The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  They called that frog Nefertiti, and she lured hordes of lovesick males down to the traps in the valley. At night sometimes Hiroko would hear her would-be suitors, and one time she even slipped out of bed to watch them springing to their doom in the moonlight. That was the night when the strange thing happened. She had been awake, in the first place, because she had been missing her family. During their journey to the hotel, even if they’d been heading west and not east, they’d always had some direction to distract her heart with. Now that they were stuck in the valley there was no such reprieve. Hiroko slipped out of bed and went outside, and stood in the cold dark with the male frogs leaping past her down the slope. She could feel the immensity of all the mud and stone and bedrock beneath her feet. The sheer magnitude of the planet, somewhere on the far side of which was Japan. Seb had helped her learn to cope with it, but a weight didn’t lighten just because you found the strength to carry it.

  Closing her eyes in the darkness, Hiroko tried to conjure up her father’s face. She couldn’t do it without placing him in the Tokyo apartment, in profile, gazing out of the window with Saori at his side. They were looking out at the surrounding tower blocks, just as Hiroko had seen them do on countless occasions. This time, however, Tokyo’s high rises stood up amid a sea of leaves. Every glass pane of every tower had filled up with green reflections.

  Ribbet, went a frog at her ankle. Ribbet. Hiroko wiped her eyes and looked down just in time to see the amphibian jump boldly onto the toecap of her boot. There it shuffled ninety degrees and tilted its head to look up at her, the moon a miniaturised reflection in each of its eyes.

  Ribbet, it said, almost like a query, and for some reason Hiroko thought it was trying to tell her something.

  She crouched down and lifted it off her boot. It sat almost motionless on her palm, as light as a thought.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘What is it you have to say?’

  It didn’t say anything.

  ‘Don’t go any further down the slope, little frog. It’s all a big trap that we made for you. We’re going to cook you if you fall for it.’

  The frog only blinked and looked queasy. Probably it was just a fancy of the moonlight, but there seemed something familiar about its worried expression. She returned it to the soil, placing it facing uphill, then stood and headed back towards the settlement, where the moonlight picked out shards of metal in the crumbled ruins of the Caisleán Hotel.

  She staggered to a halt, pushing her wrists hard against her eyes. The tears found their escape routes, all the same. Her father and Saori were with her like ghosts tonight. Standing at the apartment window, looking out at all that green . . .

  It was as if her subconscious had long been rehearsing it while she strove to turn her thoughts elsewhere. Branches had broken the tower blocks’ struts and girders. Roots had bent the deepest foundations. The towers’ own mass had done the rest. They had packed themselves down, floor by floor, with neatness. Near the ground they had billowed out dust clouds that had hidden the city and the forest as one.

  Hiroko had to crouch. The trembling in her legs was the trembling of the floor beneath her father’s feet.

  What would have gone through her beloved otosan’s mind, in that final moment before everything gave way? Saori, beside him? Something remembered from his days in America? The face of his wife, whom his daughter had killed at her birth?

  No. Hiroko knew, as certainly as she knew the layout of the bones in a prey animal’s skeleton, who her father would have thought of in those final seconds of his life.

  Ribbet.

  She opened her eyes and was momentarily appalled to find that the frog had returned, to crouch right there in front of her. Couldn’t it see that she was grieving?

  The frog’s tongue shot out and dabbed her nose.

  A moment later it was gone, hopping away while Hiroko remained too stunned to reach after it. It did not head any further down the valley, nor back up the slope. Instead it hopped along it, away from both Hiroko and the settlement and the pheromone lure of Nefertiti.

  It was not until a day later, in a moment of idle speculation with the compass in her hand, that Hiroko realised that the frog had hopped due east.

  ‘Adrien?’ she asked, and the branches of the trees atop the valley’s heights shook in a breeze she could not feel blowing against her skin.

  20

  Direction

  A month and a half passed by. Someone at the settlement had been keeping a calendar, and in mid-December Hannah began to move on her ankle again. At first she did so only for short spells, and with the aid of a walking stick, but she was desperate to rebuild her strength. She had no desire to stay put in the valley, and if the year had not been against her she would have left as soon as she could limp.

  The leaves were all gone now from the trees and in most parts of the forest the undergrowth was a black mush laced with ice. Treading tentatively through such wintry woodland, Hannah sometimes let out a heartfelt sigh, wishing that the planet would turn a little faster, and spring arrive in weeks instead of months. It pained her to admit it, but she knew that leaving at this time of year would be madness. The world would be far too cold and barren to travel in.

  On Christmas Eve a hoarfrost etched every skeletal leaf into the forest floor. Hannah was once again out walking, enjoying the crunching ground she slowly trod. Frozen water feathered every twig, and some branches looked as white as the pinions of swans. The trunks, on the other hand, remained resolutely dark, and even the mosses had turned black. When, plodding into an open glade, Hannah saw red shapes strewn among the blacks and whites, she paused and held her breath, expecting them to be the innards of some poor murdered animal. Then she yelped, and almost forgot to use her walking stick in her hurry to get closer.

