The police are fanning out now. There are blankets and a sledge, the better to take Elenya back home, but the rest are looking for footprints in the earth. They will not find them. Not one of them knows what they ought to be looking for: a simple trench, wending its way into the reeds, as the man who used to be his papa makes his way across marsh and aspens to the lost world beyond.
NEXT WINTER
On the ledge by the window, its underbelly lit up by blue and white fairy lights: the little Russian horse that was a present from his mother.
He has been up for an hour, but he has not yet ventured out; it is New Year’s morning, and if you venture out too soon, Ded Moroz will not come up from the forest and leave presents in the hearth.
He is sitting with the Russian horse when the tiniest of taps sounds at the door. In the light between door and wall appears Mr Navitski’s face. Now, the boy must call him Nikolai. His eyes are heavy but his face is bright, and he is still wearing checked pyjamas of the sort the boy has hanging on the back of the door, ready for the moment when he wants to wear pyjamas again. Mr Navitski tells him it will happen one day, but it hasn’t happened yet.
‘Are you ready, Alek?’
The boy nods.
‘Better get some clothes on, then.’
The boy has a drawer full of clothes. He tugs it open at the foot of his bed. The bed itself is untouched, for he sleeps instead in a nest of eiderdown and branches on the floor. Mr Navitski takes away the branches every weekend, but it is easy to find more; there is a tree in the garden denuded of bark, and more along the way to school, whose lowest branches have been mysteriously hewn away over the long months of summer.
In the drawer he finds a shirt, some trousers. Socks and underpants. Beneath them all: a patchwork vest of rabbit-skin pelts. If Nikolai knows he has it, he doesn’t say, so it must mean he doesn’t mind. Even so, today is not a day for dressing like that. Sometimes he puts it on after dark, but only after Nikolai and his wife Nastya are themselves tucked in. Then he can curl in it and remember the smells of the wilderness. Dressed like that, he can better remember his papa.
Once he is dressed in shirt and short trousers, he leaves the bedroom and follows the hallway.
‘Well?’ grins Nastya, appearing at the bottom of the stairs with tinsel in her hair. ‘Don’t you want to see?’
The boy nods, but remains at the top.
‘I’ll bring you a hot milk, should I?’
The boy shakes his head.
‘Okay, Alek. We’ll be down here waiting – but we’re not opening any presents until you come!’
After that, it doesn’t seem fair that he should sit on the top step all alone. He isn’t even certain why he wants to. He comes down the stairs slowly. In the living room, Nikolai is sitting cross-legged in front of the tree, with his daughter Ana squirming in his lap. She is eighteen months old, chubby, with hair the same tight dark curls as her father. Behind them, the hearth is dead.
‘Come on, Alek, you’re letting the team down. We’re freezing down here!’
It feels good to be asked, so he bounds down the last of the stairs and scurries across the room. In the hearth, he drops to his hands and knees. There are matches and fire lighters piled up, but Navitski knows he doesn’t need them. When he is finished, the fire is a burning crimson ball.
On seeing the burgeoning flames, Ana claps as she always does. She reaches out a fat fist and snatches to take hold of the boy. At last, he gives her his finger.
In front of the tree, there are presents. Ded Moroz has been. Ded Moroz did not really live out in the forest, because if he did, the wild would take him, turn him into a feral creature, and he’d have no thirst to hand out presents any longer. But it is a story the boy would like to believe, so he crawls over and opens the first one.
Later, with his new winter coat and hunchback knight, he sits in the back of the car, with Ana strapped down in her special seat beside him. Through the city they go, to that railway yard with metal stairs and the hovel above. Yuri is already there, sitting on the step. Without wailing out a goodbye, he tumbles down the steps to join them, awkwardly clambering into the car.
‘Isn’t your mama coming?’
‘Oh, no,’ says Yuri, as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world. ‘My new, new papa’s come home, so she’s busy today.’
Soon, the city gutters away. On either side, the forest rushes past. The boy keeps his head down, at once both hungry to look and desperate not to see.
It is not the first time he has seen the forest. In the beginning, he forced them to make him come. If they did not – and, on occasion, they refused – they would find him gone in the morning, and have to pick him up on the side of the road. The truth is, every time he ran, he wanted them to come after. If he had wanted to disappear again, into the snow dark beneath the trees, he would have disappeared and never been found. Sometimes, he would reach the edge of the city, the first line of forest, and simply wait until they came. He would turn his back to the trees and listen to them whisper, and count himself strong that he did not go to them, not even when they begged. He would wonder: was this what it was like for my papa, through all those years of his life? The trees begged him to come back and live wild, but he was strong enough to resist them, all until he made that promise to mama. Then the wild had won, but it was long seasons before the boy or old man could fully understand.
The car banks left, to follow the old trail. They emerge onto the top of the glade just as the first snow is breaking from the sky, and weave slowly down to the front of the house.
Elenya is hanging from the front door before they have reached halfway. In her stocking feet she bounds across the snow to reach them. Her father barks some command at her, but she does not seem to listen. Instead, she grapples the boy out of the car and smothers him with kisses.
‘Get off me!’
