by Ali Shaw
But Hiroko was already striding away, and didn’t even look back when Yasuo tensed against the flesh of her neck.
Seb, however, stopped walking at once.
Half a minute later he caught up with her, saying nothing further, only tucking something red into the pocket of his shirt.
12
Heart of the Forest
The next night the temperature plunged, and their tent and sleeping bags seemed far too thin to warm them. They found a looted lorry just before sundown, so huddled together in the back of it to sleep, their bodies with scant heat to share. They ended up lying just as Hiroko and Seb had done on recent nights: in each other’s arms. Adrien felt terribly embarrassed about it, despite the urgent cold hardening his nose and the rims of his ears. They had to negotiate each other’s comfort to settle into a sort of four-way embrace, in which he was acutely aware that his body was the most cushioned and his exposed skin the most clammy. He cleared his throat awkwardly when Hannah nodded off against his collar, yet he was also aware of how much thinner her body was than it looked; and the unexpected boniness of Hiroko’s under her baggy hoodie; and how broad and warm Seb had become. Through the joint effort of their shivering and the rattling lullaby of their teeth, they trembled and chattered each other to sleep.
When, after what seemed like endless hours of waking and dozing, waking and dozing, the sunlight crept into the woods, every leaf and blade of grass looked rimed with the cold morning air.
‘If this is how it’s going to be from now on,’ said Seb, as they put on their rucksacks and set out, ‘I think we should take shifts to keep a fire going all night.’
‘That won’t help on rainy nights,’ said Adrien, still feeling cold to his bone marrow. ‘God knows how we’ll cope in the winter.’
‘There’ll be a few more warm days yet,’ said Hannah, ‘so it’s not all doom and gloom. But that’s a good idea about the fire, Seb. I never thought we’d still be travelling at this time of year. I thought we’d be safely sheltering in Zach’s lodge.’
‘I know you did, Mum . . . and who knows? Maybe we can shelter a few nights in Michelle’s hotel. What do you think about that, Adrien?’
‘I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.’
‘But we—’
Adrien held up a hand. ‘I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.’
In the meantime, at least, it was better to be exhausted than frozen, better to ache than to shiver, so all that day they pressed on as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Although the land rose in a gradual ascent, they walked with the stumbling gait of those going downhill. When at last, in the mid-afternoon, Adrien flopped down the first from tiredness, the others dropped around him almost immediately. They sat in a sorry circle, the descending sun nothing but a blinding light to their tired eyes. Then Hannah sprang up and pointed to a heap of something.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘Dung!’
She rushed to it and crouched to inspect it at once, poking it open with a twig. Adrien watched with disgust as she exposed gooey rolls of the stuff, moist and rich and still steaming. For a moment he panicked that this was some new and extreme form of foraging, and that Hannah would pluck something out of the faeces and call it their dinner.
‘I can only think of one animal that could produce something this heavy,’ Hannah said with a grin. ‘Well? Aren’t we going to carry on? We can’t be that far behind it.’
The others didn’t share her resurgent energy but, amid grumbling from Adrien, they got to their feet and followed. Soon they found more clues of the kirin’s passing, be they fur scraps caught on a thorn or sometimes a steady row of prints in mud. The animal itself, however, seemed perpetually just ahead of them, like a name forgotten on the tip of the tongue.
Not long before dusk, the ground turned to cement. Within a dozen paces they were in the forecourt of a truck depot, where the trees towered so high that they dwarfed the lorries rusting in their branches. For once it was a relief to reach a town, for even ruined walls could offer better shelter from the wind than could the bare woods. There was also something surprisingly clean about the place. Two months had passed since the trees came, enough time for the bodies to be tidied away and for thunderstorms to scour the concrete of leaked sewage and feculence. The buildings had been reroofed by a thatch of autumn leaves, and it seemed that people had moved back into one or two houses, although more often than not they were armed and only scowled back grimly when the travellers hailed them. They steered well wide, and in a street full of oaks saw two boys gathering the green spiked shells of conkers. Upon seeing them, the boys sprang up and fled as if their lives depended on it, their footfalls pounding off the damp tarmac underneath the leaf litter.
