Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  It was hard to know what to do with this sleeping mother who refused to wake up. She looked very peaceful, her long lashes closed, the speck of mascara still visible. Only the dark red ribbons of blood in her black curls hinted at the way her skull might have been smashed against the trunk of the tree and broken open like a beech-nut or an acorn.

  They pulled her coat close and Charles did his best to put the shoe back on her elegantly arched stocking-foot. It was as if her feet had grown while she slept. It was so difficult getting the shoe back on that Charles grew afraid that he would break the bones in Eliza’s feet and eventually he gave up on the task and shoved the shoe into his blazer pocket.

  They cuddled up to Eliza, trying to keep her warm, trying to keep themselves warm – one on each side of her like some sadly sentimental tableau (‘Won’t you wake up, Mother dear?’). Leaves drifted down occasionally. Three or four leaves were already snagged on Eliza’s black curls. Charles stood up and, dog-like, shook leaves off his own head. It was really quite dark now, it was all very well saying follow the light but what if there was no light to follow? When Isobel tried to stand up her legs were so numb that she could hardly balance and fell down again. And she was so hungry that for a dizzy moment she wanted to bite into the bark of the tree. But she would never do that because Eliza used to tell them a story called ‘The Oldest Tree In The Forest’ so that Isobel knew the bark of a tree was really its skin and she knew how painful a bite on your skin could be because Eliza was always biting them. And sometimes it hurt.

  Charles said, ‘We have to find Daddy,’ his voice shrill in the quiet, ‘he’ll come and get Mummy.’ They looked doubtfully at Eliza, reluctant to leave her here all alone in the cold and the dark. Her cheeks were icy to the touch, they felt their own cheeks in comparison. If anything they were even colder. Charles started to gather up leaves and pile them over Eliza’s legs. They remembered the summer at the seaside, burying Eliza’s lower half in sand while she sat in her red halter-neck swimming-costume reading a book, wearing the sunglasses that made her look foreign and glamorous, and stubbing out her cigarettes in the sand turret they’d built around her (You’ve got me prisoner!). For a warm second Isobel could feel the sun on her shoulders and smell the sea. ‘Help me,’ Charles said and she shuffled leaves forward with her feet for Charles to scoop up in handfuls and throw on Eliza.

  Then they kissed her, one on either cheek, in a strange reversal of the bedtime ritual. They left reluctantly, looking back at her several times. When they reached the ditch of leaves they turned round one last time but they couldn’t see Eliza any more, only a pile of dead leaves against a tree.

  To go back to the tartan rug and abandoned picnic and wait for rescue? Or onward to try and find a way out of the wood? Charles said he wished they’d brought the uneaten sandwiches with them. ‘We could scatter the crumbs,’ he said, ‘and find our way back.’ Their only blueprint for survival in these circumstances, it seemed, was fictional. They knew the plot, unfortunately, and any minute expected to find the gingerbread cottage – and then the nightmare would really begin.

  Isobel was sorry now that she’d ever complained about Eliza’s paste-and-cucumber, she wouldn’t be scattering them, she’d be eating them. She was so hungry that she would have eaten a gingerbread tile or a piece of striped candy window-frame, even though she knew the consequences. They were both suddenly very sorry for all the food that they’d ever left on their plates. They would even have eaten the Widow’s tapioca pudding. The big oval glass dish that the Widow made her milk-puddings in rose up before them like a mirage. They could feel the sliminess of the tapioca, taste the puddle of rosehip syrup that the Widow always poured in the middle, like a liquid jewel. Charles searched through his pockets and came up with a stringless conker, a farthing and a black-and-white striped humbug with a good deal of pocket-fluff attached. It was too hard to break so they took it in turns to suck it.

  The wood was full of noises. Occasionally the darkness was shot through by strange sounds – screeches and whistles – that seemed to have no earthly origin. Twigs snapped and crackled and the undergrowth rustled malevolently as if something invisible was stalking them.

