The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Even though they had spent every prior night squeezed together in the tent, sleeping in what remained of the lodge’s bedrooms had brought back a forgotten propriety. They’d decided without discussion that Hannah and Hiroko would sleep head to toe in Zach’s bed, while Seb and Adrien did the same in the spare one. Neither mattress had survived the arrival of the trees unpunctured, but each was far comfier than a camp mat on a forest floor.

  The others seemed to relax after discovering a pig, and not a gunman, outside of the lodge, but Adrien found he could not do so. He lay on his back in the pitch dark and kept rubbing the tips of his thumbs together, no matter how hard he willed himself to stop. At some deep hour a barn owl took to hooting, and he swore he could hear the onrush of feathers sweeping back and forth above the roof. Then came a taut hiss that he hoped was just a tabby cat, and a brief thrashing of branches and a dead silence before the night creatures started moving again. He begged sleep to take him. He was so damned sick of the worry that beset his every hour of consciousness.

  In the dawn light he woke with a start to a pig nuzzling his face. He sat bolt upright in alarm, then realised it was a pig from a dream and that the thing prodding his cheek was Seb’s foot. The boy still slept soundly, the lucky devil, but Adrien knew his own full bladder would not let him do the same. He dragged himself out of bed, tugged on his jeans, socks and boots, then creaked down the stairs pulling on his coat and wiping dust from his eyes. Outside, the spiders were breakfasting on what moths and gnats they had caught overnight, and the branches of the trees were stretching with timber yawns as a dawn light danced westward through the canopy. Adrien chose a tree some distance from the house and unzipped his fly, puffing with relief as he urinated against the trunk. The birds carolled in the treetops and a breeze fluted through the wood. ‘Maybe,’ Adrien thought out loud, ‘today is the day to head home.’

  He had been thinking on and off about the journey back, and he did not relish the idea of it. Just as he had anticipated finding Zach alive and well and strapping, he had presumed to see certain other things on his way here. He had thought he would witness the army at work, or places where bulldozers were in action ripping down the forest. Somewhere, he had assumed, something would be getting back to normal, but instead there had only been woodland, and the roads all lost and scrambled, and of course those little wooden monsters that he was trying his best not to consider.

  With a sorry groan, he finished urinating and turned back for the lodge. He was still zipping up his fly when something cracked behind him.

  Adrien froze. Shadows swayed across the forest floor. The boughs above him groaned in their every fibre.

  When, at last, he found the courage to turn around, he had readied himself for a figure made from sticks and leaves, or a wolf, or a beast like a kirin supposed dead since the Ice Age. What he had not expected was a man with a gun.

  ‘Don’t move another muscle,’ said the man.

  Adrien did as he was told, motionless except for the muscles of his throat, which were yo-yoing up and down in his neck. The gunman was younger than Adrien, but bespectacled like him. His blonde hair and beard looked like they’d been neatly cropped a fortnight before. Dressed in a pair of torn suit trousers and a stained office shirt, he was a handsome man with the kind of face that could command a room, although the only thing that transfixed Adrien was the gun, which the man kept trained on him.

  ‘Please,’ Adrien said, ‘don’t shoot me.’

  The man blinked. He had the clenching blink of an insomniac, and when he spoke his words were crisply enunciated. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Adrien could feel the sweat beginning on his back. ‘Come . . . oh God . . . come to find Zach.’ His eyes darted back and forth from the face of the man to the gun barrel’s empty mouth.

  ‘Make some sense,’ said the man.

  Adrien tried to find a way to be calm, but the gun’s muzzle was such a tiny circle of dead space. And how could he make sense? Make sense of what? Of what he was doing here? ‘I only hoped,’ he began, ‘to come and learn something about woodcraft from Zach. Then I was going home. I was never really going to go to Ireland.’

  The man didn’t lower his weapon. ‘What does all that mean?’

  ‘Please don’t shoot me.’

