Pollard Read online

  But when she put her head out of the window, which she did as often as she could, then she felt hopeful. It could well be that a small world was still big enough. The sky was big if you like, but then the sky wasn’t the world. The clouds, the wind. The sun up there. That was big.

  Oi! Mooning about up there, open the door.

  That was the Parcel Force man. Anne hated the Parcel Force man. He gave her the willies. Will you open the door or won’t you? She never answered him. She just stared down from the window, went down the stairs as slow as she liked, stood in the doorway, blocking it up so he had to lean to see round her. Where’s the pretty one? Sexy Suzie, Anne’s big sister, geddit? He fancied her sister. She’d seen him, licking his hand with his rude tongue, sticking up his hair at the front in the driving mirror before getting out. He called Suzie sweetheart not open the door. When is she going to stop growing? he said, cocking his head towards Anne. He smelt of spit and aftershave. Have to get a ladder to get to her, and he jerked his hips forward and gave a wink to Suzie. Anne didn’t like the shiny front of his trousers. At all. He put the parcel into Suzie’s arms with his hand on her waist and his face glistening and all his spit and aftershave breathing at her. Steady now mind how you go and he slid his hand, Anne saw, from her waist, down over her backside. Suzie was disgusting. She did mail order nearly every week so the Parcel Force man could slide his hand on her backside and call Anne open the door.

  ♦

  Anne liked words. She learnt to read very early, although she never achieved full understanding, or so they said. It was just that she liked the words by themselves too much, had they known. She liked to feel their individual shape in her mouth, berries to be rolled round whole. She liked the separate sounds of them, the weight of them dropping, not crushed all together and lost. So she spoke her sentences slowly, with plenty of room. She spoke like a person packing a shopping bag, with care. For practical reasons, obviously, she said very little.

  She can’t see the wood for the trees, her dad would say, when she was small. He stopped saying it when she got large and irritation got the better of him. But the wood stayed with her, as a challenge, as something important. It was at the foot of the hill. Seeing it was Anne’s first identifiable achievement, in her own eyes.

  In the wood Anne saw the connection. There was room for everything to be themselves but still they fitted together, depended on each other even. Sometimes the fit was so tight, so interwound, it was difficult to sort it out, but she was patient; she didn’t know their names, but she followed the stems of the old man’s beard and the ivy and she knew them to be distinct. She assumed that they were happy like that, grateful for each other’s difference and sensible of some similarity.

  At home no one was grateful and difference was not a good thing.

  Home was small and inwards. It could have been lighter maybe. It was painted red downstairs, the colour of old blood and there was stuff everywhere, piled on everything, magazines and telly guides, sticker books of Connor’s, manuals, CDs, computer games, Michael’s Xbox, packets of biscuits open and cups half full, cups with mould sometimes. It made you nervous. You were always going to knock something unless you were very careful. Everything had sticky dust on it, ash and dust. Frying fat and cigarette smoke, that’s what it smelt of.

  All of Anne’s family were small, like the house, although there were a lot of them. Visitors would cock their heads at Anne’s height and ask her parents, Where d’you get her then? Must’ve been a tall milkman. Then everyone would laugh, except Anne. By the time she was fourteen she was too high and too wide for most of them to notice.

  Meanwhile, the wood drew her. So many tall things and so happy. Inside Anne’s head the world was all upwards. It was breezy tops and lower filtered light, and movement. There was no clumsiness in the wood, as far as she could see. She carried the feel of it around with her, as an alternative. It took her over. The slim verticals of its timber-grown trees were her private rhythm. They put their feet down in her dreams at night, sprang up on the table when she set down the glasses for tea, grew out of her fists when she held her knife and fork upright at meals. When she played with the baby she would find herself stopping in the middle of something, colouring for instance, and setting the crayons on end, little wax copses across the floor. She became slower and quieter than before. Her head was so full of their rustling, her eyes barred and spotted with light and shade. She didn’t want to spoil it.

  But Anne’s family was not like the wood, except perhaps in number. They saw no example in the wood, only trees. So Anne turned inwards and tried again. Trees are not people, she said to herself – and it was people that were her problem, or rather one of her problems, because sometimes the problems grew in her head, as thick as the trees.

