The Tangled Forest Read online

  In my mother’s bed that night, I listened to the sound of owls in the forest, their hoots like guardian words, watchful beneath the moon. I thought of the boy in the bed by himself. I wished he were here with us. Fox cubs and badgers bedded down side by side to share their warmth. Why couldn’t we?

  For three days he lay waxen as a candle stump, shivering in his sleep. Mother rung out the cloth and patted his brow. She boiled up chicken bones and spooned broth between his parted lips, bending to kiss the crown of his head from time to time.

  During those days, I often remembered his face at the window the night of the storm. Wide, terrified eyes staring through at our world within. Whilst the wind and rain whipped his skin, mine was enveloped in warm, soapy water, the fire heating me through. The glass had reflected only myself between lightning licks, and then it had shown him, illuminated on the other side. No more than a second, seared forever in my mind.

  If I had argued sooner, if I had fought my mother’s words, if I had insisted it wasn’t myself on the other side of that glass, would she have found him sooner? Would he have avoided the fallen tree? Would he be whole and well, and would she still have brought him in?

  On the fourth morning, I woke to find my mother gone. I pulled myself from between the sheets and went to the hearth. He was there, the boy, wrapped in my patchwork quilt, sat in my chair, his face as ashen as clinker.

  He turned his sleepy eyes towards me.

  A moment later, Mother appeared, his bedding bundled in her arms. She took it through to the back of the cottage where she kept the laundry pots. I caught the acrid scent of urine and knew that he had wet his sheets.

  “What is your name?” I asked, looking back to him.

  The boy made no reply. His hair was the colour of chocolate cake, but ragged as a raven’s nest. His face was thin, and although I could not see his flesh beneath the quilt, I remembered that his ribs pressed against his chest as though he were starved.

  As I went to put another log on the fire, he drew back.

  I had never seen another human afraid of me, yet I had seen birds flee and rabbits furrow as the poacher approached. He reminded me of them. A creature of the woods, desperate to retreat.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said, and told him my name.

  His eyes weighed upon my back as I built the fire, turning smoulder to smoke. Then I went to the pantry and returned with a hunk of bread and a bowl of milk. I tore lumps off the bread and used it to soak the milk, streams of white running down my chin as I lapped up my meal.

  I watched him watching me. I could see the hunger in his eyes and crawled towards him, offering up my bowl. He shrank further, then savagely thrust out his hands, snatching the food away.

  “You eat like a beast,” I told him, yet he showed no sign of understanding.

  He did not tear the bread and dunk it. Instead, he crammed the loaf into his mouth until his cheeks puffed out. Only when he could cram no more did he raise the bowl to his lips. Most of its whiteness bled into his lap. I watched him stuff his face, chewing and swallowing twice more until all the bread was gone. Then I continued to watch in wide-eyed horror as he curled in on himself to suck the spilt milk from his britches.

  “Stop that,” I said. “There is nothing left of it.”

  He raised his head to look at me and I felt afraid. I could not tell whether it was my words or simply my voice he heard. I wanted my mother there.

  Without warning, he bent over the side of the chair and belched.

  Freshly swallowed bread slid up his throat and onto the floor.

  A puddle of sour liquid began to spread and I moved away to save myself from smelling it.

  “What have you done!” I cried.

  It was at this moment my mother returned.

  “What have you done?” she cried, sweeping me from the floor and placing me down by the wall.

  At first I thought she was as angry with him as I was.

  Then she repeated her question and I realised, with a sudden stab to my heart, that she was speaking to me.

  “You gave him all of that bread?” she said, her cheeks flushed as roses. “Why did you do that? He is not well enough to eat such a full meal. His body is not strong.”

  “He looked hungry,” I replied.

  She knelt in front of me and took my face in her hands, searching my eyes for truth.

  “Oh, my daughter. That was kind of you, but do not give away our food without asking. I am not starving the boy. He needs small morsels, a little at a time, until he is well.”

  I nodded and she turned back to him.

  The poor creature was curled on my quilt like a dog, his elbows over his ears. I felt sorry for him then, and regretted causing him harm.

  “Where is his mother?” I asked.

  “I do not know, child.”

  2

  It took weeks for him to recover.

  Every day I would go to his room and sit at the end of his bed. He would stare at me, eyes muddied with mistrust, back pressed to the headboard as though I might launch myself at him. Questions tumbled from my tongue. How was he feeling, what food did he like, where was he from?

  No answers came.

  To pass the time, I brought a game into the room and amused myself playing in the corner. It was a simple thing, a board of pearwood set with clear glass beads. You moved the beads around the board, frog-leaping one over the other. If a bead landed on a corner, it moved to the centre, captured. If you could capture all of the beads, you won. There was a single red bead in the set, and if that landed in a corner, you lost.

  Every time I played I could feel his eyes on me. Yet when I glanced up, he looked away.

  The second day that I brought my game, I heard him move from the bed. He sat before me, so close that I fancied I could smell the scent of the forest on his skin. The third day, he came closer still. I did not move as he approached, turned to stone by my desire to know him.

