The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘That can’t be . . .’ said Hannah, but now she recognised the lattice of scars across its nose, and the two chips notched out of the tip of its horn.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, covering her mouth.

  ‘Come on, Hannah,’ urged Eoin, pulling at her arm.

  She brushed his hand aside and began to walk forward, up the beach. The breakers hissed and foamed and when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Eoin about to grab her, she was too quick for him. She ducked away and skipped forward, coming to a halt not an arm’s length from the kirin.

  It watched her down the length of its massive horn, in a fashion that might have been adorably cross-eyed had the beast not possessed the brute strength to break bones with a shrug. ‘You can’t be . . .’ she whispered, but there were the silver flecks in its irises, there the golden eyelashes she had watched blink their last on the slopes above Zach’s lodge.

  Very slowly, she reached out to touch. The kirin snorted, and whipped its head to the side, so that Hannah snatched back her hand in alarm. But it was only turning, plodding back towards the forest. She watched it go, and for a moment from the treeline it stared back at her, its eye an expressionless ball. Then with a bray like a blast from a tuba, it muscled between the trunks and was gone.

  ‘Now I’ve seen everything,’ said Eoin, behind her.

  Hannah held her breath, for to hold it seemed like the only thing keeping her together. She could feel a hot line through her heart, as if the kirin’s horn had sliced it clean in two.

  ‘Talk to me, Hannah,’ said Eoin. ‘It was almost as if you—’

  ‘Recognised it. Yes.’

  She turned to him and laid her hand on his chest, but it was with reservation now, rather than desire. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, Eoin. I wish I could, but I can’t.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I have to go back into the woods. Zach’s whole life . . . my whole life has been about the forest . . . If I let myself hate it I’ll have . . . I’ll have let the gunman do something even more awful to us both. I shot him in the woods. I feel like he’s in there still. But if that’s where he is, that’s where I have to go if I ever want to defeat him.’

  In the morning they stood on the shore in an awkward circle, waiting for somebody to initiate their parting. Neither Hannah nor Eoin could bear to do so, and in the end Hiroko stepped forward and hugged Nora first and then her father. Eoin shook hands with Adrien and called him his shipmate, then shook Seb’s and told him he would make a fine shipwright. Nora flung her arms around Hannah’s waist and pressed her whole body tightly against her legs. ‘I want you to have something,’ the girl said in a hurry, her face red with emotion. Then she offered Hannah with both hands a seashell, a fold of white enamel like a ceramic ear. Hannah turned it over to trace its ridged exterior, flecked with dots of pink and brown.

  ‘Are you sure, Nora? This is very kind of you.’

  She nodded vigorously, biting her front teeth into her bottom lip.

  Hannah slipped it carefully into her bag. Then she took a deep breath and looked up at Eoin. For the first time since she’d known him he looked like an old and storm-battered mariner loath to once more strike out to sea.

  She held out her arms and they embraced far more rigidly than either intended. It felt ridiculous, as if they were two battling crabs, and not parting friends who had not much hope of ever seeing one another again. He had drawn her another map, to complement the one of Michelle’s hotel. It was the way to find him by the sea, he said, if ever the woods betrayed her again.

  They all helped push out the boat, and Eoin lifted Nora in, then climbed aboard. As he reached for the oars his body seemed to strain like a vessel on the utmost sway of the tide. He looked back at Hannah so full of regret it was as if he had a different face, then he gazed out to sea for a moment. When next he looked back he wore a pretence. ‘Safe journey, my friends.’ He saluted them with one oar then began to row, sploshing steadily away, and after a few minutes had passed they watched him disappear around the headland.

  Hannah felt as if she had watched the waves go out, never to come in again. She stared at the vacant water for a full minute, while the others waited for her in silence. Then she turned and walked with them over the soft beach to the woods.

  They stepped into the forest and left behind them the mantras of the sea. Soon their noses were overwhelmed not with brine but with the pickled smells of dying flowers and the musts of stacked fungi. They trod a path of fallen leaves and scattered light, heading north-west this time, into a forest descending into autumn.

