The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  That was a surprise. ‘Gigi, a truckie?’ Rachel thought of the articulated lorries she saw from the screens of her operator’s station, endlessly plying the routes of the motorway network, and tried to imagine her urbane great-grandmother with a beer belly and tattoos and a filthy teddy bear tied to the front of her rig – then immediately regretted it because, despite the pain meds, laughing felt like being stabbed with knives.

  ‘Apparently so,’ her mother murmured.

  ‘So she got to travel all over the country but when she had a baby she hung up her air horn and settled right back in Birmingham to be a housewife with Great-Granddad Albert?’

  ‘That’s the way it happened, my love, for most people. When the men came back from the war everybody settled back into their old roles.’

  Except that their son Stephen, Rachel’s grandfather, may have been born in Manchester. It was nothing, a tiny thread out of place in the grand tapestry of her family history, barely worth worrying over, especially from a time so long ago when so many records had been destroyed and so much was confusing. But Rachel couldn’t stop herself from plucking at it, even though she was afraid of what knotted secret might come loose. Heath had said that Oak Mary had been dying when they’d found her, and with only one word on her lips. Stephen. It was tempting to think that a connection was impossible – that it was just a coincidence of a mocking universe. But why was there such a strong connection between her and Mary? Rachel had dreamed Mary’s life – or versions of lives – in vivid detail. And anyway, ‘impossible’ was a fine word to use when you’d fought hand-to-hand with death itself.

  ‘Will you please take me to see her?’

  This seemed to genuinely surprise Olivia. ‘Gigi? You want to visit her now? I don’t think you’re in any kind of state to go anywhere. And it’s not as if you’ve been particularly interested in spending time with her before.’

  ‘There’s an awful lot of old people in this hospital, Mum. I’ve been watching them.’ And not all of them are alive, either. ‘And I just… after what happened to me… oh God this is going to sound so stupid. It’s all so brief, you know? Life? So easily taken away.’

  This had started out simply as an attempt to persuade her mother to give her a lift, but Rachel soon felt the truth of it welling up inside her, filling her throat, and brimming from her eyes. ‘I thought I was going to die, Mum, you know?’ Her voice was thick with tears. ‘I really thought I was going to die.’

  Then her mum was crying too and holding her, and for a moment there were no hidden agendas, no point scoring or hinted accusations – just her mum, holding her, and everything was okay.

  34

  GIGI

  OLIVIA WAS AS GOOD AS HER WORD, AND, ON A drizzling afternoon in September after Rachel had been discharged, took her to see Gigi.

  Her great-grandmother was sitting in her customary wingback chair by the front bay window of the nursing home, looking out over the green sweep of lawn and the driveway that curved up to it, bordered by neat flowerbeds and a line of whitewashed stones. It was a still, dripping Thursday afternoon. The ache in Rachel’s leg wasn’t too bad, and her mum had phoned ahead to be told by the duty nurse that Gigi was having one of her good days.

  She tutted when she turned from the window and saw Rachel limping across the residents’ lounge, crutching one-handed. ‘Oh my dear,’ she said. ‘Look at you! You have been in the wars!’

  Rachel gave a wry smile. ‘You could say that. Hello, Gigi.’ She bent to kiss Gigi’s cheek. Her skin was so feather-light with age that Rachel could barely feel it at all. She was wearing slippers, a simple peach-coloured dress and a pale yellow cardigan embroidered with flowers. Her hair was so fine that it was more of a silver nimbus around her head, but an attempt had been made to style it and there was a suggestion of colour on her cheeks and lips. The nurses had obviously helped her to make an effort because she was having visitors, and it made Rachel feel guilty because if there hadn’t been something she wanted from the old lady she wouldn’t have come.

  Rachel’s mother followed and also planted a dutiful kiss.

  ‘Thank you for bringing her, Olivia,’ said Gigi.

  ‘You’re welcome, Gigi. Are you well?’

  ‘I’m ninety-six years old – of course I’m not well,’ she chuckled. ‘I’m a bloody miracle.’

  The nurse – a permanently smiling young man with an alarming monobrow – brought tea and biscuits. Gigi drank something from a cup and saucer which looked like diluted dishwater, and clucked and tutted as she watched Rachel handle everything one-handed.

