Wakening the Crow Read Online Free Page B

all my years in the Erewash borough mobile library, I’d been dipping in and out of other people’s books, and scribbling my own half-baked ideas and plans and projects and beginnings of poems and stories. I’d spent my time plucking down other people’s pills and capsules of potted knowledge, opening and shutting books and finding their dusty imprint on my fingertips, on my mind, at the end of the day. Of course, sooner or later, I was going to write a book. I was going to write a novel, something so dark and disturbing and demanding of the reader, so odd and unusual and out of the ordinary, so extraordinary that it would carve its own little niche in the genre and be recognised as some kind of minor classic, not necessarily a big-seller, indeed shamefully overlooked, but...
    And oh, I was going to have such a dark and dangerous gem of a bookshop that customers would search it out from faraway, for the treasures they might uncover in it.
    Two of my daydreams, in the humdrum dreaming-days of the mobile library.
    Nice ladies came in and borrowed romantic novels. Out-of-work middle-aged men came in, their clothes smelling of dogs and cigarettes and the cheap alcohol they got from the Co-op. Swotty school-children came in to borrow enormous, brick-sized novels about vampires and wizards. And I was scribbling in my notebook, about the saxophone I’d someday learn to play, the telescope I’d need next winter to explore the frosty night skies, the maps of the coastal walks I’d do next summer, the taxidermy which might be fun. But the two ideas which got fixed and found more and more space in my swarming scribbles were the book I’d write and the bookshop I’d have.
    Foolishness. Of course, neither of them would ever happen. How could they? They would need the kind of time and money I could only dream of having.
    Until, ping .
    No, not ping. Harder and heavier than a ping. Not a clang, not a ping, something in-between. How to describe it? I could hear it so clearly in the echoing hollows of my eardrums, in my memory. The impact of the wing-mirror of a Triumph sports-car PTO 725G on the back of Chloe’s head, at 3:17 on Saturday 3rd April.
    A gift. What had I done to deserve it?
    Nothing. Rosie would even say it was my fault. But here I was, Oliver Gooch, on a Monday morning when I used to go to work, with time to play shop. And over there, in another corner of the room, still conveniently hidden by boxes of books I hadn’t yet sorted and catalogued and arranged on their shelves, the computer I was going to write my book on.
    Yes, the same nice Indian doctor who’d first of all said that Chloe would be alright, who’d declared a month later that she might be brain-damaged for life, had told us we might be eligible for compensation. Tests on the driver of the hit-and-run car had found she’d had a few too many gin and tonics, and we could claim monies for an injury caused by a criminal act. We did claim. There was a substantial pay-out.
    Ping. I had money and time. And the sweetest, nicest little daughter to keep me company, to smile agreeably at everything I said and never utter a disparaging word.
    ‘Let’s light the fire. Hey, this is going to be nice... what do you think, Chloe? Do you want to help me?
    She didn’t really help. She couldn’t. But she was there and close and warm and smiling, yes, like a Labrador puppy would’ve been, nuzzling her face towards mine as I arranged a fire-lighter and a few little coals and applied the match. She watched with such a wonder on her face as the flame licked and curled and coaxed the coals alight, and then I added bigger bits of coal and topped it with a log of the silver birch.
    Yes, a wonder. The bark sizzled and hissed the perfume of a birchwood faraway in Siberia or Alaska, of deep snow and an ooze of resin and maybe even a tiger or a bear... but actually from a garden-centre in Long Eaton, a smokey suburban town in the midlands of England. Soon the room was warm and