Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  As Saskia drew closer, the wooden buildings took shape. They were dowdier than those of her own town, being mostly unpainted log cabins. There were no people to be seen. She stepped off the ice onto the frozen ground and approached the largest cabin, but when she knocked on the door, no one answered. She tried some of the other cabins, returning at last to the largest. Carefully she opened the door. Inside there were items of furniture covered in dust, a cooker and an iron bedstead. It looked as if it was a summer house that no one had visited for a long time.

  Feeling somewhat crestfallen that there was no one to help her celebrate, Saskia resolved to make her way around the shore until she found an inhabited settlement. After walking for another half an hour, she realised that it was taking too long. She would not now be able to get home in time to greet Pieter and their parents on their return from the city. Indeed she would be in trouble for staying out on her own. She wished that she had left a note saying that she had gone to Maria’s house.

  Saskia stepped onto the ice and headed back towards the centre of the lake. After an hours’ walk, although she scanned the horizon carefully, there was no trace of the cheerful colours of her town, just the endless white of the ice. Saskia drank the rest of the water from the bottle and ate all the chocolate. She was beginning to feel cold. In a few hours it would be dark.

  How would she prove to Pieter that she had really walked over the lake to the far shore? She kicked herself that she hadn’t brought some artefact from the cabin to show him. She could imagine his scornful face as she pleaded with him to believe her. Then she realised that even if she brought evidence he might still decide she was being untruthful. Hot shameful tears trickled down her cheeks.

  Saskia was trying not to panic, but it felt as if the ice stretched on forever. When she thought it through, she realised that it was possible that she had not reached the far shore at all, but had instead cut across a segment of the lake. That would explain why it was now taking so much longer to get home—she was walking across the lake’s true diameter, which would be much further than her outward journey. In any case she was lost, and there was nothing she could do except keep on walking.

  After another hour, Saskia stopped and again scanned the horizon. This time she thought she could see some specks which might be buildings. After another half an hour she could see definite blocks of colour. As she drew nearer, she realised that it was not her hometown but another with a more regular layout. The houses were rectangular and built of primary coloured bricks, with flat roofs. Each house had a square of green lawn and a tarmac drive. Saskia stepped off the ice and onto the land. The town seemed familiar although she was sure she had never been there before. She headed for a prominent red house and knocked on the door. It was answered by a man in a V-necked jumper and tie.

  “Hello,” he said. “You look exhausted.”

  Saskia stumbled into the kitchen. “I’m sorry to bother you but I’ve walked across the lake and now I’m lost.”

  A woman in a flowered dress came into the kitchen. She switched on the kettle.

  “I’ll make you a hot drink and you can have some toast and honey,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you have something inside you.”

  The man looked down at her. “You’re rather young to be out on your own. Don’t worry though, we’ll look after you.”

  The woman spooned hot chocolate powder into a mug. The kettle boiled and she poured in the hot water. Two slices of bread were placed in the toaster. “Take off your coat and boots, it’s quite warm in here,” she said.

  Saskia did as she was told, then sipped the delicious hot chocolate. Soon she was gobbling the toast and honey. After she had finished she felt sleepy. The woman took her into the living room and encouraged her to lie down on the sofa. It wasn’t long before Saskia had fallen into a dreamless sleep.

  When she awoke it was dark outside and the curtains had been drawn. The room was very warm, warmer than the living room in her own house. She saw that two almost grown up children were sitting on the floor, reading books. As she sat up they turned to face her.

  “Hello Saskia,” said the boy. “Do you know who we are?”

  “Yes,” said Saskia, “you’re Boris and Anna.”

  Anna laughed. “You see, Boris, I told you she would know.”

  Boris stood up. “Our parents are looking after you. They say you walked across the lake. No-one has crossed the lake on foot before. There are signs everywhere warning people not to walk on the ice.”

  “I was perfectly safe. I am quite small and the ice was thick enough to take my weight.”

