Chapter Fifteen
“Once upon a time, long ago, people didn’t die but instead they shed their skin, like a snake.”
“What’s a shed of skin?” asked Billy.
“It means the skin peels off,” I said.
“Urgh! Why?”
“A snake sheds his skin so he can grow a new one.”
“Don’t want a snake story!”
“Hold my hand if you’re scared.”
“So one day, a long time ago, when people didn’t die but shed their skin like snakes, a mother told her children that soon she would shed her skin. But the children started crying. Children don’t like things to change, you see. They get frightened. And these children cried and cried so much that their tears kept their mother’s skin moist so it didn’t shed. And every time her skin started peeling, they all cried over it. This went on for many years. But one day, the sun saw what this mummy was doing. The sun got very angry, because she has to be brave and leave her children of the earth all alone every night. She thought this mummy was cheating. So the sun shone as hard as she could on the mother’s skin, and this time, when her skin parched and cracked, the children’s tears made no difference. This time, her skin didn’t just shed—it wrinkled up like a walnut, and she died. And ever since then, people have to die and can’t come back to the earth ever again.”
There was a long silence in the tent.
I probably should have stuck to The Gruffalo. But I wasn’t sure they would have swallowed a plucky-little-underdog story. I was swaddled in the limbs of my three children. Maggie’s face brushed hot and soft against my shoulder as she turned it up to me.
“Is that story true, Mummy?”
“No. It’s a myth. My nanny told me that story a long time ago when I was feeling sad. Because my friend died.”
“Why did your friend die?” Charlie, of course, wanted hard details.
“He caught a disease called malaria.” I said. “You get it from—”
“Mosquitoes.”
“That’s right. But let’s not talk about that now.”
“Are you feeling sad?” Maggie asked.
“Very sad. What about you?”
“I’m very sad, too. And so are Billy and Charlie. And him.”
The Lost Boy gave a little moan of agreement, no louder than a bird’s sigh. But we all turned to him: it felt like a breakthrough.
“Do you want to come and sit with us?” I asked.
When he didn’t answer, I disentangled myself and scooted across the tent on my bottom.
“You can come and sit closer if you like. You must be very scared.”
He faced the back of the tent. His take-everything-in eyes were almost covered by a sweep of glossy hair. I scooted closer.
“Why don’t you tell us your name, hey? Can you tell us?”
He braced his shoulders up round his ears.
“It’s okay. We just want to help—” I laid a hand on his arm; with a swinish cry, he writhed out of my grip and clamped his teeth down on my wrist. Then he was up and floundering over mattresses to escape the tent into the dark. Maggie seized his gray blanket and raced after him. In the torchlight, I saw a perfect red crescent embossed on my skin.
I followed. As though she could follow his scent, Maggie dashed through the darkness toward the yurt and almost collided with the Lost Boy as he shot back out again, still making the same piglet noise, and we all chased him down the slope, where he scurried on his belly under Joni’s car. Maggie bent down and held out his blanket. A skinny wrist emerged and drew it out of her hand.
She nodded once, satisfied. “He just needs his blankie.” And they all turned back to the camp, leaving me in the dark, alone once more with the muttering trees.
The second grave was tougher than the first. The ground was too wet. It rained just enough for pools to form as I dug, but not so hard that I could be excused. I lifted my head to let the water wash mud from my eyes. When I looked back down, the hole was full of leaves, floating like empty lifeboats.
Where is Lola? I closed my eyes for a moment and hoped that she at least had shelter from this rain. That it had driven her into one of the barns along Joni’s latest route, so she would find her this time.
The kids sat on the tree line beneath a tarpaulin bivouac that Charlie had mastered from his survival manual. Huddled in the glow of an oil lamp, they fed themselves beans from the tin and drank cans of sticky pop. As I worked, I glanced up to check on them. Each glimpse of my children gave me a frisson of angst in the gut, like passing a shrine on a mountain road. This grave could have been for one of them.
I hauled sodden soil until the hole was almost knee-deep. But it wasn’t enough. I brought the pickax down again and again, and every movement cauterized my aching shoulders. Sometime later the grave was thigh-deep. I scooped loose soil away with the metal bowl I was using in lieu of the broken shovel, throwing it onto the grass, sitting for a moment to rest my thighs while bailing out. The hole still wasn’t deep enough, but my wrists were so weakened, I could hardly lift a full bowl of earth. A sob broke over me as I stood on burning legs to prize the pickax out of the mud again and haul it onto my shoulder. I spread my feet apart for balance, and they slapped into water. No, not yet—I had to go deeper. It wasn’t deep enough. Above me, yellow lightning strobed inside the clouds. The sky growled an immediate response. The pickax slipped from my numbing hands and slapped into the wet mud. Maybe I had done enough. “Thank you,” I whispered to the storm. And gathered my tools from the grave.
