Pollard Read online

  Who told you life was fair, hey? Ranger still looked pretty grim. And who brought that crowd down here anyway? Who was it knew where Anne lived? Are you going to tell me they’d all been down for tea and biscuits?

  Busted.

  Make your mind up then, what’s it to be? Are you coming back to help, or am I talking to Mum and Dad?

  Come back.

  Yih, come back and help, again barely audible.

  Right then, she’d have two boys, nice and early tomorrow morning. Tomorrow was Sunday so no school. Ranger would bring them down himself. You just have a think about what you want them to do, Anne, and we’ll get some of this put back.

  ♦

  After that, he was hers. Ranger gave him to her, pretty much. One boy for you, he said, as he and Peter Parker got out the next morning. Anne was in the middle of the pool when they drove up, at work already. It was her life. She had no choice.

  Put him to work, mind. And no slacking, you. He’ll see himself home. He’s got a watch. And if I find you’ve gone home before dinner time I’ll come and fetch you back after school tomorrow.

  Peter Parker was bent over, poking the laces of his trainer inside. No way would he be able to get him tomorrow. Tomorrow was track training at the senior school and Mr Tomkins was a stress bag. He wanted a hundred per cent, even out of the juniors. He straightened up again. That’s commitment.

  I’ll give you commitment. Now get in that water and get busy.

  He was dapper, like a bird, smoothing his T-shirt down at the front. Alright. I heard you. You’re as bad as Mr Tomkins nearly. He looked up. Anyway, me and Anne are friends, aren’t we?

  It was so barefaced. It took your breath away. Anne and Ranger looked at each other and opened their mouths and looked at him again, cocky, destructive, sunlit as usual. You couldn’t believe it, how he could stand there, after all, as if nothing had happened and be like that.

  Funny idea of friendship you’ve got, Ranger said. I’d like to see how you treat your enemies.

  Right cocky little so-and-so he was. And he wasn’t even really conscious of it either. Flicking his hair back, smiling. He was just his small self, stepping towards the water, rubbing his hands at the edge of the pool, like he must have seen some grown-up or other do.

  Right, Anne, what’s it to be? Give it to me, he said, I’m a man, and he struck a pose, his hands now on his hips.

  He was preposterous. Ranger got back into the truck shaking his head. Good luck then, he said to Anne. I’ll be back later. And Anne held a wet armful of stones against herself and tried to make head or tail of it all.

  ♦

  He was different on his own, like he had been the first times he came. He was nicer without his friends.

  What had happened to the other boy? Anne wanted to know. She talked in the rhythm of her work, a little breathless as she went up and down, wading slowly, scanning for the next stone and then her free arm fishing, her back straining and the other arm crooked round the ones she had reclaimed. Then up again and on, eyes always down.

  The other boy had cried to his mum when he got home. He was scared.

  Anne unloaded and stood up to rest her back. What of?

  Peter Parker was sitting on a rock at the pool side. He made a stupid face. Hello? What did she think he was scared of? Then he held his arms out from his sides and did a quick impersonation of Anne, swinging rubbish bags, bellowing. If I didn’t know you a bit I’d of been scared.

  Anne stared at him. Well, you ran away too.

  I was worried they’d get lost in the wood.

  He didn’t even believe it himself. Anne could see that. She gave a little snorting laugh and bent back to the water.

  Bucky, the other boy was called. He was scared of trouble, Bucky was, Peter Parker said. He’s not coming down the wood no more. None of them was coming down the wood, not even to the bomb hole. They was going down the new rec instead.

  Anne was wading about in the middle of the pool again, having a last look for stones. Peter Parker stayed on the edge throwing pebbles and bits of stick into the water. She didn’t know how to put someone to work and anyway he wouldn’t have been any good at it. You could see that a mile off. He had no patience. It was difficult making a proper edge. That was the point. You had to think what you were doing. You had to make it tight. He wouldn’t have had the first clue. So she let him alone.