  Anne’s mother wasn’t much use either. She said, You are as old as you feel and I feel nine hundred. And, They say you are what you eat.

  Tomato ketchup then, and toast, Anne thought, moving Suzie’s magazines so she could sit on the settee.

  Don’t you touch them books. Mum – Anne’s got my books. Anne get your clumsy hands off of there.

  They also say children on diets high in protein grow bigger, taller bodies; but it doesn’t have to work that way. It could be that growth operates on a pulley system. You grow as long as your innocence takes to shrink. You go up so long as belief or trust or hope go down. That is how it is for some people, whatever they say. Or that is how it was for Anne.

  Whenever she could, while she waited for a world that she would fit, Anne walked to console herself, down the hill from her parents’ house and into the hanging wood, for a bit of space, a little quiet and to put her size into perspective.

  Mum – Anne’s off out again.

  But Anne learnt that if she called out something indistinct, over her shoulder, as she left – pushbike, for example, or, mend Michael’s flat – they let you alone. After all, it was more room in the house without her.

  She walked out quick to get out of sight. You were on top of the world when you started, a folded country of hills and hidden valleys, thickly wooded and then exuberantly open. There were toy churches, farms, villages like handfuls of pebbles put down. All of it was small. Like her dad said, it was a small world after all. From the house, the road plunged into the valley at a crazy gradient, so that, as you descended, the hills at the back heaved the horizon up and over your head with each stride. Walking down the hill with the trees coming up to meet you was the closest thing to shrinking that Anne had ever felt. By the time she reached the bottom, she could imagine she was normal.

  She felt fine in the wood. Sometimes she’d just lie down and breathe the loamy air at the trees’ feet. She’d close the eye furthest from the ground and with the nearer one watch the toil of the insects heaving themselves over twig and leaf. That’s big, she’d say to herself. That’s insurmountable.

  ♦

  One day, when all shred of hope was gone and she realised no one else was getting any bigger, Anne stopped growing and decided she would move down to the hanging wood for good.

  She walked out quick, like she always did, only she thought they might have heard her heart, it was so loud. Nobody stopped her.

  The wood was the same as always. She breathed the air, which there wasn’t in the house. She listened to the birds, who didn’t shout. She lost herself down the quiet rides and cricked her neck looking up through the trees’ green cathedral. She lay down in her usual places, at the trees’ feet. And the trees took her in. They opened stiff arms and spread their fingers above her head. They whispered their world of wind and light, the muddy secrets of their roots. They juggled birds for her. They showed her the tiny things that height can produce, the delicate, missable fruits and tassels.

  Then the dark fell, at the day’s end, and with the dark the wood grew. The trees shot up and away from her as if she had made a mistake. The cold came up through the ground and she was alone. After a while, she told herself that she was having a
holiday. She’d gone for a chill-out, as Suzie would say, just for a few days and then she’d probably go back. Well, she’d go back once she’d got a job in the new abattoir, that’s what she’d do.

  Among the ferns and last year’s dead leaves, in the ditch that she had selected to sleep in, Anne hugged her knees and told herself stories. Wait till she’d got sorted. She’d walk back into the house, in her white suit and the white boots with steel toecaps; orange the toecaps were. They had a proper uniform at the abattoir, not like the poultry plant, where it was all old and cruddy and you wore your own painting overalls pretty much, like her dad. And when she walked in they’d say, What you wearing Anne, where you been? Look, everyone, Anne’s back. They’d all be clustered round her looking and she’d walk over to the table and sit down because she’d be tired, and someone would have to fix her tea instead. John and Michael and Suzie, they’d be all mouths open, and she’d just shrug cool as anything and say, Oh working at the abattoir, and she’d look at her dad, who hadn’t shifted over, had he, because she was no fool and he’d never do it, not till it was too late, not till the abattoir was full.

  But it was hard to keep your mind on a story, when everywhere there were rustlings and crackings. Little ferreting things scuttled where Anne couldn’t see them. In the dark the quiet wood was alive with noise. She heard cars stopping and starting. She thought she saw a man once and lay flat in the ditch, her heart bulging against the twigs and leaves beneath her. She couldn’t remember when she’d last been afraid. She was big, wasn’t she? She was never afraid in the day.

