Paradise and Elsewhere (8 page)

At first light she took a coffee and a pastry from the table in the lobby and drove to the trailhead. It was marked, just as the map indicated, with yellow tape.
Steep,
it said on the map, and it was hard going along a narrow path that rose steadily up the side of the valley. Light filtered only gradually through the canopy. Soon she was deep in the forest and enveloped by the peculiar, alert kind of silence found among trees on a still day. Now and then where there was a clearing and some lower growth, groups of small finches skittered from one tree to the next, and then in the wake of their passing the silence would gather itself back together. The light between the trees remained dim, uneven. The trail ran on thinly ahead, marked, as the map had promised, with little knots of fluorescent tape. The trees were second growth, but maturing, and densely planted: spruce, mainly, and red cedar. Beneath a thick layer of decomposing needles, the ground was tense with their roots. She came to a sharp downwards left turn, and had to scramble down a rocky channel that in worse weather would have been a creek. Now the trees grew bigger, mossier. The ground levelled out a little. A fall ahead created a slash of light, and she paused there to drink from her bottle and get her breath. She could hear running water nearby, which she took as confirmation that she had more or less arrived. This was the oldest part of the forest. There was a damp, fungal tang to the air now, an almost tangible odour. And next to her, a family of saplings grew out of a vast, rotting trunk. The mosses were extraordinarily green. This must, she thought, be the place in the photograph of Joshua that Alex had shown her, and she extracted her own camera from her pack and took a couple of shots of a vast tree to her right. She felt sure that Joshua had been here, and perhaps still was. But when she called out her voice was baffled by the trees and there was no reply, and no way other than on, deeper into the grove. Soon, the trail broke down and become many smaller, fainter paths winding through a stand of enormous trees.

“Josh?” she called again, standing still now. “Josh?”

And there, in the darkest part of the forest, she smelled his death. Her throat closed against a rush of bile, and a moment later she saw what remained of him: he was in a half-sitting position, his back propped awkwardly against the trunk of the vast, gnarled spruce. His legs were buried thigh-deep, as if he too had roots. She was sure it was him—though his face, with its awful bulging eyes, had swollen, and like the rest of him, darkened to the colour of a bruise. With the greatest effort she controlled the urge to vomit and noted that all around the body was a scatter of detritus—water bottles, a garbage bag, pillboxes, a blanket, some phials and syringes; his boots and socks, the shovel and pick used to dig the hole… Her heart thudded as she took a photograph, the flash bringing the scene into a sickly clarity. A box of some kind rested on Joshua's lap and it was, she knew, meant for her. Flies rose in a seething cloud as she drew closer: it was a plastic container, watertight, the kind made for camping. She should not open it: what would the police say? And yet how could she not? Forgetting the gloves in her pocket, Paula reached quickly for the box; his dead arm shifted as she took it and she half-ran, half-stumbled away from him, terrified—of death itself, of the silent trees with their huge trunks, their subtly connected roots.

She reached the mossy deadfall and stopped there, gasping, to empty her stomach. Afterwards, she pried the box open. Inside was a sachet of silica gel and a single sheet of paper, hand-written:

 

We, the Trees

Fair exchange. Leave us to stand.

We care not about one or even several what matters is the sum of us and what matters is what passes between the sum of us and what passes between the sum of us and the sum of you. And in time all of you will become us and without us there is none of it.

 

The rain began, fat drops pattering on the leaves, and she was crying too. She looked up, wet-faced, at the patches of grey sky visible between the branches. Joshua was dead. A network of other people were involved. When it was released to the public, his message from the trees would, handled correctly, go viral in hours. This was Joshua's story: how he had sat there with his legs half-buried, trying to communicate, even to the point of self-sacrifice, and, as the end came, numbed himself with narcotics so that he could go on. This was his story, which he had thrust upon her and in which she, Paula Jacobs, had played a part.

Joshua Pearson had passed his work on to her. She must find Alex, Angela, and Jen and join with his network of friends and supporters; she must tease out the connections, unearth the rest of the story and then tell it, not just once but repeatedly: to the police, to the Dean, to Josh's heartbroken parents, to the court, to an endless series of interviewers on news and discussion programmes, at conferences, demonstrations—and then, when more and more young people went to the woods to die, she must continue to speak out in person, on screen, in print, online—she must and would use every possible medium to spread the story of their sacrifice.