  They were wild strawberries. It was impossible, but they were. She gathered them incredulously, half expecting them to transform into mould in the blink of an eye. Yet when she tasted them they were as sweet as high summer’s best crop.

  Back at the settlement, she shared what she had found with nobody except Seb, Hiroko and Michelle. She had brought masses of the fruits back with her as a treat as well as proof, and they ate them with wonder and red juice bursting over their lips.

  ‘An early Christmas present,’ declared Michelle, when they had finished the last of them.

  ‘But from who?’ wondered Hannah, looking up the slope towards the forest.

  The next day, Christmas Day, all four of them went looking for the strawberry glade. It was nowhere to be found, so they returned to the fires in the valley and sang, along with several others, every festive song they could remember. Roland appeared and wished everybody season’s greetings, then urged them not to forget their daily chores. Michelle said that everyone deserved a day off, on this of all days, and the two began to argue. They had been arguing whenever they crossed paths, since their split.

  Just as she had sought Hiroko’s advice, Michelle sought Hannah’s on a good many things. In defiance of Roland’s orders, she did as Hannah had previously suggested and took the cows up into the forest. There they roamed for a while and ate what little they could find, then let themselves be ushered back down to their paddock. Likewise Michelle was fascinated by herblore. Hannah drew for her the best pictures she could to create a sort of forager’s field guide, and it felt good to do so. It reminded her of time spent with Zach, long ago.

  Early in January, Michelle and Roland had their most ferocious clash yet, and several other people from the settlement took Michelle’s side over his. She had discovered that Roland had been hiding a secret stash of alcohol, retrieved from the hotel’s bar, and this flew against everyone’s idea of community. When he tried to apologise he slurred some of his words, and people began to mutter about a change of direction for the settlement.

  Hannah began to practise walking without her stick’s assistance. She was always on the lookout for flashes of colour amid the drab of winter, but the next time that
she encountered something extraordinary it was not red but black and white, with a dash of blue across its wing feathers.

  She was walking beneath a mesh of grey branches, with the colourless sky cold up above, when she became aware of a magpie hopping along a branch to her left. She had thought she had seen it earlier, but magpies were common birds so she hadn’t paid it much heed. This time, however, she had a hunch that it was following her, and five minutes later it was still on her trail. She paused and thought for a moment, then turned to face it and whispered, ‘What is it you want?’

  It squawked and took off from its branch, flapping closer and beating hard its wings to hover in the air before her. In its claws it grasped something small and shiny. Hannah reached out a tentative hand and it dropped the object onto her palm. Then it flapped away laughing.

  It had given her a silver key, from a child’s jewellery box.

  ‘Adrien?’ she asked, under her breath.

  That night, Roland picked another fight with Michelle. He had uncovered a secret ballot in circulation, a petition for someone else to take charge, and he accused her of orchestrating it. She knew nothing about the ballot, having been too busy learning woodcraft from Hiroko and Hannah, and she told Roland as much. Then he revealed a copy of the petition and asked her to explain why, therefore, her name was foremost among those being suggested to take his place. At that Michelle was stunned, but a crowd had heard their raised voices and gathered round, and began to murmur their support. An hour later, Michelle was made leader of the settlement.

  It was Michelle, therefore, who led the farewells when Hannah, Hiroko and Seb set out again into the woods. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s tantamount to suicide.’

  ‘It will be alright,’ said Hannah. ‘I know it will be.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s January, Hannah. It’s the worst month for doing anything.’

  Hannah twirled between her finger and thumb the silver key the magpie had given her. ‘We’ll wait and see,’ she said.

  Michelle offered them all the supplies her community could spare, but Hannah refused them politely. And with that, and after each of them had embraced the bemused Michelle, they began to walk south.

  Their journey was a surreal experience, nothing like as trying as the one they had taken to get to the valley. Whenever Hannah’s foraging pack became empty, and she began to wonder when next they would eat, they would stumble upon splashes of colour. A plum tree, fruiting in defiance of the season. A bed of crow garlic, its aroma made doubly pungent by the crisp winter air. A grove of long, floppy leaves sprouting all over the forest floor, whereupon Hannah laughed and cried at the same time and would not tell the others what they’d found, insisting that they, ‘Dig! Dig some of them up!’

  They dug and found leeks. Fat leeks too plentiful to carry them all.

  Food might be taken care of, but good firewood did not at first prove easy to come by. The damp made most timber too moist to burn, and on their first rainy night when the drizzle sieved down through the canopy, Hannah worried that they’d all catch a chill and fall sick. At once a speckled songthrush appeared, warbling with insistent jubilation before darting away to their right, slightly west of their course. From a branch there it sang to them, and they all looked to each other and shrugged and then followed where it led, which within fifteen minutes transpired to be an abandoned cottage. Its roof was intact enough to give them shelter, and by a hearth that had lost its fireplace they found a sealed stash of logs and kindling.

