The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  He’d have challenged her as a trespasser only weeks earlier. He’d have drummed and harried her off Saul’s land with legal threats and quite probably some rough physical treatment as he pushed her into the passenger seat of the Land Rover and drove her to the exit of the western gate. He’d have taken her photograph and given it to the security boys who’d been manning the gates since shortly after Curtis arrived. He’d probably have emailed the picture to the Pembroke Constabulary.

  But he was a changed man, humbled and reduced and what he craved was human company. He listened as she told him she had inhabited a cave on the shore and that he was welcome to share her refuge and her provisions whenever he wished to.

  ‘I come here every evening, at dusk,’ she told him. Then she laughed and said, ‘Of course, that’s only if the coast is clear.’

  Once, her joke would have irritated him, made as it was slightly at Saul’s expense. But he’d been replaced in Saul’s affections by a new favourite in Tom Curtis. Maintaining the integrity of the estate was no longer his responsibility. And he found Amelia’s humour only mischievous and charming.

  ‘A warm welcome awaits you,’ she said. ‘Your presence won’t go unappreciated, Sam Freemantle.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I know everyone’s name in this locality.’

  ‘I’m no longer Sam Freemantle. Something happened to me.’

  ‘Were you hurt helping Tom Curtis? Did this happen because of him?’

  ‘Had he not come here, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘I can make you forget your pain and disfigurement, Sam. I can make you forget them entirely.’

  ‘Can you really?’

  ‘I promise you, it’s true.’

  And so the evening came when he craved company beyond endurance and he waited by the cairn for her, gnawing on a piece of stale loaf salvaged from the compound galley bins, what was left of his sight sensitive to the diminishing light in the spring sky as it reddened to the west and dusk approached.

  He supposed she was one of those shiftless alternative types. They were hallmarked by piercings and tattoos. They wore their hair in dreadlocks and travelled in convoys of camper vans. They attended the summer solstice at Stonehenge and gate-crashed the festival at Glastonbury. Once he would have avoided such people. Now he didn’t care.

  She came. She led him down a goat-narrow path on the cliff face he hadn’t known existed. She led him along the strand of shingle with the smell of brine making mucus well in his damaged throat as the sound of the waves brought a soothing rhythm to his ears.

  They walked south for quite a long time. They came upon the planting atop the cliffs above them to their left. Freemantle heard the wind change in character as it soughed through dense foliage. ‘The forest,’ he said, to his companion, ‘the trees.’

  Amelia laughed. It was a pleasant sound. ‘The memory of trees,’ she said.

  He blinked and focused his remaining eye on her. She removed the hood she habitually wore from her head. He saw no metal puncturing her face. Her skin wasn’t inked. Her hair was abundant and silky. She was really quite beautiful.

  Gloom descended and the air became cooler as they entered the cave and then darkness enveloped them completely. A new smell replaced the clean ozone smell of the sea and to Sam it smelled dead and ancient. There was something troubling about it and when his feet lost purchase in a pool of skittering slime on the cave floor he groped for Amelia’s hand, unsure of himself.

  She returned his grip. Her hand was small and surprisingly strong and reassuring. She said, ‘Soon, Sam, you’ll have no cause for concern.’

  He heard something splash heavily in the distance ahead of them. The sound shuddered off the cave walls. He heard a gasp of life and arousal and there was a hurrying, rubbing chafe as things that stank loathsomely lurched along the tunnel in their approach.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked Amelia in the fetid darkness.

  ‘Company,’ she said. Her voice came from behind him. She was no longer at his side. ‘Goodbye, Sam.’

  He barely had time to scream. And then they fell on him.

  In what he thought of as more robust times, Saul Abercrombie had been a betting man. He’d bet at the tables in Las Vegas and Acapulco and Monte Carlo. He’d bet compulsively on business hunches. He had an actuary’s calculated understanding of risk. So he knew how heavily the odds were stacked against his survival. He had a chancer’s instinct and he nursed no illusions. Without a miracle, he would die within weeks. It was why he treated the evening prior to his departure back for Wales as what might be the last he would ever spend in London.

