by Ali Shaw
‘Perhaps there used to be,’ grinned Hannah. ‘A very long time ago.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hiroko.
‘It looked like something out of the Ice Age. Like a woolly rhino, only not quite as squat. It had a longer neck, you see, and the most beautiful horn . . .’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Seb. ‘You saw it?’
Hannah nodded enthusiastically.
‘And you didn’t wake us up?’
She folded her arms. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested.’
‘Did it look dangerous?’ asked Hiroko.
‘No! It had the bluntest teeth you can imagine.’ Hannah shook the branch next to her, which was missing all its leaves and much of its bark. ‘It was eating these. And it had thick silver fur all over, and did I tell you about its horn?’
‘Like a kirin,’ mused Hiroko, in a quiet voice.
‘What did you say?’ asked Seb.
It was a minute before the girl replied, for she was staring into the animal’s footprint as if it were a wishing well. ‘My grandmother,’ she said eventually, ‘lives in a house in the forest. It’s an old house, the kind that creaks as you walk in it. It’s full of woodwork and carvings, and byōbu that divide the rooms.’
‘What are byōbu?’
‘Screens. Folding screens. And hers are covered in paintings, even older than she is. They’re of animals and beech trees and wildflowers . . . all the things from the wood where she lives, or the things people used to believe lived there. So . . . what Hannah just said made me think of that. A . . . a kirin. They’re a kind of legend in Japan, although people draw them differently. They’re our version of a unicorn, I suppose. My grandmother’s favourite byōbu has one painted so big it fills three panels of the screen. She says a kirin is a good omen.’
‘A good omen . . .’ repeated Hannah, and above and around her the trees creaked as if with pleasure. ‘Well, we’re going to need a name for it, and I think kirin is a good one. Come on, then. Let’s get packed up and follow it.’
‘Follow it?’ gasped Adrien. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘I’m happy to hear any other ideas. The way I see it we were lost, and now this kirin has left us a trail.’
To that none of them had an answer, and although Hannah knew they didn’t share one drop of her enthusiasm, she let herself enjoy the victory. ‘That settles it, then,’ she said with a beaming smile.
And they followed the kirin.
They trod the horned beast’s trail all that morning, although they did not see the animal itself. It had too great a head start, but it had left clues to read, be they more prints in the soil or snapped sticks where its horn had cut a path. Hannah was just beginning to wonder what she’d say if it was leading them nowhere, when Hiroko pointed to something high in the branches. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed.
It was a picnic table, and another not far from that.
‘Yes!’ cried Hannah, ‘I know this place.’
She began to dash about in the undergrowth, and one minute later found a painted post that marked the start of a bridleway. She had ridden this route on a mountain bike, not a year before, and remembered a smooth and tended track, with only the occasional root bumping her wheels. Now it was a line of saplings, squeezed between the older trees, but that only served to make her laugh. She was almost skipping as she led her companions down the path, feeling quite sure that the kirin, whose trail had vanished now, had led them here. Everything was right in the world, when the world was on your side. Best of all, she was about to be reunited with Zach. She couldn’t help but walk faster, and faster and faster until the others struggled to keep up. Then, after another ten minutes, they reached her brother’s lodge.
As the sheer euphoria of arrival faded, Hannah stood with her hands on her hips, taking in the sight before her. She could clearly remember her first happy visit here, when Zach had led her through each room almost on tiptoe, as if he could not believe his own luck to have moved to the place. Now she realised that she had, without questioning the idea, imagined her brother’s house to have survived intact. Instead, branches ran amok through its two timber storeys and spilled awry out of its roof. They had used the wooden architecture to their advantage, fusing with the structure and bunching their roots into the foundations. In places it was impossible to tell where a trunk ended and the older wood of the walls began, and in this fashion the trees had warped all straight lines out of the lodge, bending the very shape of the place until it better resembled a stump than a human house. Fringes of moss hung from the eaves, and folds of bark shuttered up several of the windows. Hannah bit her lip to see it that way, then took a deep breath and grinned at the others. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I should think he’s pleased this has happened.’
