BENEATH THE FOREST’S WILTING LEAVES

STEVE TOASE

The forest was bordered as all forests are. Housing estates and roads bounded the trees in place as well as any fence and ditch, and even in the rotting heart of the wood the rumble of cars was as present as any birdsong.

I locked the driver’s door, opened the boot, and passed Ethan his coat. He pushed his arms in, the lining bunching over his fists until I helped guide his fingers back to the air.

He slid his hand into mine and we walked down the metalled path. He leaned into my leg, and I felt him shake. The fear wasn’t from the trees crowding over us, but the bikes tearing past toward a destination we didn’t share. I wasn’t too worried. Once we got between the branches he would let go and I would struggle to call him back.

There was no pattern to where we went, choosing different cut-throughs each time we went into the woods. Making our own maps. I hung back and let him lead the way, watching his coat cut through the foliage, only stopping to check head-height thorns or the signal on my phone.

Where branches overlapped I imagined older forests as my eyes defocussed, and had to remind myself to watch Ethan’s steps. His worlds shaped out of mud and sticks, and the press of bark all around us, did not include me. I checked my phone again for emails that could probably wait, but never seemed to.

“Why are those trees leaning like that?” he said, standing at the edge of my vision. I shivered and pulled my coat closer, checking he was warm enough, but the cold didn’t bother him like it did me.

He stared at a small clearing with a single tree in the centre. Someone had started building a rough shelter by balancing timber against the trunk. We had seen many shelters on our walks, woven together by children we never saw, but never one so early on in its birth.

“It’s a skeleton for a hut,” I said, running a hand over some nearby bark, the moss grazing my hands with dew. Ethan crouched and grasped a nearby piece of timber, staining his palm black.

“Can we build it too?” he asked.

I checked my phone again, a stress reaction, then checked it again to look at the time.

“I don’t think we can. We need to get back to the house.”

“Just a couple of branches,” he said, rooting through the leaf litter, dragging out twigs barely longer than his arm. The stench of rot erupted from the forest floor. In the distance traffic continued to scar the motorway in an unending ribbon of metal.

I relented, because I always did.

“Those aren’t big enough,” I said, taking the sticks from his hand. “Come with me.”

It took me a few moments to get my eye in and spot good timber lying on the ground. Working together, we carried branches across to the already balanced boughs and started making a skirt to bind them together, trampling bluebells in our carelessness.

Hunger stopped our work. We walked back down the path to the car, hand in hand, with an air of contentment.

“We did okay today, didn’t we, Daddy?” Ethan said, words rounded off by tiredness.

“We did okay,” I said, and smiled.

I had time the next day to take him out again. Sarah was on a call which needed near silence in the house. At the edge of the scrub Ethan ran on, the bicycles’ slicking colours not bothering him. His fears often evaporated when bathed in enthusiasm. I followed behind, roped on by his eagerness. Some days the energy I stole from him was the only energy I had.

Amongst the trees, beneath the green tunnel they formed, the air shimmered with birdsong, beautiful and delicate in so many ways, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that every day the forest absorbed more dead, welcoming their bones and gristle below its wilting leaves. I shuddered despite the warmth of the day.

Ethan recognised the track entrance, finding familiarity in the heavy mottled ivy. Waiting for me to catch up, he bounced from one foot to another. I got to him in my own time, just for a moment, and then he ran deeper into the trees along the narrow strip of mud. I followed, keeping him in sight, his red coat glistening through the undergrowth.

He sat in the dirt, dragging decaying leaf stems from underneath his feet, face hidden by his hood.

“What’s wrong?” I said, squatting beside him.

He shook his head, and when I tried to comfort him, shrugged off my arm.

“I can’t make it better if I don’t know.”

Without looking at me, he waved an arm behind him toward the stack of wood against the tree trunk.

I stood and turned, rubbing his scalp through the hood. He pushed my hand away.

“Leave me alone, Dad.”

What I expected to see was the partly built shelter tumbled by some other forest visitor. What I saw was not destruction but construction, new uprights added to the lean-to, woven through with flexible lengths of willow scavenged from elsewhere in the forest. The building was by no means finished, and I could still see where Ethan and I had added our bits. I studied for a moment and called him over.

“Someone’s come in and carried on with the shelter, just like we did.”

“But it’s ours,” he said. I tried to ignore the wobble in his voice.

“Maybe the person who started building here came back. Think of it this way. They’ve saved us some work.”

With kids you don’t need to see their face to know when they’ve changed their mind. His whole shape altered as he took on the idea that we could still add to the shelter, and now it would take us less time.

