Thomas found the caravan at the edge of a field behind the outbuildings. He knocked on the door and Raymond appeared high above him, the caravan adding an extra foot to his height.
‘I wanted to say thank you,’ said Thomas, pushing a hand forward and up, ‘for your help the other night. For bringing me to my senses.’
‘I was out walking,’ Raymond said, quickly. ‘I don’t sleep well and I like to walk.’
Thomas nodded, his hand still outstretched. Ann had wondered what Raymond had been doing in the forest at night, but Thomas couldn’t understand her thinking. Criminals had stolen a car, set fire to it outside their house, it had exploded and Ann was worried about a local farmer who’d been nearby to help. Her thinking made no sense.
‘I like the forest. Even at night,’ Raymond added. He didn’t offer a hand so Thomas withdrew his.
‘I do my walking in the morning,’ Thomas said. ‘Usually before seven.’
Raymond filled the caravan door, his head and torso sticking out into the air. Thomas could see that the caravan was too small for Raymond to ask him in, and it wouldn’t feel right anyway, two strangers in an intimate space, the space where a man slept. Thomas thought that he should leave, but he wanted more than a ten-second chat at the door of a caravan. He’d envisaged the pair of them sat in a farmhouse kitchen, drinking tea as they went over the details of what had happened the night of the fire.
‘Well, I wanted to say thank you,’ said Thomas, again. ‘I was glad you were there to help.’
Raymond said, ‘Right,’ and looked over Thomas’s shoulder, his eyes narrow as if assessing the incoming weather. Thomas dangling, grasping for something, anything, pulled his head back and said, ‘You don’t fancy a short walk now do you?’
Raymond stepped down from the caravan and pulled the door shut behind him and began to walk. Thomas, left behind for a moment, started off after him. They were heading to the trees.
They walked in silence for a few minutes until Thomas said, ‘We’ve been here for nearly seven years now. I can’t believe it’s been that long already.’
‘Do you like it?’ Raymond asked.
‘Never been happier,’ Thomas said, as he followed Raymond’s lead through the trees. ‘Until the other night anyway. That threw me to be honest. Shook me up a little.’
Raymond nodded vigorously and Thomas, encouraged, carried on. ‘I didn’t expect any trouble out here, I thought we’d left that behind in the town.’
‘They’ve been coming though,’ said Raymond.
The words were an icy blanket on Thomas’s shoulders. He wanted to be told that Abbeystead was a haven, free from crime. He wanted to hear that the incident from the previous night was a one-off, that Raymond had never heard anything like it before. He thought for a few seconds.
‘We haven’t had any trouble before, nothing in all the years,’ he said.
‘They’ve been coming these last few months. You might not get it so much down your road – they like the faster roads.’
‘You hear them from your caravan, do you?’
Raymond nodded. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘They shouldn’t come.’
Thomas was pleased to hear a man talking sense.
‘They shouldn’t come,’ he agreed, ‘it’s not right.’
They walked up a steep incline and at the top, when they stopped for breath, Thomas asked, ‘Do you live in the caravan?’
‘When I’m working I do.’
‘So you aren’t here all the time then?’
‘Just when they need me, when there’s work.’
‘So where is home?’
‘I have a house over in Etherton, the other side of Eldpen Hill.’
Thomas nodded, he knew Etherton. He’d driven a colleague home a couple of times. It was a rundown town, he remembered. A dismal place. People waiting for buses which would surely never come. In his memory it was raining.
‘I prefer it here,’ Raymond said.
Thomas agreed. ‘Yes, well there can’t be many places as beautiful as this. As undisturbed as this. Abbeystead is a gem.’
‘Best place in the world!’ said Raymond with a gusto that surprised Thomas.
‘We love it out here,’ said Thomas, ignoring the fact that he’d spent the last few years realising that Ann probably didn’t love it at all. ‘So much nature, so much space for the kids. They’re free to come and go as they please. A proper childhood.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Raymond, ‘a proper childhood.’
‘And the views. The views you get at every turn,’ Thomas said.
