The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Branches swayed above them, or rattled clawed twigs against the frames of smashed cars. The woman was about to say something further when a blood-curdling wail cut the darkness and she clutched tight her dressing gown in alarm. Hiroko looked calmly towards the woods. She knew that cry well, for it was a kind of calling. The sound of the vixen, who lived in England just as it lived in Japan and her grandmother’s orchard, just as it lived in California, just as it lived wherever human shadows were cast. That, at least, was something that she valued.

  A propulsion of crows shot west beneath the canopy. In the distance an orange light waxed through smoke. Something on fire, the same colour as a fox. ‘Well,’ said the woman, backing away, ‘I’ve only been trying to help.’

  The vixen shrieked again, and Hiroko took a long deep breath of the air, rich as it was with the smells of exhaust and charred things and blossoms opening.

  She followed the red animal.

  2

  Birch

  Adrien dug the grave with Hiroko, who announced that the two of them would be doing it by presenting him with a spade. While Hannah and Seb sat huddled some distance away, he and the girl shovelled earth until dizziness stopped him. He was sodden with sweat and despair, but when Hiroko snarled something in Nihongo and drove her spade violently into the earth, he dug again despite his exhaustion. Sometimes they found a root in the hard ground, and had to kneel and hack at it with tools they found in Zach’s shed. Hiroko dictated a relentless pace, attacking the soil with her shovel, but Adrien could not keep up and eventually flung his down. He held his hands to his head. What were they going to do now? He knew how much Zach had mattered to Hannah, but in the days since leaving home the forester had begun to matter to him too. This lodge was supposed to be a safehouse, where he could learn the secrets of a life in the woods. Then, if he ever saw Michelle again, he’d be a changed man. All of his bleak moods and melodramas would be things of the past.

  He was still agonising about this when Seb retrieved his shovel. The boy followed Hiroko’s steady lead until the pit was long and deep. Then Hiroko laid down the spade and wiped her brow. She had blisters on her palms from the labour, but ignored them as she motioned to Adrien to follow her. He did as he was told, trailing into the stinking lodge with his eyes rolling away from the sight of the dead man.

  Hiroko took hold of Zach’s ankles and waited. Adrien looked at her as if for a stay of execution, but she just glowered fierce and expectant and he steadied himself, then went and put his hands under Zach’s elbows and felt the cold gelatinous blood there where it had clotted, and together they dragged him out and laid him in the grave with what reverence they could manage. Hannah looked on, with Seb’s arm around her. Her face looked as if it had been splashed with scalding water.

  Filling in the grave was easier, although Adrien found that his biceps throbbed with each scoop after the exertion of the digging. When the grave was full enough to cover Zach entirely, Hannah had such a fit of shaking that Seb squeezed her too tight and she spluttered and lay back shivering on the grass.

  With all of that done, Adrien opened any of the cottage’s doors and windows that could still be budged off their latches, and Hiroko scrubbed the place where Zach had lain. Yet still the smell persisted and they could not sleep indoors that night. Hiroko and Adrien pitched the tent in front of the lodge, allowing sister and nephew privacy at the grave of their lost one.

  With the tent up, nothing but grief remained of the day. Adrien and the girl kept a respectful distance from Hannah and Seb, who sat talking in low voices.

  ‘How did you get to be so fearless?’ Adrien asked Hiroko as she stoked life into their fire. ‘I mean, I wish I could deal with all this as naturally as you.’

  For a minute he didn’t think he would get an answer. Then she said, ‘My friend Carter used to say that the world keeps no secrets. Look it in the eye if you can. Everything is there to see.’

  Adrien considered this advice for a moment. ‘Is that supposed to make it any easier?’

  Hiroko lay back on the floor, her hands folded under her head. ‘You can look away if you want. Lots of people do. You can make up a whole pretend world to look at instead.’

  The fire clicked its fingers. The smoke made patterns. Adrien hung his head. He supposed that was precisely his own method, although he wasn’t sure that his pretend world was any less frightening than the real one.

