First Chapters - The Trees by Ali Shaw

the trees Ali Shaw

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YOR K • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 3

29/04/16 4:33 PM

Bloomsbury Paperbacks An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London wc1b 3dp UK

1385 Broadway New York ny 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 This paperback edition first published in 2016 © Ali Shaw, 2016 Ali Shaw has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

Extract from Dante’s Inferno, The Indiana Critical Edition, Dante Alighieri. Translated and edited by Mark Musa, Copyright © 1995 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: hb: 978-1-4088-6224-7 tpb: 978-1-4088-6225-4 pb: 978-1-4088-6230-8 epub: 978-1-4088-6226-1 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com.

Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 4

29/04/16 4:33 PM

Midway along the journey of our life I awoke to find myself in a dark wood Dante Alighieri, Inferno

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 7

29/04/16 4:33 PM

I

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 1

29/04/16 4:34 PM

1

The Night the Trees Came

He stood in the corner shop with rainwater dribbling off his anorak, looking for the cheapest box of beers. The checkout girl thought him a drunk, he knew, so he paid on his shiny new credit card in the hope it somehow proved him otherwise. He walked home with his back straining under the weight of the beers, puffing as he went, the box supported on the ledge of his belly. Tepid August rain splashed freely at his face and hair, often hitting the bullseye of his bald spot. After he had dumped the drink on his doorstep to get out his key, he paused for a moment and gazed along the empty street. The rain watered the world so heavily that he wondered if it might rinse it away. He did not think he would mind if it did.

This was a part of his ritual whenever Michelle was away from home, just as later he would watch reruns of westerns until the small hours and stagger to the takeaway for his sweet and sour chicken. Like all good rituals it summoned the same old feelings, every time. First the squalid glee (increasingly unbecoming, he knew, in a forty-four-year-old man) of slouching alone in his armchair with a meal of grease to scoff. Second, when the beer had kicked in, the self-righteous thrill that made him spring to his feet and rant at the world beyond his door as if he were some cowboy with a six-shooter, capable of riding it down. Third, and it would last until he dragged himself to sleep, the comedown ache of his self-loathing.

3

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 3

29/04/16 4:34 PM

Inside, he changed into dry clothes and began his first beer. The opening scenes of the western rolled. Horses raced across the Mojave, their hooves beating cracks into the dirt. Gunshots fired, brittle and easy, like the sounds of twigs snapping. He cracked open his second beer and sprawled back in his armchair with a happy giggle.

Later, he staggered to the takeaway and got drenched all over again and came back with battered chicken balls and a red congealing sauce in a polystyrene pot. Walking home, he marvelled at how many worms had crawled up from the earth that evening.

Scores upon scores of them, squirming in the flowerbeds. There were millipedes and woodlice too, and a legion of slugs pulsing across the road. A car rushed past, its headlamps filling every raindrop yellow, and when it was gone there were crushed trails of slime on the tarmac.

Had not the alcohol already gone to his head, he might have paused to be troubled by such a slithering multitude. Instead, he trotted home eager to appease his rumbling stomach. When he reached his front door he fumbled his key in the lock, dropped it to the path and had to stoop to retrieve it. There were worms on the paving slabs too, narrow rosy ones and the thicker kinds with crimson saddles. There were beetles big as grapes. There were wrinkled black slugs with toxic orange undersides.

In his surprise, he lost hold of his takeaway. As if in slow motion, the pot of sauce slid out of its bag, rotated as it fell, and splattered the garden path sweet and sour. He dropped to his knees to save what he could, but already the sauce was pitted by the downpour. When he staggered inside to inspect the damage done, he had saved only half an inch of the precious red substance. In that a caterpillar was drowning.

He ate his chicken balls with tomato ketchup. He started another western. Cowboys wisecracked and shot each other off the roofs of buildings. Later, his anger seized him and he sprang to his feet, cursing his bad luck to be rotting here in this box of a house, on the kind of ordered street loved only by bureaucrats, in a town like 4

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 4

29/04/16 4:34 PM

every other town in the country, and why did nobody make good westerns any more?

