by Laura Beatty
In her clearing that evening Anne worries about this new obligation. Has she failed in her duty of care, she wonders, to mud or to no mud? She doesn’t know which. Some time later, crossing the place of their meeting, she sees young people in khaki clothes, boys, and girls that look like boys, with fresh faces and their hair scraped back. The wood thumps with music from the radio of their parked truck. They are having a good time and addressing the mud issue. For a long time to come they are here, joking each other along, laying down a permeable membrane, dumping stone on top, pounding it down on the breathing roots of the trees, raking grey granite chippings, the same as a road, over all.
♦
She doesn’t like the new road. She has lived in the wood long enough to be able to feel the slow suffocation of the trees, to worry about their roots groaning under this new weight. She feels the old feelings of claustrophobia and unhappiness. She spends several whole days just sitting still and breathing. She watches her pool by night and by day. She looks at her house with the ash tree rising out of it. She thinks of her garden, scratched out of the clearing at her back. Are these incursions any different from the road? Is she wrong in what she is doing? If it is just a question of degree, then will she too get there in the end? Because, on the whole, she would like to think she has improved the wood where she lives. It is lighter now where she has coppiced the hazels and field maples. There is grass in the glade where there used to be ferns and sparse nettles. Is this good or bad? Who is to say whether grass is more deserving than ferns? The nettles don’t seem to mind either way.
And the animals that she kills, the alien plants that she raises in her garden, the trees that she cuts or crops or burns in her stove – what do all of these make of her arrival in the wood? For several days she doesn’t know how to live. She swings between wild extremes. There are times when she feels power coursing through her veins because she can do these things. Live, die. Grow, wither. She is the ruler of her glade, the only one who decides. Look, she blinks on one of her hubris days, her left eye is the sun and her right the moon. Day, night, day, night, she says, blinking them in turn.
♦
After a while Anne forgets the road and carries on in her old way. Once or twice, when she has seen Nigel at the end of a ride, with his lumpy tracksuit and his hair, windbagging on at some walker, she has turned and gone the other way, because she can’t face him. But that’s not always. And she’s been to the café too, not to scavenge, because she is so much more self-sufficient now, but just to sit in the luxury of the chairs, under electric light, taking in the world.
She likes to return to the glade and catch the whiff of herself on the evening air. Everything has a smell of its own. Foxes, rabbits, badgers. Their lairs and burrows are all identifiable, their tracks, their excrement, all tell of themselves. Anne is pleased to have something that marks the glade as her own. It makes her feel she belongs. She remembers, long ago, the night of the dustbin, the chute of rubbish in the rain and the first time her family smelt wrong.
Territory is important, in the world of the wood. Anne knows that. You need to know what is what, and whose. Because there are many people in the wood now, especially in the evenings. There are the walkers, riders, joggers, cyclists, whose arrivals and departures are like a pulse, beating along the tracks and pathways, the veins of the wood, by day. There are people by night, who move differently, in furtive and predatory rushes, singly or in little knots, their eyes round with seeing, their breathing audible. And at any time, there is a man called Ranger, who drives everywhere he can, even where there aren’t paths. He has rolled-up sleeves and clean khaki clothes and he leans out of his truck one day, arriving in the clearing for the first time.
Anne hears the engine scream its approach and comes scuttling round from the back. She is terrified. It is as if the wood had been torn. The truck is monstrous here, breathing the smell of diesel and flexing light off its metal sides.
I been looking for you. They told me you were living in the wood. Litter collection you do, isn’t it? Regular litter depot you got here, if you ask me. Litter central.
Anne can’t find her voice.
He asks questions she doesn’t know the answer to.
How long you been here? You got pretty well settled in. He talks out of the side of his mouth and there is a mixture of mockery and officialdom in his voice.
Anne looks sideways and at the ground. She is trying to reel in her mind. She holds one hand backwards in a protective gesture, palm flat and open towards her hut, the pen, the little garden full of vegetables, this world she has made from the wild.
He jerks his thumb in the direction of the hut. Get it down by tomorrow, and get going.
♦
Shaking, she drags odd bits of brash across the scars the truck has left, barricading herself against his return, as if that were possible. She makes a helpless blockade of twigs and rotten wood, listening to the revving engine dim as it finds one of the wood’s roads until she’s left to the clearing’s rustle and her heartbeat. The birds that had fled at Ranger’s arrival come back. A grey wagtail hops and dips on a stone in the stream. A chaffinch sings its territory in the middle canopy.
Anne sits at the foot of the pollard twisting her big hands. The corners of her mouth pull down as if they were subject to gravity. What does he mean? She lifts her hand as if to remove a stake from the roof, mouthing his instruction. As if it were possible. She looks at the products of her long labours. What if he pulls up her roots from here? In her stomach she feels sick and dizzy as though she were falling into something black and deep. She sits there a long time, looking straight ahead, her arms neatly by her sides, the hands now flat on the ground, now raised and twisting each other with the joints cracking. Later, she retches once into her lap, a dry noise like the night bark of a fox. Blank. She doesn’t trust herself to stand. She thinks of crawling across the glade to her shelter, if this is to be her last night, but stays where she is. She doesn’t know why. At some point she must have lost consciousness or slept because she wakes to the fallen dark and the sound of the owls hunting.
