Into the Trees

by Robert Williams

  Thomas smiled at Raymond and said, ‘Apart from your footprint? In truth, not really, no. But then, who knows? And if it does happen again, I’ve got the tapes and records to refer to. To show the police.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll come back,’ said Raymond.

  ‘People say that,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s an easy thing to say. It doesn’t really mean anything. But to live here . . . I almost wish I knew they were coming back. So I could prepare. The waiting and watching, it’s exhausting.’ He drained his glass of wine. ‘Ann thinks I should see someone. A psychiatrist.’

  Thomas looked at Raymond. ‘Do you think it’s mad? What I’m doing, after what happened? To be worried? To think they might come back?’

  ‘No,’ Raymond said firmly. ‘Not at all. I think you’re doing the right thing. You’re trying to protect your family.’

  Thomas thanked him and they drank on in silence, the darkness coming in quickly, shutting down Abbeystead for the night.

  It became their new arrangement – drinks at the house, or drinks in the back garden if the weather allowed. Thomas didn’t want to leave Ann and the children to go on long walks or sit in the pub, and Raymond seemed happy enough to come to the house. Initially Raymond only visited on Thursday nights, but Thomas liked having him around, another man in the house calmed him a little, made him feel like he had back-up, he was happy to admit, so he invited him more often and Raymond would visit several times a week. At first Raymond was shy around the family. Thomas smiled at how polite he was, even with the children. Harriet would rush over to him and say, ‘Raymond! Are you alright?’ And six foot six Raymond would blush a little, bow his head and say, ‘I’m well Harriet, how are you?’ as reverent as if he was talking to the Queen. Ann encouraged Raymond to come over in time for their evening meal and he would often stay until the family was in bed, until it was just him and Thomas in the back garden finishing their drinks. When they were done Raymond would walk to the bottom of the garden and into the trees and back to his caravan. Thomas would head up to his office to catch up on his security videos and finish the night off with some whisky before going to bed in the early hours. The sleep, even with the whisky in him, was never deep or restful, but at least it wasn’t consciousness. He wasn’t listening to the trees stretch and crack and hearing men shouldering his front door.

  Part Three

  One

  They had been the bane of his life. He dreamt of them gone, and then they were. Keith came back from the pub one night to find the house silent, the wardrobes empty. A letter arrived a week later. Rose was living with another man, they were in love, and he’d agreed to take the girls in also. No return address was included in the letter, no phone number either. Keith decided to drink, but the money from the job was now so slender it almost fit into his wallet, so he bought cheap bottles from the off licence and drank in the house. Keith ventured into town a couple of times in the week after the letter arrived, but had to rush back home when he realised tears were coming and couldn’t be stopped. Slowly, over several tearful drunk days, it dawned on Keith that he was heartbroken. It was a twist in the tale he couldn’t have predicted, he was stunned when he realised – he loved Rose. Once he’d understood and digested this shocking fact, Keith crumbled. He wept for Rose, he dreamt of her. He spent hours imagining her and her new lover, a tall, muscular man, consummating their relationship noisily and at length, in all the ways he and Rose had never done, in every room of the man’s expensive house. He heard ecstatic, guttural noises emerging from Rose, noises that Keith had never provoked in all their years of disappointing, clumsy, half-drunk love-making, when the only aim had been his own feeble climax and blessed sleep for both of them. After torturing himself in this way for days Keith hit the pubs of Etherton, intent on finding a man who looked how he imagined Rose’s new lover to look. In his third pub, when he was suitably drunk, he found him. A man ten years his junior, tall and tanned, his T-shirt clinging to his wide chest, falling away again at the flat stomach. The man was surrounded by a group of friends, all in T-shirts and jeans too. Keith turned back to his drink and wondered when it had become the fashion to head out for a night dressed so casually. He felt disdain for such sloppiness and was sadly aware that he, in his suit and tie, would be considered the one dressed foolishly by these men. Rose’s lover finished telling a story to the gathered men and the group erupted into laughter. Keith slammed his drink down on the bar. They were fucking laughing at him. He approached the man with his fists raised to the ceiling in the manner of an old-time boxer. His intended opponent looked at the portly little drunk in front of him and laughed.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘Come on,’ Keith said. ‘Let’s go, come on.’

