We are finished posting the stories produced as a result of the A Writers Shindig workshop. Thank you dear reader. I hope you enjoyed these works from other WordPress authors.
I’d like to thank Ted for pulling this group together and a crap ton of editing work.
Michael who was behind the scenes.
Sarah, Ted, Stephen, Jeremy and Emily for great stories.
I had never been part of an experience like this before. Not only did this project inspire me. I was amazed at the different perspectives one story could have on different people. We are all aware that your background, economics and education factor in to how we view a story. Each of us being from different places, gave me a front row seat to how these aspects affect reading a story. Not just mine but each of our stories.
It taught me that I have it in me to defend my material. If need be. 😉
The one wish I had, it would have been nice if were able to talk to each other. Of course, time zones, work schedules couldn’t allow that.
Overall, it was a great experience. We were encouraged to write our fingers off.
First things first — can you tell me a little bit about your writing? How long have you been doing it? What does writing do for you?
Steve:
My blog is nine years old. SteveForTheDeaf came from two things.
Firstly, as a long-haired, bone-idle twenty-something I spent hours debating music and trashy movies with other long-haired, bone-idle young folk in the pub. That was my kind of sport. I’m evangelical about low culture as high art.
Secondly, later on, I had a job that gave me untold hours alone in airports and hotels. Lots of travel, but on a fairly crappy budget. The blog felt like a fitting substitute for the pub. Me, my iPod, and my laptop wrote the first five years of it in waiting rooms, hotels, and terminals.
Over time, the writing itself started to wander. Reviews would drift into speculation, into narrative, into little flights of fancy. At the time it just felt like riffing, but looking back I think I was broadening my palette without really meaning to.
When Ted suggested setting up a story working group, it seemed to release something in me.
Like a sluice gate. And now I don’t seem to be able to stop writing short fiction.
It keeps me out of the pub at least.
Sarah:
The opening of your story evoked feelings of nostalgia in me for the farm where my grandparents lived. Your description of the cabin where your characters begin the tale is moving.
Does this setting resemble anything that you’ve experienced in your own life?
Steve:
I’m glad it invoked a feeling of nostalgia. I did not grow up on a farm. I was an inner-city kid. So this, for me, was a kind of latent wish-fulfillment thing.
I do live in the countryside now, and when I see kids in our village getting fields and forests on their doorstep — wow. I just love that for them. Go on, kid. Get out there. I’m a latent treehugger. I love being in the woods. I mean love it. I walk for miles when circumstances allow.
Through ancient forest and over hills. Me, my dogs, my wife. Heaven on Earth.
But I also know how I feel about where I grew up. I hated it then, and I hate it still. And when I knew I wanted to write from the perspective of a kid, I figured rural would help with an economy of characters.
Sarah:
Your protagonist could be anybody — any kid that never really fits into the life they’ve been handed. What do you think is the appeal of these kinds of misfit stories?
Steve:
I think we learn the rules of stories before we know we’re learning the rules of stories. Batman — or Master Wayne at least — Spider-Man, Carrie, The Ugly Duckling, Luke Skywalker. At their core they’re all “little kid lost”, off on an adventure.
At my most ambitious, I wanted to write something that had the sort of long shadows you find in A Monster Calls. Patrick Ness took an incomplete work from Siobhan Dowd and finished it after she died, and when I read it I was struck by the sense of before and after in that book.
And I love an eldritch horror concept. I’m a big old goth at heart.
I also think that in this day and age, it might only be the misfits who actually read.
Sarah:
I also want to ask you about the absent mother. This element is common in fairy tales. I’d say there are other parts of your story that evoke an “other” fantastical realm as well. Did fairy tales play a part in the writing of this story?
Steve:
I did want to write a fairy tale of sorts. I can’t escape Poe or the Grimm, but I also wanted an old- school science-fiction feel. Something that could be rendered as a practical special effect — on screen, or in the mind. I use that phrase a lot: on screen in the mind.
While my mum was present, my upbringing was very male-centric. My dad. My brother. Uncles. Grandfather.
All-male spaces are quite pungent.There’s rarely an objection to a workbench in the kitchen, a motorcycle engine on the dinner table, or Swarfega for hand soap on the lavatory.
Sarah:
Without giving too much away, would you say that the protagonist himself is like a tree that grows around wire?
Steve:
Without wanting this to sound like therapy-speak, I think we’re all trees that grow around wire in a way.
The problems we face in life, or the things that shape us along the way that weren’t necessarily part of the plan, are the things we absorb into our personalities, into our behaviours, into our psyches, even our decision-making processes.
In this particular instance, nothing grows around that wire, because anything that touches it is cleaved clean. But does the boy grow around the presence into a man? Yeah, I’d say he does.
