by Max Porter
Toothwort holds one arm over the hole and grows what he needs.
An apple takes flesh from the open cup of his palm, rising slowly from a splodge of green matter, russeting as it rounds. A freckly, perfectly realised apple, just right for the job. He drops it in to Lanny. Then he is gone, then back again more hesitant, then circling the hole, less a figure than a rippling energy between things. Then he is standing very still, concentrating, rocking on the breeze, and he wriggles his fingers and there are hazelnuts. He shakes and claps and there is a plum. Then a handful of cherries. Some beech masts and wild garlic, dozens of little wild strawberries, raspberries and loganberries, ripening and dropping off him, into the hole to keep the child alive.
The miracle harvest of his best intentions seems to please him, as if he’s been waiting a long time to save this life. He throws in blackberries and bilberries, pacing in a circle around the hiding place. He listens to the startled noises of feasting below. Toothwort laughs and it’s the sound of a hundred small birds taking flight. He hunches and makes a cup of his two hands, stomata closed, a good leafy vessel, and fills it with water, cold spring water from the chalk aquifers beneath. He pours it down for the child to drink.
Every living thing is involved.
Night falls, and Dead Papa Toothwort is done.
Jolie wakes. She’s been lying on the forest floor. How long she has been there, she can’t tell. It’s moon-peep and chilly and she’s lost her bearings.
There’s a small voice in the trembling wood. Calling her.
It’s hard to see, but there’s a faint glow from the tree line above her and she knows she’s not alone. She knows she’s close so she shouts, ‘I’m here!’
There’s a thick barrier of ivy and bramble, fallen trees, wire and rotten posts, and she knows she’s close, pushing through, kicking through bracken clumps, but she’s making no progress, the tree line is the same distance, it’s all thicket and tangles and she remembers it being more open, lighter, closer, she can’t make progress, she’s on her knees again, and she can’t see, struggling against the slope, feeling as if she might fall backwards off the earth and then ‘Go!’ she is shoved from behind, two firm hands, strength of another body, support of some kind. Yelling as if in battle, Robert is there with her. They scramble up nearer to the spot and it’s familiar but not as she saw it, there are logs and bits of old car and huge flints trip her and the bramble is thick between her and the clearing. Jolie rips at the tangled briar and her hands are bleeding and Robert kicks again and again at the fortress of weeds and thorns and two more strong hands push on Jolie’s back as she almost topples backwards and Pete is there with them, ‘Go!’ Pete is pulling at the undergrowth, stamping nettles down, rolling great lumps of mouldy wood away, roaring, ‘I’ve got you,’ and the three of them push forwards as if guided. A trinity of desperate effort. They rip and tug and flail and Jolie calls for Lanny.
She screams his name. Pete and Robert join in, shouting for him. They push and shove his name into the undergrowth, into pockets of darkness, finding suggestions of paths, and then they break into open space, familiar smells and wet leaves, a pile of broken hundred-year-old glass bottles, a traffic cone, knowable rubbish, contemporary litter, a plastic sports bottle Robert recognises, he shrieks and the other two join him and Jolie is saying that this is the spot, this is the place. There’s a zip-loc bag, cleanish and recent, a paperback kid’s book, they are finding things, they are yelling with each discovery, and there are dogs with them now, hectic, pushing and panting, sniffing and barking, it’s dark but flickering and there are other people, many voices, with torches, with gloves and tough boots, with clarity of purpose, huge shears, vehicles, the undergrowth is de-tangled by lights, the ground is suddenly just ground, small flat intimate place, step aside please, stand clear, there is a metal lid, then there is a concrete square, an open hole, radio crackle and distant blue lights, yells and discord and sirens and messages, screens, bellowing people calling for space, calling for equipment, for proper crime-scene care, calling for calm, and Jolie screaming for quiet, lying down, reaching in. The little patch of light around the strange drain, hand signals, bleeps, panting and swearing, and all of a sudden in the forest, it stops.
