The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Seb persisted, ‘is why, if you’re from . . . Iwate, you were hanging out with a trapper in California.’

  She sighed. ‘My dad’s firm moved us there.’

  Seb frowned. ‘His firm? Oh. I assumed your dad was like Carter.’

  ‘No. He was just another salaryman. But he . . . had dreams of something different. When he was my age, his family moved to a place in the woods in Iwate Prefecture. That was where he met my mother, and they became childhood sweethearts. The woods there meant a lot to them.’

  ‘Whereabouts are these woods?’

  ‘Does it even matter now?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘North-east Japan. In the middle of nowhere. You wouldn’t have seen them in any tourist stuff.’

  Seb leaned against the wall alongside her. Far below, the heads of weeping willows swayed and stirred the water. ‘But you moved back,’ he said. ‘You said you came to England from Japan, not America.’

  Hiroko gripped the viaduct wall. ‘We didn’t move back. My father said we were going to, but we didn’t.’

  ‘But you told me you came from Japan . . .’

  ‘We didn’t move back to Iwate. We moved to Tokyo.’

  ‘Oh. Why? His firm took him there, too?’

  ‘No. He left that firm. He said it was time for a new chapter in our lives. We were supposed to go and live in the forest house.’

  ‘What’s the forest house?’

  The wall in her grasp was as hard as the mountains to her back. It hurt her fingernails when she dug them into it, but she dug all the same. How excited she’d been on that hot Californian night when her father had sat her down and said, I have a surprise for you, Hiroko, and I think you’re going to like it. We’re moving back to Japan. She had whooped and stood up with her hands shaking in front of her mouth as if she were some stupid high school prom queen. We’re going to go and live in a forest house, like the ones your mother and I grew up in. We’re going to do it at last.

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’ asked Seb in a low voice. ‘This is what your dad did wrong.’

  We’re going to make that forest house ours, Hiroko. It’ll be just like the one your grandparents live in. It’ll be just the two of us, living off the land.

  ‘My whole life,’ Hiroko spat, ‘he raised me . . . he fucking trained me, do you understand? Trained me to be like my ancestors. A forest soul.’

  ‘But he took you to Tokyo instead?’

  ‘Because of Saori.’

  ‘And she . . . let me guess. Girlfriend?’

  Hiroko nodded. Then suddenly she punched the wall so hard that the pain rang all the way up through her elbow and filled her shoulder with an instant ache.

  ‘Hiroko . . . I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes you did.’

  ‘No I didn’t. That’s not true.’

  ‘Then why did you make me talk about it?’

  She pressed her hands to her eyes and growled at her own heart to try to stop it hurting. Yasuo yelped at her sudden aggression, and twisted with fear in her hood. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered as she reached up to stroke him. ‘Sorry, Yasuo.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ said Seb. ‘I pushed it too far. But hey, listen . . . I’ve got something for you. I was saving it for . . . I don’t know what. Now it can be my apology.’

  Hiroko only raised an eyebrow, but Seb grinned, reached into his pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar.

  It was still in its bright red wrapper, and despite herself Hiroko laughed when he handed it to her. Its packaging crackled enticingly in her grip, until she tore it open and broke the bar in two. When she gave Seb one half back their fingers touched, and he blushed. He ate his first mouthful very quickly, but she chewed hers slowly, trying to savour every morsel. She pushed the block of it against the roof of her mouth, pressing it there with her tongue until it melted into luxury.

  ‘Hey,’ said Seb when she had finished, and pointed at his lips.

  At first Hiroko thought he was asking her to kiss him, and she didn’t know what to do. Carter had said that the worst kind of noose trap was the one that your heart made for you.

  Seb was still pointing at his mouth. ‘You’ve got chocolate all over your lips,’ he explained, and she looked away down the valley.

  There had been boys, in the past, but the ones in America had either fancied her for all the wrong reasons or mocked her. Two or three she had kissed, but there had been no thrill in it, and afterwards they always seemed to expect to hang out, to go to the movies or go bowling or sit around indoors listening to their indoors thoughts. And as for Seb, surely Seb was as indoors as they came. Even now he was giving her that strange, lopsided look, as if she were a code he could decipher on a screen.