  “It was very brave of you,” said Anna. “Father said you were tired and cold when you got here.”

  “I feel better now I have slept a little,” said Saskia defensively. “Pieter said I would set a world record if I crossed the lake and as I am the first person to do so then he must be right.”

  “Congratulations,” said Boris.

  At that moment Mrs Petrova came in carrying three glasses of lemonade on a tray. “This is to help celebrate your great achievement,” she said, handing them round to the children. “The lake does not freeze over completely every year, so you have been lucky that you chose to make your attempt during an exceptionally cold spell.”

  Boris raised his glass: ‘to Saskia’.

  Saskia gulped down the fizzy drink. Mrs Petrova looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. “It is quite late and time for Boris and Anna to go to bed. I suggest that you should sleep again, Saskia.”

  Saskia suddenly gasped in dismay—”but my parents, and Pieter! They will be wondering where I am!”

  “We will worry about that in the morning,” said Mrs Petrova.

  Saskia sank down on the sofa under the blanket and to her surprise did not wake up until half way through the next morning. She found the Petrovas in the kitchen having a late breakfast.

  “Can I telephone my parents, please?”

  “Mr Petrova cleared his throat. “I am afraid we’re so remote and insignificant that we have not been considered for telephones,” he said. The best thing is if you stay with us until Pieter realises that you are here. Don’t worry. We will make sure you have enough food. You can have a bath now if you would like one.”

  “But I don’t understand. How will Pieter know that I am here?”

  “He will work it out,” said Anna.

  “Perhaps he will think to provide us with a telephone and then our problem will be solved,” said Boris.

  After her bath Saskia played board games with Boris and Anna, but her mind was elsewhere.

  “I think I should leave now and try to find my way home,” she said. “My parents may have called the police.”

  “Oh I shouldn’t worry,” said Boris. “Pieter will cover for you. He will think up some reason why you are not there.”

  Anna smiled encouragingly. “And you are not fully recovered from your exertions of yesterday.”

  After lunch there was a knock at the door. To Saskia’s amazement, Mrs Petrova showed Pieter into the living room.

  “Hello little sis!” he said cheerfully. “So you’re saying you made it to the far shore?”

  “I’m not just saying it, I did it!” Saskia replied crossly. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Whatever,” said Pieter. “If you say so. Only you can know. I hope you’ve been making notes about anything we need to provide here. A telephone is the most obvious thing. Mr Petrova is quite cross about that.”

  “They don’t have a television or computers.”

  “No. I suppose we envisaged them existing in an earlier time. A time before those things were commonplace.”

  “You’re pretty inconsistent about the things you have provided,” said Boris. “We have a toaster but no television. I for one would appreciate being able to communicate with the outside world.”

  Anna nodded. “It would help make the down times less boring.”

  “Down times?” queried Saskia.

/>   “You know,” said Pieter, “when we’re not playing with them.”

  “Where do our parents think I am?” Saskia asked Pieter.

  “I told them you said you were staying the night with Maria. I’ve come to collect you and take you home.”

  “You are welcome to stay as long as you like,” said Anna, politely.

  “We’d better not cross the boundary for long,” said Pieter. “Otherwise we may never get back.”

  Saskia put on her coat, hat and gloves, and after thanking Mr and Mrs Petrova, she and Pieter let themselves out of the front door. It was a cold grey day. Pieter took Saskia’s hand and led her to the edge of the ice.

  “We needn’t walk on the lake, we can just follow the shore. It is more dangerous walking on ice, especially with two of us.”

  “How was your piano lesson?” asked Saskia.

  “Ok, I suppose. To tell you the truth I’m getting a bit bored of the piano. I’ve asked Mum if I can have guitar lessons instead. She said you can take over the piano lessons if you like.”

  Saskia whooped for joy. “How far do we have to walk to get home?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Pieter “it took about an hour for me to get here, but then I walked over the lake.”

  “I really did walk across from the far shore, Pieter.”