I carried the sleeping children one by one in juddering arms to the camp. The treetops thrashed in ecstasy at the high wind, and moments later a wall of water fell from the sky. Horatio darted inside our tent for cover. I ripped off my wet clothes and zipped us inside our cave, then reached up to extinguish the hanging lamp. My fingers fluttered around the dial like a moth. I stopped. The darkness was a hot breath against the scorched muscles of my neck.
I unhooked the lamp and unzipped the door again, stepping back out into cold rain. My bare feet splashed across to the food tent. I adjusted the light so it would burn for as long as possible, stood it on a chair next to Peter. He couldn’t lie alone in the dark.
In the steaming light of morning, I inspected a food parcel that had been left outside our tent. A sprawling note informed me that our benefactor intended to “clear out before the end of the day following the sighting of individuals in a helicopter who failed to identify themselves.” He said he thought we could make use of the perishable food items he’d delivered. Plus he had additional news, he’d written in an enigmatic postscript, which he could explain if I’d come to his dell.
If he’d found out where the helicopters came from or where we should go for help, why didn’t he just write it down? I cursed the prissy old fart, but knew I’d be too intrigued to let it go.
First things first, though: we needed food, and then Lola. He’d left us a dozen eggs, fresh tomatoes, and newly baked buns, as well as some tins of food. I sniffed the buns, checking for any whiff of contaminant, but my stomach grumbled at my cynicism. I broke one open and breathed in its warmth. The kids piled out of the tent and fell on the bread. Charlie sunk his teeth into a tomato and chewed with his eyes closed and red juice on his chin. It must have been days since we’d eaten anything fresh. Even Joni’s watercress might have tempted me now. I lit the stove to cook up the eggs.
While I cooked and we ate, I started a game to forestall the inevitable onslaught of questions. “We went to the supermarket and we bought . . . smoked salmon and gravlax sauce.”
Charlie picked up the thread: “We went to the supermarket and we bought smoked salmon and Galaxy sauce and big juicy sausages.”
“Smokey Simon and Galaxy sauce and big juicy sausages and Oreos,” said Billy.
“Smokey salmon and Galaxy sauce and big juicy sausages and no Oreos because we’ve already got some so that’s just stupid and chicken nuggets,” said Maggie. We waited for the Lost Boy, but all that passed his lips was scrambled egg.
“We’ll get all those things,” I said after a while, “and he can pick something yummy for himself.”
“And Peter,” said Maggie, “can we get something yummy for Peter, too?”
I was saved from answering because the flap of the yurt opened, and Joni slipped out. She must have been out most of the night; I never heard her get back.
“Good morning, Auntie Joni,” the kids chorused.
Without looking our way, she ducked behind the tent toward the latrine.
“What’s the matter with Auntie Joni?” asked Charlie. “Is she impressed?”
“Depressed.” I dished up more eggs. “She’s feeling bad about Peter. And she’s very tired. Eat up, we’ve got a big day today.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to get Lola and then find somewhere nice to live.”
I took Joni’s plate and carried it into the yurt. The place seemed massive now that we had all cleared out, leaving only Joni’s jumble in the corner, which was heaped up as though she were still hunched inside. I made the bed, straightening the blankets and putting her pillow back together: a bundle of Lola’s T-shirts wrapped inside Lola’s black jumper. I pressed it to my face, but it only smelled of forest. The canvas flap moved behind me, and I dropped the pillow onto the mattress, bending to fiddle with the plate and mug instead.
Joni brushed past me and flopped onto the mattress, rolling away to the side, her limbs folded together like the fingers in a fist.
“I brought you some breakfast. There’s eggs and tomatoes and fresh bread.”
She drew her knees to her chest, fetal.
“Are you hungry? You must be hungry.”
Her neglected hair spread off the mattress. I hunkered down and picked up a chunk that was twisting around itself, starting to dreadlock. It was messy-beautiful, like the undergrowth that coated the huge tree Peter had climbed in the forest on the first day.
“I wish I’d believed Peter when he saw those fires,” I said. “Given him the benefit of the doubt. It wouldn’t have killed me to listen to him.”
Joni humphed.
“What?”
“It would have killed you. We would have gone out and got infected. That’s what kills me about you, Marlene. Even when you’re acting like a piece a shit, you still come out smelling like a rose.”
“I’m sorry, Joni. I just came in to give you some breakfast. And say that we’re having a funeral for Peter today. You were right about that: it’s an important ritual. We need to do it.”
