Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  SWAMP

  We park a mile from the swamp and Hendry explains that we must go the rest of the way on foot, before locating the canoe, which he keeps stashed in thick bulrushes on the water’s edge. There is arguably no other ecologist who knows this 3,000-acre space as well as he does. He has been charting the wildlife of it since a quarter of it was reclaimed by the floods. He freezes a few yards from the car and puts a finger to his lips. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I thought it was a beaver.’ Beavers were only reintroduced to Britain seven decades ago, but there are now thought to be over a thousand living in Somerset’s swamps.

  We pass just one other example of human life before we reach the kayak: a man in his early seventies, tidying the hedge outside his lone farmhouse. His manner suggests that he and Hendry have met before.

  ‘Got a new friend, Nathan?’

  Hendry explains that I am a journalist, here to write about the wildlife of the swamp.

  ‘Hope you’ve told him about the bogles? I wouldn’t stay out after dark if I were you.’

  We walk on a few more yards. ‘The old folk back in the village will tell you all sorts,’ Hendry says, when the man is out of earshot. ‘They’ll talk about giant eels, and bogles, and boggarts, and a goblin with a sheep’s head. Of course, people have gone missing out here. Sometimes they’ll bring a dog, and they’ll come back to the village without it, but it’s all explainable by human folly. People come here to fish and they’re unprepared: they don’t have a compass and it’s easy to get lost. You get little chemical reactions, little gas explosions, on the surface of marsh water like this, and people see it at night and convince themselves they’ve seen something completely different, straight from their imagination. I’ve been coming here two decades and I don’t think there’s a yard I haven’t waded through or rowed across and I’ve not seen anything I can’t explain through basic science.’

  SPEED AWARENESS

  I was one of the first to enter the conference room and I chose a seat in one of the front two rows, as did the other handful of people who had arrived early: all men, apart from me, sipping unenthusiastically at disappointing foyer-coffee-machine coffee and blinking at the light coming through the blinds as if at the realisation that life wasn’t what they’d been promised and, at some time not far from now, would be over. A large projector screen awaited us, ominously, a laptop on a table next to it. My uncle arrived about five minutes later and took a seat directly behind me. I turned to look at him in the flesh for the first time in eighteen years.

  ‘All right, Catherine? How do?’

  ‘All right. Yourself?’

  ‘Ticking over nicely. Had a new hot tub installed last weekend on t’terrace.’

  ‘That sounds nice.’

  This was one of the main facets I remembered of my uncle’s personality from childhood: his unfailing ability to have installed a new, exciting and expensive item in his house every time you visited him. On the few occasions there wasn’t a new, exciting and expensive item in his house, there was nearly always a new, exciting and expensive item just outside his house. Cars, usually: dynamically shaped ones.

  ‘Still driving like a nutcase, then?’ I asked him. ‘Where did you get done?’

  ‘A14. Just past Newmarket, near the new Starbucks. Got a thing on me satnav that tells me where the cameras are but missed the mobile one on the bridge ’cause I were sending a text and they got me doing ninety. You?’

  ‘A143, just outside Ixworth’s thirty zone. I was doing thirty-six.’

  ‘Your mum said you was living over here now. Working on trees.’

  ‘You saw her?’ I had no knowledge of this.

  ‘Yeah. In IKEA. Was back up in Notts. Went to a concert at the ice rink with Charlotte and bought a bed on the way back.’

  I looked through the blinds again, across a lawn covered in worm casts, still four weeks from its first cut of the year. It was February outside in nearly every way. Spring was straining against a natural grey-yellow screen of air. Suffolk light. A path led from the hotel complex to the village church, a Norman one, insulted by every loveless aspect to this building we were in that now blocked its view, insulted by today, by us.

  ‘Expect it keeps you fit,’ said my uncle. ‘How much does that pay?’

  When I’d last seen my uncle at a family party, five full years since the time I’d seen him before that, and not long after I’d got my first job in London, working in publicity for a film company, his opening question to me was, ‘How much does that pay?’ I had answered him honestly. Now I answered him honestly again.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘Many women do that sort of thing?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘How old are you now? Thirty-six?’

  ‘Forty-four.’

  ‘Fuck me. Dunt time fly.’

  The door opened and a short man in a lime-green crew-neck sweater entered the room, carrying a brown leather briefcase. I would have put him at about forty-four too, although he had the tissue-paper complexion of someone older, and looked cowed by all light, whether LED or natural. I turned back away from my uncle to face the man in the green crew neck. By this time the room had filled up with six more men who occupied the back two rows and looked a little like my uncle had done when I was a child, and two women, who didn’t.

  The man in the green crew neck placed his briefcase on the table beside the projector screen and introduced himself as John. He gave a brief outline of the day’s timetable, explained that we would have an hour for lunch, which we were welcome to have on or off the premises, and invited us to guess where it was that the most fatalities occurred: motorways, normal A and B roads, or quiet country lanes. People wrote the answer on the slip. The course had only been due to begin two minutes earlier and a few stragglers entered the room and took the remaining seats on the back two rows. John collected the slips and counted them up.