“Where should we start?” he asked, bounding off into the undergrowth to come back with an armful of windfall.

“Over here,” I said. Together we threaded twigs between the larger branches. Some broke, shattering with brittleness that seemed familiar. Something I felt deep down far too often. Others were softened by recent rain, food for the unseen and microscopic.

We worked well as a team, me and Ethan. He left me to lift in the larger curving branches, while he went off on little missions, piling material by my feet like he was preparing the burning of a heretic.

Once the collected wood was exhausted, we paused for sandwiches and juice, crumbs pale against the mottled forest floor. Ethan tried to balance his cup, watching the sticky liquid spill out of sight as it tipped.

“Do you want some more?” I started unscrewing the flask lid, but he shook his head, staring at the sodden spot between his feet. “Can I go and find more sticks?”

I nodded and poured myself another drink, watching him run off between the saplings, marking his coat with moss and lichen.

“Are these sea creatures?” he shouted.

“Are what sea creatures?” I got to my feet and walked over to where Ethan crouched by the hut entrance.

This was a bit we hadn’t worked on, bark stripped away from the heartwood, then used as binding. Far more solid than anything we’d built. Ethan knelt down, poking something with one of his twigs.

Half buried, it looked like the cap of a mushroom. Only when he hooked it from the dirt could I see it was a shell. He carried it over, waving from side to side on its flexing perch, and dropped it into my hand.

“Snail shell,” I said, turning it over and over. “But no one’s home.”

“Have the birds got it?”

Back when we had a garden, we often found shattered remains of snails lying on the path. “Not birds this time,” I said, turning the spiral over in my hand and examining it.

“Do you think the snail has found another home?” Ethan asked, trying to peer inside.

“Probably,” I said, distracted. Very precise scratches decorated the outer lip, stretching, following the curve out of sight. I held the fragile object up to the light, the thin lines visible as light shone through the now empty exoskeleton.

“Can I take it home? There are plenty here.”

Along the forest floor they crested through the dirt like a pod of whales. We dug them out one by one. All were empty and all were scratched in the same way.

“Can I?”

“Just one,” I said. “Be careful it doesn’t smash in your pocket.”

He smashed the shell before we even reached home, crushed between his car seat and hip. There were tears until I suggested we just pick up another next time we visited the forest.

We visited a couple of times a week after that, each time finding more work done to the hut (as it had now become) and adding our own. On each trip, new objects were left around the entrance; sometimes snail shells, other times feathers or tiny bones left in piles on upturned leaves. I tried to get Ethan to leave them there, but each new discovery was an addition to his “Hut Museum,” a small display, complete with labels and Do Not Touch signs.

The frog, though, the frog was too much.

We had arrived early, parking close and wrapping up warm against the cold. We’d brought some string to tie up the crossbeams. Our weaving had lasted so far, and whoever was our unknown workmate had reinforced their sections with thin lengths of bark.

Ethan and I had a system. For the first half hour we scoured the nearby forest for supplies, and then Ethan slid himself inside the hut, all the time looking for tiny gifts, while I worked outside, where I could stand full height.

After about ten minutes he re-appeared, his gloved hands wrapped around something.

“Do you think they left this for us?”

He opened his hands, and without thinking I knocked the thing inside to the ground. Ethan stepped back shaking, trying not to let me see he was upset.

“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to put my arm around his shoulders. He shrugged me off.

“You broke it,” he said, crouching to stare at the creature.

Though I wasn’t gentle, someone had already broken the amphibian. I crouched beside Ethan and picked it up. Each limb had been pierced with thorns, the stomach cut open and intestines dragged out. Inside something shifted. Trying to control my stomach, I held its ribs and the chest opened like a purse. Inside several slugs slithered over each other as they tried to move in the confined space.

“Will it get better, Daddy? Should we take it home?”

I shook my head and tried to keep it out of his line of sight.

“There’s nothing we can do for it now. Someone’s done a very cruel thing, and we should put this down somewhere we can’t see it.”

I tried to imagine being so calculating to inflict such pain on a creature, and had to suppress the need to be sick again. I couldn’t let Ethan see how much this affected me. I couldn’t let it affect him in the same way.

We carried the frog into the undergrowth and covered it with leaves. I tried to focus on weaving together the next section of the hut, but my heart was not in it, and was relieved when Ethan said he wanted to leave.

I tried to shake the sight of the slugs crushing each other, as they struggled to fit inside the frog’s chest cavity, the sinuous way they moved over each other. When I closed my eyes they were still there, turning into knots of muscle and slime.