Paula's hand shook as she reached in her pocket for her phone: there was, of course, no signal, and she left Josh there and began to run back through the trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C
lients

 

 

 

 

I
t's a ritual:
we shower, dress, turn off all devices, prise the lids from dips and spoon them into bowls, open rustling packets of vegetable sticks, hold wine glasses to the light. We enjoy the preparations and know Martin will arrive punctually at seven. We go together to the door and welcome him in.

A pale linen suit and faded terracotta shirt—undone as ever at the neck—set off the gleam of his rich brown skin. A tall man, he moves in a loose, underwater way.

Martin's first hour costs three times the subsequent hours, so we feel
obliged to ourselves to take it in full. The higher rate, he's explained, enables him to be open-ended: to take just one booking per evening and then stay for as long as is required. Otherwise, he'd have to draw a line and depart for another appointment, which would loom over the whole evening, spoiling the feel of the occasion.

Folded elegantly onto the sofa opposite our two chairs, Martin tastes the wine, a very fine Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, and cocks his head. “Delicious!” he says. “Now, fill me in. What's new?” he asks, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on Anna's
face as if she mattered to him more than anything in the world. And I find myself feeling that way, too. It's as if
I
had asked the question, and didn't already know the answer. It's as if her face comes into sharper focus as she prepares to speak.

“Work, well, so-so… ” She tells him of difficulties with her team, how she had to repeat tasks, of a colleague who is trying to undermine her. Martin's face picks up each fleeting expression that appears on hers, and does to it something between amplifying and refining: something which lends it the same kind of dignity and grace which print can give to the written word. As one expression dies so another begins to grow, softly replacing it. His face is a perfect instrument and on it, we are expressed. What he says is quite ordinary. It's all in the way he listens.

“I know I shouldn't worry,” she says, with a smile, a shrug.

“Don't you think anxiety is a substitute for action? The only things I worry about most are those I can do nothing about. Yet so much
is
within our control,” he says. “And that is very liberating. It means we have more time—”

“But Martin,” Anna interrupts, and his forehead puckers with her perplexity; he pauses mid-sip, “I never feel that I have
enough
time.”

“Likewise!” I say, deadpan, the irony being that my job is, basically, to organize other people's time. Martin shoots me a brief, acknowledging smile and I feel myself relax.

“Well, look at it this way: centuries ago, all people did was work, eat, and go to church. That's history! Now I fret because I can't fit in scuba lessons on
Fridays. So what is it you two don't have time for? Or shouldn't I ask?”

Martin's laugh is another wonderful thing, a benign infection, an invitation to bliss. You need do nothing but look and listen to join in, though tonight Anna does not. When he's finished she says:

“Sometimes I want just to waste time. Not know what I'm doing, what it's for.”

“Taking Time to Do Nothing. I think I've heard of someone offering that as a workshop,” Martin says. I join the conversation unbidden:

“But Martin, didn't people once just do
all
these things
themselves
?” And for a moment, just a moment, an anxious shadow, entirely
his own, passes across his face. My heart pumps harder, as if I'd begun to exercise.

“Well, I'm sure they muddled along. But you do have to consider
quality.
I doubt that you two would enjoy a home-grown conversation, now, other than as a curiosity. Surely, it's better to reward someone for perfecting part of existence and making it into a service from which everyone can benefit?”

“Do you ever converse for free?” I ask.

“With friends, naturally,” he says, back to his ordinary, calm self again. “But talk isn't something special for me. Work is work. You have pride in it, but it's a transaction: you sell something to leave the rest
of you free. Given my ancestors were slaves, I am relatively
very
happy with this.”

“But now we're
all
slaves!” Anna half-rises from her chair.

“Hardly,” Martin tells her. “And do you really want to go back to nature? Uninvent everything? Not so easy.” Had he spoken oh-so slightly differently, those words might have been hostile, but he follows them with his warmest, most compassionate smile.
My skin tightens; the hairs on my neck push against my shirt.

“But why not?” Anna's voice is rough with longing. And I too want time unorganized. However it comes. And I want her. I want her naked and wet, tangled, breathing hard. I want to abandon myself to her and then to pass into a shared sleep, a state during which no transactions of any kind occur. A void.

I want Martin gone.

“We all give freely to our children,” he's saying now. “Are you two planning a family yet?”

