by Max Porter
Robert is sweating, he has dark patches under his arms and on his chest. He unzips his Lycra top and wipes his brow.
‘Oh god no. Please.’
‘Yes, Robert?’
‘It’s, it’s Lanny. He’s being … I don’t want to say.’
‘You have to say what you see, Robert. Otherwise we can’t move forward.’
‘He’s … He’s being abused. Being hurt.’
‘And is this one of your endings? Have you seen this?’
Robert gazes at the mobile phone. He scratches his head like a schoolboy faced with tricky arithmetic.
‘I’m sorry to rush you, Robert, but I have to ask, is this one of your endings? Is this something you saw for your son?’
Robert turns away from the phone, eyes glistening, stares at the space where Jolie and Pete were, and says, ‘Yes.’
The phone is gone.
‘Bravo, Robert,’ says Toothwort, who is now completely covered in rotting flowers, a damp edgeless plant-nymph, her polished TV-ready accent crumbling into a gravelly drawl, her eyes and mouth leaking oily green fluid.
‘That was very brave. Of course you’ve seen those images. Very brave to admit that. Now, screen two please.’
A new phone has appeared and Robert strides over and begins scrolling determinedly, braced for more pain, but as he gazes into the glowing air he smiles. He unclenches his spare fist and chuckles.
He turns to smile at Toothwort behind him.
‘What is it, Robert? Is it one of your endings?’
‘It’s wonderful! It’s Lanny, handsome as anything. Alive! In his late twenties, early thirties? In a really well-cut suit, grinning like anything, with a beautiful girl on his arm. His green eyes blazing! Really lovely suit. Lanny alive and well and getting married!’
‘That’s adorable, Robert. Is this one of your endings?’
And Robert is so relieved, so lightened and unburdened, so carried away, enchanted by those images of his son that he replies, without thinking,
‘Yes!’
The hall is plunged into darkness.
No more sportswear, no more phones. Robert is shivering, cold sweat on his temples and on the back of his neck. He can’t speak, or move, or remember what he’s done wrong.
‘Oh dear, Robert. Failure. You must tell the truth at times like this. Pete managed it, didn’t he?’
Toothwort wraps him up in a gaseous embrace, slides him across the hall and dumps him, limp and dreaming, into a plastic chair.
‘Not good at all, Robert.’
Robert.
Robert?
‘Robert?’ Jolie is tapping him on the shoulder but he’s fast asleep.
‘Pete?’
The two men are sprawled on their chairs, snoring.
She looks around the hall and it is just the hall. She seems to be back in real life, or she has woken up, or she is alive, or no longer having a nightmare. She wonders whether she should go back, she wonders if the police officers who are outside twenty-four hours a day noticed her leaving, or perhaps they’ve gone, perhaps they’ve all given up, perhaps it’s all over or was never happening. She rubs her face with her dry palms and breathes in the cold stale air of the hall, all the christenings and eighteenths and retirements and jubilees and anniversaries; the wakes, the parent and toddler mornings. She breathes in the flesh particles of generations of villagers before her and it tastes like mould and wet tweed.
‘Ah, finally,’ says a voice from the dark corner of the hall, ‘just the two of us. Pink ticket number 3. The important one. The decider.’
He is sitting, cross-legged, in the most beautiful creation she has ever seen; a sculpture, a shrine, a twinkling altar made of natural things. She walks towards it across the crinkly leaves, twigs and mossy floor of the hall.
It’s Lanny’s bower. Dead Papa Toothwort is sitting waiting for her inside. He’s dressed as a garden centre ornament, a mass-produced green man for the shed door, bushy oak-leaf eyebrows, podgy cheeks, ivy hair and wheatsheaf beard. She can see cast marks on his cheeks, and the sticky remnants of a yellow price tag. He shrugs and winks.
The bower rises from the floor like a cupped hand, the bulk of it made from twigs woven and packed, expertly threaded, held together with stems and tendrils, bracken and mud, honeysuckle vines patiently stripped and woven, densely insulated with moss and mulch squeezed in the gaps, bedded down and set through a season or two. The bower is strong and alluring.
‘And look at the detail,’ says Toothwort, and she sees, as she stoops and peers inside, that birds’ eggs, pebbles and conkers, snail shells and bones decorate the interior, like a grotto, like a tiny little pagan church lovingly decorated. Layers like a geological cross-section rise from the base; a ring of knotted straw, of lichen-clad bark, of broken crockery combed from the beechwood’s hidden dumping grounds. Everything stitched together for the good of the overall design, for the depth of the welcome. It’s awe-inspiring. She sits next to Toothwort, and she trusts him.
He tilts his head, questioning.
She nods.
He looks in her eyes as if for permission.
She holds her breath.
‘Please,’ she says.
And so Dead Papa Toothwort gently breaks open time, and shows her Lanny.
