Red Leaves

by Sita Brahmachari

  Aisha smiled at the exaggerated shivering noises coming from inside the tepee as she smoothed her hands over her head. How could she explain it to Iona? Wearing the hijab made her feel as if she belonged, so that when she prayed she felt right. That first day she’d worn it to school, she and the Somali and other Muslim girls had stood together, chatting about the latest styles of wearing it, and she’d felt solid and strong and part of something beyond herself.

  ‘You better not let Zak see you with your hair down! The way he looks at you!’ Iona called out.

  ‘He doesn’t!’ Aisha giggled.

  She lifted the tepee up the bank so that Iona could get dressed under cover. Iona emerged with the towel draped over her head, hugging herself, rubbing her arms and jumping up and down to keep warm.

  ‘Not that you don’t look pretty enough with your head covered . . . I know I’d look a complete state if I had to wear one of those . . . What’s it like in Somalia?’ Iona asked as she finished dressing.

  ‘You really want to know?’ Aisha had not forgotten the insult that Iona had thrown at her when they’d passed on the street.

  Iona nodded. ‘I’ve never been anywhere else but here and Scotland.’

  ‘I wrote a poem about my country at school, I learned it to read out . . .’

  ‘Go on then . . .’

  Aisha took a deep breath before she began to recite:

  ‘It was beautiful my village before . . .

  Taking water from the river,

  Sapphire sky, turquoise sea, pale sand,

  Green, lush mountains, red earth dust,

  The smell of rose oil everywhere and myrrh incense on sun-warmed skin

  But I don’t know, now . . . what it looks like,

  My country . . .

  My country

  Lives

  Faraway in my memory

  When I was still a child . . .’

  ‘Where’s your home?’ Aisha asked Iona when she didn’t respond.

  Iona sat on the ground and hugged her legs close into her chest to hide the emotion in her face. Then she coughed to clear her throat. ‘Iona’s from Iona! The Scottish isle. Your poem took me back to our little cottage by the sea, building sandcastles. Well, that’s what it was like before the Ogre came and smashed everything up!’

  ‘Who’s the ogre?’ Aisha asked as she came to sit quietly next to Iona.

  ‘My stepdad.’ Iona clasped her elbow tight. ‘But you don’t want to know about any of that.’ She prodded the ground violently with a stick . . . ‘I’m sorry.’

  The sorry came out as little more than a whisper.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘What I said to you when I saw you on the street.’

  Aisha nodded slowly. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, then spotted something out of the corner of her eye and placed a finger to her lips, indicating the little blue-backed bird that was hopping close behind Iona.

  She turned and smiled. ‘Nuthatch! Looks like you!’ she whispered, then held up her hand as if afraid that she had insulted Aisha again. ‘I’m not being funny – Elder thought so too, what with their blue veils and big eyes . . .’ At the sound of Iona’s voice, the bird flew away. ‘Anyway, Elder said they were her favourites . . . no offence meant.’

  ‘None taken!’ Aisha laughed.

  ‘What is it about hair? Loads of religions seem to have all these rules about it.’

  ‘Well, you look like Mr Kalsi now, with your towel-wrap!’ Aisha joked.

  ‘I’d like to see his hair under that turban. He says he’s never cut it, not in his whole life! Then there’s Elder with her dye . . .’

  ‘And what about the way you have your hair!’ Aisha said. ‘Is that religious or cultural?’

  Iona laughed. ‘Never really thought about it.’

  The two girls sat by the stream for a while, as the sunshine slowly thawed out everything from the iced branches to the glistening hard earth.

  ‘So, what’s the story? Why did you run away?’ Iona asked gently.

  Aisha liked Iona’s directness. There was an honesty about her that most people didn’t have. She took a deep breath. She had thought of little else since she’d come into the wood.

  ‘I just couldn’t believe that Liliana would even think of letting me go.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t get you . . . She’s looking for you all over the place. She’s frantic. The woman looks broken-hearted,’ Iona said.

  ‘But she was willing to let me be adopted.’

  ‘Lucky you!’ Iona sighed. ‘You’re wanted by two families.’ She squeezed Aisha’s arm as if trying to lighten her mood.