And he gets pretty close to it changing the course of his life. Even though he may have gone unpunished, or excused by the timeless indifference of the thing, he would certainly have taken a different route.
Sarah:
Finally, the protagonist is challenged by some difficult family dynamics. I like the way you tell the story of him maturing into a different kind of person than his father. But there’s a moment in the tale where the reader thinks that this might not be the case — “there was before, and now we were in the after.” What do you think might have happened had that moment gone differently between the two cousins?
Steve:
When I was talking to Ted about this story while I was writing it and we were workshopping it, Ted described it as a villain origin story that didn’t. I liked that.
The father in this feels to me like many men, especially men of a certain generation, as something of a blunt instrument. When he’s hurt, his behaviour is inconsiderate and selfish, but hopefully not in a cartoon villain way.
I wanted what the boy encounters in the woods to sharpen him rather than harden him. To make him more attuned to fear, consequence, and restraint, rather than less.So the idea that he grows into a man capable of a good life — one grounded in mutual regard, in valuing another person’s perspective — felt important.
When his partner later suggests making something safe, she represents a form of care that isn’t
reactive or conditional. It’s simply present. She’s the first adult in the story who’s shown care as a resting state.
Sarah:
I loved reading these answers! Thanks for putting such time and care into them.
Steve:
Thank you Sarah. Can’t wait to hear about your story original.
The air outside was bright and heavy. Insects hummed in the grass. The clearing shone, almost white. Well, what passes for white around here. In each corner, where the sun caught the gravel, the bleached earth denied it had ever been mud, a bog, a puddle or dirt. It lay hard and unyielding. My favourite time of year. But I had no time to enjoy it. He was already walking toward the trees, rolling his shoulders like a boxer loosening up for a crowd that wasn’t there.
I followed because I was supposed to. “So this is it?” he said, not even looking around. “Your big wide whatever? Your secret world is just… all these bloody trees?” He gave a whistle, long and low. “Creepy as hell.” I felt utter contempt for this fool. “They’re just trees,” I said. “Yeah, and you’re just weird.” He found a stick and swung it at a branch overhead, snapping off the smaller twigs, enjoying the noise. “Have you got anything stashed out here? I reckon you’ve got dead birds out here. Or bones. Or dead girls.”
I said nothing. He laughed. “Look at you. Jesus. You go red when anyone talks.” We crossed the clearing. The house disappeared behind us the same way it always did. Obscured bit by bit, swallowed by trunks. When we first arrived, I used to stop halfway and check over my shoulder to make sure it hadn’t vanished for good. Now I knew each knock and turn. Each dip and shade.
These woods. My Woods. Home.
So this time, I didn’t turn around. He kept talking. About how big his life was. About girls. About fights. About the bus ride home from school, and how a boy called Darren had cried when punched in the nose and mocked for bleeding. All of it was like he was performing for someone else. He prattled on. I endured, and the forest led us onwards. We reached the dip before I knewwe were close. The trees thinned there. Like usual, the ground sloped away into the dell. He looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Is this something?” I gulped inside but didn’t let it show. “Oh.
Careful,” I said. “It’s dangerous down there. It’s steep. Hard to climb out. I fell in once.” He grinned. “Then I guess we do it here.”
He shook himself down, arms loose and wobbling again. He made sure I saw his jaw was set. It was like he’d seen boxers do on TV, and I’d seen him do already. “I told you, didn’t I?” he said.
“One day, you and I were going to fight. Guess what? Today’s your lucky day.”
He raised his fists. And here we were. Two cousins, facing each other. I didn’t lift my hands. Ididn’t defend myself. He threw his first jab. Smiling. It was a phantom punch, all noise and wind.
It didn’t even graze me; it was designed to make me look to the left, where he pushed the air. It didn’t work. I just stared at him. He took a second swing. I moved aside. Not because I’m smartor agile. But because it was obvious and I was edgy and scared. That’s when he smiled. He knew the sport had begun.
“Alright then,” he said. “You’re in.” It was then that he hit me square in the stomach. The breath went out of me like a balloon. I doubled over, coughing. He stepped closer, still smiling. “Hardto climb out, is it?” he said. “Sumo rules. What if I push you in?”
He shoved me hard and full of contempt. My ire awoke. I shoved back. Dry dust sprayed around our shoes, my boots, and his trainers, scrabbling for grip. He was bigger. He was stronger. But I had fear. So much fear. Fear of the drop, fear of the thing that lived beneath it.
He lunged again. I crouched, half by instinct, half by prayer. His balance is off. He went over me, his weight too far forward, arms flailing. A grunt, a slip, a shadow, and then he was gone. Silence hit first. Thick, like time holding its breath.
