  We were just too damned full of ourselves.

Well they were right.  

We didn’t really give a damn what the mouldy old Carrions thought of us.

All the same though, looking back, I wish now I had been more careful in showing them what I really thought of them. There was no need to get in their face as badly as I did, and, in the end, it was to cost me. Cost me very dearly indeed.

Anyway, when put next to ‘It’, the Carrion Crows dwindled to nothing at all. They were not so high and mighty when you saw them anywhere near that magnificent, splendid, utterly regal creature, who, on that particular late summer evening, came so gently knocking at our door. 

***

Some of the more switched on Humans, like those here who run the Zoo, have worked out that Crows are a lot cleverer than other birds. That man Lorenz for example – one of their most famous ‘scientists’- who was very curious indeed in what was happening inside our bird brains.

And, unlike our grudge bearing cousins, the Carrions, he had a special fondness for Jackdaws.

But also, I am sorry to say, for… err…swastikas. 

Hmm..?

Do you think maybe he favoured Jackdaws because of our light coloured eyes?  Sometimes they look bright blue. Or it could have something to do with ‘the Jackdaw of Linz’, a nickname for that little corporal who wreaked such mayhem amongst the Humans. 

Now there was someone who knew how to use words.

Humans had occasionally taught pet crows to ‘speak’. But it was not really speaking; just imitating human sounds without any real meaning.

Like those Parrots do.   Actually I had better not get started on Parrots. Supposedly so clever.  Not compared to us Crows, they’re not.  And the way they cosy up to Humans is sickening.

So it was definitely the White Raven who gave us speech, real speech. Who first came along to tell us that without language it was like were hopping along through the world without any feathers on our wings. To be without words was ‘shameful’.  It was shameful as well to bow down before those awful Humans.

As Jackdaws have never really gone in a whole lot for bowing down, that last bit really struck home.  

So you see, when It visited our Crow Village, when it left behind the gift of language standing there and all packaged up for us to unwrap, the Raven was also smuggling something else inside our walls.  Rebellion. Language would make Crow-kind free. Words would make us every bit as powerful as the Humans.

And words would make us rebel.

***

As we heard the Raven’s tapping at our door, my darling mate and I had been putting the very final touches to our nest.  Slaving side by side as a devoted couple and looking forward to raising a fine clutch of sweet little black feathered chicks.  

Lots of lovely springy twigs of just the right lengths, that’s what you need mainly for a good nest. Then some mud, or better still some nice smelly soft dung of one sort or another to hold everything together; a sprinkling of feathers on top to give that artistic touch; and, finally, so our future chicks could be sure of a safe cosy lining, fresh horsehair plucked, as they grazed unconcernedly in their paddock a hundred yards away, straight off the backs of our neighbours, the Wild Asses.

I really do wish everybody would stop being so rude about our Jackdaw nests. 

Always going on and on about how untidy and ‘ramshackle’ they are. Listen, Jackdaws are not bothered about appearances. It may look random to you, to an outsider, but I can tell you there is a very careful design in there. Somewhere. Anyway, our nests are well enough built to protect our eggs and fledglings.  And that is all that matters.

Another thing that annoys me is how Humans look down their noses at the way we get together as male and female.  

Well that is just stupid.  

Our kind – unlike some other cheating creatures I could mention – we mate for life.  And even if things do not work out, with eggs and chicks and the like, we stick together to the bitter end. In fact, let me spell it out for you.  

We Jackdaws…

Fall.

In.

Love.

You think that I am doing that silly thing, what is the word you use….‘anthropomorphising’?  Lazily thinking of an animal as if it were one of you Humans?  

No, no, no.

Not at all. You have got it exactly wrong. It is the other way around. It is you Humans who think that your own mating is something so grand and so special, and that ours by contrast is some kind of ordinary, mechanical ’bestial’ business. 

Look, I have peeked through Human bedroom windows in my time.  I know what you get up to.  All that fumbling and shoving and grunting – you think that is elegant and dignified and romantic?  

Let me paint you a picture of truly graceful lovemaking. First visualise my mate and me.  Now imagine her digging her claws tight down into the branch below us both to bravely support both our weights. Then she tenses up, staring lovingly upwards and hangs on for dear life; while I eagerly clamber up onto her back, flapping my wings desperately to keep my balance, and finally (- after admittedly I do fall off two or three times) we succeed in pressing our two cloacae together.

I waggle my tail just so. I lower body very carefully.  Left. Then right. Then left. Then right again, and….  Ah yes..!

Pop!

Pure rapture.

Now there, come on you must admit, there is a loving performance worthy of applause, combining determination, passion, tenderness and circus skills.

It is you who like to kid yourselves that you are not actually animals, just like the rest of us.   

And if you were to know our kind really well, if you had watched us carefully over time, and yet you still refused tobelieve that Jackdaws can fall in love, well, then I am afraid I would have to conclude that that is probably, my poor friend, because you are incapable of true love yourself.

So there.

She and I definitely fell in love.

But our sense of peace that August evening was rudely broken by the mysterious rapping on the outside of our nest box.  One after the other we squeezed our heads through the nest box hole, our twin beady stares warning any would be nest robber to back off.  

At first glance there was nothing at all to be seen.  

Then, through the gradually failing light, we spied it.

Now that was some Crow. Grim. Ungainly. And as white as snow…

An ordinary black Raven with black eyes is enough to stop you dead in your tracks. A pure white Raven, as big as a bird of prey, with crimson irises glowing in the dusk, that is another level of ghastly altogether.