  After a bit, he climbed up one of the sycamores that overhung the pool. It was as if he weighed nothing. He was so agile, swinging his legs up to where his arms were clasped, hanging upside down one minute and astride the branch the next. Anne looked up at him and said nothing. He walked along the branch out over the pool. You be careful, she thought. You be careful you don’t slip because I won’t be able to catch you, and she caught her breath at the thought of it, his wheeling fall.

  He lay down full-length along the branch, like a cat. There’s one over there, he told Anne. You missed one over there and there’s a massive one in the middle. I can’t believe you missed that. You want your eyes testing.

  Anne waded over and picked out the one she’d missed. The one in the middle was the one he’d thrown the first time. The pool had got used to that one. She was leaving that. It was a reminder, kind of, and a warning. I’m leaving that one. And my eyes are perfect.

  He laughed at her. She went to work on replacing the stones and Peter Parker lay on his branch and spat into the water.

  Oi. Anne whipped round, angry. That’s my drinking water. You just don’t get it, do you? Then she said slowly and clearly to him, as if it would make any difference, as if he would understand what it meant, I’m trying to live here.

  Silence, for a while.

  Are you nearly finished doing them stones? I’m getting fed up.

  Anne didn’t bother to answer.

  Then a little later. How deep is it? Shall I drop?

  Do what you like.

  Go on then. Dare me. I’ll do it. What do you bet me I can do it?

  Anne had had enough of him. She got up and headed off for her hut. Have a break, that’s what. Sit in the shade for a bit and get some peace and quiet. Peter Parker climbed down from the tree. He didn’t drop.

  He came in after her.

  Why don’t you get lost off home? she asked him.

  I can’t. It’s not dinner time yet. That man’ll come and get me tomorrow. What are you eating then? I’m starving.

  She was eating a sort of stew of fat hen and fern buds, from last night, that she was spooning up cold, sucking up the plant legs when they dangled down her chin.

  He peered in her pot. No way. That’s leaves you’re eating. That is rank. No way would I ever eat that. He was disgusted. It was as if she was an animal or something. Don’t you ever eat meat or normal stuff?

  Of course she did. She ate rabbits, when she caught them and chicken from time to time, woodcock.

  What?

  Woodcock. Didn’t he know what woodcock were? And duck, presumably he’d heard of duck and pheasant, loads of things.

  So where did she get these wood whatevers? And how did she catch them? He was really interested now. Do you hunt like with a spear and stuff? He jumped in front of her in the way he imagined a hunter would, moving his head exaggeratedly from side to side, an imaginary spear raised, shoulders up. I could do that. I could hunt. Come on, let’s go hunting now. That would be wicked. I want to see how you do it.

  Not now. Anne wasn’t hunting now. She was finishing the pool and sorting out the mess here first.

  Peter Parker was almost in despair. Oh stones! Not more stones. You done the stones. Please, he kept saying, please take me. Come on. Then, when Anne was unmoved, can you take me tomorrow? He said tomorrer. Come on, you need meat. You’ll get sick if you just eat leaves. Anne went on spooning her green mess and sucking the juice out of her beard. Where’s your spears then? At least show me the spears.

  She didn’t have spears. He looked crestfallen. She used snares and things. Anyway wasn
’t he doing something tomorrow, wasn’t it training he’d said, tomorrow?

  Well, then the day after. Next time I come. Take me next time, yeah?

  Maybe.

  ♦

  She hadn’t been to the café in ages. The weather had changed, colder and grey, and the wood was rocking with summer wind. When she got to the car park, the crows and jackdaws were sitting it out in the tops of the trees, all of them, beaks like weathervanes, pointing, so the wind couldn’t ruffle them from behind. That was a difference, Anne thought. She would always put her back into the wind. That was a drawback to being a bird, bouncing about like that on a branch, with your eyes watering, watching for the least change in direction. She sat in one of the outside chairs to read the notice boards and watch the walkers. She always read the noticeboards, even if she knew them by heart, to keep in practice and because she liked the words. Today there was a new board, a big board right in the middle, with pictures of families bicycling in helmets. It looked like they were in the treetops or something. Anne got up, intrigued. This was something new. This was rarer than anything yet.