  He brought his nose to my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his breath as he sniffed, moving up my neck to the crown of my head.

  A door closed in the breeze and the sound startled him. Before I could turn to look, he was back across the bed, pressed to his pillow.

  “Why are you so afraid?” I asked.

  There was no reply.

  At night I would lie awake beside my mother, watching the moon rise. Sometimes I talked to the moon. I asked her why this boy was ours, and she replied that he needed a home. I asked where his home had been, and she told me the woods. But the woods have gone nowhere, I thought, and she simply smiled and rose a little higher in the sky.

  I could not stay by his bedside forever. After a while, I began to wonder whether he chose not to speak. Whether he was worried that if he found his strength, he would be cast out to fend for himself.

  My living had always been done out of doors. I wrapped bread and cheese in cloth, and took a skin of water. Mother had already cut away a large amount of the fallen branches, and new shoots pushed through the soil of the window troughs. It was as though the storm had never been.

  My feet carried me lightly into the woods, my spirit free of my flesh at last.

  I scraped sap from a pine and rubbed it against my wrists to camouflage my scent so that the beasts would not flee. I danced amongst the beech trees and swung from low-lying branches until my arms ached with pleasure. I lost myself in the boughs of the tangled crabapple and poked a puffball until its powder made me sneeze.

  As evening fell, I grew reluctant to return.

  Mother lit candles in the windows, calling me home, and I was surprised to see a shadow hunched on the doorstep.

  “He has been waiting for you ever since you left,” Mother said, appearing behind the boy.

  I looked down and frowned.

  His eyes were wide and dark. I realised how strange it was to tower above him when it was usually his privilege to look down on me from my bed.

  The next day, I packed a small basket with a knife and clay po
ts. Mother had asked me to collect bog moss, and I wanted to gather mushrooms for the pantry. I swung my basket as I skipped towards the woods, but something made me turn back.

  There was the boy, crouched by the door to our cottage.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Do you want to come with me?”

  I knelt a little and patted my hand against my thigh to encourage him. He behaved so much like a dog, that I had come to communicate with him as one. He never replied to my questions, but he would to my actions.

  Rising from the door, he took a few steps towards me, then stopped.

  “Come on. It’s fun to play in the woods. I’ll show you.”

  He took a few more steps, then stopped once again. His frightened eyes followed the trees up towards the sky. As they grew, he shrank.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I told him. “They look like giants, until you are among them. Then they become friends.”

  But the boy would go no further.

  *

  The next day, and the next, he stopped halfway to the woods. I would find him waiting by the door when I returned.

  On the fourth day, my patience ran dry.

  When he stopped to stare up at the trees, I returned to his side and took his hand. He allowed me to lead him almost to the path before pulling back. A sharp yelp escaped his lips, as though I were beating him.

  “Little one, what are you doing?” my mother called, running from the house. “Don’t torture him.”

  She wrenched our hands apart and knelt to examine the boy, to check that I had not bruised him or worse.

  “I was not torturing him. I was helping him,” I said.

  She looked up with such scorn as I had never seen.

  It hurt more than if she had slapped me.

  That morning, I ran sobbing into the woods. The heave of my chest made it hard to draw breath, but I did not stop running until I reached the beeches. I wished Mother had never allowed that stupid boy into our house. It wasn’t our fault he got trapped beneath a tree. We hadn’t told him to go wandering in the woods in the middle of a storm.

  Usually my dark thoughts were easily distracted in the woods: butterflies and dragonflies, ant trails, and sycamore seeds spinning to the ground. There was so much to take joy in. So much to give delight, asking only that you see, and feel, and be.

  That day my sulks followed me wherever I went. I scowled at the butterflies, I stepped over the ant trails without pausing to play, I sat sullen-mouthed by the brook and allowed my tears to taint it.

  “It’s not fair,” I repeated to the Soul Singers, the spirits of the wood who sometimes spoke and sometimes listened. “Mother loves him more than me.”

  I decided to punish them by staying late into the night. The moon was high and the paths became silver veins through the forest. As I finally flowed towards home, carried on a river of light, a small deer stepped across the channel. She was a young doe, her speckled skin sparkling in the night. Her black eyes met mine and she dipped her head to the ground, scratching behind one ear with her hoof before bounding off through the bracken.

  As I walked, I continued to see tiny white dots dance before my eyes, and for a moment I forgot to be angry.

  When I reached home, only a single candle still burnt in the window, the rest reduced to puddles of wax. As I approached the door, I saw the boy, curled up on the step. At first I thought he was asleep, but he lifted his head as I grew near.

  I did not stop to speak, I simply stepped over him and made for my mother’s room.

  “Do you know the hour?” My mother’s voice came from the front room. She was sitting in her rocking chair, a book open on her lap.

  “Why are you awake?” I asked.

  “Because I was worried about you.”

  I was confused. I had been out late at night before and returned to find her softly sleeping. What was different about tonight, I asked.

  “Tonight, you left unhappy,” she said. “When you are happy, I know where you are. I can feel the beauty of you chasing through the trees and along the riverbeds. When you are unhappy, that light fades, and I cannot be sure of finding you.”

