Copyright © 2021 Maddy Hamey-Thomas About a half-hour walk into the countryside from my house, there is something worth looking at in a birch tree. A particularly good specimen. The tree is an outlier to the wood – the swathe of coverage from the rain and welcome spot for most of the citizens of this town. Somebody built a ramshackle treehouse in the centre of the wood, unpopular with some for disturbing the fenced-off green. Molluscs spread over its rotting boards. I don’t think it’s used really, unless you count the occasional teenage goth who goes to mooch on their own glumness, feeling a certain communion with near injury dressed as near death. And there are a few rugged cliffs about, too, but head there only if you know the approach. Chance a path through the trees and note how abruptly the ground can stop. For some reason, I’ve never seen them be climbed, though they have the natural footholds in the stone. Maybe they are seen as ancient conquests, hence the hollows for many feet and many hands, grasping and perching, and it was decided pointless to form new marks. Perhaps it’s the site of a nasty accident.
I’d never paid much attention to the clustering until recently. Strange to think how often I’d trailed the river, walked past the sheep-herd field and crossed the grooves where train tracks once lay. And I would have seen evidence of the nest-like structure that housed the organism, looked directly at it even. Drawn in by the shape of enterprise. Stopped and moved to the side of the path to let others go by, then looked up into its gently swaying home. Alone with branches waving at me like a friend at a distance, uncertain of their eyesight.
When I was young, my sister baulked at Sunday walking trips in the hills and dales. But everything I learnt, I learnt first from putting my hands into it, clambering and dangling over it, peeling it off from underfoot. Jessa would barely open her eyes, not even on the rare day when the light illuminates instead of blinds or hangs dimly to the underside of clouds. I’d drag her to where caterpillars nestled under nettle leaves, jab my finger aggressively at darting butterflies too quick for her drifting mind. The lecture of the chrysalis and the cocoon, the miracle of transformation, sat on my tongue like a cowbell unrung. My cherished act of mercy towards her.
Around here we find mud clumps mixed in with dinner. You’ll know this yourself maybe, if you’re local; not everyone is a ‘Jessa’. Jessa chose self-banishment to her room over any such rural sustenance, but we weren’t always such distant siblings. At school, we shared friends, even though we were a year apart and this should have mattered. I handed her extra Turkey Twizzlers at lunchtime and we usually pooled our tuckshop money to save for a grand feast on the weekends. Jessa taught me (a sober child) laughter, play and kindness. She never embarrassed me, was never petty. Still, there was something lighter in her flesh than mine, she seemed so untethered she was almost made up.
Years later she worked at the chain hairdressers by the roundabout, sweeping up the unwanted stale strands of people’s lives. Clients would travel from the surrounding villages, so you might have seen her. I didn’t take a job as a teenager, even though that meant a static existence, treading water at home until the future seemed clear. Jessa liked the sound of conversation and the hot, inconsiderate blast of the blow dryer that kept her swept hair-pile a rugby ball moving towards the tidy try of the rubbish bin. Sometimes she brought me home a crinkled potato in a foil and polystyrene gift box from the kiosk on the thoroughfare, it tasted soft-sweet under the browned skin.
These days I grow potatoes in my back garden. They’re a yellow variety, nothing like Jessa’s lunches. When they reach my fork, I feel I’m swallowing the ease of life. It slips down and becomes me, in an almost religious way. I hope you can forgive my earnestness… These rituals keep my life intact. I go for walks. I say ‘hi’ to the neighbours. Each day an expected minor miracle. That bush – an impressionist masterpiece in red and green. The sprawling roots of the hazel tree, murdered by a storm, house infinite varieties of insects. Nature sings eternal. I choose perspectives for watercolours that would win the prize at the summer fete but instead of making the stationary order I watch, very still, listening to the constant noise of trees talking. I sense I have time at my disposal. I go home and I speak to my girlfriend on the landline, which ties me to my plot of land, and I ask her: What can we grow next?