She led them up three steps to a wooden deck. There a bell hung, and she rang it and found reassurance in its familiar jangle, even as a breeze fluted through splits in the lodge’s walls.
‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Zach! Zach! Surprise!’
After a minute there was still no reply, so she jangled the bell again. Adrien cleared his throat, but smiled encouragingly when she looked at him for support.
She pushed the door open and let everyone into a wide hallway with jumbled coats and muddied boots scattered across the floor. Illumination came not from the wood-shuttered windows but through higher openings in the ceiling. Through these and a veil of foliage the sun pushed its light, green by the time it reached the floorboards.
They opened a door to their left, and passed through a dining room with an overturned table. Another door led into a kitchen, where violets grew among the knives, forks and broken glass strewn around.
Nobody said anything, but Hannah began to feel a magnetic dread that pulled at her stomach. She held her breath. Adrien was the one who pushed open the next door, onto a plainly furnished sitting room.
There they found Zach. He sat in the corner, with his head cocked as if listening to some inscrutable sound. A giant man with a dense beard and brawny arms, he wore grass-stained jeans and a lumberjack shirt. A wound in his chest clogged the room with a reek of old meat, and had turned his shirt to rags with a dark circle across the heart of him. As the opened door disturbed the air, flies exited his body and swarmed for a few irked seconds, then touched down again to continue their egg-laying.
Hannah did not cry out or make any other noise. Only an arm against a nearby chair. A bend in her spine and a loll of her head as if nodding to sleep. Seb made the first sound, a succession of breaths sucked in faster and faster. He rushed out of the house. After a minute, Adrien staggered after him.
Hannah didn’t leave. She could hardly even think. The sight before her emptied out her mind as if imparting something of itself. For a minute or two more she just remained where she stood, stunned by Zach’s stillness and the wound where his heart should have been. Then she knelt. She was too shocked even for tears. It was as if her mind kept rejecting the news her eyes relayed. Look again, it instructed, look again, tell yourself how happy he is to see you. ‘Zach?’ she whispered, watching his lips, imagining perhaps some palpitation or twitch of life there that she knew she had not seen.
She was barely even aware of Hiroko, who pulled down her hood like one removing a hat in a church. ‘Zach?’ pleaded Hannah, shuffling forward on her knees to take hold of him. She did not care that the flies whined around her when she pressed her face against his. How soft his beard was. How strange the texture of the dead skin at his cheekbone, neither hot nor unduly cold, merely the temperature of air, or of unremarkable things.
‘This is a gunshot wound,’ said Hiroko.
‘Zach,’ whispered Hannah, shaking him by the shoulders, then stopping at once when that motion filled him with clumsy animation. His head drooped forwards and his chin rested on his chest. As delicately as she could, she lifted his head and made it upright again, leaning it back against the wall, then reaching up to shut his eyes, which were so dry. Her fingers trembled and sh
e could not. Only then did she scream, as if that were some formality forgotten until now.
Hiroko crouched alongside her and reached out and slid Zach’s eyelids closed. Although Hannah had wanted that to be done she cried out (no words, all breath) because she wanted to see the colour of those eyes again and she wanted them to smile at her, to greet her, sparkling, when he told her this is the world changed exactly how we always wanted, isn’t this our dreams come true? And then she could do nothing except fall against Hiroko, who braced herself at the sudden capsize of Hannah’s weight against her. The girl crouched there, tense as a fist, then reached out with uncertain arms and wrapped them around Hannah, who in turn wrapped her own around the girl. They held each other tight, and with Zach’s eyes sealed all Hannah could look at was the gunshot wound in his chest, so rank and so dirty, and the heedless insects continuing their labours within.
II
1
The Night the Trees Came
On the night the trees came, Inoue Hiroko woke because of a fox. It climbed onto her chest where she lay in the youth hostel dorm, and woke her with a lick of her neck. Just one scratchy sheet between its black-booted paws and her nightshirt. It weighed less than she would have imagined, as it prodded at her nose with its own. Eskimo kisses that smelled of dog breath and damp fur.