  11

  Fox

  After their long stay on the shore, Hiroko felt strangely out of place in the forest. It had become such a damp and yellow realm, and was so heavy with water that the boughs all seemed to sag. Many of the leaves had turned limp and blotted with black, sometimes dropping to a moist floor that burped and squelched underfoot.

  Hiroko led them using the compass and the map Eoin had drawn, but for Adrien’s sake did not voice her reservations about either. Ireland had been devastated just like Wales and England, and Hiroko doubted they would find Michelle’s hotel still standing, could they even find it at all. Just as maps and magnetism had only been able to lead them to the vague vicinity of Zach’s lodge, they were going to need a kirin or a lucky break to cover the final distance.

  The days that followed ran into each other. In the mornings grey bands of mist rose out of the forest floor, as if this were the place where the rain slept the nights. They followed the compass needle and tried to stay stoic about the drenched undergrowth that soaked their trouser legs and shoes. Sometimes the rain showers would pour out of the sky so suddenly that they had to fling themselves against the biggest tree trunks they could find, since these had the thickest branches under which to shelter. Only at night did the skies become clearer. Then the decaying canopy turned to a moth-eaten gauze, above which the stars shone keen and bright.

  They passed through many villages, whose smashed wooden houses now served as nourishment for huge rinds of fungus. A few of these Hannah said were edible, even if they tasted like chalk and stained their fingers orange when they picked them. Other houses had been rebuilt into hamlets of sheds and lean-tos, with ceilings of tarpaulin and amateurish wicker. The inhabitants of such places looked, for the most part, dishevelled and hungry. Some had chopped down trees in between their dwellings, although it had clearly proved hard to dispose of all they’d felled. Severed trunks leaned on the living, and both had turned black with rot. Huge logs lay piled against one another, or heaped into bonfires so wet they had failed to burn.

  Not everyone they met was losing their battle to survive in the woods. Four nights after leaving the coast, the travellers enjoyed the hospitality of an extended family of twenty-one, who had abandoned their various old homes to build a new one on the edge of a small lake. They had in common an ancient grandmother, whose sage bearing was a painful reminder of Hiroko’s own, and freckles, of which between them they owned several thousands.

  There were fish to be caught in the lake, but the family were wary of killing too many and having none left to eat in the future. They had instead made a snail farm out of three old bath tubs, bedding them with leaves on which the snails grew fat. From these the family selected the very largest, to skewer on sticks and toast like marshmallows over their fire.

  One of the young mothers there, a slight and sharp-eyed woman called Ruth, had constructed frog traps surrounding the house. In exchange for as many hunting techniques as Hiroko could impart, she taught the girl how to build them. Hiroko considered the frog traps a stroke of genius, even if they were not much more than a bucket buried up to its rim in the ground. To turn it into a trap, the handle was lifted and fixed in place to form an arch from which a worm could be hung. Then the pit of the bucket was covered with a false lid, which in most cases Ruth had made from a plastic dinner plate. Each plate was slightly smaller than its bucket’s rim and wa
s hung, just like the worm, by a thread from the upright handle. Dangling like that, and disguised by a handful of fallen leaves, the plate balanced horizontally and looked as stable as any other ground. Yet it perfectly hid the bucket beneath and, as soon as a frog hopped aboard, gave way like a trapdoor. The luckless amphibian never got its hoped-for taste of wormflesh, tumbling instead into a hole too deep to leap out of.

  ‘I used to fix a small lamp on one, too,’ Ruth explained to Hiroko. ‘The moths loved it and flew all around, and the frogs loved the moths and fell in dozens at a time.’ Then she frowned. ‘Some bastard stole that lamp on his way through here, not a week ago, so I had to come up with a new kind of superbait.’

  Ruth reached into the bucket and scooped out the bait in question. ‘This is the only frog who doesn’t get eaten. But with her sitting in the bucket, all of the boy frogs come flocking. I call her Cleopatra.’

