by Joseph Hone
They built a fire beneath us in the early evening, a dangerous, unkempt fire built too close to the trees and the dry, brambly undergrowth immediately beyond. They grilled hamburgers here and sausages and ate crisps and drank more beer. And afterwards they chanted football songs and slogans and, circling the fire, their faces livid and drunken in the fading light, shouted obscenities across to the other group on the far side of the stream.
Clare, moving silently on her haunches, restlessly changing position on the branch above, peered down at them intently, with disgust. But she was not being critical of their words or their behaviour, I’m sure. This was not the reason for her frustrated contempt, which was more that of a predatory animal, concealed in the trees above a tempting meal it cannot for the moment procure. Eventually I forced Clare back with me to our tree-house.
I woke in the soft, moonlit darkness a few hours later, the light filtering in marble shafts through the leaves. Something was wrong, missing. A branch creaked in the silence somewhere high up in the trees quite near me. But there were other louder noises coming from the end of the lake now, shouts, laughter, a faint, dangerously excited roar on the air. I turned, looking up at Clare’s hammock. She was gone.
I followed her as fast as I could along the shadowed branches and walkways, for I was sure that she’d headed this way. But she had several minutes start on me and though I was well accustomed to the dark, I had never taken this way before at night. Nor had Clare. But she was smaller than I, and more supple and sure-footed, so that I was unable to catch her before she had reached the end of the line of trees. I found her at last, peering down into the glade, sitting astride the same branch we’d been on several hours before, looking down intently on the same campsite beneath.
But now there was real pandemonium beneath us. Some of the youths, half-naked and far gone in drink, were prancing with their girls round the fire, which had been built up since, with heavy old logs, so that it roared like an ox-roast in the night. But others, we saw, more sober in the company, were coming in and out of the circle of firelight, trying to interrupt the revellers, with something else on their mind. They were worried. Someone was missing. They shouted, sometimes grappling with the fire-dancers, asking for help.
‘You can’t fuckin’ leave Hank and the others out there,’ one of them said. ‘They may have all bloody drowned in the lake. We’ve got to help look for ’em. They’ve been gone bloody hours.’
‘Bugger off, will you?’ a lout replied. ‘What’s it to me? You’ve already got half a dozen blokes out there looking for Johnny. They’ll turn up.’
And they did. Five minutes later.
As we watched, like people in the dark gods of a theatre, looking down through the long clefts in the tree at the firelit glade beneath, a new group arrived in the circle of light. One of the youths here, just in his shirt and pants, was dripping wet, like a drowned but boisterous rat. And with him were half a dozen of his friends, equally rowdy, violent even, obviously the search party who had gone out to look for the stray. But the figure of real interest for all of us, both up in the tree and on the ground, was the man they had brought back with them, in the centre of the group, hands roughly tied behind his back, being threatened now with gleaming flick-knives.
It was the African, tall, stooped, a grave, inky figure in the dancing firelight.
‘You wouldn’t bloody believe it!’ one of the youths shouted. He was taller than the others with lank blond hair. He prodded the African viciously with his knife, so that he fell forward, wounded, writhing, onto the ground by the fire. ‘He bloody tried to kill Johnny here, this bloke did.’
The others, who had been dancing round the flames, stopped now, fascinated by this strange prize from the woods. They crowded round the African, who was trying to get to his feet, but without success, for each time he got to his knees someone kicked him down again.
‘I was just going along by the water there,’ the dripping youth who must have been Johnny said, ‘when I heard this tranny blazing away out of nowhere in the trees. I thought it was one of youse buggers with a bird. But then I saw it behind a shed, and there weren’t no one there. Well, I went to pick it up – and the next thing I were going down this bloody great well in the dark. I’d have bloody drowned if it hadn’t been for Hank and the others right then.’
