by Ali Shaw
He kept on walking, and did not at first notice that he had entered a churchyard. There were no walls left to mark its boundaries but there was a graveyard in which the trees had peeled back the turf, bringing to light what lay beneath. Now bones jutted among the branches like barkless growths, and a skull gawped from the end of one bough. To Adrien’s relief, these were the oldest graves. The newer ones were further off, and fresh flowers in the treetops warned against going near.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he mumbled, coming to a stop and wishing that Michelle had not been out of the country on this of all mornings. He couldn’t wait to speak to her, even if their last conversation had been yet one more ugly row. He had no friends in this town, probably through fault of his own. After taking up Michelle’s offer, he didn’t even have colleagues.
‘Hey!’ yelled a woman, from somewhere nearby. ‘Hey! Please help!’
The woman who was hailing him stood in the shadow of the church’s battered steeple. Adrien headed towards her, glad in that moment to be in anyone’s company. The woman didn’t seem to be in any obvious danger, but as Adrien drew closer he felt that there was something odd about her, something different from all the other people he’d passed that morning. She was roughly his own age, albeit in far ruder health, with square shoulders and an abrupt jawline, and the kind of wild sun-bleached hair that came only from a life lived outdoors. The knees of her jeans were grass-stained and she wore a tatty jersey whose sleeves were too long, so that the cuffs were torn full of holes. Her face was bronzed, blunt, weathered, and her eyes were Adrien’s new most-feared colour: green.
‘Please help,’ she asked again.
Adrien glanced ahead, towards the place where the fresh flowers hung. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘whether I’m the sort of help you’re looking for.’
‘You’re the only person who’s stopped. I’d started to think that nobody would.’
Truth be told, Adrien was already wishing that he hadn’t. He wanted to get clear of the trees. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked urgently. ‘You don’t look hurt.’
‘We need to save the yew.’
Adrien looked around in confusion. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The graveyard yew. It’s eight hundred years old.’
Behind her grew a tree so ungainly that Adrien could well believe it had lived eight centuries. Its trunk stood thicker than his arm span and its base was fattened by woody bunions. Its old bark was pronged with crooked twigs and at its highest point it split into five spines, each fraying out a spread of needled leaves. Yesterday it would have been imperious here, but today it was humbled by all the new growth. The nearest new tree, in fact, had with one muscled feeler levered half of the old yew’s roots out of the ground. Now they hung limp in the air, a display cabinet of worms.
‘This yew’s been here longer even than the church,’ said the woman. ‘They’re going to kill it if we don’t do something.’
‘Who’s going to kill it?’
She gestured to the new trees towering above. ‘They’ll starve it. They’ve already blocked out all of its sunlight, and stolen all its soil. It must be some kind of mistake.’
He scratched his head. ‘A mistake? Whose?’
She didn’t answer that question, only assessed the roots of the yew with a determined expression. Adrien watched her with gathering suspicion. Now he knew what was different about her. She was distressed, but her distress was unlike anybody else’s. ‘You’re actually upset, aren’t you,’ he began, ‘because a tree is dying?’
The woman nodded, missing all of his insinuation. ‘I used to come and sit here,’ she said, ‘on a bench. It was attached to the back of the yew. I can’t even find that bench any more. I used to bring a book, or the newspaper, or just think, you know?’
Adrien licked his lips. He too had once frequented a favourite tree to read beneath, although for some reason he had long since stopped. A park chestnut, which often in the autumn would jolt him from his book with the drop of a conker. Sometimes, and only when nobody was watching (he didn’t like to be thought of as childish), he used to prise apart the conker shell and collect the polished nugget from within.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s just a tree. You can find a new favourite one. There are more than a few to choose from.’
She turned and glared at him. ‘It’s not just any tree. It’s living history.’
Adrien took a step back, cowed by her sudden conviction. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘I know it’s really old.’
And he did know. It was not only westerns that he watched on television. If this yew was as old as she said it was it would have been a sapling at the time of medieval kings. It would have grown fat in its infancy off soil stacked full by the bubonic plague. Troubled Catholics would have prayed around it, wondering what would become of their souls when their king rejected Rome. The crude props and theatre of the mummers would have played in its shadow, as might the fresh recited verses of a feted Elizabethan bard. It would have been marched past by the hard boots of Roundheads and the fine shoes of Cavaliers. Its leaves would have tried the first smog, sucked in the first fumes of the first factories. Young women would have sneaked into its quiet churchyard imploring heaven to keep safe their sweethearts, who ducked from the whistling artillery in the mud-sunk ditches of Europe. Time had trampled through this churchyard and left behind, as time always did, the sense that just because things had progressed, they were progressing towards a goal. For thirty seconds at least, Adrien was persuaded that it would be the right thing to save the yew. Then, gently, he said, ‘Look . . . it’s obviously doomed. Even if it wasn’t, whatever could we hope to do? We’d have to tear down all these other trees, for a start, with diggers or something, and even then . . . just look at its roots. Too much damage has already been done. Even I can see that.’
