Pollard

by Laura Beatty

  Nod. And hold onto yourself with a stone in your throat till he was actually gone, just the black bulk of him giving a last wave at the hedge by the track. Listen for the truck cough and start off back, before turning to the empty wood.

  She went over and over it, after, taking apart all the words that he’d said, shredding them of all meaning, spent and dry, like matchsticks on the floor of her hut. Three more days till they actually went. She told herself that his arms were strong and holding, although she couldn’t really remember.

  ♦

  Crying day and night, in time with the rain, because it rained that night and both the following days. Fat summer rain, sounding through the leaves and on the roof of the hut. Drop drop drop and the birds singing through water, like bubbles. Anne lay, and listened to Steve and Mother and Rosie, croodling to each other in their pen, and tried not to count the dawn and the dusk and the hoot-filled night. Dawn again. She must have dozed because she was woken by Steve crowing into the falling wet. The whole wood running with water. So no one would have expected her to go and say a formal goodbye, although she would like to have seen Rosie. No one would have expected her to walk across ground that sucked like a sponge, with her hair plastered over her face and her ragbag clothes clinging. No one expected her to lie in a ditch and watch the gates of the dump for hours, until the truck came crawling under its snail-shell of luggage and turned away for the coast at last.

  And no one, looking back, would have expected to see Anne, standing upright now in the ditch. Black, sodden, looking after the vanishing truck.

  Still standing, a long time after, with the road empty except for the rain. The water streaming off her.

  Just the cut stump, with its memories of luxuriance, leaking sap at a sodden sky.

  ♦

  Ache now. And up the track, feet clodded. Cold. Rain-blinded. Up to the wood.

  Dumb.

  Stark.

  Stood in the hut. Dust, drips. Stripped. Sodden.

  Naked.

  Took Steve’s coat off its hook and wrapped the arms around her neck and got into bed and lay on it empty. Face in the collar.

  The cloth in the dark. So thin. So flat. So nothing. Just a coat after all.

  Even the smell of him gone.

  Chorus of Trees

  Nothing remains. We accept that. Standing and watching the flying sky, leaving behind the bad summer, the cold spring, the muggy winter. Now, summer slips over the horizon and goes elsewhere, and autumn takes the wood with a rocking wind.

  The colours are irrelevant. They are for others. They mean nothing to the trees, the reds and golds. They are just the memory of burning days.

  Letting the lovely leaves slip through cold fingers. Twigs too stiff to stop them; not cut out for holding. Sift them, sift them. All that stored sunlight. Hoping to shed them on your own roots at least. Keep them in some form or other. On a still day is best, just falling your own leaves on your own feet.

  More often a breeze or a snatching wind, this time of year, whirling and squandering. Clatter the blind branches. Watch the trees make light of the wind, literally, flash and flicker in the stripped stands. Dangerous, you can see that. It’s a flashing sky in between. A glare and the sun like a mad eye.

  See us toss the wind about, like a ball, between us, till it twists one without warning.

  Crack and snap, and that’s years work gone. And the wind, damage done, barrelling away down the rides.

  We are barely abreast of it. Sap-sunk. Waiting.

  Everything suffers. Vixen shifting about the wood, balancing her hunger to see where she feels it least. Carry it high, in the head is best, rage in her eye.

  Survival is a question of cork, if you are a tree. Conservation and reduction, and the efficiency of cork, replicating itself across twig ends, sealing off the leaves, loved and cast off, blocking decay, damage, retrenching against what can’t be prevented or reversed. The scars seen and unseen. So many. So much to survive.

  Most things have no cure. This is a fallow season. Look inwards down the rings, through the thickening wood that keeps the secrets of other times circled and safe.

  A living record.

  Here is Anne, for instance, moving slowly through the winter, with Steve gone. Smoke rising out of her chimney thin and grey like the ghost of a sapling. This ring has her breaking a hole in the edge of her pool, with the clean end of her hoe, filling a pan for boiling. Looking up with an animal eye at a pigeon above her, sitting sunk in its feathers. She watches it and a single feather, shaken loose when the pigeon puffed itself up for warmth, rocks through the still air like a boat, as if it were nothing precious. No one notices, except Anne.