  Six miles of new bicycle track, the board said. Healthy living in the forest. Walk and cycle safely. It had pictures of butterflies and deer. The rare black hairstreak butterfly. If you are lucky you may see a shy fallow deer. Then there was a photograph of a shy fallow deer, but in another place altogether, from the look of it.

  The next part of the notice had a picture of a long wooden tunnel on stilts. 400m of walkway, Anne read, designed to take visitors, including those with pushchairs and wheelchairs, into the majestic oak canopy to feel close to these magnificent trees. She studied the picture. She would like to ride a bicycle in the treetops, if that was what was on offer. There was a photograph of a walkway in New Zealand, in the rainforest. The trees were different! Anne saw, and packed together, not breezy and open like here. It looked thick and bursting. The walkway had huge steel legs like a pylon and there were tiny people ranged along it, pointing with eager faces. At what? You couldn’t tell. None of them was on a bicycle, as far as Anne could see.

  The walkway will be a spiritual place to view our natural world from a different vantage point, to pause for thought, to get closer to nature.

  Right.

  Anne sat down again to digest.

  Ah, our lady of the litter.

  She hadn’t noticed Nigel. He was balancing a herbal tea and a plate with a slice of carrot cake the size of Anne’s foot. Nigel was rude. He always came and slurped his tea at her table. He never offered her anything these days, just ate whatever he had, right in front of her. He put his cake down so it was close to Anne. She found herself unable to look away. I take it you aren’t in favour.

  Anne looked up from the cake. In favour? Of eating cake? She was very much in favour of cake. That cake in particular had a very favourable look to it.

  But Nigel pulled the plate towards him. No. Anne had said the wrong thing as usual. He was concerned with the wider welfare of the wood. Not trivial concern, Anne. Not trivial concern. But trivial or not, Nigel seemed happy today, fizzing even, pushing carrot cake into his mouth and pointing at the board, crumbs everywhere. He had no manners. Fiddling in his dirty old bag for papers, all at the same time. He wanted to slow down, Anne thought sourly. He’d have a heart attack at this rate.

  Of the walkway, Anne – the treetop walkway. As our only resident, I take it you aren’t in favour. Gulping. You’ll have to sign up. You could be a valuable campaign member.

  Nigel’s eyes darted sideways. Good morning, madam. He’d seen a woman now. A woman had walked past with a tray full of Ribena boxes and Nigel was up – maniac – spouting crumbs. Are you against the urban vandals of Whitehall? Are you against the despoliation of our beautiful woods?

  Anne watched him. You didn’t just talk to people you’d never met. You didn’t just go up to anyone you felt like and start talking, not like that anyway.

  The woman looked puzzled. She was trying to work it out, what he was on about. You could see that she didn’t know if he was a nutcase or not, but the long words got her. Nutcases didn’t say despoliation. Anne had head-spin.

  Nigel had papers and petitions. He had a kind of awful way with him. The woman was like a rabbit in the headlights. Her children pulled pieces of clothing, that should have been up, down. They clung round her.

  Mum I’m really thirsty Mum.

  You said we could have something nice. Ribena isn’t nice it’s boring Mum. You said you promised.

  They were round her legs so she wobbled the tray. She would have signed anything, Anne thought, just to be allowed to put the tray down and pull back her clothes and quieten the children. Nigel put his papers on her table.

  You are a woman of good sense and conscience, he said as she signed her name on his petition, and you have three beautiful youngsters. Enjoy the forest, he said, filling his own lungs and tapping his chest. It’s yours to breathe in. The children stared at him, thirst gone.

  The woman caught Anne’s eye and half smiled and turned her back. Confusion. She was barely head-above-water, Anne thought.

  Mum, look!

  Mum. Mum look at that lady. I seen a lady with a beard Mum. That lady –

  The children were shushed. Anne saw the woman’s shoulders jerk with anxiety. She was no way in control, as Peter Parker would have said. Anne got up and sat down a little further away, partly to relieve the mother of what she couldn’t control and partly for a bit of space. It was particularly busy today. She watched the little birds hopping closer and closer to the tables. In front of her was a tray, covered with crumbs that she shook off onto the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nigel, still at it, moving round the outside tables, like a cleg, swatted away by person after person.

