Season of Secrets

by Sally Nicholls

  “Of course not!”

  Emily has come over now, and is watching me with her quiet eyes.

  “He was running away, last night!”

  “You can’t have seen him last night,” says Josh. “That guy’s been up there for years. He’d be, like, a thousand years old. He’d be a ghost.”

  I want to punch him. “What would you know about it, anyway, Josh Haltwhistle? Were you there? How would you know who he is?”

  “He’s the Green Man,” Miss Shelley says.

  She’s standing in the aisle, her dark skirt flowing and merging with her shadow, so you can’t see where one begins and the other ends. The boys are silent. Even Hannah is watching.

  “Is he from the Bible?” says Alexander, uncertainly.

  Miss Shelley laughs. The spell is broken.

  “Not exactly,” she says. “Green Man is the name for a face like that – made of leaves or with leaves around it. It crops up in old churches and tombstones. Nobody knows why.”

  “Tombstones?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. She looks at me. “The Green Man is linked to the cycle of death and rebirth. He’s put on graves as a sign of hope.”

  “But people don’t rebirth,” says Alexander.

  “Not often,” says Miss Shelley. She looks so pretty I feel like melting. “OK, look. The Green Man is an old god – from before most people could read or write – so we don’t really know anything about him. But people think he might have been the god of summer – or of spring. Right?”

  “Right,” I say. Behind her, Emily has her head on one side, listening.

  “So,” says Miss Shelley. “Think of him like a year. He’s born with the spring, grows into his full power in the summer, fades in the autumn and dies in the winter. You then have the dark period of the year. Nothing grows. The earth is dead. But something wonderful happens. Spring comes again and the world is reborn.”

  She speaks as if it’s something beautiful. A man getting torn apart by wolves, beautiful! I can’t think of anything more terrible. And to have the same thing happen year after year after year, for as long as the world is turning. My poor hunted man.

  “That’s horrible!” I say. “Why doesn’t anyone stop it? Can’t anyone stop it?” And then, “Does he even get reborn as the same person?”

  Hannah says, “It’s a story, Molly.” Behind her, Josh sputters into his hand. Miss Shelley shakes her head.

  “It’s never wise to laugh at things you don’t understand,” she says. “If you’re not careful, they might start laughing back at you.”

  When the others have wandered off, I lock myself in a pew with my feet on the bench and my clipboard on my knees. I draw the man from the pillar. He’s got a body of branches and hands of leaves. He has big eyes but no mouth.

  I draw men on horses, with dogs and horns. The biggest is Josh and the second biggest is Matthew. They have red smiles and swords that drip red blood. They’re chasing the man made of leaves. A girl with fair hair and sparkly shoes watches. She might be Emily or she might be someone else. She doesn’t cheer and she doesn’t cry.

  “Lovely, Molly!” says Mrs Angus, passing my pew.

  Emily

  If I could be anyone in the world, including pop stars or the Queen, I would be Emily1. Emily has pink hairslides with stars on them and a set of rubbers shaped like unicorns and a mum and a dad and a little brother who all live together on a farm. All the bits of her match, which they never do if you live with your grandpa and half your things are in Newcastle.

  “Emily,” says Hannah, “is the most boring person I have ever met. The most boring person in Britain. In the whole world!”

  But Hannah is wrong. It’s true that Emily doesn’t say much. She hardly ever speaks in class and at break she just sits on the bench and watches, or lets Josh boss her about.

  But that doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking things. Sometimes in class she’ll say something or look at Miss Shelley in a way that shows she’s listening and thinking and wondering. I try and show I’m thinking and wondering too, but I don’t know if she gets it. I don’t know if I’m the sort of person someone like Emily would be friends with. I’m not little and blonde – I’ve got short black curls that tangle, and eyes so dark they’re almost black.

  “You’re my raggle-taggle gypsy love,” says Grandpa, which is nice, but it’s not much use outside of Grandpa-land.