Later still, he felt crushingly alone. There was nothing for it but to slope upstairs to bed. He felt stuffed full of his own ridiculousness, force-fed another dollop with every step he struggled to ascend. He drew the curtains and undressed in the yellow gloom of his bedside lamp, averting his eyes from the mirror on the wardrobe door lest he see his complexion or the sag of his gut. At last he squirmed into bed, face down. Then came the final act of this ritual of his: the prayer of abject desperation. Said to nothing, except perhaps the stuffing of his pillow, since he believed in no higher powers. Said all the same, said to anything, just in case there existed some presence out there in the cruel world that was bigger than his disbelief.

His name was Adrien Thomas.

He fell asleep with a whimper and a snore.

And somewhere out in the darkness, something creaked.

It was a night of whispers, and of pattering claws.

The rain fell for many hours, and did not relent until the flower­ beds swam with it and the verges were a mush. The trees spaced along the suburb’s roadsides hissed in unison with the breeze. It was a night when no cats fought, for any animal that owned a basket had already hunkered down. It was a night when bats flew in unseen frenzies, around and around the satellite dishes and the television aerials.

Someone’s pet rabbit died, in its hutch, of a stopped heart.

Someone arriving home late from an evening function slipped as she left her car, fell and sprained her ankle. When she looked to see what she had slipped on she found a pasty slime covering her drive, such as she had only ever seen on rotting logs in the dankest of woodlands.

The night smelled of mildew and resin. Rainwater seeped into the sewers and the soil. Along Adrien Thomas’s street a fox trotted, its head nodding, its jaws hanging ajar. It paused outside his house for a full minute, green eyes shining in the lamppost light.

5

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 5

29/04/16 4:34 PM

Worms and millipedes crawled in their masses. Twigs shivered on roadside trees. And then, from somewhere underground, a yawning creak began.

Those who heard it dismissed it for the soughing of a branch in the wind, or of a telephone mast in need of repair. Yet both its sound and its source were deeper than that. It was a moan as of some lumbering presence stirring, as of something drawing towards consciousness from overlong hibernation.

The people of the suburbs slept. Adrien Thomas slept.

There was a silent moment when the rain had stopped falling and the fox was long gone and the bats had flocked out of sight.

Then the trees came.

The forest burst full-grown out of the earth, in booming uppercuts of trunks and bludgeoning branches. It rammed through roads and houses alike, shattering bricks and exploding glass. It sounded like a thousand trains derailing at once, squealings and jarrings and bucklings all lost beneath the thunderclaps of broken concrete and the cacophony of a billion hissing leaves. Up surged the tree trunks, up in a storm of foliage and lashing twigs that spread and spread and then, at a great height, stopped.

In the blink of an eye, the world had changed. There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Branches stilled amid the wreckage they had made. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene.

Where, not a minute before, a suburb had lain, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. Some of the trees were flickeringly lit by the strobe of dying electricity, others by the fires of vehicles that had burst into flames. The rest stood in darkness, their canopy a gibbet world hung with all the things they’d killed and mangled as they came.

6

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 6

29/04/16 4:34 PM

2

Cockcrow

Adrien flung himself upright in bed, the room reverberating around him. Only when it stilled did he begin to hear all the other noises that might normally have woken him. Car alarms and burglar alarms. A spitting like a fountain of sparks. Even his own heartbeat, hammering in his ears. Then with a groaning lurch something huge collapsed outside, and he clutched his blankets to his chest.

He could tell this was no nightmare even as he slid out of bed.

With the digits of his alarm clock vanished into powerless black, he stood in the darkness clasping and unclasping his hands. He had no idea what could have happened but, outdoors, people were beginning to scream, and the noise made a cold feeling curl up in his belly.

Adrien felt for his glasses on the bedside table and thumbed them onto his face, useless though they were without light. Then he found his wristwatch and pushed the button that lit up its face.

Now he could see the warping of the floor and the splits in the walls and ceiling. In the greenish glow of his watch’s light he turned around and around, taking shaky breaths of air that newly smelled of herbs and cinders, noticing for the first time the branches that had entered through the fissures in the walls. One had burst in at ankle height, and was a hump-backed spine arching in and out of the carpet. Another had knocked the wardrobe sideways and cracked the mirror like a surface of ice. ‘What on earth . . .’ he 7

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 7

29/04/16 4:34 PM

began, just as, with a slam, something heavy hit something else out in the street. There was a brief human cry, cut short no sooner than begun.