Another one of those moments. There was before, and now we are in the after. I curled into a ball, as small as I could make myself. I tried to stop the world from moving. I knew full well what was down there. I’d known before we left the house. I knew.
I saw the speed he went in. The air in my chest felt cold and old, like the forest was holding it for me. But no… It turned out that’s not what happened. There was a noise. Not a scream. Not the clean, dry sound of something sliced. Just a heavy scuffle, the slide of earth, the crack of twigs.
Then his voice. “What the hell is this?”
Coughing, spitting leaves. Then laughter, high and breathless. “Jesus. Thought you’d killed me.”
I didn’t move. Didn’t answer. My hands were pressed flat to the ground, shaking. I waited for
something else, some confirmation from below. But there was only his voice again, louder, surer now. “Are you coming down here, Shrimp? Are you going to help me out or what?”
The forest stayed still. No birds, no wind. Just the faint hum I sometimes thought I could hear until I centred myself and realized every time that it was my own heartbeat. I thought of it as the sound of the line remembering itself. But really, it was the hum of my own existence. I stayed kneeling at the rim, the sunlight hot on my back, listening to him thrash and swear. And somewhere underneath, that thinner sound, like a violin string pulled too tight, deciding, almost, whether to cut. I knew that sound was in my head. But it was deafening.
“My ear!” he exclaimed. “I cut my sodding ear.” The brute’s voice sickened me. But the risk to him down there was too great. Thrashing around in the presence of the thread, he was a danger to himself. That was too much for me to bear. “Cousin. Look to me,” I called down. “Give me your hand; I will pull you out.” He was still cupping his left ear as he made his way to the side I was standing on. Blood was making thin tributaries between his fingers from the cut to his lobe. I watched his every move. When he was close to the thread. When it was safely distant from him. I didn’t say a word. But he only ever really came close to it a second time once. And just for a moment.
He came over to my side. The safest side to climb out. Where tree roots made something close to a ladder if you knew how to look. I held down my hand. My cousin took it, and one foot after another, he made his way out of the dell. He walked back to the house, cupping his ear. Silentand changed, he went inside while I sat in the clearing looking back to the woods.
That month, I stopped returning to sit with the thread. Not out of fear. Out of respect. And because I no longer trusted myself around such simple solutions for things.
—
I carried with me for many years the weight of that day. The memory, shame and fury are ingrained with the time I almost led a member of my own ‘flesh and blood family’ to their doom at the threshold of an ancient and immovable presence.
The pallor that summer afternoon cast over my adolescence, my prime years and my middle passage from youth to man was immeasurable. I carried that weight like a cross. I knew full well what was there. But still, I let us go. I let him face that tall, thin and final thread. But he didn’t see it. It sliced him. His ear was disfigured for all time. And yet. He knew not what had happened. Not really. A scar. A moment. A long-forgotten occurrence.
—
Adulthood didn’t arrive with grand announcements. It came in small print: rent due on Fridays; laundry coins stacked in a jar; bus timetables folded into a wallet that always felt too thin. Or a pocket that was always too full of junk. I moved into town. College first, then university, then a job that changed names more often than duties. I kept reading, kept looking for straight lines where nature refused them. Those impossible edges that felt eternal. Sometimes I’d find them in a theorem proof, a gallery frame, or a shaft of light cut square in a cinema aisle. More often than not, there was nothing. Nothing with the exact, indifferent purity of what waited in those woods.
Nothing that matched the thing I had studied and almost fed blood to.
Years did the quiet work years do. I became the person I wake up as. I met someone kind. Kind in the practical ways. The kettle is always half-filled; the coat is lifted from your shoulders before you ask; a laugh doesn’t need an audience. We lived above a laundrette. We are always surrounded by warm air and machine hum, a weather system of steam and lint. Lint that shows itself in the air. We built a routine you could lean your weight on without it giving way.
On Sundays, I phoned Dad. Weather, groceries, the price of this and that. Silence. His memory began to thin the way old fabric does: worn through at the elbows first, then everything else.
Words slipped from his pockets like receipts he’d meant to keep. The hospital rang.
We drove back. He smiled at me without recognition, as if the person he meant to greet were standing just to my left. He’s been doing that for some time. This time, he was not listening whenthey gave his diagnosis. Three days later, he was gone.
Forester’s Cottage filled with murmurs after the funeral. Plates travelling from hand to hand, the low-tide noise of family using up all the words that never help. My aunt hugged me hard enough to mean it. My cousin hovered with a drink. His hair had grown long enough to swallow the missing crescent of his ear.
“Yeah, I’ve got a scar back there,” he said, scratching absently at the covered absence. “Never healed right. Funny how you don’t remember half these things.” He laughed once, weightless.
“Bike accident, maybe. Or barbed wire. Doesn’t matter.”
