by Ali Shaw
There was a lengthy silence. A cricket was somewhere in the room with them, winding its clock.
‘If you have any decency,’ said Adrien, ‘you’ll give her the answers she needs.’
‘Don’t you get it? There is no decency in the forest. Her needs and my own are at odds.’
‘Is that why you shot him? Because you needed something of his? His food? A roof over your head? You didn’t consider that you could have just asked him for help?’
‘Listen, Mr President. You’re not at all brave enough for the world you find yourself in.’
‘So you have said.’
Hannah was thumping back down the stairs. When she strode back into the room, she had the jacket she had found in Zach’s bedroom folded over her arm.
‘Is this yours?’
The gunman fixed his eyes on it. ‘Yeah. I was wondering where I’d left that.’
Hannah flung it aside. Underneath it she held the man’s rifle, pointed towards him. ‘You shot my brother, you piece of shit.’
‘Hannah . . .’ Adrien raised his hands in a gesture of calm.
She trained the weapon clumsily on the gunman, who eyed it back with care.
‘Is this,’ she asked, her voice quaking, ‘the thing you used to shoot him?’
The gunman nodded towards Adrien. ‘I was just explaining to your friend here that we live by a new set of—’
She kicked him so hard that the chair clattered sideways and he wheezed as the breath went out of him. The chair fell at the wall, and the gunman’s head clunked against it and he landed on his side blinking with pain. Hannah stamped on his bound fingers and the veins bulged in his throat when he yelled.
‘Tell me,’ she hissed, crouching next to him, ‘why you killed him.’
‘Hannah!’ squealed Adrien, wringing his hands, but she ignored him. The gunman was forced to jostle his head up cramped against the wall, just to look back at her. ‘Now we come to it,’ he said, then spat phlegm onto the floor. ‘Perhaps at last you really want to go through with it.’
‘I think we should stop this now,’ said Adrien.
‘What I really want,’ growled Hannah, ‘I can’t have any more. Because you took it from me. All I have left is to know what it was like for him, in those last few moments.’
‘It was raining. I needed a place to stay dry.’
‘He would have let you shelter from the rain,’ she said. ‘He was a good man.’
‘There are no good men and there are no bad. Good and bad are just ideas, made up by priests and the power-mad. There is just earth and appetite, nothing more. Surely you can see that. These are not rules I made.’
A crow rasped outside and Adrien looked out just in time to see it sweeping upwards past the window, wings spread like a pair of strangling hands, up and out of sight to where the branches leaned above Zach’s grave. ‘Hannah,’ said Adrien as softly as he could manage. ‘I think you’ve made your point.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet I haven’t.’
The gunman glared up at her when she aimed the rifle. ‘If you think that the gun will resolve matters then you’re mistaken. And if you really do decide to use it, at least ask me my name first. Ask me who I am and where I came from. Who my mother was. My adorable father. If you don’t ask me now then you’ll never get the chance.’
‘I don’t want to know anything about you. I want you to feel what it was like for him. Sitting against the wall. Looking down this barrel.’
‘But the difference is,’ the man said with a contented smile, ‘your brother knew I was going to shoot him. Whereas in your case it is all a bluff.’
There was a brief violent bark as the bullet fired, and the weapon jumped in Hannah’s hands like a sleeper startled awake. The gunman was dead, a piece of his cheekbone indented and his glasses tipped vertical on the bridge of his nose. The wall was flecked where it had been plain before. Hannah turned to Adrien but he just stood there gaping at her with his hands shaking in front of him. She shrieked and flung the gun across the room, but it made no difference. She was as white as salt, and the gunman was dead.
7
The Grave
In dapple-lit glades, along the banks of streams whose shimmering surfaces reflected the trees that lined them, and through a swaying undergrowth as high as her waist, Hannah searched for wildflowers. After an hour or two she had chosen an armful: white wood orchids with their butterflied petals, peals of indigo bellflowers and a cottony binding of meadowsweet from along the riverside. The wiriest ground ivy was her final ingredient, which she stripped of its leaves and knotted into a wreath to better thread to it all the other blooms.