  ‘Only two of you got the right answer,’ said John. ‘It’s quiet country lanes. People crash on quiet lanes less frequently than they do on major roads, but when they do, it takes far longer for emergency services to reach the vehicle. Some people can be trapped, dying, in their vehicle in a field off a quiet country lane for several hours.’

  The room vibrated with a low noise.

  ‘Do you think about what it is to die? Or what it is to wait there, dying, but not be able to contact your loved ones, because in the impact of your collision with a tree your spine has been severed, and that means you cannot reach your mobile phone, which keeps ringing, in the footwell of the passenger seat? Or what it is to go on living after you have hit a child at a speed that if it was ten miles slower would not have killed that child?’

  A couple of men in the back row laughed, very slightly, but it wasn’t a laugh with any humour in it. It was a laugh like a burst crisp packet.

  ‘I look like a dull man to you, I realise,’ John continued. ‘Some of you will take in what I say, slightly, and change your behaviour, but in a few months your old bad habits will creep in. You will begin to check your phone in the car. You will push the limits, to cut off a bit of time in a journey. But I am telling you the cost, and it is enormous.’

  With that he paused, and stared at us. He held the silence. A man on the back row chuckled. The crisp packet again.

  ‘Excuse me for just a second,’ said John, and left the room with his briefcase. A minute later I saw him walking across the lawn outside the window towards the church. Nobody else noticed this. Only me, as I was sitting down by the window. As he reached the gate of the church, another man entered the room. He was taller and more confident. He also wore a green crew-neck sweater. He introduced himself as Matt.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m a few minutes late,’ said Matt. ‘But the traffic was pretty bad from Ipswich and speeding’s not really my thing.’

  An air of confusion in the room prevented his joke from really hitting home.

  ‘What happened to John?’ asked a man on the back row. Rowdy, an air of Halfords�
�� car park about him. Big neck. Twenty-sixish. Probably ate in Burger King a lot. A seasoned denizen of society’s back rows.

  ‘Who’s John?’ asked Matt.

  ‘The guy who was in here before. We thought he was taking the course.’

  ‘How very strange. I suppose there must have been some mix-up. I don’t know of any John, but I’m Matt. Now, I’m sure you’re all dying to get this over with so let’s begin.’

  Matt gave a brief outline of the day’s timetable, explained that we would have an hour for lunch, which we were welcome to have on or off the premises, and invited us to guess where it was that the most fatalities occurred: motorways, normal A and B roads, or quiet country lanes. People wrote their answers on slips of paper. Matt was surprised to find that everyone gave the correct answer, and said that it was the first time it had happened in the five years he had been tutoring this course. He told us we were all clearly excellent pupils and moved on, explaining ways we could check what the speed limit was when we were unsure, including looking at the signs on the roads branching off from the road we were on. He made a joke about the drivers in Essex and said that a good way to reduce your speed in villages with 30 mph was to always go down to third as you passed through them.

  After lunch we did a group exercise and watched a couple of films, one of which was quite hard-hitting, but before that I sat on a bench in the churchyard and had lunch with my uncle. My uncle hadn’t brought sandwiches of his own, and I offered him one of mine, which had a Manchego, rocket and chutney filling.

  ‘What’s this? You need to get some proper food in you. You’ll waste away. Look at you.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘It’s all right, actually. Tasty. Thanks.’

  Above the bench, the branches of an old yew tree shook slightly in the breeze. The door to the church was arched and wide and the texture of its old, worn oak resembled the scratches of a rabid animal. Back when I was young, my uncle was always climbing trees and I was always following him. One time my uncle climbed a log over a tree across a river, and I followed him and fell in. Sitting here, it occurred to me that in some ways this man, who I had not seen or truly thought about for many years and no longer knew, had in some strange way brought me to this exact point in my life: climbing trees for a living, and enduring a day of conference-room punishment for driving a car too fast. I had not driven my car very fast on the occasion I had been caught speeding, it was true, but I did sometimes drive it far faster than I should have done, and that needed to change. I had always liked going in my uncle’s cars, because they were faster than my dad’s. That part of me still existed, despite myself.

  ‘Not surprised you didn’t last in London, in that job. Knew it wasn’t right for you. That’s what you were like as a kid – always outdoors. You’re better doing what you’re doing now. There’s a tree at my and Charlotte’s place. Ash. Maybe you could look at it for us. It’s got that disease.’

  ‘Ash dieback.’

  ‘Yep. That’s it.’

  ‘What exactly happened earlier?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose the guy had written down the date wrong in his diary and wasn’t supposed to teach today.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘People play pranks. My mate Paul did all the carpets in this place. You should look him up, if you need carpets.’

  My uncle seemed reluctant to continue to discuss the big question of the morning, as if it was an emotional issue for him. My auntie Claire had said that was the problem with him: he wasn’t up for discussing anything, or opening himself up emotionally. But it had ultimately been only one of the problems for them, a relatively minor part of why they hadn’t stayed together.

