The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘What have you got to eat?’ asked Hannah. ‘Have you got any livestock? Have you planted anything?’

  ‘We get by from scavenging, mostly. There’s still food to be found, here and there.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘You’ll need a reserve, if you’re going to stay in one place. In the winter you’re going to starve. Don’t think that nature will do you any favours.’

  ‘Steady on, Mum,’ said Seb.

  ‘I’m telling them for their own good.’ Hannah raised a finger towards the group’s spokesman. ‘Even if you knew everything there was to know about the woods, nature wouldn’t help you when you needed it to.’

  ‘Listen,’ said the man, ‘we know it won’t be easy, but we’ve made up our minds. Those who wanted to do things differently have already left. We had a big bust-up just this morning, in fact, and they set off for somewhere else.’ Now he too folded his arms. ‘I think it’s probably best if you don’t hang around here either.’

  Hannah didn’t object, and they passed by the flyover and heard a baby wailing somewhere behind a wooden wall. As they left the place behind them, they saw the many shallow footprints of the group of dissenters who the man had described, and they led in the same direction as themselves.

  ‘The ones who left had the right idea,’ Hannah muttered as they went. ‘You can’t live off a strip of broken tarmac.’

  ‘People want homes,’ said Adrien. ‘And I can’t say I blame them.’

  They continued west, and the crowd’s many footprints preceded them. The land began to rise again, and the stones showing out of it were the biggest they’d yet seen. Then Hiroko held up a hand and they all stopped as still as they could. They’d grown used to that command, which she gave whenever she spotted prey in slingshot range. This time, however, her weapon stayed holstered. She pointed instead to the forest floor.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Hannah.

  The soil beneath their feet was moist and dark, with fallen leaves wilting into it here and there.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Hiroko.

  ‘What have?’

  Hiroko turned and pointed at the ground they had just covered. Their footsteps traced back through the soil, pressed into those of the crowd they had been following.

  ‘Oh,’ said Adrien. ‘Oh dear.’

  The footsteps of the crowd vanished a few yards behind them, as suddenly as if the woods had erased the tracks. Past that point, only their own remained.

  As the days that followed passed by, and if ever the land dropped suddenly, the four travellers were sometimes offered a view due north, where a mountainous horizon jutted beneath purple clouds. Sometimes gushing rivers crossed their path, too deep to wade. Then they had to walk a half-day or more along tree-lined banks to find a place where they could cross. Some of the smaller villages and hamlets they came upon were, like the flyover, busy with efforts at reconstruction. In others, nothing survived worth repairing. The people in each place seemed unduly territorial, and attached to their broken architecture as if it were the only dry land in an ocean.

  Between the villages the land heaped and sloped too many times to count. Seb suggested that, for a game, they try to point out faces in the stones and boulders. Many had great noses of rock, or furrowed foreheads, and still more had beards and eyebrows of bright green moss. Adrien proved especially good at spotting the chiselled likenesses of celebrities and politicians who none of them had even once thought of since the trees came. To Hannah especially, such figures seemed like distant history now, although she did not say as much, just as she did not take part in the game. Whenever she thought about playing, she looked and saw the same face repeated in every stone, and there always seemed to be a pockmark of erosion where the bullet had gone in.

  The compass told them they were drifting west by north-west, and on the next hillside, playing the boulder game again, they found an entire ring of tall stones. Hannah traced her fingers across one’s cold surface. ‘These aren’t boulders,’ she said, ‘they’re menhirs. This was a henge of some sort.’

  Each menhir in the circle stood five or six feet tall, arranged in a geometry forgotten with its arrangers. The stones pointed up like giant thumbs, mercifully free of anything like faces. Some had cavities chiselled at shoulder height, which might once have socketed other stones now half sunk into the earth or lost. The dipping sunlight banded the earth with the shadows of plants and rocks alike, and Hannah wondered whether there had once been a certain hour, on a day long before the trees came, when it would have shone meaning into the henge’s pattern.