They walked on through the trees, naming more and more things they liked about Abbeystead.
Sixteen
Thomas was right – Ann didn’t love Abbeystead. It felt to her a place on the edge, a place removed from the pulse of the world. Abbeystead wasn’t visited like the valleys an hour further north in the Lake District, there weren’t cars turning off the motorway in their thousands on weekends and bank holidays. Locals claimed that Abbeystead was a ‘hidden gem’, that it wasn’t more popular because it was tucked away below the obvious attractions of the Lakes, but Ann didn’t believe that was the reason large numbers didn’t come. From the right vantage point, in the right weather, Abbeystead was undeniably impressive, but there was to Ann’s eye a bleakness to the landscape, a functionality. On a cold winter’s day with the trees stripped and black, the fells grey and distant, the wind cavorting recklessly around the valley, it seemed to her that Abbeystead was a stranded bruise of a place. At least in Maltham there had been people. ‘All this rain,’ a neighbour would say when they passed on the street, ‘we’ll have to build an ark soon.’ Pointless, everyday, nothing communication, but Ann missed it. She could go for days without that type of interaction in Abbeystead. A quick wave from another forest dweller as they carefully negotiated their cars past each other on thin roads was the most she could hope for on most days. And if you don’t see people every day, if you don’t start off by saying the small, obvious things, how do you end up saying more and becoming friends, or even enemies? Despite Thomas and the children, Ann was lonely. It seemed that she and Thomas had run out of things to say to one another shortly after they’d moved into the barn. The months before the move had been fraught. They were dealing with Harriet’s screaming, and buying and converting the barn. And then, unbelievably, the barn was finished, they moved in, Harriet fell quiet, and there was nothing left to say. Thomas was lost in his thoughts, wandering his beautiful Abbeystead, and Ann felt parachuted into a place that didn’t feel anything like home.
Children weren’t a cure for loneliness. They stood outside the equation. In the mornings, at breakfast, before Ann had full control over her thoughts, she sometimes felt the embarrassment of a stranger in front of Daniel and Harriet. She busied herself pouring drinks, dishing out cereal, wiping surfaces clean, feeling like a nanny to the two good-looking children in front of her.
Some days Daniel was almost impossible.
‘Would you like toast, Daniel?’
A nod or a shake.
Later on in the day, ‘How was school, Daniel?’
A shrug, a muttered ‘Fine.’
‘Don’t forget your favourite programme is on later, Daniel.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten.’
He was the same with Thomas – short answers, impatient, bordering on insolent.
‘He’s just shy,’ was Thomas’s theory, ‘a quiet lad.’
But Ann knew that not to be the case. She’d seen him in the school yard, the other children running up to him as he arrived, deferring to him, offering him sweets, keen to win his approval. He wasn’t shy.
Ann felt more guilt over her feelings for Harriet. ‘Isn’t she adorable,’ was the most likely comment from people when they first met Harriet. And Harriet’s round cheeks, big smile and long brown hair all combined to make her unimpeachably adorable. But sometimes Ann couldn’t help finding her daughter’s behaviour cloying. She wanted her to misbeha
ve now and then – to throw a tantrum, lie or steal, slap and scratch, but she never did. Even when ill she was stoic and unfussy. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mummy, I’ll be fine,’ she said in the middle of a brutal vomiting bout that had been tearing through the school and finally caught Harriet. Ann couldn’t equate the happy little girl Harriet had become with the screaming bundle of terror that had arrived in their lives a few years before and sent them scurrying to the trees. Her children seemed so much more settled and rooted than her. They didn’t appear to mind the large dark house under the branches, the long car journeys it took to get anywhere, the grey fells and black streams, the gloomy emptiness of the place.