  ‘Why would I want to shoot you? I’ve only just met you.’

  ‘I . . . I thought . . .’ Did he dare to believe that the man was but an armed traveller, as wary of strangers as he? The man didn’t sound like a thug, and the linens of his shirt and trousers looked as if they had once hung on an expensive tailor’s rails.

  ‘I have, though,’ said the man. ‘Shot people, that is. No use in pretending otherwise.’

  Screws turned in Adrien’s throat. ‘You have?’ he wheezed. ‘Are you the one who shot Zach?’

  ‘I’ve never known any Zach. I didn’t know any of their names.’

  ‘Are you going to shoot me too?’

  The man sucked his bottom lip. ‘You aren’t very brave, are you?’

  ‘Am I supposed to be?’

  The man lifted the gun to look along its sights. ‘Some people are.’

  A branch swung horizontally and crashed into the man’s arm, knocking the weapon at once from his hands and following through hard into his gut. He doubled over with a grunt, but then Hiroko followed up with the branch gripped tight in both hands, cudgelling his bowed head. The man dropped into the loam and lay there prone, blood leaking out of his scalp and into his hair.

  Adrien, likewise, flopped onto the floor. ‘Thank you,’ he wheezed to Hiroko. ‘Thank God for you.’ She grabbed his arm and tried to help him up, but no sooner did he try to stand than he felt the relief whoosh to his head, and the woods turned white and he teetered sideways into unconsciousness.

  5

  Unicorn

  Hannah lay face down on the bed, struggling all over again to accept what had happened to Zach. She had barely slept a wink, and she knew she had kept Hiroko awake too, for at some early hour the girl had stood up and pulled on her clothes and slipped out of the bedroom door.

  The trees brushed and clattered against the walls of the lodge, and Hannah wished they would be silent. Since Zach’s death she had begun to think of them as a dumb flock of creatures, standing idly by while their shepherd was lost. Then it seemed to her that the soil that nourished the trees was not worthy of housing Zach’s body. She tried not to think of what would be happening to him, down there in the roots’ realm.

  She had always pictured Zach working himself grey, growing ever more into himself with age. Then, one dappled afternoon in the silver-haired and liver-spotted years of his life, he would sit down in the shade of his favourite oak and lower his chin to his chest for the last time. He deserved that ending, not for his final expression to be one of disbelief and disappointment. Hannah could barely even acknowledge that he had been shot, and that somewhere out there was the person who had done it. It was just as it had been with their mother, although this time she had no brother to support her, and not even a vacant and heartbroken father.

  Hannah pressed her face against her pillow, which was damp from intermittent tears. Now and then she held her breath and listened, half-expecting some great shout from the soil as Zach’s grave rent open and he clawed his way out. She only ever heard the chatter of the leaves.

  ‘Mum?’ It was Seb, poking his head around the door. ‘Mum, are you awake?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve slept all night.’

  There was an urgency to his voice. ‘You have to come downstairs.’

  Hannah didn’t move a muscle.

  He came over and tugged at her foot. ‘You have to, Mum.’

  She sat up, rubbing her arms and trying to smile at him. ‘Everything alright, Seb?’

  ‘They’ve caught him. Hiroko and Adrien have. He’s tied to a chair in the sitting room.’

  She stared at her son, almost wishing he were joking. ‘Him?’ she said, feigning that she hadn’t a clue.


  Seb tugged again at her foot. ‘Yes. Him.’

  Her immediate thought was that she was not ready. She was too woozy with grief for this confrontation, but already Seb was helping her out of bed and holding her hand as he led her step-by-step towards it.

  Halfway down the stairs she grabbed the banister and dug her heels in. ‘I don’t feel good this morning,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t slept. I don’t know if I can cope with this right now.’

  ‘But he’s downstairs, Mum,’ said Seb, not without concern. ‘A gunman. We’ve got no choice.’

  She wished it were otherwise, but she supposed it was the truth.

