The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked Seb, sitting down alongside Adrien.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ he said, and knew how unconvincing it sounded. ‘I don’t know what got into me. Those gulls . . . they startled me, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe you’re nervous. It’s understandable.’

  ‘And what would I be nervous about?’

  ‘Reaching the coast. There being no way to cross.’

  Adrien puffed out his cheeks. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe you’re right.’

  But once he’d forced himself back to his feet and motioned for them all to start walking again, and heard the yawks of the seagulls fade into the western distance, Adrien wondered if it were not the opposite. Perhaps it was not the sea’s expected dead end that he was afraid of; perhaps it was finding a means to get to Ireland, after all.

  The next town they entered made them all feel sure that the coast was imminent. Perhaps it was the predominance of blue and white paint on crumbled walls, perhaps the several premises of fishmongers each gutted and reeking. They saw more people than they had in any town since the first days of their journey, although none of them appeared to be residents. They were all travellers such as themselves, dispossessed and hungry-looking. Just like them, they were headed for the water.

  After a winding downhill street of broken shops and hotels, the trees quite suddenly parted. Ahead of them spread a harbour, the surface of the water grey as lead. The harbour wall was bouldered with the smashed edifices of seafront cottages, some of which had been hurled by the trees into the water. What boats had been moored to it were scuppered beyond repair, with shallow waves skulking through their broken hulls and masts.

  Here, at last, were the kinds of crowds the woods had seemed to swallow. People were everywhere, milling along the harbour front or sitting on protrusions of the wall, dangling fishing lines into the water. On a patched-up jetty, people had stripped down to their underwear to wash themselves in dirty water.

  ‘None of these boats are going anywhere,’ said Hiroko, looking at the shipwrecks. ‘Especially not those.’

  She pointed to more boats, floating further back from the harbour wall. These had not been smashed by debris, but they were black and charred and the water surrounding them was iridescent with oil.

  ‘What happened to them?’ wondered Seb.

  ‘Sabotaged,’ said someone behind them.

  They turned to see an old man guarding a half-eaten fish, flakes of which were trapped in his whiskers. ‘They sabotaged them,’ he said, and took another bite.

  ‘Who?’ asked Seb. ‘Who sabotaged them?’

  ‘Just people. Didn’t see. But my boat was one, and it was my dad’s before me. It’s down there on the bottom now.’

  ‘We’re here,’ said Hiroko, ‘to find one that’s still floating.’

  ‘Ha! You’ll be lucky. If you had a boat, why would you keep it here, where people would try to take it from you? Whatever boats are left are far away, looking for places without trees.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ mumbled Adrien, too quietly for the others to hear.

  They left the old man to his fish and followed the harbour line towards its narrow mouth. When the sea opened out before them it made the harbour look like nothing but a droplet. The coastline stretched north and south, bulging with cliffs and rocky outcrops, challenging their eyes to follow. The sea went on even further, as flat and grey as the end of everything.

  Cawing seabirds wheeled in the sky, and highest among them was a giant bird of prey with a white tail and a bright yellow beak. ‘What bird is that, Mum?’ asked Seb, and Hannah frowned and peered up at it. It sickled through the air, folded its wings and dived, hitting the sea in a rake of spray. When, a few seconds later, it headed skyward again with a fish flapping in its claws, she said, ‘A sea eagle, I think. Although they haven’t lived this far south in centuries.’

  Away to their left, a manmade breakwater sheared off a long and pebbly beach. The space between that and the forest behind it was crowded with even more people than at the harbour. Tents had been erected in line after line. Fires burned everywhere, their smoke dispersing the smell of cooked fish.

  ‘God knows why they’ve all camped so exposed,’ said Hiroko. ‘If they only went into the woods a short distance, they’d have way better protection from the sea.’

  ‘They’re frightened of the trees,’ suggested Seb. ‘They’d probably rather freeze here than go back to being underneath them.’

