Into the Trees

by Robert Williams

  Recovery was slow in coming. In the mornings his body punished him as if he’d been on a session the night before. Sweat flooded from all surfaces of his body. Surely ankles shouldn’t sweat? Keith wondered, but his did, his feet too. A pain would strike his kidneys as if they had been punched and more than once he clutched his stomach as its contents surged, and he had to surge to the toilet. On one trip to the shop he was too far from home when the dreaded kick hit, and it was a shamefaced Keith who hurried stiltedly back to Granville Road. On the third day without drink he was shivering. It was a warm day but Keith’s skin felt as if it was being pricked by hundreds of ice-cold needles. His arms and legs ached until he didn’t know where to put them. On the fourth day he stayed in bed, haunted by feelings of anxiety and dread. He lay there, his heart hammering against the mattress. He wondered if he was dying more than once. Sleep was his only escape and even then nightmares sometimes came and rocked him. It took another few days until he started to recover, until his body and mind calmed, and finally Keith felt able to venture outside again. He was still weak but the air was kinder to him now, it eased over his face, the sun warmed his body. He walked to a park and sat on a bench and watched the dog walkers and the mums and toddlers. He stretched his legs and enjoyed feeling present in the day. Then he was standing on his feet. He saw a short, brown-haired woman on the other side of the park, in a yellow coat, walking quickly, hurriedly, in his direction. When he understood it wasn’t Rose he sat down suddenly. He felt the pain of a mouse in a trap. The downside of sobriety: there was no cushion between himself and reality.

  Over the next few days Keith went from business to business in Etherton, offering himself in whatever capacity they might need him. Receptionists, foremen and managers all took his name and number, saying they would pass on his details, they would be in touch if something came up. They were all friendly enough, polite enough, but his phone didn’t ring. Keith didn’t give up. He understood the world wouldn’t make it easy for him to be a different man to the man he’d been for so many years. In his head, to help him through, he kept up a dialogue with Rose. She was supportive and encouraging, she was proud of him and the changes he was trying to make. It kept him going to think like that. After Keith had tried all the businesses in town he drove to the trading estate behind the cement works. He parked his car on the side of the wide, smooth road and approached the first building. He left his name and number at each of the units he visited, but there was nothing going at any of them. He was about to head home when he saw a van pull out of a warehouse further up the road – a larger building than any other on the estate. ‘EveryFrame’ it said on the side of the van, in smooth bright green letters. Keith had heard about them – they fitted double glazing and built conservatories, they were always in the Etherton Advertiser, winning awards or raising money for local charities. In the accompanying photograph there would be five or six men in EveryFrame T-shirts, smiling and holding up thumbs for the camera. Keith walked to the huge brown shed of a building and headed for a small door on the side of the unit. He opened the door onto a smart reception room where comfy chairs rested neatly around a low table with flowers and magazines arranged on top. He let the door close behind him and a young girl looked up from behind her desk.

  ‘Can I help?’ she asked. She only looked the same age as his eldest daughter, but here she was, smart and smiling, wanting to help.

  ‘I’m seeing if there are any jobs going,’ Keith said, trying to smile back as openly as the girl smiled at him.

  ‘I know they’re after a couple of fitters. They’re going through CVs. If you drop yours off I’ll pass it on to HR.’

  The girl gave Keith another quick smile before picking up her phone, but when she saw Keith hadn’t moved away she stopped dialling.

  ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘I haven’t really got a CV,’ Keith said. ‘I was just hoping to have a chat with someone.’

  ‘They won’t see you without a CV. Can’t you just type one up and print it off?’

  ‘Well, the computer’s not working at the minute,’ Keith said.

  ‘The library,’ the girl said happily. ‘They’ll sort you out. It’ll only cost 10p to print.’

  She smiled her last smile, picked up the phone and dialled.

  Keith left frustrated. On the drive home he imagined what Rose would say. She would tell him to get himself to the library.

  The next morning he woke without a trace of a hangover. It was still an unusual feeling for him and he savoured it. He felt light on his feet, he had an appetite, but there was something else; he felt an energy inside him that hadn’t been there for years. He wanted to move, to get out of the house, to be in the world. He wanted to do something. The strangest feeling of all was not wanting a drink. Not drinking was giving him the same buzz that drinking had years before, when it was still exciting, when it still opened up a world of promise. He strode into town but his optimism quickly floundered at Etherton library. Creating a CV, it turned out, was not a simple matter, particularly for a man who had never used a computer before, had no idea how they worked and wasn’t even sure what a CV was exactly. He managed to book himself some time on a PC, but didn’t have a clue what to do with it, and with people typing away on either side of him, one lady old enough to be his mother, he felt foolish and a fraud. He stood up to leave just as a librarian approached and asked if he needed help. Keith explained what he had come to do and confessed, quietly, that he didn’t know where to start. The librarian told Keith to write down all the jobs he’d had and the responsibilities they entailed and then, under the guise of giving him a lesson in word processing, quickly typed up the notes, correcting the spelling as he went. ‘It’s no masterpiece,’ the librarian said, as the printer chugged out the paper, ‘but it might help.’ Keith left the library with five crisp copies of a CV.