“You pay for tests, for doctors,” I tell him, “for creative play, for learning, for s
omeone to mind them, for riding, ice skating, singing, counselling… Aren't they just new clients, in the end?” Martin's face, which is my face really, is so bitter that it frightens me.

“Stop!” Anna sits up straight, her chest forward, as if inhaling some new, enriched form of air. Just the thought of change makes her feel good. She turns to me, just me and says: “I'm sure it doesn't have to be like this. Let's try on our own, please.”

I'd willingly drown in her green-gold eyes.

“I do know how you feel. I expect our capacity to do things for ourselves is atrophied, but anything is
possible
. What an interesting topic!” Martin glances at his watch. “Shall we continue?”

“No thanks, Martin,” Anna tells him, and he smiles, then stands and straightens his clothes.

“You know,” he says, “I've many clients who would take the whole evening on a regular basis. I'm beginning to find it scarcely worthwhile to do single hours.

“The apartment's looking good,
” he adds. “Who does it for you?” he says and then with a soft click, the door closes behind him, and we two stand for a moment, beached somewhere between shock and joy.

“Did you mean it?” I ask. She nods; we push two chairs close, sit facing each other, just so. Then she goes to dim one of the lamps. Then I get up, because I need to pee. We laugh at ourselves, finally settle in semi-darkness, the window slightly open, our backs cushioned, wine glasses on a small table we can both just reach. Silence bristles between us.

“Say the first thing that comes into your mind,” she suggests.

“Toffee.”

She giggles.

“You want some?”

“No. Toffee. Toffee,” I repeat. A bubble of laughter forms in my throat. And I can almost feel the pull of
toffee
in my jaw. My mouth's wet, my tongue ready for whatever the next word demands. And she waits, watching my face, my lips, my throat. I have to swallow.

“Amber,” she says. Language stretches between us, a new country, vast, intricate, ours. A glow spreads through us and, sculpting air with our tongues and lips, unravelling it with our ears and minds, in free exchange, we begin to explore all that seemed lost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lambing

 

 

 

 

W
ithout liking her much
, everyone agreed that it was a dog's life Ax Blaney led and meant by that that it was even harder than their own. The village was set high on the north side of a steep valley the colour of iron in winter and the colour of rust in the all-too-brief summer months. It was the kind of land that offered few possibilities, indeed only one: sheep. Generation after generation of the village's young had wondered, particularly on those days when wind ricocheted across the valley, strained against the semi-opaque glass of small windows set in the thick walls of houses built long ago by people shorter and tidier than themselves, why it was that those first settlers had chosen such a place to build. Yet it was a place which, when it came to it, few people had managed to leave. The single road, leading both to and from the village, was used almost entirely by those who came occasionally from the outside in, to deliver supplies, take away the mail or even, once or twice, simply by mistake. It couldn't be followed by the eye even halfway to the horizon: its colour melted into the mountain, it twisted and lost itself behind small hills, scree runs and patches of scrub. It was difficult to imagine going anywhere else.

 

L
eaving the village
might have been Ax Blaney's best course of action when her husband Lark broke his thigh pulling ewes from a snowdrift and had himself to be dug out next day, frozen stiff in an attitude of pain and rage, but neither she nor anyone else thought of it. The West Moor and the yellow-eyed sheep that grazed it had been handed down from father to son in Lark's family longer than anyone could remember, and it came, not to Ax Blaney, but to Lark's brother Crow until such time as her sons were of age.

 

T
hough the villagers pitied
Ax Blaney, they also admired a hard man, and when Crow took it upon himself to interpret what might have been considered a mere stewardship as literal ownership for the next fourteen years, so leaving Ax Blaney with a stony half acre at the back of her house and two children to raise, no one thought any the worse of him. After all, she still had a roof over her head: hers was the very last cottage, standing a hundred yards or so from the point where the road finally petered out and became a track like any other. Provided she didn't remarry, she could live there the rest of her days and people would see to it that she and the boys didn't starve.

 

A
t that uncertain melting
point of the year between winter's worst and the beginning of spring, when the stored root crops were sour, the cabbages stiff with frost and, scooping out flour, her hands would hit the bottom of the bin, Ax Blaney would take daily walks halfway up the mountain and stand on a flat shelf of rock called the Slab. From there she could see many of the surrounding moors, each a separate territory painstakingly ringed with a stone wall and grazed by its owner's branded sheep. Even though the wind was fierce up on the Slab and the mountain still dappled with snow, she knelt, took her hands from her pockets, pressed them flat on the stone before her and wished. It was a private ritual but everyone guessed more or less why she went.