That was the moment a gear clicked in me. Some wounds are larger from the outside; some histories are only visible if you were standing where the light fell. He clapped my shoulder and moved on, already smiling at the next listener, untouched by the clean, straight edge that had once found him.
When the house thinned of bodies, we stepped out. My wife didn’t ask where. The woods had a way of inviting and excusing at the same time. We walked without speaking. Branches recognized me. Accepted us. The path arranged itself out of habit.
At the lip of the dell, I breathed in air that had not moved since I was a boy. “Still here,” I said, not to be clever, just to answer something that had been asked. I went down the way my body remembered: heel sideways on the root that holds, palm on the slick bark that doesn’t. My mourning sitting on dirt and detail is unbecoming of the occasion. At the bottom, I hovered a hand over the place where the world narrows to a razor. My wife above me, outside the dip. Just looking around the woodlands and chatting to me like I was not facing the point in time that all separates into one of two.
I stood before the line. Looking up. High into the sky. Looking down. Deep into the earth.
Cleaving all that passes through it into before and then after. I held out my index finger. Moved it closer and closer still to the break in the universe. Then I touched the thread. No noise. No speed.
No hum. No movement.
A sting, bright and clean. A single bead of blood formed and fell, dividing itself again on a leaf below as if to show its working. Something loosened in me that had been tight for decades.
Breathing deep, I stood stock still for a moment. Then, satisfied, I climbed back up.
My wife was waiting, looking down into the dip as if reading a warning sign only she could see.
“This doesn’t look safe,” she said, voice low. “We should fence it off. If a child fell in there, they’d struggle to get out.” My throat tightened. “Yeah,” I said. We probably should.” She took my uninjured hand, and we walked away together. Behind us, a leaf let go and, mid-air, calmly became two. We didn’t turn.Together, we packed the last of Dad’s things. The door took the key and clicked in that small, respectful way old locks do. In the car, the headlights combed the trunks, pulled long shadows up toward the sky and let them go. The road ahead curved the way roads curve in the real world: not straight, not fair, simply going where it goes.
“Given time…” I said to the windscreen.
“Mmm? Sorry, love?” she said, drowsy from the day.
“Trees grow around wire,” I said, and smiled because she didn’t know the source but understood the sentence.
It was not a stumble; I didn’t snag my boot on a root or slip in the wet. It was a drop. It was that precipice. And I ran straight off the edge of it. Straight off of the world I’d been hurrying through and into a deep, high-sided bowl scooped into the forest floor. A hole in the ground, slick with leaves and shadows. I had landed hard on the side of the hole and slid down into its lowest point.
With the breath punched from my lungs and my momentum stopped, I collapsed into a heap near the bottom. Something metallic skittered away from me into the mushy, pulpy leaves as I came to a stop. The compass.
I scrambled toward it instinctively, fingers reaching to grasp the gift Mum had given me for Cubs. And then I froze. Bewildered by what I saw. The compass lay in two imperfect pieces.
Cleaved. One side was almost two-thirds of the object. The edges are as clean as polished glass.
The rectangle the dial was mounted on now looked like a wedge. The glass was not cracked but cut perfectly with glinting edges. The needle too was severed. The larger part lay on top of leaves; the smaller piece continued to tumble for a second longer.
Something brushed my cheek. As light as a whisper. That’s when I saw it.
A vertical line, rising from the earth exactly where the compass had fallen. Thin as spider silk, yet unmistakably solid. Impossibly tall. It climbed past twisted branches into the colourless sky, unwavering.
I held my breath. A leaf drifted down lazily. As it touched the line, it parted silently. Two halves spiralled down, settling on either side. I studied the two halves of the leaf as they spiralled down to the ground, now on two separate paths of wind and gravity. One half clipped the line a second time. It became two more pieces again. One larger, one tiny. Finally, they rested on the ground.
One right by the point the line stands proud of the earth. My eyes widened as I drank in the details of all the leaves around it. They were all cleaved in two by a perfect straight edge.
I surveyed the ground, and there are twigs in amongst the leaves. Does it cleave the trees the same way it did the leaves, my compass? When the wind blows a twig into its path?
Slowly, the slowest I’ve ever moved, I eased backwards. The line didn’t move. It didn’t hum. It simply existed. Standing impossibly tall. From the leaves to the sky.
Only when my back met roots sticking out of the side of the slope did I stop backing up. I sat there until my breathing calmed, until my panic-beating, rage-driven heart softened into something smaller. And I looked at the line reaching up into the canopy of the forest. And I felt its presence. I felt like it might feel mine too.