‘Yeah,’ the tall blond youth called Hank confirmed. ‘We were just coming along the same way, heard the row in the bushes behind this shed, and then we saw this fuckin’ buck nigger standing over a great hole in the ground with Johnny screaming fit to bust in the water beneath him.’ He kicked the African again. ‘We were onto the bugger in a flash. Put up no end of a fight, he did. But we nailed him. Didn’t we? You runt!’ He kicked him again. ‘Well, we got Johnny out, tied our jeans together and heaved ’im out with them. And do you know what this darkie had gone and done? A real boy-scout job: he’d built a bloody man trap over this old well for us, lot of dry sticks and things, and put a tranny on top, so as we’d fall straight in. And old Johnny fell for it. He’d have fuckin’ drowned less we’d come along. What do you think of that?’
Hank looked round, addressing the assembled company, his face shining with drunken indignation in the light. ‘What do you make of that?’ he added, in a tone that suggested he spoke now more in sorrow than in anger. Then he suddenly picked the African up from the ground and shook him viciously by the neck, like a chicken. ‘We’re going to have you, mate,’ he said. ‘You can’t go round trying to kill British blokes like that, you know.’ Then he threw him to the ground again. A friend brought Hank a can of beer, and he tore the top off, drinking deeply.
‘I know what we’ll do with you, mate,’ Hank said at last, gasping with pleasure, his thirst quenched. ‘We’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. Tie him up properly, lads. Then we’ll lash him to a pole.’
‘What you going to do, Hank?’ someone shouted in excitement.
‘What these black buggers used to do to us: roast him alive! Tie him to a stake first. Then we’ll roast him alive, and eat him.’
Hank was joking, I thought. But the African didn’t think so. From what I could see of his face, squirming on the ground by the fire, it was clear that he believed Hank. The African was certainly frightened, in a way he’d never been that morning. By the fire – of course, that was it: here was another fire about to maim him again, at the very least. As for Clare, it was obvious from her pleasurable excitement beside me that she fully endorsed Hank’s plans for the man. A suitable demise for her enemy of the morning.
And I thought: an end to my enemy too? Without my touching him: perhaps Willy’s killer, and Laura’s as well – who had then come after Clare and me with the same evil beam in his eye … Yet I realised I hadn’t the slightest proof for any of this. But surely it wouldn’t matter anyway. Hank was only trying to frighten the man.
He wasn’t. They got a long beech branch from somewhere outside the clearing and dug a hole for it near the fire, pounding in sods of earth round its base with their boots. Then they tied the African to it with bits of twine and some cord from the guy ropes from their tents. They put a lot of dry brambles and sticks around his feet then, building the wood up round his legs, to his knees and then higher as the man struggled vainly, his face deformed all over now, appalled in the light from the fire a few yards away.
Hank spoke, his voice screechy with excitement and drink. He still had his flick-knife in his hand. He went up to the man.
‘Before we toast you,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should cut ourselves a live steak or two from the ribs here.’ And he opened the man’s camouflage jacket and made a cut there and then as he spoke, on the man’s flesh, a delicate slash across his lower chest, like a butcher suggesting a joint, so that the blood ran. ‘That’s what you people do, isn’t it? Out in Africa. Bloody savages. Eat your mother live, you would. Wouldn’t you?’
I still thought Hank was playing some brutal game. But this last action of his made me wonder. I knew I�
�d have to try and save the African, whoever he was, if this murderous charade went any further. I took Spinks’s bow from my back and unwound the tape from the two arrows strapped to its belly.
Hank, having cut the man’s flesh open, was a vicious Master of Ceremonies now, a shark who had smelt blood. He stood back, surveying his work, and there was silence in the glade for a moment. Was this all? Or would there be more. Surely there was more fun to be had …
Hank, sensing this silence as a vital cue, started an undulating, mocking dance round the pyre then, his blond hair flopping up and down in the light, the tassels on his Nazi jacket flying. By degrees the others joined him, mostly drunk, pleased to take up the chase again.