Zach’s rectangle of earth had no headstone, so the ring of flowers she laid there was its only monument. To this she added herself, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the grave. The trees stood lofty and broad-shouldered, every branch beginning high up its trunk and reaching sunward, as if disdainful of the soil beneath. Zach had kept that soil good with grit and bonemeal until he himself had been laid in it.
Hannah bunched her fists and drummed them against her forehead. When she closed her eyes, the sight of what she had done was never far away. The bullet wound in the gunman’s head drew all of her thoughts towards it like a black hole.
When Seb found her there, she wanted to get up and go indoors. She did not want to hold the conversation she had been putting off having with her son. Apart from when he’d told her that, along with Hiroko, he’d rolled the gunman’s body in a sheet and dragged it into the woods, they had not yet spoken about what she had done. They had hardly talked at all. She wondered what lonely glade they had left it in, and how long before the worms came up and the crows flapped down.
‘Hello, Sebastian,’ she said meekly, when he sat cross-legged beside her. He had brought flowers of his own, pink hellebores that she did not tell him were poisonous.
He laid the flowers next to her wreath. ‘Hello, Mum.’
The forefinger of her right hand began to twitch. That kept happening. She wrapped her other hand around it and squeezed hard until it stopped. Seb watched without comment.
Part of her, she realised, wanted her son to say he hated her now. If Seb would only be shocked and appalled, and call her the murderer that she was, she might begin to come to terms with herself. When she closed her eyes the sight of what she’d done was never far away, and her thoughts kept returning to the bullet hole she’d opened in the side of the gunman’s head. She could still hear the shot ringing out in her ears, and feel the energy of the rifle’s recoil in her elbows. Worse than either was her anger, which she would have expected to die with the gunman. It had stayed on in her belly, and now she did not know which was worse: that she had killed a man, or that despite her disgust at doing so she was pleased that he was dead.
‘What kind of monster am I?’ she asked, unable to look at Seb. ‘What must you think?’
Seb pulled up blades of grass, piling the thin leaves into a green heap. ‘Mum . . . I’ve got a story to tell you. Will you listen?’
She nodded.
‘Okay, here goes. One autumn, when I was a kid, me and Zach went out for a walk in the woods here, just the two of us. I had that blue mobile phone, do you remember it? My first phone. I took it along on that walk with Zach and it really annoyed him. More than I could understand at the time. Why, he asked me, was I glued to its screen? Why was I missing all the birds and dragonflies and the leaves turning red? I said it was for signal. I had no signal in the lodge, let alone in the forest. If I got half a second of signal it would make my day. I bloody loved that phone.’ Seb sighed. ‘Anyway, I told Zach that my phone was more interesting than any tree or leaf he could ever show me, and you can imagine how he took that. He said . . . he said in that annoying rhetorical way of his, What’s the point of being alive if all you do is look at a screen? Hah. I was, what, eleven? I couldn’t explain, but I knew what the point was. I remember I put the phone in my pocket, after that, and we kept walking without
saying a thing. Then, after a bit, I wondered again if the phone had got a signal. But it wasn’t in my pocket.’
‘You’d lost it?’
‘Yeah. And at first Zach was all, like, that’s just as well. But I went crazy. I started looking in the dirt and rummaging in the leaves. I don’t know how long it was before he said he’d lead me back through the woods for it. I don’t think he hoped to understand why it was important to me, but he was willing to concede that if I was at all important to him then, well, maybe the things I thought were important mattered too. Even when it made no sense to him and never would. Like I said, it was autumn. Leaves up to our ankles. We crawled on our hands and knees, back along the path we’d taken, digging up the mush with our fingers. We didn’t find the phone, but after a while of crawling about together it didn’t matter so much. It just . . . stopped mattering. We were laughing at each other and covered in leaves. And . . . and the reason why I’m telling you this is that I’d forgotten about it until today. I didn’t want to come and live here with Zach because I’d only remembered the uncle who didn’t give a shit about the stuff I did. But Zach was on his hands and knees, hunting for my phone among the leaves. What happened to him here didn’t have to. It was done to him, Mum, by a man who was nothing like him. You mustn’t forget that.’