  Up the Lane

  After school, I go up the lane on my bike. Playing out.

  Playing out here isn’t like it is at home. At home, I go and call for my best friend Katy, or my second-best friend Chloe, and we play badminton in the street, or build dens in Chloe’s garden, or muck about on Katy’s computer or anything.

  At Grandpa’s, there’s nobody but Hannah, and we never played much even at home. Here all we’ve done is fight and nearly run away. So today I’m on my own.

  I take my bike out and go down the hill first; three times, for luck. Then I ride up the lane the other way, away from the village, the way I went last night.

  When I get to the place with the hawthorn trees, I stop. There are dark stains on the grass that the rain hasn’t washed away. They give me a shivery feeling, but I’m relieved as well.

  “See!” I say, to an imaginary Josh. “He was real.”

  The imaginary Josh looks impressed.

  Very cautiously, I look at the mess again. He was lying in a sort of hollow, which has got filled up with rain, only the rain is coloured with globbles of this thick, blackish red. Like paint. The stains aren’t just where my man was lying. There are more of them, on the bank by the side of the lane. It’s a trail, like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel. Off they go, drip, drip, drip, off to the left, past the sign that says PRIVATE LAND and down a laneway I’ve never gone down before.

  I get off my bike and look at the sign. PRIVATE means DANGER and KEEP OUT and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  But I want to find the man again. I want to prove Josh and Hannah and Grandma wrong. I want to know for sure that I didn’t make him up. I do make things up sometimes, and sometimes I forget what’s real and what isn’t. Like playing that the house is on fire, until I can almost see the smoke seeping through the crack under my door. Plus I want to know who the hunt are and how they disappeared into nowhere and why my man has his face in our church.

  I pull my worst face at the sign: forehead wrinkled, lips clenched, eyebrows thrust out. I don’t care if I do get into trouble. Going on to someone’s land isn’t nearly as bad as abandoning your daughters, and that’s what Dad’s done to us. And he got away with it.

  So.

  This bit of lane has trees over the top of it. It’s a rustly, living tunnel. The leaves are just starting to turn red in the corners and they’re waving above my head; trees whispering secrets, tree to tree. The blood is still here too. If the hunt does come back from wherever it vanished to, I bet it would take those sniffer wolves about five seconds to track him down.

  I wonder if they’d be able to get over a gate, though? There’s one coming up and a field behind it, with cows, and big clods of muddy, torn-up earth where the cows come through for milking. The gate is shut, but there, in the field, is this little stone house with a tumbledown roof. It’s the woodcutter’s house. Or the witch’s. It’s just the sort of place you’d go to hide in, if someone had hurt you.

  I climb over the gate and drop down on to the other side. I’ve got mud on my school shoes and my socks and all the way up my leg.

  I carry on forward.

  The house isn’t exactly a house. It’s a barn. It’s got an old barn door, with a top half that opens on different hinges so horses (or cows) can look over. The wood is rotten and the top half is gone.

  I peer around the rotten frame.

  There are stacks of wood, and sacks of cement and old ash where someone had a fire, but mostly there’s empty. Half of the roof has fallen in.

  There’s no one there.

  I don’t know whether t
o be relieved or disappointed.

  “Hello?” I say. “Hello? It’s me. Molly. It’s Molly.”

  No one answers.

  “Please,” I say, to the piles of splintered wood and the sky. “Please be here. Please don’t be dead.”

  And then the darkness against the wall moves.

  “I’m here,” he says.

  A Man in the Barn

  He’s not dead.

  He’s propped up against the wall, legs spread out in front of him. They don’t seem to be bleeding any more, but it’s hard to tell because he’s lying on the shadowy side, the side that still has a roof. I’m on the sunny side, which just has a hole and beams and clouds and a sky. His face is hidden in shadow. The thing I can see most clearly is the sole of one bare foot, which is stretched out towards me; hard and white and covered in mud.

  I suddenly don’t know what to say.

  “You got home safe?” he says. “They didn’t find you?”

