The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Hannah didn’t say anything.

  ‘I should have done more to dissuade him.’

  She sighed. ‘Of course you’re not in trouble. And thank you for saying something. This is about Seb, not you. This was his decision.’

  On they plodded, and after a minute Adrien cleared his throat. ‘Can I help you carry some of those fruits you’ve been gathering? It could free you up to pick some more.’

  ‘I don’t need any more, do I? I only need enough for myself, now.’

  ‘Umm . . . Hannah, look, if it means anything . . . I think you’re the best cook I’ve ever met. I didn’t think anyone could make vegetables taste as good as you do.’

  She scowled. ‘Is that a compliment or a concession?’

  Adrien winced. ‘Just try to remember that what Seb did last night wasn’t about diet, or principle, or anything of that sort. Seb’s a boy and Hiroko’s a girl. It’s what happens.’

  ‘He’s only just met her. You’ve only just met her, and both of you are in awe of her.’

  ‘I’m not in awe of her.’

  ‘You are. All because she knows how to kill things. As if it’s difficult to kill things. You don’t even know the first thing about her.’

  ‘She said . . . she said she’d learned some things from park rangers. And that her dad was an asshole.’ Adrien scratched his head. ‘That’s a start. Look . . . she seems like an alright kid, to me. And believe me I’ve seen my share of horrid ones. Isn’t it good for Seb to have someone his own age to talk to?’

  But he could see that it was too soon to try to persuade Hannah of anything. She looked crumpled by what had happened, and he would have preferred her to be raging, even at him. For his own part he did not know what it must be like to see a dearly held principle rejected by a child. He had never even managed to keep a New Year’s Resolution, let alone a decision about ethics. He was about to try again to cheer her up when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something dart through the undergrowth.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hannah, when he stopped dead still and stared after it.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he whispered back.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘A . . . a something.’

  ‘What do you mean? I didn’t see anything. And I hope you’re not going to call Hiroko back here to try and catch it . . .’

  Adrien shook his head, only half listening. Nothing moved in the undergrowth, save for the slow nodding of a few pillars of foxgloves. Yet he was sure that whatever he’d seen was crouched there in the tangles, observing.

  ‘What is it, Adrien?’

  He took a step towards it and at once it fled from him. It hopped up and sprang along the forest floor, running very fast. Weeds obscured it, thistles and ground ivy, but he saw enough to know it moved on two legs, was about a foot tall and as skinny as a grasshopper. He lost sight of it in the middle distance, and his eyes scanned the forest for one last glimpse. Then, instead, he saw the thing it had been running towards.

  It was a huge tree, standing on the edge of vision. Just another tree, perhaps, but grand and dark and as bare as midwinter. It had only two lower branches, which grew horizontal like the arms of a chair. Its other branches fanned out higher up, as leafless as the rest of the plant. Despite its distance, its bulk seemed to superimpose itself on the surrounding forest. To look at it for long made Adrien’s eyes strain, as if it were in the foreground and the background at the same time.

  ‘Adrien?’ asked Hannah. ‘What’s going on? You’re white as a sheet.’

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ He pointed a shaky finger.

  ‘See what?’

  He turned to Hannah and tried to find the words to describe it, then could not and simply pointed all the harder at the giant tree and whatever creature had rushed towards it. Yet when he looked again, both had vanished. It was as if neither had ever been there.

  Hannah laid a hand on his arm. ‘You look sick.’

  ‘You . . . you didn’t see that, did you, Hannah? You didn’t see it at all.’

  ‘I saw . . . maybe I saw the undergrowth shaking. I might have seen a rabbit, or something like that. It was hard to tell.’

  Adrien shook his head. ‘It definitely wasn’t a rabbit. It was a . . . a . . . it was running towards a . . .’

  ‘Towards what, Adrien?’

  ‘A tree,’ he mumbled, after a minute, confused and embarrassed. ‘I suppose it was nothing. Let’s go and catch up with the kids.’