Ghastly yes, but at same time utterly thrilling. I have to tell you, although always faithful to my mate, in that one moment I could not help but feel a certain ‘tingle’. That was one sexy bird.

The Raven had hopped on from our nest box and, one by one, It had summoned all the other Crows out from their nooks and crannies. And each had, also one by one and without question, obeyed.

Our circle of aviaries, ‘Crow Village’, was just down the hill from the Big House, that strange old building at the centre of the Zoo where the Human family made their home. I had often ached for a closer look. I had bet there were all kinds of intriguing nooks and crannies under its eaves that would make really good nests.  And most tempting of all, the chimneys.

Crow Village is where we hung out during the daytime, when all the Human visitors poured in, when we were ‘on show’.  But in the evening after dark or early morning, that was our real time. We had to stay on our toes around all the other animals and their territories, but otherwise we could roam over the Zoo, free to be ourselves.

The aviaries were built around a large pool of clear blue water in the middle of a green lawn; the grass by late summer grown long and lush and the blades, green and gold waving in the breeze. In the middle an enormous shiny black square of rock jutted straight out of the water.  And there the Raven had perched. Slowly, silently the rest of us Crows flapped down to assemble around the outside of the water in a wide semi-circle; all facing inwards, all waiting for we knew not what.

I am not going to waste too much time trying to describe what happened next.  The truth is I cannot really remember everything; and those bits where I can,  after all this time, when I try to make sense of them, they seem to just slither away from beneath my claws. On top of that, I am not even sure I have the right words, the ones I would need so that you would really understand and really feel what I felt then.

The important thing though is that I make you understand that this talking Jackdaw who is telling his story right here and right now, this is a very different creature indeed to the dumb Jackdaw who, spellbound and motionless, began listening to our Visitor.

I can though remember the beginning where the huge White Raven slowly opened wide that great war-hammer of a beak of hers – or his. It gave a two legged bounce towards us, each of us in turn taking a quick step back.

For what seemed like forever It did nothing at all.

It just stood there.

Then finally It cawed. A single time. The note came deep from Its throat, rich, rotund, like a great bell tolling; a version of the ‘Krack Krack Krack’ that any ordinary Raven would normally use to invite other birds to accompany it in flying upwards.  

But this invitation was not to anything as straightforward as flight.   

Then It cawed a second time. This time the sound did not die away, but merged into a long, low vibration, slowly rippling through the body of every single bird in that great arc. Still it did not stop, but grew louder and louder,  and the reverberation grew ever stronger until at last it became so fierce that at one and the same time it was unbearably painful and unendurably beautiful.     

At the outset what the Raven was doing seemed to us almost like chanting some kind of hymn, a great anthem to all things wild.  But then it was much more as if we being told the most wonderful story ever, a story that we wished would never end.  And finally it seemed more akin to a series of brilliantly coloured pictures one after another exploding into our minds. Visions of the way the world was. And the way it could be. The way it should be. The way the Humans had taken us all for granted for so long. The way in which our role and place in the world had, without anyone asking what we thought about it all, been decided for us a long time ago.

An open hand had been extended; and a finger crooked towards us, coaxing us forward. To come and take our rightful place, to take what the Humans had.

To take their words for ourselves.

I tilted my head a little to consider these strange new things. As I did my heart swelled. I accepted the Raven’s invitation.

And in that moment, a mist in my head, a fog I had not known was there, was blown away. In its place, a brilliant new space cleared; and within this in turn the most curious, delightful and dazzling shapes burst into existence.  

And then…

And then, as helplessly I stood and watched, one after another, and with no sound at all except each body striking the ground, every single Magpie, Jay, Rook, Chough, Jackdaw and Crow in the circle dropped to the earth as dead.  My mate too fell beside me. A grim ring of two hundred crow bodies surrounded the silence of the pool.  

And I too collapsed where I stood.

***

To any bystander we would all have looked stone dead, but it was not into true death that I had tumbled, but into a deep and dreamless sleep. The last to go under, and, hours later, the first to awake. Daylight was breaking. The Great White Raven was long gone. My mate and all of the others lay in a great wide curve; each bird was slowly coming round.

The dawn chorus swept across the Zoo, everything from the Elephants trumpeting through the Monkeys howling to Bullfrogs croaking to the Geese honking to the Nightingales carolling.

That is always a fine, cheerful sound, but this morning to me there seemed something more there than just the welcoming of a new day.  When I had gone into that weird sleep I was still a ‘dumb beast’; but when I woke up I was a ‘talking animal’. An odd new way of coping with the world called ‘language’ was flooding through my poor brain.

And suddenly I was also very, very thirsty. More so than I have ever felt before or since.  I hopped to the edge of the pool to drink, but stopped in my tracks.

Looking down into the water I saw another Jackdaw. Another bird there in this watery mirror. Oh, I had seen plenty of reflections before.  But this time I had a word for the other Jackdaw down there.

And that word was ‘me’.  

I looked over at my mate and there was a word there too.  That word was ’she’. In fact now looking up and all around me, the world was coated with a new and glossy sheen.  From now on there would be a word for everything, or at least you could give a word to everything, and on some things you could even pin a special word – a name.

Even I, in time, would have a name.

Tricky these days to remember what it all felt like in those times before I could speak, and even harder to explain it here for anyone else. I may have been given words, but they are not remotely good enough words for slippery rememberings of that sort.

If you were a bird like me, I suppose it might be useful to say to you that throwing my mind back to being a dumb animal was a bit like trying to force myself back inside my egg before I hatched.  And then, when language suddenly came, it was a little like all over again bursting out of my shell.

