by Ali Shaw
Seb only looked aghast. ‘All I want,’ he said, touching the memory stick as if it were a charm, ‘is to save my stuff. And then you can have me.’
‘You can do it later.’
‘There’s hardly any battery left, Mum!’
‘I don’t think it will take very long,’ offered Adrien, at which Seb glanced up at him gratefully. Adrien wasn’t about to start empathising with teenage boys, that much was certain, but he could not help but think of all his own photographs and videos, and documents kept like household junk, every electric memento reduced now to the thin reality of a powerless chip-set. After he had left his job he had, as one of his projects to distract himself from that awful assignment Michelle had given him and then funded (‘Work out what you really want from life . . .’), scanned and digitised every old snap and film from his past so that he could file away in the attic yesteryear’s cumbersome albums and video cassettes. He wondered what had become of those hard copies. Probably flung out through the roof by branches.
‘Ready yet?’ asked Hannah.
‘One more minute,’ whispered Seb, and the laptop immediately beeped. With a downward whirr it powered off, and Seb groaned and pressed the on button. The laptop powered up but died again before it had booted. With the next press nothing changed and Seb covered his face with his hands.
‘Come on,’ said Hannah. ‘Put your shoes on,’
Glumly, the boy unplugged and pocketed his memory stick. Adrien offered him a sympathetic shrug, but Hannah had already found Seb’s shoes and was handing them to him to drag on. When they left the house, she didn’t bother to lock the front door behind them.
Outside the police station a single mounted officer did all he could to placate both his shying horse and the gathering crowd. They had come still in their night hair and faces, packing into the gaps between the trees so that Adrien had to go up on tiptoe to see the policeman and his flustered animal. Behind them a squad car lay smashed against the entrance to the station, its chassis smeared with mud and leaves. Much of the rest of the building had been carried high into the branches, where the early morning sun found the hard square windows of the cell doors.
The officer was a young man, not far into his twenties, doing his best to yell answers to the crowd’s questions. What had happened that morning? He did not know. How much of the town had been affected? All of it, as far as he could tell, and as much of the area beyond as anyone had ventured to. Where was the council or the government or the United Nations, and what were they going to do about this? He did not know.
Adrien tried to elbow his way forward, to hear things better, but then a man shouted something in a high pitch that turned every head. A middle-aged businessman in suit and spectacles clawed his way towards the policeman. He stopped when faced with the horse, which stamped and puffed hot breath into his face. ‘I saw it!’ he exclaimed, poking his glasses up his nose, ‘hardly an hour ago!’
The businessman was shaking, so the policeman raised a calming hand. ‘Steady,’ he said, to horse and man both. ‘What did you see?’
‘A . . . a . . .’ The man wrung his fingers and looked from side to side as if with stage fright. ‘A wolf!’
The horse swung sideways and its hooves clopped against the broken road and it took all the policeman’s efforts to calm it. While he struggled, the businessman raised both arms aloft to the crowd, his tie askew beneath his unbuttoned collar and his shirt untucked and ripped in several places. ‘A wolf!’ he yelled. ‘A wolf!’
Many among the crowd whimpered. A child was crying, and Adrien felt like joining in. Yet the leaves shook soothingly overhead and the policeman brought his horse under control. ‘Calm down,’ he ordered. ‘It was probably just somebody’s dog. I saw a fair few running loose as I rode here.’
One or two of the crowd concurred in murmurs. ‘Too big!’ proclaimed the businessman, then again raised his arms to shout, ‘A wolf! A wolf!’
Eventually someone took his hand and he was led away, glancing left and right as if something still prowled out there between the trunks. Hannah grinned at Adrien, and he hoped like hell it was because she found the idea of a wolf improbable, not exciting. He did what he could to smile back, because he didn’t want to look cowardly, but he wished somebody would take his hand and lead him away as they had the businessman. He could well believe in wolves and bears now, and who knew what other beasts besides, stalking through the darkness under the trees.