It went so high I could not see the top of it. It was so thin I wasn’t sure at what point I lost sight of it. Was it where it met the branches of trees? Staring up, I was convinced I could see it reach past the top. A circle of branches seemed to part around it, allowing it to sail up into the grey above.Did it reach the sky where aeroplanes flew? Would it cut a 747 in two the way it did my compass? Did it go into space? Did it reach down into the rocks below? How long had this thing stood here? Was this bowl in the ground caused by it? I had so many questions. Until I hit upon
one that scared me more than the others.
Is it alone? Was this the only strand of immovable, sharp cutting edge in this forest? Or were the woods full of these things? Slowly. Very, very carefully, I tried to leave the bowl. Pulling myself up on the roots, I began to plot a route out of the dip. As I climbed out, my caution focused on two things. Don’t fall backwards, don’t slip, and don’t suddenly find yourself face to face with the razor’s edge. And keep your eyes peeled for others. Watch how the leaves fall. Look to the sky, look at the leaves. Don’t accidentally rush into another one.
On the walk home, I moved so slowly I must have looked like a statue at times. I scanned every trunk, every post. Afraid of lines too straight.
When I got to the clearing, Dad was gone. I didn’t go out the rest of the day. He came home in the afternoon. Hauling firewood and a hessian bag of groceries into the kitchen. I put myself to bed without dinner in the early evening. But I didn’t sleep.
—
I didn’t go back straight away. My curiosity grew quietly, like roots in cold soil; the terror of escaping the line became curiosity about what I’d seen and then doubt that I’d seen it at all. Dad and I found a routine. Ways to keep the peace between us. Fragile though it was. We stopped talking about Mum. We stopped talking about feelings. We discussed many things. Fire, woodwork, car maintenance, and school bus routine. But never thoughts, hopes or fears. And that way, we didn’t openly hate each other.
I tried to be as invisible as possible at school. Stay in the crowd. Slip off when nobody is looking. Find ways to not be seen or picked for anything. That part came easily most days. But I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d seen something totally unique. I’d seen and interacted with something utterly eternal. Weeks went past, and whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the crack in the world. the hairline fracture that had the sharpest edge imaginable.
Eventually, I went to the school library. Miss Redding pointed me toward reference books and told me not to bend the spines. I found nothing useful. Optical illusions. Fences. Power lines.
Light refraction.
But one afternoon, buried in a battered paperback on rural hazards, I found a single line. ‘Given time, trees will always grow around wire.’ Plain. Unadorned. It hit clean. I borrowed the bookand read that sentence nightly. Sometimes I traced it with my finger. I didn’t fully understand.
But it felt like the shape of something true. I still didn’t tell Dad. Silence had become furniture.
—
By the time I’d reached thirteen, I’d decided that would be a watershed. A real teenager. A young adult. The age of many. I walked deeper into the woods after school every night. testing my boundaries. My caution around there being ‘other lines’ remained. But I developed safe paths. In, out, around. One summer evening, my feet found their way back to the dell before my mind caught up. I knew for months and months that I’d come back. I just didn’t know it would be this night. Until I was there. The evening sun had taken on a golden glow.
The thread was still there. The sunset caught the line high above the trees. A shaft of gold.
Beautiful but almost so thin you would not see it if you were not looking for it. But I’d been looking for it subconsciously every day in a way. Wondering if it was thinking about me the way
I had been thinking about it. But it hadn’t. It had just been here. Not moving. Not wanting or waning. Just here. Solid and so, so thin.
As I gazed up and down the line, and without thinking, I started to climb down into the hole.
Gently and carefully planning my route so I didn’t slip. I never took my eyes off of it. The fear remained, but my curiosity stood taller. Once on the flat earth of the bottom, most leaves from the autumn had rotted away, so I stood on grass and moss. I sat at the bottom for hours, watching consequences fall in silence. When I finally climbed out, my head felt clearer.
That scared me more than the thread did.
I returned monthly. Respectfully. I never touched it. I watched raindrops bead along its length in summer storms, splitting into twin streams when they met the line. I tested grass blades, feathers, and twigs. Each parted perfectly. I pondered the line from the book, “Given time, trees grow around wire.” I had seen it now with my own eyes.
The fence around the clearing that circled the cottage, our home. Part taught, part wire fence post. Where it passed the first row of trees that marked the edge of the forest, there was a fine example. A fence that Dad had told me he had helped put up with Grandad. Back when he was my age. It was now absorbed as part of the environment around which the tree lived. There was no hole in the bark. The wire went in one side and came out the other.
The fence posts themselves had weathered and weakened with age. They still stood up. But they were not the formidable structure they once had been. But for the trees’ intervention, they would have remained in place. Doing their job. The trees’ absorption of the presence of the fence was indifferent. The trees just kept growing despite the man-made barrier. Until it was part of the fence, and the fence was part of the tree.So I sat looking at this thing. This implausible, eternal, indifferent, deathly thing. The thread wasn’t violent. It was indifferent. And that spoke to me in fearful ways I couldn’t name.
