The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Something floated through the air between her and Seb. One more eagle feather, oscillating in the glimmering lamplight. Grateful for the distraction, they both tried to grab it at once. Seb’s hand clasped around Hiroko’s even as she caught hold of the feather.

  ‘Um,’ he said and let go, blushing.

  ‘This is the last one we need,’ said Hiroko, staring resolutely at the feather.

  ‘The finishing touch.’

  She fastened it into her headdress, but found she was unable to look up at Seb. ‘They’re ready to wear now,’ she said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So what are we waiting for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was waiting for you to say when.’

  ‘Okay.’ She turned the headdress in her hands. ‘Okay . . . One, two, three . . .’

  They put their headdresses on their heads. She supposed she had no choice but to look at him now, but moving her neck to do so was like bending straight a lead pipe. She winced after she’d done it, as if it had hurt her. Then she laughed.

  She couldn’t help herself, because Seb looked so ridiculous. He laughed too, and she supposed she looked just as stupid, and their laughter danced up through the ruins above them and caused the eagle there to screech and thump its wings. At this they gasped and laughed harder, for the bird’s cry was so savage and free. It made Hiroko’s insides feel like they were carefree, soaring through the air on the back of the wind and then, and then . . .

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Seb.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, pulling off the headdress. ‘It’s like I can’t . . . can’t ever . . .’ But she didn’t know how to express it. She glowered out at the sea, where with the late hour of the afternoon the sun was dropping fast. Behind her the lamp was a sponge for the light.

  ‘We were having fun,’ said Seb, ‘and then—’

  ‘I was an idiot,’ she said. ‘I remembered what Carter’s friend said and I thought that a headdress . . . I thought that feathers . . .’

  Now Seb looked as sad as she did. ‘You thought an eagle spirit might help you feel closer to home.’

  Hiroko covered her face with her hands. ‘Like something a little girl would think.’

  ‘But I can understand why you’d—’

  ‘No,’ she spat. ‘You can’t understand!’

  He took off his own headdress. ‘I’m sorry, Hiroko. I just hate to see you being so hard on yourself. I wasn’t pretending I know what it’s like.’

  ‘What am I doing here?’ she asked, in a tiny voice.

  ‘What do you mean? You wanted us to come up here.’

  She stared west at the sun. Even that seemed nearer than her father, her sobo and sofu. And as for her mother, she felt the farthest of all.

  ‘They’re so many miles behind me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Oh, Hiroko . . . I’m so sorry. You know I wish there was something I could do.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ she said eventually. ‘And you do understand a bit of what it’s like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How far away does your uncle feel?’

  Seb looked down at the floor. ‘Different distances on different days.’

  ‘But never close.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘And I’m sorry I broke your nose when you asked about my mother. It’s almost impossible just to think about her, let alone talk.’

  ‘You mustn’t feel you have to tell me anything if you don’t—’

  ‘I killed her, Seb.’

  His lips stiffened, parted in the shape of his next word. Hiroko folded her arms and looked away.

  ‘You . . . you . . .’ he struggled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I killed her, and that’s the reason for everything. Why my dad took the job in America. Why he wanted to be miles from home.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ croaked Seb.

  ‘When I was small.’

  ‘It was . . . an accident?’

  She shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘How it happened doesn’t change that I did it.’

  ‘Hiroko . . . please tell me.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she whispered, ‘and Dad hates to talk about it. He just says that life isn’t kind enough, and we should leave it at that. But I . . . I managed to find out from my grandmother. She said the hospital did all they could, but there were just too many complications. She said they had to cut me out of my obasaan’s stomach, and she never even got to meet me.’

  Seb threw his arms around her so hard that he knocked the breath out of her. He didn’t let go, only held her body close against his. ‘You don’t have to be this tough,’ he said, loud, in her ear. ‘And listen to me, Hiroko. Eagle feathers might not fix things, and it might seem like stuff is only getting harder. But I’m going to do everything possible to help you. And I won’t let anyone stop me, yourself included.’

  She let Seb hold on to her. Beside them the great lamp shimmered with reflected light, and was their private moon in an eyrie of their own. Then, with fumbling fingers, she reached for the buttons of his shirt.

  9

  Crossing

  The next evening, Eoin announced that the boat was finished. As long as the weather obliged, they would set sail the following night. Adrien and his companions all gathered round and gave three cheers, and Hannah opened with a fizz a bottle of tonic she had found in a buried house. She’d pressed some forest fruits into a syrup, and now mixed them with the tonic. Everyone touched cups and pledged a toast to the crossing, and Nora’s face screwed up from the tartness of the drink.

  The girl fell asleep first, then Seb and Hiroko. Yasuo yawned and settled in among the teenagers’ hair, and Eoin was out cold as soon as his eyes closed. Hannah didn’t look like she’d ever sleep again, but Adrien began to nod off with an expression of troubled concentration fixed on his face. He hadn’t told the others about the thing he had seen on the throne tree. He wouldn’t have even known how to begin, but his sleep when it came was as thick as the soil, and his dreams were full of earthworms and roots.

