Pollard Read online

  Anne cooked him the egg and gave it to him on her only plate and he ate it, although it tasted weird and she didn’t have anything like toast or ketchup.

  How do you live? he asked her when he’d finished, incredulous. No toast and no ketchup and only weird eggs. He put his hands to his shorn head. But it was the first thing he had ever eaten in her clearing and she’d cooked it for him.

  They sat in silence for a while, just the tapping of Peter Parker’s stick on the ground where he was hitting things. Then he stretched back with his hands behind his head. Where’s the Milky Way then? Bet you don’t know the stars and all.

  You can’t see it from here. Not at this time of year anyway. Anne was picking up her things, the plate, the rabbit-skin blanket. She didn’t bother looking up. That’s Orion if you want to know.

  Yeah right. He laughed.

  You’re late out anyway aren’t you?

  He rolled over. I’m grounded, that’s why.

  Grounded? Was he staying out here all night? What on earth was grounded?

  Are you taking the pee? Peter Parker shook his head at her. What planet are you on, man? Grounded. You know. Anyway, I come out the window. He’s not keeping me locked up. I’m going to ring Childline tomorrow see if I don’t. He put his hands up to his eyes, curled like binoculars. It’s fucking dark. Do you get night vision if you live in the woods?

  A bit later he got nervous. He thought he ought to go back and started off, but he’d turned round again before he got to the end of the clearing. He couldn’t see nothing. Would Anne go with him? His age telescoped suddenly. A little boy. He needed to get home.

  They set out together, Anne leading the way and Peter Parker walking so close behind her he kept treading on her heels.

  Budge up then and let us walk beside you. It’s freaky back there.

  They bumped along side by side till they came to one of the surfaced roads where there was more room. Once an owl crossed in front of them making its hunting shriek. Peter Parker jumped and grabbed at her sleeve. Anne laughed.

  Only the barn owl. Haven’t you seen him before?

  Woh. That was close.

  He’d thought it was a ghost.

  When they were walking he was alright again, chattier than usual, even, talking maybe against the dark. Anne remembered her first night in the woods, much older than him. She’d been scared silly. They came to the edge of the wood, by the dell, with the path back to the estate stretched out in front of them clear enough. Peter Parker hesitated.

  Come on Anne. Walk us a bit further. There could be anyone out there. There could be freaky people in the shadows.

  Anne snorted at him. What kind of freaky people? Honestly. And he looked at her, his teeth white in the moonlight. He gave her a nudge with his elbow.

  People like you. Anne could see he was smiling. Go on Anne, just walk me to the estate. Please?

  When they reached the estate Peter Parker stood under an orange light. He offered Anne his right hand palm down, thumb out, and Anne took it without thinking, by instinct. Then she walked back to the wood with her hand still open. A couple of times on the way home she looked at it and wondered. And later, in the hut, she tested it against her softest places, to see if he had felt it to be rough, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. I’ll take you bicycling Peter Parker. You wait. You’ll like that.

  ♦

  Into the eye of summer now. August, when the sun burns a hole in the sky and the leaves turn in on their own stillness.

  Anne went out among the cows in the morning and lay full-length in the dew, luxuriating in the cold and the wet for as long as possible. From her back she saw the sky, which had got up this morning thick and mazy, lift and lift, turning itself as it went, into something its opposite, hammered out flat at an impossible height.

  Birds in the insect superhighway. The sun angling itself up the sky, staring down through its shaft, at the world that had climbed to reach it, while the world, which had got only to its own top again, saw nothing but the helter-skelter descent, down its other side and into winter, and stared at that, in stillness.

  But it was stupefying, the stillness that Anne felt too, drugged by heat and the moment, and for herself, now, by the fat sway of udders and the splay of feet near to and from underneath. That’s what high summer means, she said to herself, looking at the sky. She made a telescope out of her fingers to circle the early buzzard. He was almost a dot in the extra space. Hungry already, although he too looked lazy.

  That was the only bird Peter Parker took any interest in, the buzzard. You should get up earlier, Anne told him in her head. See him now. They’d come upon him once sitting on a post, huddling in his cloak of feathers. He’s raging, Anne had said, and Peter Parker had been scornful with a stick as usual.