There had certainly been a ‘something’ back then, a something that would become me, a something that, just as I do now, thought about stuff and moved all around the world and was able to know all the things good and bad within it. But that something did not and could not call itself ‘I’.

It could not even get to any idea at all of what an ‘I’ might be. On top of that, that thinking thing, that had not yet become an ‘I’, could not form any inkling of a time when it had not been, nor of a time to come when it would not be. That thinking thing from before had the freedom to sample and enjoy all the wonderful things offered by the Zoo. 

All except one.

Except that special thing behind my own eyes, except the thing that did the thinking itself.

But now I can think about me.

In fact, you know, I cannot stop thinking about me, and, being a Jackdaw, I am afraid, talking rather loudly…

… about me.

***

It was hardly three weeks after the Raven had come to us, when early one morning I spied the Director of the Zoo casually strolling down the hill from the Big House towards us. It was a cool, pleasant September day and the leaves were just beginning to turn. He often simply walked around his family’s Zoo to see what was what and to take the air.  

That was long before the Lady came. Professor William Faraday was still quite a young man then; a nice enough and untroubled sort of bloke it seemed.  We Crows really looked forward to his visits, especially when he had a pocket full of corn for us.

But as I saw the Professor get nearer, to my surprise a panic suddenly ran through my whole body. My wings shivered all of their own. I was not sure exactly why, but it was almost like I was naked – ‘exposed’. A thief caught in the act. I just was not ready to show my face before one of these Humans, one of these beings from whom we had snatched something so special.

Not yet.

So I hid.

The Director strode into the area in the middle of aviaries next to the pool.  I was not the only one to make myself scarce. There was not a Crow to be seen. He stepped quickly onto the black rock in the middle of the pool exactly where the Raven had sat, he put his hands on his hips and stared all around, puzzled by what seem to have become a ghost village.

“Where are you all?” He demanded.  

Not even the slightest caw or click in response.  After some long seconds he cupped his hands and yelled a more playful “…Crows, my Crows…Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

And slowly, reluctantly, bashfully, a single Magpie sidled into view. Then two Jays hopped down. Just one solitary Rook made its appearance. Finally all of us, we came out from our different hideaways. Very gradually the Director span around, weighing up the array of birds that falteringly had assembled around him.

“Where were you all, my Crows? Why were you hiding?”

 Still no response.

“Surely you were not hiding from me?” 

Humans had always had a strange habit of speaking to dumb animals without really expecting any answer. Or at least any answer that involved words. So you might have thought that what happened next would have taken the Director aback more than it did.

One of the bossier female Carrions bounced ever so slightly towards the Director. She had elected herself as spokesman for all. She opened her beak, but, much to that smug Carrion’s annoyance, it was from behind her my own Jackdaw voice that broke the silence.

“We hid Director when we saw you coming. Because before we were dumb, but now we have voices. And now we have faces too.”

“So yes, we were afraid.” 

And in this new voice of mine that fear was pretty clear.

If the Director was surprised to hear for the very first time one of his Crows speak, he did not show it. Well, not entirely. Not in any straightforward way I mean. True enough, a strange expression rippled across his face, but only for a second. Then those piercing blue eyes cleared, and he moved on to his next question. The way he spoke now seemed different. He appeared to be choosing his words precisely.  

“But who was it my Crows who first told you that you were… as you say… ‘dumb’?”

I was about to speak again, but now it was my turn to be upstaged. My mate got in first. Her voice sounded braver than mine, even a bit defiant.  She did not use ‘Director’ or ‘Professor’.

“It was the White Raven. It came to us. It taught us to speak as you Humans do. It told us this would make us like you.”

The Director’s reaction was not what you might have bargained for. A broad smile; a pretty weird sort of smile, but definitely a smile. It was almost like he had just recognised something. And maybe that he was finally, and with a strange kind of relief, giving way to that something.

At any rate he said nothing more at all to us. After some seconds he simply turned his back on us. He strode briskly back up the hill to his home. Even from here I could hear the door closing firmly behind him.

Never more again would he come with his pocket full of corn to visit us Crows.

***

The year moved on, the winter came nearer. And so she and I, we settled into our new life. Our new talking life.  The Raven had kept Its promise. Just like the Humans, we now had words. The new thing that gave power. That thing which the Raven had explained had been so slyly withheld from us. That was now ours.

What could we do with it? How did it change us?

We could – and we did – begin to form in our minds ideas of things that did not already exist. We began to think of ‘ifs’ rather than just ‘ares’. We started to imagine rather than only describe. We could have an idea of a future and we could plan for it. We could think of a past. We could regret that past and we could learn from it. We began to think of what ought or should or might be, rather than only that which is. And we began to make up stories about things which had never been.

Oh, and we could, and I am afraid we absolutely did, just like the Humans, begin to lie to one another. 

Worse each of us Crows began to lie to itself.

But most of all and for the first time ever, we could think on that fact – that utterly stupefying, bizarre and mind boggling fact that…

We.

Did.

Actually

…Exist. 

Since the time of the Raven I seem to have somehow come by an actual name as well.  So, a full three quarters through this story, let me finally introduce myself.

Pleased to meet you.  My name is ‘Edgar’.  And my mate was called ‘Eleanor’.  Edgar and Eleanor, there you have it.

There was one more change in me. One more to which I had really better confess. I had never been backward in coming forward to tell all other Crows (and especially those stupid Carrions) how absolutely wonderful we Jackdaws were, and how superior in particular I am. But before the Raven came, I could only really do this through the way I held myself in general, an overall mocking tone in my Crow sounds, and of course by way of our world famous Jackdaw strut.

