I was sitting in the garden, the shoebox marked SEREN in marker pen waiting in front of me on the patio table, still taped shut. Like every other time I’d thought about opening it since Shaun gave it to me, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure why. What did I want to know about Mum? What did I not want to know? I wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was better just to leave it, for now anyway. There was no rush.
Billie was trying to train Merlin, despite the fact that in dog years he must have been about a hundred and probably too old to learn new tricks. I watched her, an echo of when I was a kid and he was a puppy. Billie had always wanted us to have a dog. Walking to school or the shops with her always took twice as long as it should have done because she’d insist on stopping to pet every pampered pooch and mangy mutt we met on the way. But Dad said with everyone out of our house during the day it wouldn’t be fair.
‘Merlin, roll over!’ Billie told him sternly while he trotted off to sniff at something on the lawn. She ran after him.
‘Look, Merlin!’ she said, lying down and rolling over in the long grass. ‘Like this. See?’
Merlin licked her face and she wriggled and squeaked, just as I remembered doing myself.
‘I’m going in to talk to Grandpa,’ I called. ‘You hungry, B? Want a snack or a drink?’
‘No,’ she called over. ‘But Merlin says he needs some bacon.’
‘I wasn’t asking Merlin. Anyway, there isn’t any bacon. And if there was, I’d definitely eat it all myself.’
‘Mean.’
‘Yep. Just call me Cruella.’
‘I’d give all mine to Merlin. I’m going to show him some cartwheels now.’ She skipped off to where he was barking at a fat pigeon.
I watched her a while longer as she played with Merlin and did handstands and cartwheels on the grass.
As I walked towards the patio doors, I heard Shaun talking to someone who was too tall to be Grandpa. No one ever came into the house, Shaun made sure of that. I looked more closely and saw it was Jonas.
My heart flipped. I hadn’t seen him since we’d waited for the rain to stop in the hut. Every time I went there now I secretly half-hoped he’d be there again.
I’m saying nothing, Mischa said.
It was a good thing he hadn’t come back, I’d told myself. After all, I didn’t really know I could trust him. Not really. But I still looked out for signs that he’d tried to find me there. I imagined he might have come by and left me a note saying he was hoping to see me again, or some chocolate, or… And then yesterday I’d found a crane made out of paper that had been written on in pencil. I unfolded it carefully. It said:
Skadi says hi and why are you never here when she visits?
I knew it, Mischa had said. And please don’t pretend you’re not smiling, because that would demean us both.
Now I prepared myself to look casual and not particularly pleased to see him, but as I walked into the kitchen both he and Shaun looked round and I realized from their expressions that something was wrong.
‘What is it?’
‘We’ve got a bit of a problem,’ Shaun said. ‘Jonas has heard that they’re going to start doing searches in the village.’
‘Searches?’
‘House to house,’ Jonas said. ‘For people who are here without permission.’
By then, we’d been there for weeks.
‘Why?’
‘They’ll start with second homes and holiday rentals, and anyone they know who’s had visitors. They’re saying they’ll reward anyone who reports seeing people they think are outsiders.’
‘Right. When are they going to start the searches?’ I asked.
‘In a couple of days.’
‘Look,’ Shaun said to me. ‘Don’t panic. They might not come here.’
‘You know they will,’ I said. ‘You told me yourself: Imogen was suspicious when she came round all those weeks ago to check I’d gone. And, like you said, she’s always looking for ways to cause trouble for you.’
‘We’ll have to find somewhere to hide you,’ Jonas said.
‘Okay,’ Shaun said. ‘But I don’t know where.’
‘I do,’ I said.
Shaun looked at me in surprise.
I saw Jonas realize. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. Of course. Good idea.’
Shaun looked from one of us to the other. ‘Okay. Are you two going to let me in on the secret or what?’
‘The forest,’ I said.
I tried to pack our things quietly in the bedroom while Billie slept, but apparently I wasn’t quiet enough.
‘Do you like Jonas now?’ Billie said in the dark.
‘I guess. I mean, he’s okay.’