  No he isn’t. You don’t know.

  Yes he is. Look at his shoulders and his eye. He’s brooding he is. He’s getting angry enough to kill and eat.

  Because it was easy to be fooled, Anne had noticed, by the buzzard’s height, by his lazy circles and his blunt wings, into thinking he wasn’t bothered one way or the other. He’s furious up there, scoping down through that yellow eye for something warm and unthinking. They had seen him, after, ripping at his prey with that fish-hook bill of his. Pretty savage. And Peter Parker had said, Woh, and, I see what you mean.

  The buzzard’s eye is related to the sun. Anne followed him with her finger telescope. That’s how come he can go so high and not get burnt.

  By the time she got up again, with pats in her hair, it was hot already. Back into the wood’s cool, grateful. Down the old path that hadn’t changed, although now, as so often these days, a heavy-breathing jogger dodged past her. Early. The early ones were the fittest always. She’d noticed. She was looking forward to her bath.

  But her animal sense prickled. There were people in her clearing again.

  At first she thought it was just Ranger. She could see the truck parked in its usual place. But another man, with a clipboard walked out from behind the hut. He was standing by the chickens. Looking it all over. Then he looked back at the pond, at the clearing, said something to Ranger that Anne couldn’t hear and they both started to move towards the truck. He had mirror sunglasses and he lifted his feet higher than he need have done, as though there was something unpleasant. He had a bad atmosphere. Anne didn’t want to be seen. She stayed behind one of the trees at the edge, but, as he too turned to the truck, Ranger saw her. She was sure of that. He glanced quickly away and he looked shifty. He looked like he was hurrying, his hand behind the other man’s back. They got into the truck. Ranger backing more carefully than usual. The smell of diesel hung among her trees.

  Anne walked in their footsteps, checking all was well. The chickens croodled undisturbed. The pond, shrunk in the heat to leave its edges naked, still hopped with insects. Inside, all was as she’d left it, the bed rucked, with the press of her body on the opened-out sleeping bag, her stacks of pots and tins piled by the stove, the dusty trophies hanging. So nothing had been touched. Why had they been? In the pit of her belly Anne felt unease. What had they come for then?

  She thought she’d have something to eat. That was sensible. A weird egg maybe. The corn was standing, ready for reaping just about, and she’d been cutting every day, so she had flour for once. She trundled about, out to the pool for two scoops of water, one for the flatbread, one for the egg. Fussing at the stove. Riddling. Clanking pans. Stone up that covered her coolstore in the ground. Egg. Trying to bury her unease in familiar things. All her little routines.

  Then it started. No warning, just cough, cough and then roar. Like the wood was tearing. Chainsaws. Anne stopped what she was doing. What were they up to now? It wasn’t the time of year for felling. Felling happened at the back end. Anne stood and listened. It was coming from the poaching grounds. That was the walkway. They must have started on the walkway at last.

  Chorus of Trees

  Twilight at the walkway, following a day of heat an
d noise. With the falling of night, the lightest of summer breezes has sprung up. Quiet now. The saws oiled and locked away. Around the new breaks in the wood’s canopy the trees flex and bend into the extra space. A tawny crosses and settles on the far side, blinks at the change and swivels. He swoops on something unseen.

  Witness, say the trees through the breeze in their branches. Witness the change.

  Watching, down the centuries, you could see it all. The little, bitter fields expand into doctored lushness. The buildings rise. The church, new-dressed with every fashion, floats its message over the villages that are becoming towns. The dead plague times. The mud everywhere. Muddle and panic and superstition. Civil war, robbery, scuffle and rush. Spreading branches to canopy the wounded, the whimpering fugitive, the outlaw. The hunts, the lone plodder hock-deep in the unimproved rides, the titupping ladies in summer.

  Ask the milking oak how old it is. The milking oak will tell you – the things you think of as your own, that aren’t. The things you never knew. The corncrake gone, the orchid. The arrival of the rabbit and the foreign pheasant. The little owl, the muntjac – how it watched them settle, how it saw the last red squirrel die. And once, grass slender and in tender green, how it saw the fallow deer, shaken out of their Norman crates, raise muzzles to the earthy air and leap – now here, now gone – perform their vanishing trick for the first time, under a quieter light.

