The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  During a physio session she told Yomi, who gave her two options: heavier medication, or a mirror box, which was basically a portable version of the bathroom mirror trick.

  Rachel was about to reply but surprised both of them by unleashing a yawn so massive it felt like her head had hinged open behind the ears.

  ‘Wow,’ Yomi said, impressed.

  Rachel grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Tired?’ Yomi peered closer. ‘Lovely, are you getting enough sleep? You’ve got some dark circles under those eyes.’

  Rachel waved it away. ‘I’m okay. Been having some wacky dreams, that’s all.’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Not about the accident. Stop worrying, I’m fine.’

  Yomi opened a drawer in her desk and took out a leaflet, which she handed to Rachel. ‘You’re bound to be going through a pretty rough time, psychologically. There are some very good support groups you can talk to, you know.’

  Rachel made a face. ‘Um, thanks, but not really my thing.’

  ‘Or maybe your church?’

  Rachel laughed. ‘Oh, now that is very definitely not my thing, I’m afraid. I don’t have a faith.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure the Lord doesn’t mind about that.’ How could it not have been until now, Rachel wondered, that she’d noticed the discreet gold cross that hung around Yomi’s neck? The NHS probably had strict rules about the wearing of religious symbols on duty. ‘Losing a limb can hit you just as hard as losing a loved one,’ Yomi added. ‘And produce the same grieving process. Learning how to cope with that can be just as important as learning to pick up a pen.’

  ‘Well, I learned all I need to know about the grieving process when my dad died of cancer, thanks,’ Rachel replied. It was more brutal than Yomi deserved, because she was only trying to help, but it was a raw nerve, and one that hadn’t healed.

  Yomi’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my dear, I am so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I had no idea…’

  ‘I know you didn’t. I’m sorry to be a bitch. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘No, you had every right—’

  ‘Can I borrow a tissue?’ Rachel was crying again, but these were tears that she’d shed hundreds of times before; they were almost old friends. Yomi passed her the box and Rachel blew her nose.

  His funeral had been a humanist ceremony. Kieran Douglas Howson had chosen to be cremated and his ashes scattered at a woodland burial ground where the plots looked more like a well-tended municipal park than a cemetery. The ‘chapel’ had been bright and warm with polished wood, and a curved wall of tall windows, which framed the woodland as a backdrop. The religious trappings had been removed, leaving only flowers flanking a lectern. The celebrant had been a short Canadian woman in a neat suit, with eyebrow piercings and a broad stripe of purple in her hair, which twelve-year-old Rachel had thought was the coolest thing ever, despite her grief, and she’d listened to every word that the woman had said.

  ‘If there is an afterlife, it exists in the stories told about us by those we leave behind, in the memories of those who loved us, who pass those stories on, laughing at the recollection of the times we made asses of ourselves, and crying at the recollection of the times we hurt them. Let’s not do Kieran the injustice of pretending he was some kind of saint on earth. He wasn’t. He was a human being and like all human beings he was capable of astonishing generosity and unthinking cruelty. The highest respect we can pay to those we love is to remember them honestly, with all their flaws and talents, and tell each other the stories of why we love them.’

  ‘I prayed to God every night my dad lay dying, and nothing happened,’ Rachel said to Yomi, ‘except that he died in a lot of pain from a disease that wasn’t his fault. So, you know,’ she shrugged. ‘You join the dots, don’t you? If God heals the sick, why isn’t there a single case of Him healing an amputee?’ She gave a wry smile and held up her stump. ‘If He can heal this, tell Him not to bother, I’d rather have my dad back.’

  * * *

  The mirror box, when it arrived courtesy of eBay, wasn’t really a box. It was three folding panels, each the size of a large paperback book, one of which was mirrored, and they opened up into a right-angled triangle with the mirrored face standing vertical. Rachel put it on the breakfast bar with the vertical mirror facing her right hand and placed her stump on the other side of it, in the triangular hollow formed by the three panels. Smoky thought it was fascinating, and obviously provided for his entertainment, and she had to swat him away several times before he got the hint and retreated outside on garden patrol, but not before giving her a filthy look.

