The Singing Forest

by Judith McCormack

  What?

  Go on.

  She looks at Owen — no doubt he will want an adjournment to find someone more senior. Needless to say, he will not want her.

  But he looks surprised, and then a quick assessment crosses his face, followed by his usual coolness. He hesitates, and then nods.

  Not an adjournment? she says, her voice rising.

  No, he says quietly. We want this over with as soon as possible, before there is much in the way of an outcry, before the various groups can muster their forces, before they start to harangue us from all sides.

  But I’m not prepared, she says, alarmed.

  Win or lose, either way has benefits on this one, says Owen calmly.

  An orphan case.

  This thought should be comforting, but instead, she feels a lurch of anxiety. A war criminal. Doesn’t this matter, doesn’t this count in some legal sense, even some broader sense? Is that her throat thickening?

  Counsel? says the judge sharply.

  Go, Louis hisses again.

  She stands up, her pulse beating in her ears, her hands cold.

  ···

  And? says Nate, back at the office.

  A disaster, she says glumly. I ended up reading his notes.

  ···

  Nate — her ally, her accomplice, her rival. A friend, too, with all the hazards this involves. Although he is a careless friend, an uncertain friend — often kind, but unreliable. Tall, wide-shouldered, he shaves his head, his scalp naked and smooth, his eyes grey-blue slits.

  An egghead, says Louis dryly.

  And a strand running through her work life, a daily presence. He is — they are — a rolling conversation about cases, evidence, strategies. About brief triumphs, smarting losses. About irritable judges, the plights of their clients, about opposing lawyers who attempt to bully or mislead them. Her quick-fire thoughts, his ballast, her restlessness, his calm — these are all parts of this shifting bargain.

  There are only the two of them and Isabel, the office manager — Louis no longer hires articling students. They kept turning into lawyers, he said to her. Like caterpillars into butterflies, only in reverse.

  Not you, of course, he added, a little late.

  A small firm, a splinter of another. But Louis is well-known, even though his practice keeps merging, dividing, dissolving.

  Criminal lawyers, says Nate. Unrepentant loners. Even the ones who do immigration law. And notorious for their bare bones staffing.

  All of them?

  Most of them. Some of them.

  So how did he explain it, the sudden handover in court? he says now.

  A dizzy spell.

  He almost laughs.

  There was certainly something wrong, anyway. He seemed to suddenly dissolve into unrelated parts.

  Nate is trying not to roll his eyes. He is not trying very hard.

  ···

  She is walking home — Louis’s cure — hoping it will clear her head, will chase the case out of her mind even for a few minutes. The litany in her head: if only she had asked for a few minutes to prepare, if only she had been faster on her feet, if only she had paid more attention. She has replies for these things, explanations, qualifications, but her critic is wily — the more she summons up defences, the more insistent the litany becomes. She is simply no match for herself.

  Is it possible they might lose the motion because of her? No, this can’t be right. Presumably the case will speak for itself. She hopes. Fumus boni juris. The smoke of a good right. Something from international law, not applicable here — the first impression of the merits of a case, a measure of its worth. But she is tempted by the idea that rights, that rightness itself might have a scent of their own, a particular odour that can be detected.

  But these thoughts are useless. If she walks home along the waterfront, perhaps they will sail away across the lake, billowing out into nothingness as they go.

  Don’t be such a worrier, her aunt would say.

  Until her last stay in the hospital. Then she said: Now you can worry.

  Yes, she is a worrier, but usually her worries are not like this, not things that nag at her. Often she has luxuriant worries, giddy worries, cottony worries — worries that sustain her, that rouse her, that hold out their soft arms to her. And she falls into them, knowingly, ruefully, but unable to avoid them.