All four of them kept their eyes peeled for a place to spend the night, somewhere that would be both unclaimed and a shelter from the cold. They had just come to an intersection of several streets, looking for this, when they finally saw the kirin.
It stood where the roads met, beside a fountain carved with angels. The basin was full of rainwater and the golden leaves of the sycamores that leaned above it. From this the kirin was drinking with pleasured slurps. Its horn looked like a sheet of flint, clinking against the stone of the fountain, longer than its neck and head combined. Its woolly fur was tangled here and there with bits of leaf. When it had finished drinking it lifted its head and stared at them down the blade of its horn. Droplets of water caught in the wrinkles of its muzzle. It harrumphed at them, and they saw its breath cloud the cool air, and then it turned to depart. From the side it looked colossal and squat, but from behind it looked equine. It plodded away with sycamore seeds spinning in its wake.
They followed it for half an hour, until at last they had to let it get away from them so that they could find their place to sleep. They chose the remains of a café, and used broken tables to build a makeshift windbreak in its doorway. Sleep was once again an elusive pleasure, and come morning all of their eyes and limbs were heavy. It was just as they were removing their barricade from the door that Adrien dropped the piece he was moving and climbed past it into the street.
‘What is it?’ asked Seb, the nearest to him.
‘Right there,’ said Adrien. ‘Across the road from us, all this time.’
They all peered out at the building opposite.
‘Is that a theatre,’ asked Seb, ‘or an arts centre or something?’
‘Yes! But look at what they were showing!’
Blowing above the theatre’s doorway was a tattered banner, advertising its final production.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ read Seb. ‘Why is that so special?’
‘It’s . . . it’s personal.’
Adrien crossed the road to stand in the theatre’s entrance. The doors had been flung wide by long, ushering boughs. In the lobby, the carpet was buried under brown and amber leaves.
‘Would any of you mind if I took a look inside?’
They all shrugged that it was fine by them, so Adrien led them, footsteps crunching, into the theatre proper. The auditorium’s roof had been torn away and replaced by the beams of the canopy, from which hung heaps of foliage. Chandeliers would once have glittered there, but only clusters of their glass remained, dangling like catkins.
A new audience had filled up the seats. Trees sprawled among the rows, loafing their boughs like rude feet on the chairs in front of them. Down at the stage, the curtains had been thumbed back and starched into place by sap. Now a bowed wooden cast trod the boards, some striking poses with their branches, others draped in costumes, for behind them the sets had been demolished and the contents of the prop rails flung left, right and centre. There were many-coloured gowns and garlands, and great pairs of glimmering fabric wings, and fake swords and a broken lyre, and everywhere fluttering pages of the script, and a crown of antlers and a suit of furred trousers made to resemble the hind legs of a goat.
Adrien toyed with the thin hairs on the back of his head.
On honeymoon in Paris, he and Michelle had watched Le Songe d’une nuit d’été. He had worried that A Midsummer Night’s Dream translated into another language might bore her, but she had loved it even more than him. She had always possessed, he supposed, an uncanny ability to enjoy things just the way they were.
‘What is it?’ asked Seb, stepping alongside him. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ he croaked.
‘You don’t look so good. Do you think you should sit down?’
Adrien nodded. ‘Good idea.’ And where had they sat? They had not been very near the front, nor far to one side. Somewhere in the middle, and Adrien sidled from seat to seat and row to row, clambering sometimes over the trees, until he found a spot that seemed to match that in his memory. There he sat with his hands crushed together between his knees. The others hovered nearby, unsure whether to disturb him or to leave him to his reverie.
‘Would you three mind,’ he asked with a swallow, ‘if I had ten minutes alone in here?’
For a moment he thought they would refuse. He could tell that they were worried about him.
‘I’ll be alright,’ he promised. ‘I just need a bit of thinking space.’
