The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Adrien frowned. ‘Tell me what’s happened. You normally leave the pessimism to me.’

  She sat down on another chunk of broken hotel, pressing her hands between her knees. Adrien sat alongside her and watched an ant crawl through the dirt at their feet, the starlight picking out the varnish of its carapace. Another ant followed it, and another after that, and so on in a tidy trail.

  ‘I went to see Leonard,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Oh.’

  Adrien thought she might elaborate but she did not, and when a shooting star sped down the sky she didn’t notice it. ‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘whatever he said to you . . . you should just forget it.’

  Tears flashed down her cheeks as quickly as the star. ‘But what if I agree with him? Because I didn’t when he said it, but now . . . I sort of think I do. He said that nature is just a kind of mindless flow of killings, and he’s right about that. Isn’t he? He said I was fooling myself if I thought otherwise and . . . and I have been, I think. Zach fooled himself, too. All of my green friends fooled themselves. For some reason I used to be able to cope with this stuff, far better than I can right now.’ She gestured to the ants parading around their boots. ‘We’re all just . . . just lives, that’s what Leonard said.’

  Adrien closed his eyes and remembered a tunnel descending in a corkscrew through the soil, and the clatter of the feet of the ants before him and the ants following behind. In the queen’s chamber the larvae smelled so pristine, their brand-new antennae tapping forth out of their egg sacs. He opened his eyes again, shook his head and tried to focus. Hannah was gazing morosely up at the sky.

  ‘Of course I’ve always known the world is cruel, everybody does, but before the trees came I suppose I thought I had some sort of answer. Zach and me, we used to talk about it sometimes.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  She shook her head. ‘It feels like a long time ago.’

  ‘A lot has happened.’

  ‘We said . . .’ Hannah shook her head as if in disgust at herself, and Adrien hated to see that expression, so familiar when it crossed his own features, crossing hers. ‘We said we thought that people might change. That if we just . . . just . . . I mean, it all sounds so hopelessly naive now . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Zach always said . . .’ Hannah pulled a stern face and did a tearful impression of her brother. ‘We just have to get people to live hand-in-hand with nature. Then everything will work out fine. But when I look at what rises to the top, what still does now just like it did before the trees came . . . then I start to realise we already do, and we always did. When I see men like Leonard and the gunman, and Roland and Callum and all the rest who I’ve never met but I’m sure are out there . . . then no wonder everything is so bloody cruel. To think . . . when the trees first arrived I actually thought things had changed.’

  Adrien folded his hands together. ‘Do you know what I always used to love about outer space?’

  ‘Huh? Why do you ask that?’

  ‘There isn’t any way to feel big about yourself up there. I mean, looking at all these tiny lights from down here, the Earth feels so massive, but we know it isn’t really. If we put it alongside a star it would just be a speck. And even the stars are tiny, compared with all that emptiness surrounding them. Nothing is allowed to call itself the biggest, in outer space. I always loved stargazing, because it made me feel insignificant. Sounds like Leonard likes to talk about insignificance, but a man like him can’t really understand it. He’s got too big an idea of himself.’

  ‘He’s seen a lot. He said he’d been around the world.’

  Adrien thought of the thing he’d seen, creeping through the branches of the theatre in time with the whisperers’ song.

  ‘Nature’s a creature,’ he said quietly, ‘made up of many branches. Some bits of those branches are big, others are just twig-sized. I don’t think it really has a mind of its own, only a whole lot of smaller ones. Just lives, as Leonard would say. All the billions of lives going on in the world.’

  Hannah looked surprised. ‘Why can’t you be in charge, Adrien? That’s what we need. Someone who knows about small things.’

  ‘I’d be awful. I can’t even control a class of children.’

  ‘Nonsense. I saw what a difference you made on the beach.’

  ‘That was . . . under exceptional circumstances.’

  ‘Everything is, now.’