  From her angle, the reflection of her right hand gave the illusion of an identical left hand where there was none. It operated on the same principle as her bathroom cabinet exercises, but Yomi had taught her a few extra tricks.

  First there was what Rachel thought of as her musical scales: touching her thumb to the tip of each finger in turn and back again, slowly at first, then faster, concentrating on how her missing hand would feel doing the same thing, and seeing the reflection of her living one providing the illusion. Then fist clenches, finger snaps, and writing letters in the air with her forefinger. F-U-C-K-Y-O-U, she wrote, and then, because that seemed just a bit too petulant, R-C- -T-C-4-EV-A. She was just finishing up the last A and thinking that the aching in her stump really had subsided – score one more versus the craziness in her head – when she caught a flash of something metallic in the reflection. At first she thought it was something in the kitchen – one of the oven knobs, maybe, or the hanging cutlery above the hob. But it was neither of those. It wasn’t anything in the room at all.

  It was the ring on her finger.

  Except that there was no ring on her finger. Her right hand was bare.

  Yet there it was in the reflection, on the third finger where her long-gone wedding ring had been. She pulled her hand back as if burned.

  Her eyes wandered up to the kitchen chalkboard on which she’d written, a thousand years ago it seemed, Yomi’s advice: You can’t ignore something that should be there but isn’t.

  She sat back in front of the mirror box, squaring her shoulders as if preparing to defuse a bomb. Slowly she put her arms back. The ring was still there in the reflection, and still stubbornly absent in reality. She prodded it with her thumb but couldn’t feel anything. She turned her right hand to and fro, examining it. Stranger still, the ring wasn’t hers. Her wedding ring had been very plain and two-toned: a strip of nine-carat yellow gold flanked by a strip of white gold. This was narrower and cheaper looking, the thin metal faceted to give it the illusion of weight and texture, and she found this oddly reassuring because if she’d been losing her mind and hallucinating it, surely she would have hallucinated her own wedding ring? Far from being afraid, she was fascinated.

  As Rachel bent down to peer closer, the side of her face appeared in the reflection, and an eye that was not hers stared back: hollow and haunted, blue where hers was brown, and across it fell a lank curtain of hair. It had dead leaves in it.

  She jerked away from the breakfast bar, knocking the stool over with a clatter, and retreated to the sink, arms crossed protectively in front of her chest, hand gripping stump.

  ‘I’m getting very pissed off with this now,’ she whispered to the empty room.

  15

  WHORE

  DAPHNE MASSEY STOOD ON THE HEIGHT OF BEACON Hill, bent over the hood of a car and getting fucked from behind by a man she didn’t know as she watched her city burn.

  He wanted to fuck her while the bombs fell, that’s what he’d said. She’d shrugged; it was his shilling, she’d told him. He could fuck her where he liked, just so long as he didn’t get her arrested or blown up by a German doodlebug.

  ‘The only doodlebug I’ve got for you is right here, darling,’ he’d leered, and pressed her hand to the bulge of his crotch. She’d giggled, because that’s what he’d wanted her to do, but heaved a huge inward sigh. It had bee
n a long night – her feet ached, her cunt ached, everything ached. The raid had been going on for five hours when he picked her up in a Digbeth alleyway. Most of the other girls wouldn’t come out during a raid, and the few that did had long since called it a night, telling her she was wampy in the head for turning tricks while the streets were full of flames and sirens. Maybe she was. Maybe part of her liked walking around in the chaos. It made more sense than the way folks tried to carry on as if everything was normal when they weren’t being bombed. She’d long since accommodated herself to the fact that a body could get used to anything; besides, work was work, and there were all sorts of tastes to be catered for, including men who got the hots for a big explosion. The bulge in his crotch isn’t all that big, she had thought with a secret smirk.