  ‘Such a shame about your poor hand,’ she said. ‘It must be awful for you.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Rachel replied. ‘You can get used to anything after a while.’

  There was talk, then, of hospitals and doctors, medicines and maladies, and the fluctuating fortunes of distant family members whose names meant nothing to Rachel, and may not even have still been alive. The Canadian branch of the clan was considered, and plans put forward for Christmas, and Gigi asked after Tom and how work was progressing on their house.

  ‘Oh no!’ Rachel slapped her forehead in what she hoped was a convincing show of surprise, and turned to her mother. ‘I printed out some photos of the house and I’ve left them in your car. Sorry – could you please get them for me?’

  Her mother rolled her eyes in mock despair, and left to get them.

  Rachel pulled her chair a little closer to Gigi and lowered her voice.

  ‘Gigi,’ she said. ‘I’ve really come to ask about Grandpa Stephen. Your son.’

  Her great-grandmother heaved a deep sigh and was silent for so long, gazing out at the grey-gleaming afternoon, that Rachel thought she hadn’t heard her. How much time did they have until her mother returned?

  ‘He was so like your father,’ Gigi said eventually. ‘So handsome. So clever. And he was such a good man. Albert and I couldn’t have wished for a finer boy of our own.’

  ‘Of your own? What do you mean?’

  Gigi’s voice was faint and murmurous, as if she were talking to herself. ‘He made so much noise, that was the thing. Albert and I could hear him clear through the walls from next door, every night, night after night. The bombs scared him, poor little mite. Lord knows how that poor girl coped. “Good lungs on that lad,” Albert would say. “He’ll make a proper opera singer.”’

  There was another long pause while Gigi stared out of the window, though it was obvious that whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t the lawn and the drizzle-glazed driveway. Rachel began to worry that she’d unwittingly triggered an episode of her great-grandmother’s dementia. Was it anything like what Rachel herself saw when she looked into the umbra? The thought of what shades might inhabit a nursing home daunted her, but despite her misgivings she let her Sight slip into the umbra to see what Gigi was looking at.

  The bay window was replaced by a gas fireplace in a small, dark sitting room, made to feel even more enclosed by floral wallpaper and heavy furniture. Rachel found herself sitting on a dining chair at a small table. In an armchair was a young man she didn’t recognise, with Brylcreemed hair and a pencil moustache, frowning at a massive old radiogram set, which lay in pieces on the coffee table before him. Across from him…

  Rachel gasped when she saw how young Gigi looked. She was darning a sock, but still managed to look like a movie star: her hair was dark and lustrous, unlike the wispy cloud of old age that showed the shape of her skull, and even though she had no make-up on the unexpected smoothness of her skin gave her an almost visible glow. She wore no glasses and wasn’t even squinting as she worked. Her eyesight, like everything else, was perfect in youth. She couldn’t have been much older than in her early twenties; the man opposite must be her husband, Rachel’s great-grandfather Albert, who she’d only ever seen in fading black-and-white photographs. Neither of them seemed to have noticed her, intent on their make-do-and-mending.

  Rachel’s confusion deepened as she realised that this wa
sn’t a decaying echo of the nursing home; these weren’t the hollow shades of the dead. This place felt real and alive. Then it hit her: this was a memory. Gigi’s mind was wandering in the past and somehow shaping the umbra around her as she relived her youth. Whatever the umbra was, it was more than simply a parallel existence for everything dead – maybe it was somehow reactive to the memories and yearnings of the souls that inhabited it.

  Then Rachel heard it – through the walls, faint but insistent: the crying of a baby. The infant’s squalling was inescapable, a hoarse, pitiless sound, as if the baby had been screaming for many hours already. It desperately needed feeding, or changing, or both.

  Then Caroline turned to look straight at her and said: ‘Honestly, Bea, I think it’s about time you came back and saw to the little mite, don’t you?’