  I shake my head.

  “That’s all right then,” he says. He tilts his head back then screws it up, like it hurts to move.

  I come closer.

  “You don’t have shoes on.”

  “No,” he says.

  He doesn’t have a jacket either. Now I’m closer, I see that he’s bare from the waist upwards. I can see his chest muscles bulging under his brown skin.

  My dad’s muscles aren’t anything like as good as his.

  “Do you need anything?” I say. “Food? Help?”

  He leans his head against the wall and smiles. It’s a nice smile. Sort of tired but pleased.

  “No,” he says.

  It reminds me of the way my mum used to look at me, half asleep as I climbed up into her bed on Sunday mornings when I was small. I come closer. I’m not sure I believe him. Coming down the lane, I’d almost convinced myself that he was Miss Shelley’s god, but now I’m here, I’m doubtful. What if he’s just a man, hurt like my mum was hurt?

  If no one helps him, will he die too?

  “Are you real?” I say, suddenly.

  He stretches out his hand. “There.”

  I go over and take his hand. The skin is rough and warm. The nails are chipped and his fingers are crumbled with dried mud and something else.

  “Real,” he says.

  He looks exactly like the head in the church, except he doesn’t have leaves. He has brown, curly hair, with strands of red and orange which glow when the sun catches them. He’s wearing thick, brown trousers that fold over in sort of wrinkles, like the skin of the rhinoceros in the Just So Stories. They stop halfway down his leg. They’re torn and mangled by the teeth of the wolves, and messed up with mud and thick-smelling blood, but if I squint and look away, I can almost forget about them.

  “Your face is in our church,” I say.

  He doesn’t seem surprised.

  “Is it?” he says. He looks at me with the same, fond look. Then he closes his eyes.

  He’s asleep.

  I stay where I am for a while, watching him, but he doesn’t move. I stand up, as slowly and quietly as I can, and go back to the door.

  When I turn and look back, he’s gone.

  Really Real

  I sit on top of the gate and look at the sky. Really real!

  The way I see it, Famous Five-style, there are two possibilities.

  1. He’s a real but ordinary person, unmagical. I should (probably) dial 999 like the St John’s Ambulance people showed us at school and rescue him. I will be in all the newspapers – Girl Saves Injured Man. I might even get a medal.

  2. He’s something completely different – the Green Man and the old god from the church. And anything could happen next.

  Grandpa’s serving a whole queue of customers when I burst through the shop door. Grandma’s nowhere to be seen. Hannah’s in the kitchen, kneeling on one of the kitchen chairs. She’s drawing signatures in swirly purple letters:

  “Hannah. Hannaah.”

  She turns slightly but definitely round, so her back is facing me. She’s turning the full stops and the dots on her “i”s into little hearts.

  “Hannaah.” I pull on her arm. “I’ve found him. The man from the church – the god Miss Shelley was talking about in church. The one who has to die to make the winter. I’ve found where he is. We can go and rescue him!”

  Hannah jerks her arm away.

  “Leave me alone,” she says. “I’m busy. I don’t have time to play games.”

  “Hannah – I’m not messing – seriously, seriously, I’ve found a man, in a field. He’s hurt. We can help him!”

  Hannah looks ever so slightly interested.

  “I honestly, honestly promise. Honestly. Swear on . . . swear on Dad’s life.”

  “You’re not supposed to swear,” says Hannah, but she puts her pen down. “Show me first. Then if he’s real, we’ll tell Grandpa.”

  I lead and Hannah follows. I know I should be worried about the man, but actually I’m mostly excited to be leading a rescue mission. I wonder if we ought to have brought bandages, or at least aspirin.

  “You have to climb the gate,” I tell Hannah. “He’s in the barn. There!”

  “You didn’t say there’d be mud!” says Hannah. She won’t go straight through like I do (my school shoes couldn’t get any muddier). She goes round the edge, balancing on rocks. “Ow!”

