by Helen Slavin
Three steps brought her to Alizon and she found her hand reaching out, pinching hard at the bony upper arm and it was so tempting to launch her into the water but her mother had always said, no one must go into the water and so Vanessa half pushed, half carried Alizon Wilde towards the shore, her feet almost tripping with every step.
“Watch your step.” Vanessa warned as they continued to stumble towards Alizon’s car, parked behind Cob Cottage.
At the car, Alizon, shaking and rattled, scraped her key along the paintwork trying to fit it into the door. She fumbled at the lock, scuttled inside but as she tried to pull the door shut Vanessa held it fast.
“Don’t come here again.” and with that warning she slammed the door.
Inside the cool interior of Cob Cottage Vanessa’s anger sifted out of her like sand. She put the kettle onto the stove and thought about finding something to eat.
Her mother arrived back an hour or more later. Vanessa was still wired with the encounter with Alizon Wilde and did not notice how tired her mother looked, nor that her clothes were damp.
“Alizon Wilde was here.” Vanessa informed her mother. Hettie Way did not look surprised.
“What did she want?”
“Looking for you. Out on the jetty.” Vanessa looked at her mother and did not see the dark circles beneath her eyes “Just standing out there like she owned the place when I got home.”
Hettie Way gave no answer to this, she waited for her daughter to continue.
“She’s so bloody up herself. God.” Vanessa turned and noticed, at last, that her mother was very pale.
“Avoid her. Just don’t…bother about her…”
Vanessa thought that her mother was worse than pale, she looked greenish as if she might be sick.
“Are you alright?” as Vanessa said it she was already reaching for her mother who was failing on her feet. Her mother’s weight fell against Vanessa and, amidst a flash of fear at what might be wrong, Vanessa helped her to the chair. As she did so her mother gagged violently, throwing up a cascade of lake water, of dead fish and rotting weed. Vanessa’s heart was bursting with terror but she held onto her mother as they rode out a second wave of retching; more water, a long strangling ribbon of weed slithering like a bilious green tape worm. Vanessa was shaking but her brain pushed her into a primal mode and held tight to her mother.
“It’s ok. It’s ok.” she said over and over as if saying it would make it so. An affirmation. A wish. A spell. The words printed themselves into her head. “It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.” she stroked her mother’s hair as Hettie sagged back into the chair, drank in great deep breaths of air. Vanessa reached for the blanket from the sofa, wrapped her mother up. Her mother held her hand for a moment, squeezed tight.
“I’m fine. I will be alright. Don’t worry.”
Vanessa did worry. Her brain and heart were misfiring in head and chest as she reached for the mop and for the towels by the washing machine, using them to mop up the surfeit of water on the kitchen floor. Finding the broom and sweeping up the weed, slithering the fish into the dustpan.
Later, she made them tea and they sat together in the falling dark.
“What was Alizon doing here?” Vanessa asked at last, her mind recalling the image of the red woman, staring into the water. Had she pushed her mother in? Her mother looked at her. For a moment Vanessa thought she might not answer.
“Trespassing.” Hettie said and shifted in the chair, pulled the blanket up over her shoulder. “She’s a pain in the arse.”
“I told her not to come back here.”
Hettie took her hand, held it too tightly, her face looking angry.
“No. Don’t have any interaction with her. She’s dangerous. I’m warning you. Keep away.”
Vanessa felt angered. For just a brief moment she had thought that her mother might tell her something, might include her in the idea of her work as Gamekeeper, might reveal the true nature of her relationship with those bitch queens of the WI. She had felt, for just a moment, that she was going to be included and now her mother shut down that moment.
“She came here, onto the property. To our home. What was I supposed to do? Just walk in and ignore her standing out there?”
“Yes. Get inside and lock the door.” Hettie’s face looked strained. There was no give in what she was saying, Vanessa could tell, there was no negotiation possible. Her heart and head had settled into their usual rhythms but this instruction from her mother sent them reeling off again. Vanessa thought of the nights they had spent at the cottage and she had woken and heard voices or noises and always her mother had reassured her and sent her back to her room. She was too big now to be sent back to her room.
“What will she do?”
“Just leave it be. This is my job, not yours.”
“I want to help.” this was all Vanessa had ever really wanted. She thought of all the times she had offered such help and she thought she already knew the response, but, when it came it was not what she had anticipated.
“I know. I know that.” her mother was shaking, her voice barely managing to find its way out “You have to understand… you are not the Gamekeeper.”
“I know, I don’t want to be, I just want…” her mother grabbed at her forearm, held tight.
“No. Listen. You are not the Gamekeeper. Ever. Do you understand? I can’t teach you. It isn’t for you.” her mother’s face was trembling with emotion. Hettie reached for her daughter’s hand. Vanessa wanted to back away, felt more afraid than ever before in her life.
“Remember the pike? Remember?” Hettie’s face was only just holding its foundations against the earthquake of emotion. Vanessa thought, for a moment, that her mother was talking nonsense.
“Pike?” she was confused, afraid, as a memory glimmered strongly, a net, a fish, the snowed-in globe of its eye. Aurora. Hettie held her hand painfully tight, her other hand reaching for Vanessa’s face, turning her daughter’s head so that she could look directly into her eyes.
