Wildwood

by Janine Ashbless

  ‘What now?’ I asked with a sigh.

  ‘Av! You’re a climber, right?’

  I tilted my head, waiting.

  ‘Reckon you could climb that then?’ He gestured at the fountain, and I followed the line of his arm. It was a monstrous construction, built when the Waters Hotel was a private residence and its owners had serious pretensions to grandeur. The round basin was occupied by an enormous bronze triton, reclining in a bronze shell. He held aloft another scallop shell that formed a second basin, and tipped a conch to his lips as if blowing a signal blast. All around him smaller Nereids disported in the water.

  ‘What for?’ I asked when I’d taken all this in.

  ‘No but, could you?’

  Several of the crowd with him sniggered and I looked warily at their faces. Some were familiar from the village, years back, though none were among those I’d counted as friends. Others were strangers, but from the same mould: all young, none sober, with taunting looks upon their faces. I looked again at the fountain. The whole thing was maybe thirty feet high. The metal wasn’t wet but it looked polished smooth. On the other hand there were so many rococo details – foaming waves and cherub heads and the like – that there should be no difficulty finding holds for hand and feet.

  I shrugged. ‘No problem. Why?’

  There were more sniggers.

  ‘Well, we’ve got this bet on, like,’ said Simon, grinning with undisguised slyness. ‘What with you being this big-shot lumberjack so you say –’ He broke off to allow space for several derisive snorts from his audience.

  ‘I’m not a lumberjack,’ I said, wincing at the word.

  ‘Whatever. An arborist then.’ He executed a clumsy, mocking bow of apology. ‘We were wanting to see if you could climb this, to the top shell there.’

  Actually almost all tree climbing is done with rope and harness, but I’d done plenty free-climbing on rock faces too. That didn’t worry me. ‘And what would I get for winning the bet for you?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m betting against you.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘But if you win I’ll buy you …’ He pulled a face. ‘A crate of bubbly?’

  ‘A new climbing rig,’ I countered. ‘With ropes and ascenders.’ That would set him back a bit and was currently beyond my pocket. I don’t exactly earn a fortune.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘OK then.’ I don’t have an excuse. I wasn’t drunk – not really. I was just stung by the group’s air of derision. I was pissed off with Simon. I thought it would be a bit of fun. It’s no excuse really. Turning my back, I kicked off my shoes, crouched to shimmy off my tights from beneath my dress (to whistles and catcalls) and finally shucked the stupid jacket again. After considering my very inappropriate climbing attire I finally tucked one side of my skirt up into the waistband of my panties to free up my legs. That was received with appreciation too. What the hell, I thought.

  They made way for me at the lip of the basin, and I tried not to recoil when I found out how cool the water was. Luckily it came only to my knees as I waded across the slippery basin to the statue, feeling the hard discs of coins shift beneath my toes.

  Make a wish, I said to myself, teeth gritted.

  My audience was yelling advice and encouragement as I started the ascent, but I wasn’t listening. When you climb, concentration is everything; the world shrinks to include only you and the surface you’re battling. I laid hold of the beak of a sea monster, my first point of grip, and felt the metal chilly beneath my fingers. Getting my foot up onto the monster’s tail I pushed myself up, seized the arm of a flailing sea nymph, and suddenly was clear of the water. So it went on: from fish to shoulder to head to triton’s hip, my bare toes gripping the bronze scales. I had to grab his raised arm from beneath as if it were an oak branch and swing both legs up from below, hanging monkeylike before getting a thigh up so that I could haul myself up onto his massive bicep, then sitting astride it to catch my breath. That was the only tricky bit, really. My skirt rode right up to my waist as I hung there, and there were loud whoops from the watchers.

  I squinted into the triton’s huge, bearded face, wondering how he’d react if he could feel a human sat astride his arm. My pussy, separated from his skin only by the flimsiest cotton strip, must feel red hot on his bronze. ‘Sorry,’ I said, grinning. Then I knelt up, found my feet and, using his conch shell as a last stepping stone, scrambled into the high scallop shell. It was full of water, just as cold as that down at the bottom. I stood upright cautiously, ankle-deep, and looked down at my audience. I raised one hand to punch the air.