  The man looked around at his friends and laughed again. ‘I’m not going to fight you,’ he said, holding his arms out from his side in a gesture of reason and peace.

  At that moment Keith lunged forward clumsily and attempted to punch the man in the stomach. The man stepped aside gracefully and Keith stumbled into a table and fell to the floor. The man bent down, picked him up, put him over his shoulder and carried him out of the pub like a sack of potatoes, Keith’s fists raining down ineffectively on his back, the man’s friends cheering and laughing as they went.

  Keith was carried into the alley at the side of the pub and put down, quite gently.

  ‘We’re not really going to fight, are we?’ the man asked.

  Keith, all fight gone from him, slumped into the wall and slid to his haunches.

  ‘Go home and sleep it off,’ the man said, and turned and walked away.

  ‘You don’t even love her!’ Keith cried out to the disappearing back. ‘You can’t love her like I do!’

  Keith wept in the alley before he pulled himself up and staggered off to find another drink. Settled in the corner of a quiet pub with a fresh pint he considered it all. He had no idea where Rose had gone, and that was the cruellest thing. He’d been cut off. If only he knew where she was he could have gone to her, made his case, begged her to come back. He could have tidied himself up, lost some weight, even got a job. He would wear jeans and a T-shirt if that was what she wanted.

  In a sober moment two days later, when the headache had cleared enough for Keith to think without feeling sick, he considered his options. He wanted Rose back and she wouldn’t consider returning if he didn’t have a job, and whilst in the middle of his drinking and money days, when the cash left his wallet ripe and heavy in his pocket, the thought of having to return to work made him recoil, now that Rose was gone and he knew heartbreak, the thought of working for a living didn’t haunt him like it had in his glory days. He was alone and hopeless, of course he should be crawling to work every day like everyone else; he deserved no less. He was a broken man.

  But it was only when a sober Keith looked in the mirror he realised how broken he was. His skin was Etherton sky grey, and apart from the thin red tributaries that crisscrossed his cheeks, flooding his nose, there was no colour to him at all. His neck was beginning to absorb his chin, the fat was winning and he was being swallowed by it. He was mortified that the hair he’d been so proud of throughout his life, the hair that had seemed so thick, as steadfast as a mountain, was leaving him, seemingly as quickly as Rose had. He woke one morning to find his pillow covered in a thin blanket of hair. For a few seconds he wondered where it could have come from before the obvious, chilling realisation struck him. Still not believing it to be possible he ran a hand over his scalp and pulled it away to find a clutch of lifeless threads dancing between his fingers, as fine and destructible as a spider’s web. The plughole was clogged with it too. His hair wasn’t backing off slowly and kindly, leaving him with a dignified widow’s peak; this was mass evacuation, and suddenly his scalp was showing itself at him from all angles. Keith felt a shot of fear. Was this who he was now? This fat, balding man looking back at him? He took to running the hot tap to steam the mirror so he didn’t have to look at himself w
hen he cleaned his teeth and washed his face. He had enough to contend with.

  Two

  Since Chapman’s first hospital visit Raymond had been required at the farm more and more, and there were no long periods in Etherton, sitting and sleeping in his hated house, spending days dreaming of the dark forest and fells, hiding from his chaotic neighbours. Raymond was never told what illness had brought Chapman down, and his occasional questions were fielded vaguely by Sheila, and whilst Chapman did recover, he never fully regained the strength needed to work a farm. Chapman would rise at the same time as Raymond and they would talk over the work for the day and then Chapman would take on the light duties and after lunch he would remain inside, where Raymond suspected he slept most of the afternoon. It was Sheila who renegotiated Raymond’s wages, under strict guidance from Chapman, Raymond understood, and whilst his hours may have almost doubled, his salary certainly didn’t. Raymond accepted the money offered. He realised he could have earned more working fewer hours in a supermarket, stocking shelves, but he wasn’t in a supermarket with hundreds of customers and colleagues everywhere, joking or not joking, meaning what they said or the opposite. He was outside in Abbeystead, miles away from Etherton. Despite the pitiful salary and Chapman’s permanent black mood, having regular work in Abbeystead made Raymond as happy as he expected he would ever be.