  Hiroko had tied the gunman to the chair Zach used to sit on. That in itself was almost too much for Hannah. Of course the girl couldn’t know that Zach’s chairs, all mismatched antiques, had a strict hierarchy of favourites. Hannah took a deep breath and looked anywhere but at the gunman, but they were all waiting on her to do so and at last she looked. He had blood in his hair and his head was bowed. When he looked up his glasses were smeared with grease. His eyes were crisp behind them.

  ‘Which one are you?’ he asked her.

  She could only stare back at him, still rubbing her arms. ‘Zach’s sister,’ she said.

  ‘Sister . . .’ He nodded. ‘Please can I get a glass of water? My tongue is very dry.’

  ‘No,’ said Seb immediately.

  The man raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t ask you. I asked the sister.’ He looked back from Seb to Hannah. ‘Would you get me a glass of water?’

  Hannah found herself moving towards the bucket of rainwater, but Seb seized her arm. Even that made her unsteady on her feet, and she had to grab hold of him for support.

  ‘If I give you a glass of water,’ she said, ‘you have to promise to tell me everything that happened.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the man.

  ‘He won’t,’ said Seb.

  ‘You . . . you will, right?’ asked Hannah, as she headed for the bucket.

  ‘I said I would, and I’m the one tied up. You don’t have to plead with me.’

  Hannah paused, leaning over the bucket, and looked at her reflection wavering in the water. Sister . . . She was the one who needed a cold drink, and she filled a glass and downed it in one. She turned around and everyone was watching her, but she just patted her hips, took a deep breath, then rushed out of the room.

  Seb found her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs. She was doing all she could to picture Zach’s lodge in better days. Zach coming out of the kitchen door in a paper hat, carrying a birthday cake alight with candles, so anxious not to drop it that every muscle of his face was clenched in concentration. Zach coming home in the evening from a day’s work in the woods, tired but content with his lot, bits of twig or moss caught in his hair or the fabric of his jacket.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she whispered to Seb, ‘if picturing it hard enough made it real again?’

  Her son sat on the step alongside her. ‘What do you want to do, Mum?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Just don’t be beaten by this,’ he said, in almost a whisper.

  She patted his knee and rose to her feet. She strode briskly back into the room and stared at the gunman. ‘You’re going to tell us, do you understand? If it wasn’t you who shot him, you’d have just said so by now. So you’re going to tell us what happened.’

  The gunman didn’t bat an eyelid. He only looked up at her with no malice and no compassion either. At once she was light-headed again. ‘You’re going to tell us,’ she repeated, but the volume fell out of her voice.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ he said.

  Again Hannah left the room.

  ‘This isn’t working,’ said Seb, after he had followed her.

  ‘How can it? What do you expect me to say to him? Zach’s dead, and nothing can change that. And that man . . . that man in there probably . . .’

  ‘Let’s go outside. You were right. I’m sorry. We don’t need to do this right now, and neither do we all need to watch him at once. You need space to work out what you want to say and do.’

  He took her by the arm and led her outdoors, into the rising warmth of the morning. When he sat her down on the step she felt as fragile as the dew. ‘Wait here,’ said Seb, with a gentle squeeze of her hand. ‘I’ll have a chat with Hiroko and Adrien.’

  He returned inside. Hannah waited, tapping her fingernails against the step.

  ‘Here’s the plan,’ said Seb, upon returning. ‘Adrien’s going to keep an eye on him. The guy’s tied up. He can’t do anything. Hiroko and I will try to find some food. I’ll look for all the edible plants you taught me. That means you’re free to just go for a walk, Mum. Get your head straight. Only . . . don’t stay here, not anywhere near the lodge or Zach’s grave.’ He touched her elbow. ‘Fresh air will do you good. That’s what you always told me.’

  She nodded as bravely as she could and stood up. She felt slightly firmer on her feet, knowing that Seb was looking out for her.