“Lark's wife is waiting for her runts,” the women would say, keeping any traces of spite or contempt from their voices, for it could happen to any one of them. The men would more likely comment to each other, half-believing what they said, “Lark's wife's up there on the Slab—putting the Look on your ewes.”

 

S
ince the spring after
Lark's death, Ax Blaney had been offered those lambs in her neighbours' flocks which wouldn't suckle, were deformed, or for one reason or another seemed reluctant to grow. Tended carefully by herself and her boys, Ax Blaney found that many of these would survive and put on fat. Each spring she wished on the Slab and waited for the first bleatings to signal the start of lambing. The men were right in a way—she did indeed look at their gravid ewes and hope for the worst.

Blaney men had always been called after birds, and the twins could have expected to be Hawk and Eagle after their grandfather and his brother, but Ax Blaney had broken with tradition, naming her sons Right and Left because from their first days each had a distinct handedness, reaching for her unfailingly with one or the other miniature hand. In a village which admired men like Crow Blaney, the boys were regarded with some disquiet, for they kept to each other's company, were prone to weep and rarely fought. Crow should have stepped in to stiffen them but there again, people could see how it might be to his advantage if they grew up soft.

“A poor name brings poor growth. Too much mothering spoils a man,” the women would say. “But what can she do? The woman leads a dog's life. Bringing nothing and past bearing: she won't wed again.” Men did the picking in Roadsend, there were fewer of them. Turning their heads and spitting over their shoulders to avert bad luck, they summed up the situation more succinctly: “Runts.”

Ax Blaney, however, seemed to like her boys how they were and took no steps to harden them as they grew into men. Softness seemed to characterize the Blaney household; it was their mark, the sign of their difference. Whilst other families wrested their living from the efforts of wiry, indomitable men on the harsh moors, fighting the wind, moving snowdrifts, standing waist-deep in streams, the Blaney's struggle was led by a woman and took place indoors around the fire, their feeble lambs cosseted inside for weeks, sometimes months, covered with blankets, petted and stroked, named, talked to, slept with and fed from bottles. There was not a year when the twins didn't weep together at the inevitable slaughtering, performed in the yard by their mother as they had no stomach for it and thought they would almost rather have starved.

 

A
x herself disliked the task
—the lambs, grown into sheep but still clean and creamy, would follow her to their deaths, nuzzling at her legs and tripping over each other, skidding splay-legged on the flags in their natural eagerness and the last of their youthful high spirits. She stood with her legs astride them, and pulled their heads back to expose their throats, the whitest, softest part. At that moment, their yellow eyes would meet hers with an expression of such placidness that she herself sometimes could have wept from pity. They never struggled, but sank demurely to their knees in spreading lakes of blood, bright on the scrubbed stone. Yet she and the twins must eat, and the meat of those lambs cooked easily, was sweet and fat and tender as if the care that had been lavished on them repaid itself that way.

 

O
n the twins' fourteenth
birthday, which fell in November, Crow paid an unexpected visit. His wife Hammer had died only that spring. He brought with him a gift: two hats made from wool gathered from walls and bushes and spun by his younger daughter Sling in spare moments of the day. Ax served him with a bowl of soup. It was remarkable, people said, that though she had long had reason enough, and now more so considering that they were both raising their children alone—he with the benefit of two moors and two flocks and she on half an acre and a few runts—she never showed bitterness towards him.

Ax Blaney watched him in silence as he ate, his hands busy and his eyes down.

“That was good,” he said when he had finished, and turned to Right and Left, who sat by the fire holding their new hats. They looked at each other briefly, as they always did before even the slightest of dealings with an outsider, then smiled warily.

“West Moor'll be yours this day next year,” he stated, his eyes sliding from one pair of sky-grey eyes to the other.

“They don't know much,” he said, turning back to face Ax. “Can't even work a dog. Send them to work with me and I'll put them in the way of things. Shearing, slaughtering—use of a knife.”

It was common knowledge, and the source of much mirth, that Right and Left allowed their mother to slaughter. What was less well known was the quality and intimacy of life in the last house of the village: how the three of them sat around the fire late at night and could almost feel each other's thoughts with their eyes shut, how the thin soup they ate at the end of winter tasted to them better than anything in the world, how rarely they needed to argue, how often they laughed. Neither was it much appreciated that over the years all three of them had come to prefer their softness to the hardness outside, to be oblivious of pity, disapproval and their growing isolation. Ax Blaney had long since ceased to feel that she led a dog's life.