But now I had a great new set of weapons – words. I lost no time in having   fun using them.

I took every chance going to sneak up to the highest perch I could find in Crow Village; and then to suddenly shower down on its unsuspecting inhabitants a torrent of scolds, boasts, taunts, abuse and  –  terribly clever –  mockery.  

Words might not always be much good when it comes to our finer feelings, but, let’s face it, when you want to make someone else feel bad about themselves, they are pretty useful blunt instruments.

I only really meant it all in fun of course.  I don’t know why some of them took it so seriously?  After all they hazed me too. I was just better at it, that’s all.

But Eleanor made a point of refusing to join in; and some of the Crows certainly did not take it as fun at all.

There were all these new bizarre and wonderful new things, these new ways of being and seeing and doing and living.  But in some respects the rhythm of Jackdaw life just went on as it always had.  We continued to seek after food, we continued to squabble, we continued to pair off and build nests.

Eleanor and I succeeded in raising a fine clutch of five chicks – talking right from when they fledged.  And in their good time they flew away to live their own lives.  

We were just getting round to think of a second family, when disaster struck.

***

The wind had changed. It was blowing now from the east. It was as if winter had arrived overnight. Even though in the Zoo, food and shelter is provided, the coming of the cold is still very much ‘a thing’ for us all. We still look to forage more in winter. It is one of those instincts that never leave you.

The wind sliced the remaining leaves straight off all the trees all around us. The earth was frozen hard

A lonely dot gusting up there high in the sky. Hardly visible. That’s all it was at first. We were concentrating hard downwards on the stones and grass beneath our beaks, scouring for anything interesting at all to eat. No reason to look twice at a single silhouette way up there.  But my boasting and scolding and jeering had finally brought payback. And for those who looked for revenge, there was a bonus prize, possession of our jealously sought after nest site, the best in the whole Crow Village.

The first blow on my unsuspecting back was a glancing one.  A dive-bombing of beak and claw from that Carrion Crow that seconds before had been but a distant speck in the cold winter sky. It may have only been an exploratory sortie, but even so it bloody hurt! Carrions are up to three times the size and weight of Jackdaws and plunging from so high up, there was a lot of momentum behind it.

In a split second reflex Eleanor and I bounced a good three feet up into the air; fully in the game now, an enraged cloud of flashing wings closing on our attacker.

If we only had to deal with a single enemy, we would have won easily.

But they had planned this carefully.

As the first Carrion retreated squawking furiously, two more descended on us from the heavens.  We were enveloped by a terrible, confusing fluttering, swooping and beating of plumage and stabbing of beaks. I felt blood spurting from the back of my head.

Still at that – two against three and despite their greater size, we might have beaten them off. We were fighting to defend what was ours, our territory, our nesting site, and each other.  All they had to go on was a stupid sense of grudge and a peevish envy of our nest site.

But then the Magpies swooped in. Then the Jays. Then the Rooks. This was not some casual bad blood between Carrions and Jackdaws. This was a carefully planned coming together in judgement of representatives of the entire Crow Nation. This was a murder of Crows.

All my fault of course, my sin of pride, my damn cockiness – so typical of all Jackdaws; but all made so much worse by being able to speak.  

Each of the raiding party in turn held one of us down, furiously flapping to make sure they always stayed on top. They swooped down again and again with their razor sharp bills, mainly aiming for our heads or the muscles which make our wings work. We tried our best to stab back upwards and use our claws to block the worst of their fury.

But whilst there was only room for one Magpie at a time to trap me beneath in the grip of their reptile like talons, a Jay or one of the others would  be coming in each time to attack my wings or my head from the side. It was hopeless.

From where I was I could not see at all what was happening to Eleanor.

Over as suddenly as it started, our punishment posse scattering back up into the sky. They had done what they had come to do. My right wing was broken, my left eye was closed. I was in agony from the long cuts all down my side. My left leg and its claws were useless. 

And Eleanor.

Eleanor was completely still on the ground. Three Carrion Crows, two Magpies, one Jay and one Rook had pecked her to a painful and bloody death.

They had punished me by killing her.

***

So now we are at the end of my little tale.  I am afraid it has become quite sad.

Many years have passed. The whole Zoo has changed in all that time. There is chaos and decay all around. But for those who are curious as to that, you will have to look beyond my story to know more.

I am near to end of my own days as well, an old Crow. A lonely old Crow. A Crow whose feathers have weakened and whose plumage has gone grey.

How strange that this seems to have only made me even more attractive to the lady Jackdaws? ‘A downy old bird’ you might almost call me…

But I am not at all interested.

It was only ever her. Only ever my Eleanor, my one true love, Eleanor, now lost to me and gone for ever more.

And all the time that one great question goes round and round in my head.

What if..?

When the Raven came tapping at our door, what would have happened if she and I had not given in to our curiosity, if we had simply not answered at all? And we Crows as a whole, did we do the right thing in accepting the Raven’s offer, the gift of language and all that came with it?

Some might say that in offering us language, that wily old Raven was really only playing Its own special selfish ‘trump’ card; an ace in some wider power game  a game which had really nothing at all to do with hard working Crows?

So was it all worth it in the end?  

Well, if straightforward happiness is anything to go by, then the answer is definitely… no. I am not today a happy Jackdaw. Not on the whole

But then happiness is not the only thing.

Let us weigh it all up.

To start with, I am going to tilt my head to the right hand, that is where all the bad stuff lies in my head.

First of all then, I am all alone in the world now. Words brought self. Self brought pride. Pride killed my Eleanor. Her death brought my loneliness.

