by Max Porter
Dad?
Go to sleep now.
Dad?
What, Lanny?
Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?
I’m suddenly really annoyed. He’s too old for shit like this. Or too young. It’s fucking silly.
Go to sleep Lanny, and don’t get out of bed. We’ll talk about this in the morning.
I lie awake worrying, picturing my son lying on the cold grass whispering to a tree. Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope? What’s wrong with him?
PETE
It’s Lanny’s idea, a game he plays with his folks in the car. We are to tell a story, one line at a time.
We are drawing a bowl of plums and I’m trying to get him to slow down. I’m asking him not to panic if what he gets on the page doesn’t seem to relate to what he sees. Start again. Ease up. Loosen your wrist. I tell him the best representation of a plum ever created might not bear any resemblance to any plum the artist ever saw. Just look at them and think about their plum-ness, the essence of the plum as a physical plum in your space, light bouncing off the plum and into your eyes, and try a few things out and see what feels plummy, gently nudge a plum into being, don’t demand it.
He raises one eyebrow at me then looks at the plums. I almost pity the poor plums sitting there in the bowl with no defences against our joint scrutiny.
I start the game:
Once upon a time there was a man called Abel Stain.
And Lanny replies without missing a beat, The Fable of Abel Stain.
Is that your line or are you just chipping in with it?
Sorry, he says. That’s what we can call it. It’s a good title.
Right you are.
Me: This is The Fable of Abel Stain. Once upon a time there was a man called Abel Stain.
Lanny: He had three daughters and they were all really pretty.
Me: But horrible. Two of them were horrible, one of them was nice.
Lanny: The nice one was called Barbara.
I cackle.
Sorry, sorry, Lanny. Took me by surprise that’s all. I did not expect her to be called Barbara. Hang on I’m getting a beer.
I go to the larder and open a bottle of stout. I come back and Lanny has got his hair all swept over his face and he’s puffing on his pencil like it’s a Gauloise in a holder and he says,
Halloo, my name’s Barbara and I am much nicer than my ’orrible sisters.
I guffawspit beer all over the nice outlines of plums I’ve drawn.
DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT
He is in and out of shadow, moss-socks, pebble-dash skin, peering in the village hall looking at pictures of himself in the yearly competition. No more Jack in the green ale-tap Toothworts with bushy faces, these are comedy DPTs, nasty charmless things with guns, with fangs, with knives for hands, there is one with dead rabbits tied around his waist (those were the days). But they are based on fear imported, these beasts, on TV terrors, games and comics, untouched by genuine belief. He fondly remembers how much more frightening he was when the village children drew him green and leafy, born of dark gaps in Sunday school nightmares, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, threat and agony growing together, tree demon, uncle and dad, king of the hawthorn and hops, harvest and hope, threat of starvation,
In another picture he has dripping stumps for hands and words curl around him, like the quilted prayer banners they don’t make any more, for the hopeless stories of Jesus they don’t tell any more,
He leaves the village riding the smells from the kitchens, spinning and surfing, wafting and curling, from Jenny’s lasagne to Larton’s microwave stroganoff, Derek’s hotpot-for-one, such rich sauces, so much sugar, was never so varied as this, not-very-recently-dead meat dressed in fancy flavours, he laughs, funny busy worker bees of the village stuffing their faces and endlessly rebuilding and replacing things. All they are is bags of shopping and bags of rubbish. He takes such offence to the smell of Pam Foy’s stir-in jalfrezi sauce that he tears a bit of his nightmare skin off and shoves it through her window. A truly horrid dream. Sleep well Pam, he chuckles, as he floats homeward across the field.
LANNY’S MUM
I pick Lan up from school and we go home and I settle in to my work and a little while later I hear a thump from his room so I go up and I say, Oh I thought you’d gone to Pete’s, are you not going today?
He is sitting on his bed. He looks up at me and his face crumples in on itself like a piece of heated paper and he starts crying.
Lanny? I kneel in front of him with my hands on his little golden downy-haired knees, his bruised and grass-stained boy’s knees.
Lanny, what’s wrong?
He scrubs and dabs at his eyes, rolling his fists in his tears.
Nothing.
Lanny, what’s wrong? Tell me.
I … nothing.
Poppet. What’s happened? You can tell me anything.
He breathes and shudders and wipes his blotched and snotty face.
I broke something of Pete’s.
Lanny is so embarrassed he curls in on himself. His bean-plant grace has been replaced by gangling discomfort and the thought flits past me that he is simply growing up, shedding his fairy skin. I can’t visualise Lanny as a teenager.
I can’t imagine this boy becoming a man.
What did you break?
His Victorian stereo-thing.
A stereo?
No, the magic 3D photo machine, with the eye box, the eye box bit fell off and the glass is broken and I just put it back and I didn’t say anything.
Do you mean a stereoscope?
With the two pictures becoming 3D.
