by Max Porter
Any. Just a person. Something human. I tossed a little coin in my head between tree and man and it landed man, so let’s start with that.
His shoulders roll over, right slightly higher as his arms hug the page and he starts to scratch away, with a soft hum-come-whisper of half words and trickling bits of melody. Concentrating. He’s not a rusher.
He scratches his head, sits up and slides the drawing over. Furrowed brow.
Right, let’s look. Yup, I’d say that was a man all right. Nicely done. Now let’s talk our way around him a bit and see what’s what.
The grimace of concentration is gone and Lanny’s face is wide open, curious and listening. His eyes are like spring hornbeam, a very fresh green.
Right, Lanny. Where do your arms come out? You’ve got this bloke’s arms coming out the side of his body, what do you reckon?
We turn sideways and spread our arms, two aeroplanes at the kitchen table. Lanny smiles and nods down to his shoulder and then starts a new pair of arms emerging from the right height, not out the poor bastard’s centre.
Now the head, Lanny. Might I ask you to consider your own self and see if there’s anything between your head and your chest?
He grins and points to his neck, feigning discovery.
We laugh. We’re pleased. We chink drinks and raise a toast to the better-looking image of a man.
Long after he’s gone, after that first lesson, I sit and think.
I try and recreate the noises Lanny makes, his part-song chant:
‘Limmon aah, bitter car, lemmen arr, fennem arr, mennem are, witter kah, fitterkarr, but chakka but chakka but chakka, limmon aah …’
I suppose it’s some TV theme tune or pop song I don’t know. Maybe it’s just Lanny taking things from wherever he’s been listening, soaking up the sounds of this world and spinning out threads of another.
I wait.
Breeze-obedient balls of dust and fluff huddle in the corners of the kitchen.
I remember how grey I felt in the busy days, when the work was selling suddenly. When people wanted things from me all the time. Knew my name. London. And I feel my way back before that, to days of clarity like this. To being a boy.
I remember an elderly lady once showed me my own drawing of a man and asked me to consider where, anatomically, my arms began.
That lady is a long time dead.
English seasons roll out of bed.
LANNY’S MUM
Lanny dances into the room, singing, smelling of the outdoors.
Dooo yoooou know, he says, that clownfish are all born male and when the queen dies one of the men turns into a female and becomes the new queen? So what came first, male or queen?
I’d say queen, funny bean.
I wrap him up in a hug.
What are you up to, Mum?
I don’t answer, and he wanders off, tracing some current of curiosity, following his little hunches or queries back out into the garden.
I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t say, Lanny I’m writing a scene about a man who corners a woman at a party. He whispers into her ear that she is a little bitch. He presses his knee against her crotch.
I am making terrible things up to entertain people. A publisher has paid me a good sum of money to write a novel about abuse and revenge, based on a twelve-page sample I wrote in which a woman poisons a powerful man and throws his body in a furnace.
What a perplexing thing this suddenly seems to be, in the holidays, when my little boy is home from school, when I could be in the garden with him listening to his clownfish facts.
I watch him hanging upside down in the plum tree.
My husband queries the morality of crime fiction. He says I am glamorising things. Glamorising what, he doesn’t yet know, because he hasn’t read the book. I’m only playing devil’s advocate, he says then, as if his interventions have been hugely inspiring or constructive. Devil’s advocate, losing his signal going through a tunnel, asking what’s for his tea. Devil’s advocate, snoring next to me while I sit up reading.
I’m a bad enough mother. I’m a good enough crime fiction writer. Lanny is nothing to do with the sickness of the human spirit I write about. He might see contamination coming and step gracefully aside. He will not become a malevolent or unhappy person because of what was in his mother’s Word documents. This is all in my head. Lanny is all in his own head. Who is judging me? I daren’t consider it.
Does my husband sit on the train and worry that the crushing dullness of Collateralised Loan Obligations might be leaking into Lanny? I doubt it. Does he feel disgusted and ashamed that his phone, which Lanny uses to look up videos of blue whales, is the same phone on which he watches porn, sadly whacking away at himself in the bathroom while I pretend to be dreaming of murder plots? No, he doesn’t. Such burdens are always hers.
LANNY’S DAD
How’s little Lenny? asks Charles, my line manager.
Lanny.
How is he, still mad as a March hare?
I have an urge to punch this man, my twat-of-a-boss, for speaking of my son like this. But where did he get the idea that Lanny was mad? From me. And why does he think he can speak to me this way about my family? Because of me.
