by Ali Shaw
Adrien woke, stretched, and smelled something fragrant on the morning air. Hannah was already awake, crouching just outside of the cottage and putting some breakfast together, but Seb remained out cold in the other armchair. When Adrien stood up, all the muscles in his legs twanged from the day before’s walking. He waddled outdoors, wincing with every step.
‘That smells potent,’ he said, nodding to what Hannah was making.
‘Oh, good morning, Adrien. And really? It’s just last night’s leftovers, mixed with some mint to freshen things up.’
Adrien frowned. It didn’t smell like mint to him, more like the green inner fibres of a twig. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said, and rubbed his nose. Something stringy came away on his hand, but he did not think it was mucus. It was a strand of spiderweb, with a bead of aromatic sap caught in its silk.
‘Ugh,’ he said, and flicked it away.
For the first hour of walking that day, Adrien’s legs and hips ached like he’d run a marathon. Come mid-morning things improved, but once again he struggled to match Hannah’s strides. Seb took it in turns to walk alongside his mother or hang back and keep him company. ‘How on earth does she have all this energy?’ Adrien asked him, on one such occasion.
‘Who, Mum? She’s always had it. And it’s only going to get stronger, once we join up with Zach.’
Adrien mulled that over for a minute. He thought he’d detected a hint of regret in Seb’s tone. ‘Your uncle,’ he fished, ‘sounds like a bit of a superhero.’
Seb frowned.
‘You don’t think so, then?’
‘Oh, he is. He is. I mean, he’s everything Mum says he is. If ever you need someone to tell you stuff about trees, Zach’s your man.’
‘But . . . ?’
‘I didn’t say but.’
Adrien shrugged. ‘Okay. I just thought you sounded—’
‘But if you try to tell him about films or music or, for example, the website you made, he couldn’t give the slightest shit.’
‘Ah.’
Seb folded his arms. ‘He’s just like his sister, in that regard.’
Adrien paused to clamber over a low-growing branch that Hannah had vaulted with grace. His legs couldn’t get high enough for such acrobatics, so he had to lay his belly on the bark and wobble over to the other side. ‘That’s your thing then, is it?’ he puffed, once he was safely across. ‘Websites and so on? You still have that memory stick tied around your neck.’
Seb climbed over the branch as if he had hardly even noticed it was there, then touched the memory stick like a locket. He had threaded a shoelace through a clip on its lid, and not taken it off since he’d first hung it there. ‘It was, until all this happened. I don’t suppose it can be any more.’
Adrien nodded. ‘What will have become of it? The Internet, I mean, without any electricity?’
‘It’ll be like everything else. In ruins. Bits of it will have survived, and you might be able to rebuild them. But most of the data will have been destroyed along with whatever it was stored on. You couldn’t access it without power, anyway.’
‘Dead and buried, then.’
‘No point pretending that it isn’t.’
‘So why do you keep that stick around your neck? What good is that now?’
Again Seb touched his makeshift pendant. ‘I suppose it’s like . . .keeping something in a safe you’ve lost the code to. This drive contains everything I could copy before the battery on my laptop died. Images, html files, that sort of stuff.’
‘Things for your game? That kind of thing?’
Seb raised an eyebrow. ‘What game?’
‘Your mum told me you’ve spent all summer playing a g—’
Seb cut him off with a laugh, although he didn’t sound very amused. ‘Of course that’s what she’d think I was doing. It wasn’t a game, it was a project. In her eyes everything is time-wasting, unless I end the day covered in mud and scratches.’ He sighed, and tucked the memory stick out of sight, beneath the collar of his T-shirt. ‘Anyway . . . it doesn’t matter any more.’
Adrien was surprised to see the boy’s eyes moistening, and as Seb stared resolutely ahead of him he wore the expression of one recalling a real place, some quiet beach or restful meadow long since lost to tides or the cement mixer.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Adrien. ‘Tell me about your project.’