  12

  Zach

  Her brother had always warned her about moving into Callum’s community at Handel’s Wood, but Hannah was young when she was drawn there: twenty-five and high on ideas. On the night before she’d been due to relocate, when the contents of her rented flat were all packed up in cardboard or zipped away in her luggage, Zach had appeared on her doorstep unannounced.

  ‘You’ve come at the eleventh hour to try to dissuade me,’ Hannah said, with a smile, when she invited him in.

  ‘Something like that,’ Zach said. ‘In the end I just had to jump on a train.’

  They ordered takeaway and ate it off a table made from a cardboard box, sitting opposite each other on suitcase chairs. Hannah was pleased to see him, as she always was, even when he did his best to dissuade her from moving into the community.

  Zach’s best had never been very persuasive. He didn’t have much of a way with words. The most moving thing about his plea was that he’d written so many cue notes, crossed out and redrafted on sheets of lined paper. When she teased him about it, he admitted glumly that he’d been up all night revising them, and that he’d spent his train journey doing the same. The gist of his argument was that it was too soon after their father’s death to be making big life decisions.

  ‘Look,’ Hannah sighed, ‘you’re wrong. This isn’t about Dad. This is about moving on.’

  Too soon, in Zach’s opinion, was just over five months since the funeral. It didn’t sound like a long time, but it had felt like five years. Every month had felt like a year, ever since their father’s diagnosis. That the cancer took two years to kill him had surprised both Hannah and her brother, for their father had seemed to give up on life no sooner than he heard the doctor’s verdict. Perhaps he had been waiting for an excuse, ever since what happened to their mother. In contrast, the five months following his death had been full of changes, and sudden spans of time on Hannah’s hands, and a chance to enjoy life again, albeit guiltily.

  ‘I just think this guy . . .’ said Zach, ‘this Callum of yours . . .’

  Hannah folded her arms. ‘Are you always going to be this overprotective, Zach? I know you’re my big brother, but I’m not so small any more.’

  ‘Men like him . . . men like him are . . .’

  ‘He’s a good man. A very principled man, in fact.’

  ‘But men like him . . .’

  ‘A man who cares about the planet, for one thing. I thought you two would get along famously!’

  ‘He’s just . . . I dunno, he’s just . . .’

  She looked at Zach. Giant, meditative Zach, who had been able to grow a full beard since he was sixteen, who had the frame of a wrestler but the thoughtfulness of a hermit. Men and women alike were drawn to him as if towards a campfire. He could have been an alpha male in most any company, should he ever have wanted to keep any, and should he have given a damn. Hannah had foolishly thought that he and Callum would become friends. That they would find much common ground in their love of nature and their antipathy towards what Callum called the rat race. Yet when, in the veggie restaurant where Hannah had organised their meeting, Callum had espoused most lyrically the virtues of self-sufficiency, and decried those he collectively called the man, and talked at length about Handel’s Wood and how it represented a dream come true and a model for a better kind of life, one lived in harmony with nature, Zach had just stared down at his napkin as if he were back at their father’s funeral.

  ‘What it is . . .’ said Zach slowly. ‘What it is, is .
. .’

  Hannah gave him time.

  Zach frowned with concentration, as if words were sheep that needed to be whistled into place. Eventually, he managed to say it. ‘Men like him are what’s wrong with the world.’

  She laughed, gobsmacked. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Callum isn’t one of those sorts of men! What are you saying? That you think he’s a charlatan?’

  ‘He hasn’t built that place to live closer to nature. I should know, Hannah. I live in the woods. He’s not built it for self-sufficiency, either. He’s built it to be in charge.’

  ‘Someone’s got to be in charge. Why not one of the good guys?’

  ‘He wants to be in charge of you, too. You’re grieving, Hannah. Better to remember it.’

  She threw her hands in the air. ‘You think I’ve forgotten? So this is about Dad, after all!’

  Zach was about to object, but Hannah let him have both barrels. She shouted at him for the first time in years, and he took it in troubled silence, and she had to apologise afterwards.