  The house troubled him. It was always there, crawling underneath all his other thoughts, ambushing him when he finally began to fall into sleep. Every few weeks he went back to check the place, to collect what few pieces of post had arrived and clear the junk mail into the bin. He hated having to go, but he hated imagining what might have become of the place in his absence even more. It was always a relief when he turned the corner on to Granville Road to see the house was still standing at least. When he entered the front room he would see the carpets glittered with slug trails, smell the damp and cold air and try not to despair. Most of all he dreaded bumping into his next-door neighbours. A good visit was getting in and out without seeing Keith Sullivan or his girls, arriving back at the caravan without his pulse racing.

  There hadn’t been a visitor to the house in years, but Raymond preferred it that way, he was ashamed of the place and the state he’d allowed it to fall into. But when Thomas had asked him what he was planning for the weekend and Raymond told him he would be visiting the house, Thomas offered to drive him.

  ‘Ann says I need to get out of the house. She’s convinced I’m going mad.’

  Raymond tried to brush the offer away.

  ‘How long does it take on your bike?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘An hour or so,’ Raymond said. ‘The hills slow you down.’

  ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes in the car, twenty-five at most. There and back in an hour or so. We can stop off for a pint on the way back.’

  Raymond was powerless to refuse, but he dreaded to think what Thomas would make of his home. A man who lived like Thomas standing in his house was unimaginable.

  Abbeystead was deep in mist the morning they set off but at the top of Marshaw Fell they broke through into a bright day and the sun stayed with them all the way to Etherton. The strong light and blue sky brought clarity to the ugliness of the place and as they passed through the outskirts of the town Raymond became so embarrassed he squirmed in his seat. With Thomas beside him all the faults and ugliness he usually put to the back of his mind leapt out at him. How had he come to own a house in a town like this? They passed boarded-up shops and pubs, rows of small, red-brick houses, many with sale and to let signs, sticking out like frozen flags. They passed a row of shops along the bottom of a grey precinct, two charity shops, a bookie’s, an off licence and then more boarded-up windows. Graffiti covered the boards, slogans and symbols that meant nothing to Raymond.

  And the people.

  Raymond didn’t judge, he was in no position, but he saw. Everyone in Etherton was either bone-thin or bulging out. It was a hopeless place.

  ‘Not the nicest part of the world,’ Raymond said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Thomas replied. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  Raymond didn’t believe him.

  Raymond directed Thomas from the main road and down a grid of thin streets to Granville Road. He noticed that the street he lived on didn’t look too bad compared to the town they’d just driven through. The houses were neat and well maintained, a couple even had hanging baskets at the front and flowers in the window. ‘I’m eleven, on the left,’ Raymond said and pointed. ‘The scruffy one.’ Thomas drove along the street and pulled up outside Raymond’s house. Both men sat and stared for a few seconds before Raymond unbuckled his seat belt.

  ‘Shall I wait here?’ Thomas asked.

  Raymond sighed. He had wondered about asking Thomas to stay in the car, but now they’d arrived it seemed less urgent to keep the state of his house a secret. ‘You might as well see it,’ he said. ‘But it’s worse on the inside,’ he warned.

  He turned his key in the lock and pushed the door open, sweeping back a scattering of post. He flicked on the light switch and the bulb flashed and popped and the room shot back into darkness. They walked through to the next room and here the light bulb held. The house was as cold as Abbeystead on a winter morning.

  ‘This is the kitchen through here,’ said Raymond as he slid open a door onto a small square space at the back of the room. He peered out of the window and was surprised to see a clean backyard, his dustbin upright.