  ‘I was looking forward to meeting Zach,’ he said. ‘He sounded like someone who knew how to cope.’

  ‘Cope with what?’

  ‘The forest. The way the world is now.’

  Hiroko nodded. ‘It’s a shame.’

  ‘You . . . you know how to cope, don’t you?’

  She only laughed.

  ‘What’s it like, Hiroko?’

  For a minute he thought she’d say nothing. The gathering flames snapped and bit at the logs, while evening’s gnats veered through the smoke. Then Hiroko closed her eyes and said, ‘You’ll feel better about things once you’ve found your wife.’

  Now it was Adrien’s turn not to speak, and to stare into the brightness of the fire. His plans had not changed. He was not going to struggle on alone towards Ireland, although there was no way he was going to confess that to Hiroko or the others. No, he would stride off in a westerly direction in two, maybe three days from now, then skirt back round the grounds of the lodge and strike east, and so home. The others would think it brave and romantic, he would think it small and gutless. Yet, if there was one thing Adrien Thomas had always known about himself, it was his limitations.

  The next day, and the next, the crisp air sharpened the leaves, and they all agreed that the year must by now have slipped into September. It seemed to Adrien that the month was already recalibrating for its colder end, and after breakfast he took a brisk walk to work heat back into his bones. He lapped the lodge a few times and trampled through the surrounding woodland before at last he ventured inside, where the rank smell was lessening thanks to a chill wind that had scoured the place.

  He found Hannah sitting at the kitchen table, which she had righted to spread with Zach’s photo albums.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  ‘Hey.’

  She showed him a picture of two scruffy children on a bench, the boy tall with a gap between his teeth, the girl wearing plaits and craning her neck to look up in admiration at her brother.

  Adrien pulled up a chair. Hannah turned a page. ‘He had a portable generator,’ she said. ‘A petrol one that didn’t need the mains. Out here in the woods his electricity often failed him, but he was never in a hurry to fix it. Sometimes when the lights went off I thought he’d knocked out the power on purpose.’

  ‘And the generator’s gone? Do you think that’s what this is about?’

  ‘No, it’s still there, but . . . it’s been used.’

  ‘It was probably used by him.’

  She nodded. ‘Maybe, but he didn’t like to. This all makes no sense, Adrien. Zach had no enemies. I’m trying to figure out whether anything’s been stolen. I need something to understand, anything. I feel as if . . . I owe it to him to find out how it happened.’

  Hannah had said such things several times the evening before, in between bouts of crying. Nobody tried to give her an explanation. Adrien reckoned that you didn’t need enemies to be unlucky, or meet the wrong person at the wrong time. He had thought better than to say so out loud.

  ‘Is there anything missing?’ he asked. ‘Maybe the generator was too heavy to steal? Has the fuel been taken?’

  ‘It’s still there. Most of it, anyway. The only things that are definitely gone are Zach’s pigs.’

  ‘He had pigs here?’

  ‘In a paddock outside, although that’s demolished now.’

  ‘That might have happened when the trees came. They might have escaped.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighed, rubbing the sides of her head, ‘I’ve thought of that too.’

  He looked up at the branches co
ursing through the ceiling. ‘Is it too early to ask what you want to do next?’

  ‘No. We’re going to stay here. Where else is there to go except back? I think Zach would have wanted us to keep the place going.’

  ‘I’ll stay for a bit. For a few days at least. To help get things back on track.’

  ‘You don’t have to. You have to get on. Find Michelle.’

  Adrien looked away guiltily. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘let’s not worry about that right now.’

  ‘I would really appreciate it,’ said Hannah, ‘if you stayed for a bit.’

  He thought about going to hug her, but in the presence of her photographs the familiarity they had fostered during their journey left him and he felt too much a stranger. He thought about Michelle and tried to recall how he had used to comfort her when she was upset. He could not remember how he’d done it, although he could readily recall the countless times she’d aided him. And so he and Hannah sat in the cold silence of the rising morning and a bird rasped outside, and something rustled overhead through the wood.

