by Laura Beatty
But she was confused. It took a long time, past Smarty’s old fields, the chicken sheds, the poaching grounds, as though she were swimming black water. Slow limbs and her own breath loud in her ears. It was deep into the night when the walkway rose up before her, deserted at last, with its clean, man-made lines saying, Order, Clarity. Anne stepped towards the ramp.
Something gleaming there, at the foot.
♦
His eyes were closed when she picked him up. His eyes were closed and he still smelt of fear. White face almost translucent, and did she imagine it or was there a pulse beating at his neck? She carried him. Thistledown boy, gold hair new-grown. But he was heavier than you expected, a dead weight, and she thought she might break before she got him to her hut. Stumbling, back on fire across her shoulders, and maybe she made a high noise in the back of her throat, a keening, or maybe she didn’t. Was he warm against her – or was it her own warmth she felt?
She carried him through the dark, to her hut. She laid him on her bed and she looked, as best she could in bad light, for damage. She bathed what she could see. She laid her head on his chest, but her own heart was making such a noise it wasn’t possible to hear.
She held a feather to his lips and when the feather moved – and moved – and moved – she couldn’t help the words or the sounds that came out of her, unbidden and for the first time. That choking rush of human things. What she did, what she said to him, they were just the limited words and gestures, just the ordinary things that a woman can do for a child. We don’t have anything else.
But the length of that night.
The vigil in the hut, with the night noises outside. Holding the thin hand. The dirty nails. The smoothness of the skin. And the dust in the hut, the smoke from the stove. Do they bother you, Peter Parker? Are you warm enough? She bent over him continually, in the hopeless candlelight, and checked for his breathing. Thank God. Thank God. And the moon slid, cold and ancient over the wood, and the owls called.
Just a woman and a child after all.
At dawn, in panic, she took his shirt off. She laid him across her lap and she studied the miraculous map of veins across his chest and arms for movement, for any indication of life behind them. She dropped the feather among the dust and fumbled for it. Held it up. Couldn’t see. Holding her big hands, now together, now apart. Oh please. Oh please. Touching, the amazing hair, the pale skin of his chest. Finding he was warm. Rushing to cover him with everything she could find, in case he got cold.
But it was so hard to know.
A long finger of light stretched across the floor, and in the canopy the birds were singing up another summer day. But Anne was shaking now and Peter Parker’s head lolled.
She carried him in her arms, to her doorway, to the sun that he most reminded her of, to wake him. And in its light, his hair did wake, and his eyelashes, and the fine down on his cheeks. But the dew was on everything and the cold came out of the ground. And Peter Parker didn’t shiver.
Then Anne caught him against her, rocking. Rocking.
And a cry convulsed her, as she lifted her face to an empty sky.
Oh my boy. My boy.
Peter Parker.
Where have you gone?
♦
His arm hangs down and his head slightly back and his body drapes itself across her open knees and on his chest now a slow and bitter salt rain falls. Anne sits holding him and the sun lifts up through the branches of the trees, and the white duck takes to the water and in the distance there is the barking of dogs and voices that call, Simon!
Another beautiful day. The world and the wood roll on the same. A horn on the road carrying across, and the light slanting into the clearing. The small birds hopping closer and closer, wondering why Anne is not eating her breakfast, fluttering back and forth, perching on branches of the nearest hazels whose leaves shine translucent in the first light of this morning. Anne and Peter Parker sit on. Dew on the webs on the moss at the foot of the trees. And now pigeons clap upwards and the wood echoes with the barking of dogs and shouting.
Simon! Simon!
A helicopter stutters and Anne still sits with the boy across her lap. She doesn’t look up, or call. She has no instinct for flight. She feels no connection to the people approaching. She looks at the moss and even in her agony she thinks, clearheaded, that it is so green, so dew-spangled, even today. Nearer and now nearer, and the undergrowth splitting.
She is still looking at the moss when the men in black and white, with dogs straining at the leash and Ranger with them, burst at last and with violence into the clearing.
♦
Now everyone is shouting and Anne’s mind is dark. The little birds have all gone. Stay where you are, someone keeps saying. They hold her as though she was going to move. They pick up Peter Parker. They bring a bed for him, a flat bed, and they strap him on it with blankets over and straps.
They cover his face and they carry him away, a different way from Anne.
In light and shade and shade and light again, Anne watches the thin shape of him, out of sight.
♦
The little room smells wrong. It is hard-edged and white. No shade here. No filtered light. Every surface is flat like a knife. Difficult to find your way around a cell, if you’ve been used to a whole wood. Often Anne gets as far as the shelf-bed and is confounded. Up again and round.
There is a moon in the room, or a pale sun, square and very high up, barred. You can see the weather sometimes as if it were a swatch, not the whole thing, just a sample. When it rains at last, it is sample rain. Neither really sound nor smell, in the room at least.
Elsewhere, if you shut your eyes, it plops on the mould of memory, riffling and sliding through layers of less and less resistance, leaf, twig, leaf, leaf, air, and smells come up to greet it and the sound and the taste of it is absolution.
♦
Like it is raining now, on a big man, walking up a track, head down. Raining on an empty hut when he gets there, the ground turning to mash. Leaves and blown twigs and sticks fallen, and the pool brown and swelling to flood. Silt and brash have pushed it up and over the stones and into the clearing, and on its surface now, among the giant gouts, are bobbing plastic bags. He watches the bags gyrate. A slow dance, under the drops, until they saturate and sink. Full bags, tied at the tops like rabbit ears. And in the bags is purpose.
And that is something.
Epilogue
There is still the wood. More or less. Just about.
Hard to eradicate, because wood is the fifth element after all. Closer to our own in some ways, although we have lost the knack of living in it. More human than air, or fire, or water. The only one to know, like we do, youth and death.
And it is an element, if you brave it alone, coming at its bulk slantwise, across a clagged field, with only half-intent to enter, and nothing to tell you whose wood it is, or if it only belongs to itself. And it won’t help, despite its affinity, should you swing crazily for a moment, balaned on the top barbed wire, and lurch down and up the other side of the boundary ditch, all mud and brambles. It will just swallow your light with treetops, up and over your head, hiding birds and whispering.
But it will take you, if you let it, like it took Anne. Standing for the first time alone in that glimmer, it will be surprising if you don’t prick alert with some forgotten sense. Listening – for what?
Something it knows, that you’ve forgotten maybe. Some story it absorbed. The distillation of a particular life, lived against the grain of the time. It doesn’t matter where you start. You could pick any ring, reopen it at any point, and find it looping back on itself forever, still innocent of the end. A life lived in the wood, for instance, starting with the misfit at its centre, working outwards, counting down the rings that it took for her to become native, because survival doesn’t come naturally to us any more.
Or something in the tree’s heartwood, when the wood had made her, and where she’ll always be, pacing the round of the sam
e inner rings, gaunt, after a particularly hard winter, raging like the fox, eyes burning.
Then stand, like she did, at the wood’s edge, by the field corner maybe, on a day when the sun stares milky through the mist, as if through cataracts, and the trees are ghosts and the breeze spins out its airborne droplets into threads of light, so you walk through a storm of glitter. Then you’ll have some idea.
That’s her. That’s how she was.
EOF
Table of Contents
Titlepage
Prologue
Growing Up
Growing Roots
Chorus of Trees
Maiden I
Maiden II
Chorus of Trees
Bolling I
Bolling II
Fauna
Chorus of Trees
Timber I
Chorus of Trees
Timber II
Chorus of Trees
Dead Wood I
Chorus of Trees
Dead Wood II
Epilogue