Seb returned a grateful smile. ‘Some other time, perhaps. But thank you for asking. That’s Adrien Thomas one; Zach, Mum and Callum nil. And they’ve been playing all my life.’
‘Wait . . . who’s Callum?’
Seb looked amazed for a minute. ‘Huh? You don’t know?’
‘I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned someone called Callum . . .’
‘But Mum would have . . .’
‘She hasn’t.’ Adrien paused for a moment. ‘Oh, wait, hang on . . . he isn’t . . . ?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t even call him your f—’
‘No.’ Seb clenched his fists. ‘He’s just Callum. Because he’s never done anything to deserve being called anything else.’
‘Callum,’ repeated Adrien, stooping to pass beneath a meeting of branches. ‘Are we allowed to talk about him?’
Seb made a big act of indifference, but his pace quickened and his lips were tight. ‘Talk about him all you want. He’s as good as a stranger to me.’
‘Do you ever see him?’
Seb shook his head. ‘He tries now and then. He phones once in a while. That’s something that can dent Mum’s enthusiasm, I assure you. I don’t speak to him, though. I tell Mum to say I’ve gone out. He emails me sometimes, but it goes straight to my junk folder.’
‘Are you not tempted to at least—’
‘No. Why should I be? He booted Mum out of Handel’s Wood and never did a thing to help her raise me.’
‘What’s Handel’s Wood?’
‘The place he founded. You’d have hated it. It’s where they met, when they were young. She hasn’t told you about that yet, either? It was a hippy place in the woods. Growing all their own food, using their own sewage for fuel, that kind of thing. I would have hated it too, I’m sure. But you only have to see the photos to know how happy Mum was there.’
‘And she left because . . . because . . .’
‘Yeah,’ said Seb. ‘Yours truly came along.’
Adrien remained adamant that he did not like teenage boys, but nevertheless he felt a tug of concern for this one. Seb was trying hard to smother his anger, just as Adrien could remember doing during his own youth.
‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Seb, with a sweep of his arm. ‘It’s normal. I read on one site that fifty per cent of all parents split up.’
Adrien thought of all the schoolkids he’d watched struggle to cope with their families’ break-ups. ‘Statistics,’ he said, ‘are never much good at making you feel better.’
‘I don’t know. It’s just the way the world is. Relationships come to an end.’
Adrien thought impromptu about Roland. He could imagine him presenting that same statistic to Michelle, trying to pry her away from her husband. If the chances of saving his marriage were as good as fifty per cent, Adrien supposed he was a lucky man.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Seb, who must have picked up on his sudden aura of gloom. ‘I didn’t mean to imply that you and Mich—’
‘My own relationship is doing just fine, thanks,’ said Adrien in a hurry.
Seb said nothing.
‘Look,’ said Adrien, ‘you’re too young to know about this, but the thing about falling for someone is . . . is that because you don’t know it’s happening until you’re already head-over-heels, you can’t . . . you can’t be as prepared as you’d like. And it . . . you know, it goes very fast. In ways you’re not used to. You just hang on for dear life, and you haven’t got a clue how to steer it, and then all of a sudden you realise that at some point way back there the whole damned thing came off its wheels. You mess
it up, that’s all I’m saying. You never really know what you’re meant to be doing, and you mess it up.’
‘And that’s what’s happened to you and Michelle?’
Adrien watched a lone pink petal flitter through the air, then ruin the secrecy of a spiderweb. ‘Something like that.’
‘What are the chances of fixing it?’
He hung his head. ‘Honestly . . . I’ve no idea.’
‘You should tell me something about her. So I can picture what she’s like. Tell me something from the beginning, when things were easier.’
‘Why would you care about something like that?’
Seb looked faintly offended by that question. ‘I like figuring out how things came together.’
‘Uhh . . . you know, actually, all I can really remember about our first meeting is . . . panic.’
‘Panic? That’s all?’