It had been a risk for him to come and warn us about the searches, I knew that.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I like him.’
‘But do you like him like him?’
‘You need to be asleep, Billie. It’s late. We need to be out of here early tomorrow.’
‘I can’t wait to live in the forest.’
‘I know.’
‘Like Robin Hood. Or squirrels. Or witches.’
‘Sleep,’ I said.
‘Okay. But can we come back and visit Merlin sometimes?’
‘Close your eyes.’
‘They are closed.’
‘Well then… close your mouth.’
‘It is closed.’
‘It really isn’t.’
‘I mean mmm mmm mmm.’
‘Okay. Night. I love you.’
‘Mm mmm mmm mmm.’
I smiled.
‘That meant I love you too,’ Billie whispered in the dark.
‘You sure you’ll be okay?’ Shaun said, anxiously looking round the hut, when he’d run out of excuses to stay. ‘Definitely got everything you need?’
He’d brought a camping stove and a load of slightly out-of-date tins of beans and soup, a tin opener, some Jammy Dodgers, porridge and a few eggs he’d won in a game of chess against a retired civil servant who kept chickens. There were also sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, a bucket and loo roll; Granny’s fancy old picnic hamper with plates and cutlery and glasses; some matches, candles, a string of battery-operated fairy lights; a tube of sting and bite cream, loads of bottles of water, a pack of cards, a sharp knife and Grandpa’s cricket bat. He leaned it against the wall next to where I’d laid out my sleeping bag. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
I’d brought my rucksack which I’d carefully re-packed with all our stuff from home, so that there was not a trace of us left at Grandpa’s. I’d also brought the SEREN shoebox at the last minute, hidden under a blanket in a carrier bag so Shaun wouldn’t ask about it.
Billie was already off in search of squirrels, unicorns and other forest creatures. She’d been sad to leave Merlin behind, despite my promises that we’d visit him often.
‘You worry too much,’ I said to Shaun. ‘I mean, I can’t say I’m a fan of the toilet arrangements, but other than that it’s perfect. Like you said, no one comes into the woods at the moment anyway.’
‘Come back to the house if you need to, but stay out of sight if you can till you know it’s safe. If there’s any reason why you can’t come in, I’ll put a warning in the window.’
‘What warning?’
He thought. ‘That red rose plant that’s usually on the side. I’ll put it in the window. You’ll see that?’
I nodded.
‘I’ll come back and see you’re all right tomorrow, okay?’
He gave me a bone-crushing hug.
Then he was gone, and we were alone in the forest.
The first night was kind of scary, though obviously I pretended to Shaun the next day it wasn’t. The dark was dense and black, and everywhere there seemed to be rustling and scratching and scuttling. Why had Mischa made me watch all those old horror movies set in the woods? Oh right, blame me, she said, and for a second I was comforted by the memory of us watching them through our fingers with bowls of microwaved popcorn, screaming at every jump scare till Mischa’s mum came in and said something annoyed-sounding in Polish. But the thought was only briefly comforting and in another moment I was gripped by a primal fear. As I listened for predators – tigers, serial killers, tarantulas – I could feel every bit of me go tense, ready to spring into action and… do something. Presumably involving Grandpa’s cricket bat. Or screaming.
Until I remembered there was no one to hear me scream.
I hardly slept.
But as the days went by the forest became our home. We couldn’t go back to Grandpa’s. ‘Best to wait till things calm down a bit,’ Shaun said, and I agreed. In the searches, they’d found several ‘unauthorized outsiders’, he told me. Family of people from the village mainly, people like me who’d just come here to be safe. They’d been arrested and threatened with detention if they didn’t leave. There had been a meeting at the village hall and things had got pretty nasty, Shaun said, with some people arguing it was outrageous to treat innocent people like that, and others claiming that it was only fair, that there wasn’t enough food to go round, that people who’ve done nothing wrong don’t need to hide, and, anyway, that no one knew who these people were. Everyone was tense. Shaun said it was fine to visit as long as we were careful, but not to go back to stay, not yet. I didn’t argue.