  On the floor of the wood, the small technology of down, unremarked among a mush of leaves. That’s nature for you.

  Let it go, the branches clatter. Let it go. The trees stand in the cold and face inwards, towards memory. And the balsams that someone planted once dream the richness of a sticky fragrance given to the breeze, and the ashes dream their complicated quivers of leaves, and in the cherry stands, they dream of being in a condition to waste blossom on the ground. Fragility and scent, blowing about their heads. Let it go. Let go.

  Bolling I

  Autumn, winter. Waiting. Spring, summer, autumn again.

  More autumns. Slow, mud-clagged to mid-calf sometimes, legs feathered with fallen leaves, stumbling about the jobs of survival. Because Anne was a survivor, Steve had said so. Forage, repair, cultivate. Sometimes a disabling pang that brought you to your knees, which could have been the pain of spring, after so long, or could have been Steve. He was taking a long time. If he was coming, that is.

  Dry and wet, waiting. Sudden blossom and fall and long cauterising winters.

  Then not waiting. One day, for no particular reason, waiting no longer. Just the wood’s slow revolution. Cut and sprung again, chopped or fallen, then push and bud and leaf. Up again and onward. Anne forgot her anchoring hope and let herself be rolled too. You could feel the ground turning underneath your feet, if you stood still long enough. You could tell you were moving because the skies raced backwards. Sometimes the clouds left the birds standing. Mist, lifting to bone in winter, or flecked mackerel. Swept skies, after a night of storm. Grey and a glimmer of gold towards evening, or just the fog that seeped out of your brain in the morning and never left till you closed it in again at night. The plough swinging about the sky in the dark. And the wind.

  I’m counting on you, Anne still said to herself, although she knew she’d given up – was it long ago, or was it just the other day? For a while, on the wood pile there was a heap of notched sticks but she’d stopped notching and she’d burnt the pile, so she had no idea how long. She’d seen the dump under new management, a dirty-looking man with a ponytail and a missing front tooth; not going to ask him if she could help. It wouldn’t be the same. She’d forgotten Barry, who was no good anyway. She’d watched Carl, skinny cockatoo, take his life plan down the road to the town, where she’d lost him. Sid too, but separately, had gone to the town, taken his nicotine smile to the girls who were made of flesh, not newsprint, where Anne hoped he had finally burst.

  Over time, Anne changed. You do change with exposure. The skin coarsens and grows dark. She lost her soft moon face. Her fat limbs hung loose and sinewed. Her fingers became jointed and knobbled like roots. Hard as wood she was now. Much of the time, when it was mild enough and she wasn’t collecting, or fixing her hut, or down at the café, she sat against the pollard ash because there was something familiar to her about its apologetic slump, the centuries of mutilation it had survived. She looked at its leaves, so fresh in spring, its delicate, arrow points. She’d been vain of her hair once. Now she held its thin strands, roped in her hands. You’ve got pretty leaves, she murmured. How come you get such pretty leaves? In her mind and when she talked to it in her thoughts, the pollard was always female. She sat on its feet, fitted her head between the boils and bumps on its trunk, suffered the bristle of its epicor
mic growth. What are you doing, ash tree? her fingers asked its mossy bulges.

  Nothing any more. Just sitting it out.

  And, Me neither, she would answer. Sitting it out. Me too.

  ♦

  At some point, along with her body, Anne lost time.

  January, February, March. Wednesday. One week, Friday, August, Octember. A fortnight o’clock. Breakfast, six, seven, tea, morning, noon, nine-time. It is important to Anne that she doesn’t forget. She doesn’t know why. She rolls the different words round her mouth while she does whatever she does, to remind herself and so as not to lose everything. She doesn’t like orienteering her way through life without a map but she doesn’t have much choice. She holds on to before and after. With a flash of recognition and usually once only, she can do dark and sap-sunk winter and waking spring and the lazy idyll of summer. Sometimes she finds a word like Easter or Christmas in her mouth, for no reason and at probably inappropriate times. Valentines, she says to herself while skinning a rabbit. Mothering Sunday. She has to keep her wits about her. You couldn’t find your way around the simplest life without time. Dawn, dusk. Night and Pancake Day.