  So it was that Hannah wandered uphill through the forest, and for the first time in memory had no heart for it. Seb was wrong if he thought she could get away from what had happened by walking. She was as familiar with this stretch of woodland as she had been with Zach’s lodge. Although it appeared wild and free, every acre had been lovingly managed by him. Wherever she looked there were traces of her brother: the bird and bat boxes he had affixed high up in the tree trunks; the steel crutch added to a sapling to support its straight growth; the ivy cut back and parched to rescue the trees from its strangulations.

  ‘Was even that too much for you?’ she asked of the woods, glaring up at the canopy. ‘You would let him die for as small a thing as that?’

  There was some blight up here, some vegetable disease that had hollowed several of the trunks until haunted creaks rose from their cavities. She watched two crimson millipedes pursue each other through tunnels in a rotten log.

  ‘He would have tried to fix this for you,’ she muttered. ‘Done all he could to make you well again.’

  She rubbed her eyes. She had to pause and hold on to a branch when the lightness went through her, but after a minute she was steady enough to hike onward again. Of course she knew that it had been a gun, probably that very man’s gun, and not the woods that had killed Zach. ‘But you didn’t do anything to prevent it,’ she snapped. ‘After he devoted his life to you.’

  Pausing at the sight of something turquoise in the undergrowth, she found it to be a speckled segment of eggshell, underneath one of Zach’s bird boxes. Nearby, with its head resting on the pillow of a wood anemone, lay a shrivelled chick, grey and rotting. Pushed, no doubt. Hannah had always hated that they pushed one another, and that it delighted their mothers, and she folded her arms and stalked onward through the forest.

  Now she arrived at a spot her brother had taken her to countless times, where a dependable branch protruded over steeply sloping ground. From it Zach had lashed a swing made from half the varnished plank of a garden bench, and Hannah had an urge to sit on it one more time. Both rope and wood creaked as she climbed aboard. They had used to arc here. If you built enough momentum, the swing would carry you out above the slope and grant you a view across the treetops below. Instead she only scuffed it into motion, letting it sway her.

  ‘Is he the one who killed you?’ she whispered to wherever Zach was.

  The only answer came from the creaking rope, for which she was the pendulum.

  She remembered trudging through these woods with Zach, inhaling the scents of May’s blossom. They had come up here and he had pushed her until she swung the highest she could go. She remembered being a little girl on their garden swing, and he had pushed her just the same. They were celebrating the day he left home for agricultural college, when even their reticent father laughed and was merry. They were celebrating his graduation. They were grown-ups, pulping berries to make one of his wines, and she could smell the juice as they mas
hed it in a pan.

  She clenched her fists around the rope and pushed off with her legs. The swing lifted backwards and then swooped out, over the slope, and she leaned her body to make it buck higher.

  Perhaps it was being in motion that shook loose her mind, but as she swung she recalled other, less pleasant memories. The day their father packed their mother’s clothes away. The smell of the house after he’d been drinking. Night after night of falling asleep to the sounds of his piano-playing, outpourings of notes looping long into the small hours. She and Zach had got through it together, and his heart was beating in every recollection.

  The swing launched out above the roof of the woodland. The treetops bristled as far as the eye could see, with only a half-collapsed pylon a reminder of what the world had been like before. Hannah swept backwards and then out again, heaving the rope to go higher. She rose, rose with the creak of the swing, and fell back.

  It was during her next forward rush that she saw the foliage shaking below. She had to wait for another forward swing to be sure, but yes, there it was, a thrashing patch of leaves and branches at the foot of the slope. Then came a long bellow, half lost behind the groaning of the rope at her ear and the whooshing of the air. She pushed down her feet and scuffed to a halt.

  When the bellow came again another followed, deeper in pitch than the first. Hannah jumped off the swing and headed towards it, cautiously at first, then letting the downhill momentum of the slope carry her. Only when she arrived at the place where she’d seen the greenery shaking did she pull up sharp.