  Cleopatra was the greenest, most bulbous frog Hiroko had ever set eyes on, her flippers long and horny and her eyes swirled like two polluted crystal balls. She seemed nonplussed by the fates of her admirers, who Hiroko enjoyed learning how to cook that evening. She made sure to feed one to Yasuo, confident that foxes ate frogs in the wild, but after one bite he spat the meat on the ground. He grumbled for the next fifteen minutes, like a disgruntled customer let down by a favourite restaurant.

  The next morning, Ruth led Hiroko between the frog traps she had dug and the rabbit snares Hiroko had taught her to lay. Ruth had her baby boy strapped to her body by a sling, while Hiroko carried Yasuo at times on her shoulder and at times let him down to gambol ahead through the undergrowth, the white tip of his tail weaving back and forth like the flight of a moth.

  ‘Have you not,’ Ruth asked Hiroko as they collected their spoils, ‘been tempted to settle down in a place like this?’

  ‘No,’ replied Hiroko immediately. ‘Never.’

  ‘But you and Seb would make such a—’

  ‘We won’t, though. We can’t.’

  Ruth looked surprised, but Hiroko was too busy biting her lip to elaborate. She had never really had any place she thought of as home, unless it was her grandparents’ house tucked beneath the beeches. She and her father had moved two or three times between rented properties in San Francisco, and none of those had felt like home either. Home was the forest house her father had promised her. Home was somewhere in a future that could never happen now.

  ‘What about after you find the hotel?’ Ruth asked. ‘What will you do after that?’

  ‘We might never find it. Compasses can only take you so far.’

  ‘You make it sound like you don’t want to . . .’

  ‘I do want to,’ said Hiroko hurriedly, ‘but I don’t want to stop. I never want to stop. Not anywhere.’

  Later that day, the travellers bade farewell to Ruth and her assembled family. With no little ceremony, the elderly grandmother presented them with a plastic ice-cream tub, filled with hard smoked frog meat. Hiroko grinned at Ruth when she cracked it open to peek inside and see the strips of amphibian jerky, which smelled of bonfires and marsh salt, but Ruth only looked tearful, trying to smile at Hiroko while simultaneously stroking the fine hair on her baby boy’s head.

  ‘This is for you,’ said the grandmother in her cracked voice, and after a moment Hiroko realised that she was talking to her. ‘Ruth said you might like it.’

  The gift the old woman was offering was a rectangular pouch of faded red silk, tied shut by a knot of gold thread. It was smaller and thinner than a purse, and Hiroko stared from it to the grandmother and then back. It was an omamori charm. It couldn’t be anything else.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ Hiroko demanded after a minute.

  ‘Hachimantai. Long before you were born.’

  ‘Hachimantai? In Japan? Are you serious?’

  ‘It was many, many years ago. And this luck charm has served me well since then, as you can see.’ The old woman gestured to her offspring and their partners and their children, gathered close around her.

  ‘I can’t accept this,’ said Hiroko.

  ‘You will,’ said the old woman with certainty.

  Hiroko did, and with that they left the family behind them. For a while they were able to follow the banks of a crystal-clear spring that was headed for Ruth’s lake, but when its course turned south towards its origins they had to vault it and carry on north-west. Insects whined in the damp at all hours, and every now and then Hiroko felt the itch of a new bite. All the while, she kept the silk pouch pressed tight against the palm of her hand.

  ‘This is for you,’ her father had said, offering her a blue omamori tied shut by white thread. ‘I got them for luck. That we might move to our forest house soon.’

  They’d already been back in Japan for three weeks when he’d said that, staying with Hiroko’s grandparents. On most of those days her father had disappeared to go house-hunting, leaving Hiroko to help her elderly sobo in the orchard. Each time he’d returned later than the last, explaining that the perfect house was an elusive beast, one that needed to be stalked before it could be found. Hiroko could understand that, despite her impatience, but the blue omamori bemused her. Her father had never been a superstitious man, even when it came to something as innocuous as a temple luck charm. She knew it was a commonplace gesture to buy them as gifts, and that now-adays fewer and fewer people really believed there was genuinely luck to be had from them, but it was not the omamori’s purchase that was so out of character. It was that her father had actually chosen to visit a temple. ‘Arigatou . . .’ she’d said, accepting it from him.