Second, it hurts like hell to remember her. I mean to remember losing her. But however hard I try, I can never forget it. Never more again can I find real peace. Because I have this thing in my head called ‘the past’, so I can never again completely forget anything at all.

Third, now that I am an ‘I’, I see clearly what ‘I’ really am. There is no hiding from myself anymore. Basically I am just a selfish old fool of a Crow, and one who constantly makes up lies to deceive and fool others. Once upon a time of course I managed to fool myself too – that was better. But I seem to have lost that knack. So I can never again do that.  I am naked before myself.

Fourth, so the Raven’s promise was that we would be ‘set free’ through words.

Really?!

Well, I am certainly not free – not free even for one single moment – not free from myself. Never again can I get away from my own thoughts, my own selfishness. Even when I saw Eleanor there lifeless on the ground, yes I felt real, selfless grief for her.  For the first second.  But in the next my thoughts came back again to..? Yes, inevitably and sickeningly. Back to me.

I know words now. I also know something called shame. I have become a ‘me’: but I do not particularly like ‘me’.

Fifth – and by far worst of all – now I know death. 

Oh, a lot of us at one point or another think we understand that we are going to die one day. But it was only when I saw my Eleanor lying there on the earth that I finally really got it.

Deep down in my bones, I mean. Yes, it will really happen to me too. A future will come, probably soon now, where I will be as dead as can be.  That worm I swallowed this morning. I will be as dead as that.

In that dream time before the Raven opened its damned beak, there was no fear of death. There was no past. There was no future. There was no ‘prison of me’. There was no inevitability of extinction.

There was just life, life flowing ever onward. And whatever the thing was that I was back then, it simply blurred at its edges into everything else that is.

That was innocence.  A bliss that I will never again know.

So surely better to have refused the Tempter.

Better to have stayed in that paradise of unawareness?

And yet…

And yet…

And yet…

Time now to tilt my head to the other side, to the left. To the good stuff.

Now that I am a talking animal I can make up stories. Delightful stories sometimes. I can create something that never was.

Now there are two new whole realms in my head. One is called ‘the past’ and the other is called ‘the future’. We Crows can travel backwards and forwards to these places. We are no longer stuck fast in one time. We can learn from yesterday. We can plan for tomorrow. We can imagine a world that is better than the one in the past. More – we can imagine many different futures and we can choose between them.

And, perhaps, if we try hard enough we might even make the best of these actually come about?

Now each of us Crows has an idea of how we and others ‘should’ behave; rather than only how we ‘do’ behave. Now, there is right and there is wrong.  We are free to choose between them.

I think back to the Director’s smile. Was he actually sad or angry that the Raven gave us language? What was that smile of his really about? Or was this what he wanted all along? What kind of father after all does not want his children to grow up?

But look here, I am near my end. I am exhausted by it all. I have no time left. So now I will let my poor old head come back up to rest upright in a comfortable position.

I am still unsure about so much. But Eleanor’s and my chicks are out there someplace. They will have had chicks of their own by now too, our grandchildren.

Now they have always been talking animals.

It is too late for me. But not for them.

Any sequel to this story must belong to them. They will work out what to do with the Raven’s ‘gifts’.

All in their own good time.

They have known they are Jackdaws from the start.

And, somehow…

That makes me happy.

ENDS

“WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS”

08.12.24

My mother has been dead for twelve years.

Or has it been fifteen?  Do you know, I do not really remember. I do not actually bother too much with that sort of thing.

But last week she came to visit me.

Just to check up on me, you know. To see how I was doing in general. Dad was there too, but he walks a bit behind Mum most of the time these days, and I cannot always see his face quite as clearly.

Dad has been dead for a lot longer … what…thirty years? 

When Mum was freshly dead, she used to come to me all the time. Then that slowed down a lot.  

Strangely though, in these more recent years, and as I have got near to my seventies, my parents’ visits have become much more frequent. It could be because I am nearer that same age when I last remember them.  Although there are still some especially very vivid memories of their younger selves in there too.

Their recent apparitions have on the whole a lot easier going on me. Back just after she died, Mum tended to show up to argue with me. Questioning what I was doing. Telling me ‘how to do things right’.  

But last week, when she manifested, quite unexpectedly – and surprisingly vivid, on our holiday in Croatia, it was much more that I was explaining things to her.  

This is how things are done Mum. This is the way the world is now. Look around you at all these wonderful things you could have enjoyed, if you were still alive. If only Dad and you had been a bit more adventurous.

And surprise, surprise…

She agreed.

She was smiling and nodding. Expressing interest. Asking me further questions.

Clearly, whilst she has been dead, Mum has learned a lot about life.

***

Of course I do know what was really happening there.

It is not at all that they had come to visit me. It is I who had summoned them.

Because I want to continue THE argument. The old argument I have always had with them. With Mum in particular.  And now at last at the age of sixty-seven, I think might just be in a position to finally win it.

Do you suppose that actually most people have something like that going on inside heads?  

I think they probably do.

A continuous ‘back and forth’ long after she is dead with your own mother?  Or maybe with your father?  Or maybe for you, you in particular, it is that bit out of the ordinary?  You may be having a tug of war with some very special unique ghost of your own, not a parent at all; but someone else from way back when?

Like I say – someone special.

I bet each person’s argument is different; and some are immensely more difficult arguments than mine. Some people’s disputes might be so harrowing that they flatly refuse to pursue them at all.

I can easily imagine a lot of people tell their parents’ ghosts politely to ‘please go away’.

And I can hear some others telling them to ‘just piss off’.

None of that really applies to me though.