  ‘There was a stone like this near Handel’s Wood,’ she told the others. ‘Not as big as these or as elegant, but I used to sit on it when I wanted a quiet place to think. I sometimes wondered if it was put there just for that purpose. Not for any complicated religious reasons or for any kind of time-keeping or calendar, but just as a place to stop and think. And I used to wonder, if that were true, what all those ancient people thought about when they sat there.’

  She looked sideways at Seb. After she had found she was pregnant, after Callum had turned the community against her, she’d gone to that standing stone most every night, trying to picture the person her baby might grow up to be. Now that baby was nearly grown into a man, and with the light striking him side-on, she looked for something of Zach’s reflection in him. To her disappointment, all she could see was Callum’s.

  The stone circle seemed as good a place as any to make camp, and the adults got the fire going while the teenagers set out hunting. When they returned they did so hauling a dead sheep, and Hannah looked away. It was only a ewe with a mouthful of long yellow teeth, but its eyes stared out of its upturned head with a calm surety never found in living members of its species. For the first time in her life, Hannah was grateful to crows for seizing up eyeballs. It seemed like an act of guardianship.

  ‘We saw a whole flock of these,’ said Hiroko, ‘chewing their way through the woodland. They’re leaving hardly anything green to eat, but we can at least eat them.’

  Hannah opened their sack of supplies, to distract herself. The few shrivelling mushrooms left inside would be her evening meal, but that didn’t matter. The act of chewing, of hearing the wet movements of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, made her feel too close to what she had done at Zach’s lodge. To her alarm, the gunman’s death was getting harder to deal with every day. Even to drink water could sometimes be too painful, even to sneeze. The hole in the side of his head had opened up as easily as a mouth.

  ‘Sorry I found nothing better for you, Mum,’ said Seb. ‘I wish I’d found something green myself.’

  Hannah’s smile, the one that was supposed to tell him it was all okay, would not come.

  The flames that night burned tall and dancing. The flickering light turned the menhirs a ruddy orange, and revealed the grooves carved into their surfaces, worn almost flat by time but pronounced again by fire. Whether they were the lines of old runes or simply decorative patterns, Hannah did not know. Seb and Adrien were talking, but she didn’t listen. She only watched Hiroko slump the sheep over a flat rock and start cutting out its guts. It was unceremonious butchery, but in that orange glow, on a stone that might once have been part of the circle, Hannah could not help but think it resembled some ritual of old. Blood and flesh and sacrifice. That was the way of the world.

  ‘Hey,’ said Seb, ‘what was that?’

  Adrien let out a long, nasal yawn. ‘What was what?’

  ‘Shh!’ hissed the boy, springing to his feet. Hiroko joined him, stringing her slingshot, and Hannah tilted her head and did her best to listen.

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ whispered Hiroko.

  ‘What kind of noise are we listening for?’ asked Adrien, beginning to sound nervous.

  ‘Shh!’

  Something yelped. A tiny gruff yap from somewhere nearby.

  Hannah stood up. ‘There,’ she said, pointing.

  It stepped into view as if materialising out of
the firelight. A fox kit, staring up at them frightened and innocent. Its eyes were as green as the edges of a lemon rind. Its nose was a wet point.

  ‘Is it alone?’ asked Seb. ‘I’d have thought it would be with its mother.’

  ‘It’s alone,’ said Hiroko, crouching to be closer to its level.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Hannah, peering into the darkness for the vixen.

  ‘Of course it’s alone,’ said Hiroko. ‘It wouldn’t come out of its den unless it lost its mother.’

  ‘It might have followed her.’

  ‘Not a kit this small. I know about foxes.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘So do I. And if it’s lost its mother, then that’s a terrible shame because it means it’s going to die. It’s going to die and it might even have been abandoned. Vixens do that, if their kits are born too late in the year. They just abandon them, let them die of the cold.’

  Hiroko was staring at her. ‘This one won’t be abandoned.’

  ‘It already has been.’

  Hiroko glowered at her briefly, then said, ‘You’re wrong,’ and returned her attention to the fox.