The bower disappears, all is unbuilt, and they are sitting on the floor of the woods in dappled morning sunlight. In comes the sound of her child, singing, Lanny’s strange half-song half-hum chit-chat, and he is among them, in his school shorts and a T-shirt, pottering, planning, darting about, delicate and focused, laying a few early markers, clearing the ground, drawing the perimeter with a stick, off again, back with a bundle, off again, like a time-lapse nature video, she sees him a thousand times a second, her little winged thing, attending to his creation, flickering sun-up sun-down, days layered upon patient days, and she realises their life at home, his time at school, what she thought of as his real existence, was only a place he visited.
It is so good to see him. Bliss. He is not real, he is just the memory of Lanny on the things that he touched; she knows that. He is transparent, in and out of actuality like the light itself, but still, his mannerisms, his voice, his gorgeous body language, his extraordinary green eyes. She watches and sees the bower become part of the wood. A deer pokes its head in the entrance, then a middle-aged lady with an OS map, then a squirrel, then Lanny is lying on the floor singing at the top of his voice, grabbing armfuls of mulch and grinning, then he is sobbing, punching the floor, then he is hunched over writing his strange little recipes, his letters, his plans, then he is gone and the bower is half built, waiting, and warmth brings odd dusty knives of light into the space. It’s a sacred place. Toothwort’s concrete skin has softened and rustled into life, he’s made of real leaves now, and he smiles at Jolie and mouths the word ‘Watch’.
The walls come up around them, Lanny packing and fiddling, tweaking, knotting and tutting, whistling and chatting, and Jolie feels his breath on her cheek. She closes her eyes and feels the twitching pulse of days and nights, and when she opens them the walls are built and Lanny is darting in and out between her and Toothwort, adding snail shells and chalk, fitting nuts and hard berries, dead insects and interesting twigs into every possible gap, and then she sees other kids she recognises briefly darting into the bower, laughing, and one of them smashes a wall, and Lanny is back patiently fixing, smiling as he works and then he is lying down and he looks his mother straight in the eyes. She smiles and her child smiles back.
He sings ‘Say Your Prayers and Be Good Too, Or Dead Papa Toothwort Is Coming for You’ and he closes his eyes.
He says, ‘Old man’s beard and ivy and moss, pass through hundreds of seasons unharmed.’
‘Lanny? Love?’
He can’t hear her.
Crouched across from her, Toothwort has darkened, his foliate head has ripened into mould, fungus and brown ripples, sweaty, heavy with rot and enzymes. He smells like natural truth, like sex and death. It�
��s comforting, and Jolie hugs herself and inhales. The room is juddering, snoring, humming. Toothwort seems to be shrinking, shrivelling in on himself, the mushrooms darkening and turning to wet clumps, turning to soggy knobbly autumn compost.
He gazes at her. He lifts one hand, which changes from a perfect blusher mushroom into a ball of flies and is gone. He raises the faint outline of his other hand to his lips and blows her a kiss.
He says something but all she hears is a wheeze. He is sinking into the ground.
‘What?’ she says. ‘What?’
He seems to whisper ‘follow’ or ‘for you’ and his face darkens like a stain as he dissolves.
She sees that Lanny is packing things into his bag, preparing to leave. Night is creeping in through the gaps of the walls.
‘No!’
Jolie panics, she tries to reach over to her son but she is locked in place. Her legs are fixed. She can’t move.
Lanny hops up, grabs his bag and ducks out of the bower.
‘Wait!’
He is running away, up the track, past the Elvis Hair Hawthorn, over the stile and into the dark wood, darting through the trees, leaping over stumps and brambles, his rucksack bouncing on his back.
‘Lanny!’
She tries to give chase, but she is only watching. She is only vision, no body. She follows but not at her own speed, not touching the ground or feeling the weather.
She is caught between what’s real and what’s not, moving through the partial air, through the solid trees. She is like a camera panning across a set. It is sheer torment but she is also suffused by a deep gratitude, the drug-like bliss of appreciation for what she is being shown. She is being shown Lanny. They are up in Hatchett Wood.
As the steep flank of the old wood meets the fenced rim of the managed fields there’s a sparser hundred yards of thinner, younger trees. It feels like a frontier, a meeting place between she’s not sure what. It’s poised, this place, ready and waiting like an empty stage.
She reaches Lanny as he is kneeling, scrabbling, pulling aside a man-made blanket of branches. He uncovers the big metal lid of a drain. He uses a screwdriver to pop open the cover, then he gets his fingers under and heaves it up and over. It lands with a heavy whump on the leafy carpet.
Jolie calls out but she knows he can’t hear.
Lanny’s camp is a disused storm drain, dug into the hill, invisible unless you walked right to it. It’s a perfect boy-sized space, a den cut into the floor of the forest. A brilliant place to hide.
She sees him climb in.
‘Lanny, no!’
She watches him sit on the metal grille, three feet beneath the surface, and she watches him unpack his notes, his pens, his knotted charms, his book, his little bottle of water and his snack bar.
She watches in horror as he fidgets on the grating beneath him. Shuffling. She sees him recognise the click and shift, sees the awful split-second in which he realises something’s wrong. A look of worry crosses his face as a black bruise of cloud-shadow thumps across the clearing.
There’s a pop and a screech.
