Come Home
Crack
I’m confused when I open my eyes. Sun ripples through a mottle of green but as I squint, I realise that it’s canopy, not ocean. That was just a dream – swimming, or perhaps flying.
Crack
Something is under the trees with me. Something close and loud.
Crack
I roll over to see that an oddly proportioned person is beating through the scrub. No, not odd, just a child. It’s confusing looking upside down.
The child curls shoulders inward to worm further into the thicket and strikes a trunk steps away from where I lie, apparently oblivious to me. Their weapon is a rotten branch, disintegrating with its fury.
I try to make myself smaller. It’s dim in here, my coat is a dark green, but if it comes any closer it’ll surely see me. What would happen then? It might just stare or ask a nonchalant question. Some kids wouldn’t realise that there’s anything out of the ordinary for a bald girl to be curled up alone in a hedge. But what if it screamed for an adult? If I move now, I’m bound to draw attention.
The child starts to kick the trunk, foot slamming in time with the branch. A huff escapes him with every blow, something between anger and laughter. Perhaps if I stay very still I’ll escape notice.
There’s movement close to my face – the malleable body of a caterpillar bunching its way up a bramble.
‘Tod!’ The shout falls limp in the muggy air. ‘Tod!’
Tod, for that must be the child’s name, sticks his tongue between his lips, focusing hard on not hearing.
‘TOD!’
I catch the whites of rolling eyes as he slashes out one more time, then wriggles backwards out of the shrub.
‘You’re so childish.’ A new voice, nasal with pleasure. A sibling?
I listen to their bickering fade across the park, my body shuddering only now the danger is over.
It seems absurd that I should have once been as small as that child, as inchoate. Even the memories of those years feel fabricated. I have an awareness of something, but it feels more myth than memory; a time when it was always summer and people were a hundred feet tall. To place myself alongside that girl, any comparison is fickle. I look in on her through smudged glass. Me and yet not.
It’s in this way I remember the weekends my family would go walking, through forests; over hills; along the Levels, so perfectly flat that they seemed to stretch farther than the real world into wild, unbounded time. I remember Dad teaching me silly songs to march to; or showing me how to focus his DSLR, holding it for me as I placed my eye to its window. I remember him chasing me along paths, snapping his arms in the pretence of a crocodile, how, when I was tired, he would hoist me to his shoulders where my hair could brush the sky.
But Mum? The memories of her are more nebulous, not so much a personality as a feeling – the reassurance that should I ever look back she would be there, steady blue eyes above a ready smile. If Dad was the weather that shaped me, Mum was the earth into which my roots spread.
Yet there is one memory in which she has shape.
My red wellies churned up white dust, outpacing the clunk of Dad’s boots, so fast that any second the horizon must fall within in my outstretched hands.
But Dad was calling, we had to slow down, let Mum catch up, she couldn’t run like us. Never rush her, never tug. She trudged with the weight of worlds. And so we continued like this, sprint then stop, sprint; her sturdy form waxing and waning behind us like the pull of the moon.
Yet when the shout came, it was hers.
Otters!
I raced back, almost stumbling in my excitement, only to arrive and find her feet pointing at a pile of brown mud. Poo?
Otter scat, she explained.
The disappointment was severe. Knowing that there were otters here was not enough. I wanted to stroke their velvet bodies with a look; to feel the touch of the dark eyes that teased from our TV screen. A need close to hunger.
Yet Dad wouldn’t even allow that it was the right type of faeces. Blotches broke out in Mum’s cheeks as he pressed home that there weren’t any more otters left in England, that there are barely any wild otters left anywhere.
The argument ricocheted over my head, Mum not yielding, Dad repeating ‘They’re dead, poisoned, gone’, until I started to cry. Mum wrapped her arms around me, though her eyes remained narrowed on the scat. She didn’t care for whatever evidence Dad could lay at her feet, she believed in the otters.
Is that why I remember that day? The senselessness of her thinking? There are never definitive beginnings to such things, but it was a start, and without such markers, where would we be?
I haven’t been back to the Levels for years. It’s almost always flooded now, that wild horizon swallowed in the reflection of sky.
Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to look back? When I open my mind’s eye, I find myself submerged in brown, turgid waters.