  Every direction felt unsafe. An owl swept soundlessly on its flightpath, low over their heads, and Isobel was sure she could feel its claws touching her hair. She threw herself on the ground in a frenzy of panic that left Charles unmoved. ‘It’s just an owl, silly,’ he said, yanking her back up on to her feet. Her heart was ticking very fast as if it was about to go off. ‘It’s not the owls we have to worry about,’ Charles muttered grimly, ‘it’s the wolves,’ and then, remembering that he was supposed to be the man in charge of this woeful expedition, added, ‘Joke, Izzie – forget I said that.’

  Moving on was slightly less terrifying than standing still waiting for something to pounce, so they soldiered on miserably. Isobel found some comfort in the warm grubbiness of Charles’ hand clasped around hers. Charles remembered a snatch of verse, It isn’t very good in the middle of the wood.

  Tree after tree after tree, all the trees in the world were in Boscrambe Wood that night. In the middle of the night when there isn’t any light. Perhaps instead of letting them loose in her big green field, Eliza has chosen to set them free in an endless wood instead. Isobel thought she would have preferred it if she’d just returned them to the baby shop.

  The path turned a corner and forked suddenly. Charles took the farthing out of his pocket and said, ‘Toss for it – heads right, tails left,’ in the manliest way he could muster and Isobel said, ‘Tails,’ in a weak voice. The coin landed wren-side up and the little bird pointed its beak at the left-hand path. As if on cue, the moon – full to bursting – dodged out from behind her cloud cover and hung over the left-hand path for a few brief seconds like a neon sign. ‘Follow the light,’ Charles said decisively.

  The path was becoming overgrown, brambles reached out and plucked at their clothes and tweaked their hair like bird’s claws. It was so dark by now that it took them some time to realize they weren’t really on a path at all any more. A few steps further on and their Start-rite shoes began to be sucked into the ground. Everywhere that they tentatively poked their toes proved wet and boggy. They had heard stories of people being drowned in quicksand, sinking into bogs and they plunged on quickly through thorns to a higher and drier piece of ground.

  ‘Things can’t get any worse,’ Charles said miserably, just before the fog started to advance, wraithlike, towards them. It curled around the trees and grew thicker, like opaque water, wave after wave, engulfing everything in a ghostly white sea of fog. Isobel started to wail, very loudly, and Charles said, ‘Put a sock in it, Izzie. Please.’

  Too weary to go any further, too confused by the fog, they curled up at the foot of a big tree, nestling in between its enormous roots, which arched over the ground like gnarled bony fingers. There were plenty of dead leaves here for a blanket but they remembered Eliza under her leaf cover and pulled their coats tighter. A cold counterpane of fog settled itself around them instead.

  Isobel fell asleep immediately but Charles lay awake waiting for the wolves to start howling.

  Isobel dreamt the strangest dream. She was in a great underground cavern, warm and full of people and noise. By the light of hundreds of candles she could see that the walls and the roof of the cavern were made of gold. At one end of this great hall a man sat on a throne. He was dressed all in green from head to foot and wore a golden band round his forehead. Someone handed her a silver plate piled high with the most delicious food, like nothing she’d ever tasted before. Someone else pressed a crystal goblet into her hand, full of a liquid that tasted of honey and raspberries, only nicer, and no matter how much she drank, the goblet was never empty. The people in the hall began to dance, sedately at first – but then the music grew more frantic and the dancing got wilder and wilder. The man with the golden band around his head appeared suddenly at her shoulder and shouted at her above the din, asking her w
hat her name was and she shouted back, ‘Isobel!’ and immediately the hall – along with the lights and the music and the people – disappeared and she found herself alone in the wood, eating a rotting mushroom from a leaf and drinking ditchwater from an acorn cup.

  She woke up with a jerk, her dream evaporating into the dawn – there was no sign of crystal goblet or silver plate, nor even of rotting mushroom and acorn cup – just the stillness of the forest. Charles was snoring, curled up tidily like a small hibernating animal. The fog had lifted, replaced by a watery dawnlight, nothing had changed, they were still alone in the heart of the wood.

  PRESENT

  LEAVES OF LIGHT

  ‘Ancestral life – the bacteria and the blue-green algae – came a billion years later. The blue-green algae were the first to know how to turn molecules of light into food. The oxygen released by this process changed the atmosphere of the Earth for ever, allowing the creation of life as we know it.

