by Helen Mort
‘You,’ she said. Then, hesitantly, ‘I thought it was the one thing in my life that might make you proud.’
He shook his head and buried his face in his hands.
‘Good God.’
The Don
There’s always someone on my banks, lost in their own drama. Angry phone conversations. Gestures nobody else can see. A woman rocking back and forth with her knees hugged to her chest, surrounded by the rubble of other people’s lives – a fingerless glove, a Durex wrapper, copies of used car magazines. When it’s all over, I’ll carry on as I always have, beautiful, between the ghost shapes of mills, the outflow and the empty factories, the spoilt and unspoilt pubs, threading between the washed-up children’s shoes and the crushed Stella cans. I’m a seam through the city, gleaming like melted-down cutlery when the sun shines on me directly, a memory of knives and brightness, polished usefulness. Sometimes the light makes me spark. My movement is slick as a machine. The engine of me pulses, fired by the Loxley, the Rivelin, the Sheaf, the Rother and the Dearne, powered by Great Grains Moss, Winscar Dam. I push through Penistone, Deepcar, Oughtibridge. I enter the edges of town like someone coming home. Leppings Lane. The Hillsborough Footbridge. I’ve seen weeping and anger, men throwing off scarves, couples holding one another tight. Hillfoot Bridge. Steelbank Weir. The disused footbridges. Kelham Weir. Wicker Weir. The places that stood for industry once: Owlerton Rolling Mill, lost to fire. The remnants of fig trees by the banks, from when they quenched hot metal in the water and made me warm enough to germinate new life.
Leigh
The first time Leigh went to meet Alexa in Nether Edge she was neurotically early. She sat outside the café on a wooden slatted bench, sheltered by a canopy of plants, and watched a man in a long leather coat feed crusts to his Akita. The creature was remarkably placid, but when she went to stroke it, the man didn’t look up from his crossword, his frown deepening. The glass windows behind her were steaming up, coffee and wet coats. She saw Alexa approaching – tweed jacket and high ponytail, a slim efficiency of movement – and pretended she hadn’t.
‘Have you been here long?’ Leigh shook her head.
Inside, Cafe#9 was unnaturally comfortable. There was a casual eccentricity about the customers – some with conspicuous hairdos, jackets decorated with ironic badges and others in paint-spattered overalls, unshaven, red-eyed. As if they belonged in the café and nowhere else, fixtures as crucial as the small wood-burner and the corner piano. Back on the street, they’d be shifty and nervous, slightly stooped as they walked. Here, they took their shoes off and talked loudly to strangers and ate gooey flapjacks and scattered the crumbs. There was a guide to trees and how each wood burned pinned on the wall. The tables were shaped like lungs. Two teenagers were playing chess next to the bookstand, calling out the moves as they went. The shaven-headed man behind the counter was already making Alexa’s latte.
‘And for your friend?’ he asked, emphasising the last word.
Alexa hesitated, glanced at Leigh and shrugged.
‘Espresso,’ said Leigh. ‘Please.’
This was not a place where it was easy to be angry and that gave Leigh comfort, even when Alexa sat as far away from her as she could and folded her coat over her knees. Posters by the counter were advertising a gig: Ash Gray & The Burners. The image showed a man with a mane of curly hair, mid-song, playing the guitar left-handed. There was a double bass propped against the wall, the colour of cherry-red Doc Martens, and exotic drums rested on stacked vinyl. It was as if the café had music poured into it each weekend, the hot, bright water of phrases, and held it, kept it long after it had cooled. It was a place to be known or to be unknown, whatever you wanted. A man in a flat cap and burgundy necktie sat down on the edge of their table and smiled at Alexa. He was tall and slim with a neatly shaped beard and intelligent, kindly eyes. Every movement seemed gentle and precise. Within moments, a couple came to join him, leaving their seats on the other side of the café and knocking the table as they leaned to hug him. Alexa dabbed at her spilt coffee with a napkin.
‘Here.’ Leigh handed her a handkerchief and Alexa didn’t take it.
‘Who carries one of those?’
‘Grandads, mostly. And hipsters.’
Alexa didn’t smile.