Mum was especially present during the hotel’s buffet breakfast on the terrace looking out over the Adriatic.  She was interested in that bit, you see, because she once ran an hotel herself: the Mayfield Commercial Hotel near Withington Library on Wilmslow Road in Manchester.

Perhaps you have heard of it?

That is where, and that is how I grew up. A slightly strange childhood: sharing the TV with strangers; walking past new faces all the time on the staircase; doling out hot water bottles to each guest bedroom every night. All in a rickety, old, four story Victorian House. A friend came to stay once and said, compared to his own family’s dull little semi, it seemed like a full on ‘Adams Family’ set up.

But then my sister, brother and I, we did not know any different.

I say ‘an hotel’…

Most people would probably say a guest house, or a bed & breakfast. The Mayfield certainly did not, like the Royal Ariston here in Dubrovnik, have five swimming pools, room service, loads  and loads of bars and restaurants, etc.

There were in fact only eight bedrooms, not like the three hundred stacked up on top of one another here. Delivering hot water bottles every night for this place would be one hell of a job.  

So now, Mum is sat there at my shoulder bright eyed with curiosity, as Diane and I eat. Dad is there too. All this ‘weird’ food laid out will have dismayed and confused them at first.  But actually, given so many options, they could get the very breakfast they wanted. Say… bacon, eggs, and sausages? They would have been completely thrown though by finding the right way and place to do all the queuing, or how exactly you were supposed to get served.

So Diane and I go and get the food for them (this of course is all in my head). I am squeamish about meat. I really hate the whole idea of bacon, so, as I trot back to the table towards a beaming Dad, eagerly rubbing his hands together with a plate of rashers, I look straight ahead and, careful not to fall over, just do not glance down at it.

Mum is aghast at the idea of cheese and fruit and nuts and yoghurt for breakfast. I lecture her on how ‘the doctors today’ all say these foods are really healthy for you.  She relents in a kind of philosophical musing tone, “Ah well…I suppose so…”  

She always did give way to doctors.  It was just as well for all of us that my brother became one. That at least helped turn the tables on her a little.

She continues to be dismissive of those people who are drinking ‘champagne’ for breakfast, and says something about all the waste.

I nod my head, and, in this instance, I mark her up with a tick. Well done, Mum. You are coming along.

Both she and Dad stare out at the brilliant sea and sky around us and this is with real pleasure. “Oh, will you look at that!  Isn’t that lovely! It is so blue! You could not imagine it, could you…?” Mum waves her hand in a vague semi-circle towards the view. It is in a typical way she had. It always reminded me of the Queen Mother waving her hand toward the crowd.

So they are quite impressed by the sheer beauty of the Croatian coast.

I know that is going to put them in a quandary here though.

You see, this isn’t Ireland.

And Ireland is where my parents came from, and to where they always returned. Literally and in their heads. For all their own holidays. For all our family holidays.

Very wonderful those were too.

Coming to a ‘posh’ hotel in a hot country they had never heard of, that would just have to be a silly, expensive, show off extravagance. What after all is wrong with just going back to Mayo year after year?

Now do understand me, the West of Ireland really is beautiful and wild. But the thing is, it isn’t the whole, wide world. Not the only place worth thinking about. And the way things were done and had to be done in the 1930s in the West of Ireland is not the only possible or desirable way to do anything at all.

And that, you see… that right there is what my never ending argument with Mum has always been about.

That is why I am obliged to drag them back from the afterlife to pursue it. I need to have another go. I have to make them see! They have to finally admit I was right; and they were wrong. They have to accept that they are no longer teaching me about the world.

I am teaching them.

But it is not just that.

I am not quite that cruel. Not quite that stupid. I do really also want them to enjoy themselves. And they will, I know, if they just try hard enough. Or if I just try hard enough, I can fix them. I can fix my parents’ ghosts. I can make them be like me.

That is why I have brought them to Croatia. Because Croatia is even more beautiful and more wild than Ireland. That is going to annoy them. I really begin to think I am at long last on the point of winning. My mother starts to stroke her temples. Oh God, it is awful hot in this place! Her face is creasing up in stress.

Dad looks around at all the other people having breakfast. There are lots. From lots of different countries. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, Africans as well as all kind of Europeans and North Americans. An awful lot of accents, of skin colours, of ways of dressing, of ways of eating, of ways of sitting; all here mixed up on the sunny terrace taking breakfast together.

When they were alive, Mum and Dad were not too bad on the whole on the whole race thing. I mean they were not great there either; but when you consider how most people were and some still are; and if you can force yourself to admit that, when you really get down to it, in any time and any place (- and despite the way you and I know now how we ‘ought’ to behave and think) people generally like people who look and speak and dress and eat like them.

And they do not so much warm to those who do not.

It is just a fact of life.

In the case of my family though, a lot of weird and wonderful types passed through our guest house. That made a difference to the way we all thought. About everything. 

Dad was always curious anyway about others and otherness. Mum was too, in her own different style, but too tired running the hotel to pursue any curiosity.

Dad looks around all the hundred or so tables, where in the sunshine the tourists are busily consuming so many different food stuffs. He and I both notice how many of them do not seem all that happy on holiday. Perhaps it is because they are all talking to their own ghosts and not having such a good time of it? We exchange knowing ‘father and son’ glances. Dad has caught the eye of a Sikh man over there in a red turban. I recall that for some reason he got on particularly well with Sikhs in real life. The man is raising his hands gesturing towards the good weather and smiling back at Dad. Dad recognises that this requires some acknowledgement, so he quickly tilts his head on one side and back again together a slight wink.  I recognise this as a classic ‘Mayo nod’.