‘Go home,’ the policeman advised the crowd. ‘I know nothing more than you do. Return at the same time tomorrow and I’ll pass on whatever I can learn between now and then. Ration your food and tell your neighbours to do the same. It may be some days before we can begin to fix this.’
‘They’re not going to fix this,’ muttered Seb as he, Hannah and Adrien left the police station.
‘They might,’ protested Adrien, although he was beginning to believe otherwise.
Seb shook his head. ‘They’re fooling themselves if they think that can be done.’
Hannah put an arm around her son and gave him a sideways squeeze. ‘Don’t worry, Seb. They might not need to do anything. I know this all feels . . . I know it feels scary, but give it time and we might see a blessing in disguise.’
‘People have died,’ said Adrien, with a touch of indignation. ‘My next-door neighbour was impaled by a branch.’
Hannah frowned. ‘Oh . . . I’m sorry, Adrien, I didn’t mean to sound flippant. I mean, I know people have died, and I’m sorry about your neighbour. I’m just . . . trying to see the bigger picture, that’s all.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ proclaimed Adrien, ‘and all I can see is endless bloody trees!’
‘Mum, you heard what the policeman said. The whole town is covered. Didn’t you hear that man who said he’d ridden here from his village, on his bike? He said it was all forest, all the way in.’
Hannah nodded, not even slightly alarmed. ‘Who knows? Maybe the trees have covered the whole country.’
Adrien tensed. ‘You sound like you want that.’
‘All I’m saying is that it could have been something much worse.’
‘What could possibly have been worse than this?’
‘When nature gave her answer,’ Hannah said simply, ‘to all the things going wrong.’
Adrien cleared his throat. He might have no choice concerning the trees, but lunatic hippies and teenage boys were the two things he needed least in a disaster of this magnitude. ‘I’m very tired,’ he announced in a tight voice. ‘I think I’m going home now. It was nice to meet you both.’
‘Oh.’ Hannah looked disappointed. ‘Well we could come with you as far as—’
‘No! No need to trouble yourselves.’
‘But you said you live in—’
‘Bank Street, yes. Which is in the other direction to your place.’
‘Is it? I thought that was not so far from us.’
‘I should know,’ Adrien insisted. ‘I’m the one who lives there.’
Hannah nodded slowly. ‘Ri-ight. Okay. Well . . . sorry. Um, and good luck. And goodbye, I suppose.’
‘Adrien . . .’ It was Seb.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you got enough food?’
The boy sounded genuinely concerned, but Adrien didn’t let his expression betray that no, actually, he had next to nothing in his kitchen, and that was why he had been living off takeaway since Michelle went to Ireland. At the mere thought of food, his stomach gave a conspicuous rumble. He hoped neither of them had heard. ‘I’ll be just fine, thank you,’ he said,
‘On our way here you said you hadn’t eaten breakfast . . .’
‘All the more reason to head back now.’ He waved at them forcefully. ‘Nice to meet you!’
And with that he turned and marched away.
Instead of walking straight home, Adrien headed to the nearest supermarket, reasoning that if people in faraway places were allowed to go looting in the wakes of typhoons and tidal waves, he
was allowed to do so now. If he could just get one decent meal inside him, he might find the fortitude to confront the awful thought teasing his mind: if the forest covered more than just the town, if the forest stretched on for such a long long way, how was he going to contact Michelle?
He wondered if she knew yet about what had happened. Perhaps she was sitting, even now, in her hotel room in Ireland, dressed in the business attire she always managed to make look artful, ready for a day at her conference, watching the news on the television. Somewhere in the middle of England, the reporter would say, a horrid little town had been pulverised overnight by a forest. And then she would recognise it as her town, and think at once of all the people she knew there, and of her husband, and then . . .
And then he was not sure what she would think.
Adrien groaned and hung his head, ashamed of how he’d behaved on the morning that Michelle had left for this trip. She’d woken him on the sofa, where he’d slept the night, and after he’d rubbed his eyes he’d seen that she was already wearing her work clothes, with her packed suitcase at her side.