‘Well . . . we met in an art gallery. I was bored, to be frank with you. I don’t get much out of looking at paintings. I was there as cover on a school trip, and I was sat on a bench in front of a Van Gogh when this lovely woman in a business suit sat down beside me and only then asked if the seat was free.’
‘You liked her even then.’
Adrien blushed. ‘Something like that.’
‘I could tell. Go on.’
‘I told her the seat was free, and she said isn’t that painting beautiful. I said it was. I didn’t really think so but she was beautiful and . . . I remember she smelled so intoxicating . . .’ Adrien paused for a moment, and his steps faltered. ‘She told me . . .’ he cleared his throat, ‘about the things she admired in the painting. I told her that I liked the way the spirals foretold Van Gogh’s mental degeneration, which was something I’d overheard a stranger say in passing five minutes before. I didn’t really know what it meant, but Michelle clapped her hands and looked at me as if I’d read her mind, and I wished . . . I really wished that I had. Then just when I hoped that moment would go on for ever, one of the schoolgirls bounced up to me and asked what time the bus was leaving and . . . and after I’d told her and she’d gone off with her friends, Michelle looked disappointed and asked if the girl was mine. No, I said, oh-no-no-no, of course not, I’m not even married, I’m a teacher, I’m on a trip. Then she said Ooh, an art teacher? And I thought God, that’s what she wants me to be.’
Seb raised his eyebrows. ‘You didn’t tell her that you were?’
‘Of course I did. And I managed to bluff through that first encounter. And then she kind of smiled in this adorably sexy way and asked me, as if it were the cheekiest, most adventurous thing in the history of the world, whether she could have my email address. I gave it to her, and she arranged a meal, and after we had eaten that meal she asked me out.’
‘Even after you’d admitted you knew nothing about art?’
Adrien winced. ‘I didn’t. I’d read and read and boned up on all kinds of artists so I could prolong the bluff. Just to get through that meal with her. And by the end of it I was so besotted that I couldn’t bear to tell the truth.’
‘When did she find out?’
‘Not right away. Our dates were a kind of torture. Wonderful torture, of course. I had so much art homework I barely slept. After maybe our sixth time seeing each other, after I walked her home to her flat, she told me she knew. She said she’d known the instant I lied about being an art teacher in the gallery. She said she’d fallen in love with me for being such a bad liar. That she loved me for trying so hard. Whatever that meant. And then she invited me in.’
Seb was grinning from ear to ear. ‘It’s so good to hear you talk about the happier side of—’ He stopped. The smile left his face and he never finished the sentence.
The woods had turned pink.
It was as if with one step they’d gone backwards from late summer into spring, for in the canopy the usual greenery had met a sudden wall of trees in flower. The air foamed with blossoms, thanks to a breeze that tore the petals off the twigs and streamed them through the forest.
‘Isn’t it pretty?’ asked Hannah, when Adrien and Seb caught up with her. ‘Even the floor is pink!’
Adrien looked back at his footsteps, crushed fuchsia trails in a carpet of blossom. He didn’t think it was pretty at all.
‘Look at you two,’ laughed Hannah. ‘What does it take to make you enjoy nature?’
A stream of blossoms flowed along with them as they walked, like the train of some elegant dress. Here and there a scrunch of its petals hitched on a sprig, but they soon unravelled and blew free again. Everything was so soft and satiny that none of them realised, until Adrien spotted the broken edge of a building rising out of the flow, that they had arrived on the edge of the next town, its wreckage strangely lit beneath a sifting roseate ceiling.
‘This must be the place I saw on the map,’ said Seb.
‘Yes,’ agreed Hannah, suddenly a lot less cheerful. ‘I was hoping we’d dodge it.’
‘Me too,’ said Adrien, remembering the decay of the last town. Compared with that other, this one at least seemed eerily at peace. Its population appeared to have evacuated it entirely, although Adrien supposed there could easily be a thousand people within earshot and he would never see them behind the blowing petals. Everywhere smelled cherry-sweet, even a surfaced sewage main he glimpsed when the blossoms parted to reveal it.
