Wakening the Crow Read Online Free

one miraculous moment, she might open her mouth and say something. And of course they enjoined us to engage her with picture books and drawing, with music and stories. Rosie had bought her a mouse. Because, a few weeks or a month after her accident, and she’d recovered marvellously from the blow on her head and was apparently sound in all her limbs, she still hadn’t whispered a word. She wasn’t the sly, defiant, occasionally foul-mouthed Chloe she’d been before. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t read. She just smiled. She blinked and she smiled, in utter, blank, angelic silence. She was lovely, in the same way that a soft and harmless Labrador dog is lovely, but she was altered completely.
    And so the doctors, the consultants, the specialists did all their tests on her and pronounced some kind of brain damage, unfortunately, which might be permanent, or she might – one day, with all the energy and stimulus we could apply as parents – she might snap out of it and...
    ‘What do you think, Chloe? Do you think anything? What’s going on inside your pretty little head?’
    She looked up from her toast and jam. The mouse had run inside her sleeve, I could see the bump of its body snuggling up and up. She smiled and she held a piece of toast towards me, something which the intact Chloe would never have done. I took it from her.
    ‘Thank you, Chloe, that’s nice. Yes, better for me.’
    Mumbling, my mouth stuffed full, I confronted myself in the mirror, on the opposite wall of the warm, friendly, nice and utterly unchallenging kitchen. I saw Oliver Gooch: hardly an oil-painting, pudgy and unshaven in sloppy pullover and baggy corduroy trousers, a youngish, middle-aged man with receding, thinning dark hair and an odd, questing snout... not a Titian, not a Raphael, more of a Rembrandt, one of those peasant potato-eaters.
    You shit. So what are you going to do today? A bit of writing? I doubt it. Play at shop? Take the angel for another jolly?
    I felt again into Chloe’s coat pocket. Pieces of glass, like rough-cut diamonds. The windscreen had shattered into hundreds of sparkling gems and some of them were here, on the palm of my hand. I put them onto the kitchen table. Bits of glass with blood. With Radio 4 and toast and marmalade.
    She flickered her eyes across them and up to mine.
    Then I felt into my coat pocket and took out the little velvet box that Mr. Heap had given me.
    ‘Hey Chloe, it’s not even seven-thirty, and we’ve already got tears and blood and broken glass. I wonder what else we’ve got here. Let’s go and play shop, shall we?’

 
    Chapter Four
     
     
    W E DIDN’T HAVE to go far. Down the stairs and across the hall, into the front-room. It would’ve been the vestry. We’d just bought a church.
    Oh god, the mouse. Our church mouse, called Mouse. Just as we started down the stairs together, it wriggled out of Chloe’s jumper and plopped onto the first step. As it sprang down and down ahead of us, Chloe gave a squeak of surprise and pursued it as fast as she could.
    ‘Hey careful, Chloe, slowly...’
    Too late. She’d bundled herself down, hopping on both her feet behind the mouse, and as it reached the bottom and crossed the flagstones of the hallway in a single white flash, she was there too. But she stumbled as she landed two-footed on the final step, she staggered and sprawled forward, face down on the floor.
    The mouse was gone. By the time I reached her, Chloe was gathering herself upright again, apparently unhurt, just shaking herself and about to continue her pursuit.
    ‘Hey, clumsy, for heaven’s sake take your time... what’s up?’
    She turned her face up towards mine, smiling through the blood which was welling in her mouth. ‘Oh lord, what on earth have you done? Let me see...’
    She was fine. She seemed to think it was all rather odd and amusing. She hadn’t knocked her mouth on the hard floor, she was just a bit breathless from the impact of landing flat on her