Chapter Four

A Voice in the Trees

As I drove past the house that had been my aunt’s the upstairs windows snatched at the afternoon sun. The light on the glass erased the room where I used to sleep, as though the anonymity of the suburb had spread into the house. My mother had expressed surprise not far short of a reprimand that Thelma and my uncle lived somewhere so lacking in character. My aunt had valued the northern light that the generous windows afforded her studio, but now I wondered how much the view had meant to her – the view of Third Mile Wood.

The suburb might have been designed to hold the forest back, in which case it was failing in its task. One roof sprouted a small shrub like a feather in a cap, however little of a token of achievement. Some of the fences behind the houses were scaly with ivy that had climbed out of the woods. In a drive a paving stone had tilted up, exposing a contorted knuckly root. A few cars were parked on an expanse of gravel by an entrance to the woods. Flyers for a local folk festival lay beneath the windscreen wipers, fluttering in time with restless foliage as Roy and I left the car. A board above the stout fence bore a map of the woods, so vandalised that the diagram of paths was indecipherable. It was just possible to discern four walks, often crossing one another: red, blue, yellow, green. “Let’s go green,” I said.

That path led directly behind my aunt’s old home, where the shadows of the houses spread an unseasonable chill. The window that had belonged to her studio was full of leaves, a reflection of treetops. In my teens I’d thought this looked as if the woods were reaching for her. I was about to follow the path into the woods when a head reared up above the fence.

It belonged to a child on a swing in the back garden, but the sight reminded me of a remark Roy had made at Thelma’s wake. I was making to ask him about it when the little girl sailed up again. Her pigtails were the last of her to vanish, and she left her voice behind. “You’ll get lost in the puzzle,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Are you talking to us?”

Her voice reappeared before she did, pigtails flailing. “Get lost in the woods.”

As I wondered if this was a clarification or a directive, another voice joined hers. “Are you talking to yourself again, Francie?”

“I don’t ever, mummy. Now it’s a man.”

I heard footsteps tramping to the fence ahead of a plea: “Don’t stop pushing me, mummy.” A bolt clanked back, and the gate that used to let me into the woods swung inwards, revealing a large ruddy woman whose extravagantly herbaceous dress bared her muscular arms. “May I help you?” she rather less offered than said.

At the top of the sloping garden the little girl was trying to increase her arc. “Your daughter was saying we’d get lost,” I said.

“You mustn’t mind her. She worries for people, that’s all.”

“She needn’t worry we’ll be lost,” I said for the child to hear as well. “I’ve stayed in your house.”

“The gentleman means he came visiting, Francie.” Considerably lower the woman said “We’ve had enough of her talking to people who aren’t there. Who were you staying with?”

“My aunt. That was her studio.” I indicated the window, and a woman looked out as if I’d summoned her. “Who’s that up there?” I couldn’t help blurting.

“My other mummy,” Francie said with pride.

“It’s our bedroom at the moment,” the woman at the gate said. “We aren’t sure about the view.”

“Your little girl said it was a puzzle.”

“You can still call her our daughter,” the woman said with a look that searched for disagreement. “I don’t know why she would tell you that.”

“Because there are faces in the wood,” the little girl called. “Really there’s just one.”

“You can see all sorts of things at her age if you go looking for them,” the woman said. “Anyway, enjoy your walk. I’d better get back to my exercise.”

She meant the swing. Its repeated squeak grew fainter as Roy and I made our way along the sporadically gravelled path. At least she’d given me an idea what he must have thought he’d seen during Thelma’s wake. Of course children often saw faces in foliage. I seemed to recall doing so myself in Third Mile Wood, unless that had been a puzzle picture I’d pored over as a child.

Silence intermittently pierced by birdsong massed around the path as the green of the forest did: explosions of foliage, gatherings of moss and ivy on the tree trunks, elaborations of undergrowth. When I glanced back I couldn’t see a single house, as if the woods were impatient to be themselves. “Why’s it called Third Mile Wood?” Roy said.

“My aunt used to say it was because however far you thought you’d walked, there would still be a mile to go. Mind you, I don’t know how much she used to make up.”

“Like what?”

I felt oddly hesitant about remembering. “In the autumn the trees in here used to catch the wind, keep hold of it, I mean. You’d hear the leaves fluttering like bats in a cave. That’s one thing she said.”

“Why would she if it wasn’t true?”

I was disconcerted by how eager to believe Roy appeared to be. “She may have thought it was. They’d given her the drug by then.”

“Or maybe she wanted to lend you her imagination. What else did she tell you?”

“I remember once she said in the winter some of the leaves stayed on the trees when they ought to have fallen. Just their veins hanging in the air, she said. When the trees turned to skeletons their leaves would too. Maybe that was a picture she never got around to painting.”

“Wish she had.”