She let out a deep breath. ‘You’re kind, Seb.’
He smiled at her. ‘I don’t think we should stay here.’
‘We can’t go home. Not after all this.’
‘No. But I don’t think Zach would have wanted us to stay.’
Hannah frowned. ‘He would. This place was his dream. He’d be grateful to us for keeping it going.’
‘But we can’t keep it going, can we? Nothing can keep it going without him. Zach would understand. It’s going to twist you up to be here. I already can’t bear it.’
‘But . . . what would you have us do instead?’
‘Help Adrien.’
She looked at him as if he was kidding, but Seb was serious. An adult’s seriousness, for which she was simultaneously grateful and saddened. ‘Seb, I don’t even know if Adrien—’
‘He’s going to Ireland.’
‘I’m not so sure he really is.’
‘He is. Believe me.’
She shook her head, unsure. Yet already relief was dripping into her. Not because of what Seb had suggested doing, nor even where he had suggested going, but because it seemed he was offering to guide her.
Later that day, Hannah sat at the window of Zach’s bedroom, leaning her elbows on the sill and looking out at the woods that had filled his garden.
‘Hey,’ said Adrien, stepping gingerly into the bedroom. ‘I just wanted to check how you were doing.’
She waved a hand airily. ‘Oh, you know.’
‘No, I don’t. I’ve no idea. Look . . . I wanted to tell you that, if you wanted to, um . . . God, I don’t know . . . talk. About what happened. Then . . . you know, you’re welcome to, uhh . . . talk to me. Because . . . although I don’t know if I think it was necessarily the right thing for you, to do what you did, and it was . . .’ He wiped his forehead. ‘It was a horrible thing to have to witness, I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t think differently of you, for doing it. It wasn’t the same as what that man did to your brother. It’s important to remember that. I’m worried that you’re sitting there trying to convince yourself you’re a bad person, when you just . . . you did something . . . something anyone might have to do.’
Hannah pressed her fingertips against the windowpane, which by some small miracle had survived the coming of the trees. ‘How strange,’ she said softly. ‘That’s what I keep saying to myself. I should be hearing sirens. Someone should come for me and then . . . then that bastard wouldn’t be right. He said there’s nobody out there who’ll make me pay for what I’ve done. He said . . . he said . . .’
‘I think you should forget about everything he said. And I think you’re going to make yourself pay. I can see it already. Maybe that’s one difference it would be good to remember.’
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the cool surface of the window. The blood had come out like the quick sweep of a matador’s flag, and then it had been over and done.
‘Listen,’ said Adrien, after a minute. ‘When I watched you do what you did . . . after the initial shock of it . . . I felt . . . relieved.’
Hannah opened her eyes.
‘If that makes me a cold bastard,’ he said, ‘then so be it. I suppose it does. That man said I wasn’t at all prepared for the way the world is now, and maybe I’m not, not yet, but I’m a bit more prepared than I was before he said it. If you’d told me I’d react this way a month ago I might have protested. But not now.’
‘I didn’t plan to do it,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s almost as if I did it with my hand, not my head. No, that’s not right. With a gut reaction. No thinking at all. I did it with my anger. I was just so stunned by how little that man cared.’
‘Hannah . . . if I were brave enough, and that man had killed my brother, I might have shot him too.’
Hannah swallowed. ‘Thank you, Adrien.’
Adrien blushed. ‘Now then . . . why don’t you get some rest? Try not to dwell on things. I’ll leave you in peace.’
He had already shuffled halfway out of the door when she called out his name very quietly.