  Amid the chatter a loud whistle rang across the lawn. I looked around, wondering if we’d been spotted by an angry hotel manager.

  Then the water started up. It came out of the conch and struck me in the face, such a shock that I staggered and hunched to my knees. All around my scallop shell little jets sprang up vertically. From the figures below, from pursed lips and gaping fishy jaws and even the breast of one amply endowed Nereid, long plumes arced into the night, all converging around the highest point of the edifice, all gushing over me before falling in a curtain from around my feet. In seconds I was absolutely drenched, and it felt icy cold. The only thing I could hear over the splash of the water was the howls of laughter from the crowd below.

  I realised what had happened at once; this whole thing had been a set-up arranged by Simon. He must have got some of the hotel staff in on it too, to time my humiliation so precisely. I spat water, speechless with shock and rage. I realised that my soaked dress must be translucent, that the cotton was clinging pore-close to my skin, that my body was exposed before a score of shrieking drunks as if I were a contestant in a wet T-shirt competition.

  And as I ground my teeth I realised something else too: that I could shriek and attempt to cover myself and submit to the humiliation and become the victim they wanted, or I could face up to them. So I straightened my back and stood up tall, my back taking the blast of the main jet of water, my hands clenched at my sides, my body held proudly. I looked down on them with my hair – which always goes to rings when it’s wet – hanging around my face and all the contempt I could muster in my eyes. My gaze swept the crowd.

  It fell on Michael Deverick. He hadn’t been in the audience to start with, I was certain of that, for I’d have noticed him. But there he was, a little way across the grass, alone now, watching me. He wasn’t laughing. His expression was watchful and intense. I forgot the others for a moment as my eyes met his. My chest was heaving with the strain of drawing breath. I must have been one hell of a sight.

  The laughter died away to muffled giggles.

  ‘Enjoying your shower, Av?’ Simon called.

  I wrenched my gaze back to him. ‘It’s fine,’ I declared. ‘Have you got the balls to join me?’

  He must have been a lot drunker than I was. He passed his bottle to friend, dumped his jacket in one motion and scrambled into the water without a word. I could see the furious determination in his face as he approached: I’d really got his back up. It took him two attempts to find a footing on the statuary, which was ten times more slippery now that it was running with water, and that just made him madder. On the third attempt he scrambled as high as the triton’s waist, reached out to grab at the arm and struggled to his feet.

  The triton shrugged. That’s how it looked to me, watching from above. The metal flesh rippled and danced under the cascade of water and Simon lost his grip. He lurched, trying to make up for lack of balance with his feet, but the fool had kept his shoes on and the surface was too slick for purchase. His feet slid from under him and he fell face forwards. I heard the wind being knocked from his lungs as his stomach made contact with the bronze, then he was suddenly sliding away, arms spread wide. He bounced off the lowest tiers, tumbled sideways and clipped his head as he hit the pool. When the splash settled he did not get up. From where I was, looking down on his body floating there limply, I could see a mist of dark blood spreading ou
t around his head.

  Several people in the crowd shrieked. Others started to climb into the pool.

  I made no cry. I don’t remember there being anything in my head at all, not a thought. I just began to climb down. It should have been much harder because of the water, but I have no real memory of the short journey. My body simply took over where my mind could not cope, and it must have been done in less than a minute. Even so, by the time I splashed down knee-deep into the water the others had reached Simon and dragged him to the bank. People were scrabbling for their mobile phones and running to get help from the hotel.

  ‘He’s still breathing!’ someone yelled.

  I stopped where I was, halfway across the pool, suddenly lost. The scrum around Simon was thickening and there was no room for me. Probably it was best that I keep well clear. I turned away and waded to another quadrant, slopping out onto the lawn, shivering. My nipples were so stiff with the cold that they ached.