And together they all danced round the African, in a savage parody of jive and twist and rock-and-roll – gyrating, throwing their backsides about and clapping their hands in the air above their heads as they chanted bloody slogans and racist obscenities, the graffiti of a thousand condemned playgrounds coming to frenzied life.
But there was still time, I thought. They would calm down. Indeed I noticed one or two of the youths on the outskirts who were not taking part in the dance at all. They were trying to restrain the others.
‘All right, Hank,’ one of these said. ‘Give it over. We’ll have the fuzz here. Let the bugger go.’
But Hank took no notice. He left the circle then and went to the fire a few yards away, where he drew a long burning ember out. I knew that, even if he was only fooling, once this even touched the dry brambles round the African’s feet, the man would go up in flames like a rocket. On the other hand, I thought, if I used the bow, if I shot Hank, they would find the arrow afterwards …
But perhaps I’d have no alternative. I was about twenty-five feet above the pyre, looking down at a slight angle on the African. If Hank came to set him ablaze it would be a fairly easy shot. I should be able to wound him, on the backside or leg, and take the consequences of the arrow being found afterwards.
Hank returned then, the torch in his hand, pushing his way back through the circle of dancers. He flourished the burning stick like a metronome in front of the African’s face for half a minute. Then he brushed the man’s good profile with the red-hot branch, from top to bottom, singeing the hair and flesh.
The African screamed.
And I could stand it no more. Hank had his back to me. I drew the string quickly, aimed for his legs, and loosed the arrow. But in my anger I drew too hard. The arrow went high. It must have transfixed Hank, going right through his chest, so that he fell forward onto the pyre, dropping the burning torch which instantly set the brambles alight at the base of the pyre.
The African was struggling now, seeing a chance of escape, Hank’s body lying half across him as he slipped gradually down, smothering the flames. His friends came for him, trying to drag him away, while another, with a knife, moved behind the African and started to cut him loose from his bonds.
The others had all panicked meanwhile, for the flames had taken hold around the base of the pyre and had begun to spread outwards over the glade, along the fuses of drier grass. The whole place was suddenly empty. And the youth who had been trying to free the African had run as well, leaving his job half-done. But it was enough. The African was suddenly free of the burning post and there was only one man left in the glade who couldn’t run: Hank, still sprawled to one side of the pyre.
The African had been slightly burnt about the feet. But he was still perfectly active. He should have run himself, for the flames were spreading quickly now all over the glade. But instead he stayed a moment, turned and, as a last gesture, pulled Hank’s body right over the blazing pyre, so that it would roast there properly, the black leather jacket and the paint of its gold swastika already burning fiercely. Then the African was gone, running between the gathering sheaths of flame, the little firestorm that was engulfing the tents, the motorcycles, everything that was in the glade.
But soon the flames had risen beneath us too, and caught some of the dry beech leaves on the lower branches of the tree we were hiding in. They began to feed on the leaves, moving towards the other trees in the valley, on the very things that had hidden us happily from the world for the past two months, the basis of our security, our existence.
And there was no way of stopping it. The fire raged upwards through the trees around the glade, so that Clare and I were moving quickly back along the branches and walkways towards our tree house, the wood beginning to crackle and roar as the flames lit up the valley behind us. And suddenly we were like hunted animals in the forest, leaping from branch to branch, running from the holocaust.
Thirteen
Clare and I were back in the great house, hidden in Alice’s tower, next morning: we could see over most of the burnt valley to the east. The fire had destroyed half a dozen of the trees there, round the lake, and must have burnt every remnant of our own life in the place as well – our tree-house, the makeshift furniture, the old nursery-stained copy of Pigling Bland, Spinks’s Good Beer Guide and French letters, along with the ropes and aerial walkways which had been paths out of our house into a green web, a remote world hidden in space, yet where the shapes of branches, the pattern in a particular cluster of leaves, had become familiar to us as if they’d been the garden round our cottage on earth. All this must have been burnt to a cinder by now.
