by Paul Kearney
There is a murmur around the fire at her words, like the Amen at the end of a prayer. I stumble out of the firelight after that, baffled, and I am glad to be going but sorry to be leaving, all at the same time.
I look back once, and Queenie is still watching me as I go, standing as still as a stone. I think I see her shake her head.
But there is nothing to do except follow Luca’s back as the moonlight takes back the night, and down the hill we go amid the black and silent trees, and the frozen snow crunches under my feet like burnt toast.
LUCA GOES VERY fast, and it seems that he glides by every grasping briar, and even his footsteps seem quieter than mine. Soon I am gasping, unable to keep up with that easy lope, and I have to beg him to slow down.
He looks at me as I stand panting before him, his face in darkness. ‘Girl, you came to the wrong shop tonight,’ he says.
We continue more slowly, always downhill, and through gaps in the trees I can see the lights of Oxford, but they seem far away, and the wood is dense and still and in the more open spaces the snow is deeper yet, still falling in skeins across the moonlight.
‘My name is Anna,’ I say to him, annoyed. No-one bothered to ask back at the fire, which seems strange, not to mention impolite. And Luca does not reply, but keeps walking, his head turning from side to side, up and down, as alert and searching as a deer.
‘Don’t you want to know where I live?’
‘I knows where you live,’ he says carelessly. I am dumbfounded.
‘How –’
‘I followed you home last time, on the Meadow. I saw you meet up with the big man outside the pub. I watched you all the way, girlie.’
‘My name is Anna!’
‘All right, then. Anna, watch where you put your feet. You make more noise than a lame cow.’
I have no response to that, but am outraged. I would much rather be called a guttersnipe. Luca’s deft sureness in the woods is infuriating. I have always thought of myself as quick and agile, but he makes me feel like a clumsy toddler.
But there is clearly no point in talking, and I do my best to tread more carefully. Luca is following no path but his own, and so quiet is he that more than once I am sure I have lost him in the play of moonlight and shadow and drifting snow amid the trees.
In fact I come to a halt at one point where the wood is especially thick, because it seems he has completely disappeared. I feel a moment of cold panic, but then there is movement ahead, perhaps forty or fifty yards away in the wood, and I start off for it.
Only to be grabbed from behind. I utter a squeak before a hand clamps over my mouth and in my ear a hot breath says, ‘Don’t move.’
It is Luca. He has one arm around my chest and the other is under my nose. It smells of soil and tree-sap and sweat. I can taste the salt of it as the fingers hold firm against my lips.
I struggle for a moment and he gives me a shake, like a terrier with a rat, and his hands tighten on me. ‘Quiet,’ he hisses, and I can feel his mouth make the word against my skin.
We stand like that, locked together. I can feel his breath on my ear. I know now that he is going to stab me. He brought me into the heart of the wood to kill me and dispose of the –
The movement I saw becomes more obvious. Someone or something is picking its way through the trees ahead and downslope of us. I see a dark shape move, brindled with light and shadow. A deer, I think, but it is the wrong shape, too low to the ground. And it has a bulk which is like nothing I have ever seen before. A black lion, a tiger, a panther. No, it is none of these, and yet it is a big animal of some sort, padding quietly through the undergrowth.
I catch a blink of eyes, silver green, reflecting back the moon, and I begin to shake. Luca holds me closer.
The thing veers off, and I swear I can hear it sniffing the ground as it draws away again. More than that; I am sure that at one point it rears up and walks on two feet, like a man, before dropping down again. But that cannot be right.
Luca and I stand stock still for a full ten minutes after it disappears, until my nose is running down his fingers and I have pins and needles from standing so still, and I am desperate to go to the toilet and the cold only makes it worse.
At last Luca releases me, but he takes my shoulders and turns me round, and lays a finger on his lips. I nod, wiping my nose on my sleeve, wishing more than ever that Pie was here to hug, or that father would suddenly appear with a torch and a big revolver – or even that someone big and cheerful like Jack would turn up smoking his pipe, to rescue me again.