  ‘What exactly did Zach do here?’

  ‘Looked after the trees.’

  ‘I know that. I mean . . . do you know how he did it?’

  ‘Some of it, of course. I used to help him when we stayed.’

  ‘Then maybe we should do those things today.’

  Hannah lightened a fraction. ‘Yes. That would be . . . right. I’d like to live like him for a bit, do the day-to-day stuff he did. Try to feel what it was like to be him here.’

  So that day they played at forestry management. They walked among the woods, and Hannah pointed out the spots where the deer had gnawed the bark, and then showed them a trick where just by crouching they could see much further between the trees, explaining that, ‘This is the level the animals eat at, so it’s much clearer. Once upon a time there would have been bigger animals in the forests, and the trees themselves would have been like shrubs and grasses to them. But now it’s only the lowest few feet that get chewed back. I learned how to do this from him.’

  Adrien looked up at the buckled canopy and imagined those long-dead larger animals she had mentioned: forest elephants and aurochs and maybe even kirins, all tearing up the vegetation with their giant teeth, and it made him shiver and feel glad for the extinctions of history.

  Later in the afternoon they found a diseased branch rotting on a healthy tree. They sawed it off and applied a salve where they’d removed it, to save the rest of the plant from infection. They checked on stumps that Zach had coppiced. They repaired the protective mesh around a young sapling. Then they came upon some birches, and Hannah halted with a sigh.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ she said, and drew in a long, snorting breath. ‘He called this glade his off-licence.’

  Adrien did not know why, but he guessed it was something to do with the taps: black plastic taps hammered into the trunks, and a plastic container suspended below each. ‘Nothing will come out at this time of year,’ Hannah said, but turned one nevertheless. She gasped when a trickle of sap flowed into the container, a transparent substance with a green veneer.

  ‘It only flows in March,’ she said, wide-eyed.

  The sap kept on coming, fast as tears.

  ‘Perhaps you should turn it off again,’ said Adrien warily.

  Hannah dipped her finger in, to taste it. The others tried too, apart from Adrien, who stood back battling anxiety.

  ‘It tastes good,’ prompted Seb.

  ‘It’s just . . .’ fumbled Adrien, ‘you know . . .’ He wanted to say that it felt provocative to bleed the trees and drink what was taken, but it seemed that to do so had raised Hannah’s spirits. When he tried the sap, it had a cleaner flavour than he’d expected. He’d thought it would be sickly like too much maple syrup, but instead it was all clarity, only subtly sweet. The aftertaste was the faintest of things, like a fact eluding memory. Adrien swore he knew it from somewhere, even though he had never drunk sap before in his life.

  He didn’t enjoy it one bit.

  On the way back to the lodge, the sap’s aftertaste stayed tingling on Adrien’s tongue. He followed behind the others and did not join in their conversations. Perhaps he was simply allergic to tree syrup, but he was beginning to feel even more uncomfortable in the forest than usual. The trail they were walking led them through glade after glade of birches, where bracken feathered the undergrowth. The peeling outer bark of every tree was quite beautiful, the colour of sunshine on snow, yet underneath the exposed timber was dark as grime. Adrien was once again worrying that plants such as these were bad things to drink from when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something step out from behind a trunk.

  It was small and bipedal. That was all he could tell without turning to look directly, which was something he was at first too terrified to do. He had fallen some way behind the others, and they had not noticed him stopping in his tracks. Whatever was standing there remained in his peripheral vision, and the birches creaked all around him and the twigs tapped without rhythm.

  ‘Count to ten,’ he told himself.

  On the count of twenty-three, he managed to look.

  Standing facing him was a little figure, just like the one he had thought he had seen in his kitchen, or the one on his windowsill, or the one in the woods on the way to the lodge. Its body was plaited out of stalks and twigs, and for a head it had a crest of frosted leaves like a thistle’s.

  It turned and ran with its arms outstretched like a scarecrow’s. It tottered along like a child on the first run of its life, making a noise like a whisper as it went. Adrien was about to yell to the others to come back and save him when he saw what the figure was running towards.