  ♦

  The trees could have told her. Sound is what takes over in a wood, in the dark. Shufflings, things dropping, knocking. The piglike muntjac yelping in the undergrowth. Somewhere to her left, one of the pines mewing like a cat.

  There are voices outside that you don’t hear until you are alone. Don’t attempt the wood on a night as dark as this, unless you know it like the back of your hand. There’s too much of your own mind out there.

  Down in the ditch Anne’s head swivelled, swivelled. Listen.

  Wood and a riding wind.

  We won’t help, say the trees. We are miles up at night, hooking our fingers into the sky, in league with all you most fear. We snag and whip. If you try moving, deafened with your own heartbeat and your breath booming, we jab and prod, sudden and out of nowhere. We are long silhouettes that reach to the sky. Married to formlessness, knocking branches at the night, tattling tales.

  Into a wind that spooks and bolts, they are talking.

  ♦

  And inside the wood, where Anne crouched, the dark roared, although below the canopy nothing moved. Chilly for summer. Not a night for standing around.

  While Anne shivered and panicked the moon opened its cold eye beyond the trees, and in its glimmer a bird crossed one of the far fields, just the black outline of it, could be an owl, could be a late crow, hard to see. On the bank above the road a weasel paused upright and the white of his chest flashed in the headlights of a passing car. Then down and away into the deeps of the wood, his small sound, scurrying through Anne’s consciousness nightmare size. She couldn’t help whimpering. A weak, animal noise, but it shocked her, it seemed so loud. Her throat dry. Had she given herself away?

  Not a hand’s distance visible, in the wood, only where the moon opened a slip of sky between treetops, a nail-width of light, or a star, the dog star for instance, flared minute.

  How long does a night last? Anne lay in her ditch and locked her shoulders and strained her eyes and willed the light to break. Please God. Please God. And stretching away down the ride, the limes that stood head and shoulders above the other trees shivered alone in reach of the moon and watched the horizon and said nothing, while an aeroplane blinked, blinked. And the wind rode the wood, mercilessly, all night long.

  ♦

  Wobbly, in the dawn Anne crawled to the roadside. She thought she’d watch her father going to work, just for reassurance. She waited a long time. She told herself that if she called out to him perhaps he would help her. He would get off his bike and not mind if he was late. Give her a swig of his tea, let her eat his dinner. Anne hadn’t made up her mind what she’d do, when he came scooting round the corner. He whisked past. Lack of sleep had made her slow. She opened her mouth to call. And then she didn’t call. He was gone in a moment. Anne stood on the bank with her mouth still wide and her mind calling, still seeing his back, the shirt stretched over his chicken-bone shoulders, even after the corner had swallowed him up.

  She had never seen her dad like that before. He had looked almost young, hooped over the handlebars, leaning into the corner, speeding away into the summer morning. He must look like that every day, the separateness of her father’s existence hitting her suddenly and for the first time. He could have been anyone’s dad, or no one’s. He didn’t look like he belonged to anyone, just a man in painting overalls, taking his secret self off to work.

  But Anne felt better when she’d seen him. It wasn’t that different from watching him from the house. Bye Annie. Bye Dad. Be a good girl.

  ♦

  Anne’s mum never walked anywhere. If she wanted to go to the village she got the car out, even on a day like today. She was a lazy cow if you like, not that Anne would have used the word cow. That was Suzie, or her brothers, cow was. When Anne saw the car go past, with Leanne strapped in her baby seat, she headed back up the hill. She would have waved at Leanne but the car was going too fast.

  Anne still had her latchkey.

  On the side, when she got in, there were someone’s cold chips and mayonnaise, still in their paper. Anne ate them first, wolfing them down with the chip fork. Then she ate toast, cereal, smoked turkey ham and two packets of crisps from the cupboard.

  What are you doing, Anne? Connor was in the doorway, mouth open, with his duvet round him. They stared at each other. Nothing, Anne said, by instinct. Nothing. Then, after a while, she said, I’ve left home, but with a note of appeal in her voice, as if she was trying it out, as if she wanted it verifying. She wanted to say, Did you notice? Or, Did anyone ask? But somehow she didn’t.