  Rachel recoiled and her Sight returned to the living world where Caroline was Gigi again, gazing out at the watery daylight through thick spectacles. A moment later Rachel’s mother returned, holding the photographs that Rachel had strategically left in her car. ‘Here you go,’ she said, handing them to her daughter and looking around. ‘Now then, who does one talk to about scaring up another cup of tea?’

  * * *

  NAME:

  Beatrice Rebecca Eaton

  Rachel stared at the name on her tablet.

  BORN:

  22 October 1919

  MARITAL STATUS:

  S

  OCCUPATION:

  labouring; factory worker

  ADDRESS:

  34 Queens Rd, Birmingham, Warwickshire

  OTHERS AT THIS ADDRESS:

  Stephen Arthur Eaton (b. 1942)

  Even though many census records had been destroyed and electoral rolls suspended during the war, the information had been surprisingly easy to find. There were any number of ancestry-tracing websites available, and all of them at some point linked to the archived database of the wartime Identity Card Register. Knowing Caroline’s and Albert’s full names returned their address in 1943, and with that Rachel had checked the records of the houses on either side. She even looked at it using a street view app: a steeply gabled little terraced two-up two-down with a neat front garden and a Neighbourhood Watch sign on the lamppost out front.

  Beatrice’s son was Stephen Arthur Eaton. He’d been born in Manchester. Her grandfather’s name had been Stephen Arthur Howson. She found a record of his death, but no evidence that he’d ever been born.

  ‘What did you do, Gigi?’ Rachel whispered to the screen. ‘What did you and Albert do?’

  35

  THE TALE OF BLACK MEG

  FOR ALMOST A MONTH AFTER THE HOSPITAL SENT Rachel home, she did everything she could to make Tom believe that she’d put the business of Oak Mary behind her. She did her physio exercises, watched television, drank tea, completed what chores she could, and even started hobbling around her old running routes. On the last Sunday in September they ordered an Indian takeaway, and on the Monday morning he left for work with a peck on the cheek which turned into a longer kiss that told her he evidently thought they were on the long, slow road back to normality. She waved him off with her single hand, the very existence of which should have told him that normality was beyond her reach forever, and went inside to call a taxi.

  * * *

  The cab ride to the Cooper’s yard was expensive, but there was no way she was going to beg a lift off anyone; the chance that they might have told Tom was too great. She asked to be dropped off on the empty roadside and then made her halting, stumbling way on her single crutch to the old prefab house through the woodland just as Mary’s deaths had done, but once she got there she realised that her efforts at remaining hidden had been unnecessary – for the moment, at least, the place was deserted.

  Except that it wasn’t entirely deserted, just by the living.

  Rachel remembered the voice that had awoken her before the attack. Wake up, girl! Wake up! She’d thought it had been the remnant of a dream, but now she knew better.

  She let her Sight slip into the umbra and saw that where, in the living world, the prefab was surrounded by nothing more than overgrown grass and weeds, in the umbra it had a neat picket fence, tubs of flowers and a wicker chair out the front. A sandy-haired man in a string vest and baggy trousers was digging in a small vegetable garden behind the house. He was forking over clumps of earth and had a sheen of perspiration on his face, and looked so alive that if she hadn’t already known he was dead it would not have occurred to her for a moment. It was nearly October, harvest time was all but done, and he was putting his vegetable patch to bed for the first frost. Were there even seasons in the umbra? Maybe there were if you wanted them strongly enough.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, in a tiny voice of which she was instantly ashamed, so she went around the side of the prefab to where he was working and said it louder, adding: ‘I can see you, you know.’

  He stuck his fork in the soil and turned to look her up and down. ‘Oh you can, can you? And hear me too, I’ll bet.’

  His manner was more curious than aggressive. He had a narrow face with a big nose and wonky teeth, which might easily have seemed threatening, but his smile was warm and wide and made deep dimples appear in his cheeks.

  ‘I’m Rachel,’ she said, putting out her left hand – she could see it, even though it wasn’t there. ‘I think you might have saved my life. I wanted to say thank you.’

  He eyed the offered hand with amused scepticism. ‘I think you might have the wrong idea about me, miss.’

  ‘Humour me,’ she replied.