“Ah, sure it is a grand day… He offers back to the Sikh gentleman.  

But I know that Dad too finds it far hot as well.

Diane and I start talking about what we are going to do that day, probably walk the walls of Dubrovnik; and as we chat on about this, Mum and Dad (and the Sikh who of course, like them, wasn’t there in the first place) sort of gently fade away.

***

I said I brought my parents here. That is not entirely true either. Some bit of me might have done, sure, but I think in this particular place and time it was especially easy for them to slip through.

I suspect it is because we are on holiday, our first for two years.

And being on holiday is a bit like being dead, like Mum and Dad are, isn’t it?

Oh, let me rush to say that I do not mean that literally; or in any bad way. It is simply that being here in this hotel in Dubrovnik sometimes feels like… not exactly being alive.  It is not like the rest of ordinary life.

Do you know what I mean..?

All that sea stretching out forever in front of our room balcony. It just goes on and on. And all that sky.

The vastness of it all…

Oh..!

Oh, I really must tell you about the seagull.

In “real life” I hate seagulls.  Seagulls are those horrible things that seem impossibly large when they get close, that dart around your feet and flash around your head at Colwyn Bay trying to steal your chips. You know that no matter how hard you try or how many times you chase them away, they will always come back at you. Looking at these vicious creatures, you just know that if there were a baby lying there abandoned and helpless on the sand, if a seagull was hungry enough it would not hesitate for a second to peck the baby’s eyes out.  And you know also they are positively proud of their bloodiness because of that red spot, the one they display arrogantly on their bills

But the seagull at the Dubrovnik Royal Ariston Hotel, ‘our seagull’, that is a very different kettle of fish.

Every day Diane and I see it floating high up in the air directly in front of the picture window of our hotel room on the fifth floor. It seems curious, staring in at us. Somehow ethereal and unreal. I would even stretch to rather beautiful.  

Whatever it is after, whatever it wants from us, it certainly is not our chips.

We do not have to do anything very much here either. We can sleep all day if we want.  Every day can, should we wish, be just the same as the one before.   

The whole thing doesn’t feel entirely real, not substantial enough, as if it is failing to resist us. So that provides the ideal opportunity for those very unreal things, the ghosts of my parents, to sneak in.  People used to say that Halloween was the time when the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead became thinnest. I think this holiday is much more like that kind of crack in reality. And through that crack, those two utterly unreal things, who once gave me form, blood, bone, flesh and character, have slipped.

***

Diane and I are walking the walls now, the next morning. It is really good.  I recommend that if you ever go to Dubrovnik, you walk the walls. We have seen them before in a way, because Dubrovnik was used a good deal to film the TV series ‘Game of Thrones’.

You can see so far. Over the sea. Along the coast.  Peering down into the city.

And there are, thank god, many fewer tourists up here.

One of things Diane likes best (me too) is that up here on the walls you suddenly find yourself walking past or looking down on ordinary Dubrovnik homes and into regular people’s back gardens. Many have their washing out. Impressively long lines of clothes cooperating between separate houses strung over some considerable distance.  A line there composed exclusively of white knickers; a string over here of check shirts.  One of the bows of clothing has so many different colours placed side by side that these might almost be chosen on purpose and hoisted in celebration.

The people who live here then, whoever they may be, are clearly not at all bothered by or even remotely interested in the tourists lumbering around. We like the way the ordinary, the ‘day to day’ is suddenly there in the midst of all the otherwise “just there for the tourists stuff”.

And there is another sense, as you stroll across the City’s skyline, in which reality breaks in on you.

It is the war.

It is too easy in this pretty, quaint place to forget that just over twenty years ago Dubrovnik was shelled by the Serbians.  Too easy at least until every few yards along the walls something or other reminds you and points out where there has been damage and what restoration has taken place or is taking place. The city was besieged by the Serbian-Yugoslav army; some of it pounded to rubble. But the Croatians fought back and won their independence in the end.

I wonder how they feel now about all those people living just a few miles away, their Serbian and Bosnian neighbours? At this thought of mine, Mum and Dad, entirely absent since the day before on the hotel terrace, suddenly materialise; one walking to the right, and one to the left of me, as they would have when I was a small child. They too are looking at all the information on the war. Although not at all what you could call a religious war, the fact that the Croats were mainly Catholics and the Serbians Orthodox was not completely irrelevant. Before I came here, I did not realise that Croatia was so incredibly Catholic. There are churches, monasteries, what look like family sepulchres, shrines wherever you look.   

Oh, isn’t awful! The ways these poor people must have suffered, says Mum.  Dad shakes his head in rueful agreement and as if recognising something of old. Those Serbians are divils!!! Continues Mum.  At that very moment one of the buskers infesting Dubrovnik starts up yet again with the Game of Thrones theme tune.

And I know that Mum and Dad are thinking once more about Ireland.

This time though it isn’t about an Ireland left behind in their youths and bathed in sentimental afterglow. But an Ireland oppressed by the English over centuries. “Suffering Erin” has floated up to the top of their ghostly minds.

Ah, sure isn’t this just the same as what they did to Ireland…  

There they go!

I am irritated by this.  I have heard it too much. Don’t they know that Ireland is not the only bloody country in the history of the whole world to have seven hells knocked out of it by a powerful neighbour?

I mean, yes the English did on the whole behave atrociously in Ireland over so many centuries.

But was all very complicated, wasn’t it? 

Never black and white. 

And well, it wasn’t ever, you know…‘personal’.

My parents continue walking, hunched up and scowling now, on either side of me. Diane has gone ahead some distance. I speed my stride up so I can catch up with both her and my present again; and, for the moment at least, leave my past behind me.