No sooner had she woken than it sprang down to the floor and stood at the foot of the bed as if waiting there for her. Hiroko was on the bottom mattress of a bunk, in a dorm that slept all twenty schoolgirls on the European trip. Everyone else was still asleep. It was, after all, the dead of night.
In the dark, the outline of the fox’s body scruffed into the gloom. Only its supermodel eyes were visible, fixed on hers. She had seen foxes hypnotise hens with such eyes.
‘What do you want?’ she whispered in Nihongo.
The fox pawed the floor with impatience.
‘Go away,’ she said, half-heartedly.
Instead it stepped forward and seized the corner of her bed sheet in its teeth. Then it backed off, tugging the sheet with it, and Hiroko gasped as her legs were bared. She slid out of bed, feigning sleepiness, then made a swift lunge for the blanket. The fox anticipated and yanked it out of reach, dragging it towards the door.
Hiroko grabbed a second time, but missed again.
No sooner had she done so than the trees arrived.
They smashed up through the floorboards, slamming the bunk she had just left into the one atop it. From there they crunched both against the ceiling, sandwiching Tanaka Manami, who had been sleeping above Hiroko, between furniture and plaster. Branches as thick as pythons thrashed as they grew, flipping aside mattresses, snapping every right angle of the bed frames. Then they had arrived, and were as still as if they had always been there, and all the movement in the dorm came from the waking schoolgirls, who quickly began to scream.
Hiroko remained where she stood, too astounded to move. Nearby Yamamoto Shiori called in pain for help, and Shimizu Natsumi bleated gruffly like a boy, and other girls called out questions or just let fly their voices. All the baggage of the trip had been strewn around the dorm in an instant. Uniforms hung unfolded on twigs. Neckties wrapped around the wood like striped ivy, a surreal opened wardrobe of blazers and white socks.
Hiroko looked for the fox, but it had vanished, her bed sheet gone with it. She had never before seen a fox so nose-to-nose, even in her grandmother’s orchard where the animals came and went as they pleased, and it was perhaps this smaller amazement that kept her calm in the face of the larger one unfolding around her. Had a fox just saved her life?
She took a deep breath and assessed the dormitory. The biggest tree of all had impaled Oonishi-sensei. The English teacher was pinned two feet off the ground, still in her nightclothes. It was this that made many of the girls scream, flapping their hands at their faces as if their fingers were on fire. Hiroko felt a scream of her own coming, but she forced it back down her throat. You could overcome most anything if you refused to turn your face from it. She stood for one moment more with her head bowed, perfectly still amid the mounting chaos, then looked again and did not look away. Oonishi-sensei, who had been her English teacher for nearly a year now and who she had respected above all the other staff at the high school, had enjoyed conversing with Hiroko in the language that she taught. Often she would ask her to describe, as elaborately as possible, some place Hiroko remembered from California. Oonishi-sensei loved to hear about San Francisco’s waterfront and harbour district, but Hiroko always preferred to tell of the national parks to which her father had taken her, for weeks on end, during every vacation. Sometimes the teacher struggled to keep up, and Hiroko had to slow herself down or repeat things in plainer English.
The delicate moonlight lit up one of the sensei’s dangling palms. The other was obscured among the leaves. Her bare feet poked out from her pyjama bottoms, a strangely intimate sight, even in this scene. Her blood trickling down the bark looked colourless in the dark.
Hiroko slipped out of the dorm and into the shadowed corridor, where leaves flapped from the ceiling like the webbed wings of bats. She ducked beneath a wooden overhang and stood for a minute in the doorway to the boys’ dorm. There the scene was much the same as in the girls’, only with more screaming. Ito Ken caught sight of her, and his face was slicked with sweat and terror.
Look the world in the eye, Carter had always said. It keeps no secrets from you.
She smiled at Ken to try to encourage the fear out of him. He was in the grip of it and his lips quivered back around his teeth as if invisible fingers had pulled them. Hiroko turned away. She drifted down the stairs and through the hostel lobby, now pillared with trees. The table football’s red and blue players lined the branches of a fir tree. A vending machine, which had been lifted off the ground, let fall a can of soft drink like a raindrop from a leaf.