  “Well then,” he said, “it’s something that you’ll never need to do again.”

  THE CLOSURE

  Conrad Williams

  SIDDALL CAME DOWN THE CANTED ROAD in the dark and the soles of his boots slipped and skidded on the polished cobblestone tops. He was cold; his first cup of coffee was still an hour away. He had drifted north, stopping every so often for a week or so to do casual work—usually hard labour—in places that sounded as if they ought to exist in a gnarled, industrial fantasy novel: Esher, Peatling Parva, Grimpo, Slattocks. Now, something in the architecture, or maybe even the people, called to distant memories.

  He thought he might be close to home, or rather, the house in which he had grown up with Jen, his older sister. After Jen moved out—she married an Argentinian and went to live on a farm in Purmamarca—and his parents died, he relocated to Birmingham and found work on building sites. He was just seventeen. He never married. He never stayed in one place long enough to make the right kind of connections. He couldn’t shed the feeling that being itinerant was in some way associated with criminality, though he had never done real wrong. It flavoured the way he spoke, and moved. There was a shiftiness about him, he knew, but he could not change now. Twenty years stumbled by, a relay of trains and buses, rented accommodation, pints of heavy and the clack of pool balls, solitary walks along canal towpaths and late-night meals of battered something and chips snaffled from polystyrene trays. He felt sometimes that he was ghosting through life, that he might actually have died at some point but never noticed.

  He crossed the bridge over the motorway and, as he often did if it was not raining, stopped to gaze down at the road. It appeared impossibly clean and bright, futuristic even. The few cars abroad at this hour gleamed under the streetlights as they swept by the more numerous HGVs, trying to beat the early morning rush. A gap in the traffic; silence fell, along with a rook, alighting on the hard shoulder where it swaggered over to peck at the unpacked carcass of a weeks-dead badger. Siddall moved on. He would be late at this rate.

  This place was familiar to him: this field abutting the railway embankment. It called out from a shadowy corner of his mind. Did he play a football match here once? Was that it? Memories of the school minibus, which was really little more than a stretched van: jouncing around in the back of it with the chosen few selected to travel with Mr Rose—the teacher charged with looking after the football team—while the other boys had to cadge lifts off reluctant dads. Toepoke, the boys called Mr Rose, because he couldn’t kick a ball properly. He stared out at them from behind John Lennon-style glasses, his thin bearded face pale but for the border where it met hair, the skin an ugly, blotched red. Mr Rose took football because there were no other male teachers and Peanut wasn’t interested. Peanut was the headmaster, so called because his first initial was P (to this day Siddall had no idea what it had stood for), and his head was very round and relatively small.

  Siddall glanced left and saw another street he recognised. He followed it, all thoughts of work banished from his mind under the sudden onslaught of recollections. Mr Rose wore tennis shoes on the football pitch. Mr Rose ate Mr Kipling’s apple pies starting with the lid first before he scooped out the pallid contents with his little finger. Mr Rose had a voice that made everything he said sound like an accusation.

  He remembered Miss Hurst, his form teacher in the last year of primary school. She drove a Mini. Large leather bag. Towards the end of the year they had started a topic called Jobs. Her voice, light and lyrical (she was American, she came from Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Siddall paused, startled by this sudden detail). What do you want to be when you grow up? They went around the class. Baker, like my mum. Ferry pilot, like my granddad. Policeman, fireman, teacher, astronaut. And you, Jeffrey, what do you want to be?

  A surgeon, Miss.

  He’d fallen in love with the inside of the body, spent hours poring over the copy of Gray’s Anatomy he’d found for pennies in a charity shop box; the elegant poses of a physique that ought not to be able to arrange itself so. His mother had bought him a colouring book but instead of the usual pictures of animals and beaches and picnics, here was the body presented as a series of black and white spaces, stripped back to muscle, to nerve, to bone. He neatly coloured the arteries red and the veins blue. The lymphatic system, with its sequence of nodes and lumps, he treated to a pale green. He was fascinated by the names of these hidden, secret regions, and remembered by heart some of the sentences in that colouring book despite not really understanding them at the time. He referred to them often, like mantra.