  He watched the ants pass by his toes. Neither he nor Hannah spoke for a minute. Then bricks scraped against bricks in the nearby hotel, and some part of it fell to the ground with a crash and the noise of twisting branches. Hannah flinched at the sound, but the ants marched on. Adrien closed his eyes and could remember a chamber, somewhere underground, where the eggs lay about like piles of rice. He and his fellow ants sorted them, tiptoed over them, checked for the nuclei beneath the white outer rinds. Beside him the giant queen crouched, many times his size, and strained her abdomen and laid another egg. He took hold of it in his teeth and carried it to its pile and came back and waited for the next egg to fall . . .

  ‘Adrien?’ asked Hannah. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, mopping his brow. ‘Never been better.’

  She looked unconvinced, but before she could press him another shooting star streaked quick and white to the south, and Adrien pointed to it and said, ‘There!’

  Hannah looked too slowly. ‘I didn’t see it,’ she sighed. ‘I don’t think I’m going to see one tonight.’

  She had her arms folded, and her trigger finger was tapping against her elbow. Adrien watched it for a moment, although Hannah was too preoccupied to notice. Then he reached out and took hold of her finger and enclosed it in his own.

  Hannah turned to him at once and uncrossed her arms and he spread his wide and put them around her. She leaned against him and her hair was against his jaw and her breath came out against his neck.

  ‘Give me one more day in this horrible place,’ whispered Adrien. ‘I still think there’s something I have to do, if only I can figure out what. Then I’m taking you away from here. We’re leaving Leonard behind. We’re going to go south, and we can try to find Eoin if you want, and we’re going to work everything out a step at a time. You’re the one who got me here in one piece, and I’m the one who’s going to get you safely out again.’

  12

  Gunman

  Hiroko cremated Yasuo, because she wanted him to be in the air and not the earth. Without telling anyone where they were headed, she and Seb carried what was left of him out to the woods. In a quiet glade they built the fire, and let it burn and burn for hours, the two of them circling now and then to stand downwind of the smoke. The flames thrashed and floundered, like the tails of the magical foxes in the stories her grandmother used to tell.

  ‘They all feel even further away now,’ she whispered to Seb. Her hood was raised and her cuff was damp from where she’d chewed it to hold herself together. ‘My sobo and my sofu and my otosan.’

  ‘Talk to me about them,’ suggested Seb. ‘So they can feel that bit closer.’

  She shook her head and watched the smoke rising. ‘Words can’t help, not this time. They aren’t close, Seb. They’re on the other side of the world.’

  He didn’t have an answer for that. The fire blazed. The sun laboured across the sky. The planet tweaked on its axis. ‘I just wish,’ Seb said at last, ‘that I’d done something more to stop Leonard.’

  ‘You did everything you could.’

  ‘Did I? I thought I did. But I promised I’d help you, and now Yasuo’s dead. So what good did I do?’

  Hiroko grabbed his hand and threaded her fingers between his. She could feel the tension in his knuckles and wrist, just as she could see it in every other joint of his body. He’d not shown her such anger since he’d told her about his father, but she was grateful to him for feeling like this. It was as if he was keeping her own fury burning, while she had no strength left to tend it.

  Wh
en, in the afternoon, Yasuo’s pyre died out and the burned brands were left glowing and bursting in their wake, there was no sign left of the fox kit’s bones. They would be mixed into the ash that the fire had made, or dispersing with the smoke on the wind. After a while Hiroko nodded and the couple made their way back towards the settlement. The trees they passed beneath were larches, their yellow needles falling steadily to lie on the ground in a decaying thatch. The canopy was the colour of wheat, the sky above it a drab old grey, but whenever Hiroko closed her eyes it was a fur-red blur that she saw. She had stared so long into Yasuo’s pyre that it had imprinted on her vision like a sunspot.

  They arrived back at the valley and Hiroko stayed quiet all evening, lying down early to sleep. Several times, that night, she woke up grasping at the empty space in her hood. Several times she felt whiskers tickling her cheeks, then when she opened her eyes saw only empty darkness.

  In the morning, a cry of someone else’s anguish woke her.

  It was so loud it sounded like something prehistoric, and Hiroko sprang up with her knife out, blinking away sleep. Only as the cry subsided and turned into a steadily sobbed, ‘No, no, no . . .’ did she realise that it was coming from further off in the camp, and was that of a man.