  So what.

  There used to be ditch banks, hand-dug, along these rides. There were dead hedges and wood pasture. There were quarters painstakingly coppiced by a man whose hands were as dead cold as his blade, working on through the winter’s silences alone. Shaking crumbs from numb fingers at dinner time, to feed the birds who were his only companions. Cutting, stripping, binding. Not a lot wasted then, if that is any consolation. Slow and solitary, lighting a fire for warmth when he stops, and then on again, numb-knuckled into the dark afternoon, so that ten summers later you could walk down this green nave.

  Now another man works alone, a different way, clearing stands in this hot, late summer, high up in the seat of the Timberjack, among the timber-grown pines, pulling levers all day. A giant elbow, crooked towards the sky, swings its metal knuckle round, swivels, locks sideways round the trunk of the tree and then a small noise, only just louder than a whirring sound, for what – a couple of seconds? – and the pine falls. Roll forward a little. Lever. Slide along. Lever. Grip. Lever. Another whirring and the end of the pine falls neat onto a stack. Roll back. Lever. Shoot another length through the metal knuckle. Lever. Whirr and drop. And so on, for three or four lengths, and then the elbow hoicks the brash away, and the Timberjack rolls over it. Takes another pine.

  You can do ten months’ work in ten weeks. It’s a nice piece of kit, the Timberjack.

  At dinner time, on the mobile phone, with the crows watching. I’m in the Forest, can you hear me? Finish late. It’s a dodgy signal. He eats in the cab, with the radio on, because the cab’s got air conditioning.

  No stopping, even with the dark, because they’re under pressure to finish the job. They are reinstating wood pasture, beyond the walkway. Headlamps like monster eyes among the tree trunks, and the Timberjack eats, and spits, and eats again, and the man goes on, far into the night, pulling the levers, in the dark, alone.

  And the trees watch, and go on living, till the Timberjack gets there, or the chainsaw.

  Above them, briefly, a falling star, scoring down the summer sky. The sky holds its history, just like us, their full heads say. A star falls and the sky keeps it, opens its palm to show us, light years later.

  Timber II

  Another day and the saws still going. What was up with Ranger? Anne saw him standing by the far ash, on the edge of her clearing. He’d come on foot.

  He never went anywhere on foot.

  She was sitting with her legs out, making and mending. She knew by instinct when someone was in the clearing, so she looked up and saw him there, trying not to be seen.

  Blimey, she was sharp, she was.

  He kept coming back. He brought her presents, a cup from the Woodpecker gift shop, with a woodpecker on the front of it, in case she had company, a packet of tea once, a bar of chocolate. He sat with her, different from before. He made conversation at her, which she wasn’t used to. His wife Madeleine was expecting again. Mr Stallard was coming down. Visitor numbers were up. How did she manage things in winter?

  He’d never asked before.

  What did she think to an allotment? If he could get her one.

  ♦

  It was inconvenient, all these visits, although he was being kind. A lot needed doing. Cutting the corn from the edges of the fields and down the sides of the tractor tracks. Plenty of jobs before winter came, things to sort and store. She hadn’t got time to sit around chatting all day. And if Ranger was going to turn up, she didn’t exactly want to be caught coming back with game or with armfuls of corn however much poaching he did. It was awkward. So they sat, in silence, often, when he did come, and listened to the chainsaws working on through the oak stands.

  She came to hate the noise of the saws. The sound of air ripping. That was the first thing. Sweet and soft, the morning air, and the chainsaw raw against it, which is just the sound of appetite. Then the settled sound of the saw put to the tree, like something slaking itself. Gulp, gulp. Bark, cambium. Choke, rest and then feeding again. Sapwood, slower, through the sapwood, into the heartwood and out the other side. Then even above the saw, you heard the tree’s last silence. The silence of it holding, holding, pause and the chainsaw ticking over.

  Sometimes a groan as it went.