The yew was in short supply of leaves. Those it still had grew in serried strips along the twigs, like the teeth of broken combs. Its bark was as grey and eroded as the graveyard’s headstones, as if the aim of its long growth had been to turn itself into yet another monument to the dead.
‘I can’t bear to just give up on it,’ said the woman.
‘There’s no shame in giving up,’ said Adrien. ‘I give up on all sorts of things. But . . . maybe this yew has served its time. Been around too many people. If it had a bench attached to it, well . . . that makes it almost a piece of our furniture. Maybe there’s not enough tree in it, any more, for it to . . . for it to . . .’ He looked up and around him and then snapped his mouth shut. He had been about to say for it to be spared, as if some judge had decreed what the forest could and could not destroy.
‘Not enough tree in it any more,’ repeated the woman, then simultaneously laughed and sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
Even if she was some sort of crazy hippy, and Adrien had little time for hippies, he was pleased to have made her smile. A breeze hissed through the canopy. The yew’s exposed roots shivered pitifully.
The woman nodded and turned away from the uprooted tree. At the same time a tear sped down her cheek and Adrien’s pleasure turned to alarm. He had enough to worry about this morning, without a stranger crying on his shoulder, so he whipped out his hip flask and offered it to her.
‘But it’s eight thirty in the morning,’ she said.
He took a swig of the whisky and was about to return it to his pocket when she laughed. ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t want any.’
When she took it and her fingers touched his they were rough-skinned and warm. She drank more than he felt he had been offering, then gave it back with a grin. ‘Thanks. This was kind of you.’
Adrien liked being told that he was kind.
‘You must think I’m some sort of crazy hippy,’ she said.
Adrien wasn’t quick enough to deny it.
‘That’s okay,’ she shrugged. ‘Most people think that about me. But I’m not. My name’s Hannah . . .’
‘And I’m Mr Thomas,’ he said by habit. ‘I mean, u
gh . . .’ He trailed off in disgust because it was his teacher’s moniker, even if it was also his surname. ‘Just Adrien. Just call me Adrien.’
‘Alright, Adrien, where are you headed?’
‘I don’t really know. I only planned to get away from my street. Out from the trees. But they just go on and on. And on.’
Hannah nodded. ‘I think they might go on for ever.’
Adrien took another backward step. He didn’t know what he found more disturbing: that idea, or the hopeful way in which Hannah had suggested it. He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know about that. They can’t go on for ever, can they?’
‘If they can appear as suddenly as this, who knows?’
He tried not to think about it. ‘I’m going to try to find a working telephone. I thought perhaps I’d try the police station. Maybe someone there will have some answers.’
‘Mind if I tag along?’
Adrien hesitated. Already he was becoming dispassionate about the yew. Pleased, even, for its impending death. One less tree to fell. Likewise, he might rather be alone again now. Other people always made life so complicated.
‘First I need to fetch my son,’ said Hannah, as if his silence was agreement, ‘and then we can head to the station. My house is only a few minutes away. Mind stopping there en route?’
Adrien did mind, but could also never bear to look ungracious, even when he felt it. He hung back a pace or two behind Hannah as she led the way. The last thing he wanted was to meet her son, and he considered dashing off. There wasn’t much chance of bumping into her again, so he would never have to explain himself. The only thing that stayed him was the indignity of it.
‘So,’ Hannah asked as they went, ‘what did you do for a living?’
For a moment Adrien wondered how she knew that he’d stopped at the school and was on a career break. Then he realised that she had simply made a correct assumption: that whatever he had done before he would not be returning to any time soon.
‘Uhh . . .’ he said, ‘I was a teacher.’
‘Wow, good on you. My dad was a music teacher, so I know a bit about that. It must be hard. Standing there in front of all those kids . . . the very idea gives me the shivers.’
‘You’d get used to it,’ he said, although he never really had. All those bored, pubescent faces and their intimidating chatter at the back of the class. All they wanted to do was flirt with each other and spring pranks on him.
Adrien didn’t return her question as they walked, and ask Hannah what she had done for a living, simply because he was too busy being immiserated by her good cheer. Everyone else they passed looked stunned or distraught, but Hannah was in no short supply of smiles. Noticing something in the middle distance, or perhaps pausing to touch a particular leaf, her face would light up with childlike glee. Twice already she had directed the full force of that smile at him, and he had shrivelled like a bug under a lamp.
When Hannah stopped and laughed out loud it seemed the strangest sound beneath the whispered friction of the leaves. Coarse, almost vulgar, to laugh in the face of the smashed world. She was laughing at a town house whose walls the trees had carefully unshuttered. They had been pulled open like the front face of a doll’s house, putting all of the rooms and fixtures on display. Slender shoots had unpicked every chair and every fitting, refurbishing them with threads of green and the occasional flower. To these a morning haul of insects had buzzed, and lured in turn countless birds of all sizes. They whirled about the building in colour and song, for in truth it was a house of perches now, fit for birds alone. Blue tits and great tits and coal tits bounced from mantelpiece to picture frame, while pigeons loped in the kitchen and chaffinches swirled through the bed chambers. On the top floor a sparrowhawk joyfully unravelled the stringy insides of a starling, while crows bobbed at its clawed feet, quarrelling for its table scraps.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ asked Hannah. ‘Like everything made right?’