  Adrien gazed back at the treeline and felt as if the woods, too, were an ocean, between which and the water this open ground was but an exposed spar. Even as he looked, another rabble of travellers emerged from the forest and came to a halt, dazzled by the size of the sea.

  He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Just as he’d expected, there was no way to cross to Ireland. Yet none of his pessimism had prepared him for the cold and heavy sensation that now filled up his gut. He felt as if he were two hundred feet further forward, and had opened his mouth and swallowed gallons of salt water and seaweed. It didn’t make sense. He had wanted this failure, this excuse to turn back, but now that it was upon him he found that he did not want it at all.

  Work out what you really want from life, Michelle had tasked him, and he’d sat in his armchair just as he’d hoped to go home and sit in it again. Adrien stared out at the peaks of the waves coming in, and each was a knife slid in between his ribs. What did it mean to have been so cowardly? Wasn’t it as certain as the sea was vast that any lover worthy of that name would have striven every day to be reunited with his love? Yet he had been content to hide away, and to wish Michelle all the best with another man.

  Seb put a hand on his shoulder. Adrien would have reached up to grab it, were it not for the impropriety of doing so.

  ‘You’d better not be giving up,’ said Seb.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s high time I did. There are no boats. I’ll just have to take it on the chin and go home.’

  ‘Not yet. We don’t know what we might find yet. We just have to hope for surprises.’

  And as the boy said that, and much to his own confusion, Adrien felt as if some small chunk of driftwood had bobbed to the surface of all the swallowed waters inside of himself. He clung on to it with all the small resolve he possessed.

  That afternoon, while Hannah got the camp set up and Hiroko and Yasuo disappeared to shoot gulls, Seb spent the rest of the day towing Adrien between the campers on the coast, asking whether they’d seen any boats. All those they met were escapees from the woods, who covered their possessions with blankets when the newcomers approached, or watched their cuffs as if at any moment a blade might spring out of one. Some of those who had been there longest admitted they had seen one or two boats but added that, should a vessel make anchor, there would always be a crowd of others trying to board it. What made Adrien and Seb so special, they demanded to know, that they thought they could take precedence over those who had been camped there far longer? When, that night, man and boy returned to the tent, Adrien at once retired to his sleeping bag and zipped himself in tight. The sea gushed and snorted, while outside the tent Seb repeated all they had heard to Hannah. Hiroko had still not returned, so when Seb left to find her and Hannah fell silent, Adrien had only the distant hubbub of countless strangers to distract him from the vastness of the water, along with an ever-so-faint whisper, coming from the trees.

  2

  Slingshot

  Adrien wasn’t the only one made pensive by arriving at the coast. At first, Hiroko had tried to ignore the lump that had formed in her throat as soon as she’d set eyes on the water. She had coolly strode off to hunt seagulls, and for every bird she brought down Yasuo had cheered her on with a hungry yip. She had shot four, but only two of those had been dead upon landing. The other two had some life left, which she’d squeezed out with her boot. At first she hadn’t understood why she’d found it troubling to do so. She’d ignored the uncomfortable feeling and cut out a
piece of breast for Yasuo, then tied the gulls’ feet together and hung them over her shoulder. Yet she had not returned at once to her companions. Instead, she’d found a rocky outcrop some distance from the clustered campfires, far enough from their warmth to be deserted by the people of the beaches, and was sitting there still as the sun set over the water, her hood raised and her eyes fixed on the violet gradient of the evening sky.

  Eventually, she managed to work out why the gulls’ deaths had troubled her. It was the stilling of their wings, the loss of flight. It was the reminder of her own permanent grounding.

  Yasuo lay curled on her lap, pointing his nose upward at whatever angle Hiroko directed her gaze. They were not looking for the first timid stars, so many more of which were visible these days, nor for the hairline moon. They were looking for a red blinking tail-light that Hiroko knew she’d never see. In the woods it had sometimes seemed impossible that human beings had ever taken flight in great vessels of aluminium, let alone that she had been just such a traveller only a few weeks before. To think, when she had boarded her plane back in Tokyo, she’d fantasised about never returning there.