Last week, the week I was becoming absorbed in the disfigured branches of the birch tree, we were out by the patio, pretending not to notice the chill. Molly was sheltered just inside the shed; we glorify it as our ‘summer house’ and line the windows with tealights and lanterns. She held the tiniest tip of her tongue between her teeth, only releasing it to breathe an occasional, deep and intentional sigh. When we’re lucky we see bats slice dark, holly-leafed shapes over the back hedge. We had some friends coming over with their kid, they were late to arrive. I’m so sorry, Molly said suddenly. I carried on staring into the night’s recesses, but I knew what she meant because of the time of year. I nodded gently a few times in acknowledgement. A cat was wailing down the street.
The Fletchers arrived, their suddenly teenage kid, Charlie, in tow. It took my middle-aged brain a second to catch up with the image of her, stood tall as a cypress tree in the doorway. The family don’t live in town, but in the catchment area for Charlie’s school. Before they moved to this county, they asked us in an email how we enjoyed living here, the pros and the cons. They never replied to our curated lists and photographs I’d especially supplied of the Saturday market stalls, the ordinary redbrick house of a famous printmaker, the local pie vendors and a vintage fashion shop we thought Charlie might visit. We were proud and giddy pressing the ‘send’ button. We forgot our planned lie-in the next day and leapt up to revisit our favourite sites, reinvigorated; we ate lunch on the green with the ducks and pigeons drawing ever closer and the postcard, curling river nearby. Molly suggested the meadow walk where we’d last seen a giant peacock butterfly unfolding its wings flirtatiously. Just as we agreed that it didn’t matter if our friends joined us – we were fully under the spell and embrace of our surroundings and the two of us felt wholly complete – the Fletchers enrolled their daughter at the school.
That night, Charlie was distracted by the smell of fresh lasagne but taunted by its roiling, preventative steam. She would lose track of the conversation, testing the temperature of the side of the dish with a sneaking forefinger, but with her chin in her hands she looked for her opening. One hand moved to inch a spatula into the corner of the wadded pasta, whilst she asked if we knew of her classmate who’d been absent from school. The hand was smacked down by her mother’s quick reflex.
‘Charlie, you must ask!’
‘It’s fine, we need to cut it to cool it anyway… No one’s heard from her and her parents don’t reply properly to our texts,’ she trilled.
The theory was that this girl had been struggling with her brother’s death. The years of grief had apparently made her volatile and unmanageable at home, terrorising siblings and unruly in class. She’d spoken about leaving home for the Big Smoke to her delinquent friends, but she played truant so often that it took the gradual wearing down of a week’s worth of drug-dealers-are-her-teachers-now jokes for anyone to think twice. Before the bereavement, she had apparently formed a casual dance troupe that practiced at the bandstand every Tuesday and Thursday; she sold illustrated cards featuring locals’ pets via the town Facebook group for crafting; she complained of the love she so generously received in outgrown tickles from Mum and Dad. I could foresee the press quotes from the shopkeeper from whom she bought chocolate bars on the way home from school: ‘A tragedy caused by tragedy. She was happy-go-lucky by nature, before her brother, you know… ’
The townspeople to this day commiserate the death of the brother, though in truth, neither child had yet been found and the lad’s demise only pragmatically assumed. The cooling béchamel stuck fast to the tableware like the topic of conversation to the evening. Had the girl tried to get to London? She was 14. Charlie showed us some striking charcoal portraits on her phone: the girl had had these exhibited in the end-of-year art show. Maybe if she had stuck it out at home… pain be damned?
Speaking in this way with everyone, half-memories were coming loose, drifting sediment that I could allow to touch me or choose to shake off. The dinner party assumed my deep frown to be a direct response to the present story, so they naturally ignored it. It could be as easy to ignore the memories too, of what felt like, now I turned to them, the whispers of children been and gone.