  The next day, she moved to Handel’s Wood, and Zach helped her to transport all her things. His last words to her, before leaving her there, were, ‘You can come and stay with me whenever you like. You know that anyway, but there it is: said. If you need to get away from him, my door is always open.’

  She’d laughed that off, and a mostly happy eighteen months had followed. It had felt good to eat the food they’d grown themselves, to keep fires burning using only dead wood and sustainable stocks, to use sparing electricity from a biofuel generator. It had been good, and therefore easy to overlook those moments when Callum would appear out of nowhere to join a discussion and, within minutes, turn it effortlessly into a conversation about himself. Easy to overlook the way his eyes always lingered on the mirror, in the cabin she shared with him. After all, he was very good-looking and the sex was the best she’d ever had.

  Whenever Hannah looked back on the moment she’d first told Callum about Seb, she always wondered what she’d been feeling beforehand. Had she been excited? Buzzing at the idea of sharing her big announcement? Dreamy with thoughts of how their future might play out? The memory had been obliterated by his subsequent reaction.

  ‘Hey,’ she’d said, that evening. ‘Sit down for a minute. I’ve got something amazing I want to tell you.’

  She could definitely remember smiling as she gave him the news. She could definitely remember stopping when she saw his face.

  What she loved about Zach, when she ran to him four weeks later, was how unhappy he was to have been proved right. She had just endured a month of Callum’s tantrums and black moods. Worse than that was the way in which, within days of her refusal to give up on the baby simply because he commanded her to, he had turned the entire community against her. His plan, it had seemed, was to force her out and forget about her. To a great extent it was successful.

  On her first night in Zach’s lodge, after fleeing Handel’s Wood, her room there had smelled of moss and of pine needles and of mud, but also of something more lingering and familiar that went beyond the smells of her brother’s house, way back to a simpler time. A woodland holiday when they were children, and both their happy father and their vibrant mother were still alive and with them, and life and the world she lived in were both so much simpler.

  The next day brought a change in the air. The ground softened underfoot, and Hannah could smell the minty tang of herbs that loved the damp places. The pale stars of wild primroses ringed the earth, and through them ran long-trodden trails of muntjac and hare. They had crossed an invisible threshold into ancient woodland, forested since long before the trees came, and Hannah stopped them and said, ‘This is the wood where Zach lives.’

  It was clear to her that none of the others shared her excitement. Hiroko, of course, knew nothing of Zach and hadn’t shown any interest in rectifying that situation. Adrien tried to look bright for Hannah, but he’d been twitchy ever since whatever had spooked him yesterday. Seb, on the other hand, she would have expected to show at least a drop of enthusiasm.

  ‘Your uncle, Seb! We’ll be with him in a matter of hours.’

  Seb watched a crow flap past between the branches. ‘Will we? How are we going to find him?’

  Hannah wanted to stamp her feet. ‘We know these woods. We’ll just . . . look for something we recognise and make our way from there.’

  Seb didn’t appear convinced, but Hannah pushed past him and set a pace fast enough to always stay ahead. She’d relish Zach’s company now more than ever, and reckoned she’d need his support to convince any of her companions to see the forest as a blessing.

  The trees they now walked beneath did not branch until at great height, their trunks growing sheer and single-minded until they sprawled apart some thirty feet above. From there countless limbs spilled back towards the earth, forming leafy domes each of which felt like a private garden inside. In each Hannah hoped for a landmark she could use to guide them on to Zach, but most were full of nothing except leaf litter and logs, and once a hare that sat up straight and eyed them bravely. Then the rubber stretched in Hiroko’s slingshot and it bolted out of sight.

  In another of those green domes they found a perfectly intact bus shelter, and to start with this raised Hannah’s hopes. ‘There’s been forest here for centuries,’ she told the others. ‘So these must be trees that have just filled in the gaps. We have to be standing on a road, no question about it.’ She began to inspect the bus timetables. ‘I bet I can find our way from here.’

