“She died, Juniper,” the woman says simply and I nod, grateful that now we both know.
Bear sobs and falls into me, against me, and I crouch down to take him in, the weight of him, right up against me.
I keep my gaze on the woman. Willow. “When?”
“Four years ago. Just before Bear came to you. We hoped the two of you would come back some day. Come home.”
I nod, although it doesn’t feel like home now.
“Your father, Gael—” Willow starts.
“He’s here?” I ask.
“Not right now, but he will be. Any day.”
But I’m not listening. I’ve already turned away to Bear, to the sobbing coil of him.
Other people are appearing behind Willow – women, men, children – and I hear our names run through the crowd, and Mum’s name too, a whispered refrain. I can’t stand it – everyone looking on in pity as Bear sobs beside me.
All I’m thinking suddenly is Hester and Cam and Queenie. How we left them for Mum and she’s been dead this whole time. No one ever sent that message. No one ever bothered to let us know.
If we’d known we would have stayed with Hester. If we’d known we wouldn’t even be here. What have I done, dragging Bear all this way on a false promise? He could have stayed with his forest folk after all.
It was always Mum we most wanted. Mum would get us. She’d understand us, she’d understand everything about us, because she grew up in the city too.
Some of the kids crowd in closer to get a better look and I can feel Bear’s breaths getting faster. Heaving sobs that wrack his entire body. I want to scream at them all to go away. I want to scream that our whole journey was a lie, a sham, because our mum isn’t at the end of it. She’s gone forever and there’s no place left we can find her.
Willow ushers the others away and I gather Bear up in my arms to carry him on my hip, like I always used to, his thin legs gripping round my waist. One of the men appears next to me and puts his arms out. “I’ll take him.” Bear leans in to me, tighter, and I brush the man away.
Willow leads us to a few slate huts at the edge of the settlement. Old, empty ones. She directs Bear and me into the one that looks most intact. She says she’ll come back later to make the beds up, but then she knows to go.
There are two simple wooden bed frames and a little chair, a child’s chair, in the corner, and a few shelves on the walls, but other than that it’s empty. The floor’s mossy and there are spiderwebs in the corners, but after all our days in the Wild we’re used to those things.
I sit down on the chair with Bear on my lap and he cries and cries. I know I should be crying too but I can’t. I’m frozen, numb, like it’s too big a thing to take in.
I stroke Bear’s tangled hair and his cheeks, all chafed from the cold and streaked with muddy tears. He’s mine now to take care of, all mine, like he always really was.
I try and think what Annie Rose would say, the words of comfort she’d reach for, but I can’t think of any words at all. I think of pictures instead. I think of the stars and flowers I painted when Bear first came to us to make him feel at home.
After thinking about them for a while, I prise Bear off me so I can stand up. I go to his rucksack and take things out. His Jungle, and all the things he collected on the way as well. The conkers and acorns and pinecones and every kind of seed we saw. I start to put them on a shelf by one of the beds.
Bear watches for a little while. “What are you doing, Ju?”
“I guess this is our home now. For a while at least, till we decide if we like it. We should make it nice.”
“We can stop walking now?”
“Yeah. We got here. Both of us.”
Bear nods and repeats my words. “Both of us.” He’s still got tears in his eyes but he gets up and takes the animals from me. “It’s OK, Ju. I can do them.”
I watch his little hands working as he arranges the animals on the shelf. The neatness of his formation, the symmetry.
“We never did see a bear, did we?” he says as he finds a spot for his brown bear.
I shrug. “Maybe they were just an urban myth.”
Bear shakes his head. “No, Ju. They’ll just be further north, or hibernating. One day we’ll see them.”
I smile. I put Emily on one of the beds and get out my sketchbook and drawing pencils. Then even though it’s kind of ridiculous for this to be a priority right now, there are these hooks high up near the ceiling of the hut and I fix up a length of string between them so I can hang up our sleeping bags to dry.