  Connor gathered the duvet round himself and moved into the room. Doesn’t look like it, was all he said, and then, I’m watching telly.

  Connor wasn’t so bad. He was only seven. Anne didn’t mind Connor, so long as Michael or John weren’t around. I’ll watch it with you, then. Any excuse, and it was warm in the kitchen, compared to the wood. She thought she’d make tea. She made Connor tea too and took it over to the settee. What was up with him anyway? Why wasn’t he at school?

  Poorly.

  They watched Chancers, This Teen Life and Pingu. After a while Anne felt uneasy. She didn’t want to be there when her mother came back. She got up and went upstairs. She went into the boys’ room and took one of Michael’s fleeces so she wouldn’t be cold at night. Then she went in hers and Suzie’s room. Thank you very much. Suzie had put cushions on Anne’s bed and a pink drape, like it was hers already. I’ve only been gone a night, Anne said out loud. Then she wondered why she’d been surprised. Suzie was a cow, if you were looking for one. Anne knew that. She knelt on her bed and looked out of her window, at her old view – the road to the wood and the poultry plant, the fields, the big sky – to remind herself what it looked like from inside, to see if it looked different.

  But she couldn’t see anything. However she faced her eyes forward they looked back, through the back of her head, at the bottles and jars, the make-up remover, shampoo, styling spray. At Suzie’s clothes spread out luxuriating, easing their shoulders into the extra space. She couldn’t see her old view, only Suzie’s room. That was hurtful. She wanted to smash everything in that room. She took three pots of nail polish. That would teach Suzie. Not Dusky Plum because that made your nails look like you’d missed with the hammer. Hi Ho Silver Lining, Gilty Party and Moody Blues. Then she went back and took In the Pink as well, for good measure. Paint her own nails if she felt like it. Then
she went downstairs and filled her pockets with food.

  Ta-ra Connor.

  Where you going?

  Nowhere. I’ll be in the woods if you want me. If Mum and Dad start going into one, come and find me in the woods. I’m getting a job.

  Connor was still pale under the duvet. He never took his eyes off the telly. Alright, Anne. See you. Is there jobs in the woods?

  Yes. See you, then.

  Can you make me another piece of toast?

  She went back into the kitchen. She made him the toast and another piece for herself, because if you’re putting on the toaster you might as well do two.

  When she gave it to him he looked round her to see the telly.

  Ta-ra.

  Ta-ra.

  ♦

  It was summer but Anne got cold. She had no shelter. She got wet like she’d never known. Water has no manners, Anne discovered. Whatever shape you make, it finds a way. She was bent over like a boulder the first time it rained, with her nose, for warmth, inside her shirt. She could see water in the folds of her belly and how did it ever get there? Oh Jesus, she said to it. Give us a break. Get lost, can’t you? But Anne was good at enduring. She sat like that and watched it rain inside her shirt and waited for it to stop. Was it funny or sad that she had rain inside her shirt? Look, she said to herself, it was so sad that her hair was crying. The water was running off her hair ends, down her chest and in her bra and over her belly as if she was her old windowpane.

  From where she was sitting, on the far edge of the wood, she could see out to the fields. All the fields gone milky with rain and the cows lying, blinking it off their eyelashes, still chewing. There was no time when you weren’t eating, if you were a cow. Inside a wood, rain is sound first and wet second. Patter, patter, patter and the smells came right up out of the ground and the birds just sat, shaking themselves like dogs every now and again.

  If she was a windowpane, Anne would be able to see her insides, like the clock Michael had, the alarm clock from the jeweller’s he got where you could see all the bits in different colours. She used to sit and watch the little wheels clicking round when he wasn’t in, didn’t she? Sneak in his room and look. What are you doing Anne? Nothing. She wasn’t doing anything. Well don’t do nothing in here see. Now she put her nose back in her shirt and watched herself, as if she had little red and blue cogs and springs, small electric green rods whirring, a primrose pale, half-moon with wires, that shuffled back and forth. Do nothing if I want to, she thought. Do nothing all day. Then she studied the hairs, the fine pale hairs on her belly, the wet, white slab of her and the little shiver pimples. More like a chicken than a clock. A great plucked chicken.