The path turned a bend, beyond which it curved in the opposite direction through the trees, quite like a mirror image. I’d assumed the woods might bring my memories alive, but now I had the odd notion that the process could be reversed. Had my aunt’s fantasies affected me more than I’d realised? I felt as if something she’d shown me lay around the next bend. This was no reason to feel even slightly apprehensive, and I matched Roy’s eager pace. As our stony footsteps seemed to hush the birds, I saw a long object lying beside the path. “I think I remember that,” I said, only to feel absurd – it could hardly be the same log I’d seen decades earlier. I recalled thinking that one looked as if it was trying to hide in the grass, in which case it would have been thoroughly hidden by now. Just the same, it looked confusingly familiar – the four upheld stumps of branches situated regularly enough for legs, and the circular knots in the lopped end, suggestive of eyes blind with moss beneath a ragged smile in a flat inverted face. “She told me about something like that,” I said.

“It’s some wood.” Rediscovering enthusiasm, Roy said “What did she say?”

“She said if you turned it over it would waken the wood.”

“The wood,” Roy said before gesturing around him, “or the wood?”

“Maybe it was supposed to be both. She said a friend told her.”

“So did you turn it over?”

“You can see I didn’t,” I said and had to laugh at myself. “No, of course that’s not the one. Whichever it was, I didn’t touch it and she didn’t either.”

“Let’s try it now, then.”

I couldn’t help holding my breath as Roy poked the toe of his trainer under the log and levered it out of the grass. It wobbled on two of its stumps and then came down on all of them. Either the impact stirred the grass around it or the departure of unseen insects did. When the activity subsided I couldn’t quite see where it stopped, perhaps because I was distracted by the appearance of the log, crouching on all fours to thrust forward its round slab of a face. It might have been a carving of a guardian of the woods, blindly alert for intruders and poised to leap. “She should have put that in a picture,” Roy said.

He was already striding onwards, and I made the effort to outdistance him, which gave me an excuse to glance back. Had the grinning log toppled over? At that distance I couldn’t be sure, and the long grass didn’t help, but I thought the stumps resembling a caterpillar’s legs might be uppermost again, as though it had twisted onto its back to await the next visitor. While this was a notion my aunt might have had, I was happy to leave it behind.

Ahead the path split into a pair that appeared to be marked as green as the leaves that shaded them. I took the left-hand route, which was slightly more gravelled than its equally overgrown neighbour. My instincts suggested that it would eventually bring us back to the car park. It led through a tunnel of trees, beneath branches heavy with leaves. The foliage was so abundant that long before we reached the end I began to feel as though the laden boughs were about to nod towards us, lowering the leafy roof. The notion reminded me of a carnivorous plant, and I was glad to emerge into relatively unobstructed sunlight, even when I saw a pattern of stones beside the path. “What are you thinking now, dad?” Roy said.

The sight had made me falter. The four grey stones were bare except for a fur of lichen, which didn’t lessen their resemblance to inverted hoofs. “My aunt showed me something like that in here,” I admitted. “Someone’s buried a horse upside down, she said.”

“That’s kind of what they look like,” Roy said and scrutinised my face. “She said more stuff, right?”

“She told me there were places where the world could turn upside down or inside out. Supposedly her friend told her.”

“Which friend?”

“I think it may have been the man she left my uncle for.”

Roy’s interest flagged or at any rate reverted to the sight beside the path. “Did she show you how turning things round worked?”

“There’s her painting where all the trees you think are convex are concave, and all the spaces between them are inverted trees.”

I assumed he was asking about Thelma’s work, but I recalled how her suggestion had made me feel – as if I were on the wrong side of the globe, hanging by my feet towards the sky. She’d said that you didn’t need to move the symbol, unlike the log – that just concentrating on it would be enough. Perhaps I turned away too fast, however ridiculously irrational my haste was. I almost lost my balance, and the world around me seemed to capsize, dangling the forest into space. I was about to grab Roy for support if not for some greater reassurance when I managed to regain my sense of how things ought to be. “Enough of that,” I declared and waited barely long enough to make sure Roy came away as well.

The path was distinguishable only as a strip of paler grass, no longer emphasised by gravel. I felt as if the vegetation that had overwhelmed it was threatening my senses too. The sunlit greenery everywhere around us was so intensely present that I could smell and virtually taste it, leaving little room for thought. My aunt had never said how you would know if the world had been turned inside out, but the notion made the trees at the edge of my vision feel illusory, close to abandoning their substance to exhibit some kind of reversal, a hollowness eager to take on more life. Whenever I glanced aside I saw nothing my aunt would have imagined, which surely meant I needn’t. A marker post next to the path heartened me, at least until we reached it. Was it painted green, or was that moss? When I looked back for reassurance that we hadn’t wandered away from the official routes, I couldn’t see the path. “Aren’t we going further?” Roy said.

I should make the most of the time we had together. We had hours of daylight yet, and I said “Anywhere in particular?”

“Anywhere your aunt showed you stuff.”