  ‘After the blue-green algae came the mosses, the fungi and the ferns. By the end of the Devonian Era the first trees – genus cordates – were already extinct.

  ‘In the Carboniferous Era there were forests of giant ferns, the first conifers appeared and the coal fields were laid down. 136 million years ago, the flowering and the broad-leaved trees made their first appearance. Most of the trees we know today were in existence by twelve million years ago,’ Miss Thompsett’s voice drones through the classroom. On my right-hand side, Eunice is as alert as a sheepdog as Miss Thompsett writes on the blackboard in her tidy writing –

  CO2 + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O + H2A.

  Miss Thompsett herself – dark green twin-set and box-pleated tartan skirt – is as tidy as her handwriting.

  On my other side, Audrey is hunched up asleep, her arms pillowing her head on her desk. She has shadows as dark as bruises under her eyes and she is dreadfully pale. She’s not really here at all, as if someone had made a really poor facsimile of her and sent it out into the world without telling it how to behave, an incompetent doppelgänger.

  Miss Thompsett bores on … outer layer of the epidermis and into the palisade cells … she’s giving us ‘a brief history of photosynthesis’, and the effect is like a sleeping draught. Her words pour into my ear and then curl around my brain like green fog … chlorophyll, grana, photons …

  Eunice transcribes busily. Everything in Eunice’s exercise book is neatly drawn, highlighted, coloured, labelled and underlined. Her diagrams are more exact than a textbook. On the board, Miss Thompsett is drawing molecules, the molecules are the size of ping-pong balls. The world Miss Thompsett inhabits must be gigantic, her primitive organisms the small size of small towns, her elephants the size of Sirius B.

  My head nods and my brain grows cloudy and soon I’ve joined Audrey in sleep. ‘Right,’ Miss Thompsett says suddenly, so that I wake up with a jerk. ‘Now draw me a cross-section of a leaf to explain photosynthesis.’ I haven’t the faintest idea what a leaf looks like in cross-section (well – green, thin, flat –

  – but I don’t think that was what she wants). I haven’t even got the right textbook.

  Apart from Audrey, everyone else is labouring over their leaves, and Miss Thompsett says, ‘Problem, Isobel?’ in a way that implies there’d better not be and I sigh and shake my head.

  ‘Audrey Baxter!’ Miss Thompsett says loudly and Audrey flinches awake looking like a startled cat. ‘So good of you to join us,’ Miss Thompsett says – but too soon, for Audrey is already out of her chair. ‘I have to go,’ she mumbles and disappears out of the door. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey, Isobel?’ Miss Thompsett asks, a puzzled (though very tidy) frown on her face.

  ‘She’s not herself,’ I say vaguely (but then who is?).

  I bend over my biology textbook with my coloured Lakeland pencils and, to cheer myself up, draw a tree.

  Not any old tree, but a wonderful, mystical tree that comes from somewhere deep inside my imagination. A tree with a gnarled and knotted trunk with bark, coloured in cinnamon and raw umber, and a huge head of leaves, parted down the middle. On the left-hand side, I draw the leaves in every shade possible from the green spectrum – the colours of soft moss and trailing willows, of tangled timothy grass, of apple trees and primeval forests.

  And on the other half of the tree – a bonfire of leaves, leaves flaming up in a conflagration of red-gold, ginger and bronze. Leaf skeletons toasted to the colour of fox-fur, leaves jaundiced to quince and sulphur, dropping like sickly jewels from the charred branches, leaves like topazes and lemons shooting up tongues of fire the colour of rosehips and blood. A leaf like the breast of a robin detaches itself and floats upward on a plume of wood-ash. And all the time that the right-hand side of the tree burns, the left half remains as green and whole as spring.

  Perhaps this is the tree of life or Eve’s knowledge tree? Zeus’ own Dodona oak or the great oak sacred to Thor? Or maybe Ysggadril, the ash, the world tree, that in Norse mythology forms the whole round of the globe – its branches propping up the sky roof above our heads, full of cloud-leaves and star-fruits and its roots beneath the earth springing from the source of all matter. Trees of Life. It goes without saying that Miss Thompsett isn’t impressed by my artwork.