Out in the street, people stood in shock and horror, regarding the bent lampposts, the cars high in the branches, the smashed house fronts and the roads torn up by roots. Everything had been burst and bent anarchically, but the scream Hiroko had stifled for Oonishi-sensei would be her only concession to panic. ‘Look the world in the eye,’ she whispered to herself. It had been a kind of mantra that Carter, that tough old trapper to whom her father had entrusted her in the wilderness, had repeated every day of his life. ‘How do you expect to survive in the world,’ Carter would drawl, ‘if you turn away from the very sight of it?’
Hiroko did not turn. She looked around her at the lobed roof of leaves, the billboard levelled by an oak, the telephone mast shoved aside for a new and less sheer upright to claim its place. It did not surprise her to find she had an appetite for such destruction. She had always had that streak. Not for sustenance alone had she enjoyed learning to trap, to pluck and to skin and to butcher while Carter or her father urged her on. The parting of muscles had always engrossed her, the backwards jigsaw of the skeleton undone.
She could still hear screaming from within the hostel, and from elsewhere, so she kept walking and only paused when she had gone some distance. Not many more steps and she would be walking away from her fellow pupils, her teachers, her school in the city, from whatever effort they would make to return to it, return her to Tokyo and the life she did not know how to live there.
‘Hey!’ someone called. ‘Hey, are you alright?’
Hiroko looked back over her shoulder to see a middle-aged English woman, still in her dressing gown, crossing the street towards her. One of her hands was held out and shaking. ‘Are you alright, love? How badly are you hurt?’
Hiroko looked down at her arm and saw that there was blood on it. She did not know how it had got there. ‘It’s not mine,’ she shrugged at the woman. ‘I’m fine.’
The woman nodded. ‘Are you looking for someone? Are you all alone?’
‘I’m with a school trip.’
‘And where are the rest of them, love? Are you lost?’
She pointed back towards the hostel. ‘In th
ere. And no, I’m not lost.’
‘Would you like me to walk you back to them? I’m trying to help people.’
Hiroko considered it for a moment. Perhaps the senseis would be attempting to restore some calm to the other pupils. Perhaps they would be as blind with fear as the teenagers were. Apart from Oonishi-sensei, she had never respected any of them.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but thank you for your concern.’
She began to walk away, between the trees.
‘Wait,’ said the woman.
Hiroko paused.
‘It won’t do to be all alone in the woods.’
‘Won’t it?’
‘Where are your family, sweetheart? We have to find a way to contact them.’
‘My father is in Tokyo with Saori. My grandparents are in Iwate Prefecture. That’s all the family I have, and there isn’t any way to contact them.’
‘What about your mother? Where is she?’
Hiroko scowled, but it was not the first time a stranger had blundered into asking about her mother, and it would not be the last. ‘Like I said, I was here on a school trip.’
‘Was?’
Hiroko gazed back towards the youth hostel, and could think of no good enough reason to return to her classmates there. She supposed there might be some brief pleasures to be had from helping them survive. It would be easy, now, to prove that the girl they’d called a country simpleton or, worse, a gaijin because she’d lived so long in America, was actually the smartest among them, and that she wasn’t stupid just because she struggled in exam halls or had been put back a school year for not knowing how to push numbers around paper.
‘I’m sick of them,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be on my own.’
‘But you can’t just give up on your friends like that.’
Hiroko glared at the woman so fiercely that she backed away, tightening her dressing gown around her waist.
‘They’re not my friends,’ said Hiroko. ‘I don’t have any friends now.’
That was the truth. She’d only really had two friends during the entire seventeen years of her life to date. Carter had been one of them, but the limping old trapper didn’t even have a telephone and there was no way to keep in touch once she’d moved back to Japan. Her father had been the other. She had been best friends with her father, until he met Saori. A pang of regret shot through Hiroko at that thought, and it took her a moment to stifle it.