In that case we might as well find our way out, since nothing further came to mind – and then I recalled her saying the woods had a face. I’d never seen or grasped what she meant, but now I felt it could be anywhere around me. A sense that I might glimpse one, shaped by leaves or bark or the contortions of a fallen tree, distracted me from concentrating on the ill-defined path. Not seeing so much as the hint of a face only intensified the feeling that one was about to reveal itself, perhaps the first of many repetitions of a solitary face. Its imminence felt like an unseen shadow, and despite the sunshine that parched the track yellow I had to shrug off a shiver, as though we were walking through a marsh. At least a marker post ahead established that we were following an official path, except that as we came closer I saw it owed much of its greenness to moss. The post wasn’t as regular as it had looked at a distance, and when I tried to strip away the moss, the stump disintegrated. It hadn’t been painted at all. It might almost have been feigning artificiality, a trick played by the woods. “We need to find a path that’s on the map,” I said.

“I can’t remember what that looked like.” Less hopefully than as a challenge Roy said “Can you?”

While I had only a general impression, I thought the green path had circled left, eventually returning to the car park. The problem was that I had no idea how far back we’d strayed away from it or how we could find it again. Beyond the false marker there wasn’t even a path. The nearest to a track that I could see led into the depths of the forest to our left, and I was about to propose heading for it when Roy said “What’s that?”

I was more nervous than I’d realised. “What are you seeing?”

“Nothing.” Before I could react he said “Listen.”

At first I heard a vast protracted breath – a hot breeze passing through the woods. As the leaves very gradually regained stillness, I wondered when I’d last heard birdsong. Silence as oppressive as the unrelieved verdure settled around us, and I was about to ask Roy what he expected me to hear when I caught the sound. It was a voice, so distant that I had no idea of its gender. I thought it was singing a song, though I couldn’t distinguish a word or even a melody. “Let’s find her,” Roy said.

“We don’t know if that’s the right way. It sounds like the folk festival.”

“I think it’s a radio at someone’s house. Anyway, whoever’s there can help us.”

This surely was an option. I couldn’t understand my hesitation, especially since the voice came from the direction I’d meant to follow through the trees. As we advanced into the forest I felt as if my mind could take in nothing except green. Even the tree trunks were fattened with green moss. I sensed growth progressing all around me, too measured to be visible, although suppose some aspect of it formed into a face? I did my best to focus on the route between the trees and the voice to which it seemed to promise it would lead. More of a tune was audible now, though it sounded as though the performer was searching for one. Every so often I caught a few words I took for a refrain: “Call me my name.” This surely suggested a folk song, which might very well mean it was coming from the festival, but at least that would take us out of the woods. I had no idea how far we’d followed the nominal path when Roy said “Have we done the third mile yet?”

I wished he hadn’t asked. “I hope we won’t have to,” I said.

The idea seemed to let the woods close in. When I looked back the far end of the path was indistinguishable from the trees. In the distance ahead it grew equally impossible to locate. The stillness all around us felt like the imminence of a transformation. We were crossing an elaborate mosaic of fallen leaves, who knew how many years of them, and I remembered my aunt saying there were places where leaves chased you even if there was no wind. Glancing back showed me nothing of the sort, but I could have fancied the path stirred underfoot, as if the leaves were restless. Perhaps I was treading on insects, not an appealing notion. I could have thought the sensation or its source had enlivened the woods, and here came the threat of faces in the trees again, a vision I wished my aunt had never lent me. I felt desperate to grasp the words of the distant song so as to rein in my consciousness, but could still hear only that same phrase: “Call me my name…” As I strove to bring the voice closer it seemed to lurch at me, only to fall silent. I was willing it or anyone to become audible when Roy said “Have we done it?”

I felt almost robbed of words, or nervous of understanding. “What?” I said like someone no more than Roy’s age.

“Aren’t we back? Isn’t that a house?”

I peered where he was pointing. A mass of green beyond the furthest trees looked more solid than foliage, but remoteness could be lending that appearance to a bank of leaves or grass. Even when we halved the distance I was wary of embracing the illusion, and urged a voice to make itself heard. Instead I heard a door creak open, which could be the movement of a tree trunk, even if there was no wind. The sun glinted on a pool of water, though how could a pool be so high in the air? Perhaps it was on top of a ridge. Now I saw it was rectangular and upright, and felt as if the woods had lost their power to confuse my perceptions. The sight beyond the trees was indeed a house, painted an unhelpful green. My aunt’s house stood to its left, and along the fence to the right was the car park.

I made for the entrance and didn’t slow down until both of us were in the car park, from where I gave Third Mile Wood a last look. I saw trees absorbing the sunlight, and no trace of the fancies I appeared to have inherited from my aunt. “Well,” I said, which felt almost like enough, “that was some kind of an adventure.”

“Just the start, dad.”

For once I might have preferred him to sound less enthusiastic. “I’d like to head home now.”

“I didn’t mean today.” Having finished not much of a laugh, Roy said “Let’s see more tomorrow. There’s lots we could.”