Adrien pressed his fist to his teeth and tried to think straight.

Still as naked as when he’d slid into bed, he crept across the room and opened the bedroom door.

Bark blocked the way.

It was the cracked rind of a tree trunk, grown up through the floorboards and on into the ceiling. From there it would unfold its branches through the attic and the rafters above. Following its upward lines with his eyes made Adrien swoon, and for a moment he thought he would faint.

He steadied himself, then found the strength to reach out and touch the bark. Grains of soil cloyed its recesses. Torn wires dangled from twigs.

Adrien snatched back his hand. For a minute he could only stare. Then, spurred by sudden indignation, he lunged forward and shoved at the tree with all his might. It did not budge. Again he snatched back his hand.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘Mary and Joseph.’ Then, just to be sure, he added, ‘Michelle.’

Might he have died and gone to some kind of hell? He did not know what he had done to deserve it, save for having done nothing particularly saintly either. He wanted to turn tail and flee from the tree but there was nowhere to run except in circles around his room. After half a minute, he thought to try the window. He tore back the curtains and the street was overcome with trees.

‘Oh my God.’ He pressed his hands to his head.

It was a night wood clogged with the rubble of all the walls, gardens and pavements that had preceded it. Headlamps and rear lights shone through the foliage and the devastation. Cars had been flipped vertical, or else were suspended by the branches. One still sounded its alarm with its indicators blinking orange auras. A van hung on its side in the high fork of a trunk, beaming two spotlights at the ground, its driver sagging inert against his safety belt. Torches 8

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 8

29/04/16 4:34 PM

and the square lights of mobile phones flashed and swayed at ground level as people staggered out of their ruined houses, each as stunned as the next. The trees had ejected every last obstruction from the soil. Pipes and cables and the contents of basements.

Clipped lawns ripped to shrouds of turf.

Sweat tickled the small of Adrien’s back. ‘Michelle,’ he croaked, as if to say his wife’s name could somehow rush her all the way back here, across the Irish Sea, to save him. When it did not, he tried to think what she would do in his place. She would rally in no time. Her neighbours’ screams, growing more frequent now, would compel her into action. Michelle could face anything down, brave whatever life threw at her.

But he was not Michelle and she was not here. He was Adrien, and people had always cited their marriage as proof that opposites attract.

He tried the bedroom light but the bulb did nothing, so he dressed in a dark and terrified hurry and found his mobile phone in the pocket of his jeans. It had no signal, and he wondered how long it would be before he could call Michelle. He craved the reassurance of her voice right now, even if it were raised at him in one of their daily arguments. After a minute he dared to lean out of the window (the pane had vanished) to see what had become of the rest of his house. Branches hooped and hooked out of the front wall, and it appeared that one tree had grown up through the kitchen and another through the bathroom. When the floor groaned under him he had the sense that his bedroom was only held intact at the trees’ mercy, a kind of treehouse balanced on their shoulders.

Shade by shade now, Adrien’s eyes were adjusting. In the canopy something small crept then bounded. A grey leaping streak of fur that he realised was a squirrel going about its everyday habits, as if the trees had stood there for all time. Something about that made Adrien’s stomach wobble, and he had to hug himself tight to stop himself from vomiting.

‘At least,’ he thought out loud, when the sickly feeling had passed, ‘I’ve done my homework.’

9

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 9

29/04/16 4:34 PM

He began to strip the bed.

On many nights, since moving to this house, he had lain awake imagining some crisis that would require him to abscond through the window. Often the mere act of imagining disaster could convince him of real danger, and he would nudge Michelle in the dark and whisper something like, ‘Can you smell that smoke?’

‘No. It’s nothing. Oh, Adrien, not this again. Go back to sleep.’

Instead of following her advice he would envisage flames raging on the landing and begin to plot their escape. He would attempt to work out how many sheets he’d need to knot together to make a rope long enough to descend from the window. Michelle, noticing him tense in the darkness, would ask him what was wrong.

‘Nothing,’ he would say.