It was a shock to Ann, the way she felt about her children. She’d always wanted to be a mother and even as a school girl, when one of her friends would say, ‘God that’s disgusting, pushing something the size of that out of yourself,’ her arms spread wide to indicate a baby the size of a television, and everyone would shriek at the horror and impossibility of it, Ann would shriek too, but she wanted children, was certain of it. And whilst she had fears about what would happen to her body and the pain of childbirth, she didn’t worry that she would struggle with motherhood – it never crossed her mind. When pregnant with Daniel her concern was that she would love too much, worry about the child all the time, worry to distraction, smother with attention. When a car sped past she shuddered and held her pregnant belly and fretted about the day her child would be old enough to walk along pavements by busy roads without her supervision. And now the children were here she did love them, she would die for them, but it wasn’t the feeling of all-encompassing love she’d been expecting. Ann was shocked at how quickly she was bored with motherhood, particularly when Daniel was very young, by his demands for attention, his neediness and endless presence. ‘He never goes away!’ she wanted to shout at people when they came to visit and cuddle and coo. ‘He’s here all the time!’
But the plan had always been for two children and how could she tell Thomas that she wasn’t even sure she was handling one child well. What would he think of her if she told him that sometimes she wished Daniel wasn’t there? And maybe, anyway, she just needed to get used to motherhood. Perhaps she just needed more time to adjust. And then, of course, along came Harriet and her terror and lungs, and Ann was dreaming of a return to the days of tedium and boredom with Daniel. With Harriet, for the first year, it was about survival, nothing more, and somehow they did survive, and then, one day, Ann drove both children to school and drove home in an empty car to an empty house. It was a day she’d been waiting for, dreaming about. Six hours without children, six hours, every day, five days a week. It was a luxury she could hardly comprehend. They had spoken about a job, her and Thomas, but Thomas liked things as they were, enjoyed the rhythms and routines of their life. And he was earning reasonably well, they weren’t an extravagant family, their spending was modest. ‘What about holidays and sickness?’ he asked. ‘How will we cover those?’ So they agreed Ann would look for something suitable in a few years, when the children were older.
Ann didn’t intend to waste a moment of the time afforded her. She remembered the minutes, hours and days she’d let slip away before she’d had children. Time spent doing so little when she could have been doing so much. There were courses to study, books to read, friends to catch up with. In fact, what couldn’t be achieved with thirty free hours a week? But when the time came, when the hours were laid out in front of Ann, she froze. She thought at first that she was disabled by the freedom given to her; that she was so worried about wasting a second of time she was paralysed into inactivity. Ann would start a book and put it down after four pages, distracted by worry – was it the right book to be reading now? Should she be reading another book instead? She would flick through the prospectus for the Open University, wondering what to study – should it be something purely for enjoyment or a course that would help her find a better job when the time came? Ann would consider visiting a friend to shake her out of her slump, but they lived too far away now just to drop in, she would need to phone first, and her hand didn’t reach for the phone. The first few free weeks passed in a muddle of frustrated anxiety, of books started and discarded, courses considered and rejected, trips never taken. And then suddenly, without warning, it was winter. The leaves fell, there were brief days of sharp autumn sun, warm air held in a dizzying chill frame, and then it was winter. Short dark days of cold and rain. Ann found it hard to even move. She’d begun her free time sluggishly, but now she was disabled. She would drive the children to school in the murky mornings and return to the house, the trees stealing the miserly light the day was offering. The house would be cold and dark on her return and it took a monumental effort to keep on top of the housework, never mind attempt anything else. If she forced herself the housework could be finished by lunch and after eating she would try to read one of the many books borrowed from the library but would invariably drift into sleep with the book dropped into her lap. When she woke the house would be even darker than before, she would feel the trees outside, lined up against her, and she wanted to run.
