Adah followed through on her promise. We did climb trees.
She was slightly taller and stronger than I was, so she helped give me a lift up. And then I was in, climbing through the branches, although they started to creak a bit too much the nearer I got to the top. I thought I’d get an amazing view from up there, but no – there were just loads of leaves from all the other trees, all of them tightly packed next to each other. It was as if down on the ground wasn’t the real forest, just a dress rehearsal for the main stuff up in the skies.
‘What’s it like?’ Adah shouted up to me.
‘A lot of leaves,’ I answered. ‘Although some of them look as if they’re going to fall pretty soon.’
‘That’s because it’s autumn,’ she said, as if this was a really interesting piece of news I wouldn’t have thought of myself.
She came to join me eventually, and we spent a little while talking about how awful our family members were.
‘My aunt can be so mean. Sometimes she throws bottles at my head. Glass ones. They never hit me, of course. She’s too drunk to be able to aim properly. But once one smashed just above my head and one of the pieces cut me quite badly. I’ve still got a mark on my shoulder.’ She pulled at her jumper to expose a bit of flesh. Along the top line of her shoulder I could indeed see a thin red mark. ‘I sometimes wonder if there’s any glass still in it. It itches quite a lot, and sometimes if I press down on it I get this weird tingly sort of pain that doesn’t go away for a bit.’
‘Couldn’t you see a doctor?’ I ask.
She looked at me as if I was stupid, but didn’t say anything.
We sat for a bit in silence, playing with leaves, picking them off the branches, shredding their dry stems, watching them float down one by one.
A rustling and shaking made us both jump.
‘What is that?’ I shrieked, and Adah looked scared too for a second, then started to laugh.
‘It’s only Levi. Look!’ She pointed down. I saw him instantly, darting about near the trunk of the tree, running back and then thudding his weight against it, causing the whole thing to shake worryingly.
‘Stop it, you degenerate!’ Adah shrieked down.
‘What did you call him?’ I asked, watching the boy stop what he was doing and look up, grinning. He had a strange face – one that might look nice and friendly on someone else, but on him it looked wicked and full of mischief. He had deep, hazel eyes and frighteningly white teeth.
‘I called him a DEGENERATE.’ She shouted the last word down at him.
‘What the fuck you on about?’ Levi called up.
‘It’s what my aunt calls him,’ Adah said. ‘Which I think is a bit rich, considering she spends most of her time glugging from a vodka bottle.’
Levi was positioning himself on the lower branch, preparing to climb.
‘Er, no, I don’t think so. We don’t want any dodgy teenage boys up here,’ Adah said with conviction, although I could tell she wasn’t really that annoyed. When he carried on climbing, she even moved further up the branch she was resting on so he had space to haul himself up and sit on. Once he’d settled, he turned his gaze on me.
‘So, girlies. What’s the game, then?’
Adah tutted. ‘There is no game,’ she said, scornfully. ‘We were talking before you rudely interrupted us.’
He looked at her blankly. ‘I’m not rude.’
‘You are. We were having a private conversation and you started sticking your oar in. Or your foot,’ she said, giving his dirty trainer a tap, since it was pushing up against her jeans.
‘I wonder if you girls are secretly plotting,’ he said. ‘Plotting to take over the forest. Seize it as your own territory.’
Adah let out another tut and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s already our territory. Although as I’ve already explained to Kitty, it actually belongs to Jadis, Queen of the Woods, whose spirit still floats on the wind and whispers on the river.’
He looked disbelieving. ‘Surely it would make more sense to float on a river and whisper on a wind, not the other way around?’
Adah turned to me and made a can-you-believe-his-cheek sort of face. ‘He thinks he’s so clever,’ she said. ‘Just wait until the Day of Judgement comes. He’ll be sorry then.’
‘Why will I be sorry?’ He gave me a smile then, as if he were letting me in on a game he was playing.
‘Because naughty boys like you will get what’s coming for them.’
‘What have I got coming for me? What have I done wrong?’
Adah made a face as if she was deciding what she wanted to say. Then she started scratching the tree bark with her fingers and, not looking at him, said, ‘I’ve seen what you do in the wood shed.’
‘What do I do in the wood shed?’ There was something hard and not that nice about his grin; it was almost becoming a smirk.
Adah looked up at him. ‘Things. Nasty things. In the wood shed.’
Levi frowned at her, then turned to me.
‘So, who the fuck are you then?’
His use of bad words made me worried – I wouldn’t normally want to be in a tree with someone who said words like that so easily – but I decided to ignore it for the moment and instead said to him: ‘None of your business.’
He laughed. ‘It is my business. If you’re in my forest.’
‘I’ve told you,’ Adah said, sounding impatient. ‘It isn’t your forest. It belongs to—’
‘The wicked old witch who died in the cottage, yeah yeah, I know,’ he said, batting away Adah’s words with a flick of his hand. ‘I’m more interested in the right here and the right now. And in the now, this is my forest, and what I say goes. And when there’s a stranger – some new blood – wandering in the wild, I want to know about it.’
He said all this while staring at me. I matched his gaze.
‘My name is Kitty.’
‘Kitty? Kitty?’ He said it like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. ‘What type of name is that? Kitty? Surely your parents didn’t call you that?’
‘Oh clear off, Levi. You’ve got the weirdest name of anyone I know.’
‘At least mine’s a real fucking name. Her one’s like something you’d name a furry animal. Or an old lady.’
‘Old ladies start off as little girls. Or haven’t they taught you that at school yet?’