  He felt better physically. He was stronger than he’d been on the day of the cave exploration. The Harley Street man had injected him with something as potent as it had been expensive. It was temporary, but temporarily it was working. He felt strong enough to stroll among the sites that had meant so much to him in his long and colourful career in the capital.

  He walked through Bloomsbury until he came to Red Lion Square. The square hadn’t changed greatly since the day of the demo and his arrest. It had lost a few trees to Dutch Elm Disease. It had lost a few more to the Great Storm of 1987, the one the weather forecasters had rather infamously failed to predict and warn people about. But essentially it looked the same, surrounded as it was by austere and elegant Georgian houses no one lived in anymore.

  Abercrombie remembered the turmoil of the times, which had been political. And he remembered the turmoil in his mind, which had been to do with being young and insecure and having yet made no impression on the world. He had been a student of politics in those days at the LSE and as he stood there in the gentle rain of a London spring, he recalled a quote coined by the great German statesman Otto Von Bismark he’d come across back then.

  Bismark had not been a believer in the afterlife. He’d been a Junker and a soldier and was a pragmatic man. He’d said, the only true immortality is posthumous fame. It was a good line and in so far as it went, it was probably correct. And Saul thought that he was famous enough for the memory of his life and his accomplishments to endure after he was gone. But he wanted the present state of affairs to continue for rather longer than nature seemed to have planned. He was content to have Bismark’s dictum proven by his own demise eventually. He just wasn’t ready for the moment to arrive quite yet.

  He walked from Bloomsbury to Soho and to Soho Square, where he’d enjoyed his epiphany a decade earlier. Jittery with crack, damn near psychotic in the aftermath of a huge crack binge, he’d kind of come-to there one summer dawn with no idea how he’d stumbled into that particular location.

  He still believed that had he become aware of his surroundings in a nightclub, or even a store or a car park, he’d have broken down completely and been committed, despite his fame and wealth. He’d been close to that, a cigarette paper’s thickness away from it, truth be told.

  But he’d regained something of his sensory awareness in Soho Square. The light had been soft through the leaf canopy and there’d been the smell of grass and flowers and bark and a chorus of happy birdsong. He’d hugged a tree. He’d actually hugged a sycamore tree and its gnarled surface had been real against his cheek. Its solidity had reassured him that the world could be predictable and benign. And beautiful in a prosaic, cyclical way he could learn to appreciate and enjoy without the stimulation of chemicals.

  He looked at his wristwatch. He had a drinks appointment at 7 p.m. and didn’t want to be late for it. When time was short he’d discovered you became economical with it in a way he hadn’t been before. He’d been a man who habitually and unapologetically kept people waiting. He didn’t do that now.

  Will Davies was already in the bar. The man from the Mirror looked about five years older than his picture by-line but that was a modest deception by the standards of Fleet Street, where most of the mugshots topping the stories were decades old. Abercrombie looked older than his own publicity shots, he knew. But then he’d be
en ageing in recent months with carcinogenic acceleration. The stock shot of him Davies’ paper had used had been taken only a year ago.

  The bar was quiet early on an early summer evening, as he had known it would be. It was why he had chosen it. He shook hands with the reporter, accepted his offer of a drink and sat down. He was sipping a double measure of single malt and felt relaxed when the first question was asked of him. The pilgrimage paid to the two most important London locations in his adult life had delivered him a sense of calm.

  ‘Heard of a guy named Andrew Carrington?’

  ‘Not ringing any bells,’ Abercrombie said, after a pause. ‘Illuminate me.’

  ‘I was sent a pamphlet, something written in the early seventies and published by a small independent press in Oxford. It was sent anonymously.’

  ‘Anon,’ Abercrombie said. ‘That’s one prolific author.’

  ‘It was written under a pseudonym. I did a bit of research. Three or four people could have written it. It concerns Gregory of Avalon and the Forest of Mourning?’

  ‘Continue, brother. I may even subscribe. This is all news to me.’