Everyone quiet.
Just a mother and the name of her child.
PEGGY
False things, endings. Sustenance for fools and never what they claim to be.
Nevertheless.
I died the summer after they pulled Lanny out of the drain in Hatchett Wood. My heart stopped, but my body stood holding the gate for a further fifteen minutes. Several people said good afternoon to my cooling corpse. Eventually a light wind toppled me over. I lay on the path for an hour or two until I realised I was free to go, could just up and leave the old carrion Peggy lying on the path.
I go up to Lanny’s spot most nights and it is markedly transformed, that place. Close to the spot where the earth was disturbed a boyish sapling stands. It never grows. It’s lad height, healthy, and catches the evening sun.
There is a gentler breath up there, a different depth to the wind when it passes. The very presence of the boy changed the place. His songs left something up there.
He goes by another first name now. When asked, he tells a simple story: He fell, he slept, he was scared; he survived because of a rucksack of snacks.
He knows people were cheated of the story they expected. Or wanted. He knows that when he was found alive he became a walking reprimand.
The posters and leaflets were recycled, the police went away, the liaison officer got promoted, Robert and Jolie’s marriage disintegrated, Peter Blythe stopped showing new work. Lanny is taller and hairier now, he moves more slowly, asks fewer questions and thinks straighter about man and nature. He huddles behind the bus shelter smoking and laughing with his friends.
He has tried to lose the memory of Dead Papa Toothwort. Like the last speaker of any language he has had to forget in order to survive, but some knowledge of it lives in his marrow.
I could go on, but watch:
Deep in a silvicultured English wood there’s an old man sitting on a stump gazing at the roots of a fallen tree.
He gets out a big pad of paper and two wooden boards.
He opens a little box of charcoal and removes a fragile stick of burnt willow. He sits and does nothing but look for ten minutes. The beech trees watch him, safe under their canopy.
Then he starts by moving across the page with just the dry heel of his hand, not making a mark, just letting his arm and his eye and the forms he’s looking at become acquainted, and then in confident strokes he starts to draw the roots, starts to let them take shape on the page. His line leaps and pesters at the idea of the roots, and the roots play at being bones, tangled bodies, burnt buildings, ravaged metal frames of industrial leviathans, profiles, serpents, knots and cavities, and he smiles because as he darkens and works them they start looking and feeling like tree roots.
‘Mad Pete.’
‘Ah, good evening sir.’
The old man bends and drops his drawing on the floor. He stands, clutching a hand to his lower back, to the pain in his bones.
‘Come here then.’
The two men embrace. The younger man is a foot taller and he smiles as he stoops into the hug, seeing the drawing on the floor.
‘Nice.’
‘All right, Master Dürer, you have a go.’
The young man takes two bottles of beer from his rucksack. He digs about to find his keys then pops the lid off both and offers one to the old man. They chink and drink.
‘This is from Mum,’ says the boy, handing the man a book. ‘A signed copy of her latest.’
‘Oh bloody hell, more nightmares.’
‘Always more nightmares.’
The old man rips a sheet from his pad and secures it with a metal clip to the spare board. He hands the board and a stick of charcoal to his companion and nods at the upturned tree.
They have an hour or t
wo of good light left.
They draw the woods around them.
Love and thanks:
Lisa Baker.
Mitzi Angel and Ethan Nosowsky.
All at Faber, Graywolf, Aitken Alexander and Granta.
Kate Ward, Louisa Joyner, Eleanor Rees, Jonny Pelham, Rachel Alexander, Kate Burton, Catherine Daly and Katie Hall.
Lucy Dickens.
International publishers, translators and friends.
Most of all, for everything, thank you Jess.
About the Author
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Max lives in Bath with his family.
Also by the Author
GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS
Copyright
First published in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Max Porter, 2019
Cover design by Faber
The right of Max Porter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34030–9