Seventeen
Keith didn’t last the required six months. The odds were against him from the outset – he’d never lasted six months in any job. And this job was tiring, exhausting at times, so when he woke up blinded by pain, racked with sickness, he didn’t bother turning up because he couldn’t have done the work anyway. Hungover to the point of useless was how he woke quite often in his first months in Etherton. Boredom was his downfall. Work, eat, sleep, shit wasn’t enough. He needed some excitement, and that led him to drink. But he wasn’t interested in just being drunk, it was the ritual of the night out he loved. The shower after tea and then choosing the clothes, laying them out on the bed to check the outfit worked, the careful dressing and slapping on of aftershave, the ten minutes spent in front of the mirror combing his hair until it was a perfect sweep on his head. Then into the night. The possibilities stretching out in front of him, even in a town like Etherton. The first drinks were always the best, the last drinks an effort to get back to the hope and promise of the earlier drinks, and whilst that didn’t always work, sometimes it did. On those nights Keith would fall asleep feeling euphoric, full of plans, his promised future twinkling like lights on the sea front. And then he would wake up with the pain of the hangover and the disappointment of remembering who he was and where he was, the reality of the dull day lined up in front of him, with all its sisters and brothers waiting dourly behind.
It was Rose’s fault Keith was sacked, he believed. If she’d let him stay in bed, he would still have a job, but the day he was fired Rose pulled the bed sheets off him at seven in the morning. ‘You,’ she said, poking him sharply in his neck, ‘are going to work.’ In the early hours Keith had returned from a heavy session, woken Rose up and demanded she cook him something to eat. When she refused a huge row had followed which culminated in the whole family screaming at Keith and Keith throwing a bedside table down the stairs in blind fury. With the sheets torn off him, a sore neck and nowhere to hide, Keith stumbled to the bathroom, where he was sick into the sink. He sat on the toilet for half an hour, trembling and sweating, regretting every drink. When Rose began pounding on the door he went to change into his work clothes, wanting to get out of the house, away from the mad, nagging woman. Despite having to stop on the way to work to be sick again Keith found himself thirty minutes early for his shift. He curled himself up on the bench in the corner of the Portakabin where the men hung their coats, ate their lunch and fell asleep. Keith woke when a couple of colleagues came noisily through the door. He kept his sore head down, his arms wrapped around himself and his eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to engage in any conversation.
‘Look at him over there,’ one of the men said, ‘curled up asleep like a little dormouse.’
‘Bit small for a dormouse that one,’ the other man said.
Keith wasn’t lying on the bench any more. He was a whirling ball of
arms and legs, careering towards the men as fast as a spinning wheel. Just as he launched his attack Eric Calpin, Keith’s boss, came through the door. He helped drag Keith off his shocked colleague and pinned him against the wall with the other men. The smell of drink fled from Keith’s pores, violent words crashed from his mouth, he struggled and thrashed like a rat in a bag. It was five minutes before the three men felt able to remove their hands from him, to let him down off the wall. It was the quickest firing Eric had ever been involved with and Keith, by then spent and still unwell, went calmly, meekly, not shocked he’d lost another job, just relieved he could go home and back to bed.
The next morning Rose stripped the bed of its covers again and demanded Keith get dressed and go and find some work. ‘I got you this job. We moved the whole family here, and don’t think we’re going back to living off nothing. We’re not living off my cleaning money, Keith. Not the amount those two eat and the amount you drink.’
Keith was happy to escape Rose’s fury but the streets of Etherton quickly turned his mood sour and then black. It would be better to be poor somewhere else, he thought. With cash in your pocket Etherton wasn’t so bad; there were pubs and shops like anywhere else. Without money it was a shithole. He idled through the streets, trying to ignore the regret that was spreading like a virus in his chest, draping itself over his shoulders. Eventually there were no more streets to walk and Keith braced himself and climbed up the steep steps and into the job centre. He scanned the cards on the board and immediately saw that the best paid jobs were at the cement works. He even saw his own job advertised already. After discounting the cement jobs he was left with shop assistant, kitchen hand or factory work. All so low paid it wasn’t worth it, all jobs for younger men. An image of himself as an old man alone in a bedsit in a tall dark house jumped into his head. He shivered and flung the thought away. He turned and assessed the women behind the desks on the far side of the room. They all looked hard-faced and battle-ready and he was in no mood. His sacking would complicate signing on and they would insist he applied for the useless jobs pinned to the board. Keith fingered his wallet – there was still £60 from his last wage packet in there. He left the job centre and went to the cheap cafe by the station and cradled a cup of sweet tea until the pubs opened.
Into the Trees Page 6