  ‘I reckon this guy Carrington wrote it.’

  Abercrombie sipped and shrugged.

  ‘He’s a professor of mythology. At least he was. He’s semi-retired. In the pamphlet he makes some fairly wild claims about the forest and its inhabitants. Actually, he makes some pretty wild claims about one inhabitant in particular.’

  ‘Again, brother, you’re gonna have to shine a light.’

  ‘And you’re lying through your elderly fucking skin.’

  Abercrombie grinned. ‘I don’t have to take that shit,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re still sitting there.’

  ‘Why haven’t you pursued this story? I’m genuinely perplexed about that.’

  ‘People are less interested in forests than you’d probably think. Even in yours. They’d rather get irate about wind turbines.’

  ‘That’s not the real reason.’

  ‘Picture a young woman,’ Davies said. ‘Blonde, a bit vapid, skinny, smokes too much.’

  ‘You’ve just described half of Soho, brother.’

  ‘I’ve just described Isobel Jenks. Since I stopped writing about you and your fucking forest, she’s stopped following me. And my stereo system doesn’t choose its own playlist. And my car radio behaves itself.’

  ‘David Baxter was your source? Jesus, I can’t believe I didn’t work that one out.’

  Davies grinned. He said, ‘You’re not a well man, Mr Abercrombie. But if you restore the Forest of Mourning, you might rejuvenate someone who can change that for you. And evil bitch that Carrington says she is, she might just be grateful enough to do it.’

  Abercrombie drained his drink. ‘I thought you’d be more sceptical about that kind of supernatural shit,’ he said.

  ‘I was,’ Davies said, ‘until Isobel Jenks gate-crashed my life after hers was supposed to be over.’

  Abercrombie had left the bar and was walking past a Greek Street sex shop with his mind on the Fitzrovia restaurant where he intended to dine when his mobile rang. The number on his display belonged to Tom Curtis.

  ‘Tree Man.’

  ‘You’ve got Alfred Crawley’s account of events at Loxley’s Cross, haven’t you, Saul?’

  ‘Who told you about Crawley?’

  ‘A professor named Andrew Carrington.’

  ‘This Carrington guy is becoming a royal pain in the ass.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, and yes, I’ve got Crawley’s account. What of it?’

  ‘I’d like to read it.’

  Abercrombie sighed and looked at his phone. ‘Then I’d better tell you where it’s kept,’ he said.

  There were three of them. They were all in their late twenties. The leader among the trio, the one who suggested they do it, was a Russian from the Black Sea port of Odessa. The second of them was originally from County Cork. The third was a Pole from Danzig. Their shared passion was fishing. They worked on the dayshift driving the JCBs that filled the holes around the tree root systems before hand-held jackhammer teams moved in to tamp down the ground.

  The work was repetitious and sedentary for these drivers. It was well paid and there was cause and effect to factor in; the fact that what they were doing amounted to something visually spectacular that literally got bigger every day. The food was excellent, the dormitory rooms were warm and dry and the beds were comfortable.

  But the camp had about it an air of confinement. Entertainment amounted there to cracking a few beers and sharing in a communal sing-along. Otherwise it was hunkering down with your laptop or listening to something you’d downloaded through your iPod buds. It got boring after a week and tedious after two and after that it just depended on your temperament. Fights had broken out. Feuds had begun to flourish. Despite the limited opportunities communal living offered to do things in private, affairs had been started.

  The Welsh men and women among the workers coped best because well-remunerated work was a novelty in this depressed part of their country. They were earning and not spending and they weren’t so far from home that the isolation got to them the way it did to some of the immigrant labour force. They counted their money and counted off the days and weeks till completion of the project.

  The Russian, Peter, was less sanguine. He thought that a little night fishing might be just the thing to improve the situation. He had smuggled an inflatable dinghy on to the site. It fitted, with its pump, neatly into a backpack designed for the purpose.