  I get to the barn first. He’s there; sleeping in his corner. The sun has moved, so there’s a ray of light from the hole in the roof shining on his face. He looks like a curly-haired Jesus.

  “Hello,” I whisper. He blinks at me.

  “Ough!” says Hannah. The floor inside the barn is lower than the lip of the door, and she’s stepped right off it and landed on a plank of wood. She slides off and grabs my arm. “What is this place?”

  “It’s where he is.” I point. “Look.”

  “Where?” says Hannah. “What’re you pointing at?”

  I look.

  But he’s gone.

  Mum

  I want Mum tonight. I want to tell her about the man in the barn. I want to take her there and say, “A man was here and then he wasn’t. Is he real?”

  “The world is a strange and wonderful place, Molly-love.”

  That’s what she’d say.

  “The world is a strange and wonderful place,” I whisper, but it just makes me feel more alone than ever.

  From my bed, I can see the light on the landing. I can hear people laughing on the television. I could go and talk to Grandma and Grandpa. I could tell them, a hunt rode through our village last night. A huntsman rode through our village and was gone. I could say, there’s a man in a barn and my teacher says he’s going to die. But I’m going to save him.

  I don’t move.

  My mum’s name was Diana Eleanor Brooke. She died on the eighth of August. She was thirty-nine, which sounds very old, but isn’t really. Not when you think that Grandma is sixty-nine and Grandpa is seventy-four.

  My mum was the most beautiful person in the whole world, probably. Beautifuller than Miss Shelley, even. She had long fair hair and green witch-eyes and a turned-up nose with freckles, which is a most un-adult thing to have. Neither Hannah nor I look much like her. When I was little, I used to hope that my black curls would turn blonde and straight and so one day I might grow up to look like her, but it never happened. The only thing we have in common is freckles. She was the only grown-up I ever saw with freckles. She wasn’t ever very like a grown-up though. She was grown-up about things like bedtimes and cleaning your teeth, but she was like a little kid about other things, like Christmas trees and fireworks and fairies. She believed in fairies. She thought she’d seen one once, when she was smaller than me. Only it was just for a moment, out of a car window, so she was never sure. I almost believe in fairies too. And I like Christmas trees, and banana ice cream, and jumping waves at the seaside, like she did.

  Mum is the person I want now. She’s the person I want to tell about my man. She wouldn’t thi
nk I was playing games or making things up, like Grandma and Hannah do. She’d know what to do. She’d—

  I don’t know what she’d do, but she’d believe me.

  Flower and Tree

  So I’m on my own. That’s OK. When I come home from school, I go straight through to the kitchen. The shop would be a better place to go, but Grandma’s in there and, anyway, she’d notice if things went missing. The kitchen is Grandpa’s place and he’s much less observant. I get a carrier bag from the drawer and I fill it with things. Apples. Bread. Orange juice. A packet of ham. A tin of beans, a tin of peaches, a tin of thick rice and tomato soup. A fork. Matches.

  If nobody else is going to help him, that doesn’t mean I can’t.

  There are blackberries growing in the hedgerows in the lane. More of the trees are turning autumn-coloured – soft yellows and oranges. It looks as if somebody’s smudged over the world with a paintbrush, dulling and mixing the colours. The banks are covered in the hard stalks of dead cow parsley. The air is fresher, and colder. It smells of leaves and grass and wet earth.

  When I go through into the barn, he’s there. He’s awake. He’s moved. Last time he was leaning against the wall, now he’s huddled up in the corner, out of the wind.

  “Hello,” I say.

  He looks up when I come in. “Molly, isn’t it?” he says. “I wondered if you were coming back.” He holds out his hand and I come and sit beside him.

  In the evening light, I can see his legs clearly. They look awful. I can see the stains and tears, all the way down. There’s a strong smell, like something’s rotting, and flies are crawling about on his strange trousers. I look away.

  “Do they hurt?” I say.

  He yawns and shakes his head again.

  “Should I get an ambulance? Someone to help?”