—
At fifteen, an axis shifted again. Dad made up with his sister, my aunt. For years, they hadn’t spoken. Not since we moved to the cottage. Was it because we moved to the cottage? I didn’t know. But now they were reconciled, and that meant my cousin on my dad’s side reappeared in my life. Two and a half years without him had passed. I didn’t realize what a pleasure that had been.
Always confident, a lot taller, with a grin sharpened by universal approval. I couldn’t bear him.
All adults adored him, instinctively. He was a bully. Behind the scenes, a violent thug with a clean smile and a way of throwing adults off his scent. I could smell the rot in him. And he could smell the fear in me.
We ate dinner at my aunt’s house. Voices overlapped. Laughter inflated the room. The years apart seemed to melt away for Dad and for my aunt. For her husband and for my cousin, too. They talked of memories. Of what was missed in between, but never of the rift. Never of reconciliation or regret. Only forward. They drank and ate and made merry. And when the meal was done, they encouraged my cousin and me to head outside together.
To get some exercise. To go and have some fun. My cousin seemed to genuinely like that idea.
He said he wanted to show me his bike. His goalposts. His den is at the bottom of their huge garden. I nodded in agreement and dreaded the idea. So once plates had cleared, and adults had uncorked another bottle, we were dismissed.
At first, things were polite enough. We sat on the patio furniture while my cousin spun the wheels on his upturned BMX and talked about brakes, tyre treads and pads that fitted on the frame of its hot-rod red frame. I was polite. I told him my bike was once Grandad’s. It weighed a ton. He laughed and called me a word I’d never heard before. I knew it was a slur.
As our time in the garden wore on, his tone shifted. “Why’d she really leave?” he whispered after putting his bike away as he tried to keep a run of volleys going with a football. “I don’t know,” I muttered, and he kicked the ball at me. It hit my hands and bounced back to him. He laughed. “She used to buy me good birthday presents. “I liked her,” he said, rolling the ball on his foot again for another three keepie uppies before it rolled off onto the lawn. “Me too. She was good at presents.” He cuffed the back of my head. “Bet she couldn’t stand the idea of living in those woods. You reek of them, you know.” I said nothing. Some cruelties are rehearsed. He’d been thinking about sticking me since I entered the house. I could tell. And now he’d done it; I just hoped he was done. “We should get into it one day,” he said. “You and me. Mano andMono.” I didn’t correct him.
A month later, my aunt and her whole rotten household visited our cottage. Dad and Uncle shared manly exchanges outside the cottage. Roasting each other lightly with teases and roughhousing. My aunt had me show her around the cottage. She seemed to disapprove of the state of every single thing she saw. My cousin seemed even bigger and more verbose outside of his home. In mine, it felt like a violation. My quiet, monk-like peace and carefully trodden routines are violated by loud voices, questions and judgment. Again, a big meal where we all sat across the table. My aunt cooked it before she came. She heated it up once it had got here. I have to admit it was nice to have new potatoes, carrots and gravy. To have home-cooked (but not this home) food filling the house with a smell that made me remember Mum.
Dad had the wine covered. This is what was considered his way of hosting. Provide the wine.
And the sloes. The stuff he’d got bottled under the stairs. Grimy-looking second-hand bottles filled with homemade forest-fruit-based booze. When opened, it reeked, and it always made the glasses dirty. I knew they’d get to that wretched stuff soon enough. So I tried to make my excuses. “I’ve got homework to do. I have to go to my room later.” I was planning to give myself some quiet time. Hoping my cousin would find me boring and want to stay with his parents and
Dad instead of me. I wanted an escape boat in time.
“Don’t worry about that,” boomed Dad. “Why don’t you show your cousin around? Show him what you find so fascinating in those woods all the time.” I wanted to protest. I wanted to just say no. But I always do as I am told. So when the last of the ice cream and crumble had been scraped from the bowls, my cousin’s hand on my shoulder was all the signal it took. And that was the end of the only good meal I’d ever tasted in Forester’s Cottage.
“Come on, Shrimp,” he said, and the adults all laughed. “I’ll race you through the woods.” I suddenly wanted to throw up everything I’d just eaten. “Go on, son. Get out of here. Give us adults some space, yeah?” I nodded. I swallowed hard. And I went to pull on my boots. I just knew this was going to go badly. I just knew.
By the time I got one boot on. He was already trying to rag on me more than I had the willpower to bear. “Come on, Shrimp!” he shouted again. It got him a laugh last time. Why not, eh? It was like it was a name everyone agreed I deserved. The adults laughed from the table, their voices thick with drink. Dad called after us, “Don’t go too far!” and then laughed at his own line, as if danger itself was a punchline.