‘I’m going now,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve got to catch my plane.’
As steadily as the daylight, Adrien had begun to remember every hurtful thing he’d shouted the night before. Yet Michelle’s posture, and the way she’d just hovered there as if there were one last thing she’d forgotten to pack, had suggested she wanted to make peace before she left.
Adrien had rolled over and faced the cushions, and not said a word.
The supermarket was already full of people, all bustling and squeezing for their ransacking. They bumped and dragged trolleys over the busted tarmac of the car park, none of the goods in them bagged. One man’s collection of wines reassured Adrien that nothing had been paid for either, and when he joined the press of bodies inside he shouldered his way first towards the off-licence aisle. To his dismay this had been emptied entirely, although it still stank of alcohol drained from smashed bottles. Adrien moved on, through all of the aisles above which the roof had not caved in. Nigh on everything had already been taken, and most of what remained had overflowed from earlier looters’ spoils, or tipped off the shelves and been trampled against the floor. A bent old man fought his back to collect trodden beans. A child, egged on by her father, crawled with frightened concentration into a cold grotto of freezer compartments, where the twigs dangled with glass as if it were a hoarfrost.
When at last the tide of looters flowed him out of the supermarket, Adrien’s only trophy was a sack of ice cubes, its contents melted into bagged slush. He told himself that any clean water was a godsend, but his gut clenched with hunger and disappointment.
He got lost three times on his way back home. The world looked so different now, and the vegetation seemed to distort paths and turn straight ways crooked. When he finally found his house, he supposed he ought to be grateful. It had survived the forest’s coming far better than most, and in his kitchen there were even cupboards still mounted on the walls. All he could find in them, however, were packets of flour and sugar, and one out-of-date cereal bar. He ate the bar immediately, curled up into a single soft morsel, then washed it down with half the slushed ice cubes, which he’d poured into a mug.
Many times Michelle had suggested he grow vegetables in their garden, and now he dearly wished he had done so. She had even cleared the space for him, a few years ago, unearthing and replanting the flowers she had tended there before, choosing him the best fertiliser and bordering the plot with stones selected on a trip to the seashore. In a garden centre they had purchased the seeds and the bulbs, and he’d fed off her excitement at imagining their first crop. ‘By day we can garden together,’ she’d said, ‘and in the evening eat the vegetables you’ve grown.’
But on his first attempt at tending them he had put down the trowel and looked at the dirt lining the creases of his palms and thought how precious and fleeting life was, and how he worked long hours all week in a job he loathed and that the sole reason for doing that, as far as he could tell, was to receive a salary that enabled him to purchase and not farm his own food. How he hated gardening. The falseness of it. Digging out a weed because it wasn’t pretty enough. Coming upon the slugs who had melted after digesting pellets. One time blindly reaching into a spray of withered daffodils and finding a bird bleeding to death from someone’s pet cat. ‘Mother Nature is a psychopath,’ he’d told Michelle, ‘and I won’t spend my weekends on my hands and knees, painting her toenails.’
‘Now you say that,’ she’d said, tears springing down her cheeks, ‘after we’ve been to so much trouble. What else are you only pretending to enjoy?’
In his ruined kitchen, Adrien took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He understood full well that he’d been an awful husband. What he had never understood, and in fact still could not, was why Michelle had stuck with him for so long.
Leaves dangled from the kitchen’s light fittings, and Adrien could see up to the bathroom through a hole in the ceiling. He discovered that he had, absent-mindedly, reached across and begun to play with a protruding branch. It had broken through the wall behind the cooker, pushed open the oven door and unfurled as if it were something baked there.
Adrien plucked one of its leaves and tried to eat it, but it tasted bitter as pith. He spat it out and washed the taste away, then noticed which mug he was drinking from and didn’t know whether to smile or to cry. Michelle had brought it back from her last big trip, as a jokey kind of present. Kisses from Egypt, read the caption, and the picture was a close-up of a camel’s slobbering mouth.