  She rose from her chair and made for her room.

  A while later, I followed.

  *

  The next day I was too tired to go to the woods. I stayed in the garden, playing my game. The boy sat a few feet away, watching.

  As I leap-frogged the red bead about the board, it slipped from my grasp, rolling towards him. The boy put out his paw and stopped the bead in its escape. To my astonishment, he rolled it back to me.

  I rolled it back to him.

  He rolled it back to me.

  We continued our game until my mother placed a plate of cookies on the step and told us to eat.

  The boy no longer wolfed his food. He ate calmly, but never left a single crumb. When Mother wasn’t looking, I caught him licking his breakfast bowl. It was as though he couldn’t trust my mother to feed him again. As though an echo of starvation whispered in his ear, taunting aching ribs.

  Sometimes, I would give him half of my share.

  The next day, I went back to the woods. This time I tied my parcel of food to my skirt and did not take a basket. I wanted my hands to be free to finger the bark and the fallen leaves. I did not look back as I crossed the threshold. I knew he had followed me halfway across the garden, and I knew he had stopped, as he always stopped, afraid to enter my world.

  The first part of the path was straight, and if you followed it, you would pass the baker, the farrier, the chandler, the seamstress and the skinner, eventually arriving at Grandmother’s house. Yet I never went that way by myself. Instead, I turned to the right or the left, along animal trails which crossed each other in secret webs.

  “Which way should I go today?” I asked myself, aloud.

  On days when I could not decide, I would put out my arms and spin on the spot until I grew dizzy and fell over. Whichever way I landed, I would walk.

  I held my arms horizontal, and began to turn.

  I stopped.

  There, on the path between here and home, stood the boy.

  He was as far from me as the distance between the treeline and where he usually refused to go further. Yet here we both were, beneath those beautiful trees.

  I remained very still, afraid to move lest I frighten him back to the safety of our house.

  “Hello,” I said, greeting him as though we had never met before.

  I turned my back and chose to go right, down through the daffodils and dainty wood sorrel, past the ancient oak and the tangled crabapple. I fought the urge to look behind. When I came to the stream with the fallen log, I crouched and cupped water to my lips. I raised my hands a little, looking for his reflection, feeling my heart fall when it was not there.

  Turning my head, I confirmed that my companion had left me.

  I did not know why I should feel so downhearted. My greatest pleasure was to play alone in the woods. I needed no one else. Yet it had seemed a sign, his shy sloop sailing through the forest, caught in my gale. What unknown shores might we have discovered? What rich spices and mysterious lands?

  It was not I who had been abandoned, but our adventure.

  A sound caused me to look back.

  On the opposite side, my tatty friend was bent on all fours, touching his lips to the surface of the stream, sucking down his thirst.

  Once sated, he slumped back on his haunches and smiled.

  I smiled in return.

  I placed a leaf on the water and watched as it became ensnared in the fingers of a fallen branch. It ducked and bobbed, but could not get free.

  My friend was less delicate. In one long sweep of his arm, a hundred leaves left port, the sheer weight of them forcing the release of my vessel. A flotilla of fallen foliage. As the armada disappeared out of sight, headed by my first ship, I noticed that five or six of his were now trapped against the branch. Somehow it seemed less sad than a single ship, as though they had made harbour.<
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  Laughing, I ran back up the trail to the tangled crabapple. Of all the trees in the forest, this was my favourite for climbing. Every moss-covered limb led to another, and another. A ladder leading to the sky. In spring the branches lay heavy with blossom, and I would stand beneath them and pretend to be a bride.

  As I began to climb, he stood beneath, staring up.

  “Come on!” I called. “I will catch you if you fall.”

  I continued to climb, but he did not.

  Then, in the space of a breath, he was above me.

  His slender muscles moved beneath sinuous skin as arm over arm he ascended.

  I had never seen another person climb the way he climbed.

  So assured. So certain that each movement would find its match. That the branches would catch him before the ground. That birds would lift him up with their song and the clouds would make him weightless.

  I envied him then.

  This had been my game. I had climbed this tree since I was old enough to toddle. It should have been me showing him how confident I could be. Yet I could not stay mad at him for long. Not when I reached the top beside him and saw the look of wonder on his face. The whole world was reflected in his eyes. The sky, and the stream, my mother’s house and the town, the birds and the beetles and the brazen roe bucks.

  We sat for a long time, simply watching the world.

  *

  That evening, when we returned to the house, it was to find my mother sitting on the step.

  “Where have you two been?” she asked.

  “Playing, mama,” I replied.

  She pulled me to her, kissing my temple, holding out a hand to shake the boy’s paw.

  “Did you enjoy yourselves?” she asked.

  “Yes, mama. We drank from the stream, and tumbled in the leaves, and climbed the twisted crabapple tree.”

  She hugged me again, ushering us inside for parsnip soup with buttered bread.

  The next day, my friend was by the path before I had even finished my porridge.

  An energy imbued him, spilling over to fill my own mortal cup.

  “Stay safe,” my mother called as we hurtled past the hawthorn.