Behind the counter, the man was singing along to a band he’d put on the iPad. It was a full, mellow sound, old-fashioned and modern at the same time.
‘Can you play?’ asked Leigh, nodding to the instruments.
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I’ve always been shit at music.’ She laughed. ‘Shit at most things, really.’
‘I don’t know who the bass belongs to. Jonny’s maybe.’
‘Who’s Jonny?’
‘This is Jonny’s place.’
‘Right.’ The espresso had made Leigh’s mouth dry. Dry and bitter. She wished she’d asked for water. ‘Do you know everyone in here?’
Alexa didn’t smile. ‘Everyone apart from you.’
‘Yet,’ said Leigh. ‘You don’t know me yet.’
‘I don’t know if I want to.’
‘You asked me to come for coffee.’
In the silence, Leigh busied herself with the Bird&Bee’s Firewood Collection poster on the wall.
Oak. The king of trees has a sparse flame.
Sycamore. Will not burn when green. Season well.
Sweet Chestnut. She spits and she sparks but burns well. Roast the nuts, too!
She tried to imagine what each branch looked like, but she could only think of the taste of chestnut, the rich sweetness of it. Alexa was stirring her latte. The two men and the woman next to them were hunched over the table, talking softly. She caught the names of local streets, varieties of tree. She remembered a newspaper article in the Star she’d seen weeks ago in the shop café, how leafy suburban Rustlings Road was being threatened with tree-cutting, how the council maintained it was a way to make the pavements safer, and how the protestors camping in Endcliffe Park disagreed. There’d been rumours of contracts signed, money promised to a road-contracting firm. She wanted to listen, wanted to be part of their intimate circle, their three heads bowed together.
‘They’re going back to the Vernon Oak tomorrow,’ said the woman. ‘There’s been a tip-off.’
The man in the flat cap sighed. ‘And can we stop them?’
‘We can slow them down. Make life bloody difficult,’ countered the other man. He had John Lennon glasses that suited his face and white stubble. His partner was petite, alert. She had the quick hands of an artist and she wore a red and white spotted dress, hair gelled slightly.
‘And there’s the money,’ she added. ‘Last week on St Ronan’s Road we delayed them by days, they had to come back three times. They were raging.’
Leigh was nervy and distracted. Why would Alexa ask her here if she didn’t want to talk? She didn’t seem angry, more indifferent. On the drive from Hathersage, Leigh had murmured to herself as she passed the gated houses on the south-western side of town, the insubstantial, elegant trees at Brincliffe Edge, rehearsing apologies and declarations. I never meant to meddle in your life. But once I had, I wanted to make it right. Nothing sounded the way it did in her head. I did it for Pete. I did it for you. I didn’t think … I wasn’t thinking. Now she was in Alexa’s presence, she couldn’t bring herself to try.
‘Another coffee?’ she asked, weakly, picking up her wallet.
‘I’ll get them.’ Alexa stood up abruptly. As she reached for her coat, the slim, gentle man opposite put his hand on her arm.
‘Jasvinder?’
‘Sit down, love,’ he said. He had a slow and deliberate way of talking, it seemed to make the whole room gather around him. ‘These are on me. There’s something I wanted to ask you.’
* * *
The oak was larger and broader than Leigh had expected, the road quiet, apart from the protestors who stood with hushed reverence around the base. It was draped with yellow banners and bunting. The we
eks since her meeting with Alexa in the café had been frantic, her phone buzzing with news about roads where trees were under threat or where action was planned, covert attempts by the developers, red herrings and hoaxes. The police had arrested two elderly women for obstruction. In one demonstration near Ryle Road, a protestor tried to get in front of a chainsaw, and they only switched it off when he started clutching his small terrier to his chest, too. A mother had been cautioned for taking her baby on a protest.
Ever since Jasvinder and his friends had coaxed them into their circle that day in Cafe#9, Leigh had been lit with energy, ready to leave the house whenever she could. She was reminded of a customer in the gear shop who belonged to the Edale Mountain Rescue Team, how he’d spring into life as soon as a call came through. She felt indignant, hopeful and giddy, which, she realised, was better than she’d felt in months.