“I did not decide this. The Pike. Remember?” There was no escape, memory surged back, water and weed.
“Esox Lucius.” Vanessa said and Hettie nodded, nodding and nodding, the only way to keep the tears back. She stroked Vanessa’s hair, the way she had when she was small.
“This place…Havoc Wood. Pike Lake. Cob Cottage…This place, is not your place.”
It was so cruel. So definite. Hettie let her daughter go, her hands moving to her own face, covering her mouth, her eyes closing against the tide of tears.
Vanessa walked out through the double doors onto the porch, jumped down the flight of three steps and across the grass. Hettie watched her daughter stride to the lake, pick up pebbles and begin to throw them one by one into the water.
Hettie leant forward in the armchair, resting her head in her hands for a moment. She was tired, the kind of tired you became from having fought hard enough to live to fight another day. She peeled off her sweater, moving her left arm gingerly. The sleeve beneath was ragged and the claw marks had cut deep. She would need to stitch the wound. First she needed a painkiller as her arm was aching from where it had been dislocated and she had been forced to pop it back. She checked the wound, it was cleanish but she needed to be certain. She stood up, making for the sink and her first aid box, the room wheeled around and Vanessa’s arm caught her, steered her back into the chair.
“I can stitch that for you.”
Hettie, eyes filled with tears, nodded.
They were quiet as Vanessa worked to repair the wounds.
Vanessa had understood all her life that her mother’s job was not the usual run of gamekeeping, that that was just a name to pin it with in the world. This fact did not make it any the less disconnecting.
Much later, with starlight sprinkling the lake they sat on the porch, wrapped in blankets against the chill air. “I thought I could use science to protect you.” she confessed “Explain. Measure. Classify.”
Her mother nodded.
>
“I know.”
They sat together for some time longer, then Hettie hefted herself out of the chair and stepped towards the door. She hesitated.
“Vanessa.” she took a second to gather herself. Vanessa’s heart was pounding again and she felt as tired as if she had run a marathon. “The sooner you can get away from here, the better off you will be.” her mother’s voice cracked with emotion.
PART FOUR
Arctic ‘85
What delighted and depressed Dr Angela Byrne about her intern, Vanessa Way, was that the young woman was full of intelligence and passion and creativity and that, before many more years passed, that intelligence would be questioned, the passion dimmed and the creativity crushed.
Vanessa Way was resourceful and hardworking. There was no task too small, no project too large. She had been out in the field from forest to tundra, she had learnt to use the snowcat in one lesson and could, in fact, strip it down. Dr Byrne felt she could trust Vanessa Way with her life, and that was quite something out here in the far north where Norway and Finland, Sweden and Russia all began to blur into the snow.
The male contingent at the research station were, in Dr Byrne’s less than medical opinion, like primates that had undergone one too many neurological experiments. Dr Byrne had been carrying them for too long and, once she got the measure of Vanessa, she realised that she didn’t have to carry that burden any longer. She could leave the men to their idleness and atavism and she and Vanessa could do the proper research.
To provide an example; Dr Finbar Hardy, a rather portly climatology professor from Dublin, didn’t go out to collect samples or measurements if he deemed it ‘too cold’. As a consequence, he had not left the building since November.
“Little Miss Way is just too bloody enthusiastic.” was Dr Tom Crowe’s chief complaint about the diligent and energetic young intern. “She’s just bloody infuriating.” he stirred his porridge. He was running low on oats and it was another two weeks before the supply plane dropped in.
“I call her Tigger.” Dr Finbar Hardy confessed, eating his powdered egg which he had prepared in a style that might be called scrambled.
“I’d tap that.” said Dr Craig Bale. As he lifted his spoon of Shreddies to his mouth a Sabatier knife sliced past his ear and landed with a thwonk in the surface of the table. It twanged back and forth a little, giving some idea of the velocity at which it had been thrown.
“If you so much as look at her too long Bale, that is the knife I will use to cut off your balls.” was Dr Angela Byrne’s farewell.
“Someone’s got a crush.” Bale muttered.
“I heard that.” shouted Angela from some way down the corridor.
Today the two colleagues were travelling up the frozen lake to take pillar samples from the permafrost in a narrow inlet that reached out from the lake, into the forest that edged it. The two had worked well together and amassed more data and samples in the two months since Vanessa’s arrival, than the male members of the research team had in almost a year. Dr Byrne meant to make up for all the lost and wasted time. Where before she had been tired out with the effort of being such a one-man band, Vanessa’s arrival and skill had given Dr Byrne renewed energy. She had determined, in fact, that she was going to offer Vanessa Way a position in her department at the university.
Today, if the pillar sampling went according to plan, they were also going to work through a grid they had mapped of the lakeside forest area and log all the flora and possible fauna that was out there. Already Vanessa had shown a wide ranging knowledge of lichen and they had begun a detailed record of the local forest nearest to the centre and the species present within.
As they skimmed across the frozen lake on the snowcats, the sky gunmetal above them, Angela thought that as soon as they all returned to civilisation she would like to introduce Vanessa to her youngest brother, Mottram.