Lanny, sweetheart. Firstly, it was an accident, and secondly Pete is very fond of you and I’m sure he’d rather you just told him. It’s always best to be honest.
Exactly! I didn’t tell him, I just sneaked off. Like a liar. It’s so rude.
Enough of this. It is not so rude. Come. Now, come with me.
We go downstairs, put our shoes on, and leave. We stride down the road. We don’t talk, but Lanny sticks to my side in a way he hasn’t for years. He is obedient and nervous, not the free-range verge-clambering son I am accustomed to.
We knock.
Pete opens the door and he has bright white arms. Plaster arms.
Maestro! I thought you’d stood me up. Maestro’s Mother! To what do I owe the pleasure?
We go in and Pete washes his arms and shows us the chalk-white skull he has been modelling on bones of wire. He makes tea and we sit at his table.
Pete, Lanny would like to admit something to you.
Oh gawd this sounds ominous. Been stealing my valuable artworks have you?
There is a moment like a cello note, then. Warm and wooden and full of other things. Nobody speaks but we are all listening.
Lanny fidgets. Pete looks at me and his blue eyes are all trust and twinkle. He reminds me of an old Cornish fishing boat.
He smiles. Come on then, lad, the suspense is killing me.
I broke your stereoscope.
My what?
I fiddled with the eye bit to make it closer together and the whole top bit fell off and the glass inside is smashed.
LANNY. The stereoscope?
Pete’s eyes pop in mock-outrage and he clenches his fists.
Good god, Lanny, that stereoscope, my precious stereoscope, was handed down to me by my Great-great-great-Aunt Oxfam Charity Shop and cost me all of about £4.50. I could not give two shits that you broke it. Jesus Christ, I thought something bad had happened!
Lanny is as pink as a radish and looks from Pete to me and starts to giggle.
Um, phew?
Phew! says Pete, and roars with laughter, banging the table and reaching over to cuff Lanny on the head.
Pheweeeee, I say. There, poppet, what did I tell you? No need for a total mental breakdown.
Crisis over, says Pete. Now roll up those little sleeves of yours and let’s make some mess.
> DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT
Dead Papa Toothwort, local historian, seventy-fourth-generation cultural humus sifter, is giving a bright orange Fanta bottle top a tour of the village.
Keep up, chap, still lots to see.
He does the voices
(this place had a distinctive accent until quite recently, “yop buck”, you can still hear it on a handful of village tongues).
He tells the fascinated plastic cap of times past. He resuscitates tales and teases stories from the molecular memory of the village.
Chopped into the briar here, was all hazel, some holly, Danish axes, Pip lost a finger, underfoot here was the old village road, before our Black Death party, this hump is the back wall of a dwelling even I can’t remember and here a notable font of not-local stone, this was all open field, Matilda rode Wilelmus here and snapped his little weapon, hedged into half-acres, small furlongs for ugly ploughs, hawthorn went in, half and half again, was a pond here, was a Roman soldier raped by his primus pilus here, was the fact of us being seven miles from the mill that defined us, was beech to the left of me – beech to the right – beech coffin bury me – beech for my wife, ah yes those were the days, yes those pretty little black bags decorating the hedge are in fact dogshit bags courtesy of Brian and Fay and their beagles, paid our licence, paid our tax …
Such a beautiful place, interrupts the Fanta cap … BEAUTIFUL? screams Toothwort, pausing the tour, taking the form of a notable English poet with a waterproof map and a breathable turquoise jacket: Beauty is what, my semi-synthetic friend? Illness, decay and exploitation? A tapestry of small abuses, fights and littering, lake-loads of unready chemicals piped into my water bed, greed and decline, preaching teaching crying dying and walking the fucking dogs, breeding and needing and working and …
The Fanta lid is quietly whistling a roundhead ballad.
He has stopped listening to Toothwort the bore, Toothwort the over-the-top audio guide.
Roger de St John once rode this way to look at some hedging and was heard to say ‘nice run to the valley’, good scope for poaching, haunted rowan moves a yard a year, Saxon boundary, concrete silage bunker, too many children for only one teacher, each year more demand for privacy, high-speed broadband, cures for limp dicks and depression, insecure boundaries, imported vegetables, nostalgia for expansion,
Dead Papa Toothwort sways in the breeze and the many-centuries-long furrows of his remembrance all tilt him towards the child; Strong Henry Beresford born 1426 cut down three thousand oaks in his lifetime, and the boy understands that effort and that labour. Shifty Giles Morgan born 1956, purveyor of abundant natural light for kitchens and low-impact loft conversions, he will die in his bed from rotten lungs, and the boy sees that in sequence and fairness. Runny Jenny Savage born 1694 wasn’t a witch, was no such thing, was simply a curious cook, and the boy feels that too, comprehends without knowing whether they are centuries dead or alive next door. The boy understands. He builds his magical camp in the woods as a gift to them all. They should worship him! He is in tune with the permanent, can feel a community’s tensile frame.