  Look at her now though, now she’s learnt a stillness of sorts, and acceptance. She has a rabbit-skin waistcoat that she wears under Steve’s jacket when it’s cold, belted over an assortment of ill-shaped items. Patchwork lady. Ragbag. But she’s strong. She moves differently, with a slow and rolling gait, lifting her feet clear of sensed obstructions, or of mud. Her hands, like Steve’s, have their own intelligence. She is quiet, steady. She knows the creatures about her, their tastes, their habits. She lies watching her hens, for instance, listening to them talking to each other. Chickens make a lot of different noises. She puts her face close to the netting and she talks back. She has no idea what she is saying.

  Look at her tools, propped inside the door, tidy, alive with constant use. The matt satin shaft of her hoe, the clean prongs of her fork. And the dip of her bed, or her floor, by the door, or the stove, where passage has shaped it; the tarry inside of the hut, warm and Anne smelling.

  Outside, Anne raises her head, tells the weather, the season, the time. She smells rain and coming frost, fog and drought. She hears the fox on mossy paws in the dusk. She sees the woodcock that thinks itself invisible on the woodland floor.

  If she could give herself up finally to the roll of the years, to the round and round and round. If she could live self-sufficient, in a circle.

  But there is no match for her in the wood. Nothing looks back at her and says, I am yours. We fit, you and me. Her blood is full of different urges, and she is driven by her blood. Monthly, she is reminded of her thwarted function. Coping with the disaster of it, a week’s humiliation, the rags, the wretchedness. And who invented a woman’s body? For goodness’ sake. What was that about?

  She can’t get away from it. She can only be human. So she must go on, down the line of her life, and now, if she is rudderless in terms of time, she compensates with place. Her place, which is the wood. Not just its geography, she knows that well by now – the web of interconnecting paths and rides, the private tangles of the unwalked parts, the café, the car park, the visitor centre and picnic glades, the surrounding fields and their hedgerows or fences – but her place in the context of the wood and the onion layers of its world. She’s a survivor. She watches and she tries to understand.

  She holds the fresh kill in her hands, weighing its loss; how is it, she thinks, that it weighs heavier with life gone than it did before? Wondering about herself, her doggedness in the matter of survival.

  She looks at her kill, just the bulk of the bird, flopped anyhow, wings up over its head like a woman’s dress, heavy with death. Will she too be heavier with the yeast of her life gone?

  On a stone by the pool, she lays out the little bags and pipes, the red and blue and buff of heart and stomach and spleen. She isolates each organ and looks at it with reference to herself. Does she contain these lurid colours? Lying on her bed afterwards, she pictures the pouches full of half-digested food, juice and effluent and blood, coiled and colourful inside her. How clever and how complicated, she thinks.

  She watches her generations of chicks hatch, wobble on reed legs about the run. Steve after Steve after Steve. She has stopped naming the hens. Mother is an old lady, mardy and flea-bitten. Anne has eaten so many Steves. Done her best to fatten them, then wrung their necks. At first she ran round the pen after them. Mayhem. The whole flock in a flap, impossible to catch. Then she learnt that if you go in when they’ve roosted you can get them easy. They’re quiet on their perches, so long as you don’t mess about. If you get the wrong one, you leave it for a bit. You don’t want the whole lot going wild on you. She has eaten Rosie.

  You can see the life in animals and birds. It is a light in the eye that goes out with the twisting of the neck or with the snap of the spinal cord. There is a period when this is Anne’s chief preoccupation, this moment when the light is extinguished, when the bright eye veils itself with death. Then she loses interest. She turns her attention to plants, to the trees that arch above her. Waiting for leaf burst, how do they know? Now! she shouts at an oak one slow spring. Now! Hazel and thorn first, always. She looks at the thickening buds. Where is your life? She peels the bark to the quick wood, rubs her finger in the colourless sap, licks it. If you collected enough sap, would it be green? Is it the sap that is the life? Or something else, some green current deeper inside, that signals rather than courses through the stems and trunks around her, large and small alike? She doesn’t know. Nothing tells her. But she doesn’t give up. She just tries harder.