‘I won’t,’ she declares, dragging him to the house. ‘I think you could use a bath.’
She does not really mean it; it is an old joke now, because she finds it delightful to remind him of that time she dunked him in the bubbles and raised him up from dark brown soup. Together, they go inside. In the living room, a tree is bedecked in gold and silver tassels. The star on top shines with silver light.
A puppy runs circles around them. Elenya bats it back, but it wants to go to the boy and releases a succession of shrill yaps whenever he stops teasing the scruff of its neck. At last, Yuri scampers off with it, to cavort in front of the wood-burner, or in the cubbyholes under the dining table.
Soon, there will be dinner – but, as Nikolai and Nastya ferry Ana into the house, to be cooed over by Elenya’s mother, Elenya drags him upstairs. In her bedroom, the spoils of the morning are laid out. She has got dresses and scarves, embroidered gloves and new winter boots. A framed picture of Mishka sits at the side of her bed.
‘Now we can get to it. What shall we play?’
It doesn’t matter what he says; they always end up playing whatever game Elenya decides. She drags out board games and stuffed animals, the rancid end of the last bone Mishka ever chewed, but today none of them will do. At last, she produces a box wrapped in red paper, with a silver bow and a card he cannot read.
‘Well, go on,’ she says. ‘It’s for you.’
Inside lies a book. As is the girl’s way, it is a book he has seen before – and not one she ought to be giving. He opens the first pages – and there, before the story of Baba Yaga, she has written him a note:
For the Wild Boy
Before he closes it, he remembers: ‘I never said thank you.’
‘Well, you can say it now.’
‘Not for this. For … the eiderdown. For last year.’
‘Oh, that,’ grins Elenya. ‘I got such a telling off for that, even after …’ The rest of the story remains unsaid.
‘I … gave it to my papa,’ says the boy. ‘To keep out the forest.’
‘An eiderdown’s not enough to keep out the forest, thou
gh, is it?’
The boy shakes his head; you need walls and roofs and roads and clothes.
‘They never found your papa, did they?’
They did not. Woodsmen, police, roamed far and wide, but all they found were the trees. No campsites. No fires. No snares set and checked for squirrels, rabbits, the other lowly creatures of the forest. If there was a body, they said, the beasts of the wild had left nothing to be scavenged. The boy knows the truth more keenly than any: he crossed the marshes, into that older wild. There, the trees would drink him up, turn him into the new shoots of spring, the green leaves of summer, the forest mulch on the winter ground. That is why, when he looks through Elenya’s window, he sees not only the tops of the trees bound up again in ice, but his family in the forest.
There was a tale told in the days after his papa came to pick him up from school. It lingers still, in the corners of classrooms, where children are forbidden to speak of it but find, nevertheless, a story too delicious to ignore. Once upon a while, the wild man of the forests came to the city. On legs like roots and arms like briars, he circled the schoolhouse.
Let me in, let me in, he cried, with a voice made of wind.
Never, said the schoolhouse, whose voice was made of bricks.
Then I’ll crow and I’ll snow and I’ll blow your house down …
All at once, the wild man called up a blizzard. Wind clawed down, and the schoolhouse doors came apart.
The wild man came into school on a carpet of thorns. When he reached the classroom door, he found it locked.
Let me in, let me in, he cried, with a voice made of wind.
If I let you in, you’ll take my kin, said the door, whose voice was made of paint and varnish.
Then I’ll crow and I’ll snow and I’ll blow this door down …
At once, the blizzard roared through the schoolhouse halls. The classroom door flew in, and the wild man stalked among the children, touching each with a finger cold as death.
I am a man of winter, I am a man of ice. Which of you is naughty, and which of you is nice?
But none of the children would answer. And when none of the children would tell which was good and which was bad, the wild man wept. He lifted one little boy, put him over his shoulder, and dragged him, sobbing, back to the forests. That little boy was never seen again. And from that day to this, whenever a mother should want to admonish her children, she would tell them: be good, be kind, or the wild man of the woods will come and take you away.
There comes a call from beyond the bedroom door: the familiar bark of Elenya’s father. This time, he is not barracking her for her latest attempt at best behaviour. He is only announcing the serving of a New Year’s goose.
Elenya is already opening the door by the time she realizes the boy has not followed. He appears stuck in the window frame. He inches his way to the pane and smears his face there, so that it looks as if the snowflakes are settling on him instead of the glass.
‘Come on, Alek. Yuri will gobble it all if we don’t …’
‘I want to go out,’ whispers the boy.
‘Go out?’
‘Not into the trees. Just into the garden.’
‘Mr Navitski wouldn’t allow it.’
The boy scowls, ‘But Mr Navitski isn’t my papa.’
They stand in silence. A great hand of snow slides down the window glass, revealing greater portions of the garden.
‘Come on, then,’ Elenya whispers. ‘While they’re busy in the kitchen …’
In the living room, the puppy gambols with Yuri, who seems as intent as the dog on gnawing on a great bone wrapped in ribbon. Ana is already at the table, bouncing in her high chair, but the adults are swilling drinks in the kitchen.
They cannot leave through there, so instead they go through the front door. He can feel the icy prick of each snowflake, but it is a comforting sensation.