  Thomas smiled at him. ‘It’s a good space, isn’t it. High ceilings.’

  Raymond shook his head. It was kind of Thomas to find something nice to say but he couldn’t think a single good thought about the house.

  ‘It’s a wreck. Years ago I wanted to sell it, I wanted rid, and they did a survey and found damp in the walls and underneath the floorboards. That would have to be sorted first and there is no central heating. It would cost thousands before you looked at redecorating.’

  ‘It does smell a bit damp,’ Thomas conceded. ‘Central heating would probably help dry it out. Have you thought about applying for a grant? You can get help with that sort of thing sometimes.’

  ‘So much needs doing, I don’t know where to start. And there is no money to even start with it all. I try not to think of the place.’

  ‘Could you cut your losses and sell it as it is? Let the buyer do all the work?’

  Raymond looked around at the house he owned and couldn’t imagine that there was a single person in the world who would give him money for it. And, more depressingly, he would need somewhere to live one day.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said. ‘I doubt the Chapmans are going to keep the farm going forever.’ He trailed off. He’d voiced his biggest fear – that the farm would be run down and retired and he would be out of work and required to leave the caravan. He didn’t know about the finances of the farm, but he knew that over the years Chapman had earned less, and now with Raymond doing most of the work, even less. And Chapman was getting older and had been ill; it wasn’t a situation that would continue forever. To try and shake off the chill that had settled in him Raymond said, ‘I’ll just check upstairs,’ and disappeared up the dark staircase. He glanced in both bedrooms and the bathroom. As he shoved his head through the bathroom door he saw that the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling had bloomed. It was the size of a dartboard now, and the ceiling looked spongy and vulnerable where the stain grew. Raymond closed the door. It was another reason to put the house from his thoughts as much as he could. He returned down the stairs and made sure the back door was locked and gathered the post, shoving the few addressed envelopes into his coat pocket. Raymond and Thomas stepped onto the pavement, the day feeling warmer now they’d been in a cold house. As they drove down the street they passed a paunchy man walking slowly, unsteadily, up the road. If it hadn’t been for his shortness and leather jacket Raymond wouldn’t have recognised him as his neighbour. How he’d aged. Thomas didn’t notice the man at all.

  Threer />
  Keith was relieved to arrive home. After days of drinking he felt unwell and needed to sleep. His back had begun to spasm, locking him in pain, and his left eye felt tender and hot. He couldn’t remember if he’d been in a fight or if his injuries were from a fall and he didn’t care either way; he was bone-tired and only wanted sleep. He crawled up the stairs and dropped onto his messy bed with a heavy groan. As he lay there in the cold sheets Keith was hit by a clear and simple thought: this isn’t living. Feeling sick and tired all the time isn’t how most people experience life. That afternoon and into the night Keith dreamed of the mundane. He dreamt he was sober and ate a good meal. He dreamt he had a job. His job was to sweep clean the forecourt of a garage. When people passed on the street they waved to him and he would raise his brush in response. In the morning, with the hangover holding him firmly in its rusty jaws, Keith remembered the dream and wanted to return there, to escape his poisoned body. He wanted Rose to walk in the room and tell him everything would be alright.

  The next day Keith walked to the nearest shop. He walked slowly, he had to, the pavement rose and fell unexpectedly, his legs dropped and bandied like he was crossing a bouncy castle. The air manhandled him, rushing at his skin. When he finally reached the shop he pushed the door, but he struggled to open it, it felt as heavy as a ship. Once inside Keith attempted to focus, but he was dazed by the brightness of lights, the busyness of the shelves. He’d been staring at trays of fruit for five minutes when an assistant called the manager and the young man arrived and asked Keith if he needed any help. Eventually, with the help of the manager, Keith found his basket full of the items he’d come to the shop to buy – cans of soup, bread, vitamin tablets, apples and bananas, no drink. He was exhausted after the short trip and went straight back to bed.