  He was utterly forgettable: middle-aged, balding and tubby with it, wearing spectacles and an overcoat that made him look like a low-rent Leslie Howard. His mouth was girlish and his hands were oddly delicate. At first she thought he was an accountant or a schoolteacher, but he had a car, and that was exciting.

  It was entirely illegal to be driving during an air raid, and at one point they were flagged down by men in uniform demanding to know where the bloody hell the client thought he was going, but he showed them some papers, after which there was much saluting and they were allowed to pass.

  That was the point when Daphne began to worry about who the client was.

  * * *

  The silly thing was that she hadn’t even been looking for work this evening, not really. She’d been out with three of the other girls – Sally, Flo and June – for a drink and a giggle to take her mind off the fact that she’d been given the boot from yet another job. The Marston Green works, it had been, sweeping and tidying up after the women who were welding and riveting airplanes together. The woman at the Ministry of Labour – a sour-faced bint called Mrs Lewis – had given Daphne her work chit and ignored her protestations that it was all bound to go pear-shaped again. She had no technical skills to speak of, and had produced a receipt for her fine from the police to prove that she was a genuine working girl and not just some idler, but that hadn’t made any difference.

  ‘We must all do our part,’ Mrs Lewis had said. ‘Where would our boys be if they gave up after a few setbacks?’

  ‘Back at home giving their wives a bloody good seeing to, I should think,’ Daphne had replied, which had not impressed Mrs Lewis. Still, she’d taken the chit and gone to the factory the next morning.

  By teatime she was out on her ear.

  It had been the other women, of course, as it always was. As soon as they’d clocked where Daphne had come from they refused to have anything to do with her. Some of them refused to touch any of the tools she’d used, as if she had something contagious. It was one particularly snide remark from some posh wife of a well-to-do husband about how they were going to have to fumigate Daphne’s overalls, ‘Or better yet, burn them! Cheap tart!’ and the accompanying duck-babble of laughter, which finally snapped the thin thread of her temper.

  ‘I might only get a few quid instead of a nice big house,’ she retorted, ‘but we both earn them on our backs all the same, don’t we, bab?’

  In the cat-fight that followed it took three men to haul Daphne off the posh woman, who had a nice big house but for the next fortnight would have a black eye to remind her of those that didn’t.

  The police popped Daphne in a cell at the Steelhouse Lane lockup to cool down for a few hours, but evidently decided that it wasn’t worth their while charging her as their night was already busy with more serious criminals such as thieves and looters. By the time they let her go she was sorely in need of a pint so she went straight down the road to the Eagle and Tun where she met up with Maisie, Flo and June.

  There were no Yanks in the pub that night but there was a singer, which made them laugh. Hilariously, the closest category to ‘prostitute’ the Ministry of Labour had on its books was ‘light entertainer’. They asked the singer if she knew ‘The Deepest Shelter in Town’, but she got sniffy at that so they sang it for her until the landlord booted them out, and they went laughing and singing into the streets:

  So honey, don’t get scared, it’s there to be shared

  And you’ll feel like a king with a crown

  So please don’t be mean, better men than you have been

  In the deepest shelter in town.

  That was when the raid had begun and her three friends had scuttled off down the nearest shelter, ironically enough, whereas she had chosen to walk amongst the noise and flames.

  * * *

  The client took Daphne to the Lickeys, which made sense because from up there they had a magnificent view of the city as it burned. There was a barrage balloon station on Bilberry Hill opposite, probably manned by soldiers. That was likely part of what did it for him, the risk of getting caught. She remembered coming here as a little girl, on day trips with her brothers and sisters, watched over by Wendy, the eldest. There had been donkey rides and ice cream from a fat Italian man called Antonio who sang and wore a white apron and had a moustache that went out past his ears. Did families still come up here these days? Wendy had done all right for herself in the end, marrying an engineer and moving to Coventry, although that had borne the brunt of the German bombs and now there was no telling whether she was alive or dead.