‘There’s something I have to ask,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’
‘I wondered if we might come with you.’
Adrien frowned. ‘Come with me where?’
‘To Ireland.’
He gaped at her. All he could say was, ‘Ireland . . .’
‘It’s unexpected, I know, but you see I’ve had a change of heart. I can’t stay here, not with all that’s happened. I need to, you know, head towards something, and I don’t have anything else to head to now that Zach’s . . . now that . . . that. I need some sort of momentum, Adrien, and maybe . . . maybe when you think about it, you could use a helping hand.’
‘Right,’ he said, ‘you want to go to Ireland.’
She looked away. ‘I thought it would be this way. You’re not going, are you? Seb said you were, but you’re not.’
‘Of course I’m going,’ said Adrien, in a twisting pitch, ‘but the thing is . . . the thing is, er . . .’
Hannah returned her head to its resting place against the window.
‘Oh fuck it,’ said Adrien.
She looked up.
‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘I never much fancied the idea of carrying on alone. It would be my pleasure to have you come with me. To Ireland.’
8
Fox
They left the lodge the following morning, for just as when they’d departed their own houses, they could only pack and prepare what they could carry on their backs. Hannah spent an hour alone at her brother’s grave, and then they were away, passing quickly through the centuries-old forest that Zach had tended, then into land that had been forest for barely three weeks. There the trees were bigger, the bark craggier, the roots running in great ridges through the soil.
They came to a small town in the evening, but did not enter and made camp on its outskirts. Rain fell overnight and pattered off the tent roof, and the ground was moist come morning. They pushed on through the town and found it to be almost entirely abandoned, fit only for weeds and the first germinating saplings. Broken roofs had let the rainwater in, to pool in whatever was left of the rooms beneath. Mould had flowered, and insects had hatched in their millions to gnaw the fixtures and wallpaper. Wherever there was mud or soft soil, there were also trails of angular footprints, left by countless vermin. Sometimes there were also fresh human tracks, but what people they encountered were always sorry sights, poking through the rubble or staring vacantly into the canopy.
Beyond the town the land grew hillier, although it was hard at first to notice beneath the trees. It fell, as if by default, to Hiroko to decide when they should rest and
when they should push on. Hannah had none of the energy that had propelled them to Zach’s lodge, and sometimes it was all she could do to put one foot in front of another.
Stones began to rear out of the hills, alongside the tree trunks. Some looked dirty enough to have been ejected from the soil when the forest came, while others were sun and wind-worn, as if they had stood there when the land was bare. For three days they hiked through such wilder places, and Hiroko called them to an early halt on each, in order to have daylight left for hunting and foraging. Hannah, however, found she had hardly any appetite, and the prospect of scrounging for mushrooms no longer appealed to either her head or her stomach.
‘Why don’t I do it?’ Seb suggested. ‘You’ve taught me all the basics, and you can check what I bring back for anything that’s poisonous.’
Hannah was only too glad to let him do so, and he took her foraging knapsack when he walked off alongside Hiroko. They notched the tree trunks with their knives as they went, to mark a path to follow back to the tent.
Five days after leaving Zach’s lodge, they came upon a group of some thirty or forty people, camping on a stretch of dual carriageway. They had constructed rudimentary shelters beneath a flyover, and were erecting fences using sawn wood. The instant Hiroko led the others into view, somebody from atop the flyover whistled, and several young men hurried down to meet them.
‘You can’t stop here,’ said the first man.
‘We don’t want to,’ said Hiroko, folding her arms.
The men glanced at each other. ‘Okay. That’s okay, then. It’s just that we’ve had trouble, and most people who find us are looking to get out of the woods.’
‘This isn’t out of the woods,’ said Adrien.
‘It will be, when we’re done.’
Hannah looked past the men, to the place they were building. It was nothing special, just a few acres of concrete with unfounded huts sitting atop it. There were also stumps, some two dozen of them, where the settlers had cleared space by felling trees.