  There, at the edge of the dim circle of illumination cast by the pool, stood Michael Deverick. Our eyes met. He raised one brow and smiled, very faintly. I thought – I hoped – for a moment that he might drape his jacket around my shoulders, but he turned and walked away into the dark.

  No one was more surprised than I that nine months later I was working for him. Fairy tales are supposed to end with a wedding, not start with one.

  But then, the fairies in this tale weren’t exactly what I’d imagined either.

  2: Into the Woods

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I drove down to Devon to start my new job, I had a dream that woke me shaking.

  At first I took no active part in the dream; I simply saw. There was a dark space, huge but crammed because within it fought two dragons. One was red like ripe hawthorn berries and the other as white as birch bark; both were scaled and winged, though their wings couldn’t have been much use there in such tight confines. They fought coiled around each other and rolling over, claws scrabbling for purchase and teeth clattering as they slid and interlocked, their yellow eyes protected behind cloudy nictitating membranes, their hot breath coming in roaring gasps while barbed tails lashed. Neither seemed able to make any impact on the armour of his foe, but the ground shook. I felt the vibration running up from my feet into my belly. I felt the heat radiating from their writhing bodies. And as I became aware of myself, so did they become aware of me; the struggling ceased and two pairs of amber eyes turned in my direction, flaring bright as the protective membranes rolled back. I felt my heart galloping in my empty chest as, tiny and vulnerable, I met those terrible stares and all the blood seemed to drain down my body, paralysing my legs and swelling my sex.

  They came for me, forgetting their struggle in their eagerness to lunge for my flesh. The red one closed its jaws about my chest, knifelike teeth sinking deep. The white one took both my legs in its long mouth, grinding down. It was a dream and I felt no pain, just the incredible pressure of penetration and the lubricious heat of their wet mouths. Helpless, I was lifted between them, splayed and gasping. First one then the other tugged my limp body.

  I woke just before they pulled me apart, wet with sweat and excitement.

  Knocking the chain brake on with the back of my wrist, I switched the engine off and dropped the saw to my side. It caught at the end of its short tether and swung below me while I leant back in my harness, relishing the sudden hush. The rope lashing me to the fork high overhead wanted to send me swinging back towards the main tree trunk, but my heavy boots kept purchase on a branch, holding me steady over the forty foot of clean air that separated me from the road verge. Tony, my groundsman, moved in across the grass to clear away the dead branch I’d just dropped. I smiled down at the orange blob of his plastic helmet and gave him the thumbs up. That was the last of the hanging snags in this lime, and we’d had to get it cleared so that the builders could pass safely up the drive in order to work on the Grange.

  Slowly the petrol fumes cleared and I could breathe the clean air and the scent of the cut wood. It was June and the lime was in its first bright green flush of leaves. I tipped my mesh visor up and rocked gently on my heels, enjoying the light through the stippled canopy, the sense of space below and around me, the sensation of being held by the harness like a child on a swing.

  I love working with trees. I love their size – it’s like working with giants. I love the challenge of climbing up into them, and the incredible sensation of working at height, when all the rest of the world shrinks away beneath me and there is nothing else that matters, no problems, no one else, only me and the rope and the wood and the basic questions: Where next? Will this branch hold my weight? Can I reach?

  I love using my skills to bring down those vast structures, when it’s necessary to fell them, with clean precision. I love the fresh air and the weather in my face, rain or shine. I love being out on a frosty morning but feeling toast-warm from the heat generated by my own labours. I love the fact that I have to work hard, pushing my muscles to the limit, over and over. I love working up a sweat and an ache and then going home at night to relax into a bath with a favourite bath bomb fizzing around me filling my world with rose petals and perfume. I love watching the plants change with the seasons and slowly grow, knowing that the trees will be there for far longer than I will. And I love too the roar of the saw in my hands and the bite of a newly sharpened chain into the wood and the smell of sawdust and two-stroke mix. I love the fact that I do a job most other people couldn’t attempt. I love being good at this.