  Then thump, like a muffled bomb and the ground reporting shock. And afterwards, sometimes, Timber! and a laugh.

  It was hard to listen to it all day long, day after day. And then Anne would look up, nearly at her wits’ end with irritation, and see Ranger staring at her, with that uncomfortable look he wore when he was with her now, saying nothing. Drive you mad.

  ♦

  Once there were some people walking, who came into the clearing by mistake. Look, someone’s actually living here. Oh my gosh, look at that. Gawping at Anne and Ranger. Is this bit private then? Sorry. Ranger got up and he looked so awkward and he whooshed them away quickly. Is there a quick way to the path? Anne heard them ask and, I suppose you could say we’re lost in the Forest. A laugh floated back as he shepherded them out. Lucky we bumped into you.

  Anne tried to concentrate, get her jobs done. She did everything in a rush now, when she could be sure Ranger wouldn’t turn up, after he’d gone home for tea, or in the early morning. But on the fifteenth day, or maybe the fourth, who knew? – the noise and his company got to her at last, and she stood up and walked over to the busy side, like she was drawn to it. Down the unquiet rides, with her rolling gait.

  Where are you off to?

  No answer.

  Just Ranger, puzzling, among the trees in the clearing, by himself.

  ♦

  Anne saw their backs first. A group of people, the scene of an accident, craning to see. There were mothers and children there, watching, and the children were dancing with excitement, like Peter Parker, because it’s wicked, seeing a big one go. Massive, and it goes with this crash.

  People tended to move away from Anne, so she got to the front quite quickly, among the children. The site alive like an ant heap. Everywhere, men with hard hats, who are experts, so they say. Who say it’s dangerous work. Wait till you’ve got your chainsaw licence, sonny, as they lean on the rails of the Portakabins or the sides of the dump trucks, drinking tea and watching themselves. They wink at the young mothers and swagger because of their own importance, because there is tape separating them from ordinary people, tape with a sign on it, showing a black hand and Stop! No entry to unauthorised persons. They are authorised. That’s the difference.

  Anne got tunnel vision. Suddenly she couldn’t see anything, except the new hole in the roof of the wood, like a punched tooth. And confusi
on. She felt the confusion going on along the fallen limbs and in the gap above. The mapping systems of the birds disorientated. The exodus of so many tiny things scurrying through a still trembling profusion of leaves.

  And the leaves.

  The leaves that were made to angle cleverly and rotate, to catch and store light, to be obstinate in wind, mashed into earth with the force of the fall. All this Anne saw for the first time. And the neighbouring trees, stripped, in passing, of branches and side shoots, held out their torn limbs and gaped with her.

  She watched the men working into another. But she felt it now as if it was in her own body. This is us, she said with the trees. Bite. Bite. Crack. The thump of it as it hits, and the shock waves the earth sends through her own feet.

  She blundered unseeing through the tape, which snapped against her, and across the site, arms up against the undergrowth, legs kicking like a swimmer, over bramble snag and fern.

  Oi! they shouted at her. Oi! Clear the site. This is a hard-hat zone.

  But Anne can’t hear. She is listening to the trees. So someone comes, someone is detailed to escort her out of danger, because they realise now – she’s the lady from la-la land – and the others, not escorting, wink at the young mothers again and look strong. Always protect the public.

  But she was going anyway.

  ♦

  Anne walked faster than she’d ever walked. She put her head down and she didn’t look up until she reached the clearing. She sat down, heaving a little, the sweat from her exertions making grimy tracks from temple to chin. She leant against the pollard, and put her hands down without thinking, on the knobbles of its feet, and looked up into the green of its feathered profusion. Well, she asked it silently, what do you make of that?

  It reached out broad, either side of her, impassive.

  The handsaw, the cross-cut saw, the saw that roars, teeth whirring. Nothing new to a pollard after all. They’ve watched it for eight hundred years and upwards. They’ve stood and weathered it, maybe three hundred since they were last cut. Frozen, in attitudes of shock. Standing till they drop to pieces. The Queen Hive Oak, the Church Path Oak, the Milking Oak, the Meeting Ash, the Holy Ash. The only ones to have names, as if they were human. These trees are age-old.