  ‘I just can’t believe she’s willing to let me go,’ Aisha repeated, biting her lip to stop herself from tearing up. She felt the same raw feeling of rejection now as she had on the day that she’d packed her bags and left.

  ‘It didn’t look like that to me, when I saw her. It might not be what you think? You know that song . . . Iona hummed the tune for a moment until the words came to her . . . ‘If you love someone, set them free?’

  Aisha shook her head.

  ‘Well, it’s about giving people a choice. Maybe that’s what she was doing.’

  Aisha was amazed to hear Iona speaking like this. When she’d first met her, she’d done exactly what she hated others doing to her, and judged the girl. If enough people did that to you and you didn’t have anyone to love, it would harden you up in time. How would I be without Liliana? Now, in the woods, she was seeing another Iona, and what she’d said was true. Maybe it wasn’t as simple as feeling unloved by Liliana. Perhaps this was about accepting that her abo would not be coming back so that she could stop searching for him and step into her own future? The dream of Elder’s amber egg igniting and the ladybird flying free flared in Aisha’s mind. She knew now that she’d come to the wood to say goodbye to her abo once and for all so that she could begin her life without him.

  ‘And what’s going on with Zak? What’s the story there?’ Iona asked.

  Aisha explained what she knew about Zak’s mum being missing and that his parents had split. ‘He was talking in his sleep about moving to a new house. He kept muttering about walls falling down. I’m not sure about the other stuff with the soldier, but he seems to be all caught up in thoughts of war. Maybe he’s trying to understand something about his mum’s work . . . I don’t know – he’s a bit mixed up.’ Aisha shrugged.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Iona laughed. ‘I feel bad for giving him such a hard time now. I just hope he’s looking after my Red.’

  Liliana and Shalini stood around the newly dug grave of Eddie Lowie. Liliana had placed a bunch of brightly coloured chrysanthemums in a vase and now set it on his grave.

  ‘He loved our garden. Used to say to me that it gave him more pleasure than anything else, especially when he couldn’t get out much.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Shalini asked.

  ‘A carpenter. It was a family trade, he said. Went back generations. He seemed proud of it.’

  ‘But he has no family now?’

  ‘Seems not!’ Liliana nodded to the gravestone next to Eddie’s, which was engraved with the name ‘Maisy Lowie’. ‘She was his sister. I think I might have met her once,’ she said, inspecting the other graves and reading out the names. ‘“Peggy Lowie” . . . Looks like she was the mother.’

  Shalini sighed deeply. ‘It makes me so sad when I hear of old people with no one to pass their stories on to, or to sit with them at the end. It doesn’t happen so much back home.’

  ‘I’m going to get a headstone made for him,’ Liliana said. ‘So if anyone ever comes looking, at least they’ll find him here.’ Liliana’s voice wavered.

  ‘You were a good neighbour to him.’ Shalini linked arms with her as they walked away from the churchyard.

  ‘I tried. No news of Zak’s mother then?’

  Shalini shook her head slowly. ‘They’re saying now that Zak might have been taken for political reasons, because of his ma’s wor
k. They’re waiting for someone to come forward, making their demands.’

  The longer time went on, the more hollow and hopeless they felt about everything.

  Liliana looked back at the newly dug grave. ‘The hardest thing would be never to know what’s happened to them. Not to have somewhere to go to remember . . .’

  Even after the search for Aisha had been ramped up because of the national press coverage, and the whole area scoured, there had not been a single sighting of either of the children. The two women walked on in silence over the frozen earth, asking themselves the question that neither of them could bear to speak. When, and in what state, will Zak and Aisha be found?

  ‘This feels like proper winter now,’ Shalini said, shivering as the cold bit through her long woollen coat. Liliana took her friend’s hand and squeezed it comfortingly. Coming together in this crisis was the only way to get through the agony of unknowing.

  Zak retraced his steps to the place in the wood where he and Aisha had last seen Elder. He bent down low, kneeling in the undergrowth, and sure enough, there, through a thicket of brambles, stood a tall stone structure covered in ivy.