She didn’t reply.
“And I also wanted to say, for the record—you did the right thing. For Peter. There was nothing we could have done for him. Except . . . wait. I can’t begin to imagine how awful it must have been, Joni, but it was brave. Merciful, even.”
Joni heaved herself over to face my way. I reached out to deliver a gesture, a hand on the shoulder or some other expression of support like she might offer. But her eyes burnt red, and my hand hung in the air between us.
“The angel of death,” she said, her voice bumping along the ground to reach me. “Get out of my tent and keep your fricking kids out, too.”
The ashes were sodden from the downpour. We dropped them in sloppy, gray lumps as we trod the path from the camp to the field. The sun streamed down. For a second, it graced our heads while the green grass washed our feet. But then the tender moment passed, and we trudged to the hole in the earth, next to the lumpy soil of the first grave, which had been washed away into a cowpatty mess. The new grave was knee-deep in rainwater.
I stood and stared into it. Lifted my hand to Charlie, his grip in mine.
“We can’t use that,” I said at last.
We walked back to the camp, with Billy lying, at his own request, like a baby in my throbbing arms. Wracked and tender. His eyes were fixed on the backlit leaves of the canopy, as he used to do as a baby in the pram. “What the hell does he see?” Julian had asked me once on a park bench. “What’s he thinking?” The blue gaze had been unrelenting. The leaves danced for him. Do they still dance? Is that what he sees now? I studied his passive face, inches below mine. His eyes were different now, though: glassy and rigid, like a fish’s. I hoisted him into a different hold and pressed him flat against my chest, his legs instinctively clamping my waist. I turned his head on my shoulder so his face tucked under my chin. While we walked, Charlie outlined the details of a Viking funeral. It was all burning boats and floating pyres and sacrificial maidens.
“But it was raining all night, Charlie. We won’t find enough wood for a fire.”
“We could use the charcoal?”
“It won’t burn long enough.”
He chewed on his finger. “It would burn inside that tree. The hollow one at the Bury Ditches? All the leaves inside would still be dry, and there were bits of wood and sticks and that. It would be like an upside-down boat.” He looked up at me with hopeful eyes. “Peter loved Vikings.”
“No fires,” I said, “no way.” But we had to do something with him. And there wasn’t time to waste. We had to take care of Peter, but there were also the living to think about: Lola, Joni. “No fires, Charlie. But we could use that tree.”
My early childhood didn’t include funerals. People died, of course. There were parental tears behind closed doors, hushed outbursts. But I never attended church. “Too upsetting,” they said. “You wouldn’t understand.” Instead, I stayed home with the nanny, eating cake, and when everyone got back from the funeral they kissed me too hard and pressed coins into my hand. As is so often the case with parenting matters, I’d only realized my mother’s true motivations once I had children of my own: she didn’t want me at the funeral because she didn’t want to be constrained by my presence. She didn’t want to hold back her emotions to avoid upsetting her child. But times change. As Joni had said, we make the rituals now. Not that I had a lot of choice; I couldn’t leave the kids with an aunt who had put herself into a voluntary coma. So they had to come with me. But I could also see that it was best for them. To learn how to grieve, to honor a friend. Pay their respects. I had to show them how to take care of themselves, and not just their physical requirements.
So I made the kids get in the car and not look back while I carried Peter’s body down the slope. I had already searched the tent, trying to find a favorite object, something to leave beside him in the grave. But he had nothing. Even his shoes were still on his feet. As I laid him onto the filthy carpet of the Beast’s boot, I remembered that back in the city I had promised to check on his mother and get his Star Wars Lego. But I never did. I never did anything for him. I never even spoke to him about his mother. I just assumed Joni had taken care of all that emotional stuff.
Shame sideswiped me, and I sunk to my haunches behind the car. I laid my palms on the ground and pressed my forehead down, too, grinding my face into the sticks and stones. A feral cry burst from me like vomit. All the things I had never felt, buried in the deep, seemed to surge up, catching me in the barrel of the wave. Squeezing the air out of me. Leaving me gasping. I pushed myself up from the ground and drew in a long breath, the sound of waves retreating over riprap, and slumped again. Then I thought of the silver Burmese Nat, my house guardian, one of the few things I had salvaged from home. I got up and dug him out from under the driver’s seat, placing him next to Peter before we set off.