  There is no way you’d catch me working in an office all day. I’d go crazy.

  I stared out through gaps in the canopy, drinking in the view. From here I could make out glimpses of the grounds that were my new realm: the lawn hacked roughly from a pasture of waist-high weeds, the ruined glasshouse, a corner of the pond, and the tips of exotic trees planted in Victorian times and now coming into their full stature – great Douglas firs and monkey puzzles and tulip trees, the dark spires of a grove of wellingtonia, the golden foliage of ginkgos and larches. Further off, outside our boundaries, a hazy patchwork of fields stretched out to the grim line of the Dartmoor plateau. When I turned to look in the opposite direction my line of sight was blocked by the green bulk of Grange Wood, just coming into leaf, but I knew that Exmoor lay beyond that. We were sited almost perfectly in the centre of the vale between those two wild moorlands, but down here the land was lush and the climate sheltered.

  It was time to descend. There were more limes all along the drive to the Grange that needed attention. I took one last look around me and it was then that I saw her, perched on a branch to my left: an old woman with a hooked nose, wrapped in a shawl.

  I gaped.

  She winked one golden eye at me. The shawl was flecked brown wool, and from beneath it her bare feet stuck out, bearing the most incredibly filthy curved nails. She spread her arms wide and dropped off the limb, gliding away on wide wings.

  I nearly choked. It had only been a trick of the eye, but for that brief moment the illusion had been perfect. ‘She’ had been a bird all along: a big one, OK – maybe a buzzard – but only a bird. A twisted branch behind her had been conflated with her outline, and I’d completely mistaken the scale of what I was looking at, but it had been enough to fool me. I laughed out loud.

  When I’d recovered my poise and felt a bit less like an idiot I kicked off from my station and swung in to the trunk, catching myself on springy legs. From there it was a simple matter of abseiling down the length of the rope all the way to the ground. As I touched earth it felt like gravity had claimed me again, and I stretched my back, as always half disappointed and half relieved to be back. I unhitched the climbing harness and dropped it to my ankles. I’d found that if I walked about in one then the thigh straps tended to press in places that were, well, unprofessional.

  I glanced towards Tony, meaning to tell him about the buzzard, but he was talking on his mobile phone. Tony was a local man, Devon born and bred, and grizzled like an old Labrador. Desp
ite his years he seemed, to my silent relief, to have no problem working under a woman’s instruction.

  Another builders’ van rattled past us as I carried harness, saw and rope to the back of our Land Rover. There were a lot of men at work on the Grange, converting the Victorian shell into a state-of-the-art conference centre. What Michael Deverick was thinking of building a conference centre in rural Devon, I wasn’t sure, but it was hardly my problem. I had nearly thirty acres of overgrown garden to worry about restoring instead, not to mention the woodland beyond that.

  Tony stuffed the phone back into his pocket. ‘That was Mr Deverick,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Up at the house.’

  I was a little surprised. I hadn’t known our employer was actually on site. I hadn’t even seen him since Emma’s wedding; my somewhat perfunctory interview had been handled by one of his project managers. I scratched at the back of my neck, trying to cover for the confusion I was feeling. ‘Now?’

  ‘He said as soon as you got down from that tree.’

  As I walked up the drive, I realised I was actually feeling a little nervous. I’d dumped my helmet but a quick check told me that my hair was tangled into elf-locks by sweat, so I just hoped that by a small miracle it would dry to sleekness as I walked. The rest of me wasn’t in much better condition; it had been hot work up there. The dust and little insects and flecks of bark that always sift down from a tree canopy had stuck to the bare skin of my face and neck and arms, and would stay there until I had a bath. I was wearing heavy boots that made me clump and padded chainsaw trousers that, being cut for the male waist, tended to slide rather low down my hips. The sleeveless vest I wore under an equally sleeveless khaki jacket had a distinct damp patch positioned just over my breastbone. I wasn’t ashamed of the way I looked, but it certainly wasn’t respectable. And respectable was what I needed if I had to face Michael Deverick.