I had only managed to rescue Spinks’s fibreglass bow, and his backpack filled with a few things that wouldn’t burn and could have identified us afterwards – the army binoculars, the gas burner, the metal pots and pans. Of the rest, of all the haphazard bits and pieces which had been vital adjuncts to our life in the woods, there could have been nothing left. And I felt homeless once more, looking out on the ruined valley from the carefully arched Gothic windows in the tower, back in a contrived world, at risk again. Clare was beside me, the two of us crouching down, noses almost on the windowsill. She was sucking her thumb, bereft herself once more, looking out over the valley where there was nothing left of her content, nothing but the central trunks and a few of the larger branches of the great beech trees, blackened, still smoking in the blue summer light. I held her hand as we watched, but it was inert like the hand of a doll. The firemen were still pumping water on the smouldering ruins from the lake and the police were downstairs with Alice again.
We had escaped the flames a few hours earlier, running from the valley up the path from the lake, into the greenhouse and walled kitchen garden, and from there we’d made our way into the house by the back door, which Alice had arranged always to leave open for us in case of just such an emergency.
We met her coming down the oak staircase, half-asleep, alarmed. I told her what had happened and she had sent us at once to hide in the tower while she contacted the fire brigade and the police. And now we waited for her to come back from her interviews with the police downstairs: to hear the worst, perhaps? Had they, for example, found the arrow?
Hank, almost certainly, must have been burnt to the bone. But the arrow was made of aluminium. Besides, others in the circle must have seen the arrow: its impact, if not its flight. Would they remember the angle it had come from? From above? Or had they all been too drunk to remember anything? And what of the African? Had he escaped? Or had the police got him, along with the louts? Was this an end for Clare and me, or another beginning?
We waited. There were pots of raspberry and nut yoghurt in the fridge. But neither of us could eat. Alice’s big pinewood hand loom was in one corner of the room, with a half-completed roll in the weave, a rug it looked like, or the beginnings of one of her Indian bedspreads. Clare walked over to it and gazed at the emerging cloth intently. There was a complex pattern in it, red circles and lozenges on an oatmeal background. Clare touched one of the lozenges. Then she tried to pick the cloth apart there, extract the diamond, undo the weave, and failing this she started to manhandle the shuttles, tearing them out of the loom, so that I had to force her to stop.
And she was angry suddenly, a bitter
fountain of rage, the pent-up frustration at the loss and change of her life coming into her throat with a violent scream, so that I was sure we would be heard downstairs. And I knew I wanted us both to survive, so I gagged her mouth with a hand, and kept it there, cruelly, firmly, for a minute.
Then I heard steps on the stairway outside the tower, and the door opened. It was Alice. Clare and I were down on the floor, as if we’d been two children fighting, struggling. But I could hold her tongue no more. I took my hand away, expecting the awful scream again. But it never came. Instead Clare gazed up at what Alice was cradling in her arms. It was a splendid model boat, several feet long, a fully-rigged three-masted tea clipper, an East Indiaman, the hull a gleaming black with a gold band right round beneath the rails and a scrubbed pine deck with little coils of rope and meticulously detailed brass fittings. It was obviously part of Alice’s expensive Victorian bric-à-brac from the top landing.
Alice saw the tears of rage, the anguish in Clare’s face. ‘Look,’ she said, without looking at her, bending down and setting the boat up on the floor, ‘there are even real tea-chests down here in the hold. You can take them out. And there are a few real sailors too, somewhere.’ Alice played with the ship then, rather than in any way pressing Clare to occupy herself with it. Alice had learnt all about Clare, was as tactful in her approaches to her now as Laura had once been.
Clare didn’t respond at all. But she didn’t scream, though, either. And, of course, I had realised by now that all her language would have gone again in this second change of home. She was mute with this loss of Eden. And we were back again at the beginning, where I’d been with her two months before in the valley: where one couldn’t look at the girl directly, explain anything to her, where she was practically an automaton, a vegetable.