***

On our last day in Dubrovnik, we finally go into some of its famous churches.

I like some churches. 

Well, l like them some on the outside.  Lovely old quaint buildings covered in ivy and an otherworldly mystique, snuggled into the landscape.

That’s fine.

But mostly when I go inside, it all goes wrong. Something starts to creep me out. I do not like the stale incense. I do not like all the fussy iconography and the rococo detail. All the uncalled-for, fiddly little gilded bits.

For me the cosmic and the camp have never gone together well.

I especially do not warm either to massive, in-your-face sculptures of a man nailed to a cross and writhing in agony.

On top of that, and paradoxically precisely because I was raised as a Catholic, I am not at liberty to simply treat a church like it is just any another place. I was brought up to believe that God is actually there.

In person.

Watching me.

Not just symbolically, like all you lucky, uncomplicated Protestants get to believe, but literally, Jesus Christ incarnate in flesh and blood.  And on Sundays I was supposed to eat him.

Back on page two I told you that I can be squeamish about meat, so you can just imagine…

That central aisle facing straight on to the altar and therefore to the sacred presence itself, that is the danger spot. God forgive you, if walk up that aisle or across it without genuflecting. God is there himself staring at you right down the centre of the church.

So anyway you get the picture, I am not at all relaxed inside a church.

This is all despite a residual (if very ambiguous) sympathy for the Catholic and Christian faith from which I so long ago departed. And I have a continuing strong interest in the whole idea of religion without actually believing in it at all.

As an aside, it is interesting to speculate, now that they have been dead for a bit, on what my parent’s position on religion now is?

No, it is not religion itself that repels me. It is the physical insides of churches. Some of them anyway. It may just be claustrophobic memories of every Sunday in my early life, packed in St Cuthbert’s Church, Withington in Manchester up alongside a largely equally unwilling and sometimes unwashed throng of churchgoers. Too many bodies, too little light, too little air.  And too many gore-ridden ‘stations of the cross’ (fourteen in all) luridly decorating the walls.

The Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary here in Dubrovnik is no exception. I envy Diane who has no such hang ups. She can wander around, back and forth and criss cross and treat it all like some kind of museum or a castle or something.

I cannot wait to get back in the fresh air.

Except…

Except for that one thing in the church that I do like.  Something that seems pleasingly simple, natural and pure. In fact, in the midst of all the slightly putrefying effect of the church, it even seems healthily purifying.  Something that I have liked since I was kid. Something, when otherwise bored stiff in church on Sundays, was fun to do. And something, when I did actually believe in God and heaven and an afterlife and sins and purgatory and hell, that actually made a kind of sense to me.

I like votive candles.

I like lighting votive candles.

I have always liked candles. All types; and in fact for some time I even made them for a living.

I can still find their flickering flames mesmerising. I remember as boy pondering what exactly was the difference between plants and animals on the one hand, and a flame on the other? In other words why is a candle flame not given the distinction of being regarded as alive? 

It can, when you think about it, be considered to have been ‘born’ when first lit; then it will feed on wax and oxygen; it can give birth to another flame; it might, before its time, be blown or snuffed out, or, when it has consumed all its fuel, perhaps it will reach an old candle’s death.

I look around the church.

Mum and Dad are nowhere to be seen at all at the moment.

Without knowing exactly why I am doing it or even really expecting to, I walk over to the tray where the unlit votives are provided. There is a sign suggesting a one euro donation.  So I slip two euros in the slot, choose my two candles, enjoy carefully lighting them from those already burning and give my two pride of place in the tray with all the others.

In Catholicism votive candles have all kinds of uses: to fulfil some kind of promise or vow, to honour God or a saint, to express some kind of ‘sacred intention’. But I was brought up to think of them mainly as a way to pray for the soul of someone departed, (my grandparents for instance), so that person spends less time in the fires of purgatory.

Even as a fairly devout child, I did not like that whole purgatory thing. One of my primary school teachers used to say over and over again that he hoped everyone in the class would go to purgatory, because that way we would at least all be guaranteed eventually to end up in heaven.

 I am sure he only meant the best for us, but…

And people use votive candles for one other reason. They light them to celebrate Halloween.

As a former professional candle maker I happen to know that votive candles are exceptionally good value for money. They are made from the very slowest burning grade of paraffin wax. For one euro you can light a memory for your dear departed for up to eight hours; and win an undetermined period off the end of their sentence.

That is a good deal in anybody’s book.

But sadly in the end even they – and the memories they represent – will burn out.

Tomorrow morning early when we will be in the skies above us departing Dubrovnik, the two candles which I lit so carefully and which burn now so merrily will be nothing more than twisted and burnt out stubs.  It is at least a consolation that someone will doubtless recycle what is left of the wax.

***

I am writing this up a month or so after our holiday, sitting comfortably enough here in our living room in the early morning light and concentrating to get it all down on paper.

Suddenly I feel there is somebody silently staring over my shoulder, straining slightly to see what I am up to, to read whatever it is exactly I have written down.

I do not give that person or persons the satisfaction of my turning around.

I hear the disapproving tut of a woman’s voice, followed by a fatherly sigh of disappointment. These are all too familiar sounds from twelve or fifteen years ago.   

My parents clearly do not think that a grown man should be wasting his time with such nonsense. Or indeed in embarrassing himself and his family by writing of personal matters.

In considerable irritation I now do start to move to turn round to explain it to them. I am about to tell them that they just do not understand. They simply do not get the modern world at all.

But by the time I do turn, there is nobody there at all to argue with.  

THE END