They round the corner of the house, onto the untouched snows at the back. At the edge of the forest, the trees gather – but he has to think hard to remember which is mama’s tree. Soon, he supposes, he’ll forget altogether.
‘Did you want to … go under?’ asks Elenya, temptation in her voice. It is a remarkable thing to the boy, but even after what his papa did, she would still dare to go into the forest.
He shakes his head.
‘Why not? You’ve never been to your gingerbread house …’
He has not. Sometimes he thinks: I’ve forgotten it. But even the act of forgetting is a kind of memory, and the harder he tries to keep it at bay, the more it flashes across the backs of his eyes or grows into a fairytale castle of ivy and thorns in his dreams. How could he possibly tell Elenya how much he wants to go back to it, yet still deny her the thrill of taking him under the trees? How could he tell her: if I go under the trees, I might turn wild like my papa; I’ll fight against it all of my life, just like my papa, and only the seasons will tell if I win or fail. How could he say: my papa lived in the tenement all of his life, but he never stopped being wild. Not really. He pretended and pretended, and then it burst out of him, and it was roots and shoots and gnarled branches and bared teeth. And how could he say: now, I have to pretend as well.
A sound, a hammering, fists on the glass. The boy whips his hand from Elenya’s, turns around. In the frosted glass, there hangs Elenya’s father. The door flies open, spilling light, spilling songs, spilling the smells of fat roast sausage.
Elenya’s father is about to roar out, when Mr Navitski lays a hand on his shoulder.
‘I’ll sort them,’ he says.
Once Elenya’s father has trudged back inside, Navitski comes to the step. ‘Come on you two. It’s being served.’
Shrugging at the boy, Elenya squirms back past Mr Navitski.
‘Alek?’
The boy nods, puts one foot on the step. That is enough to make Mr Navitski drift off.
Tempted by the heat, the boy crosses the threshold. Inside, he turns back to close the door. It is almost shut, but he cannot quite bear to close it altogether. Snow eddies towards him. He breathes it in, pitches forward to breathe in more.
Only then does he see the marks at the edge of the garden. A chasm opens in his chest. He opens the door again, tumbles from the step. Two steps, and then another, the snow climbing past his ankles and shins.
At the edge of the garden: a thin trench, wending its way out of the trees, wending its way back again.
Something takes flight inside him. He staggers forward, plunging into yet more snow. Smells come alive. Sounds, so distant and near. The sting of a nettle. The groaning of branches bearing too much ice. The soft pull of a cattail root as it is hauled out of the ground.
Click and soft thump. Click and soft thump.
He crawls through the snow to the edge of the forest. He sits, with his feet betraying the edge of the trench. Laces done up tight. Socks to keep out the cold. He takes them off, casts them aside. Too many buttons on his shirt, too many zips and buckles and pins.
‘Alek, are you coming inside?’
Mr Navitski has himself stepped out of the house. Even now, he is striding across the garden.
The boy takes back his socks, puts them on his feet; takes back his shoes, slips them over socks sodden and cold.
‘What is it, Alek?’
One last look into the snow dark, and then: ‘Nothing, Mr Navitski.’
‘I thought you called me Nikolai?’
The boy crosses the garden again, taking the teacher’s hand. It is as if he is asking to be led inside – but the boy knows different; he is the one leading Navitski.
He hurtles down the length of the kitchen, finds Elenya at the table and takes her wrist. She comes with him, back to the frosted glass.
‘What is it?’
The boy forces open the window. Outside, the snow is tumbling over the trees. It comes more fiercely now. He has to squint to see.
‘There,’ he says, his eyes seeking out the edge of the trench. ‘There, and there …’
So he must stand alone – but now the snow is too thick, and now even his own footprints are disappearing, the ground a white so perfect that only the trees could tell he was ever there at all.
Click and soft thump. Click and soft thump.
Something wild inside him, and something wild, out there, in the night.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to: Cassie Browne, Katie Espiner, Charlotte Cray and everyone at HarperCollins; Euan Thorneycroft, Jennifer Custer and Helene Ferey at AM Heath; my mother, for not leaving me to run too wild in the woodland when I was a boy, and especially Dad, for all of his woodland lore.
And, of course, to Kirstie and Esther, for everything else.
BACK AD
Jon Heather, proud to be nearly nine, knows that Christmas is a time for family. But one evening in December t1948, no longer able to cope, his mother leaves him by a door, above which the legend reads: ‘Chapeltown Boys’ Home of the Children’s Crusade.’ Several weeks later, still certain his mother will come back, Jon finds himself on a boat set for Australia. Promised paradise, Jon soon realises the reality of the vast Australian outback is very different; its burnished desert becoming the backdrop for a strict regime of hard work and discipline.
So begins an odyssey that will last a lifetime, as Jon Heather and his group of unlikely friends battle to make their way back home.
Epic in scope, Little Exiles is based on the extraordinary story of the forced child migration between Britain and Australia that took place after World War II and how this flight from home shaped the identity of a generation of children.
‘It’s knockout – beautifully written and told with such emotional precision – I really, really loved it.’ Jim Loach, director of Oranges & Sunshine
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