  Hannah was surprised by how resolute, even how shrill, her own voice sounded. She took a deep breath and tried to sound kinder. ‘All I’m saying is that I think it’s best if you leave it be.’

  ‘You’re still wrong,’ said Hiroko. She held out her hand, and the kit watched her and flicked its tail.

  ‘It will give you a nasty bite,’ said Hannah.

  The fox kit approached Hiroko in stops and starts. When the girl touched its nose, it bit her finger, and Hannah was surprised at herself for feeling pleased to have been proven right. Yet the baby fox did not sink its teeth in. It pricked out four beads of blood, and Hiroko squealed with delight. At that Hannah took an uncomfortable step backwards. What kind of girl was this, who enjoyed being bitten by foxes?

  ‘It likes you,’ said Seb.

  Hiroko reached out her other hand and scratched the fur between the fox kit’s ears. The tiny animal purred, then coyly lapped up the blood it had drawn from her fingers.

  ‘I like it, too,’ said Hiroko.

  ‘It doesn’t like you,’ puffed Hannah. ‘It doesn’t think in that way. It’s a wild animal, for heaven’s sake.’

  Hiroko picked it up.

  ‘Put it down,’ insisted Hannah.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ scowled Hiroko. ‘It’s like you want me to leave it to die.’

  I do, thought Hannah, but didn’t say so. She was suddenly embarrassed, and felt her cheeks turning red. But yes, she wanted it to die. Death was what happened to fox kits abandoned by their mothers.

  Hiroko cooed over the kit and it nestled into the crook of her elbow, as might the tiniest child. When, for a few seconds, it turned and fixed Hannah with its yellow-green eyes, she knew at once what it felt like to be a hypnotised rabbit. Its black lip was a calligrapher’s stroke. Its smile was a secret kept.

  The baby fox tracked a passing moth with its gaze. ‘I’m going to call him Yasuo,’ said Hiroko. ‘My grandfather’s name.’

  Hannah wanted to knock Yasuo out of Hiroko’s arms. She wanted to chase him away into the night, and strike him if he returned. She folded her arms and returned to the warmth of the campfire. If Hiroko said so, she supposed, then the fox was coming with them. But as far as Hannah was concerned, nothing in nature could be trusted any more.

  9

  First Blood

  It was not only roads that had been pulled out of shape by the coming of the trees. Rivers had been diverted and dammed, or had burst out of banks undone by roots. Flash floods had carved out new routes to the coast, and the recent rainfall on the mountains had seen cold racing rapids swerve through the forest, sweeping away wildflowers and small mammals without mercy.

  Ten days after leaving Zach’s lodge, and by their reckoning a full month since the trees came, Hiroko led the travellers to the edge of a town that had been hit by such flooding. Water had flushed rot and dust up from under the dereliction but, finding its onward passage dammed by swathes of wreckage, had swirled back on itself and half submerged the town. The trees that stood in the streets looked engorged and drunk, their leaves dripping now and then into the water. Blanched branches floated on an opaque surface, and when Hiroko shot a duck she did not keep it, for its feathers were bubbled with noxious suds. Moribund herons stood knee-deep amid flotsam, watching dead fish float past on aimless currents, while a pack of filthy rats scratched and nipped each other in their bath of river scum.

  The water was too deep to wade through, so they made camp upland of the town and hoped they’d figure out a way to cross. Once the tent was pitched, Hiroko and Seb set off uphill to hunt less polluted prey, and Hiroko carried Yasuo the fox kit with her.

  ‘Sorry about the way my mum’s been lately,’ said Seb, as they walked. ‘She’s having a rough time coping.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ said Hiroko, and hoped Seb had some idea of how hard she found it to apologise for anything in life. ‘It’s obvious she’s finding it hard. I guess I could have been more understanding.’

  ‘That’s okay. I think you were right to adopt Yasuo. I’m already quite fond of the little guy. You’ll make a good fox mum.’

  Hiroko thought momentarily of her own mother, and had to close her eyes. ‘I don’t think I could ever be an actual parent,’ she said. ‘I’d just be so scared of fucking it up.’