  We walked back to the hotel and as we sat down for the afternoon session, it occurred to me that the room was very much divided into two sets of drivers: those on the back two rows, who drove fast a lot of the time, were proud of it and would continue to do so after the course was over. And those of us on the front, who were embarrassed about being here, and would like to try to be better citizens. A couple of blokes on the back row heckled Matt when he claimed that speed cameras were of benefit to society and not a government scheme to generate easy revenue. My uncle probably would have been with them, had this been a few years earlier. Instead he lurked in a half-and-half area. Row three, leaning back a little, as if occupying some middle ground, not quite with anyone, sitting on the fence about his allegiances.

  At the end of the day my uncle pointed out to me that we were now living remarkably close to each other, no more than four miles apart in this newish part of the country for both of us, but we did not arrange to meet again. By the time I said goodbye to my uncle in the car park, his face had changed: I had the sense that I was looking at him through a tunnel, and years and jowls had fallen off him every minute until he was physically the same man he’d been when I was younger. On his head was a strong shadow-memory of his thick, almost black hair, despite the fact that almost all of it had gone, the strands that remained being ever-weakened by heavy rain. The droplets slid down the church walls behind us and darkened the scratch marks on the door about ten yards from where, watching through the window, I’d lost sight of John, his walk just discernibly changing to a crawl as he disappeared from view. Within a year, my uncle was dead too. Not from a car accident, but cancer, although I never enquired as to which kind.

  NINE TINY STORIES ABOUT HOUSES

  SEA HOUSE

  The house leaned out over a corner of the sea almost as if the cliffs were a church wall and the house itself was a gargoyle stuck to the wall. When the couple reached their room, the first thing they noticed was a portrait of the devil hanging opposite the beds. The devil looked slick and smug in this illustration, like a man you were told to trust by someone who prized cleanliness above all other qualities, apart perhaps from the alleged quality of personal wealth. They would have been less scared if the devil had had red eyes and a pointier nose and a tail and looked more traditionally devil-like. While she applied her make-up, he turned the portrait so the devil faced the wall, then they went off to watch their friends get married.

  She danced for several hours and he, joined by an accomplice, harangued the DJ when the DJ ceased playing songs that people liked and began to play songs that he thought would make people impressed by his esoteric knowledge. By this point the bride’s aunt had gone to bed and been woken again by a knock on the door of her room and opened it to find nobody there. By the time the couple got into bed they had drunk a lot of champagne. The room had two single beds and she seemed much further than three feet away from him in hers. ‘Have you seen how round my bottom is?’ she said, twisting her head to look back at it, as if for the first time, then fell asleep. He outlasted her only by a minute, the scarlet room spinning around him. He did not notice the three drawing pins in the bed and the other four stuck in his bare thighs until the next morning, when he was sober.

  HOLIDAY HOUSE

  She always remembered it as the best holiday house. Everyone had been there, the time she went. All the best people. There had been a big central room, a bit like a medieval banqueting hall, and the bedrooms were all off that, a perfect circle of them, with the exception of the crow’s-nest bedroom, where her aunt and uncle slept. She had been five and her parents were still together, and drove an orange VW Beetle. A wicker chair hung from the ceiling like the ones everyone had only previously seen in catalogues, and Pete sat in it and it crashed to the floor, which was surprising because everything about Pete was very skinny apart from his beard, which still probably didn’t weigh all that much. All the cars outside smelled of their engines in a way cars didn’t any more. She liked inhaling it.

  These memories were so vivid and comforting that almost three decades later when she realised she lived near the house, she went to see it, and its new owners, who did not run it as a holiday home like their predecessors, very kindly showed her around. She wandered through the rooms,
exclaiming at how small they all seemed compared to her memory of them. She thanked the current owners, thinking it best not to admit to them that she had got the wrong house.

  RIVER HOUSE

  Polly lived across the track from the house and Sam liked her a lot. Her main interests included dogs, books, cats, UFOs, fossils and bones. Before she’d left her husband, they had been burgled and he’d shown the police into the porch. The policeman had asked what was in the trunk in the porch and if anything had been taken from it. ‘No, that’s just my wife’s bones in there,’ he had replied. From her position across the track, with her small dog and large cat, Polly had watched the various tenants fall in love with the house then become derailed by life in eclectic ways. The river ran partly under the house and later, when Sam dreamed of the rooms, they were always very damp and overrun with swimming creatures that were oddly lizardlike and redolent of prehistory.

  A few years after Sam left, Polly told him the details of the stabbing that happened in the house, which she said were different from those reported in the local media. She said she had taken a photo that Sam might want to see, which was of a ghost standing beside the gate to the field next to the house. The photograph wasn’t a digital one, she said. She tried not to get involved with all that business. Sam said he’d like to see it and the two of them arranged to go for a walk a fortnight later, on the north coast, where she hoped to find dinosaur bones. A week later Sam received a phone call from Polly’s daughter, informing him that Polly had died of an undetected brain tumour. During a digital clear-out half a decade later, Sam came across Polly’s email address and a steamroller of sadness hit him: very different from the sadness hemight have felt if he had stumbled across her physical address.