  ‘It’s alright, you know,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Feeling homesick. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’

  She turned away, wishing he hadn’t said that. Some feelings you buried for a reason, just as you buried a carcass to stop diseases from spreading.

  ‘I mean . . . it might help to talk about it. Doesn’t have to be now. I’m just saying that I know what it’s like to lose all respect for your father. It’s something I’ve done.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Seb,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough family talk for one day.’

  ‘But, Hiroko . . . I don’t see the same reaction in you, when you talk about your dad. I actually wonder if the two of you—’

  ‘Please . . .’

  Seb was in full flow now. ‘—could have made things work again. He let you down, I can see that, but I think perhaps you miss him, too. You haven’t said where you left things with him, when you got on the plane. Were you at each other’s throats? And you haven’t even mentioned your mo—’

  She swung around and punched him. She didn’t mean to, but the decision was in her knuckles, not her mind. The blow cracked squarely on his nose and floored him onto the stone. He squealed at once and grabbed at his face, gasping for air, and she knew from the bubbling sound of his breath that she had just broken his nose.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘Seb? Seb, I’m sorry.’

  Seb tried to say something but blood was coursing over his top lip. It had already painted a red line down his T-shirt, and when he attempted to stand he swayed so dramatically that Hiroko feared he would stagger off the viaduct. She grabbed and steadied him by holding his shoulders. Meanwhile Yasuo skittered down to the floor, and stared with wide-eyed excitement at the drip-drip-drip of Seb’s bright blood.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Hiroko whispered, holding Seb upright.

  He spat out red saliva. His head swayed and his eyes glazed over and came back again. Hiroko pulled off the hoodie he had given her and scrunched it up so he could use it to stem the bleeding.

  ‘I’m going to have to set it for you,’ she said.

  For a moment he looked terrified, but then he nodded and she was impressed by his bravery. She steadied herself, pinched hold of his nose (his chest heaved at the touch), then snapped it back into position.

  He screeched, so loud and sharp that the noise swept back and forth off the valley’s hillsides and Yasuo sprang away to hide behind Hiroko. Seb’s hands flailed out and gripped the first things they could, which were Hiroko’s arms. He let go and swooned but she caught him again, and drew him tight so he could nod against her shoulder.

  ‘That’s the worst of it,’ she said, as the first part of his pain subsided. ‘That’s the worst, I promise.’

  When eventually Seb spoke, he sounded like he had the flu. ‘Huv you ever haghd your noze broken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So hoe the hell wuhd you know?’

  Then he made a strange, deep gurgle that panicked her and made her wonder whether she had damaged more than just his nose. After a minute she realised it was laughter. ‘Hurrg . . . hurrg . . . hurrg . . .’ he croaked. ‘I s’pose I deserved thaght.’

  She
realised that at some point she had taken hold of his hands, and was clasping them in hers. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘of course you didn’t. You just wanted to get to know me better.’

  Seb laughed again, but Hiroko still felt awful. Apologies were nothing but words. Deeds were what mattered, and she had just broken his nose.

  And so, never much daunted by a trickle of blood, she kissed him.

  10

  Whisperers

  The sea, thought Adrien, as over the next few days the valleys smoothed out into flatter country, would decide everything. He was glad to have given Hannah some sort of direction but he worried, whenever he watched her struggling to place one foot in front of the other, that in truth it was only a postponement. The water, in all likelihood, would be a dead end. It was inconceivable that there would still be ferries running, and they had nothing valuable to trade for passage on a smaller boat. Adrien had imagined, in a fanciful moment, them all building a raft out of wood, but he could barely swim the length of a heated pool and would no doubt drown when the first hefty wave sloshed him overboard. No, the sea would decide everything. And what it would decide was that their journey had come to a crunching halt, and that Adrien had no choice but to put on a brave face and turn back for home, and when he got there dust the leaves from his armchair and await Michelle’s return. That, after all, had been his first plan and the most sensible. Michelle would never expect him to make his way to Ireland, and if anyone could contrive to cross in the other direction it would be her. Adrien would wait for her, and if she did not come he would assume she’d given up on him and set up with Roland, and he would not hold that against her. When he put himself in Michelle’s shoes, and thought of the self-pitying oaf of a husband who she’d left on the sofa when she’d departed that day, he was all too happy to jettison Adrien Thomas out of his life.