But there is only the dark silent wood, and the strange boy whom I know to be a murderer, but who may have just saved me from something unknown and terrible.
‘What was that?’ I say in a tiny whisper.
I see his teeth as he answers. ‘No business o’ yourn, girl. Just be thankful I was with you. Now let’s be off out of here, lessen you wants to sleep under a tree tonight.’
I keep close behind him as we pick our way onwards, and at times I even reach out and seize the back of his coat for fear of losing him when the slivered moon goes behind cloud and the night darkens as though someone has just blown out the wick of a great lamp.
It seems an age before I see the lights of Wytham village through the last of the trees, and we finally come out from under the canopy and are crunching through calf-deep snow in open fields. It is the familiar world again, icy cold, white and stark, but a world I know. And the jagged ice-cold terror I felt in the woods slips back again. Into the half-denied space where what we have seen and heard cannot be true.
We climb a last fence, and are on the road once more, though it is almost lost in the snow, a tunnel between white blasted hedges. My toes are numb in my galoshes and I have fragments of briar and bracken clinging all over me by thorn and hook, and I desperately need to pee. We trudge along until I can bear it no longer and I am shuddering and shivering as I call on Luca to halt.
‘Look away.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t be stupid. Just do as I ask.’
His eyes widen. ‘All right then, but be quick about it.’ And he stares resolutely at the lights of Oxford as I squat shaking in the snow, and the steam rises around my legs, and the sharp smell of it too, and my face is burning as I straighten and rejoin him but I am sure he cannot notice in the darkness.
We walk for what seems a long time, and I am barely aware of the distance, my numb feet setting themselves down one after another like the workings of a clock. At last, though, I stop shaking, and begin to feel more normal again.
‘So Queenie is your mother,’ I say at last to break the silence.
‘Aye.’
‘That stew was very good. What was it?’
‘That were rabbit. Ain’t you never had rabbit before?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Queenie can make rare vittles out of anything. She could make a stew out of rat if she chose.’
‘Ugh. Who would ever eat rat?’
‘Anyone, if they was hungry enough.’
That stumps me a little. We pass the Trout, which is lit up and has a few men propping up the bar inside as though the world were still normal and ordinary.
We walk through Wolvercote like two snow-flecked phantoms. Luca seems not to mind the cold, and he is all the time looking at everything as though expecting something to jump out at us, whereas I have my face half buried in father’s scarf and the cold is searching every corner of my clothes. I am beginning to see how grown-ups can consider snow a tiresome thing.
‘The pretty girl, Jaelle, is she your sister?’ I ask at last, to chop up another of the silences.
‘That she is,’ Luca says patiently.
‘And the others – are they all family?’
‘Of one sort or t’other.’
‘Why are you all living in the woods?’
He waits a while before answering. ‘We’s just passing by.’
‘You were here a month ago, when... when I saw you that n
ight.’
‘Wasn’t a month. Wasn’t a whole moon just yet.’ He spits into the snow. ‘Sometimes we stays longer in one place than in others.’
‘What about Bert? Did he die?’
‘That he did.’
I can think of nothing more to say after that, not for a long while. The snow is blowing in clouds across Port Meadow, and we are not far from where Luca killed the fat man that night and I want to ask more but I am too scared and bewildered.
This boy seems so much older than me, so much in charge of things, so sure of himself. I want to ask him why his eyes lit up under the moon that night, and what happened to the other men on the Meadow, and why his family are camping out in Wytham Wood, but somehow I cannot.
And I keep coming back to the animal in the trees, and every time I think on it my mind gets as frozen as my poor feet, and I really don’t want to know anything else, and in point of fact I am quite sure I know more than is good for me already.