There’s a tap at the door. It’s Willow. She’s carrying a couple of steaming bowls.
“Can I come in? I brought soup. The village is preparing a feast for you both, but feasts take time. I figured you two must be hungry now.”
“Thank you.” I stand aside, embarrassed at how quickly we’ve leaped in to make the hut ours. “Where does our dad live?” I ask tentatively.
Willow flushes. “Just a few huts that way.” She pauses. “He’s in with me. We’re together.”
I stare at her and it takes ages to work it out. They’re not just together in the same hut.
“What about your baby’s dad?” Bear asks, confused.
Willow goes even redder and her eyes flick across to me.
“Bear,” I say. “It’s our dad’s baby too. He’s living with Willow now.”
“What about Mum?” Bear trills, indignant.
Willow looks awkward and I feel sorry for her. “It’s been four years, Bear,” I say. “Mum’s been gone for ages now. It doesn’t mean our dad loved her any less.”
Willow looks at me gratefully then turns to the shelves where we’ve started laying out our things. “This doesn’t feel right,” she blurts out. “You should come in with Gael and me for now. It’d be a squeeze, but we could start work on a hut next door to us in the spring, for when the baby’s born, to give us all more room. It isn’t right you being on your own.”
The thought just makes me claustrophobic. We don’t want to join another family. That’s not what we came for.
“We’re used to being on the edge,” I say. Bear looks at me. I know we’re both thinking of our Palm House, right on the edge of the Buffer.
Willow’s shaking her head. “It feels wrong, you being out here.”
“We don’t mind it. We don’t want to be in the way.”
Willow looks sad. “Don’t say that, Juniper. This is your home. Just like it was your mum’s. You know you’re named after this place?”
“The juniper tree? Did my mum like gin or something?”
Willow snorts with laughter. “Sometimes,” she says, giggling. “But Ennerdale itself, in old Norse, the Viking language,” she says, her eyes twinkling, “Ennerdale means Juniper Valley. Marian named you after this place, so it is your home and you do belong. Both of you do.”
She picks up my sketchbook and starts leafing through it. All the things we drew along the way. Bear’s night sky, and my picture of the train carriage, and all the leaves and insects. The people too. Those we left behind: Annie Rose, Etienne, Ms Endo. And the people we met along the way. Hester, Cam, Queenie. Larch, Dani and Manfri. It even felt sad to leave Manfri in the end.
When she reaches Ghost – the swirls of light and dark and the speckles on her jowls where her whiskers come out – Willow looks at me curiously, though all she says is, “These are really good, Juniper.”
Bear snatches the sketchbook off her like he can’t bear her looking at it. Willow flinches. “Don’t you want to ask about your dad?” she asks gently.
I stay silent, unable to express what’s inside me.
“Gael will be so proud of you both.”
“Maybe,” I say, keeping my face all taut.
“He made the same journey, didn’t he?” Willow says. “He’ll know what it feels like.”
I look at her, confused. “He came from out here. It was easy for him.”
Willow shakes her head slowly. “Your d
ad was from your city, Juniper. He came here with your mum.”
“No!” I say. “Mum left the city with someone else. A boy from her school. He was called—”
“Sebastian,” Willow finishes. “Only he never liked that name. He wanted something with more meaning, so he called himself Gael. It means—”
“Wild,” I whisper. It was in that old baby name book, encircled with the same vines and hearts that Marian had. I always wondered why. Our dad picked a new name. He must have chosen it from that book. Maybe Mum helped him.
“Our mum and dad came here together?” I say. “We never knew.”
Willow nods. “Gael hated his family. He hated them with a passion. When he left the city, he was determined never to go back, never to have any contact at all.”
“His parents worked for Portia Steel,” I say. That was why Mum got all the blame for them running away. That was why it was such a big deal, why Abbott never forgave our family. He got it in the neck from Steel because the precious Sebastian had been tempted away from his school. That was why Abbott had it in for me and Bear, from the very beginning.