They had been working on a section of the lake several miles to the east and their track along the shoreline now led them into a small inlet that poked its icy finger deeper into the forest so that the trees formed a dense horseshoe around the narrow point of frozen lake. They had grid marked the area into square metre boxes on their maps.
“If you work your way down the first row of grids we’ve marked on this eastern side and I will work down the west and we can meet up in three hours?” Dr Byrne suggested. Vanessa nodded agreement and, unloading their kitbags, they left the snowcats at the edge of the inlet and walked inward. It was a satisfying walk of less than half a mile, the trees closing in on three sides, spiking the air with their needle scent and what had been a bright blue Arctic sky clouded over, the air growing colder and heavier.
At the apex of the inlet they began working their separate grids and moving apart from each other. Vanessa was quickly lost in her task, noting the tree species and working her way through their task sheet of scrapings and sampling. Each lichen that she found she could name, lichens had been a favourite since her childhood, she loved the colours and the idea of the symbiosis of the two lifeforms helping each other to survive. Teamwork. That was how she had described their existence to her mother. The lichen were neither one thing nor another and yet they could survive almost any habitat.
She was prickled for a moment by a memory of her mother, just a smile on a lakeside day and yet the sorrow she felt was like ice freezing through her. She took a moment, a deep breath, looked about her. She could see Dr Byrne in the near distance.
As she stepped back into her task her eye was caught by the sight of a lichen patched onto some bark litter that was half embedded in a nearby bank of snow. It was a particularly beautiful shade of green and as she lifted a small piece up with her clumsy gloves it seemed like lace, the light caught and angled inside it so that it looked bejewelled. Vanessa stared at it for a long time, her hand moving this way and that to trap the light in all the ways she could. Fierce little shafts of light. Diamond white. Snow white. She looked up and as she did so, the forest before her seemed suddenly sprinkled with light, the bark and needle litter glittered, the light travelled impossibly. It must be bouncing off the snow. Vanessa looked for reasons for the effect, but there was something awry about this light. There was no source for a start. The sunlight that had accompanied them on their journey from the research huts had long since been clouded over. She took a few steps out of her grid, as she did so her eye was drawn further into the wood by a patch of lichen mapped onto the trunk of a tree.
It was roughly the size of a good quality dinner plate and it ranged and clung to the bark of the tree showing three shades of green dependent upon how deep into the gnarls of the bark it had reached. Such a beautiful green. She sketched quickly, her gloves not hampering her quick pencil movements. There was a sound. Animal. She looked up. Something moved between the trees at some distance. A horse grazing the reindeer moss except it lifted its head and was taller than any horse she’d ever seen. The hide, a pale storm grey speckled darker here and there and swashed by the silver grey mane. She took a few steps closer. Should there be a horse here? She stumbled forward, her foot catching on a fallen branch. She lurched, catching herself, her arm reaching for the nearest tree. When she looked up there was nothing but trees. No horse. And she had wandered badly.
Vanessa had an odd sense of waking up from an uneasy dream. She looked around. She had definitely been awake, there was no way of taking a nap in this landscape. She was bundled into her arctic gear but the sense of having slipped out of kilter lingered and she looked at her watch. She had lost thirteen minutes. Surely not? It hadn’t taken her that long to walk from the edge of the lake? She orientated herself. She was only a few steps into the trees. She checked her light meter, noted the levels. She flipped the page on her task sheet and noted the new grid reference.
She took her usual care collecting samples of the tree lichen, a crustose form, probably a Rhizocarpon but she didn’t know which. She would have to look it up when she returned. As she wrote she grew aware of a bri
ef wafting scent of honey. Where was that coming from? Vanessa sniffed the lichen, it smelled of cold and earth and bark, and yet, there was a distinct smoky honey scent in the air. Where was it coming from? Needle litter? A fungus in the mouldering bark? She made a note of it and labelled samples of each. She looked across to where Dr Byrne was working. All seemed normal. Except that Vanessa had spent her lifetime in Havoc Wood and understood the strengths of the forest. What she had felt just then, the sense of time shifting combined with the scent given off, was a biological power surge akin to the heat that her mother’s hand gave off on some encounters when she was out gamekeeping.
Vanessa continued mapping but the lichen proved a distraction. This one, with the blue heads looked like a Cladonia Bellidifloria, Red Solider Lichen but, as its name suggested, it ought not to be blue. Vanessa grew excited at the idea that she might discover a new lichen. Starlight blue, fallen from the heavens. There was that thought drift sensation again. Vanessa halted herself and felt dizzy, as if the landscape stretched slightly as it left her behind, or perhaps caught her up? She was unsure. Something was happening and it was not quite right. Once again she looked across the landscape to her colleague for a reality check. Dr Byrne, stooped over at the lake’s edge taking pillar samples, a sound of slowly ground snow, of metal implements, of breath.
Vanessa thought she might pack up early and head to the rendezvous point. She was aware that she was not thinking straight and this was no landscape in which to be woolly headed. She was also conscious of the idea that somewhere along the line ten minutes had drifted by without her noticing and she did not wish to be late, after all, Dr Byrne was not a patient woman.