  In ways such as these the journey was made smooth for them, and Hannah began to recover her optimism: optimism, it seemed, restored from a past self, a self from before Zach had died. By the start of February they reached the coast some thirty miles east of Dungarvan. From there they struck west, asking everyone they met whether they’d encountered a sailor with a capricorn tattoo and a vivacious little daughter. One or two people had, and on an overcast day they found him, waist-deep in water as he waded back to the shore. He had a filled pot of shellfish in his hand, but he dropped it with a splash when he saw Hannah. She beamed at him (and a robin sang from out of the woods), and then Nora came hurtling out of nowhere and flung her arms around Hannah’s waist.

  Eoin had been repairing the house of his parents-in-law, who he said he had buried at sea. The travellers helped him to complete the work, just as they had with his boat, and they lost sight of the days passing by as they did so. The rain fell heavier and often, and on one bitterly cold morning the icicles hung like glass roots from the eaves of the house. When it snowed they built a life-sized snowman, and Seb lifted Nora so she could place pebbles for its mouth, nose and eyes. Then she used her finger to draw spectacles into the snow and said it was Adrien Thomas, and Hannah nearly choked on the sudden tightening in her throat, and the woods made a creaking noise like the snow underfoot.

  One evening, after the thaw, while Hiroko was playing wild beasts with Nora and a salt-starved Eoin had gone for a dip in the ocean, Hannah and Seb sat alone on the sand. After a while, Seb said, ‘I’m glad we got this chance to talk with you in private, Mum.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ she asked. ‘Have you got something to tell me?’

  Hannah was excited about this. For weeks it had been obvious that Seb and Hiroko had a secret in their lives. Seb was far better at concealing it than Hiroko, but he was still her son and she had learned how his face worked as only mothers can. She’d become so excited, in fact, that she had already begun planning a little party. What could be more appropriate, given that the new life of spring would coincide with their announcement? They were going to be good parents, she knew, and it would be a pleasure to think of Hiroko as her daughter-in-law.

  Seb was struggling to say it. She nudged him with her elbow, trying to hold back her smile. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘you can tell me.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last, then cleared his throat. ‘We’re going . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ She could hardly bear to wait one moment longer. ‘Going to have a what?’

  ‘Going,’ he said.

  She waited. ‘Going to . . . ?’

  ‘Going, Mum. Um. I’ve been trying to tell you since we got here. But I haven’t been brave enough. Sorry.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ she asked, although she had heard him full well. ‘What did you say you were doing?’

  ‘Leaving, Mum. Once the summer’s here.’

  She held her hands to her head. Leaving? It made no sense. None at all.

  ‘Blame me if you’re upset, not Hiroko. It was my idea.’

  ‘But . . . where? Where could you possibly want to go?’

  Seb puffed out his cheeks. He ran his hands back over the top of his head. ‘Japan.’

  Hannah was silent for a minute. And then, despite her distress at the thought that she’d be losing him, losing both of them, she gasped with a proud laughter, and reached out for him, and they embraced so tight that he winced in pain from his newly unslung arm. They held each other gentler for a minute, and then she went and found Hiroko and hugged her too, and after that, no more words were needed.

  Seb and Hiroko left on the first truly warm day of the year. Eoin gifted them the boat, the one that they had helped him to build, for they planned to retrace his route along the coast, and so eventually back across the water to Wales, and then perhaps around Land’s End and the south coast of England until they were ready to brave the crossing to France. They were in no hurry, for of course it would be foolish to be. Their journey was going to take them years and years.

  Years, Hannah hoped, were something they had on their side.

  At the hour of their departure, the trees creaked and seemed almost to strain to be with them on the beach, as if they wanted to be closer when their farewells finally took place. Hannah and the others stood in a stiff huddle to wave them off. There were tears in all their eyes, but Hannah’s most of all. Yet when Seb and Hiroko began to row she felt, despite her sorro
w, something that was bittersweet and apt. The two of them had a path to follow, and whether that path proved as straight as they hoped for or a tangled thing without any bearings did not matter, so long as they could keep their feet on it.

  Seb’s eyes stayed locked on his mother’s as the boat shrank into a haze that eventually concealed it. Then Hannah closed her eyes and for a minute kept fixed, in her mind, a picture of that face she had first seen laid down on her breast not minutes after he had breathed his first. His eyes had sought out hers on that day just as they had on this, and now she felt as if all of her struggles to be here in this moment, waving him farewell, were steel preparing her for what he needed, which was the right and natural commencement of his adult life. And now he was gone, and Nora clung to her leg, and Eoin took hold of her and clasped her close, and she felt both a sorrow and a pride, which she imagined might in past lives have been saved for aisle days and days of white dresses, and among the trees the green leaves were whispering, and above them wheeled countless birds of many species and above those the deft clouds. Life was changing into something new, in keeping with its ancient motions.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Sue Armstrong for your dedication and positivity, and for long patient sessions hearing out story ideas.