  Come late afternoon the next day, the water lay flat and metallic. Eoin swam out a good distance, diving under the surface to test the currents, then waded back to the beach and clapped Seb on the shoulder. They all knew they would be leaving that night.

  As soon as darkness fell they disassembled their tents, not saying a word as they did so. Their luggage was already packed, and Adrien and Nora stood guard over it while the others slipped into the woods to drag the boat to the beach. Once they had done so, the others kept watch as Eoin and Seb secured the final fittings, then all together they pushed it out until the tide took over, and one by one pulled each other onboard. Eoin wanted to conserve the motor’s fuel until it was most sorely needed, so they took up oars and rowed as they had practised in between stints restoring the vessel.

  Under the lights of the many stars, the coast shrank from something that had seemed so firm and large underfoot to something slight and receding, a thinning wedge between the darkness of the water and the enormous sparkling sky. Here and there along the shore guttered the final glows of campfires, but the people on the beaches were asleep and their dim red lights dwindled quick as embers. Then the land faded and was gone.

  The water slurped the oars. The waves swelled large but never steep. After an hour, on Eoin’s instruction, they paused and breakfasted on fresh water and food from their packs. In the meantime the shipwright unravelled a small sail that they had cut out of canvas, and tested it to see what power he could coax out of the wind. The breeze offered up some gentle momentum, which meant they could row in shifts for the next couple of hours until at last, when the sun began to rise, the wind dropped and Eoin tugged the motor’s cord. The blades began to chop a frothy V into the water behind them, and they all loafed back on their benches, stretching their arms and staring around them at a dawn view identical in all directions. Sea t
hat might have been endless. Sky blank as an unfinished map. In the woods they had often felt a green claustrophobia, but as day broke here they faced its exact opposite, and eventually they stopped looking to the plain horizons and preferred the details of the boat and their own selves and rucksacks crammed into it. At sea, it seemed, there was only the distance.

  Adrien listened to the gurgle of the water parting for the boat. He kept thinking about his encounter on the beach, although he still did not know what to make of it other than to resolve that, should he ever see the throne tree again, he would run screaming in the opposite direction. He told himself he was an expert at putting off thinking about things, and should do so now, but every time he managed a reminder sprang from an unexpected source. Even here, out to sea, he could be prompted. The woodgrain on the boat’s timber cladding became like the wrinkles in some ancient hide. The polished knots in the deck became like the hollow eyes of the whisperers.

  Adrien hung his head overboard to avoid looking at the timber. The others nodded knowingly at one another, and he knew they mistook him for seasick.

  The waves, in the end, gave Adrien a much-needed distraction. Out to sea they grew bigger, and swelled up a memory of simpler times. Five nights’ holiday that he and Michelle had taken along France’s Côte de Granit Rose. In the final light of those summer days, the cliffs had softened to a pink so delicate that they had lost all hardness and looked more like marshmallow than granite. Adrien and Michelle had spent that week simply wandering the Côte, losing themselves in whatever suited them. In the evenings they ate fish so fresh they half expected it to flip off their plates, drank much wine and slept heavily. Then they woke in the early afternoons to do it all over again.

  Adrien had meant to pose the question on the first of those days. Courage, however, came harder than intention, and it took him until the fourth attempt to grasp the opportunity. It was an evening in which the sun balanced red on the horizon and lingered late, as if it had seen the far side of the world and deemed it less interesting than that of Michelle and Adrien. The couple bought an inflatable dinghy, which they splashed out to an islet of rocks where the stones stood up in fairytale parapets, warm and salmon-coloured in the sunset. When they reclined on them they found the firm surfaces perfectly eroded to fit the shapes of their bodies. Adrien did his best not to stare at Michelle’s legs, bared by her swimsuit. For his part he wore only waterproof shorts, the beginnings of his flabby tummy protruding over their elastic.

  He had been proud of his foresight when purchasing those shorts. They had a pocket in their lining kept shut by a zip and a strap of Velcro. A perfect hiding place for a ring. But when it came to the moment, the fabric of the pocket was drenched and his fingers jiggled madly to try to get in. Michelle watched him fumbling in his loins, her bemused expression turning Adrien redder than the sun.

  ‘Um,’ he had said eventually, poking around his nether regions until they at last produced the ring, ‘Um?’

  She had flung herself at him and wrapped her arms around his neck, and they had embraced and stood together flesh against flesh, and she had whispered her Yes as hot as a kiss in his ear, and he had been happier than he could ever remember. The proposal thus surmounted, it had seemed to him that the hard work was over, and that all that remained was to live out their lives in wedded bliss. They would let love, Adrien had thought so contentedly, be both their anchor and the wind in their sails. Everything would work out for the best.

  The sun had crossed the better part of the sky by the time the Irish coast grew from a thread to a long array of sandy beaches. The sun and the sand’s reflection turned the sea bone-coloured in the bays and inlets, and urgent gulls shot overhead without calling. As their boat drew closer to shore, the travellers could see further inland. It was forested as far as the eye could see.

  ‘Were there always woods here?’ asked Adrien of Eoin.