  Without thinking what he was doing, he began to trample the ground. When the undergrowth became too thick he hunted around for a fallen branch to beat his way through, thrashing at the earth, his warm breath blasting the chill morning air as he hacked out a passageway. He could feel the thorns entering his skin, but he didn’t care, he had to get to the monument.

  Now he felt the concrete slab beneath his feet, and grabbed at the ivy. It came away in great rope-like vines. He pulled and pulled until finally, underneath, he exposed a stone covered in lichen. Hunting around for a sharper stick, Zak began to scrape away at the moss until indents in the stone revealed themselves and he was able to read the words that must have lain covered for years. The borders of the stone were carved with ivy, acorns and leaves.

  Zak held his breath in disbelief as he read:

  Zak’s stomach lurched as he read. He didn’t know how it had come about, but these names written in stone were no longer just strangers to him. These were people that he felt as if he knew and cared about. Then he remembered his own dismissive words as he’d lashed out at Mr Slater – ‘history is a pile of crap’. Now he knew that he had been chosen by the craftsmen of his new house to uncover this memorial. Reading the names over again, Zak tried to piece together the family tree. So Jonny and Stan were Edwin’s brothers. They had probably all died in the trenches. Poor Albert and Hannah . . . his wife. When had she died and how? Zak wondered if it had been of a broken heart at losing all three of her sons. Only their daughter, Peggy, had survived. Thinking about the photo of Albert and Edwin, and counting forward in time to the war, Zak worked out that Edwin must have been about twenty-five or twenty-six when he died. The young soldier who had led him to the air-raid shelter would have been around that age too . . . Zak thought about the smiling faces in the photograph he’d printed off. In that happy moment Albert could have had no idea that his three sons would be taken from him so young.

  Zak examined the names as he worked it all through in his mind. So the boy who had accompanied him to the shelter was the Edwin in the photograph, who had fought and died in the First World War along with his brothers. And the old man who had come to him in his dream was Eddie, the owner of the jacks, most likely named after his Uncle Edwin. He must have been the little boy who Aisha saw in her dream. Poor Eddie and Maisy – the children who had drawn on the shelter wall – had waited in vain all those nights and days for their dad to come home. But I wonder why Aisha dreamed of Eddie as a little boy and he came to me as an old man.

  Zak could see it all laid out in front of him now, how this family of builders and carpenters who had made the house that he was living in had been . . .

  ‘Felled, all felled.’

  He swung around and there, following him down the path that he’d tunnelled out, was Elder, surrounded by a chaotic gathering of wings.

  ‘Come out, come out! Where have all the words gone? Aisha’s not the only one whose good at poetry, long tracts of verse . . . whole Odysseys were stored here once.’ She knocked at her head in frustration and waved her arms around as if hacking her way through her own tangled memories until she finally caught hold of the thing she was searching for. ‘This one’s for you, Hannah. For all the mothers!’

  ‘Felled, all felled,

  whose airy cages quelled,

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

  All felled, felled, all are felled . . .’

  Zak stared at Elder. Every time he looked at her, she seemed a little more haggard. Before he realized what she was doing, she had grabbed hold of his hand and squeezed it tight between her claw-like fingers.

  ‘You unravelled the vine, but if you lay the stone bare, it’s only fair, you need to care.’

  With her back to the memorial Elder scattered crumbs for the birds and started chanting: ‘Edwin Bainbridge, Jonny Bainbridge, Stan Bainbridge, Albert Bainbridge, Hannah Bainbridge, Peggy Lowie, Peter Lowie, Maisy Lowie, Eddie Lowie.’

  ‘How come you know all their names?’ Zak asked.

  ‘Elder holds them in her head, all the children of Home Wood, every name has a leaf, every leaf has a name, golden for my precious ones, my hearts of gold.’ She held her doll close and rocked her back and forth.

  Elder began digging at the ground in front of the memorial with her bare hands. As she dug, she sang to herself: ‘For every season, turn, turn, turn, time to accept, time to forgive, but never, ever forget.’

  Zak knelt down beside her to help and was shocked to see the hollow look of grief on the old woman’s face.

  ‘You’ll help me say goodbye to my sweet Crystal, won’t you?’ she asked.