  The day has changed now, no longer hot, the sun stranded behind layers of clouds. The wind is fresh and raw, shuffling through the leaves of the trees along the wharf, heavy with the uncertainty of rain. Out over the water, the sky — marbled in grey and white — is shifting and changing, clouds rolling across it. For a moment, some light breaks through, casting a silvery gleam across the waves of the lake. Then it fades away again as the clouds slowly drift into each other, gradually merging, separating. She inhales deeply, filling her lungs with the cool air, attempting to blow away the sludge in her head.

  Farther on, a man is sitting on a bench, his knees spread out, his shirt straining over his bulging stomach. He tosses bread crusts from a paper bag, and a flock of gulls peck at them, their white heads jerking in and out. One glides in for a landing, graceful, coasting on motionless wings for an impossible length of time.

  Suddenly there is an explosion of beaks and wings, shrill cries — a fight. The birds scatter for a second or two, and then they are back, searching the ground.

  As she nears them, they turn towards her and then begin waddling in her direction, expectant.

  If hope is the thing with feathers, what does that make you?

  They look at her with foolish faces.

  Birds. Dimwits on the ground, maestros in the sky.

  To one side, the lake swells and retreats, leaving strings of seaweed, ruffles of dirty foam on the beach. In the shallows, the tiny pebbles are rust-coloured, green, grey. The smell of a dead fish, half-buried, catches in her nose — she sees it in the sand, a piece of driftwood snagged around it. Behind that, the sense of space — the water and sky stretching out until they disappear in the slate-blue mist of the horizon.

  Ahead, a woman in a cardigan is sitting on a rock, her posture unfinished. She watches a ferry churning towards the quay, trailing streams of white wake, the gulls circling it, dipping and soaring. Lifting her head, she wraps her arms around herself, then looks towards Leah for a moment — her eyes drifting, hungry for something.

  A minute later, she is seized with an impulse. She steps off the boardwalk, kicks off her shoes, pulls off her stockings, then buries her feet in the sand, cold and soft. Now into the water — even colder — up to her ankles, her knees — a dense, blunting cold.

  The breeze catches her hair, the air smells like algae. The shallows around her are dark green, and farther out, the surface of the lake wrinkles and smooths. A hawk soars overhead, climbing the wind currents.

  Her feet are aching, but her head is clearer. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees small shapes flitting through the water. Fish, she thinks with surprise. No bigger than goldfish, dark bodies quivering, shooting forward.

  In a minute, her feet and ankles are numb, and she wades back out of the water, onto the sand, sitting down on the remnants of a bleached log.

  The wind picks up again, and a life preserver bangs on a pole.

  He wants to see you. An hour after the motion, Isabel had been at her door — pale hair, dry skin. A poet from Colombia, someone who helped to put out a literary journal that had been too brash, angering the wrong people in a country prone to violence. Forced to flee, now one of the people in limbo, working in the office until her claim is decided, until she has more means, more possibilities. In spite of her ethereal appearance, she is as practical as soap, scornful in both English and Spanish.

  He wants to see you, she said again, a warning in her voice.

  Louis — sitting back in his chair, his
barrel body turned to one side. Often he seemed to have more grain, more presence, than most people — to occupy an additional area around his physical being. All the better to keep people at a distance, something he did well. What did she know about him, after a year of working there?

  She knew this: he was a reader, more than that, an urgent reader — unable to stop himself, unable to help himself. Books sustained him, fed him. Not the tiny legal library they shared with another firm — his own office shelves were filled with hardcovers, paperbacks, some leather-bound in maroon, slouching between bookends. Usually five or six open at one time, on his desk, on a chair, on the floor, many of them with torn covers, page corners folded over, coffee stains. He had an intense relationship with them, as if they were a group of papery, argumentative lovers.

  Legal philosophy, legal history, even religious law, anything but the statutes or reports that might apply to cases, that might be useful. He seemed to be drugged by words, an endless inflow that soothed something in him, a craving that could only be eased in this way.

  Perhaps all these words have fed his arrogance, though. Last month, a few glasses of wine into a Bar Association dinner, he began holding forth — only half-jokingly — on a taxonomy of stupidity he claimed to be compiling.