  Seb, Adrien and Hannah all followed her to her feet, just as did the strangers they shared the building with. Even the heaviest sleepers were rising, for the sobbing was too distressing to ignore.

  Outdoors, the dawn light shone the pitted mud. A starling stretched a worm from the ground, and rooks traced overhead. Other people were emerging, too, Roland from his shelter and Michelle from hers, and two dozen more folk who all headed with Hiroko and the others towards the source of the noise.

  They found Leonard kneeling outside his lonely shack, his shoulders trembling and his glasses removed. He had red scoremarks down his cheeks where he had tried to claw his tears away, but one by one they kept coming, welling on his eyelashes then dripping into the mud at his knees. As for his Alsatian, that lay on its side, its body taxidermied by rigor mortis, its head made strangely two-dimensional by its wounds. The bloodied brick that someone had used to flatten its skull lay alongside it, but the dog was no longer bleeding. It must have been killed at some hour in the night, and flies hummed around it now. Leonard swept a hand at them, but they carried on.

  ‘Leonard,’ said Roland, who for all his cool seemed as shocked as anyone there. ‘What . . . what happened here?’

  Leonard did not seem to hear. He spread his arms and said, ‘This is our dog!’ Then he bowed his head and pressed the back of his fist across his eyes.

  How strange, thought Hiroko, to see him like this. He looked a different man in his open grief, as if he were some cracked and tumbledown statue now restored to its purer shape.

  She still hated him.

  Looking at the dog again, she entertained the brief fancy that Yasuo’s spirit had done this. Yet it seemed unlike a ghost to bash a dog’s skull in with a brick, and with a sigh she acknowledged that Yasuo was gone now to wherever the smoke of fires flew. She couldn’t even draw any pleasure from the dog’s death, even though it had been the animal who had killed her fox. The dog had been the weapon, not the wielder, and to blame it would be like blaming her slingshot for the kills she herself had made.

  Leonard stood up. He drew his arm slowly across his eyes, but that could not prevent them from streaming. He put on his glasses and spluttered, and his bottom lip trembled out of control, as shiny with saliva as the morning ground was with the dew.

  He spotted Hiroko in the crowd at once, and when he trudged towards her the people of the settlement parted and she was left with only Seb, Adrien and Hannah for support. She steadied herself and met the big man’s eyes as he came to a halt a few feet away. ‘You know what you’ve done,’ he said, but his voice sounded uncharacteristically faint.

  Hiroko shook her head. ‘Not this. This wasn’t me.’

  ‘You did,’ he said, nodding. ‘It had to have been you. It was revenge for your fox.’

  She looked from face to face of those assembled, and saw that they either all believed Leonard or had no guts to side against him. Of the people from the settlement, only Michelle dared meet her eye.

  Hiroko tried to resist reaching for her knife. ‘I didn’t kill your dog,’ she said as calmly as she could, ‘and this is how you can know. If I had killed it, I would boast about it. Believe me, I would. And I wouldn’t just leave it lying there. I’d break it in half like you had it break my Yasuo, and I’d nail the two parts of it to the wall of your hut.’

  One or two people gasped, and some stepped backwards. The rest held their breath and waited for Leonard to explode. Instead he just watched her for a minute, then nodded. He turned back to his Alsatian, as if he hoped his vision had deceived him and that, at any moment, the animal would spring to life and wag its tail. He snorted and went to where the brick was, and picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

  ‘Leonard,’ said Roland cautiously. ‘I think you’re in some sort of shock. Go for a walk. Talk to someone, if you must. As for you, girl, I’d like to speak to you in private.’

  ‘No,’ said Hiroko. ‘There’s nothing to say. I didn’t do this.’

  Roland lowered his voice. ‘Of course you did, and you’d best admit it. Like he says, it was payback for your fox.’

  ‘I was with her all night,’ objected Seb, ‘we were in the shelter until just now.’

  ‘You would say that. Of course you’d say that.’