And so I say nothing, but I can’t help but look at Luca as we walk along, side by side now. He is rather handsome, in a pinched sort of way, and his long nose seems too big for his face. He is very thin, and I suppose he appears as though he could very well have eaten rat stew and enjoyed it, and I suddenly feel very slow and stupid beside him, and though he seems so much older, I really think he is not.
These thoughts take me all the way across Port Meadow to the railway line, and as we cross the bridge and the buildings of the city loom up all around us, the thought of the trouble I am in now rises like a sour taste on my tongue, and I am almost as afraid as I was in the woods when Luca held his hand over my mouth and the nameless beast walked past us through the trees.
‘What time is it?’ I ask him as we find ourselves back on Walton Street, with the snow blowing through the yellow cones of gaslight. There are not many people around, and the snow is packed tight on the road, pocked with prints of feet and dug into channels by the wheels of motor cars.
‘Nowhere near the middle o’ the night yet,’ Luca says, sniffing the air as though midnight had a peculiar smell to it.
‘Father will kill me,’ I say.
‘Does your Da know you’re out?’ Luca asks.
‘He said I could have an hour. I think it’s been three. Or four.’
Luca grins. ‘Never heard o’ time being doled out like that, in bare mouthfuls. There ain’t no clocks in the woods neither.’
I am more hungry for time of my own than I am for food, I think. And I am suddenly furious at Pa, who is so miserly with his own time and will not allow me to spend mine.
Is it that I just want to be alone, me and Pie in our own little world? I used to think so. After tonight I am not so sure. The woods, the people I met in them, they have me in a spin. I did not think that Oxford could be exciting, or that people like these even existed outside the pages of books. I almost tell Luca this –
But in the end I only sigh. ‘I can get home myself from here.’
‘Queenie said to see you all the way home, girlie, and that’s what I aim to do.’
‘Have it your own way then,’ I snap. Girlie. Why can’t he use my name? And I kick my way through the snow, arms folded, annoyed, wanting to get back at him.
‘But if my father sees you, I bet he’ll... he’ll call the police or something.’
Luca glides along, and there is something ugly on his face. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘Because you’re a stranger, and you talk funny, and... and your eyes light up at night, that’s why!’ And you killed fat Bert I think, but do not say.
Luca watches my face as I stomp along, until I am uncomfortable with it, and somehow ashamed. As if he knows my thoughts.
‘Well they do – I saw it!’
‘You don’t know what you saw, or half of what you see neither,’ he says with disgust. ‘You ain’t nothing but a spoiled little brat that needs a good kick up the arse.’
‘I’d like to see you try!’ but I am infuriated with myself. I am saying stupid things, and I feel so young beside him, and it makes me angrier still because I don’t want to say I am sorry and yet I feel I should and I am not even sure why.
‘Just you stay out of the woods, you hear me? Midwinter night is coming and they ain’t no place for such as you.’
‘I’ll go where I like. You can’t stop me.’
He throws up his hands in exasperation, a little like father does when he is making a point.
‘You want to wander the Great Wood, then you goes ahead, and see how much I care. You’ll find things in there you don’t want to see, girl, and it’ll be on your head alone. But don’t say that me and mine didn’t treat you square, or try and warn you, that’s all.’
‘What could be in the woods that is so dangerous?’ I sneer. ‘Rabbits? We’re not in Africa. There are no lions and tigers or bears, not in England.’ And I am thinking of the shadow in the trees as I say it, and know how false my words sound. And he knows too.
‘There’s more to this world than what you folk see under gaslight, or through a window. My people, we wanders the length of the country all our lives, and we knows things the rest of you has forgotten, and we see things that ain’t seen no more by such as you. So heed me girl.’
The corner of Moribund Lane is in front of us. We stand under the streetlamp there, white with snow, Oxford shrouded and withdrawn all around us. It feels more dark and cold here than it did in the depths of the wood, and all at once I feel close to tears, and hate myself for it.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I whisper. ‘It’s not home at all.’