Adrien tried his best to see it like she did, as some sort of happy restoration, but then a croaking magpie bounded out of the pantry and shook an emptied crisp packet in its beak, admiring its greased reflection in the foil.
‘We’ve needed something like this for a long time,’ whispered Hannah.
‘I don’t know,’ said Adrien, also in a whisper. ‘I really don’t know about that.’
‘Cheer up,’ she said, and nudged him with her elbow before setting off again. He stayed put for a moment, astounded that she might demand such a thing of him. Then the magpie cawed like a vulture, and he scampered after Hannah.
The two new acquaintances moved on, leaving behind them the house full of birds. Heedless of their departure, that house’s feathered tenants continued to sing that the building was their own. A rabble of sparrows squabbled over berries put forth in the master bedroom. A starling had found a snail in the bathtub and cracked its shell over and over against the enamel. The sparrowhawk on the top floor finished its meal and beat wide its wings before take-off, swooping away to leave what bones remained to the crows.
Now and then, other townspeople wandered by that house. The birds paid them no heed, although often those passersby stopped to listen to the squabble of song emitting from every floor. Thus distracted, nobody saw or heard a tiny figure, an emaciated thing no bigger than a monkey, creeping head-first down the trunk of a tree.
The figure was green and sticklike, as if it were made out of twigs and leaves. Its eyes were two round and empty sockets and its mouth was a criss-cross of thorns, giving its head the overall appearance of some squirrel or rabbit skull hewn out of wood. It moved in the stop–start fashion of a mantis, and when it reached the forest floor, raised itself on two crooked hind limbs.
The breeze blew. The forest creaked.
The little figure waddled unseen, except perhaps by a swivelling pair of avian eyes, following Adrien and Hannah.
5
Wolves
When they reached Hannah’s house, she introduced Adrien to a tree that had crushed her car into sheet metal and burst rubber. To Adrien’s deepening disquiet, even this did not arrest her smiles. ‘Don’t you think it’s an improvement?’ she asked, with her hands on her hips. ‘I’ve never liked cars anyway. And the funny thing is, I’ve spent years trying to grow one of these in the back garden.’
Adrien scowled at the destruction. ‘A tree?’
‘A black poplar.’
He squinted at the plant. Its leaves like arrowheads, its bark the brown of bog water. ‘You must be really pleased,’ he said.
‘Seb!’ she called out, as she led Adrien inside. ‘Sebastian!’
No reply.
‘How old’s your kid?’
‘Sixteen.’
Adrien might have known it would be the worst age. He thought of all the sixteen-year-old boys he’d taught, their grease and zits and toilet humour. It had been despair at all that which had, in part, led him to so fear having children of his own.
They found Seb in what had once been the sitting room, but which was now a kind of cave made from plasterboard and branches. His ears were covered by a large pair of headphones and his eyes were fixated on the screen of a laptop. He was skinny and pale, and either his T-shirt was too small for him or else his arms were too long, or both.
‘Hey,’ said Hannah, ‘hey, Seb.’
Seb didn’t hear beneath the headphones.
Hannah made her way across the room, but before she reached her son his laptop beeped a battery warning. Seb stared horrified at the red light that accompanied the noise.
‘Come on,’ said Hannah. ‘We’re going to the police station.’
‘What?’ Seb asked. ‘Why?’
‘To find things out.’
‘Okay . . . I’ll be right with you, Mum.’ But he neither moved nor looked away from the screen.
‘I liked it better before computers had batteries,’ said Hannah, turning to Adrien. ‘When I could just pull the bloody plug out if I needed his attention.’
&
nbsp; Adrien laughed awkwardly. He too was at odds with technology, although he maintained that technology had started it. He moved closer until he could see the laptop’s screen. The boy was copying files onto a memory stick, muttering, ‘Come on, come on,’ as a progress bar inched towards completion.
‘Seb,’ said Hannah, ‘this is Adrien. I met him this morning.’
For a horrified moment, when Seb looked up, Adrien thought the boy recognised him. His mind filled with the mugshots of all the teenage boys he’d taught in recent years, but he did not catch Seb’s among them. Then the boy gave a distracted nod, said, ‘Oh, hi,’ and returned his attention to the screen, on which the animated hourglass kept spilling its digital sand.
Adrien cleared his throat, relieved not to have to be Mr Thomas. ‘Um, hello, Sebastian. I don’t suppose you have an Internet connection on that thing? Or any way to contact people? My wife is in Ireland.’
Seb shook his head balefully. ‘The Internet’s down. Everything’s down.’
‘Oh,’ said Adrien. ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’
The laptop’s progress bar crawled. Hannah, restless, gazed through the empty window frame at the world without. She had changed subtly since the moment they’d entered the house. Her smiles had left her and she’d begun to fidget. When a squirrel ran a helix along a branch, she half-reached in its direction. Then she turned back to her son with renewed impatience. ‘We should be outdoors. We should be experiencing this.’