Even so, she weighed Crow's offer carefully for its advantages and disadvantages. What he said was true: although she let them help her, Right and Left were incapable of working the half-acre at the back of the house, let alone the moor, and she, though strong, was growing old. On the other hand, she was reluctant to send them to Crow, seeing as he'd already profited so much at her and their expense—and without even turning to look at their faces she knew that being taught by Crow to use a knife would seem to them a fate worse than death.

Crow felt in his pocket, brought out something wrapped in a scrap of chamois, and pushed it to her across the table.

“Open it,” he said; then, when she hesitated, leaned across to do it for her. A small bone ring carved to give the impression of plaited rope lay on the soft leather. “This time next year we'll wed,” he said.

Ax Blaney felt the weight of her sons' relief behind her as she pushed the ring back untouched. “Crow,” she said, “me and the twins will stay as we are.”

Crow pushed his chair noisily across the flags and walked to the door. “But you'll never do that!” he said. “The year those two are sixteen you can kneel on the Slab all you like but you'll find no one giving you runts. Why give, people will say, when they have the means to fend for themselves?” He left the door to bang in the wind.

Ax Blaney picked up the ring and threw it in the fire. “Don't you worry,” she said as they watched it, a black band in a burst of flame, burning hard and long, “we'll stay as we are.”

 

T
hat night the first snow
came and Ax, sleeping in a chair by the fire was wakened as always by the sudden silence it brought. Right and Left slept on a mattress of lambskins; she had made it years ago, and since then they had grown beyond all expectation so that their legs stuck out almost to the knee. They lay on their sides, facing each other so that each would see the other on first waking. She rose and pulled the blanket over them, feeling its thinness, the weight of her promise—its impossibility, the twin impossibility of betraying it.

Crow was pleased with his evening's work. “She'll turn,” he commented drily to Sling and his son Gull. “She'll have to. Come the spring after next she'll be banging on our door.” He made sure as well to inform the rest of the village of his offer, long expected, and its refusal, utterly unforeseen.

“Who does she think she is? If she won't be shorn, she'll have to be skinned,” commented men and women alike. It was easy to avoid the last house in the village. “She may feed runts and put them in a feather bed, but we've no need to. She can put grass in her soup.”

That spring, Ax received only half the usual number of ailing lambs, and those were left anonymously by night at her door. The superstitious sympathy which had tempered the villagers' contempt for difference vanished, and tongues long bitten back ran free. “A woman that slits sheep brings a long winter and a year of foot rot,” said the men, leaning on walls of stone crusted with pale lichens, built by their fathers' fathers, “but she'll turn.”

Indeed, the next winter was particularly harsh. Day in, day out a thin column of smoke rose from each stone chimney. The road was blocked from late October, and although the sky was often almost unnaturally bright, shining like blue ice over the iron-coloured foothills, with their long shadows and the drifts of white in the valleys, those early snows endured for many months.

The flocks gathered in sheltered corners, cream against white and grey, their marks—crimson, viridian, Prussian blue—like wounds on the side of a huge beast, sleeping or dead. Many were slaughtered out of season.

Late in February, the weather suddenly broke. Free of care, Crow and the villagers eagerly awaited lambing, Ax Blaney's appearance on the Slab, and the submission to follow. Ax, however, stayed at home, swept her yard carefully, took out the last piece of salt meat and put it to stew with some barley.

“This is the last of it,” said Right, throwing mean scraps of peat on the fire. They both looked up at her, questioning.

“Don't worry. Put it all on. Eat,” said Ax, setting the bowls before them, taking none herself. She watched them carefully. How fine their faces were, so little touched by wind or rain or rage, and caught now in the first yellow sunlight of the year. How soft their hair.

“Is this the last?” asked Left, hesitating before refilling his bowl. “Will there be lambs this year?” How perfect the set of their shoulders, the clear gaze of their grey eyes, which met hers suddenly, calm, trusting and content; how much she loved them, how angry she was that every last thing should be taken away.

“There will,” replied Ax, her eyes shining. “Eat.”

After, she told them to leave the dishes, and asked them to come out into the yard. A single star pricked the darkening sky above their house.