  The shipwright shook his head. ‘Not this time last year.’

  ‘That settles that, then,’ said Adrien.

  Suddenly the motor gave a noise like a sigh of relief, then stopped chopping when the fuel ran out. Although everyone was exhausted, they all took up oars for the final stretch, buoyed by the sight of land and eager for a beach where they could drop anchor. In the south-west distance, they thought they could discern the shapes of people moving about on the sand, and coloured shapes behind them that might have been tents. They turned north and rowed along the coast in the other direction.

  Turning into one of several wide and deserted bays, they saw columns of trees snaking out towards the beach, wherever there was soil enough to support them. Some had grown too tall, with roots too shallow, to stand up to the ocean’s gales. They were knocked over and half-buried in blown sand, their leafless branches reaching back for the denser woods like desperate arms. Those inland trees were browning fast, and here and there had already rusted for the coming autumn.

  They put the boat ashore, and disembarked with wobbly legs. After they had built their campfire, Seb volunteered to scrounge nearby for supplies. When he set off to do so, Hiroko went at his side.

  Eoin looked back out to sea. ‘Dusk’s coming. Would you mind stoking the fire, Adrien? I’ve a mind to set some lines out on some rocks I thought I saw north of here. If we get lucky we might have fish for breakfast.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Adrien, licking his lips. ‘We’ll get it nice and hot for you.’

  ‘Stay here, Nora,’ said Eoin, grabbing his pack. ‘And make sure to keep warm.’ Then he headed back towards the water.

  Nora needed no excuse to take off her boots and socks and warm her toes near the gathering flames. Hannah looked at her, then at Adrien, and then without a word followed Eoin.

  ‘Oh,’ said Adrien, finding himself alone with the child. ‘That’s how it is, is it?’

  Nora grinned toothily up at him, but Adrien found he did not mind being babysitter. He was going to miss the girl, when she sailed away with Eoin in the morning. ‘You must be glad,’ said Nora, wriggling her toes in the firelight.

  ‘Glad about what?’

  ‘Getting away from those little people you saw.’

  Adrien poked at the campfire with a branch. The salt air had dried the branches into perfect tinder, and the flames crackled and stood up tall.

  ‘Do you know what a pessimist is, Nora?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pessimist is me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Adrien sighed. ‘I mean . . . I’m not so sure I’ll be rid of those things that easily.’

  ‘But they’re on the other side of the sea now. I’m glad we got away from them. I’m glad we got away from that scary lady in the camper van. She gave me nightmares.’

  ‘She, at least, won’t be troubling you here. I don’t think there’s any reason to be worried about her.’

  ‘But you do think . . . what? That the little stick people will swim after you, all the way to Ireland?’

  ‘No.’ Adrien looked over his shoulder at the sombre expanse of the Irish forest. ‘I don’t think it’s going to work like that. Not with the trees having appeared here too. Just call it a hunch.’

  ‘Is that was a pessimist means? Someone who does things with a hunch?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be a pessimist when I grow up.’

  He chuckled. ‘I never thought I was going to be one either, when I was your age.’

  Nora yawned indifferently. ‘Do you know any bedtime stories, Mr Thomas?’

  Adrien flinched. ‘You don’t have to call me that any more. Just Adrien is fine.’

  ‘It would feel . . . funny to call you Adrien. I mean, Mr Thomas is your name.’

  ‘Not any more it isn’t.’

  Nora looked puzzled. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. The school is over, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know how to do Monsieur Thomas, if you want. I can do both!’

  ‘I’m not Monsieur Thomas and I’m no
t Herr Thomas and I’m not Signor Thomas and I’m not bloody Thomas-sensei like Hiroko bloody taught you. I have no surname. I want to be Adrien again now, and no more.’

  Nora was silent for half a minute. The logs spat and the embers leapt.

  ‘What about your wife?’

  Adrien stoked the fire with his branch. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Isn’t she Mrs Thomas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Madame Thomas, then?’

  ‘No.

  ‘Then what’s her name?’

  ‘Michelle.’

  ‘I know that.’

  He sighed. ‘Why ask me, if you know it already?’

  Silence again. Wood broke in the flames with a satisfying hiss.

  ‘I just don’t understand what she is, if she isn’t Mrs Thomas.’

  Bits of bark glowed ruby red while others papered into ash. ‘This is the very last thing I’m going to teach you,’ said Adrien quietly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This. You don’t know the answers to everything, when you grow up.’

  ‘But you’re a teacher.’

  ‘An English teacher. All I know is stories.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘since you never answered my question.’

  ‘What question was that?’

  ‘I asked you if you knew any bedtime stories.’

  ‘Not really. Just big books and plays.’

  Her bare toes squirmed expectantly. ‘A fairy story, though. You must know one of those.’

  ‘Fairy stories are all about wolves and bears and hags in the woods. I’d rather not think about any of that stuff.’

  ‘What about that one you told us in the classroom?’

  He racked his brains, but he was certain he’d taught no fairy tales on the beach. ‘You must be getting sleepy, Nora. We didn’t do any of those.’