  Simply reading the names of the bus stops made her feel closer to Zach. These were the places where her brother bought groceries, visited friends, took her out for a pub lunch whenever she came to visit. One of the bus routes led so close to his lodge that Hannah was certain they’d be with him come the end of the day.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, striding ahead a few paces then crouching to part the leaf litter. There was tarmac underneath. ‘Here’s the road, just like I thought. All we have to do is follow it. It’s going to be easy.’

  They set out, but the road vanished after two minutes’ walk. Hannah stood with her hands on her hips. ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘These are the same woods that have always been here. If all these trees were new, there’d be old ones uprooted everywhere.’

  ‘Maybe they’re on the same side as the new ones,’ said Adrien morosely.

  ‘But why would they want to stop us finding Zach? They’d have no reason to do that.’

  Hiroko looked baffled. ‘Trees don’t take sides.’

  Neither Seb nor Adrien rushed to contradict the girl, but Hannah was at least grateful for their conspicuous silence. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This has to be the way. Let’s all keep an eye out for other clues.’

  For a while after that, all they saw was forest. Then, pushing through a curtain of leaves, they came upon another bus stop. ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Hannah. ‘I knew it. Just let me work out which stop this is, and then I can tell you how close we are.’

  The others waited as she examined the timetable, but it was as she was doing so that she noticed a peeling sticker on the glass, and then a scribble of graffiti on the frame. Both looked familiar.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Seb, even as Hannah thought it. ‘This is the same bus stop we found before.’

  Hannah stepped out of the shelter and stared imploringly up at the trees, but they gave no sign of how to reach her brother.

  Two hours later, they came upon the bus stop for a third time. They did not see it any more after that, but by the time the sun sank Hannah’s spirits had gone down with it. At night the others conversed in low voices in the tent, but she did not join in with them. She closed her eyes and pretended she was a girl again, racing through a green world with her brother at her side.

  Crunch.

  Hannah opened her eyes. It was the night, and the others were asleep around her. The moon glowed so brightly that she could see a pair of wriggling earwigs silhouetted on the ceiling of the tent. Ha
nnah yawned and tried to remember what dream had just woken her. There had been a heavy sound treading through the forest, a sound that went—

  Crunch.

  She sat up wide awake.

  Crunch. It was the noise of something big as a log, crushing the twigs and leaf litter. Hannah held her breath and waited for it to come again.

  Snorrf. This time it was a huff of heavy breath, then something like chewing and something else dragging through the dirt. Crunch. It came from nearby, not far outside the tent, and Hannah slid out of her sleeping bag and crawled across to the door. She unzipped the inner tent as quietly as she could, reached through and opened the outer zip an inch. Then she pressed her eye to the opening, and peered out.

  Snorrf.

  It was the horned animal she had seen sleeping by the brook, the night after finding Diane. It stood not a stone’s throw from the tent, partially obscured by a thicket. At least as tall as a horse, it was nevertheless as bulky as a rhino and covered in a coat of tasselled silver hair. A loud and herbivorous rumble escaped from its gut, and it tore loose a mouthful of vegetation from a tree and stomped one foot with a crunch. It had a pug face, more wrinkled and squashed than a cow’s, and broad nostrils out of which it gave a snort of breath so powerful that it could be smelled at once, even in the tent, an awful halitosis of cud and rotting vegetable matter. Hannah hardly noticed it, so transfixed was she by the animal’s horn. Almost as tall again as was its bearer, it looked more like slate than ivory. A faint lacquer of iridescence coated its enamel, becoming almost a sheen at the tip. The animal snorted and walked away, leaving a trail of crushed and broken debris in its wake.

  When the others woke in the morning, they found Hannah waiting for them, beaming from ear to ear. ‘Look at this!’ she said, and they all gathered round.

  She was pointing to a footprint, a flattened circle of leaves and dented soil. Not far from that was another, and grey threads of hair snagged on one or two twigs.

  ‘What made these tracks?’ asked Hiroko, crouching over them. ‘There aren’t any animals this big in England.’