On their first walk to a watch together, Alexa had softened and started to talk. They discovered they had the same stride length and could match each other’s pace. There was no great apology, no need for Leigh to beg for forgiveness. But, with the trees to talk about, their silences became shorter. That night, Alexa had sent her articles on WhatsApp, links to vitriolic pieces by George Monbiot, tweets and endless petitions. This is how state and corporate power subverts democracy. Trees are the lungs of the planet. Over texts, they began to joke with each other. They risked emoticons – smiley faces and thumbs-up. Alexa was more forthcoming behind a screen. She told Leigh how she was getting on with her dad, and Leigh pretended Pete had told her nothing at work. Leigh was careful not to push her with questions, but in time she began to mention Caron, too, how they were in occasional contact, civil but not quite friends. Alexa and Leigh met for pints at The Union, a gig at Cafe#9. Leigh always drove to Alexa’s neighbourhood. She began to feel at ease in the café. They learned her order and started making it when she walked in. There were regulars she didn’t talk to, but was happy to see all the same. The girl with Fifties headscarves. The four men who always made a show of ordering scrambled eggs, but then barely touched them. Halfway through, one would always get an important call on his mobile and slouch outside, then the rest would follow. She sat alongside each of them the way you sit with afternoons.
Dore was grey under a veil of cloud this morning. A few cars passed and pipped their horns at them. A woman who seemed to be in charge gave Leigh coffee from a thermos and checked she had all she needed. A smile was twitching at the corners of her face.
‘If this comes off, it’ll be the best publicity we’ve had yet.’
‘No pressure!’ yelled a burly man in an anorak and everyone laughed.
The green of the trunk matched the green of the pavement underneath. It reminded Leigh of the privacy of the woods above Hathersage, close to North Lees, where the air smelled of bluebells and blackberries, and the leaves made a paste under your feet. She checked her balaclava to make sure it covered her face fully. She plucked at her jumper, dark, fashioned with black wings to make her look like a bird, a crow or a raven. One for sorrow. Wasn’t that magpies? She needed good luck. She couldn’t afford to fall or fuck up. Then she started to move, slowly and deliberately up the tree, high into the branches, where she sat and looked down and waited for the cameras.
The Trees
At night the trees call to each other across the roofs of the houses. There are so many, but there are never enough for an army. Some of them are splayed and ancient with voices like church doors. The saplings sound like bicycle brakes on a wet day. They shout from every corner of my body, a choir in Ecclesall Woods, a small cough from the corner of the Botanical Gardens, a single, loud voice on Ryle Road, where a tree is an island, intervening, steering the movements of people. Even when the felled trees whisper, they are louder than owls. They talk about their suffering, how they were cut. But mostly the trees yell to each other like men across a building site. In summer they announce who they’ve seen: the loiterers, the smokers, the ones who try to speak to them, flat palms against their trunks, forgetting that they don’t understand the language. They laugh, a ripple that starts in the branches and spreads until it tickles the stars. Some of them have stood for hundreds of years, but they are calm. The saplings speak about magpies and penknives, the sly touch of the sun. Somewhere in the suburbs, you are awake and – though you don’t know it – it’s them you listen for, alone at your attic window, hugging yourself tight.
Leigh
Leigh passed a hand across her face as if she could wipe the sun from her eyes. Apparent North seemed to shimmer in the heat. It was the best day of the year, the wind still for once. Even the midges weren’t out. She watched a clot of cyclists move slowly up the road below, leaning into the gradient, chugging their way to Burbage North and the brief downhill. They were half a rainbow, red and orange and blue and green.
She saw the leader pull away from the others, then they came together again as the incline steepened and the others reeled him in. He would get ahead again and then they would catch him, overlap. That was how it would always be. She felt the burn as if it was in her own thigh muscles, the sweet ache of uphill, of work. Then she turned back to watch the woman on the rock, the short, blunt buttress she was climbing, stubborn as a thought. Her white helmet was too bright in the sunshine. Her quickdraws clinked as she shifted her weight. All the routes here had ungainly finishes, few holds at the top. The woman bellyflopped her way over the edge, laughing.
Alexa stood up and looked down.
‘Safe!’ she yelled.