  Fragments of conversation drifted back to her. Well, they can do what they like if they’ve got the planning, Anne heard. It was a red-faced woman sipping from a sports bottle. She had purplish hair that stood up as if it was wet. I don’t really have a problem with it, one walkway in a forest this size. Her clothes looked as though they had grown on her.

  Anne raised her face to the sun and closed her eyes.

  Have to move you along today, Anne. It was Sue, wiping down the table and taking the tray. We’re getting busy for dinner time now. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask, you know me.

  Anne got up. She thought she’d go back by the skips, check for anything useful.

  On the edge of the car park Nigel was talking to a man and a woman now. They were holding hands and making small moves of impatience. They only had the lunch hour. Nigel didn’t notice.

  Anne heard, Public body, and, Checks and balances, and, Damaging in terms of habitat. The problem with Nigel, Anne thought, is that he speaks a language no one understands. The woman interrupted him. She’d had enough. Yeah, well, if it gets some of the kids off the streets and into nature then I’m all for it. People come before wildlife, in my book.

  Anne thought of Peter Parker. Was Peter Parker a kid off the streets? she wondered, as she peered into the car-park bin. Just polystyrene cups and sandwich wrappers. Anything that was good for Peter Parker was good in Anne’s book. She was going to look in all the skips for bicycles and then she and Peter Parker were going to bicycle into the treetops.

  ♦

  Lazy summer days meant Anne didn’t sleep so much at night. You didn’t need to sleep in summer. It wasn’t dark for long enough. Anne went night-walking, to the oak stands, on the other side this time. The boards in the car park gave all the coppices names. She went to remind herself of the places that fitted the names and she went at night because the light summer nights were too good to waste. Also the wood was different at night. Things changed their geometry in the dark. They made up new rules. Insignificant things tripped you up or snagged or soaked you. Distances you knew to be short stretched as long as they felt like it. The owl’s flight disentangled itself and grew unerring, and the bats who had no eyes to speak of flew faster than thoug
ht and never bumped or cramped. Walking at night made you small.

  She walked round the edge of the wood because mostly the understorey was too thick in darkness. No one wanted to be struggling through a thicket in the night. The sky lightish, great ridges of cloud tonight like sand bars on a dark sea. There were one or two stars, in between, and the moon weightless and slim again, newly delivered of one more blind white child. Over the stile and into the land beyond Smarty’s, stinking of barn-reared chickens and the barns themselves, long and low and black, where the foxes came to nose the locked doors and the paper cracks and smell blood and feathers and dream their wild and beating dreams. This was a good rabbiting field, where Anne set her snares in the ditch at the wood’s edge. There would always be a fox there, looking at the sheds as she checked her haul, turning away bested, licking his black lips with a long tongue. Dream on, she’d say to him, gloating. Try rabbit for a change.

  Madiron Coppice, Crabtree Thicks, these were the oldest of the oak stands. Quinton Tongue Coppice, Rolls Mere Coppice, Stony Coppice and Great Straits. She didn’t know which one she was in and she didn’t much care, rolling their names around in her mouth and barging through the thorn backwards and into the wood again. Lovely. The night smell of it up through the ground, and soft underfoot. Tawnies faint on the other side, calling on the wing. The long straight boles of timber-grown oak. Trees are warm. It’s a low, slow warmth, imperceptible like their growth but it’s definitely warmth, or that’s what Anne thought as she moved rustling among them.

  She was looking up into the patterns their canopies made, black against the sky, polite how they made room for each other, not wasting any light but not encroaching on each other either. No overlapping, or hardly any. If she hadn’t been looking up she might have seen him before she heard the shot, the low whizz and crack of a rifle. Close by, a deer buckled among the hazels. Anne’s heart leapt to her mouth. She almost cried out. She might have walked right into it, two seconds sooner and she might have been shot herself. She dropped to her knees, flattened herself like the hares in the field, tried to control her breathing. Someone came shoving through the undergrowth. Heavy feet. Anne could see a flashlight, arcing back and forth.