Hannah nodded reluctantly. ‘Okay. We’ll wait for you in the café where we camped. But . . . please be careful.’
She smiled encouragingly and then, along with the teenagers, left through the stall doors.
Adrien took a deep breath and leaned his head back against the seat cushion. The theatre seemed very quiet, now that he was alone in it.
After the curtains had closed and the applause had faded, they’d walked arm-in-arm out of the theatre. They were like first-time drunks and lovers both, still snorting with laughter at Bottom the idiot, with his head turned to a donkey’s by fairy magic. Truth be told, both Adrien and Michelle had been tipsy even after their interval drinks, and when one of the actors had intoned in a deep, loud voice, ‘Dieu te bénisse, Bottom! Tu es traduit . . .’ Adrien had leaned on Michelle’s shoulder and repeated it in English. ‘Bless you, Bottom! Thou art translated!’ At that Michelle had snorted with laughter, and when the people in the row in front had turned around to glower at her, she’d wiggled her tongue out at them (and he had loved her all the more for it).
What had happened next? They had been happy; back to the hotel; more wine; breakfast by the river; day trip; restaurant meal. It was easy to be happy on honeymoon, when you took the lead role in your own life. It was when you got home and you felt like an extra delivering the same few lines every night that happiness became elusive.
Adrien skipped forwards through time, on through the acts of their marriage. Their story played out just as he knew it would, with no great villainy (indeed, the real disasters and the losses had always brought them closer together) but a multitude of small affronts, all of them his. All of their arguments, when it came down to it, had started because of him. He had seen the world too fearfully, he could acknowledge that now, although he did not know if he could ever break that habit. ‘Sometimes it seems,’ Michelle had once said, ‘that unless things work out perfectly, all you want to do is hide away from them. Then you hate yourself for not being braver, and it’s like you eat yourself alive.’
The wind dipped through the exposed roof of the theatre, and the leaves that frilled the proscenium arch hissed for silence. Adrien got up and walked down the ramp, and at the bottom of it heaved himself onto the stage. He stood at its centre, looking back out at the auditorium. It would rot away into tatters. It would never again fill up with a human audience. Still he felt a strange scrutiny on him, as if he were indeed a performer and all of the trees harsh critics itching to pass judgment on him. He had never been comfortable as the centre of attention, even in classrooms.
He looked at the props and the costumes. Dangling from a nearby branch was a donkey’s head. It was a full-fitting mask for the actor playing Bottom to wear, once the fairies had made an ass out of him. ‘Tu es traduit,’ Adrien whispered, taking it down from the branch.
He turned it around in his hands. Bottom, the prize idiot from a rabble of idiots. Adrien traced his fingers down its donkey nose, as if it were a real animal leaning over a fence. Its ears were wired straight, and the long face and muzzle had been sculpted from something like papier mâché. The lips were parted wide and the teeth covered in a reflective fabric that would catch the spotlights and make the mouth space seem darker, for out through the mouth the eyes of the actor would peer.
Adrien punched it. The delicately crafted eye burst inward, and when he tore the hole wider the mask ripped along its seams as easily as a paper bag. He yanked out the wire and flung it aside and shredded what was left of the mask and threw it on the floor and had glitter all over his fingernails.
He clasped his hands to the top of his head, and to touch his bald spot was to remember just how long he’d been destroying himself. His baldness was his diary, his rings in the bark. He wondered if he would have gone bald so quickly were he a better man, a man like Roland, who was sure of himself and his place in the world. Had he as good as torn his hair out, just by being the man he was? Michelle had tried to save him from it, but he had never shared the faith she’d had in him. Self-loathing was a difficult thing for those who had none of their own to understand. It had its own seasons. It could trick you into thinking it had lifted, only to come cycling around again. You attacked yourself in the same ways you always had. You flung the same accusations. Perhaps you could no more rid yourself of self-loathing than you could rid the world of winter. What was certain was that, like winter, in its wake it left you bare. That was what it had done to Adrien’s marriage. It had blown out all the candles and left only the cold.