  Adrien shifted the weight of his rucksack and trudged on through the forest. Hannah kept falling behind, whereupon he would drop back alongside her and smile, and she would try to smile in return. The teenagers, meanwhile, picked them a path using the compass and Hiroko’s instincts. What they hoped to get out of this journey was beyond Adrien. He could tell, however, what was going on between them. They had shown no mushy signs of affection (he supposed Hiroko wasn’t the sort), but ever since they’d returned from the viaduct, something had been different. Seb had said he’d broken his nose by falling off a boulder. He was actually a competent liar, but all his fine acting had been spoiled by his accomplice. Hiroko had been unable to stop staring at her boots, scraping the heel of one at the toes of the other. As for Yasuo, he’d made a noise like a laugh while Seb told the story, and looked with eager mirth from his mistress to the boy.

  The next day brought rain. The first sign of it was a fat drop that hit Adrien in the eye, and soon after the woods began to rattle with water. It was hard at first to know how heavy it fell, for the canopy provided an initial defence against the downpour. Then came the boom of thunder, and the leaves shivered en masse as if they were the storm cloud itself. Soon the foliage bowed under the weight of all its caught water. Chutes of it tipped through the branches without warning, and it always seemed to Adrien that he was the one beneath it who got soaked.

  To his relief, the compass eventually brought them to a country church, the rain hammering off its lead roof and a first stroke of sheet lightning silhouetting it against the treetops. ‘Hannah,’ shouted Adrien above the thunder, pointing to a bristled tree that arced its back like a cat against the church’s wall, ‘isn’t that the same kind as the one in the churchyard where we met?’

  Hannah bent her neck to look up at it. ‘Yeah,’ she said flatly, ‘a yew.’

  The yew shivered in the rain, its fronds combed by stormwater. ‘Come on,’ said Adrien, shaking himself. ‘It’s only going to piss it down even harder out here. Let’s get inside.’

  ‘You three go in,’ said Hannah, her voice almost washed away on the air. ‘I’ve always felt . . . uncomfortable . . . in churches. I’ll stay out here.’

  ‘Mum,’ said Seb, ‘you can’t. You’ll catch a chill.’

  ‘I’ll huddle in the porch. No point worrying about me.’

  Adrien flapped his hands about, as if that would sway her. ‘But it’s tipping it down!’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Okay,’ he conceded, then turned to the teenagers. ‘What about you two?’

  Hannah replied before Seb could. ‘Please don’t wait out here with me, Seb. I’ll be fine, honestly. There’s only room in this porch for one, and I’ve stood through worse rain than this. Go in, all three of you.’

  Adrien looked from the hissing rain to the solid church door, to the insubstantial porch where Hannah would be sheltering. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘what we’ll do . . . what we’ll do is see if there’s anything inside that will help keep you sheltered. We’ll dress you in a vicar’s robe, if we have to.’

  Again she tried to smile for him, then he swung open the door and led the other two through it.

  Inside, they were stunned for a moment to discover a generator whirring behind a large halogen lamp, a bright nucleus like ball lightning. Around this crowded nine or ten people, some standing, some seated, all looking up at the newcomers. There were several frightened-looking men wearing flat caps, and a handful of women in cagoules, scarves and jumpers. The lamp flung Gothic shadows at the ceiling, and made the carved saints and grotesques up there pull tortured faces.