  The pharyngeal muscles are primarily concerned with deglutition.

  The procedures—developed over centuries of trial and error—to repair the body became a fascination for him, from first incision to final suture, and he grew impatient to hold those perfectly balanced tools of carbon stainless steel. His mother found him a medical kit in a junk shop; it contained forceps, clamps, enamel kidney bowls and a glassine bag of reverse cutting needles. He spent long hours threading them with fishing line and practising sutures on offcuts from an indulgent butcher who was a friend of the family. Running stitches, simple interrupted stitches, running locked stitches, pulley stitches, vertical mattress stitches … he became expert at them all. It was a long way from the warehouses and scrapyards where he had fetched up. At the back of his mind was the strange regret that he would never get to see the peculiar arrangement of his own internal organs.

  He found himself at the junction of a road—Lodge Lane—where he had lived and gone to school. He thought of the ice cream van that pulled up outside his house, and the next-door neighbours whose garden was blighted by a pair of BMWs slowly rotting into the earth. Harry Roughsedge, his best friend, had lived at number 63. Here was 12, his old house. He felt a lancing of the heart when he saw the stone wall that separated the front garden from the back. He had helped his dad build that wall back in the early 70s, when he was a toddler. It had served as a goal whenever his dad wanted to take some shots at him. So much else had changed: the front door, the fence, the garage. But there was the huge chunk of granite his parents had brought back in their car from Scotland after a family holiday to serve as a tombstone for their old cat, Ziggy. There too, the magnolia tree they had planted together on his mother’s 50th birthday.

  A weakness flooded him under the onslaught of memories, all the good and bad things to have happened under that roof. Aware of a face at the bedroom window—what had been his parents’ window—he sidled along to the school gates, where a different kind of grief awaited him. The route through these gates and along the approach road to the school was one he had taken so many times that the vie
w seemed permanently imprinted on his retina. He ought to have seen the diamond-link fences that cordoned off the concrete tennis courts and the distinctive shape of the Octagonal hall, where the fourth and fifth years attended assembly. Beyond that, the low blocks of the canteens and the playing fields.

  There was nothing but opened ground and the stilled hulks of demolition plants. Bulldozers, crushers, hook wagons. What had been the classrooms and staff rooms and laboratories and corridors was so much wreckage piled in a far corner waiting for the lorries to take it away. He couldn’t go into his old house, but he would go in here. He felt anger rising inside him. Why had this been allowed to happen?

  Siddall clambered over the gate and hurried up the approach road. A hospice was being built where the tennis courts had stood. There was nobody around. He glanced at his watch and saw that his shift had started twenty minutes previously. Another job lost. It didn’t matter. There would be others. The ground, carved up by the caterpillar tracks, had frozen into unforgiving ridges that he now stumbled over as he made his way up to see if the gym and the old canteen buildings might still be standing. He almost didn’t see the girl. She was sitting against bags of cement, and was almost the same colour. A scarf was wrapped around her neck and mouth, but it didn’t muffle the wet, phlegmy sound in her throat that caught his attention. Her eyes were large and pale blue; he couldn’t see her eyebrows because of a low, straight fringe of dark brown hair. It didn’t matter. He knew her. Recognition drove a spike through his thoughts, though he could not yet conjure a name.

  “Hello,” he said. She didn’t reply immediately, but looked off to her right, towards the area he was trying to get to. She stirred and slowly drew herself upright with some difficulty as if she had been sitting down there in the cold for some time. She began to totter after him, but was unable to keep pace. Possibly she was ill. The scarf around her throat and mouth suggested a bad cold, maybe something worse. He thought of his textbooks. He thought of asthma and bronchitis and emphysema and chronic obstructive airways disease. He thought of corticosteroids and N-acetyl cysteine.