  ‘What’s in it?’ asked Seb, walking just behind her through the woods.

  Hiroko shook herself, then looked down at the little red pouch from Ruth’s grandmother. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

  ‘It’s an omamori. You don’t open it. It’ll have a sutra inside, or the name of the shrine it was bought from. It’s supposed to bring good fortune, but if you take it out of the pouch it becomes just words on paper.’

  Seb looked confused. ‘So . . . what is it when it’s in the pouch?’

  ‘It’s not in the pouch. It’s in some other place. Don’t you get it?’

  He still looked confused, but Hiroko was feeling too on edge to have patience with him. ‘It’s in the spirit world or something,’ she said, then immediately felt stupid for sounding like she believed in all that stuff. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Seb, it’s just some bit of junk from a temple stall.’

  That was her own grandmother’s view of omamori. ‘Plastic rubbish,’ she’d often pronounced, ‘attracts plastic spirits.’

  Hiroko couldn’t think of anyone who’d dare to argue with her sobo, even if an omamori wasn’t made from plastic. On the day after her father had given her the blue one, after he’d disappeared again to look at houses, the old woman had noticed it hanging from a hook in Hiroko’s room. ‘Where did you get that?’ she’d asked, narrowing her eyes.

  ‘My otosan gave it to me.’

  ‘Hmph. Open it.’

  Hiroko frowned. ‘You’re not supposed to. It brings—’

  ‘Bad luck?’ wheezed her grandmother, her grin showing off her crooked teeth. ‘Do you think bad luck would dare to come in here?’

  Hiroko nodded obediently and unpicked the omamori’s seal. The thread unfastened with ease. Inside was a strip of inscribed paper.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know what these words mean,’ she said, puzzling over them.

  ‘Hand it to me.’ Her grandmother held out her fingers. Hiroko did as she asked, whereupon she gave the inscription a cursory glance and then enclosed it in her fist.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what it said?’ asked Hiroko after a minute, when all the old woman had done was stare at her.

  ‘It’s the name of the temple your father bought it from.’

  ‘Oh. From the way you reacted, I thought that—’

  ‘It’s in Tokyo.’


  ‘What?’

  ‘I suspected as much. He has been careless. I found some of his train tickets.’

  ‘Train tickets?’

  ‘Most days, perhaps every day since you came here, he has run away to Tokyo.’

  ‘No he hasn’t.’ Hiroko didn’t want to believe it. ‘Why would he do that?’

  Her sobo sighed and looked out of the window, beyond which the yellow depths of the beech forest rustled. The old woman’s tongue made a dry click as it wetted her lips. ‘One day,’ she said at last, ‘I will show you the cuts your parents made in the orchard.’

  But Hiroko could hardly bear to listen. Tokyo? Her father had actually been going to Tokyo? Why hadn’t he told her?

  ‘They cut them into the apple trees. When they were just starting out. Two teenage sweethearts. I never thought it would last.’

  Tokyo was miles away. Miles from the forests her father had always promised her. What had he been doing there?

  ‘They carved their names, mainly. Cut hearts around them. Your mother engraved bad poetry.’

  Hiroko began to feel light-headed, hot in her chest and cold in her belly, and dizzy and rigid at once. Run away to Tokyo? Run away from what? How would they find the forest house if her father wasn’t even looking?

  ‘The bark has grown over most of the cuts, since those days. The kanji they wrote in the tree trunks are sealed away. But, if you know where to look, you can still see certain signs of them. That is how trees remember, after all, and how they remind you.’ The old woman shook her head solemnly. ‘Your father, Hiroko, can’t bear such reminders.’

  ‘Hiroko . . .’

  Hiroko mopped her eyes dry with the sleeves of her hoodie. Yasuo licked her cheek, and she scowled and recalled the miles between everything.

  ‘Hiroko . . .’ said Seb.

  With a grunt, she let go of the red omamori. It drifted to the floor like a leaf, but she didn’t even pause to watch it fall.

  ‘Hey,’ said Seb, surprised, ‘you can’t just leave it here . . .’