I was 11 in 1985. We moved into Forester’s Cottage in early November, when the light went thin, and the trees stood like grey ribs around the clearing. Every winter before that, the streets had been lit by street lamps and rain on concrete, reflecting headlights. Living among these trees was the first time I’d seen real dark. Black featureless nature. A void of light on the really overcast nights.
The cottage had belonged to my grandfather. I didn’t ever get to know him, not really. I remembered boots by the door on the day of the funeral, mud flaking off them like scabs of dried outside dragged in. I remembered silence. It wasn’t like darkness. Silence always had something else in it. Smaller things, in the distance, in the walls.
Inside, the house smelt of damp wood, old stone and older tobacco. Dad propped the back door open while he hauled our boxes from the car, his wheezy breath fogging in the cold like it came from good lungs. I followed behind, hugging a damp cardboard box marked Bedroom. The cardboard had gone soft, and none of the straight edges held their intended lines anymore. The tape curled up the sides, peeling away from the pulpy frame but keeping the flaps in line. I held the bottom just in case.
We unpacked badly. Like men. Boxes slumped half open on the landing; coats hung from bent nails hammered into beams decades ago. Dad’s dad was a rudimentary decorator. Dad stacked tins in the cupboard and wiped dust with his sleeve. In the lounge, a gas fire hissed, trying its best. The smell was round and cloying. It filled the room up to your chin.
My box held my battling robots, lots of socks, some old schoolbooks from my last school, and the little brass compass Mum gave me when we walked the coast last summer. The hinge stuck, but when I pressed the clasp, it sprang open. The needle quivered toward north. I snapped it shut.
Mounted on a rectangle of metal with a hole drilled in the bottom. I’m supposed to wear it around my neck, but the string went missing long ago.
That first night, the noisy new quiet pressed against my ears. When it was this kind of silent, even my breathing felt rude. I’d have to work out where it fits in between the fox barks, the owl hoots, the trees creaking and the plumbing groans. I lay awake, listening to the wind rattle the eaves and the gas ticking in the lounge. Somewhere deep in the house, floorboards sighed like someone shifting their weight.
Days blurred, cold and grey. Dad made tea that tasted of mud and disappeared into the woods with maps he didn’t explain; when he returned, he was always tired and short-tempered. The woods surrounded the cottage. Some days, I wondered how he got the car out because the trees were so dense in all directions.
I explored the clearing we lived in cautiously. There were carpets of moss, lying slick on fallen logs. I found many pale mushrooms clustered like tiny hands with little hats on the fingertips.
Pools of cold, dirty water could always be found lurking between stones. If you ventured into theshadow, the place changed so fast. Three minutes into the trees, and the cottage vanished behind a crowd of indistinguishable trunks.
When I went to school, I would often sit alone on the bus. Mud on my shoes and a bit up my trousers, the smell of Dad’s cigarette smoke in my jumper. The other kids didn’t speak unkindly to me. They just didn’t speak to me. At all. School was cold. Small and smelled of disinfectant constantly.
We had been in the cottage about six weeks. I had been at the new school for about two years.
Dad was drinking before he cooked. That was never a good sign. Burnt liver and onions again.
He’d even put some wine in the pan. It made it taste funny. All I said was, “Mum never cooked my food with wine.” He took my plate, which still had most of the meal on it, and poured it into the bin. “She’s not coming back,” he said.
My fork was still paused halfway to my mouth. The last morsel of food balanced on it over the table. He swooped in and swallowed it whole off the prongs. “She left. The stuck-up cow!
Wanted something else. Someone else. You’re stuck with ME! That’s just how it is.” He boomed as he chewed my last bite of food. My throat tightened. My belly rumbled. My eyes swelled. The cottage’s walls pressed in.
“You’re lying,” I whispered. Dad’s jaw bunched. “Don’t start. You’re done. Dinner is done. Get upstairs. BEDTIME!” He roared as he reached for the wine bottle.
“Mum loves me. I know she does.” I said as I sloped away from the table. His voice cracked.
“Then why isn’t she here?” In a low hum, the sentence trailed off into a pained noise. “Because of you,” I said, and as I spat the sentence out, the words tasted older than me. They smelt of tobacco and wine. He sighed in that way he always did when he’d had enough and conversation was over. “Bed!” he commanded. I did as I was told. I always do as I am told.
Upstairs in that creaky, damp, wonky, stinky bedroom, I curled myself tight in my blankets.
Pulling them in so hard against my chest. My hands hurt, and my shoulders set like clay. Thepatchwork one Mum had knitted for me still had the faintest smell of her washing powder in it.
I’m not even sure Dad used washing powder.