“Gael worried if his parents found out they had grandchildren in the city, they’d make a claim on you.” Willow’s voice trails off. She looks at Bear, who’s crept up to me and slotted his hand in mine. “You’d like to meet your dad, wouldn’t you, Bear? I know how excited he will be to see you again.”
“If he’s our dad, why didn’t he come for us?” Bear says.
“He thought you were safer where you were, with your grandmother.”
“He should have come anyway,” Bear says. Willow looks to me for support but this time I stay silent.
“You’ll meet him soon,” Willow says in a bright tone. “I promise you will. We don’t have any way of getting word to him, but it was Gael’s plan to be home by winter solstice. The shortest day. It’s only a few days away. Your dad’s not one to break his word.”
After Willow’s gone, I tear the portraits out from my sketchbook and line them up on one of the shelves.
“Can I have the one of Queenie?” Bear asks.
“Of course,” I say, passing it over. “Queenie’s yours.”
Willow’s soup is going cold beside us, but I can’t face it. I sit down on the chair again, exhausted, empty, and Bear climbs back on to my lap. “I’m sorry, Ju.”
“Sorry?” I ask, puzzled.
“About Mum. You needed her more than I did.”
“Why would you say that? I’m thirteen. I’m almost grown up. You’re the one we needed her for.”
“I’ve already got you, Ju.”
He wraps his arms round my waist and places his head against my chest so he’s right up against my heart.
“You’re unique, Bear, you know that? The one and only.”
“No one else in whole wide world?”
“And no one else in the Wild.”
The Wild is the world for us. I don’t think we could ever go back to the city. We’d be savages there now.
The villagers light fires and prepare a feast for us. We taste the beef that Cam raved about, and a huge pink fish from the lake. There are vegetables too – potatoes, kale, cabbages, leeks – in this rich steaming soup. Like our Gloop but thicker and with a load more flavour. The villagers sit round the fire on wooden benches and kids flock around the edges. Bear holds back at first, shy, but the kids don’t give up. They run past him, laughing, enticing him out of the circle to play, and it doesn’t take much before he’s off. Running off with them.
Willow introduces me to people, tells me who everyone is and sometimes a little about their story. Who came here, who was born here, who came back.
It’s hard to take in all the new names and faces but I suppose there will be time for that. We’re certainly not crossing the mountains again in winter.
“Are there ReWilders here?” I ask Willow, looking around the fire at the older villages.
Willow nods. “Only a couple now. We’ve had a few losses lately.”
“At least they got to enjoy it,” I say.
Willow looks at me, confused.
“All this,” I mean. “Nature’s great recovery.” I think of Silvan, still locked in the city.
“You’re right.” Willow pauses. “But it’s a big legacy to have. A big thing to be responsible for. The ReWilders have their demons, all of them.” Her voice is heavy and I look up at her.
“What about you?” I ask, realizing Willow hasn’t told me anything about herself. I’ve told her pretty much everything – about why we left, about the Institute, about May and Ms Endo, and exactly how bad Portia Steel’s gleaming city is now. It felt like I needed to tell someone, that someone here should know all that.
Willow smiles almost apologetically. “My mum was one of them. One of the ReWilders. I was born here.”
“In Ennerdale?”
“In Ennerdale. I’ve spent my whole life in this valley, Juniper.”
Willow talks to me about our dad, as though she has to explain things on his behalf. How things were back then. Why he travels so much. The tick disease has shifted, changed. She says maybe one day soon there will be a way to get more people out here. That’s what our dad’s doing. He’s working with scientists in one of the northern cities to help develop a vaccine.
“With blood transfusions?” I ask sharply.
Willow looks horrified. “No, Juniper. No one here would be involved in anything like that. You’re safe here.”
At one point Willow disappears and I wonder if she’s gone to sleep – she’s been yawning a lot – but she comes back with a pile of papers. “I thought you’d want to see these.”