We didn’t get back out into the forest for another two weeks. My time with Ethan had evaporated in homework and computer games, until I returned him to his mother at some anonymous service station. Every day I left Sarah sleeping in bed, got up without disturbing her, and went to the woods alone. I always took a different route, but found myself drifting back to the unfinished shelter.

Every time there was a little more done, a few staves woven through, or a handful of leaf-covered branches balanced on top. Never much, almost like whoever was placing them was trying to tempt me out of cover, like a trail of steak left for a dog. I did not take up the bait. It felt wrong to do anything without Ethan there. The building was something we worked on together, and I couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm on my own.

I sat in the motorway services’ restaurant drinking coffee that was more scorch than flavour. Ethan came in first, his mother walking behind. I watched him sit down, reached in my bag for a bottle of water, and pushed it over the table to him.

“Ethan says you’ve been getting out to the woods with him,” his mother said.

I nodded.

“Says you’ve been building something. A hut.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She straightened up and glanced back to the carpark.

“Good to hear. Some fresh air will do you both good.”

With a neat step, she turned away from me and walked toward the door.

“Say hello to Sarah,” she said, but I ignored it.

Back at the apartment, we were barely into the door when Ethan was pulling on his boots, still coated with fine mud from his last visit.

“It’s too late,” I said, taking off my own shoes.

“Just for a little bit. We don’t have to do much. I just want to see that it’s still there.”

Sarah popped her head around the corner from her office.

“Hi Ethan,” she said, smiling. “Take him. I’ve got another couple of hours I really need to get done, and then we can order pizza when you get back.”

Back in the car I spread newspaper over the footwell, and then helped him climb in, buckling the child-seat belts across. Not an easy task while he refused to sit still.

“Settle down, otherwise we’ll just go straight back into the house.”

He let me thread his arms through the straps, and clip him in place.

At the forest I unfastened him once more, and all the stored energy erupted at once. I locked the car fast and tried to keep up. Amongst the leaves and brambles I lost sight of him more than once, panic frosting my lungs, until I glimpsed him in the gaps the forest left for us. Taking a shortcut I finally caught up with him, and busied myself collecting branches too heavy for him to lift, then pausing to help him lift the ones he’d set his heart on.

Our unknown building partner had done little since the last time I checked, but enough for Ethan to notice.

“They’ve been very busy,” Ethan said. “That wasn’t made when I last visited. Neither was that.” He carried on, picking out every single improvement and change since he last stayed with me.

We worked until the light faded, then walked back to the car, and after the short drive, I carried him up the stairs, still asleep, laid him on his bed, and took off his boots.

“Save his pizza until morning,” I said to Sarah. “But I’ll have mine now.”

Ethan jumped onto the bed far too early, knee catching me in the ribs.

“Can we go now, Daddy? I’m ready to go and do more.”

“It’s six a.m., Ethan. Go back to bed.”

“Nice and early. No one else will be in the woods.”

I rolled over to try to get some support from Sarah, but she was turned away, asleep or ignoring.

He grabbed my arm and pantomimed dragging me out of bed. I could have sent him away, lost my temper, but I was already awake. Instead I let myself be prised from the last of my sleep, grabbed coffee, and then bundled him into the car.

The shelter had changed. Where our unknown collaborator had built their sections, the wood was now obscured by smears of what at first seemed to be white mud.

I watched Ethan run up and peer close.

“What is that?”

I ran a hand over the rippled surface.

“It’s some kind of daub. A very ancient way of stopping the wind and rain getting inside,” I said, and winced as something snagged my skin. At first I thought it was one of the pieces of straw binding the mud together, or the uneven surface. Then I saw the tiny bones embedded within the mixture, sharp spurs protruding out. In the forest’s gloom I struggled to see what animal they came from. Some curved around like a tail or serpent. Others were grouped together like any pattern the worker had in mind had slid apart as the mixture settled between the timber.

“Can we do some?” Ethan said. He reached out to copy me, and I grabbed his wrist. A look of hurt was there for a moment, then gone.

“We don’t have anything we need to do this. We need water, mud, some straw,” I said, trying to explain.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging, his coat coming half off in the process. “I’ll go and find some wood instead.”

He almost knocked me off my feet when he ran back up.

“I’ve found it,” he said, the words thinned by his breathlessness. “I’ve found it.”

Unsure what “it” was, and worried to let him investigate further by himself, I allowed myself to be dragged away.

“Look,” he said.

If the leaves hadn’t been sodden there would have been no sign of the spring beneath. A few feet away someone had dug into the waterlogged ground, as if carving out a shallow grave. Instead they’d scraped out wet clay, beside it a pile of blackened straw.