I don’t think I slept a wink that night. It was like the floorboards, the owls, and the plumbing were mocking me.
I didn’t ever hear Dad creak up the stairs all night. I kept hearing him moving around. There were chairs, doors, and the tap on the sink making a deep donkey-like groan as he washed something up at two am. But I am sure he didn’t sleep. When I felt brave enough to come down for breakfast, he was still sitting there in the kitchen. The wine bottles were three now. Two big ones and a half-size one. Like a little family. Mum, Dad and me . . .He barely looked up when I walked across the stone floor of the kitchen. I rushed to find my plimsolls by the back door because I could feel the cold through my socks so strongly that it felt like my feet were getting wet. I pulled them on and turned back to the kitchen table. He was leaning like a wounded hero in a movie. Holding his side. “Do you want tea?” I asked almost silently.
“Mmmm” was his only reply. I took it to mean yes. So I lifted the kettle from the stovetop and, with both hands, hauled it over to the big porcelain sink. I had to tiptoe still to reach the tap at the back. The whole time, Dad just sat there. Barely moving.
When the kettle was full, I hoiked it back over the edge of the sink. Spilling a little from the movement of the water inside. I carried the heavy steel kettle back to the stove. Passing Dad a second time on my way. I lifted it over one of the burners. A scraping noise rang out as it found the central point over the ring. Placed the hefty container on the iron grid around the rink. “Tea?”
I enquired as I reached for the matches. “Dad? Tea?” He looked directly at me as I stood there with the matchbox in one hand and a lone match in the other. His big hands held out before him now silently commanding me to hand over the fire-making tools. I never get to do the best bit of anything.
I placed the matchbox and the lone match in his two palms. He rolled the stick across his fingers and through his knuckles without really gripping it at first. It arrived between his thumb and finger like a magic trick. He struck it hard and short against the rough side of the box. The crack and spark of the match head fascinated me as I watched. For a moment, he held it still. Letting the baby flame grow past the risky stage of an early end. Once we had an assured ‘burner’ on the go, he handed it to me like a tiny torch.
Carefully and with my hand cupped to protect the flame, I made my way back to the stove. I held my palm so close to the glowing bulbous light, hoping to feel more heat than I could bear. But it wasn’t so hot. Once the gas was lit, I searched the fridge for butter and milk. We had enough of both. And the bread bin still had three slices in a Sunblessed bag. The noggin looked OK, but the slices had early signs of blue dots. “Bread’s mouldy,” I muttered and shook the bag so the slices landed on the cutting board. Dad still barely moved. “Dad. The bread’s mouldy. Do you want something else?” He looked at me as if I’d just insulted him. “A bit of penicillin never hurt anyone,” he said, unblinking. I didn’t understand. “Do you need a tablet, Dad?” He held out his hand, but I was unsure of what he was asking for, so I just put my small hand in his. “Are you
OK?” He closed his rough, warm fingers around my whole open palm. “Toast those slices, Son.
A bit of mould will do us no harm.” I made a face. He didn’t like it. “No harm at all,” I tried to pull my arm away.
“I don’t want to eat mouldy bread, Dad. I don’t want to.” He closed his eyes, like he always did when he was ‘searching for his patience’. “You eat what we have, so there’s no waste, and you get a full tummy, Son.” I knew he was in a mood that could not be resisted, but unwisely, I continued to disagree.“No. I don’t want to eat mouldy bread.” I pulled my arm from his grip. He looked outraged.
“Mum never let the kitchen get like this,” I blurted, looking for words that would have maximum impact. That one didn’t land. He just put his hands on his knees and glared at me. “She’d never let things get into this state,” I reiterated. Dad smiled a threatening smile. “Don’t you mention her again, Boy.” I knew this was a precipice. A cliff edge in the conversation. I just walked out into thin air anyway. “Don’t YOU talk about her. She’s my mum. She’s mine, not yours. Not anymore.” I felt the air leave my lungs, the kitchen, and the world. I could hear a pin drop in that moment. He looked at me like nothing I’ve ever seen before or since. Like the world split in two that moment. There was before. And now we were in after.
Dad’s chair scraped. He rose sharply, but I was already running.
Cold air slapped my face as I bolted out of the kitchen door; I darted across the clearing. In twenty long strides, the forest swallowed me whole. Sharp black branches whipped my arms.
Leaves skidded underfoot. Roots snared my boots. But I was not talking to gravity. I was a prey animal in flight mode. I pounded and pounded my feet against fallen leaves and squelchy muddy bits, leaping over twisted fallen branches and heading downhill. Deeper and deeper into the woods. I saw the leaf colours change. The reds and browns darkening to muddy, spotty, wet, half-rotted blacks. The ground tilted.
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