I saw a friend from my past, and he’s laughing his apple-shaped cheeks to the ringing of a dirty joke. I could remember the teeth imprints left on his lower lip from concentrating so hard in science lab. The class scoundrel would set small objects alight, and I saw distinctly my friend’s glee at this tiny devil’s spellbinding misdemeanours. This friend from science class wanted the grand gang, no question. He was one half of the Velcro strip that bound him easily to the other boys. But there was a moment, after a few victorious grades, that he thought not only of changing room larks. His parents squeezed his arms on results day with suppressed parental ecstasy. What next… ? and What if… ?
At the age where power begins to change hands between child and parent, there is sometimes a last-minute rush towards binding decisions. The alliances the child has made are in danger of falling away as their elders attempt to glue them to their own plans. I was really trying hard to remember now – I believed this friend was sent off to boarding school – though the mental push for certainty was keeping events vague. I did know that I never saw him again, not in the town, not anywhere, though perhaps I saw his parents still. In my imagination, or in my memory, they were hollowed out, tired. A mournful memory, for sure, but tellingly not for his parents. I was hurt for the boy unmoored.
It was impossible not to think of Jessa, too, as Charlie reported each detail of her missing peer, as though it were gossip, chewing throughout and performatively expressing some acceptable level of shock. But I could visualise Jessa, whereas this girl had disappeared into a void in my imagination. If Jessa had been London-bound, she’d probably still be hairdressing, but ushering customers into plush seats with glossy, just-published magazines and declaring herself the owner at their polite enquiries. She would date someone in media production, and go to parties but decline the copious amounts of cocaine available. She would call her mother late at night if she was scared walking home, because she knew her mother would want her to. London wouldn’t have gobbled her up like the boogieman – she was vigilant but unafraid of crime. But this troubled girl, she was rocketing around with no thread to bind her anywhere. Jessa would have called me, had she settled somewhere else, and she would have found the space to ask about the reserve, and the work I was doing there with birdlife and such. I still felt troubled by my sister the following morning, although from faded images rather than hypotheticals. I took the walk that skirted the woods. I kept at a pace. A child shrieked my attention toward them; a family were flying a kite. I thought of all the things I would teach a young child, if I could have stomached one, in this beautiful place. I’d show them the organism. After noticing it this last month, I felt its presence more keenly and I knew it had been growing.
Again, I waited until I was alone. I climbed a neighbouring tree for a better vantage point and peered upwards. The tree’s tissue had sparked outwards from the parasite’s point of entry to make a vicious, sprawling new entity, like a confused star, flaring and flailing. People will tell you that these parasites are commonly found in trees, but I will say that it was not at home here. Thick and bristling with energy it was, though on the surface, static. I felt frightened but looked long and hard, feeling as though there was slight movement happening just outside of my direct gaze. This wasn’t the case. I purposefully ceased blinking. It was happening all the time, and right in front of me.
The longer I looked, the more the twigs stood out to me in high relief and the world outside grew pale and wanting. Tunnel vision showed me that each protrusion that the parasite had made was inching forwards infinitesimally, groaning. Looking for ways of escape. The tree bark bulged to accommodate it, letting it squeeze between its layers, bloating. There was a ragged scratching. Numerous offshoots from the healthy part of the plant were piercing the air and forming a line beside each other, a row of ill siblings. No shoot had permanently relieved the tree of its torment. An opening leaf bud had been encircled with the new tree-forms, had flopped over in acquiescence, pushed into irrelevance by Jessa in the tree. I saw her thin arm creaking into an unnatural bend, splintering wood, clipping skin. There was a noise like a car braking but in slow motion, and very high pitched. It was always there, and later when I moved away down the path, I could still hear it, now that I’d tuned in. Hearing it was a constant, aural itch. Jessa was yelling at me from beyond birch wood, too, a deadened sound, no longer herself though retaining something from before. Absent from our lives for so long, this infection, this tree-eater, now appalled me.
That night I dreamt that I was filling up with wooden flesh. It expanded out, commingling with skin to form bark. Trembling on the edge of bursting, I kept on growing. Still somehow, becoming less, and still less.