Luca stares at me, exasperated. But then his face softens. I see pity in it, and I hate that too. He is right. I am a spoiled brat who knows nothing, and I have always supposed myself very clever, but I can only come out with the wrong things to say, and I want to make it right and I don’t know how.
‘Places ain’t home,’ he says at last. ‘People is. Bricks and chairs is nothing.’
He drops his eyes, and again, he raises his hands the same way Pa does. ‘I leaves you here,’ he says gruffly. ‘I see your house, and there’s light in yon window.’ He reaches out and tugs a piece of dead briar from my scarf, the thorns ripping away one by one. ’Your Da is there, I suppose,’
I look at him. I am quite tall for my age, and he is short for his. I do not have to raise my head by much to kiss him on the cheek, but as I do he darts back as though I meant to bite him.
He rubs his face. ‘What’s all that about?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, and sniff. ‘Tell Queenie her stew is very good. And thank her for it.’
‘You be all right now?’ There is colour in his face. I do believe he is blushing, and I feel as though I have won a tiny victory, but I don’t know why.
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Then that’s that.’
And just like that, he turns and walks away, back up Walton Street. I watch him a while, and I see it when he turns around to look back at me, and I raise a hand. He just stares, then continues on his way.
And all of a sudden I feel more alone than I ever have in my life before, and my feet are like two lumps of clay as I trudge down the street towards the tall old house with the lamplight spilling out of its window into the falling snow.
7
AND OF COURSE the door is locked, and I had a feeling that would be the way of it. So I stand in the snow, and I listen to the voices inside.
Sometimes the lessons we learn take forever to be driven into our heads – like learning French – and sometimes a thing happens which can teach you that lesson in a second, a moment. So I stand and wait outside the door and don’t touch the bell chain. For some reason I feel I am not the same Anna who set off from this same place just a few hours ago. She was a spoiled brat I suppose, just as Luca said.
I still want warm feet, and lamplight, and I desperately need to hug Pie in a snug fresh linen-smelling bed. But it is as though the quiet calm voice which has always been inside of me
has suddenly taken charge, and it is not a strange other kind of voice at all.
It is me, and it has always been there.
The door opens at last, as I knew it would, and the Committee members begin to troop out, the warmth of the house blooming out into the night with them. The meeting went on late, as it always does, and Mr Paparakis goes by with his little moustache, putting his homburg on his head. And Mr Meronides, who wears too much eau de cologne and whose eyebrows meet in the middle. They seem disgruntled and preoccupied, and barely glance at me as I squeeze past them without a word, hidden by the passing overcoats. I am in the hall and almost at the foot of the stairs when I hear father’s voice, sharp as the crack of a whip.
‘Anna!’
I turn around, and father is glaring at me, and his face is blotchy and his eyes are red-rimmed. Even in the meetings, he keeps a tumbler of Scotch at his elbow these days, along with the piles of papers and his pipe and his fountain pen.
Then he is distracted again by someone shaking his hand, and says goodbye to Mrs Gallianikos in quite another tone, and smiles, and claps someone else on the back, and I sit down on the bottom step and pull off the old Monmouth cap and unwind the scarf from my neck, and now that I am in from the cold I can smell the woodsmoke on them, a fine, blue smell that instantly brings back the woods and the firelight. I wonder what it would be like to go to sleep staring up at the stars, and feel the snow land cold on my face with the bright warmth of a campfire beside me and the cold earth below, and the trees in the circle of my eyes overhead, moving with the wind. That would be freedom, to do that.
And for a moment, I understand Queenie and Luca entirely, and think that they and theirs are rather a sensible folk, to want to stay clear of desks and hallways and committees and heaps of papers no-one ever reads.
The door closes, and father is alone in the hallway with me, swaying slightly. His rubs his hand over his eyes, and he seems very pale and I can see the skin of his head shining through his hair, which I never noticed before. I feel sorry for him, and that is a rather horrible thing – to feel sorry for one’s own father.