From somewhere just above her head, as though it had been perched on one of the branches waiting for her to wake, Ranger’s threat settles again in her mind. She is shivering. She tries to look sensibly into the future but she finds there is only now.
♦
When Ranger returns Anne is numb, where he left her. She has a look in her eyes, like a rabbit in the headlights. Alright, Ranger says, leaning his clean elbow out of the truck window. The way he says it indicates that something big is following, some huge and mechanical action as though Anne and her house were to be torn by force from their ground, as though a giant digger were to bite, scoop, rumble off with them in its metal mouth, spit them out, roots up, on some tip or wasteland to die. Anne doesn’t move. She waits, staring.
But Ranger says nothing. It is clear even to him that she can’t go. It is clear too that he is angry, with himself as well as her, because he is not a heartless man. He hasn’t the stomach for the job. He shouts at her, You keep out of the way. He doesn’t want the general public getting a fright. Keep your garbage in here and nowhere else, is that clear? He waves his hand round to indicate the bags and bottles that Anne has collected, the careful things she has kept against one day. I don’t need bag ladies in my wood. Then he takes his anger out on the truck, throwing it into too tight a turn, making the engine scream. For a kind man he can be pretty unkind. In the sobbing relief of her humiliation and reprieve Anne slumps against the tree, nursing to herself the hands she twisted all night. Garbage, she says to herself, garbage? And, my wood?
She looks up into the branches of the ash, contorted with cut and regrowth, listens to the soothing, seen-it-all-before rustle. He had driven straight over her barricade, mashed it into the ground. We were here before you, she whispers to herself. Whose wood then, and whose garbage?
♦
But Anne creeps about the wood after this, often at nig
ht. She begins to resemble the night people in the way she moves and breathes, looking over her shoulder in case she should have strayed too far, fearful of Ranger. She’s never been so far at night before and in this new, inverted world she sees among the trees people she used to know. One of her teachers once. That was a surprise.
She sees the cars in the car park. One light means I’m on my own, two for two and you can watch. The car park is busy at night. She is amazed. Once she sees Suzie. On a night off from Barry, she supposes. Suzie’s with the Parcel Force man and he is bucking her like a pony. Anne just watches. It isn’t the first time Anne has seen Suzie. She was young when she started, before Anne left, even, behind the shed one evening. Anne didn’t know the man. You tell anyone and I’ll smack you so you won’t see or tell anything ever again. Understand?
Every now and again Ranger comes in his truck. At first he just looks at her and drives away. Later he starts to ask questions, just a few at first. You make that with my timber? I could get you just for that. That’s viable-habitat timber, that is. He never gets out of the truck. That waterproof, is it? I bet you felt it last week. What do you eat? You want to be careful you don’t poison yourself with one of those mushrooms. Don’t want to come and find you out stiff. That’s about all I need, a dead body in the wood.
In the winter, one day, he brings her some venison. He leans over the seat beside him, throws it at her. Might as well have it. It got hit on the road. Don’t want you dying on me.
That was a good day.
The next time Ranger comes, he has a picture with him. He beckons her over. It is a coracle, a kind of boat. She’s good with her hands, could she make him one? For the visitor centre. She might as well do something to pay the rent.
Anne takes trouble over it, as an insurance policy. When he comes to take it away, she hands it over with reluctance. It is better than she’d expected. He, too, is impressed.
He is friendlier after that. He brings her things she needs, vegetable seeds, a needle and cotton, food. Sometimes he brings her packets of biscuits. Those are red-letter days. Anne eats the packets at one sitting. She can’t help it. She gorges herself and then sits at the foot of the pollard, burping softly in a sugar haze. She remembers custard creams at the dump. Where is Steve now?
Dark falls and Anne tries to settle her unease. Maybe it will be alright?
She watches as the barn owl, that had been perched outside his hole, sweeps sudden on his evening flight, wings too wide for the wood’s small spaces, heading out to the grassland and the field ditches, then she goes in. He is late.
In the hut Anne has made reed mats from the rushy grasses that grow down all the rides. They are plaited together in complicated patterns with the seed heads facing out all round the edge like tassels. She made them because the flint floor got so cold in winter. Looking at them by the light of the stove, she thinks they might please Ranger. She carries them out to show him on his next visit.
Those are quite a tidy effort, they are. He’d like her to make some for the shop. They are promoting local and traditional crafts.
Shop?
Nowadays he asks her things he needs to know. How many head of deer does she think there are? She knows there are thirty-six and a doe about to calve. Did she see the take-and-bake boys firing the stolen car – how many and how old? How many were there in the Woodpecker car park last night? He doesn’t mind about the spectators, they are just perverts, but if he can get the number plates of the porno stars he can do them for it. That could make it quite embarrassing for some people. Some of them have quite good jobs, I’ll bet.
And Anne tells him.