  The next day he drove to the industrial estate and dropped off his CV with the smiling receptionist at EveryFrame. She remembered him and promised to deliver the CV to the correct person. Keith drove home thinking about how helpful everyone had been. He should have stopped drinking years ago, he thought, if this was how people treated a sober, striving man. His luck continued later that night. When he was sorting through his clothes he found over £100 in the pocket of a jacket he hadn’t worn for months. Money that would previously have gone on drink was spent on another food shop. More fruit, a few slices of meat, even some vegetables. When he was leaving the shop with his full bags he passed rows of magazines and a cover brought him to a halt. It was a huge white ship sailing across a flat blue sea. A cruise. Rose had always wanted to go on a cruise but Keith had never been interested. He wanted towns and cities, pubs and clubs, but he could see it now – both of them lying on a ship crossing an ocean. Walking past white buildings in a foreign town under a fierce sun, back to the ship at night, sailing through the warm dark, looking up at stars, holding hands. When he had the money in his pocket he would book that cruise. Before he bought food or clothes he would go to the travel agent’s and book a cruise, then he would find Rose, give her the tickets and she would kiss him. Keith could see it.

  Four

  It was a week after Raymond and Thomas had visited his house when Sheila found him in the shippen. She asked Raymond to come across to the kitchen for a talk when he was done. She held her arms crossed over her chest as she spoke, as if protecting herself against a chill, but it wasn’t cold at all. Raymond went back to his work feeling weak. He’d never been called to the house before for a talk. He couldn’t decide whether to finish the work quickly and get the meeting over with or take his time and delay whatever was coming. After ten minutes of worry he pulled the shippen door closed behind him and walked over to the house. They sat at the kitchen table with Frank nowhere to be seen, but Raymond knew he would be behind one of the closed doors close by, listening. Sheila’s face was drawn, she didn’t offer Raymond a drink. They chatted about the jobs Raymond had planned for the day and then, as if
they were still talking about the broken cattle grid, she was saying she was sure it wasn’t unexpected, that Raymond must have realised, particularly with Frank’s health as it was . . . She stopped. She hit one hand with the other, and, like a diver jumping off a board, threw herself into it.

  ‘We’ve had to sell the farm, Raymond. It’s breaking Frank’s heart.’

  Raymond didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you understand, Raymond?’ Sheila asked. ‘The farm won’t be ours. There won’t be a job.’

  Raymond did understand. Seven days before, he’d spoken to Thomas about his worst fear and now it was being delivered to him.

  ‘Raymond?’ Sheila said, looking for a response.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Raymond asked. He couldn’t imagine Chapman anywhere other than on this farm and in this house.

  ‘We’ll stay here. But we’re selling the land and the cattle to the Whitwells.’

  Raymond looked up. ‘Maybe they’ll need―’ he said, but Sheila was already shaking her head.

  ‘Whatever you think of Frank he did his best for you,’ she said. ‘He tried to get them to take you, but it’s the Whitwells, Raymond.’

  The Whitwells. Raymond understood. Three strong sons and all the equipment a farm could ever need, no matter how big. Chapman wouldn’t have even mentioned Raymond’s name.

  ‘How soon?’ he asked.

  ‘Six months. But you’ll have to deal with the Whitwell lads before then, Raymond. There are things they will want sorting before we hand over, and Frank isn’t up to it.’

  Sheila leant across the table and put her hand on Raymond’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, Raymond, I really am.’

  Raymond walked across the yard, past the shippen and over to his caravan. It was a warm evening, the fields were green, the trees behind his caravan full and strong against the sky. Abbeystead had never looked more at peace but Raymond couldn’t see it. All he could see was a damp house in a dark town, screeching fat girls and a nasty little man.

  Five

  It was close to midnight and Ann was stood at the bottom of the back garden, standing where the trees began. Thomas was in his office, drinking, watching tapes of the empty road, making notes about passing neighbours’ cars. They hadn’t been speaking properly for weeks, months. When they had their first house together he would sometimes join her in the garden and they would stand and look at the night sky together. He would listen to Ann as she pointed out different constellations and planets. Sometimes he wrapped his arms around her and pushed into the back of her, always a sign he wanted to take her to bed, but that wasn’t a bad thing. There was even talk of them buying a telescope for a while, a good one, with different lenses and a tripod.

  Ann’s fascination with space had begun when she was a child. She was born at just the right time; she was eleven years old when man landed on the moon. Her parents sent her to bed at the usual time but promised to wake her in time to see the landing. She followed her dad downstairs after midnight, dressed in her pyjamas, anticipation quickly replacing her tiredness. She was so excited she was weak; her legs were fizzing, like they could barely support her. She held the banister firmly on her way down the stairs, descending as carefully as she could; she didn’t want to fall and die moments before man landed on the moon, that would be a terrible thing to happen. The Tattersalls, their next-door neighbours, had been invited and were sat on the settee where Ann usually sat, so she crawled between her dad’s legs and rested her back against the foot of his seat and stared at the television.

  ‘Say hello to Mr and Mrs Tattersall, Ann,’ her mum instructed her.