  He’d brought his gear too – telescopic rods that fitted into a cylindrical case less than a metre in length. He’d discussed his plan with Alex the Pole and Sean the Irishman and they were all very much up for it. And then the night came when the weather was serene and the cloud cover sufficient for them to cross the three or four miles of open ground before the concealment of the forest they were helping create enveloped them and concealed their progress to the cliffs and the shoreline completely.

  ‘What do you reckon we’ll catch?’ Sean said when they reached the cover of the trees. They’d plotted a route that would steer them well clear of the fresh planting progressing through the night to the north of where they walked.

  ‘Mackerel,’ Peter said. ‘But this is fishing for sport, my friend. We don’t have to eat our catch.’

  ‘Flat fish, too, in these waters,’ Alex said. ‘Very tasty flat fish, I should think. Dover sole and the one you call hake.’

  Sean said, ‘What do you fish for in Danzig?’

  And Alex laughed. ‘The harbour waters are too polluted to support any life but eels,’ he said. ‘They’re filthy and they’re ferocious and you wouldn’t want to eat one of them, my friend.’

  Ferns brushed quietly against their legs. It was funny, Sean thought. The forest was so dense and silent that it seemed to have been there for centuries. He hadn’t seen any ferns planted. There was ivy too growing on the trunks of mature oaks and cedars and willows in such abundance that it seemed to have been there since its hosts had been saplings.

  That wasn’t the case. Every single tree of whatever age and provenance had come in clean of parasites. And ivy was a parasite, however pretty it tended to look in a context such as this.

  It wasn’t completely dark. A full moon glowered somewhere behind the thin cloud cover above them and it provided enough washed-out, gloomy light for them to see as they got nearer to the cliffs. There was no scent of the sea yet in Sean’s nostrils, they weren’t close enough. There was no on-shore wind and the land they tracked was too dense with forestation to smell of anything but bark and lichen and leaves and a mouldy suggestion of moss.

  ‘It’s getting foggy,’ Peter said.

  Sean chuckled. ‘Focky?’

  ‘Yeah, and fuck you, Mr Linguist. How’s your Russian?’

  ‘OK, point taken.’

  ‘My point, smartass, is that there’s a mist descending.’

  ‘We’ll be
OK,’ Alex said, ‘so long as it doesn’t thiggen.’

  ‘Fine,’ Peter said. ‘Poles are supposed to be stupid.’

  Alex said, ‘Only in Ameriga.’

  ‘Guys, guys,’ Sean said, pausing, ‘there’s a serious point at stake here. If the fog really is thickening, do we want to be in an inflatable boat at sea when no one knows we’re there and the only distress tool we have is mobile phones?’

  ‘Fuck, yes,’ Alex said.

  ‘You heard the man,’ Peter said, ‘come on.’

  They reached the cliff edge, the margin between land and sea, about twenty minutes after that exchange. They were about a thousand metres to the south of the Puller’s Reach cairn. But that was a landmark none of the three men had ever laid eyes on. It lay by now at the heart of a large cluster of yew trees in a part of the forest’s edge that had not required their efforts to flourish and expand.

  It was safe to use a torch. The work going on that night was several miles to the north of them. A night trawler might see their light twinkle from out in the wastes of the Irish Sea. But they were confident no one else would be alerted by its beam. They used it to search for a pathway down to the shore. The cliffs were not particularly high at the spot from which they had emerged, perhaps eighty feet, but it was still a descent that required caution. They wanted to fish, not to maim or kill themselves.

  After ten minutes they identified a route and then took it, deliberately, carefully, perhaps aware that though the mist hadn’t blanketed their path to the beach, it did seem to be growing denser.

  They each had on a backpack. Peter’s held the craft they intended to fish from. Alex’s was filled with lures and barbell hooks and jars of the worms they’d collected from the earth during their working day and brought along as bait. Sean’s was filled with a case of beer. And as Peter inflated the dinghy they cracked open a Heineken apiece and discussed the threat the worsening weather represented to their planned night of recreation.

  ‘What was that sound?’ Sean said, when their discussion ended and the rubber boat was taut with air.