Anne regards these exchanges with Ranger, like she regards the mat-or coracle-making, as a form of rent, paying for her unwanted presence in his wood. She doesn’t like doing it. When she tells him these things, she never looks at him. She looks at the ground between them and talks in an automatic voice. If she had been able to meet his gaze, he would have seen that what was in her eyes, when he came back into the clearing to see her off, had never left. Even when he is gone and she is by herself again, Anne is not at ease in the way she used to be. She sits in her hut, plaiting for him, and she feels she will never get free of the threat he represents. Under, over, under, over, under, over and back; turning the grasses, deft and unseeing, she plaits his hold over her into mat after mat. Sometimes, halfway through, she will stop suddenly and look at nothing and shiver, mesmerised like the rabbits she sees on the road at night. How come the animals haven’t noticed the change?
♦
When she is not plaiting, Anne worries. She worries about what is allowed and what is not, about whether she can lay claim to any of the things she used to think of as hers, or whether all of it is his. She is up with her bag, almost at dawn. She collects frantically, against what – she doesn’t know. She combs the wood for things that will come in handy, protect her against cold, change, displacement, disaster. Sometimes the things she picks up are useful, sometimes they are not. She has quite a collection of single gloves, of hats, scarves, a trainer, a broken umbrella. Once she found a mustard-coloured jumper, nearly new, that must have slipped from someone’s waist as they got into the car. It had been driven over; there were tyre marks right across the front but it was otherwise undamaged. She put it on straight away. She wears as many of the things as she can. That way there is less risk of them being taken from her. Ownership is a cloud in her head that won’t go away. She is sure of it only when she is in physical possession.
Anne worries about what might happen if she is not careful, behind her back, when she is asleep, and she worries about food. She worries about the grey-stoned paths that are snaking their way through more and more of the wood, and about the people who belong on them. Who says how a wood should be? – the animals and the trees, or the people who fill it up? At the back of Anne’s mind, so she can feel it all the time, lies something huge and frozen; something that is worse than winter, a dark expanse, against which she gathers and stores and preserves. She works demonically in her garden, producing more than she can eat, giving the excess to Ranger when he visits. They look nice, he says, eyeing the carrots, or the beans or the fat, bullet cabbages. Quite fancy some of them. And Anne lumbers over, pulls them up and offers them to him, without looking. Afterwards she worries that she gave him too much, counting how many are left, cursing herself for her stupidity. Clumsy tart. Bitch. Sod.
It doesn’t occur to her to curse him.
At night Anne suffers from bad dreams that leave her dizzy and sweating. Sometimes she wakes up with her eyes dry and wide, stretched against a darkness as opaque as her future. Sometimes it is her own cry that wakes her. It is often the same dream. She dreams she has no house. Something has happened to it that she struggles in the dream to remember or to understand. She is making her way through the wood to the clearing, fighting with brambles and undergrowth, wearying herself with clambering over and under fallen timber. She panics that she has taken a wrong turn. She doubles back and tries again. She thinks someone has taken it away, that it has been moved or pulled down. But when suddenly she breaks into the clearing, she remembers. She knows that there is someone else in it; Ranger has taken it over. There are cars parked and it is his house now. He sits big and friendly, with his sleeves rolled up, in her doorway. His little boy plays up and down a grey expanse of grit, where her garden used to be. They wave at her.
Or, she dreams she is sleeping under her barrow, her knees jammed under her chin, her head locked downwards to fit under the metal rim of what little shelter it offers. The barrow is not in the wood, it is out on the road and her sleep is fraught with the worry of the cars she can hear swerving to avoid her in the dark. She strains her ears for the sound of a bicycle. The bicycle will rescue her, she thinks. She hears the swish of its tyres approaching and with a thumping heart she opens her mouth to call out but, however hard she tries, the muscles in her neck taut and her chest bursting, she is unable to do more than whisper. She wak
es braced against impact.
Stumbling out to calm herself, Anne stands swaying in her doorway. There is a young vixen out there, rootling among her possessions. The fox stops, head towards Anne. Anne can see the liquid glint of her eyes, weighing her up, as surprised as she is. Then she’s off, loping into the trees, lugging her tail behind her, like a piece of baggage. Anne thinks she can’t go on like this. She has become so unsettled. In the morning she stands over Ranger’s tyre tracks, the route he has made for himself into her clearing. The ruts are deep and permanent.
Bolling II
Anne’s mum and dad paid rent. She can remember that. The money was kept in a tin on the top shelf in the kitchen and once a month someone from the council came to collect. To make it easier for you, Mrs Tarbot. We know it can be difficult getting out with all these young ones to worry about. But that wasn’t the reason, everyone knew. It was to make sure they got their money, that’s why they called, standing on the doorstep with their mouths pulled back in a dead sort of smile. My goodness she’d got her hands full and wasn’t everyone growing fast. They looked at Anne when they said that. Mrs Tarbot must have done something to deserve all those children and they’d laugh, heh, heh, heh, a dead sort of laugh and all the little Tarbots would just stare and not laugh back. They weren’t fooled. Often the tin had been raided for something or other and the money was short. It was humiliating, the whole thing. That was when Anne was young, before her dad got his job at the poultry plant. It was better after that. The money went straight to the council by direct debit.