Pete took her off belay and grinned up.
‘You’ve got my stylish moves,’ he said. ‘Like father, like daughter.’
Alexa stuck her middle finger up at him. Leigh stood slightly apart from them. She was part of the day, but something told her not to get too close, give them space. She watched Pete putting on his shoes. Quick, practised movements. But not bored ones, not over-rehearsed. Each climb was a new climb, however soft. However hard.
‘Hey, Pete,’ she said. He angled his head towards her. Safi sat next to him. She angled her silvery head, too. ‘She’s got your approach to gear as well.’
He looked over his shoulder. Alexa had placed one large cam in the crack; she’d moved it up with her as she climbed. Practically a solo. Leigh heard him chuckle.
From the top, Alexa didn’t say anything, but her face was alive. She was wrapping a sling around a rock, content and absorbed in the movement.
‘Should I go up and help?’ asked Leigh.
‘Nah. She’s OK. She’s a fast learner.’
Leigh nodded. She had hoped he would say that. Going near either of them felt like a kind of trespass.
‘Besides, if her belay’s crap, it’s only my tin skull we’ve got to worry about.’
Safi had seen a grouse lift out of the heather below, its call startled from it as it rose. Her legs tensed and her ears flattened. She started forwards and stopped, as if something was tethering her to Pete and Alexa, an invisible loop of their rope. Leigh knew how she felt. She was leashed to the rock, walking away from it in smooth arcs, always drawn back again. Perhaps she’d been tied to Stanage all her life. The cyclists had vanished over the top of the hill, but they would be back, too, back next week and back the week after, pitting themselves against the same roads, imagining they’d tire of them, but never tiring, not really.
Alexa took in and the rope pulled taut on Pete’s harness.
‘Alexa?’ he called up.
‘What?’
‘It was a pleasure. Holding your ropes.’
‘Shut up and climb, Dad.’
In the car on the way up, Alexa’s speech had been peppered with it. Dad. Dad. Trying the word on again, like something she thought they’d both grown out of. Pete had started climbing. Alexa was giving him too much slack, but he didn’t seem to mind. There was a route to the right of her that Leigh could solo, an old favourite, steep for the grade. She was content to stand in the shade, hardly moving. Last year she would hav
e been moving. Last year she would have done six routes by now. But it wasn’t last year. And she was stiller.
She yawned, a cat-like, wide-mouthed yawn. She was knackered from Tom’s engagement party. Her head was clear, though – she’d driven, not stayed long at the hall, clutched an orange juice. Practised saying ‘Sophie’ when people asked her name. When they toasted the happy couple, she lifted it high and caught Tom’s eye and gave him a proper, teeth-out smile. The kind of smile your eyes join in with. And if he felt anything like embarrassment or regret, his face didn’t show it. Tom and Rachel walked off through an archway thick with roses. The stray petals on his suit looked comical, like bird shit. She’d thought about sharing that with someone, with the gangly, bearded academic on his own by the drinks table, by text to Tom himself, but there was no good reason, and she’d stopped doing things unless she had a good reason, so instead she took a photo of the couple as they walked away. She placed the card she’d got for them and a single bluebell on the gifts table, and she’d left the drone of pissed gossip and small talk and driven back through Hope, the road straight as a promise all the way home.
Alexa and Pete were on the descent now. She could hear their voices, the clatter of their gear as they got closer. They had the same gait. She didn’t know why she’d never noticed it before. They came back under the edge and stood next to her, looking up at the rock. Alexa was breathing hard in the heat.
‘What’s that route over there?’ asked Alexa. ‘The one that looks like a battleship.’
‘That’s Black Car Burning.’
‘The route Caron wanted to climb?’
‘She’ll climb it,’ said Leigh. ‘She’ll be back.’
And she would. She’d be back stronger and leaner, with hard fingertips and feet that knew the route in the dark. She’d be back, this year or next year, and Leigh would hold the rope for her and she’d do it properly this time, do it so that she was almost climbing with her as the sequence came together, as her own heart lifted and stalled and lifted again. Caron would stand on top of Black Car Burning, and something in her would be quenched and Leigh would help to quench it.