We’d wake early. Breakfast was usually porridge made with water and cooked on the gas stove. For the first weeks we had honey, which we rationed carefully. Shaun brought us raspberries from his garden. Occasionally he’d bring us more eggs and if we were really lucky some cheese or butter. ‘Sorry I can’t bring you more,’ he said. But I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to take his and Grandpa’s rations.
After breakfast, Billie would say, ‘I’m going to find squirrels today,’ or ‘I’m on a hunt for fairy circles,’ or ‘I’m going to visit my favourite tree.’
‘The other trees will get jealous,’ I told her as she skipped off, clutching Luna.
I told her about an article I’d seen online once about how trees can talk to each other and look after each other, and how they have memories and even heartbeats.
‘I know,’ she said, as if it was obvious.
To my surprise, despite the spiders and the night-time noises and the previously unthinkable toilet arrangements, I found I liked living in the forest.
Wow, Mischa said. I did not see that coming. I thought we agreed we were the people least likely to survive the apocalypse because we had no practical or relevant skills. And now look at you, surviving in the wild! Next thing you know, you’ll be whittling and foraging and starting a fire with sticks. You’ll be skinning squirrels and drying their meat for winter and making their fur into mittens.
Shaun visited when he could, in the afternoons when Grandpa had a nap, but he never stayed long. Since the time Grandpa had wandered off and got lost, we both worried about him being on his own. We’d agreed that when he could he’d stay overnight at Grandpa’s. Eventually he pretty much moved in so he could care for Grandpa all the time.
Some evenings Billie and I would walk through the forest to Grandpa’s, always checking that the rose wasn’t in the window before we went in. But it was never there. Billie would skip ahead, desperate to see Merlin. As we got closer to Grandpa’s I’d call her back. In this part of the forest, closer to the village, occasionally there were people around – joggers, couples sneaking into the shadows, dog walkers – and we’d have to hide behind trees until they were gone.
Sometimes Grandpa remembered who I was, sometimes he didn’t. I’d get him to talk about the old days, when I was a kid or when he and Granny were young. He still remembered things from back then vividly. He was always pleased to see me. I told myself that was enough.
‘Grandpa,’ I said one night. ‘There was a word you told me when I was a kid. A Welsh word. You said it couldn’t be translated because there isn’t a word for it in English. It sort of means homesick, but it’s more than that. Like longing for a home you can never go back to because it doesn’t exist any more. I wish I could remember it.’
‘Hiraeth,’ Grandpa said immediately.
I looked at him, surprised. ‘Yes! That was it.’ I wrote it in my notebook in the candlelight when I got back to the hut that night.
It was hard to leave Grandpa. I always had a moment of panic that this might be the last time I’d see him. But the panic passed as I walked back through the woods with Billie at dusk, the damp, green, growing smell of everything all around us, the birds, the leaves, the trees watching over us.
Billie’s favourite tree became the wishing tree. I told her there had been one in a story Grandpa had told me and that they were a real thing all over the world. Every day we went and sat under it and made a paper crane and put it in a branch of the tree and made a wish.
There was a robin who came to visit us every day. We’d feed him scraps and leftovers even though we barely had enough for ourselves. Every morning when I got up and went out of the hut he’d fly down. Every morning it made me smile.
Jonas visited too. Occasional, brief, slightly awkward visits at first, but as time went on he visited more often and for longer.
Hmmm, back again, Mischa said. Someone’s keen.
He’s just being nice, I said. Helping Shaun out.
Right, Mischa said. Or maybe he just really, really likes trees.
He brought me things I needed. I started writing them down in a list, so that when I wanted sanitary pads I didn’t have to ask him face to face. Whatever I asked for he seemed to be able to get.
‘Try asking for sticky toffee pudding and salt and vinegar crisps,’ Billie suggested.
‘That’s too much, B.’
Ask him for a diamond necklace, Mischa said. He’d find a way to do it for you, babe.