  ‘Hello,’ Ann said, glancing their way for a tiny second before returning her unblinking gaze to the television.

  ‘She’s not interested in us tonight, Mrs Stead,’ said Mr Tattersall. ‘Man is about to land on the moon!’ He said the words with great exaggeration and winked at Ann, who was staring at the screen as if her neck was fixed forward with rivets.

  *

  None of it disappointed Ann, not one second. From the sheer blackness of space to the slow-moving man bounding about in his big white suit, it was exactly as she imagined it would be. ‘Man on the moon,’ she kept saying in her head, ‘man is on the moon,’ as if repeating the words would help to make the image in front of her understandable somehow. Even now when she looked up at a full white moon she struggled to accept that man had walked there, actually stepped on that rock up there in space. Despite his best intentions Thomas had never really shared her fascination and he eventually stopped joining her in the garden at night. Thomas, Ann discovered, was rooted to what was in front of him – trees, fields and hills impressed him. ‘Look at that,’ he would say as they drove past Parlick, covered in white frost. ‘Spectacular,’ he would say at the sight of Coolam Snape being attacked by horizontal rain. Ann wanted to shake him. Abbeystead was just a valley, there were thousands like it and a brief geography lesson could tell you how and when it was formed, whilst up above, if you could be bothered to look, hung a universe. That was exciting to Ann, not a million dark trees gathered together on a wet hillside in the north of England. Ann had read that if you travelled at the speed of light it would take fourteen billion years to cross the universe. And all of that was just above them, right above their heads, but Thomas never looked up. Ann had tried to spark Thomas’s interest. She’d told him the sun they were looking at in the middle of the day was a star so big it could contain a million earth-sized planets, and the sun wasn’t even a big star, there were bigger, much bigger. Thomas had nodded and said, ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ but she knew he gave it no real thought, that he didn’t find it amazing at all really, that he preferred the cold hard reliability of a north-facing fell.

  The night was the one thing about Abbeystead that Ann truly loved. With the nearest city forty miles away there was no light pollution and the night skies could be spectacular. But not tonight. There was heavy cloud cover over the valley and no stars broke through. All around her was black. The lights in the house were off and from the bottom of the garden Ann couldn’t see the house at all. She stared so long she began to doubt it actually stood there. She began to shiver. Everything gone; the house, Thomas and the children. The shivering didn’t stop. If everything and everyone was gone, there would be nothing left for her to do but turn and walk into the trees.

  Six

  Keith was taken to an upstairs room by the smiling girl from reception. He was told to help himself to coffee and biscuits, that his interviewer would be along shortly. Keith didn’t want anything to eat or drink; he was nervous and sweaty. He’d walked to the interview thinking the exercise would help calm his nerves, but the walk took longer than estimated and he’d ended up rushing and was now hot, sticky and anxious. Keith was surprised at how nervous he was; he was usually blasé about this type of thing. Usually, once he’d got his foot in the door, he was confident about charming people into giving him a chance. This time though he needed the job. He wasn’t at the interview to placate Rose, he didn’t have any of the money she earned to support him if it didn’t go well. And most importantly he needed the job to show Rose how he’d changed when he did, finally, see her again. Keith looked around. The room didn’t help with his nerves. He was used to chatting to a man in overalls in a pokey office at the back of a factory, at the side of a warehouse, a radio playing, a calendar of girls on the wall. This place was something else. A thick blue carpet, a large wooden desk, no invoices spilling out of broken files, no stained cups cluttering the place up. On the wall behind the desk hung framed awards and certificates. Keith wandered over to the huge glass window in the far wall and looked down. Men were working away down there, each one of them in EveryFrame overalls, a big white tick on their back. Some were loading up vans with frames, others measuring and cutting glass. Everyone down there busy. Something wasn’t right about the scene and Keith couldn’t understand what. He only realised when one man called out to another at the far side of the warehouse and the man turned
to reply: there was no radio. Whenever Keith had worked in a place like this there had always been a radio blasting out, distorting, sometimes more than one, the songs fighting each other in the air above the workers. What kind of place doesn’t have a radio? Keith wondered.

  ‘Busy down there, isn’t it,’ a voice from behind him said. Keith spun round to see a young woman in a black suit holding a pile of papers. A pair of glasses rested on top of her forehead, pushing back her full dark hair. She was already tall but a steep pair of heels set her even taller. She was young and beautiful and Keith felt short, fat and bald. He walked over to the woman and they shook hands.

  Keith said, ‘Busy, yes, looks like you’re doing well.’

  ‘That’s why we’re hiring.’

  The woman slipped behind the desk and told Keith to have a seat.

  ‘I’m Kerry Pearson, head of HR. I have your CV here,’ she patted the paper on the desk in front of her. Keith smiled. He was proud of his CV.

  ‘Before we get into the interview I want to ask about your past experience. You’ve had lots of different positions.’

  Keith smiled again and said, ‘I’ve seen it all.’

  ‘But you’ve never stayed in one place for long.’

  ‘When I was younger I liked to get out and about, see what I was missing elsewhere. I wanted to see it all and I moved from job to job. But I’m looking for something more stable now.’ He laughed a small laugh.