  She stroked the fur of Yasuo’s scruff. The kit nipped her fingers as she did so, and she felt his affectionate teeth pricking out the blood. The skin of her hands had become traced all over with bite-lines and tiny scabs. A dot-to-dot of nips and scratch marks, some of which would scar. She liked it. As if it were a tribal marking.

  A fox can be almost human, her grandmother had once told her, and her elderly sobo should be the one to know. She had lived her whole life in her house in Iwate Prefecture’s beech forests, where foxes came and went all day and night.

  They are animals that remind us of ourselves. Opportunistic. Quick-witted. Will eat anything under the sun. Beautiful some days, mangy on others. Can hypnotise you with their eyes.

  Her grandmother knew all about foxes. Her garden was an orchard, and at the foot of the orchard lay a cleared space that she said was a no-man’s-land, separating the apple trees from those of the wildwood beyond. In the wildwood was a shrine, which her grandmother tended. Little more than a stone house the size of a beehive, it had a low torii arch that marked both the start and the finish of the path that led to it. It had been built in centuries past to honour Inari, whose messengers were foxes, but Hiroko’s grandmother told of how, in bygone days when there were no bullet trains and hardly any roads reaching into the forests of Iwate Prefecture, the local people had taken to honouring the messengers over the god. The shrine had become covered in foxes. Hundreds of them, all cut from wood or stone with varying skill, some of them detailed with chipped paint and ribbons, some so poorly carved that you’d never know what they were supposed to represent, were there not so many more to compare them with. The shrine had once been a busy place, but now hardly anyone paid their respects. Sometimes a grey-haired villager would make the journey, but if they found Hiroko’s grandmother cleaning it up with her broom they would turn and scurry home without looking back. ‘They say I am a majyo,’ Hiroko’s grandmother had once confided with a grin, ‘and that I make my spells there.’

  Hiroko closed her eyes to prevent the tears from welling. Her childhood visits to those beech woods were among her most treasured memories. Always her sobo would be waiting, when she and her father arrived, and would present to her an apple bright as amber, and tell her fox stories until the sun turned red.

  Boots crunched on sand. Yasuo barked and lifted his nose, then barked again enthusiastically.

  Hiroko blinked the moisture from her eyes and remembered where she was: on the beach beneath a violet sky and its absence of aeroplane trails. Seb approached her cautiously, with the collar of his jacket turned up against the sea breeze.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I came to look for you.’

  She shrugged. That was self-explanatory.

  He stood awkwardly over her, with his hands in his pockets. His nose was healing slowly, although a v-shaped purple line still marked the break. He would look different, once the bruising subsided. The gristle would set in a lopsided bulge, and he would appear older than he was, and perhaps tougher too. She reckoned she preferred it. She dug out a smile for him, then looked back up at the moon and stars.

  A sudden light appeared in the sky, leaping down it like a spark struck by a flint. Her breath caught in her throat.

  ‘Look!’ exclaimed Seb. ‘A shooting star!’

  But her breath had caught because, for a deluded instant, she’d thought it was a tail-light.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Seb, after a minute. ‘Are you feeling homesick again?’

  Hiroko folded her arms. ‘I’d have thought you’d have been put off saying that.’

  Seb touched his fingers to his nose. ‘I thought this was because I asked about your mother.’

  She laughed. ‘And now you’ve brought that up again too!’

  He sat alongside her on the rocks, close enough for their shoulders to brush. She was grateful at once for that smallest contact, and Yasuo was evidently pleased to see Seb too, clambering off her lap to stand on his knees. Seb scratched him between his ears, and the kit nuzzled closer to enjoy the attention.

  Seb had been careful, Hiroko knew, not to push for anything more since kissing her. He had let her be the one to initiate things, no doubt wary of getting punched again. Hiroko had only tried to kiss him one more time, and neither that nor their first kiss had been prolonged or powerful. That was not through lack of enthusiasm, but because both of their breaths were stale, and their lips chafed from the chillier nights. What meant more was closing their arms tight around one another, was to run their fingers gently through each other’s hair, to slip their hands beneath their shirts and feel the heat from the smalls of their backs.