  ‘Shh,’ said Leonard, striding back towards Hiroko with the brick in his hand. She faced him down, as best she could. Seb drew close to her side, and Hannah and Adrien were at her back.

  Leonard held the brick so tight that his knuckles were white. His stare locked with Hiroko’s and his irises were blue as ice, and she could make out her reflection in his glasses. Only the wind and the flies made noise, then a trio of crows who landed on the roof of Leonard’s shack and eyed the corpse of the Alsatian.

  Leonard turned away from her again. ‘She’s telling the truth. And she’s the only one of you brave enough to do it.’ His glare passed quickly across all the assembled faces, until it came to rest on Hannah’s. ‘You,’ he said, with an intake of breath, as if she had just there and then stabbed him. ‘Is this how you follow up on your warnings?’

  Hannah shook her head, and looked upset. ‘It wasn’t me either,’ she insisted.

  ‘What message did you hope this would give me? Did you think this would change anything for the better?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  He locked eyes with her, just as he had done with Hiroko. Then he turned away and raised his voice to address all those gathered. ‘One of you. It had to be one of you. I’ll find out, believe me. You know what happens, after that.’

  Then he stalked away, between the rows of shelters.

  For the rest of that day, a tense atmosphere hung over the settlement. Several times Hiroko overheard groups of people discussing the death of the Alsatian, then falling silent if they noticed her passing. Clearly they all thought she’d done it, regardless of what she or even Leonard had said. Leonard himself was nowhere to be seen, and he left his dog lying dead where they’d found it, and nobody dared so much as to cover it from the flies.

  Hiroko did her best to sleep that night, and not to think of Leonard or the Alsatian, or of poor little Yasuo or her family so many miles away, or even of the snoring and rustling of the strangers in the shelter. Seb was her remedy. She pressed herself against him with their foreheads and noses touching, their arms around one another, their hair tangled up. Sometimes the movements of his feet stirred her, and sometimes she suspected his toes and hers of carrying out a romance all of their own at the foot of the bed. Their nudging was the one thing she didn’t mind waking her. If it did, she would focus on the soft flow of his breath against her cheeks and lips, and do her best to think of nothing else in the world.

  Love was a trail through the forest of
yourself. If grief and savagery threatened, you could stick to its course and hope it would prevent you from disappearing into shadows. Finding that trail in the first place was the hardest part, but now that she had found it she had no intention of letting it out of her sight. That night she dreamed of the forest house, but in her dream it was she and Seb who lived there, and her father came to visit them and he and Seb joked in Nihongo and were happy. She was not angry any more, she realised, at her otosan. She wondered if he realised that she missed him, wherever he was now, if he was even alive. She wondered whether parents had some inbuilt sense of whether or not their children loved them, no matter where the child was or how badly they had behaved. Tochan, she thought, at some waking point in the night, I understand it all now. And it was true. Her father’s heartbreak had simply been too insistent to allow him to return to the beech woods in Iwate. She no longer thought of that weakness as dishonourable. In fact, she loved him all the more for his admission of it.

  She smiled and lifted her cheek and laid it against Seb’s. He smiled too, in his sleep, and she stroked the hair along the top of his neck. She wasn’t even sure if she was awake or asleep but, regardless, she hoped she would soon dream again of the forest house. They had an orchard there, she and Seb, and he always chose her the sweetest of the apples . . .

  All of a sudden there was a hand over her mouth and nostrils, and another around her waist. Before she knew what was happening, she had been lifted off the ground and was being dragged backwards, towards the door. All of her kicking and struggling did nothing to break her assailant’s grip, and he had stolen her out of the shelter before Seb could even jump to his feet. Then the hand across her mouth tightened and all she could smell was old meat on rough skin, and she could not breathe. She could not breathe. She battled to do so, but she could not breathe.

  She tried her best to bite, but the hand squeezed so tight that her jaw buckled. She was outside now, in the night, and she could not breathe and it made the dark turn bright. Her eyes rolled for want of oxygen. Somewhere Seb was yelling her name but everything was pitch black and blurring into blue-green and how fast she was moving, how fast, and she could not breathe.