He sniffed loudly and then reached for something in his pocket. I was startled to see him draw out a packet of cigarettes. Dad used to smoke, but he hadn’t for years, and even my memories of him smoking had faded into a memory. But the smell of it, as he lit one and breathed out, filling the leafy air with a grey haze, took me back to when I was very young, when I would play on the swings and Dad would smoke on the bench nearby. Mum used to say he’d smoke there to try and ‘distance himself from the herd’, whatever that meant. I thought it was because most of the other kids were at the playground with their mums, so if Dad took me, I think he felt left out of the all-female parents’ gang. They’d all stand around chatting and he would feel awkward on his own. Smoking gave him something to do.
‘I can’t be dealing with school right now. I got real things to cope with.’
Adah let out a disbelieving splutter. ‘Like what? What on earth would you have to cope with?’
He let out a stream of smoke quickly, looking cross. ‘Don’t you carry on with none of your cheek, young missy. I got things, you know. Real things. I’m trying to get some cash quickly so I can leave this place. Fuck off back to Doncaster where I was born.’
Adah was still looking at him with disdain, shaking her head and smirking a similar smirk to his. ‘And how are you going to do that? Sprout wings and fly? And what about your foster parents?’
He let out a sharp bark of a laugh. ‘If anyone could sprout fucking wings I bet it could be me. But no, I’m going to buy a motor. And anyway, them lot don’t care. They’re having a baby of their own. Didn’t think they could, before, but now they’re all obsessed with that shit – buying prams and all. It’s like I’m not there. I stay out all night in my cabin and nobody gives a fuck. As soon as I’ve got my motor, I’m gone.’
It took me a few seconds to realise he meant a car.
‘You’ll never afford it,’ Adah said with confidence. ‘Bet you can’t. Bet you die before you’re able to afford one.’
‘Bet I don’t.’
‘Bet you do. You can’t drive at your age. And where you going to get the money from anyway?’
‘I have my ways.’
The sentence sat quietly between us for a minute, then Levi turned to me and said, ‘Adah’s right, though. About your cottage. I don’t know about an old woman, but there’s something … I don’t know … weird about it.’
Adah scoffed, ‘Something weird. Don’t be ridiculous.’
Levi looked highly displeased. ‘It was you who fucking started it with your strange talk. I’m just agreeing. I think there’s something fucked about the place. Something not right.’
Adah twisted her mouth a bit, as if she were considering his reasoning. ‘Like when you have a rabbit caught in a trap and it’s broken its leg and it just won’t die,’ Adah said, nodding slowly.
‘Who said anything about rabbits?’ Levi muttered.
‘I think I want to go home now,’ I said. The image Adah had created of a struggling rabbit, unable to walk from a broken limb, had disturbed me beyond comfort. I didn’t want to go back to the house. I didn’t want to walk through the woods for the rest of the day. But I knew I couldn’t stay in this tree listening to these two freaks bickering on about things that upset me for hours on end.
‘Oh no, don’t go,’ Adah said. ‘We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to make out that your house is bad or anything. Levi was just being silly.’ She kicked the boy in the shin and, although he still looked grumpy, he nodded immediately.
‘See! Everything’s fine. Let’s stay and count the leaves.’
I shook my head, my arms reaching out to pull myself from the little area of trunk I’d been sitting on. The bark scratched my ankle as I slid my feet out and tried to stand.
‘Careful, you’ll knock us both to our deaths!’ Adah protested.
‘I’d quite like to die,’ muttered Levi. ‘Sooner rather than later.’
‘I just need to get out,’ I said. I tried to get myself into a position where I could lower my legs down whilst holding on to a branch with my arms, but immediately I felt my shoes slip and I was clawing at the tree with both hands, trying not to fall.
‘Hold on, I got ya,’ Levi said. He helped me back up and I sat on the middle bit of the trunk, panting and trying not to cry.
‘Right, if we’re really getting down, I’ll go first and help you two girlies down after.’
Adah tutted. ‘Thinks he’s a big strong man, doesn’t he, Kitty?’
I decided not to point out that he might well have just saved my life, and nodded, meekly.
Levi clambered down effortlessly to the ground and then called up. ‘OK, then. Who’s first?’
‘You go first,’ Adah said. ‘I’ll hold your hand until he’s got your other half.’
She did as she promised, and within seconds, I was being helped down from above and below until each foot one by one made it to the damp, leaf-strewn floor of the forest.
Then he went to help Adah down, but came up against her protestations of ‘I can bloody well do it myself, little boy!’
‘Little boy? I’m like four years older than you! Or more!’
Adah tutted loudly, but accepted Levi’s hand. He helped her down the last few unevenly placed branches so that all three of us were finally back on the ground, as nature intended.
‘Do you want to go home?’ Adah asked gently, looking at me with kind eyes. I had the mild sense that I’d become the child of two parents; Adah and Levi. I wasn’t sure I was a fan of this arrangement, so I shook my head. ‘I’m fine. I just wanted to be on the ground.’
‘Well then,’ Adah said, ‘I think we should explore young Levi’s hideaway.’
‘What!’ he barked, looking affronted.
‘Yes. Let’s do it. Let’s go to the wood shed.’ Adah nodded as she said it, and folded her arms to make clear that, to her, a decision had been made.
I looked at Levi, who was kicking bits of twig and leaf up with the tips of his trainers. ‘Will there be spiders?’ I asked.
Levi looked up quickly. ‘Yes. Yes there will be. Lots.’
Adah laughed. ‘I think Lev’s trying to put you off, Kitty. He doesn’t know that spiders are your friends.’
The boy looked sullen again.
‘All right,’ I nodded, folding my arms like Adah. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go to the wood shed.’