  And here was her little sister Daphne, skirt up around her waist, being fucked for two quid from behind over the bonnet of an Austin 10 by a small man with tiny hands as she watched her city being bombed in flowering explosions of orange flame and thinking it was funny how she wasn’t sure whether she was alive or dead either.

  Then an unexpected thought occurred to her: I bet I could paint this.

  Art had been the only thing for which she had shown any talent at school, back in that impossibly distant other life when there had been such things as school and ice cream. She’d been indifferent at maths, uninterested in reading, and cack-handed when it came to housewifery lessons, but with a pencil or a paintbrush in her hand she could disappear for hours into a world of imaginary landscapes far from the back-to-back slums and endless rows of terraced houses that hemmed her in on all sides. She got into trouble several times for bunking off school to wander around the big museum and art gallery in the city centre. Her favourites were the landscapes of Rosa Brett; not just because they showed her hazy horizons and towering skies, but because she was a woman painter, largely ignored in favour of her more famous male Pre-Raphaelite colleagues. Daphne’s mother, despite not really understanding, had been wise enough to know that the world was moving on and it might just be able to carry her strange, distant-eyed daughter into a future that wasn’t limited to raising a family, and so had encouraged her, while her father humphed and snapped the pages of his newspaper.

  Then the war had come, and soon there was no more ice cream, paper was rationed, and the world became more interested in blowing itself to bits.

  All the same, Daphne thought she might be able to scrounge an old watercolour set from somewhere, and come back up here in the daylight to see what kind of horizon presented itself.

  * * *

  The small man’s breathing was quickening and his pounding against her becoming more frenzied as he approached his end. The hands that held her hips crawled up her back and clamped her shoulders, forcing her down hard onto the metal. For a small man he was stronger than expected.

  ‘Oi!’ Daphne protested. ‘Steady on there! I’m not a bloody rolling pin, you know!’

  He ignored her, thrusting harder, grunting, and his hands moved to encircle her throat.

  ‘Oi!’ she repeated, louder. ‘And you can stop that silly game and all!’

  Maybe he didn’t mean it, and this was just his way of getting off. He wouldn’t be the first. But he was tightening his grip now, and she’d never put up with that nonsense before and she wasn’t about to start tonight. She managed to squirm her right arm underneath herself, and reached back between he
r legs to where he was slapping into her, grabbed his bollocks and squeezed. Hard.

  He screamed and fell out of her, stumbling backwards, clutching himself.

  Daphne got to her feet, gasping, pulling at her knickers and her skirt. ‘Tosser!’ she spat. ‘What part of “nothing funny” didn’t you understand?’

  He was groaning, cursing, tucking his wilting prick away.

  ‘Take me back now,’ she demanded. ‘Or I’m going straight across to those soldiers, and I don’t care what fancy bits of paper you flash around.’

  ‘I’ll show you what I find funny,’ he growled. He wasn’t just tucking himself in but also taking something out, and that was when she saw the knife in his hand.

  ‘Wait,’ she whispered, backing away. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t need that. I’ll do whatever you want.’

  ‘That’s very obliging of you,’ he said, and tilted the blade. ‘But you misunderstand – this is what I want.’

  Daphne ran, plunging down the slope through the trees whose branches whipped her face in the darkness, and screaming for help to the soldiers on the opposite hilltop. Even if they could hear her they were surely too far away to get to her in time. The small man was limping after her, calling, ‘That’s the spirit! Much more like it! Give me my money’s worth!’ Then her foot caught on something, and the world spun itself around her and smashed her in the back of the head.

  He caught up with her as she lay dazed and unable to move, and took his money’s worth of her with his hands and his knife.

  * * *

  And she watched.

  * * *

  The small man stood over her a while, panting with his exertions. The firelight in the sky gleamed on the blood that slicked him to the elbows, appearing quite black, as if he’d been dipped in tar. He dragged her body deeper into the woods, where there was a large hollow oak tree broken at the trunk and open at the top. He hoisted her over his shoulder and posted her feet-first into it like a parcel. Then he walked back towards his car, whistling.