  Slowly, he reached for her, and his eyes widened in surprise as their fingers made contact and she shook his hand firmly. His grip was warm, the skin roughened by labour; nothing like the shades at Scoles Farm Asylum and not in the least like that of a ghost.

  ‘Well go to the foot of our stairs!’ he laughed. ‘How’d you pull that trick?’

  ‘Make us a cup of tea and I’ll tell you,’ she said.

  The interior of the prefab was utterly different to what she remembered: the random clutter and mess left by the Coopers’ itinerant workers had been replaced by an immaculately tidy, if spartan, home. There was a newspaper folded on the coffee table and a pipe in an ashtray next to a radiogram like the one she’d seen in Gigi’s memories. He walked through to the kitchen and put a kettle on the hob, which he lit from a pack of Pilot matches.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said, shaking out the match. She could smell it, the pungency of sulphur. ‘You look like you need it.’ He nodded at her crutch and cast. ‘You’ve been in the wars, eh? Oliver,’ he added. ‘Sewell. Sorry, I should have said before. I’m not used to this. Chatting. I don’t get much opportunity to. Not with, you know…’ He stopped, embarrassed.

  ‘The living?’ she finished for him.

  ‘Hmm.’ He took down a battered tin and spooned loose-leaf tea into an old brown teapot. ‘No. Women.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I shouldn’t have been surprised, though,’ he went on. ‘That you could, you know, with the hand. I saw what you did to those others, the ones that came for you and your friend. Handy, that was. ’Scuse the pun.’

  ‘You saw what happened?’

  ‘Yep. Saw it all. I should’ve helped more, sorry.’

  ‘Oh no, no. You helped just enough. Besides, those others? I don’t think you’d have come off well against them somehow.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He reached down a biscuit tin covered in pictures of daisies, removed the lid and offered it to her. ‘Custard cream?’

  She hesitated, wondering what the damage might be, and decided that a single biscuit couldn’t do much harm. ‘Why not? Thanks.’ She took one with her dead hand and transferred it to her living one, thinking, Ghost biscuits!, and had to stifle the urge to laugh. She didn’t want to have to explain it to him; maybe the word ‘ghost’ wasn’t politically correct. Corporeally challenged, she thought, and this time had to disguise her laugh as a coughing fit.

  ‘Are y
ou all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she waved it away, pointing at her throat. ‘Just a crumb. Went down the wrong way.’

  ‘Well don’t choke to death, will you?’ he replied. ‘You’re pretty and all, but I’m not that desperate for company.’ And he actually winked at her.

  ‘Are you… are you flirting with me?’

  ‘I may be dead,’ he said, ‘but I’m not that dead.’ The kettle started to boil, so he filled the pot and put a knitted tea cosy over it, blew the dust out of a decent cup and saucer for her, and found a chipped old mug for himself. Beneath her hand a patch of mould had bloomed on the table’s linoleum surface in reaction to her taking the biscuit, but he didn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘So you know you’re… I mean you don’t mind…’

  Oliver let her flounder for a moment. ‘Well I’m not sure what else you’d call it. How is your friend? Is she all right?’

  It was like cold water to the face. ‘No. No she’s not at all right, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah,’ he nodded sadly. ‘Redcaps got her after all, did they?’

  ‘Uh, Redcaps?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Army slang for military police. Closest thing I can think of to what they are – you know, keeping the troops in line, sticking to curfew. Dragging them back if necessary.’

  ‘You know them?’ She leaned forward eagerly.

  He made a face. ‘I wouldn’t say know them. I don’t think they’ve ever been men, or even alive, really. But I’ve seen them. Seen one, anyway. My one.’

  ‘Your one?’

  ‘We all get one, on the day we pass. You’ll get one too,’ he added, and the matter-of-fact way in which he referred to her death raised gooseflesh on the back of her neck. It briefly crossed her mind to tell him about the being that had worn the face of her father, but it was still too raw. He checked the pot, poured tea for them both, added milk for her and sugar for himself, then sat back and sipped. ‘They’re guides, or maybe guards. For me, it was the eleventh of March 1982. I was sixty-four years old, just like in the song. I know I don’t look it but this is what I always looked like on the inside, so.’ He shrugged. ‘It was in the room next door.’