  ‘Me too. I’m definitely never having any kids.’

  In Hiroko’s hood, which was where she had been keeping him, Yasuo shifted in his fur and buried his snout against her neck.

  ‘Is that because of your dad?’ she asked Seb.

  ‘You’ve guessed it.’

  ‘What happened with him?’

  Seb shrugged. ‘Nothing, basically. He’s never taken any responsibility whatsoever. Oh sure, every blue moon he’ll telephone me. Then he always says he wants to reignite our relationship, or something like that, as if we ever had one in the first place. It really upsets Mum, when he calls like that. And it pisses me off too. I don’t even talk to him any more. I just put the phone down. Sometimes I hope he’ll actually show up and say that stuff to my face, just so I can punch him in his.’

  Hiroko paused for a moment, unused to such vitriol from Seb, but she supposed she might become just as angry, should she dare talk about her father.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s okay. The way I see it is . . . he’s just like one half of the spark plugs that started me. Nothing more. Certainly not a parent.’

  They walked for a few more minutes without speaking, then Hiroko said, ‘With mine it was Saori.’

  Seb looked surprised that she’d volunteered any information at all about her family.

  Hiroko blushed.

  ‘What’s Saori?’ Seb asked.

  ‘A name,’ she said, then strode off ahead of him, stiff with embarrassment. They had been meandering their way back up the slopes on the eastern side of the flooded town, but having gained some height they had now veered back around to the west. ‘Look!’ Hiroko called back, relieved for the distraction of some stone feature up ahead. At first she had thought it a lone menhir, but as they drew closer it proved to be the start of a thing much larger.

  ‘A viaduct!’ gasped Seb, catching up.

  The viaduct was still intact, arch after arch. The trees had twisted themselves around its pillars but brought none of them down.

  ‘This is how we’ll get across,’ declared Hiroko, for the viaduct bridged their side of the valley to the other.

  ‘To think,’ said Seb, ‘this was towering over us the whole time.’

  ‘There were too many trees to see it.’

  ‘I know, but . . . it makes you wonder what else we could be missing.’

  No sooner had they stepped out onto the viaduct’s straight stone path than the wind turned wilder. Hiroko braced herself as her hair flapped and Yasuo’s claws clung on through her top. It was
the first time since the coming of the trees that she had been able to see such a distance as this. From up here she and Seb could look up the valley at the mountains in the northern distance, straggled with trees. As the land turned more craggy the plants grew shorter, stubborn and sprawling, whereas to the south there was a sea of dense green, parted by a cleft where the valley bottom and the river ran. The sunlight found the flooded floor of the town, and it was as if there were a broken copy of the sky reflected amid the ruins.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Seb, watching her.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ lied Hiroko, surprised that the distance had so hurt her. She could see so far, yet the distance to the horizon was barely even an inch compared with the distance between her and Japan.

  ‘You’re homesick,’ said Seb.

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘If it makes you feel any better, and I know it’s not the same . . . I miss my home too. I miss my bedroom. I miss electricity.’

  Hiroko watched two dots in the sky grow into birds. A pair of kestrels winging their way up the valley. At the last they dipped their flight and sped under one of the stone arches of the viaduct. Then they were away, shooting for the mountains with two high shrieks unstrung on the wind.

  ‘You told me you were from a place called . . . Iwate,’ said Seb, getting the pronunciation wrong.

  Hiroko leaned on the viaduct wall and pressed her palms flat against the wind-cooled stone. ‘Ee-wha-teh,’ she corrected him, ‘and I told you I didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Then why tell me about it in the first place?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because you’re really insistent, I suppose.’

  ‘Talk to me about something you do want to, then. Talk to me about Carter.’

  Hiroko hung her head and closed her eyes, to try to demonstrate just how limited her patience was for where this conversation was going. But Carter loomed in the dark of her mind as large as he had done in the forested sierras of California, loping along and delighting in his own skill with a slingshot. He could have brought down both those kestrels in a flash. Carter could hit the eye of an ant blindfolded.