I gaze down at London from the twenty-third floor of this heated glass box. It’s as if a gigantic child has vandalised a city-sized circuit board, chucked some bricks in, sprayed it with dirt, started painting it but given up. Trains chuffing in and out, little people hurrying for cover or lunch or greenery. It takes itself so seriously. It’s ludicrous. I love it.
The village we live in is so small. Fewer than fifty redbrick cottages, a pub, a church, the little council cottages like a breakaway settlement, a few bigger houses dotted about. The space between buildings, the space around the buildings, that space is a preposterous thought, considered from here. How can that possibly work, that little cluster of homes surrounded by trees and fields?
My annoyance fades. Lanny would be thrilled to be compared to a March hare, leaping in the long grass, boxing his own reflection. A bringer of strange dreams, skipping about the wide open village.
He’s great thanks, Charles. And yes, bonkers. Totally bonkers. Gets it from his mother.
PETE
We do some lessons outdoors while the weather’s good.
What’s your favourite season, Lanny?
Autumn.
Ah good, mine too.
We trudge away from the village, through the gap in the hedge where Sampson’s miles of stubbly set-aside meet the back end of the school playing field, and the land bends away.
We stop by the Elvis Hair Hawthorn.
This, Lanny, is a significant place.
Why?
This is the first point at which you can no longer be seen. The village is always watching, but past this point you’re beyond their gaze.
Either side of us, woods. Ahead of us, hills. Counties lapping falsely at each other over the stone plates which rough-and-tumbled to form this gentle landscape. Some very old trees round this way. Saints.
We tramp down the steep-walled chalk and moss run, tree roots like sea monsters lining our route, and we discuss the passing of time.
I tell Lanny about the ghost of Ben Hart who runs up and down this track trying to find his beloved. Headless Ben Hart calling out for his girl. I’m only teasing, trying to shit him up a bit, but he replies in all sincerity, Brilliant, I hope we meet him.
We stop and draw the tangled lines of beech foundations, under us stone and bone, above us the burnt sienna canopy, starting to crisp.
This was the way to a hillfort, once.
The boy does well with charcoal. Likes the way it smudges.
Making shadows, he says.
We go back and experiment, printing with skeletal leaves, where insects and time have stripped away we build with ink, we drip and dip and make a decent new mess.
Often as he works Lanny says strange and wonderful things, mumblings, puzzling things for a child to say –
I’m a m
illion cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.
I burst out laughing.
You what? Where did you get that from?
Not sure, he says.
He tilts his head and some half-formed secret thing skips out of his mouth and disappears into the space between us.
Times like this Lanny seems almost possessed.
DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT
He has some rules, like never trust cats, never kiss a badger, always lick a new flavour pesticide, only eat what yields to a twist, and always make sure at the summer fête to get amongst the folk who dress up as Toothwort. Every year in the costumes, in the posture, in the ligaments and juices of his worshippers, he himself must move
thirsty work listening to all this, more talk than ever, he is so thirsty from watching all the adorable decomposition and keeping up with all the grinding lyric-practical nonsense of their days,
He peers into the kitchen of the boy’s house and watches the child drinking milk and he sees the cold liquid pouring into the boy’s belly, trickle puddle pond lake, into the cellular cathedrals of his organs, into his bones. Dead Papa Toothwort is drunk on the hydration and nourishment of the boy. Glorious, he sings, as he swings his way back into the woods, flinging himself in thirty-foot arcs between telegraph poles, dressed as a barn owl with car-tyre arms,
LANNY’S MUM
Robert said I should try again to offer Pete some money.
We argued about it.
He brought it up at a dinner party with Greg and Sally.
Tell me, he said, is it or is it not weird that Mad Pete is giving free art lessons to Lanny?
Don’t call him that, I said, because I think it’s horrid, and I dislike the cruelty Robert performs when he’s drinking, when he is showing off to friends.
I vote totally weird, said Sally.
I vote not in the slightest bit weird, said Greg. He’s Peter Blythe, he was pretty famous back in the day, so you’re getting a bargain. And if they get on well, and he needs the company, go for it.
‘Needs the company’ is exactly why it’s not right. It’s unprofessional, said Sally.
Exactly, says Robert, waving his expensive salad tongs. Who needs the company? Are we lending out our son to stave off Pete’s loneliness? Like conversational meals on wheels for sad old artists?
Oh fuck off, Robert, I said. Is it beyond your shrunken world view to imagine that something nice might exist without money ever needing to change hands?
Glances.
Awkward silence.
Go on Robert, I think to myself, deal with your angry wife and your weird son.
Bloody hell, love. Fine. I just think you should insist on making it a formal thing, that’s all. In my shrunken world view, I think that’s the right thing to do.