  Zak nodded. He felt as if he had no choice, but maybe this was part of what he had come here to do.

  Elder sat back and tried to catch her breath as Zak picked up a stick and continued to dig for her. ‘I found you, Edwin,’ Zak whispered to the memorial, ‘so please, please, please, let Mum come home safe.’

  ‘For every season, turn, turn, turn,’ Elder sang again, crying as she rocked to and fro.

  When Zak had dug the hole deep enough, Elder kissed her doll and pulled the blanket over its face and head. Zak placed a layer of leaves in the bottom of the hole and shuddered. To Elder at least, this really was her goodbye.

  Elder kissed the doll’s head, leaned forward and placed her bundle in the hole.

  ‘Cover her with earth, earth to earth, earth to earth . . .’ Elder chanted as Zak filled the little grave with soil and patted it down. She took off her poppy and laid it on top of the grave. Zak let his white poppy rest on the ground beside Elder’s, then searched for his red poppy, until he remembered that it was the old man Eddie who had pinned that on him in his dream.

  ‘Time to go home now,’ Elder whispered. ‘Time to heal these cuts and grazes.’ She took Zak’s arm and leaned on him heavily as they walked through the wood. She smelt sweeter than before, of mould and . . . roses. Zak looked around to try to find his bearings, but felt completely disorientated. The last time he had been in Elder’s den the place had been shrouded in mist, but he must have walked miles and miles in circles, because it seemed that Elder’s home was just beyond the stream, and only a little way beyond that was the air-raid shelter. From here the old woman must have been able to listen to them chatting and see them every day. So Iona was right – she had been looking over them. The smell of ripe apples wafted towards Zak as he helped Elder inside her den. She walked slowly over to the pram, got out a tube of antiseptic cream and handed it to Zak for his cuts. He thanked her then she felt around her neck, pulled a leather necklace of amber-coloured beads over her head and handed them to Zak. He peered through the clear surface to the treasures trapped inside.

  ‘Untie them.’ She ordered him. He did as he was told and unthreaded the egg-sized beads. Elder took them from him, inspected them and handed them over
one at a time. ‘The leaf family for you, to feel the bonded branches, tides of history, leaves scattered to the wind, the pain of war. Ladybird for Aisha – she knows, she knows. Butterfly for my Iona – not long now till she hatches out. Old pure wood goes way, way back in time, keeps you rooted. I can tell you something – old Elder’s been around a few times.’

  ‘Are you sure these are for us?’ Zak asked her. It felt wrong to take them. They looked as if they might be the only precious things she owned.

  ‘Who else but for my earthstars?’ Elder nodded and eased herself to lying down and closed her eyes.

  ‘Mother earth is cold and tired now, I need to rest.’

  Zak looked around for a blanket and found one in the pram. He lifted it up but discovered that something had been folded inside. He unwrapped it and took out a photograph, a name carved in plasterwork and a map. Zak felt breathless at seeing them again. So he hadn’t imagined any of it.

  ‘Why did you take my stuff?’ he asked sharply.

  Elder’s head rolled to the side and she opened her eyes.

  ‘Elder needs to trust the ones who unravel the vine . . .’ She pointed towards the entrance and Zak walked over to the wreath of dried leaves and began reading the golden names, some freshly written and some faded with time and age. There were many names he did not recognize, but plenty that he did.

  ‘Crystal, Iona, Red, Aisha, Zak, Peggy, Eddie, Maisy, Albert, Edwin, Hannah, Kalsi, Abdi, Amina, Lalu, Liliana, Shalini . . . Jessica, Lucas . . .’ Even Lyndon’s name was there. Zak shuddered as he read the names aloud and Elder’s eyes began to grow heavy.

  ‘How did you know my family’s names?’ Zak demanded.

  ‘Read them in Mrs Kalsi’s newspaper,’ Elder answered without opening her eyes. ‘All my woodland children.’ She pointed her finger in Zak’s direction. ‘Must remember, important to remember.’ She continued chanting names of people he had never heard of, as if it was a mantra to send herself to sleep. ‘Unravel the vine back through time . . . Ah, my sweet Crystal, I won’t be long now, look for my light . . . look for my light.’