  And all the time Seb had been picking away at her defences with these damned questions of his, asking her again and again to untie some further part of the knot that was herself.

  ‘I found you something,’ he said, showing her a wad of blank postcards. ‘I found them in a trashed-out tourist shop. I thought maybe you could write them.’

  She hesitated, then took them uncertainly. Yasuo lost interest at once. He settled down and laid his chin on his paws, his tail snaking back and forth against Seb’s thigh.

  The postcards were pictures of the ocean before them and the seafront town in more colourful repair. ‘Why would I want to write these? There isn’t any post any more.’

  ‘Of course there isn’t. That’s the good thing about them. Nobody will ever read what you have to say. I thought you could write them to your father. To your grandmother. Even an angry one to Saori. Anything that helps.’

  Hiroko drew in a long breath. ‘If you haven’t got something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.’

  ‘Bullshit. I used to post pages on my website that no hyperlinks led to, and no search engines registered. You’d have to type the exact addresses to find them, and you couldn’t do that if you didn’t know what to type. But they still existed, do you see? They were still out there. Each page was like a letter, one for Callum, one for Mum, one for Zach . . . you get the idea. I changed what I’d put there whenever I felt like it, but you’re the first person I’ve ever told of their existence. I don’t think anybody ever read them, but the point was they’d been written.’

  Suddenly Hiroko burst into tears. Seb gaped at her, too surprised to act. Then she pulled herself back together with a growl. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ she said stonily. ‘Please forget it ever happened.’

  ‘Hiroko, I’m sorry if I—’

  ‘It wasn’t you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘I said forget it.’

  He fell silent for a minute. In the gloom she saw a crab moving, tiptoeing sideways over the stones. She bit her lip. Yes, alright, she would admit it. She was homesick. She missed her grandmother walking in her orchard. She missed her grandfather sitting on the deck of the house, waiting silently for night to fal
l.

  She missed her father.

  ‘Have you got a pen?’ she asked.

  Seb handed one to her.

  Hiroko cycled through the cards. Here was a photo of the seaside on a day of blue skies and ice creams. Here was a balmy afternoon and dolphins swimming in the bay. Here were fireworks blossoming over the water. She turned that card over and faced the blank reverse, gripping the pen so tight that her fist was shaking. She didn’t expect to be able to write anything, but when the nib touched the card something strange happened. The words sprang out of her without thought or decision, as if the kanji were all contained in the ink. Before she knew it she had written out the symbols for Grandmother, and, What am I supposed to do? It’s all too far away and too much. I need you to say a prayer for me, at the fox shrine. I need you to say a prayer for my father. I need – but then she was out of space, having written too large and uncontrolled. She tapped the pen against her chin.

  ‘This is a bad idea,’ she said.

  ‘Why? You looked like you had something to say.’

  She shook her head. ‘It feels like . . . pulling out a plug.’

  ‘That’s how it’s supposed to feel.’

  ‘You do one.’

  ‘Me?’

  She chose a picture of the harbour, full of boats. On the reverse she wrote Callum, and held it out to him along with the pen. ‘Write it.’

  He didn’t take the postcard. ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘See. Not so easy now, is it?’

  ‘You wrote yours in Japanese. You’ll be able to read what I write on mine.’

  ‘Who cares? But I won’t look, if it makes you happier. Or maybe you could write it in computerspeak, or something.’

  ‘It doesn’t really work like that. And anyway . . . look how peacefully Yasuo is sleeping. I think it’s better if I stay nice and still.’

  At once, Yasuo’s eyes snapped open. He stood up with a yawn and a stretch, then prowled off Seb’s lap to rejoin Hiroko.

  ‘Ha!’ she said, scooping up the fox and placing him back in her hood. Then she forced the postcard into Seb’s hand.