Sally, who is a fool, giggled and said, Raw nerve Rob, and Robert and I shared a flickering and bitter conspiratorial glance because he detests being called Rob.
So I knocked on Pete’s door.
Come in, he said.
I won’t, I’m killing someone important in my book. I just popped down to give you this.
And what’s this?
Some money for Lanny’s art lessons.
Oh no, you mustn’t.
We feel we ought to, I said. And I was proud of myself for saying ‘we’, proud of my insincere solidarity with Robert.
I feel you absolutely ought not to, said Pete. As I said before, just buy a golden bird in the spring. I won’t accept payment for something I’m enjoying so much. Your son has brought me joy. He’s got a good eye. I like showing him things.
He loves it, I said. He sits in his room and draws, and sings.
Good, said Pete. I should be paying you!
I walked up the village street, pretending to be on my phone so as not to have to stop and chat to Peggy about the coming moral apocalypse, and I squirmed in the imaginary space between how Robert would react to a comment like that – I should be paying you! – and how I wanted to hear it. I wanted to be charmed by a comment like that. I wanted dinner parties with Pete, not Greg and Sally. Dinners where nobody speaks for a while, where we talk about books we’ve read, and someone falls asleep and it’s not weird or eccentric, it’s just slow and kind, unhurried and accepting. Acceptance is a fascination of mine. I ask at every parent’s evening, Is Lanny accepted? Well-liked? Settling in?
And his teacher says, Lanny? You make him sound like an illegal alien. Lanny’s wonderful, absolutely at ease and well-liked, as if he’s been here forever.
PETE
I hate the smell of metal, Pete.
He mumbles as we sit, dangling legs over a chalky ledge, up in Hatchett Wood. The village is a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of church and pub in the middle. Four hundred people sheltered from the fields, clinging to each other for warmth. Redbrick boxes and the outlying farms, the big house, the timber yard, a handful of scruffy agricultural blemishes on the green patchwork skin of this area. If you looked at the village from above and it was a man, then his hair would be Hatchett Wood. We’d be sitting on top of his brain.
The smell of metal scares me, he says.
At once I am a child again, smelling my palms.
Blood iron, coins, nails and pins.
War men with bullets and rusty hinge grins.
The smell of metal lingers on my lips and on my fingers.
My father would have me count his coppers on a Sunday. Memory swings like a hard dirt rudder then slips up with a boom and a crack and catches the wind.
God, Lanny, I say. I hate the smell of metal too. I despise the smell of metal on my hands.
Why do they call you Mad Pete?
Hah! I dunno mate. I don’t think my covering all the trees up by the cricket pitch with plaster-of-Paris after the Great Storm did me any favours. Anyway, I don’t mind it. Mad Pete. Better than Bad Pete.
Or Sad Pete.
Well yes. Isn’t fair though, given how fuckin’ – excuse my language – given how insane some of the folk in this village are.
Like Jean Coombe.
Exactly! She wears a Santa costume every day of the year and carries a golf club in her wicker basket and I don’t hear anyone calling her Mad Jean.
LANNY’S DAD
I’m awake, thinking of quarterly dividends and Olympic women cyclists. I hear the crunch of gravel, too heavy for a fox, too light for a man. I hop out of bed, pad across the room and peek out of the curtain.
What the hell?
I tiptoe hurriedly across the bedroom, out onto the landing, down the stairs, avoiding the creaky step. I’m not sure why I’m being secretive. I go through the kitchen and out of the open back door.
He’s at the bottom of the driveway turning onto the lawn.
I follow at a safe distance.
He walks to the old oak.
He kneels and presses his ear to it. This whole thing is lit by the security light, and beautiful, like a film set.
Lanny lies down, talking to the base of the tree.
I wander over, heavy footfall and a cough so as not to surprise.
Lanny? Lanny you’re sleepwalking.
He turns to me, green eyes flashing, wide awake.
Oh wow, do I sleepwalk?
What? Well, I don’t know. What the hell are you doing out here?
I’m awake, Dad!
Yes, I realise that now, Lan. I’m wondering what you’re doing out here. I assumed you were sleepwalking. It’s the middle of the night.
I heard the girl in the tree.
What?
There’s a girl living under this tree. She’s lived here for hundreds of years. Her parents were cruel to her so she hid under this tree and she’s never come out.
OK, nutbar. Come on.
He offers no resistance as I scoop him up. He’s freezing cold.
As we crunch back up the drive I tell him, Lanny, you shouldn�
��t wander about in the dark.
Have you ever heard her?
No. I think you’ve imagined it. There’s nobody living in the tree.
I carry him up and lie him down, cover him with his duvet, add another blanket, give him his stuffed polar bear.