“Can we do some?” Ethan said.

I stared at the spring and shuddered, glancing up to see if the sun was still high.

“Someone else has started working here. We can’t really change what they’ve started.”

“But we did when we started making the shelter better. You didn’t say no then. You just don’t want to get dirty.”

I shook my head, trying to think of another reason to discourage him.

“We don’t have anything to carry the clay in, or to mix in the straw.”

“You have loads of old buckets at home. Please, can we go and get two? We’ll only need two. You can carry one, and I can carry one. I promise not to spill anything.”

I let myself be persuaded as I always did. He asked whether he could stay at the shelter until I got back, and whinged when I said no, that high-pitched whinge that cuts right through.

“We can go back and stay, or go back and come out again. Your choice,” I said, grabbing his wrist and starting back to the car. After the first couple of steps he fell in behind me and I let go.

We drove back to the apartment, and rummaged in the garage, Ethan finding the buckets and tipping plaster-encrusted tools onto the concrete floor in his enthusiasm to haul them back to the car. I picked up the old tools and searched for a spade, throwing both in the boot, and strapping him back in his car seat to make the short journey back.

The approach to the shelter was covered in snail shells, hundreds of them, all lying on their side, spiral up to the sky. I grabbed Ethan’s shoulder to stop him crushing them and knelt to pick the nearest one up.

Bones inside the shell rattled out into my palm. I had no way to identify them, just another one of the dead buried in the woods. A frog or mouse that found a grave beneath the fungal rot.

Ethan pushed past me and picked up handfuls, dropping them into one of the buckets, more bones rattling out as they fell upon each other. A container filled with two slaughtered populations. The awareness of what that meant crept in slowly. I hid my disquiet and fed off Ethan’s enthusiasm instead.

I dug, while Ethan used his bare hands to scrape balls of clay into the bucket. With dirty hands he smeared lines under his eyes and down the centre of his forehead. Using the other bucket, I collected water from the spring, not worrying how many beetle-infested leaves I caught up, and then poured it over the lumps of clay. Both of us slid our fingers into the unkempt straw and dropped it into the bucket, watching as it sank below the surface, leaving specks of mould floating upon the surface.

Before we started the next stage I laid out the rules to Ethan. We only work on the parts of the shelter we’d built. I’d put the daub on, and he could smear it in place. When I said it was time to stop, we stopped. Nodding so hard I thought his head might fall off, he stepped back and let me start.

I noticed him flagging before I noticed the light failing. All through the afternoon, we worked in silence carrying bucket after bucket of daub to the shelter and smearing over the timber. I knew we were only playacting at skills we did not have, but in the silence I felt a companionship I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt with him before. By the time I realised how late it was, he had no more energy to walk back to the car and I carried him in my arms, letting him fall asleep against my shoulder.

Back at the flat I went into his bedroom, walking quietly so I didn’t disturb his sleep. Looked at his Hut Museum. The small snail shell scraped clean alongside the shattered frog bones and the broken snake vertebrae arranged like gaming counters.

We went back the next two days, starting after breakfast and working until teatime, until he slumped to the forest floor exhausted. Each day there were more gifts spread across the leaf litter, scraped out shells stuffed with moss, or animal bones arranged in intricate designs that broke up when we stood on them, unseen in the forest floor. I didn’t draw attention to them, and neither did Ethan, though I saw him notice them, his gaze flicking over the patterns, and filing away the memory for future.

At the end of the third day, we sat down with our backs against a nearby tree and shared a small packed lunch, dividing the sandwiches between us. I knew the question was coming, in the silence between us and the expressions flickering across his face.

“Daddy? Can we camp out here? We can put a blanket across the front of the doorway, and the plaster on the wood will keep the wind out.”

“I’m not sure, Ethan,” I said, taking a sip of coffee from the flask cup. “It gets very cold at night.”

“But you’ve got those really warm sleeping bags and it would only be for one night.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Sarah said when we got back home. “It’s only for one night, and you can always sleep in the car if it gets too cold.”

“I won’t get any sleep if I do,” I said, trying to talk her out of talking me into it.

“You won’t get any peace if you don’t,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s going back to his mum soon.”

Sarah’s gaze flicked behind me. I didn’t need to turn around to see him. Sarah’s expression said it all.

“Well done,” she said, and ran out of the room to find where he had hid himself.

He packed too much into the car, the rear window obscured by bedding and supplies, but I wasn’t allowed to say no after the previous day’s upset. We drove in silence, him smiling and me not. Once parked, I grabbed as many things as I could, but not everything designated essential by him, and we walked in silence into the woods.