  It was a tree. Of course there was nothing remarkable about that in itself, but this tree grew giant and leafless on the far limit of vision. It was big enough to tell that it had only two lower branches, each a colossal thing that grew parallel to the ground without forking or putting forth so much as a sprout. Its higher branches all began some thirty feet up, where they forked and split into a hundred thorny tips and gave the entire plant a spreading kind of symmetry, like that of a high-backed chair. The tiny figure scampered towards it, and Adrien felt just as small as it was, and cold to the bone. He wanted to cry out but his jaw had tensed shut. Then he blinked, and the tree was gone. It and the figure had vanished in an instant.

  After a few stunned seconds, all of Adrien’s blood flushed back from wherever it had drained to. He turned and raced after his friends. When he reached them they had still not noticed his delay, and only glanced up at him without concern. Perhaps they were so used to his default state of anxiety that they couldn’t tell it from his true fear, and he cleared his throat and was about to blurt out everything he had just seen when he realised that Hannah was telling a story about Zach. She was absorbed in it, as were the others, and tears were in her eyes. Adrien shut his mouth and looked back over his shoulder, but the giant tree and the figure both remained gone. Then Hannah finished her story and there was a sombre silence from the teenagers. Again Adrien opened his mouth to speak, but when Hannah smiled sadly for her brother he couldn’t bear to interrupt her, nor to take that smile away.

  Once they’d got back to the lodge, Hannah started looking through Zach’s cupboards. ‘Look!’ she said, bringing out two dusty bottles from their storage beneath the stairs. ‘And there are loads more.’

  The bottles had no labels, but whatever was inside them was clear and lemon-hued. ‘Birch sap wine,’ Hannah declared, then crouched down and rolled a keg out of the cupboard. They lifted it onto the table, at which the woodwork shook and the wine bottles rattled glassily together.

  ‘And cider!’ she declared. ‘From his apple trees!’

  Adrien had always considered cider a crude drink, flavoured like a highway underpass. Likewise he had poured scorn on wine made from berries or flowers or birds’ nests or heaven knew what else, saying that there was a reason why winemakers had spent millennia cultivating g
rapes and not blackberries. And yet, since his earlier fright with the tree and the little whispering devil, a fright he still hadn’t found a way to tell the others about, even the sight of the barrel’s brown dust made him itch for alcohol’s confidence.

  Hannah took some glasses from the cupboard and laid them beside the keg and the bottles. Then she gestured theatrically, every inch the maître d’, and put on a wobbly customer service accent to ask Adrien which aperitif he required. He smiled at her, because in that moment she had tricked away her grief, and she grinned back at him before it came crashing back all the heavier for the guilt of forgetting.

  ‘Just the cider, please,’ said Adrien, and when Hannah reassured him that the sap wine was delightful he lied to her that he never mixed his drinks. Hiroko held up her hands in polite refusal, but Seb held out a wine glass and Hannah filled it. Then Hiroko got some water from her bottle, and they all toasted the absent master brewer as the sun shifted away behind the tree line.

  The cider was bitter and salty both, like sea air cheering the senses just as it stung them. Adrien finished his quickly, whereupon Hannah offered him a top-up. Come the end of his third glass, he was drowsy and began to yawn. Seb, after an initial surge of energy, lolled to sleep, and Hiroko leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. Hannah stared into her glass for a few minutes, and then began to talk about Zach, while Adrien nodded but said nothing, so that her anecdotes were bracketed by respectful quiet.

  Then, after one such silence, Adrien realised that Hannah too had nodded off to sleep and, since this coincided with another topping up of his glass, took his drink outside to where the stars showed between the branches and the moon was a hairline crack in the sky. There he sipped the cider, letting his teeth bite at the glass as he did so, just to feel the act of drinking better. Despite his tiredness he did not wish to hurry sleep. He had a lot of thinking to do, and thinking was always less daunting with a glass in hand.