  Everything in the wood has a meaning, she tells herself. You just have to set yourself to understanding. This is the task she undertakes, the task that will orientate her, even in the absence of time. She decodes everything, the noises the animals make around her, one noise for mating, another for the marking of territories, for fear, or warning. This is pleasing. Every noise the animals make, she decides, is made for a reason. They change their coats, or their feathers, for a reason. They hunt to eat, or to keep in practice for eating, so as not to lose the efficiency of a skill.

  The plants, too, oblige more often than not. They put out colours to attract the bee or the female, to entice or to warn – touch me, don’t touch; eat me, don’t eat. Everything meant something if you looked at it right. But however matter-of-fact Anne has become, however much she assumes, in her role as decoder of the natural world, that scrutiny will make all things offer up their meaning in the end, there are some secrets that the wood still keeps. She has noticed how the bark of the trees changes colour in the spring, according to type. The oaks go pink, the limes and sycamores green, before leaf-burst. This means that the tree is full of sap again, that the leaves are coming. Even so the arrival of the first leaves is always unpredictable. Every year the spring plays grandmother’s footsteps with her, despite her vigilance. Twig, twig, bud. Bud, fat bud. Leaf. There is, Anne thinks, a step missing.

  The wood is changing, slowly. Anne doesn’t know why.

  But there is much to learn there, too. Besides trees and scrub and the plants of the woodland floor, the wood is growing signs. Anne reads all the signs dutifully as they spring up on the walking tracks and around the ponds and ditches of the public parts. They, too, she assumes, are part of understanding. They are the only evidence she has of how other human beings view the wood and its plants and creatures.

  Ponds are very important habitats, she reads on a board in front of one of the wood’s natural basins. Not only do they support their own aquatic communities of animals and plants but they are also a focus for other woodland wildlife such as deer, bats and birds. Anne looks at the flies on the surface of the water. She can’t get close enough to see the aquatic community because there are rails all the way round. She doesn’t know what they are protecting – her, or the silt-choked shallows.

  In the evening she looks at her own pond. An important habitat, she thinks.


  ♦

  The pond skater, she repeats out loud, battling with the sign and its meaning, on another occasion; is a mini marauding predator. It detects vibrations through the water of drowning insects and then without breaking the surface tension skates over the surface to devour the hapless beast. She can’t help it; she says out loud – But it was drowning, it would have died anyway. She is puzzled by this sign. What’s the big deal?

  Equally puzzling are the signs now at all the intersections of the rides. They are solid and varnished, with red and green lettering cut into them, inside circles or triangles like road signs. Parking. No parking. Warning horse trail ahead. Then, within four feet, on the other side, No horse riding please. Cycle trail, she reads. No cycling. Warning cycle trail ahead. Only occasionally does she see anyone on a horse or a bicycle, but she pictures them conscientiously, and in droves elsewhere in the wood mounting, dismounting, preparing themselves for the sight of rider or cyclist, before mounting once more. What a rigmarole.

  The people, she decides, who are in charge of the signs must be the men she has seen from time to time, carrying clipboards and consulting each other among the trees. They have soft white faces like their own intestines. They wear padded clothes and shoes that make them tiptoe. In their pockets there are mobile phones which trill like a separate population of birds and which they answer with an air of the highest purpose. Anne is fascinated by these men. If she has the good luck to stumble on any, she positions herself in the shade and watches them greedily. But they are rare. They come very seldom and she doesn’t ever see them in the same place more than once or twice. They talk and they write things down and they punch numbers into their phones and issue instructions to people in other places. Where? Anne wonders.

  She comes across a group of them once, on a quiet track, not one of the main rides. One of them is clearly more important than the rest. He is angry about something. Has enough has been done to address the mud issue? The others look anxious and contrite. The mud issue is their fault. They crease their soft and gut-white faces. They consult their clipboards. Well, they hope so. They think this time they have. They glance at each other and nod in mutual reassurance. Yes, this time he will see a big difference.