Someone had come during the last twenty-four hours and finished the hut, smoothing out the last of the plaster, and decorating the roof with what looked from a distance like pink garlands. Ethan ran up and dragged one down, pulling as it snagged on some bark.

“This is wet,” he said, letting go.

The intestines were fresh and still full, stinking with waste and undigested food. I sent Ethan to collect firewood while I tore them away, dropping them into a bag I’d brought for rubbish.

“What are they?” he said.

I sat down and stacked the wood in front of the hut, explaining as I worked.

“Do you think the animals they came from were okay?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t think so. I think they’ve probably been eaten now.”

He went silent and stayed that way for a long time. I busied myself laying the sleeping bags out and tying torches to the ceiling, my mobile phone hidden under my pillow, to give me something to read if he ever went to sleep. As night fell we sat around the fire listening to the forest wake and watching the flames. We didn’t talk much. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but I realised how little I knew about my son. How little I’d taken the effort to find out. It’s not that information was hidden from me. I’m sure if I’d asked his mother she’d have told me who his best friend was, or which homework he struggled with, but in those moments around the fire I realised how much of a gulf there was between the two of us.

We stayed awake too late. He told me stories he thought were either funny or scary, and were neither. When I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly midnight I insisted he go and lie down, expecting him to still be awake when I too lay down.

Walking around the small clearing I tried to see between the trees. The night was another creature draped over the forest’s branches, unknowable and impenetrable. I tried using the torch to see further. A slight mist in the air walled the beam in so I saw less than without it.

Not wanting to wander too far, I walked back to the shelter, climbed into the sleeping bag, and turned over to go to sleep, Ethan lying turned from me, his feet just catching my bag as I settled down.

When I woke I checked my phone to see what time it was. Barely past two in the morning. The forest sounded full of more noise than during the day. Every sound was warped and twisted by the stillness and my imagination. I thought I heard crackling and I glanced outside to check the fire was out. Apart from a few glowing embers the night was cold and forgotten.

Though I tried not to, I soon fell asleep again, waking only when Ethan’s knee hit me in the ribs. His eyelids undulated as if deep in dream, but something about the way his chest moved told me he was awake.

“Open your eyes,” I said, reaching out to stroke his face to gently ease him back to the world.

The light changed a touch and I saw delicate fronds of moss stuck to his lashes. He grabbed my arm, thorns embedded in his palm snagging my skin. I reached up for him, but my arms did not move. I tried to untangle them from the sleeping bag, the inside damp from sweat and the forest floor. Something I could not see snagged my ankle and I felt a movement against the back of my knee. Outside, the blanket door was dragged aside, and hands damp as rotten wood reached in. The arms were endless, knotted with bindweed and mould, dripping softened bark across my sleeping bag. There was no body beyond I could see. The fingers turned upwards, sensing the air. Waiting for something to change. I tried to shake Ethan awake but sleep held him too tight.

The hands tore through my sleeping bag, the nylon stuffing looking far too white and artificial caught on the broken nails. I felt one bark-covered fist press against my throat, pinning me to the ground. The second hand ran across my cheek and my lips, almost a caress, and then slowly but surely prised away my left eye.

I wish I could say I blacked out then, and that the pain saved me from watching. The hands lost interest in me. I tried to get up, fight my way out of the sleeping bag. The more I struggled the more I was clutched by the soil and sticks below me. The hand was now reaching toward Ethan, clasping his fingers and gently lifting him to his feet. I watched his fingers grasp the hand back, and even through all my pain, and panic, and anger, the jealousy still appeared.

Ethan stood, his sleeping bag falling away, even as mine cocooned me to the ground. With no way to move I tried shouting, not caring who heard me as long as Ethan did. The second hand reached for my mouth then, forced fingers between my teeth and, with fingernails sharp as blackthorn, tore several holes through my tongue. My mouth filled with blood, drowning any words I still had.

There was no violence toward Ethan, barely any coercion, just the gentlest of persuasion and my son was gone, and I was alone.

When I woke, the entrance was sealed over, hazel staves woven into each other, turning a door into a wall. I searched the shelter for weaknesses, for places rotten, where softened wood had been used. Places I could shatter. Slowly but surely I snapped my way out.

They don’t believe me, the lawyers, the judges. Sarah. They’re sure I left him amongst the dead, lying beneath the forest’s wilting leaves. Search in my head for answers I don’t have. I run my hands over the plastered walls of the cell, wary of snagging myself on bones. If the conditions are right I can smell the forest on the wind, and in the distance I hear the rumble of cars, as present as any birdsong.