‘Help me,’ he said, although he did not know to who. It was the same abject plea he had uttered a hundred times before in his life, the same he had made on the night the trees came, after he had crawled into bed fat with processed chicken and discounted beer. He held out little hope of an answer. If someone as good as Michelle could not help him, he doubted whether anyone could.
The branches swayed against the circle of the missing ceiling. The wind raked the clouds. Adrien hung his head and groaned.
Ten seconds later, his groan was still echoing in the theatre. Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Adrien stiffened, like an actor succumbing to stage fright. When finally he looked, it was just in time to spot a whisperer loping along a rafter. Then came another, running over a branch like an acrobat before a jump. And there, among the rows and rows of seating in the middle of the auditorium, was the throne tree.
That it had appeared in the blink of an eye, without so much as a sound or a waft of displaced air, was not even the most alarming thing about it. This time it had only its lower branches, that pair of them that grew horizontally like the arms of a gigantic chair. Above them its trunk came to an end as abruptly as any broken stump. All of its higher branches were missing.
The throne was empty.
A whisperer with teeth of thorns crawled onto the stage. Another sidled along a branch of a tree where the pages of the prompter’s script hung scattered, and its tiny footsteps dislodged some of the sheets so that they floated down to the boards below. Now a full audience of the little monsters was appearing throughout the theatre, climbing onto the tops of the seats or finding perches on low-hanging boughs. Over there was one that seemed all head and no body, with dock leaves for ears. In another place was one plated and horned by bark, as a stag beetle is by its shell. The noise they made was a ceaseless hiss, filling up the auditorium like the hubbub before a performance.
‘But where . . .’ murmured Adrien, his gaze pulled back towards the empty throne tree.
Something in the rafters creaked.
One by one, the whisperers looked up, but for a minute all Adrien could do was stand very still, trying to compose himself. At last he looked too, and the creature he had seen on the beach was hanging where the theatre’s roof should h
ave been.
All of Adrien’s breath wheezed out of him at the sight of it. It looked like the crown of a tree come loose of its trunk, a dark outline against the sky above. Its countless forking limbs were so enmeshed with the branches of the theatre that it was hard to tell where the creature stopped and the trees began, except when one of its legs swayed free of any anchoring trunk and took a step through the canopy. It took another step after that, and another simultaneously. It moved with the slowness of a crab, but its destination was clear. The creature was coming down towards Adrien.
At first Adrien could find no strength to flee. Even when the creature had descended near enough for him to smell it on the air, a whiff like mouldering leaves and rancid fruit, he couldn’t do much more than gape. Its great long legs, clad in bark and haired by twigs, moved with a groping motion as if it were blind. When finally Adrien came to his senses, it had clambered so near he could see a kind of opening in the hub of shoulders that was all it had for a body. In the middle of that wooden knot from which all its limbs grew, was a mouth. It was a dark hollow gleaming with sap, seams of which had crystallised like an amber saliva on its lips.
Adrien ran.
He had gone only a few strides before a whisperer blocked his path. Its slack jaws were full of woodworm grubs, which dripped out of tunnel-holes in its cheeks as well as from its fibrous tongue. Adrien spun around to go another way, but found a second whisperer waiting there on all fours. Neither of them was looking at him. They both had their necks arched to gaze at the descending creature, but when Adrien tried to run in a third direction there was another blocking that way too, and another after that, and more and more of them piling onto the stage, each with its eyes bent upwards and a dry noise flowing out of its throat.
They were whispering to the creature, Adrien realised. And in response it groaned, and its many limbs swayed like those of a sea anemone reaching out in its pool. As it lurched ever closer, the smell of it doubled. Its stench was rot and must and growth in the damp, so potent it made Adrien’s mind bob against his skull. The creature only moaned all the deeper, and one leg scraped and itched its body as it moved, dislodging pieces of dank and dead bark.