  Wilful ignorance, he said. Hubris. Disastrous judgment. Extreme recklessness. Outright idiocy. And some people are more than one type, more than one genus. Include them all, and it adds up to a pile of dolts and nitwits.

  What about smugness? she wanted to say. Her instincts roused, she was immediately on the side of the dolts. A toast to folly and blunder, long may they reign.

  But he has a certain stray warmth as well, something that surfaces unexpectedly — a touch on the shoulder for a client, a rare word of praise for her or Nate. This is oddly disconcerting, particularly since he often becomes more remote afterwards, as if he regretted it. Married to an artist — Carla — often exuberant, someone who teases him gently in front of other people. A little boy as well, a later-in-life child, endearing, wild. Once, when he mentioned him, the look on his face was weak with affection.

  Even when he is critical, though, pointing out her shortcomings, he often sounds eerily kind — a tone that was more in sorrow than anger. Not today, though. Today he was caustic.

  That was quite a performance. What possessed you? You could barely get a word out of your throat. You embarrassed me, you embarrassed the firm. You embarrassed yourself. You were unprepared, not paying attention.

  If there was anything he despised, it was his polar opposite — a lawyer who was stiff, awkward, at a loss for words. Her excuses rushed to mind again, but she could feel his contempt.

  How could I be prepared? she protested. It was last minute.

  Last minute is a fact of life in practice — better get used to it. That is, unless you want to change professions, which you might want to consider.

  What about you? she wanted to say, stung. The man who was stranded mid-sentence. The man who lost his place, lost track of himself for a few minutes, who had to have someone else take over. Was he daring her to raise this? Was this an aggressive way of defending himself? But it seemed too risky to say anything about it, a small minefield.

  Some of it’s true, though, isn’t it? said Nate later. You weren’t paying attention.

  Nate, not a person of cheap sympathies.

  She puts her shoes back on, starts walking again. This time she turns north, across the strip of sand with its plumes of scrub grass, and suddenly — in its city-like way — the lakeshore is gone and she is walking up side streets.

  If Louis was so hard on her today, she must ensure he never finds out about the case where she froze up entirely. Now this, this is a fatal problem for someone who wants to be a trial lawyer. This is a dream-strangler.

  Take long, slow breaths, say the experts, the suppliers of free advice. But this is a useless idea for someone who is unable to breathe at all. Tense and relax your muscles, they say. But this is impossible when her muscles are already seized up. Imagine yourself performing the desired action, and all the details of what you are seeing, hearing, and feeling. You can create your own outcome, you can produce the result you want.

  She finds this last one vaguely surreal. What if the lawyer on the other side is also imagining his desired outcome, the opposite result? Would this create duelling realities, some metaphysical game of Rock, Paper, Scissors?

  No, the cure for this is practice, experience, speaking so often in court it will become almost effortless. After a while, sentences will flow out of her mouth seamlessly, long ribbons of words wrapping around cases. Even Louis must have been nervous as a young lawyer — although this is hard to imagine. But eventually the problem will disappear. Eventually it will go away. Why? Because it has to. Because it must.

  A few more blocks now, and she is home.

  This place. A narrow house, the bottom step to the porch sagging on one side, a stack of newspapers listing precariously on a chair by the door. The window sashes are newly painted, though, a small blow for order in their ongoing feud with decay. And it is a feud, the place is porous, the wood soft with age — water seeping into the basement, drafts hovering around the windowsills. For every advance, a setback.

  The dampness gives it a spongy quality in the summer, turns it into a drunk of a house. But it dries out in the winter, dries out so thoroughly that the curtains, the pillows rustle with static electricity. This is its best moment, though, dusk, when the lines of the house emerge more clearly, some trick of shape and light, a moment of subtle coherence. Perhaps the builder designed it at dusk, not realizing that these lines would retreat in daylight, would retreat again as dark settled in.