  ‘Finish these diagrams for homework,’ Miss Thompsett orders pleasantly, ‘and if you can find time, read ahead to the next chapter in your textbook.’ Find time? Where might it be located? In space? (But not in the great void, surely?) At the bottom of the deep blue sea? At the centre of the earth? At the end of the rainbow? If we found time would it solve all our problems? ‘If only I had more time,’ Debbie says, ‘then I might get something done.’ But then what would she do?

  Eunice’s cross-section of a leaf: Photons of light speed down sunbeam arrows for exactly 8.3 seconds and splash through the outer layer of the epidermis and into the heart of the palisade cells. The molecules of light race into the chloroplast, into the perfect little green discs of the grana. The light is drawn further and further in, helplessly attracted by the magnesium at the heart of the little chlorophyll molecules. Light and green embrace, dancing a wild jig of excitement for a tiny fraction of time while the little molecule of light gives up its energy. The chlorophyll molecule is so agitated by this encounter that it splits a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The plant releases the oxygen into the air for us to breathe. The hydrogen converts carbon dioxide into sugar which is used to build new plant tissue. ‘Unlike the plant,’ Eunice notes in bold fountain-pen, ‘we cannot synthesize our own molecules of food from light so we must eat plants or animals that feed on plants and thus without photosynthesis we would not be able to exist.’

  As the tide of summer wilderness has died down in the garden, several lost objects have been revealed – an old shoe (they’re everywhere), a tennis ball, Vinny’s second-best spectacles and poor Vinegar Tom, no longer a soft-sock kitten body, but a hard dried-out felt thing, flattened into the ground. It’s not possible to say how he died but Vinny refuses to believe that Mr Rice is entirely innocent of felinicide.

  Vinny is very upset by the young cat’s death, normally she restricts herself to a narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating) so that it’s quite disturbing to see her scarecrow shoulders vibrating with sobs and Charles and I try and placate her with a garden funeral. ‘Cat that is born of cat has but a short time to live on this earth,’ Charles says manfully as Vinny moans open-mouthed by the graveside. Richard Primrose intrudes, suddenly popping out from behind a rhododendron and sniggering, ‘RIP – Rise If Possible, snarf-snarf,’ and I have the satisfaction of seeing Vinny whack him with the spade.

  Mr Rice falls from grace even further when Debbie discovers him on the living-room chaise longue in a compromising position with a battleship-blonde called Shirley, the barmaid at the Tap and Spile on Lythe Road.

  ‘Doggy position too,’ Mr Rice confides smugly to Charles.

  ‘Doggy?’ Charles repeats, one baffled eyebrow cocke
d ready to go off. But now Mr Rice is lying doggo in his room waiting for Debbie to calm down. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ Gordon mumbles helplessly, “fraid you’re in the dog house.’

  ‘Makes a change from you then,’ Mr Rice sneers.

  ‘Look,’ Charles says, pressing something into my hand as I hurry out to school. A handkerchief, slightly grubby, folded in a limp triangle. ‘Hers?’ I query, rather cynically. ‘Yes,’ Charles says, unfolding the triangle, ‘definitely.’ The handkerchief is monogrammed with an elaborate embroidered ‘E’ and as we cannot think of anyone else with that initial, I suppose it must be hers. A faint trace of memory, a barely decipherable twitch along the neurons (a faint click) reminds me of something. Charles presses it against his nose and inhales so hard that he snorts unattractively. ‘Yes,’ he says. I sniff the handkerchief less belligerently. I am expecting tobacco and French perfume (the scent of a grown-up woman) but all I can smell is mothballs. ‘Found it in a drawer,’ Charles says. I’m beginning to suspect that he’s turning the house upside down, looking for Eliza, perhaps he’s already pulling up floorboards and ripping down plaster. But looking for Eliza is a heartbreaking and thankless task. We have done it all our lives, we should know.

  None the less, I take the handkerchief and push it deep into my coat pocket before running the length of Chestnut Avenue to the bus-stop on Sycamore Street.

  The bus makes its stately progression up the High Street while I try hard not to listen to Eunice, sitting next to me on the top deck, wittering on about adenosine triphos-phate. Instead, I smoke a jewelled Sobranie pretending to be sophisticated and concentrate on imagining Malcolm Lovat without his clothes.