During the day, he brought Skadi. She was his excuse for being out. At night he’d visit if the rest of his family weren’t around or sneak out when they were in bed. Billie would be asleep by then. We’d build a fire and we’d sit and talk.
After a while he stopped talking about it. He didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to know. Instead, we talked about life before, our friends, the bands we liked, what we wanted to do when life was normal again. We wanted to keep the real world out. The forest had its own time.
I found myself waiting for his visits.
‘What month is it?’ I said to Jonas one day.
‘July,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
My birthday had passed and I hadn’t known, hadn’t even thought of it. It felt so strange to realize it. Even stranger to think of my birthday last year, the perfect picnic Dad had organized, in that other world.
Had he remembered my birthday this year? I knew he would have. He’d have been thinking of me, wherever he was.
‘Hey,’ Jonas said. ‘Clem. Are you okay?’
I nodded because I couldn’t speak.
He looked at me for a moment as if deciding whether to ask me what was wrong. I was grateful when he didn’t. Skadi trotted over to me and laid her head on my lap.
Later, when Jonas was gone, I took the torch and walked through the forest. It was still warm. I sat under the wishing tree and took out my notebook. I thought of that morning, of Billie waking me with the notebook, of Dad, the picnic, the cake. Danny. Of the letter waiting for Claudia on the doormat at home.
I opened the notebook to a fresh page. I wrote, Dear Dad.
But I couldn’t think what I would write to him, even if he could read it.
I tore the page out and in the dark I folded it into the shape of a bird.
Then I placed it next to me among the ancient roots of the tree.
I closed my eyes and thought of Dad and wished.
Time was different in the forest. We didn’t measure it with clocks or calendars, but by colours: of berries, of leaves, of sky at the beginning and end of each day. We picked blackberries and ate them for every meal until we were sick of them. The trees turned yellow and orange and red. We crunched through the leaves and kicked them up, made piles of them to jump into. In the mornings, the outside of the hut was draped in cobwebs beaded with what looked like diamonds glittering in the chilly air. We collected conkers and acorns and their tiny cups, which Billie filled with drops of morning dew and left out to entice the woodland sprites she was sure were watching us.
I sometimes felt watched too. I’d hear a rustle in the undergrowth or see a flash of something in the corner of my eye that wasn’t there. Not sprites. Something bigger. But just as imaginary, surely.
Shaun brought us extra clothes and blankets, sleeping bags he assured us were made for sleeping outside at the top of mountains. Jonas brought tins of coffee and rice pudding and custard that we could heat over the stove to keep us warm.
There hadn’t been a frost yet but, still, the mornings and nights were cold and would only get colder.
Billie and I both caught colds. Billie’s was just a sniffle; she was better in days. Mine wouldn’t shift. It sat on my chest. I woke in the night coughing till I could hardly breathe. My whole body ached. Shaun was worried. He brought me fresh ginger to mix in boiled water and goose fat which he told me to rub on my chest at night. I told him I had, but I couldn’t do it. It smelt dead.
‘Do you think it’ll be safe enough for us to move back to the village by the time it gets really cold?’ I asked Shaun.
‘I expect so,’ he said, but his face told me the opposite.
‘What if it’s not?’
‘We’ll work something out,’ he said, not meeting my eye.
When Billie and I were better we filled the tree with paper cranes as the real birds migrated. In the clearing near the hut, we’d see great Vs of them in the sky. We’d imagine where they were going and how long it would take to get there. We’d imagine flying away with them.
The box of Mum’s stuff stood in the corner of the hut, unopened. I pretended to myself that I forgot it was there but I never did. It whispered to me, like Pandora’s jar in the story Grandpa used to tell me. Open me.
Why didn’t I?
I thought of all the times I’d tried to find her online, secretly googling her name. Not because I wanted to contact her, I told myself. I was just curious. Just to see a picture of her maybe or find out what she was doing. But there had been nothing. She was just an absence. I sometimes felt I’d dreamt her or invented her.