‘This is a horrible place,’ he muttered, sticking close to the others.
‘At least it’s a spectacle,’ said Hannah. ‘We should try to enjoy it.’
Adrien folded his arms. Every time he managed to see through the blossoms, his disgust was vindicated by a glimpse of something awful beneath. In one place he saw a corpse so encrusted in pink and white flakes that it looked like a man made from coconut ice. Likewise the blossoms’ perfume hid another smell, something as elusive as it was repulsive. Adrien did not think it was silage or death or any of the other bold odours he’d become all too familiar with since the trees came. Still it made his stomach turn, especially when the breeze blew stronger and whisked up the air.
Hannah led them towards the town centre where, when they reached it, every shop and office was lathered in petals. Still they saw no residents, although here and there isolated hunks of masonry loomed hard out of the cloud. The smell Adrien had no word for lingered on the air, and when they found themselves in the forecourt of a petrol station he wondered whether it might be from the diesel, some of which was still dribbling from the pipes. The trees had smashed the pumps and doused themselves in petrol, to which stained circles of blossom had stuck like scales. Adrien leaned closer to one and took a sniff.
No, the smell was something else.
‘You know what?’ asked Hannah, grinning now, ‘I think places like this are a message for us.’
Adrien stood up straight and rolled his eyes. ‘A message,’ he repeated sarcastically. ‘And what message is that?’
Hannah stopped smiling. ‘That we don’t need oil any more.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Hannah.’
‘Heaven has nothing to do with it. I’m talking about nature.’
‘If nature is in the business of sending us messages,’ said Adrien, ‘I wish it had started by sending an email. Instead of, you know, destroying the whole fucking world.’
Hannah put her hands on her hips. ‘How many messages do you need? She sent us more warnings than anyone could count.’
‘You see,’ said Adrien, raising a finger, ‘I’d have accepted your point if you hadn’t said she.’
‘It was just an expression.’
‘It was telling, that’s what it was. You think nature is some big happy fairy sitting on her mushroom throne.’
‘Can I squeeze past?’ asked Seb, before Hannah could respond. He had opened his pack and pulled out his drinking water, which he now drank until the last drops were gone from the bottle.
‘Seb, what are you doing?’ asked Hannah.
Some of the petrol pump’s diesel had welled in a gnarl of
the trunk that had displaced it, and into this Seb dipped his emptied bottle. The fuel glugged into the container. ‘I’m keeping out of this argument, Mum, but people will want this. It will be worth far more than water.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Adrien, pouring his own water onto the dirt at his feet, ‘we might be able to barter it for something.’
Adrien followed Seb’s lead, then recapped the bottle full of oil. ‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘you should fill yours too.’
When he turned back to her, she was red in the face. ‘Why on earth,’ she seethed, ‘would I want to do that?’
‘Because, like Seb says, other people will value it, even if you don’t. We’ll be able to trade.’
‘But people won’t need it, will they?’
‘Yes they will,’ said Adrien. ‘To light fires and things.’
Hannah threw her hands in the air. ‘We’re in a forest! There’s tinder underfoot, everywhere we go.’
‘That’s all very well for you to say. Not everyone knows how to light a fire from scratch.’
‘Then they need to learn! Winter will get here eventually, and by then they’ll freeze if they haven’t figured it out. We certainly won’t be helping them by delaying that lesson.’
Adrien was just about to retort that one less person would freeze with a bottle of oil to burn, and that Hannah could be bloody hectoring at times and he didn’t appreciate it, when what she’d just said hit him full force. How did he expect to survive the winter, if he did as he planned and slipped home after they’d reached Zach? He had not yet learned how to start a fire, let alone which mushrooms did and did not kill you. He could barely even put up the tent without bashing his thumbs with the peg mallet. What exactly, he asked himself, did he know how to do? He knew how to see the bleak side of every situation, that was one thing. He could recite a few lines of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that was another.