Adrien was just about to take another sip when he saw, standing in the kitchen doorway, a figure made out of sticks and leaves.
It was no more than a foot tall, with an oversized head that weighed to its left. For a face it had only a deformed knot of wood with a hollow in it, which might have been a single eye socket or a mouth. Its ears were two tatty leaves, angled towards him as if listening.
Adrien yelped and on instinct flung the mug at the monster. Yet no sooner had the handle left his grip than he realised his mistake. The breeze, blowing in through smashed openings, sifted apart the figure’s body. It was nothing but a chance arrangement of twigs and greenery, and the mug missed it and shattered off the doorframe, water spraying in every direction.
Adrien stood motionless for a minute, biting on his thumb. Then he tiptoed over to the mound of sticks and nudged it with his foot. It was as innocent a collection of natural litter as might be found anywhere in any forest.
‘Nothing to be worried about,’ he told himself, although, for some reason, he still was. He unscrewed the cap of his hip flask and sniffed the remaining contents with suspicion. Then he downed them, and began to wish he had not scorned the company of Hannah and her son.
6
Whisperers
Hannah was just a little girl when she fell in love with the woods.
One summer of pale sun days, when the light hung plentiful and brittle but never warm, her parents took her and Zach for what would prove to be their final family holiday. The journey was a time-stretching, seat-rattling voyage from traffic jam to traffic jam, onto the motorways and the dual carriageways and at last the country lanes, beyond which the trees lay in wait.
Of course Hannah had left the city before that. She had watched the countryside pass by en route to grandparents, uncles and aunts who lived in other towns. She had spent a few weekends at the seaside, instantly disliking the slabs that were the ocean and the blunt cliffs, along with the sand that she found in her clothes for days to come. Her last time there she had stood on the beach with her hands on her hips, blowing raspberries at the water, resolute that she hated oceans and was a city girl with an urban heart.
Yet that summer, in the forest surrounding a petite cottage blushing with dog roses, she’d had her first chance to roam. The same was true for Zach, and he took on the role of her guide in the wild. While their mother sipped wine and reclined in the c
ottage garden, and their father tinkled the keys of the piano that took up half the floor space in the sitting room, Hannah and Zach were free to claw their way from bush to bush, to snap off what flowers and cones they fancied and to be scratched and stung in return, to choose from an endless supply the best broken branches to use as adventurers’ staves. In the afternoons they carried hatfuls of nuts and berries back to the cottage and their mother would hum and hah as she consulted a guidebook and threw some fruits away and washed others at the sink and declared them fit to eat. They climbed taller and taller trees, not even thinking about falling, sitting side by side on high branches and swinging their legs in unison. They built a den out of fallen timber and, when they returned to it the next morning, found a weasel preening there before it hopped away, with each leap bending its spine as curved as a horseshoe. Then, in the evenings, they would sit on the floor and watch the log fire crackling, and recount all they had seen that day, and their father would coax long beautiful melodies out of the piano, and their mother would watch him adoringly, trying not to blink and miss a note.
Although Zach kept a watchful eye on his sister, he was never condescending or brusque, as other girls’ older brothers could be. That summer he led her through that arboreal realm hung with that month’s eerie light, and stood at her side in a fairy ring of red toadstools, and marvelled with her when she found a magpie’s nest with an earring and a tin soldier and a silver key inside. Hannah kept that key in her pocket from that moment forth, trying it now and then in cracks in the bark.
On the last day of that holiday, feeling something like grief about leaving, Hannah asked Zach if fairies dwelt in the woods. To her surprise, he abandoned his usual pragmatism and paused to consider it. ‘Fairies, huh?’ he said, and looked around as if he might actually spot one. ‘I dunno, Hannah. Little people dressed in flowers just don’t seem like nature’s thing.’