When I was a kid, I used to make up stories about why Mum had left. She’d won the lottery and gone to live on a private island where I’d soon be joining her. She was a spy on a secret mission. She was in witness protection and had been given a whole new identity. I even half-believed them sometimes. I invented her witness protection persona: Mitzi Sinclair. She had dyed blonde hair. She wore leather trousers and big earrings and dark red lipstick and worked in a fancy boutique. I liked Mitzi. Sometimes a part of me hoped I’d get to go and live with her one day.
But Mitzi wasn’t real, of course. The truth was more mundane. One Saturday morning when I was five, Dad made me pancakes for breakfast and said he had something serious to tell me. I was prepared for the worst straight away, because the last time he had said that was when my guinea pig, Dotty, had died. So I thought instantly of Shadow, our beloved, bad-tempered cat. Surely fate couldn’t be so cruel as to take her too?
But it was worse than the worst. This time the something serious was that Mum hadn’t just gone away for a break to get well again, like last time. She’d gone away for ever.
I’d stared at Dad, trying to make sense of what he was telling me.
‘Is she in heaven?’ I asked at last. That was where Mischa’s granny had gone when she went away for ever.
Dad was silent for a moment.
‘No, Clem. Not in heaven.’
In fact, it turned out she was in Birmingham. She had taken her highest-heeled shoes and the silky party dress that made her look like a film star. She had not taken the photo of her holding me when I was a baby that was in a silver frame Granny had given her. It sat smiling at me from the mantelpiece for weeks afterwards until I accidentally knocked it onto the floor and then accidentally stamped on it. She’d gone to live a life where she could be the film-star version of herself and not the version in the photo with the snotty toddler. This new life could only exist without me, or even the memory of me. This much was clear to my five-year-old self.
She hadn’t said anything to me or left me a note saying Sorry, or It’s not your fault, or One day you’ll understand or I love you.
The last day I saw her, the day before she left, became imprinted on my mind. It had been hot. I’d helped her to hang out washing on our balcony, handing her the plastic clothes pegs, but when she didn’t take one I looked up and saw her leaning on the balcony rail looking away from the line of damp socks and limp knickers, away from our flat and out over the playground and the streets and the rooftops.
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to swim in the sea?’ she’d said, closing her eyes. ‘Even just to paddle. I can’t remember the last time I swam in the sea.’
I spent hours, weeks, years trying to decode that message, in class, in diaries, in the dark of night when I couldn’t sleep. In the end I realized it just happened to be the last thing I remember her saying to me. And maybe she didn’t say it at all. Maybe I just imagined it afterwards because of the stories Grandpa told me about beautiful women who were really creatures of the sea and couldn’t live on land without wasting away. When you think about it, it’s far more likely that the last words she said to me were something like ‘Brush your teeth’, forgotten because of their pitiful lack of hidden meanings.
Real or not, that memory of the washing line messed with my sense of geography for a while as I assumed that Birmingham was by the sea. I imagined Mum walking along the beach there, eating ice cream and fish and chips, swimming in the wide blue ocean. It felt like an extra betrayal when I discovered that Birmingham, the place she’d chosen to go, was so very landlocked. I suppose she just knew someone there. And she didn’t stay there long anyway. She didn’t stay anywhere long, going by the mutterings I overheard between Grandpa and Dad. She travelled abroad, always on the move, settling somewhere for a while and then off again. Granny was the only person she was in touch with, and even that only occasionally. I looked up the places I heard them mention on the world map stuck on the kitchen wall – Thailand, Greece, Morocco – plotting the course she was following, trying to work out where she might go next so I’d be ready if it turned out to be back home. If there was mention of a specific town or city I googled images of it so I could see what she saw.
And then, at last, I stopped. I didn’t want to see the world as she saw it. I didn’t want to know where she was. There was no map that would explain to me the route she’d chosen, the journey that had taken her away from me. And I didn’t want her to come back. Home was where she wasn’t. It was where Dad and Billie were. And Claudia too.
I pictured Mum swimming out to sea, further and further away, smaller and smaller until she was a dot on the horizon and then…
gone.