  The architectural tricks of churches had never really impressed any sense of sanctity onto Adrien. He had been to some truly vast cathedrals in his time, but had only ever been left cold by the shadow of so much stone. If he was ever trapped there for too long (say, for the length of a church service) he always began to feel that he had been buried alive. In this church, however, there was a new architecture. What they had seen of the yew from outside proved now to be not much more than an offshoot, for in here its true glory was revealed. It had congregated the pews with its boughs and shattered the slabbed monuments. It had pulled out the font like a plug chain. Its fingers had sunk through cracks in the flagstones and its trunk, as it groped up the insides of the tower, had forced loose the bell. For a moment Adrien could ignore the people around the lamp, imagining instead that bell tolling and clanging its final peals when it crashed down to the floor, where it now lay a quarter buried in stone. He thought of his own wedding bells, ringing out dimly through the intervening years. He had checked his watch. He had been on the church green sweating in the sunshine, smiling and nattering to guests and feeling sick from his top to his tails. Then there had been Michelle, gliding into the church in her wedding dress, bright in the shady aisle like a moonbeam through the night.

  He gulped. Everyone was looking at him, even Hiroko and Seb, as if he were for some reason their spokesman. ‘Um, good afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said a man among those gathered at the lamp. ‘If it’s shelter you want then welcome. If it’s trouble, then know we won’t stand for it.’

  Adrien held up his hands. ‘Trouble is the last thing on our minds. We just want to wait out the storm.’

  ‘Then make yourselves at home,’ said someone else. It was the vicar, a barrel-necked man in a leather jacket and dog collar. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  Adrien laughed, delighted at the very idea, and watched with pleasure the steam hooting out of the kettle, anticipating the hot liquid that would take his mind off his clothes, which were stuck damply to his flesh. ‘Would it be impolite to ask for a fourth cup?’ he said. ‘We’ve a friend who’s decided to wait outside.’

  ‘Out in the storm?’

  ‘Yes. Well, she’s squeezed in the doorway. She, er . . . she doesn’t like churches.’

  While the water poured and the teabag was stirred, Adrien looked up at the church’s ceiling. Sculpted into the beams that crossed it were devils and angels and stranger faces still. It took him a moment to realise that some of those faces were made out of leaves, albei
t wood-carved ones. Their mouths hung open either to spew out more foliage or swallow it up. One puckish face had oak leaves for eyebrows and a chin of ivy. Another had cheekbones of holly and flat, stemmed lips. There was one with forget-me-not eyes and flowering whiskers. There was another with a hooked nose and ivy for a mane. Every one of them was different, but all were chiselled by the bold, crude skill of a country carpenter. They adorned every level as high as Adrien could see, but he could tell there were more on the edge of the light. Sometimes, when the lamp flickered, they looked like they were moving, and he didn’t like what they reminded him of. Adrien didn’t remember any such monsters in the Bible, although he had only ever got as far as the bit with the chariots.

  The vicar, having poured the tea, cast around to find an umbrella.

  ‘I’ll take it out to her,’ said Adrien, still feeling uneasy about the carvings. He received the first steaming mug and the umbrella from the vicar, then tried clumsily to tuck the latter under his armpit while reaching for the second cup.

  ‘Let me help you,’ laughed the vicar, patting one of his pockets to find a pack of cigarettes. ‘I could use a smoke anyway.’

  Leaving Seb and Hiroko to dry out indoors, and Yasuo to shake his red fur and peer suspiciously at the halogen lamp, the pair of them headed outside.

  Hannah was clearly pleased to see them, having squeezed herself against the door to try to avoid a seam of droplets coming through the cracked porch roof.

  ‘Hey,’ said the vicar, handing her one of the cups of tea, ‘we come bearing gifts.’

  She took it gratefully and when, after that, the vicar pulled from his jacket the pack of cigarettes and offered one to them both, Adrien was surprised by how hungrily she accepted.

  ‘I never took you for a smoker,’ Adrien said, as he took a cigarette of his own from the vicar.

  ‘I haven’t touched one since I was a student.’

  ‘There’s no need to feel guilty about having one now,’ said the vicar. ‘Unless you stumble upon a cigarette factory on your travels, you’re never going to get the chance to pick up the habit.’