  Now she sees Gus has fixed a rain gutter — this morning sagging off the side of the roof. For every setback, an advance.

  As she pushes open the door, the pruney smell of old carpets, mice, and cigarette smoke meets her. Rudy is home, fussing over his cooking, a pork stew of some kind. An uncle, one of three — almost part of the house themselves, the walls, ceilings imbued with their hoarse voices, their bristly faces.

  Rudy, the oldest — beaky, a puff of grey-white hair around the edges of his skull. A dandelion seed head of a man, sour-sweet, someone with low blood pressure who faints easily. He starts to waver and then looks around frantically for a chair, or sits down on the ground abruptly so that he will not fall and crack his skull. This makes it seem as if he is fainting deliberately, as if he lies down first and then faints, but falling is dangerous, and this move is born of long experience. Eat salt, says his doctor, and he does — sardines, olives, pickles — with little result. He is never out for long, but she learned from an early age how to catch a sinking body, or at least break its fall.

  Later, at dinner:

  What’s in this slop? says Malcolm, grimacing after a couple of bites.

  Rudy glares at him.

  You cook, then, he snaps.

  Something he says often.

  I don’t cook, says Malcolm derisively.

  Something he says often.

  Then he shakes his head, a little more emphatically than required. A man who thinks of himself as good-looking — a genuine feat of self-deception. In fact, he looks as if someone had dragged a damp cloth across his features, blurring them.

  But it is true that Rudy is a poor cook, his dinners are barely edible. His sense of taste is fading, and he has begun adding ingredients almost randomly — cayenne, paprika, bay leaves, celery seed. His tongue is going blind, and his dinners show a frantic longing for flavour, a yearning for something elusive that goes with it. The results are peculiar, but he is their only cook and they need him to cook, however lacking it is; Malcolm and Gus are hopeless, and she has no time and even less interest. The appeal of mixing, baking, roasting eludes her — she is puzzled when Nate exclaims over a fiery pepper, a salty cheese.

 
Malcolm pushes his plate away and lights a cigarette, dragging in the smoke, his body visibly relaxing. He is a devoted smoker, he loves it in a way he loves nothing else, smoking is his darling. The routines — shaking out the cigarette, the click and flash of the lighter, the first deep inhalation — have worn furrows in him. Gus smokes as well, but not like this — he smokes doggedly, as if it were a requirement, some sort of obligation. Between the two of them, she grew up in a tobacco haze, the rough smoke familiar, comforting, part of the climate of the house.

  She tries the pork stew now.

  Good, she says, without much conviction.

  Malcolm hoots, and even Gus gulps back a laugh.

  Rudy glares again and throws down his fork, tines bouncing off the table onto the floor.

  Gus makes a mild sound in his throat. He is her soft spot, more than a soft spot, a dough-faced man, burly. A man who still believes T-shirts are undershirts, who leaves glasses around with the dregs of rye and ginger ale. When her six-year-old self ended up in this house, she had been almost feral with shock — her senses enlarged, her body rigid. She had sniffed out a faint trace of gentleness in Gus, something on his breath, on the surface of his skin, and had attached herself to him with an unchildlike ferocity. Rattled at first, he tried to rally — they all tried, even Malcolm went through the motions. Mortified by the man — their brother, her father — who had disappeared a few years earlier, leaving a note and three hundred dollars wrapped in a piece of cloth. I’m sorry, said the note. Only that. I’m sorry.

  Then her mother gone, several years later — crushed inside a heap of twisted metal.

  What else can we do? said Rudy.

  Their brother. Their niece.

  None of our business, said Malcolm.

  It’s only on weekends, said Rudy. The aunt will take her during the week.

  Gus nodded.

  And he’ll come back. He’ll hear somehow. This is only for now. He’ll come back once he hears.

  You have no idea where he is? said the social worker. I don’t believe it for a minute, said her tone.