The little metal hinges snap, the rusted grate comes away from the derelict walls of the drain and drops. The world gives way. The child and all his things plummet into blackness.
Lanny wails in pain from the floor of the dark pit and Jolie roars and scratches at the air but she isn’t there. She is helpless and silent. He cannot climb out and she cannot climb in.
Out of the hole she hears screaming and crying, shouting for help, a voice growing hoarse with wailing. The sounds of her child’s mind serrated by fear. Embarrassment and shame and yelps of baffled hurt.
Pleading ow ow ows and sudden screeches. He begs to be found. He tries every possible scaling or scrabbling or searching for hand-holds. He is stuck. He tries many things. He throws his book out and it lands, sadly, open midway through. Lanny screams and bellows for his parents. For his mates. For his teachers. For his friend Pete. He calls for them all.
The moon spreads a flattening blanket of light across the woods. She cannot bear it. She desperately wants to peer into the hole. To reach him. She yearns to climb in with him. But she knows she is watching a replay, she is peering from a fold in time. Time. Perfect time of night, in the woods, watching your son disappear.
She thinks of the painted Virgin, a fantasy mother, with a gap on her lap where the future should be. Hands curled round an absence, caressing the empty space where her son once was.
Time accelerates and pauses, wobbles and misbehaves in a way that is familiar to Jolie, speeding through the dark hours so that she doesn’t have to listen to the sobs of her son and then holding still while he’s quiet, and the terrible closeness between them is all there is. There is some kind of grace in the unreal encounter, as when he was very new, when he was a tiny baby first breathing and feeding.
He rations his water, but takes the final tiny sip in the morning of the second day.
There are great stretches of silence. There are glimpses of the week she has lived. A policeman traipses along the pinched top lip of the wood taking photos and Jolie screams, hopelessly. She shouts – voicelessly – that he is here, he is just here. How is it possible that he hasn’t been found?
A team of volunteers with neon yellow jackets walk the edge of the field whacking at the long grass with walking sticks.
A badger trundles over and noses the open paperback disinterestedly.
A man comes close to the hole. He is smoking a cigarette and calling Lanny’s name, kicking up leaves as he goes. He is not searching as if expecting to find. Lanny must be sleeping and does not call out. The man wanders off and another night begins.
In time she hears song, curling up out of the hole as Lanny starts to sing. A garland of part-rhymes and nursery lines, bastardised pop tunes and repetitive sobbed or chanted pleas to be rescued. His hope begins to fade.
He talks of his terrible thirst, of being freezing cold, of his own shit and piss and tears. Jolie’s heart is broken. She hears him saying his weird prayers and he shakes them empty and spits them out. Now beneath us is growing, up above us is growing.
Collect rainwater, he yells, disgusted, pleading, dreaming of water. He licks the mossy walls of his cell. He sucks the dirty clumps of moss beneath him. He hates himself. He knows enough about human bodies to know that his will fail if he can’t drink water.
On the fourth or fifth evening Lanny speaks directly to his mum. He says sorry. He tells her he loves her. He whispers stories of gratitude and regret. He says he is so thirsty he could invent the idea of water every second. He says sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Dad. Tell Arch and Alf and Mrs Lucas sorry tell Pete sorry tell Gran sorry. He describes his bower and hopes she finds it. He sings of the terrible strangeness of being alive and the agony of being trapped in a cold damp drain when his bed is half a mile from here. He sobs and asks to be found.
‘Please find me.’
He says, ‘Mum, I’m dying. I’m dying, Mum.’
Much later, eyes closed, curled on his side, shivering, he remembers. Just as he is sliding towards dark sleep, just as his tongue is hardening and his blood is slowing, exhausted, he whispers, ‘Toothwort?’
Jolie’s flesh prickles and the whole scene sharpens and snaps alive. The air is crisp. The forest is awake.
Lanny says, ‘Toothwort? You promised. I’m thirsty. Please?’
‘Toothwort?’
Fifty yards from Lanny’s trap a beech sapling shivers and thickens itself loosely into the shape of a little human being.
Jolie watches him and smiles as she realises.
Of course.
He is a child.
She supposes he must be wearing something like his original skin. Verdant. He stands calm and small against the undergrowth, a green-stem changeling. He is naked in the dusk, glowing. Flickering thin edges of leaf or stalk take the weight of his steps, become mammal, then melt back into plant. He seems happy, now. The edgeless peace that h
angs in the air at this time of evening seems to emanate from him, immemorial. Jolie watches him inch forwards, radiant, and she realises he is good. A god, perhaps.
He tiptoes towards his friend, trapped in the forest floor. He reaches the hole and lies down, peering over the lid.
He speaks to the boy.
Lanny Greentree, you remind me of me.
He stands. He seems to be looking at Jolie. She can’t hold the sight of him steady. Her brain and her eyes don’t know what messages to send each other, so there is no resolution. He blinks and glimmers in and out of solid form, camouflaged or non-existent against the woodland, against her disbelief. But she’s like the well-trained dreamer who interrupts or haunts their own dreams with knowledge of the waking pain to come, so she concentrates. She watches so hard she might break.