‘Something must be. Your eyes are open.’

‘It’s nothing.’

And in the earlier days of their marriage she would press herself closer to him and lay her hand on him and stroke his chest until he dozed back to sleep.

He finished stripping the bed and took from the gaping cupboard all of the spare sheets. He tied their corners together with the only knot he knew, which he lost faith in after having fastened two sheets. It looked too simple to dangle his life from, even though he tested it by tugging with all his might.

When he had tied a good enough length, he found his keys and threw some clothes into his bag, supposing that he would not be able to get back into the bedroom until the fire brigade or whoever the government sent arrived to put things right. He licked his fingers and used them to smooth his hair down. For a second his fingertips touched the balding crown of his head and his heart sank familiarly, then he tied the rope of sheets around the bed’s headboard and again around its legs. At the open window he paused and could only gape at the canopy. Behind it the sky was just becoming visible, a masked grey that seemed to agitate the leaves into life.

10

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 10

29/04/16 4:34 PM

When Adrien yanked the rope all of the knots held firm, but looking down from his first-floor bedroom felt like teetering out of a high-rise. ‘Help!’ he called. ‘Up here!’, but the new foliage absorbed his voice and none of the people wandering dazed into the ravaged street heard him. He flung the tied sheets from the window and was briefly satisfied that the quantity required was exactly what he’d deduced it would be during those nights lying awake beside Michelle. Then he turned, heart thumping, and squashed his belly across the sill, pivoting until his head was in the bedroom and his feet kicking open air. He seized the rope and lowered himself a knot, then another, then one more.

A frightened shriek popped out of his throat, like an air bubble escaping a plughole. The rope had held but Adrien panicked regardless. He clung to the string of sheets with his eyes clenched shut, until the muscles of his arms began to strain. Then with gritted teeth he looked up at the criss-crossed branches, and longed to climb back to his room and wait to be rescued there.

When he tried to lock his ankles around the rope it only swayed dizzyingly side-to-side. His own weight was stretching his wrists and shoulders and, finally, pain and terror forced him into action.

Scuffing the wall with his toes, he steadied himself as best he could and tried to abseil down, his palms burning from the friction. He misjudged the last few metres and fell with a back-quivering thump.

For a minute he just lay there on his front lawn, waiting to discover which bones he had broken. When the pain of his landing lessened, he was surprised to find they were all intact. Regaining his breath, he climbed to his feet and surveyed the disaster he had once called his address. Other people stood here and there, stunned into silence. Some were bleeding, others covered in dust. Over them all the trees cast their shadows, although now and then the wind chanced an opening and a star shone through. Then, briefly, a pale glow edged the leaves and they were like sharpening knives.

Adrien tried his best to take stock of it all. It was clear that other houses had fared far worse than his own, and his next-door 11

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 11

29/04/16 4:34 PM

neighbour’s was one such casualty. Its owner, Mrs Howell, was an elderly dear who seemed to spend her every waking moment clipping her verges and manicuring her flowerbeds. She would not be doing that again. Mrs Howell’s front wall had fallen away completely and the contents of her bedroom had been offered up to the air on arms of timber. Adrien’s throat tightened when he saw her bed, and hot tears swelled on his eyelids. The bed hung above the street, punctured by three long branches that had scattered mattress foam among the twigs like misshapen blossom.

As for Mrs Howell’s body, Adrien could see little of it, wrapped as it was in her bed covers. Just like the bed, it had been skewered.

Only a liver-spotted hand and one lock of hair showed between the folds of the sheets.

Adrien turned away, holding his forehead, but there was no relief to be had in any direction he looked. ‘Why has this happened?’ he muttered, but the forest gave no answers. It only enclosed him in its towering prison. Smells of bark and mosses filled the air, as well as some syrupy scent that was faint but ever present, like blood in the tongue. Somewhere in the distance a building rumbled its collapse. Somewhere somebody was weeping. The sun, beginning to rise, edged with an emerald glow the leaves overhead.

A dog barked. A cock crowed.

And out of sight, on the highest of branches and in the most secret of hollows, stranger creatures went about their business.

12

9781408862308_txt_print.indd 12

29/04/16 4:34 PM