Do you see? His intuition?
Lanny Greentree, your miracle ribs remind me of me.
Like me. Do you see?
The Fanta top has gone.
Toothwort is alone. He’s tiny, the pulse of a robin redbreast, not even that, the empty air where a robin was earlier in the day, the atom-memory of the pulse, smaller than light.
The boy knows me.
He really truly knows me.
PETE
We’re in the woods. Given the choice, Lanny will always choose the woods.
I’ve told him about the weird Willis sisters, growing devil rabbits in their greenhouses to spy on us.
He’s come right back at me with a story about forests knowing if a person’s good or bad. A decent human they’ll keep alive, guiding them to water and food. A bad person they’ll kill in a day, all forces of the forest united against the impure imposter.
Could say the same of a big city, I say.
I’m scratching away in my book, nice new fine-liner pen, hatching, bits and bobs, enjoying being wrapped up in my coat, drawing the beech trees’ gnarled little belly-buttons, could be old hills from above, could be warts, trying to get Lanny to enjoy using a pen, not being able to rub out, he’s a fanatic for rubbing out, trying to show him how you can keep on building, use the dark, wrestle a thing back if you’ve taken a wrong turn, I want him to enjoy making marks, I want him to let his wrist go a little bit. Hang on, where is he?
Lanny?
I am alone.
His sketchbook sits open next to me. There’s a nervous charge in the air. Something guilty. Like when you meet a deer in the wood and the deer disappears and you’re left standing there all clumping human noise, and there’s shame in that.
Oh god I’ve lost him.
Where is he?
Lanny?
Then from way up above me,
There are bees up here!
There are bees up here!
Pete, there are bees up here!
He is fifty foot high, clambering about the crown of a vast chestnut, foreshortened like a painted trompe l’oeil angel in the rigging of the wood.
Above him I can see a sparrowhawk pinned to the ultramarine.
Stay there and hold on tight, you little nutter, I wanna draw you!
LANNY’S MUM
In comes Lanny clicking and murmuring like the peculiar transmitter-device he is. I minimise the document so he can’t read over my shoulder; a scene in which my protagonist has pushed a corrupt politician in front of a train and then – hours later – found a little piece of his cranium stuck to her V&A Museum tote bag.
Hello poppet, I thought you were playing football with Archie and Toby?
Nope. Got bored. Can I tell you a secret?
I’d love that, yes please.
I almost told Pete but I want it to be a surprise, and I don’t want to tell Dad because he might be cross.
Right, and what makes you so sure I won’t be?
You’re never very cross.
I could start now. Go on, what is it?
I’m building a bower.
A what?
Like bowerbirds do. I’m building a camp full of all the best stuff I’ve found, like a tiny museum of magic things.
Ah, yes, I know what you mean. In the garden? Have you started?
Nope, somewhere secret. I’ve been working on it for ages.
Is Archie helping?
Nope. No way.
And the bowerbird makes this for his lady, right? To impress a girl. May I ask who the lucky female Lannybird is?
Urrr, NO, it’s for everyone. It’s for the whole village and anyone who finds it. It’s to make them fall in love with everything. It’s my biggest project so far.
Bigger than your Book of Spells?
Same thing really, just outside. And I stole some string, some kindling and plastic sheeting from the garage. Sorreeeeeee …
He slithers off somewhere, singing, and I open up my horrid book and type and type and type and type and realise with a strange mix of befuddlement and joy that Lanny is my muse.
LANNY’S DAD
Lanny woke up crying about some ghost story Pete had told him about crooks in the woods.
What the hell is that man putting in his head? I asked her.
Yup, I much prefer your approach of plonking him in front of the TV and checking your emails.
What?
Nothing, go to sleep.
This is how it’s been for a while now; magical Pete, mundane Dad.
Truth is, they’re right.
I went down there on Saturday to bring Lanny home for lunch and we got talking, old Pete and me. He was painting lengths of MDF so I offered to help, while Lanny was drawing a huge minotaur on a sheet taped to the floor, and we chatted about this and that, and he showed me how to get a good smooth finish on the boards, and he hummed, and we took it in turns to w
ipe down the side of the boards for drips with a rag, and an hour passed and she came down to get us, asking why we’d missed lunch, and Pete put a loaf and a lump of cheddar out, and we ate, and Lanny brought his giant beast to life with occasional steers from Pete, and then we left, and we chatted with Peggy for ten minutes about the likelihood that the fly-tipper who’s been dumping sofas up at Harley Lane would be prosecuted, and only after getting home and opening a beer did I realise it was the nicest few hours of my life for ages, and I hadn’t thought about work, I hadn’t checked my phone, and I’d enjoyed the painting, and then at some point that afternoon she and I snuck upstairs for a proper long bonk, a giggly natural no-stress romp, and life in the village felt good.