I flick through them, spellbound. They’re sketches – a tiny child, fast asleep, newborn, and then sitting up, laughing, crawling, walking. It’s a girl and she has tight curls that get looser as she grows.
“Who?” I ask.
“Don’t you recognize yourself?”
“Who drew them, I mean?”
Willow laughs. “I’ll give you a clue. Gael certainly can’t draw like this and you obviously inherited your talent from someone.”
I blush.
“I’ve still got all your mum’s paints and brushes. They’re in our hut. I’ll bring them across to you tomorrow.”
I smile gratefully. “I look happy,” I say, staring into the little girl’s face.
“You were always happy, Juniper.” Willow’s voice is breaking up and my eyes flick across to her.
“You knew me then, didn’t you? That’s why you recognized us.”
Willow nods. “I knew you at once. You and Bear. None of us gave up. We knew one day you’d come home.”
In one of the pictures, there’s a man with dark curly hair and I know him straight away. I’d know him anywhere. It’s like seeing Bear all grown up.
“Dad.” I touch his face and Willow smiles at me.
“Did Mum draw Bear too?” I ask.
Willow nods. “Yes, but only a couple of times. Marian was different by then. She was different after she came back from the city. After she’d taken you there. She regretted that for the rest of her days. Everyone had told her it was best, that it was for your safety. Too many little ones were dying. It was a horrible time to live through.” Willow shivers, but she squeezes my hand.
“Why did she die, Willow?”
“She was just too weak. It had all got too much for her, and then the pregnancy, out here…” Willow pauses and puts her hand on her stomach.
“Why did Dad send Bear to the city?” I ask, unable to resist one final question before I let Willow go to bed.
“For you, Juniper. It was Marian’s last wish that you and Bear would be together. Gael had to honour it, even though it broke his heart all over again.”
The Ennerdale kids are playing this elaborate game of hide-and-seek in the dark. Bear’s standing apart, watching.
“How’s it going, Bear cub?” I ask, walking over.
Bear pulls a face. “I can�
��t remember all their names. There are too many of them.”
“But what are they like?”
“They’re not as smart as Queenie, but I suppose they’re OK,” he says, taking my hand and leading me away from the fire.
“Where are we going?”
“To the lake.”
“It’s too cold!”
“We’ve got our rabbit skins. Please, Ju!” he says, tugging at me. “I want to see it at night.”
I laugh. “OK, Bear. You lead the way.”
There’s this promontory that goes out into the lake, almost like an island. It’s pitch-black, inky, but our night vision is good now and tonight the sky seems more lit up than ever, even though the moon itself is thin – this new crescent of light.
Bear’s picking up stones and throwing them into the water as far out as he can. “I guess we should have known,” he says thoughtfully. “That’s why Mum didn’t come for us.”
“Yeah.”
“The other kids say Dad’s coming any day now.”
“I know.”
Bear pauses. “Why would he go into a city, Ju?”
“He’s working with some scientists, Willow says. To see if there’s a way to bring more people into the Wild.”
Bear looks shocked. “Like Steel was?”
I shake my head. “Nah. Willow promised me. This is different. This is good, Bear. And it means he’s the right person to help us too.”
“Help us?” Bear asks, his nose wrinkled.
“To get Annie Rose. And Etienne, if he wants to come here.”
Bear looks confused. “Etienne and Annie Rose don’t have the resistance.”
“I know that, but I still reckon there has to be a way.” If scientists are right and you can give a person immunity. There’s a load of detail to be worked out, it won’t be easy, but there must be a way. There has to be. They’re our people and we can’t just leave them behind.
Music floats out over the water, and voices too – talking, singing, laughing, just like Hester’s camp. Bear looks over, his face glistening in the moonlight. “Do you think they’re dancing?”
I smile, thinking back to him cavorting round the campfire with Queenie. “Shall we go and see?”
Where the World Turns Wild Page 21