There was little dignity for Peter while he was being shoved inside a tree. None of the formality and solemnity I had imagined. I still felt washed out, as though by salt water, flushed and stinging. Empty. The kids were restless, nervy. I pushed on with the plan. The fronds I wanted to lay across Peter’s body clung with every resolute fiber to their branches, refusing to be torn or twisted away. I left them broken, hanging from moist gashes. Sharp tang of sap. The sense of waste angered me. The tree will die now! I stamped at the mud that clagged my boots. We gathered fallen branches instead. Thick as antlers, dried leaves curled fetal. Back at the hollow tree, I tried to arrange Peter in a ceremonial way under the cover of the wood. But Maggie kept throwing in handfuls of grass, and Billy contributed bits of rubbish that he’d found in the field—a polystyrene cup, a miniature plastic horseshoe, a bent feather—and I lost my temper and told them they were being disrespectful. They wheeled away, pushing and pinching, taking it out on each other.
Above me, a buzzard screeched. I stopped and looked around for Charlie. Over toward the bulk of the hill fort, he was trudging back from the car park, holding out the bottom of his shirt to carry stones. The Lost Boy did the same. I captured the other two with a firm hand on the shoulder and directed them to gather more rocks. While they were busy, I settled Peter and placed the silver Burmese Nat at his feet. Facing out, spear high. I loved its fierce gaze, the way its back arched in an ecstasy of sacrifice. Defender of home and hearth. “Look after him,” I pleaded, and had one last stroke of its smooth back.
The children piled their stones around the entrance to the tree. Nothing elaborate—there weren’t enough rocks for a wall—but we made a little threshold that sort of defined the place as his. Once we were finished, we stepped back and looked at the overall effect in silence. I put my hand on Charlie’s shoulder, but he was too mesmerized to notice.
It was time. I had to push us through this memorial. “It’s normal at funerals to tell stories about the person who died. To remember them. If you want to say anything about Peter, you can.”
There was a long pause. One of the stones shifted with a sharp click, and we all jumped.
“All right, I’ll go first,” I said. “Um, Peter had a lot of energy. He was a curious boy, and he loved to try new things.”
I sounded like a school report. All wrong. My thoughts were too slippery. I steepled my hands over my face as though I might catch them. And then I saw Peter’s face clearly in my mind: the moment when Joni brought him back after he’d run away from the broken shovel, his willing smile, the direct look in his round eyes. Like my Nat.
“Peter was brave. I used to think he played the fool to get attention, but I underestimated him. When he tested Charlie’s mad inventions—like that skateboard with only one wheel, do you remember that?—he did it to help. He was glad to be your friend, Charlie. And who could ask for more than that? And he climbed that big tree on the first day because he sensed something was wrong—he had good instincts. He was looking for his mother—” This fact only occurred to me as it came out of my mouth so that I almost choked on it. “And again, when he sat all night by the gate, he wanted to protect us. Peter knew his own strengths. Which is more than most adults can say. He was a brave boy—”
My voice pulled too tight to speak. Thoughts and feelings slipped away, and I gripped myself to hold on. We had to get through this; I was the only one who could navigate us through. Charlie squeezed my hand, but he still didn’t say anything, and there was another long silence.
Billy stepped forward and pulled from his pocket a shiny blue packet. He held it between two hands, his eyes moving between the packet and the tree. His mouth bent up with confusion, and he started to cry. I eased his fingers apart. Inside was a crushed Oreo still in the wrapper.
“Do you want to give this to Peter?” I asked.
“Sharing is caring,” he said, but closed his fingers over his last biscuit. A moral dilemma too onerous for three-year-old shoulders. I bent down and kissed the tears off his cheeks. His skin was flawless. I hissed a fierce wish inside my head—my first prayer since all this happened: Let Billy forget. He is surely young enough. Let him forget the fear, the hunger, the screams of other children. If one of us can come out of this unscathed, let it be him. Let it stop, and let him forget.
When I released him, he wiped his runny nose on my shoulder and held the biscuit up to me. I leaned into the tree and dropped it through the branches. Billy took a wobbly breath and smiled with relief—he’d found the strength to do the right thing. He stepped back into the line.
“I didn’t like it when Peter scared my rabbit,” said Maggie.
I waited to see if there was more, but apparently there wasn’t. She was truly her mother’s daughter.
The Lost Boy delved into his pocket and held out a single Lego brick.
“Thank you. Peter loved Lego, did you know that?”
The Lost Boy nodded. I placed the brick in the tree. We waited in line again. Buzzards drifted overhead.
“Charlie? Anything to say?”
Charlie stood ramrod straight, fists clenched by his sides. He shook his head.
“Sure?”
He closed his eyes, and tears surged down his face. I dropped to my knees in front of him and held his tight body. His tears ran down my neck and formed a rivulet along my spine. They seemed to carry all his words in perfect eloquence. I kept my palm flat on his back as though I could soothe his pounding heart through the skin. Charlie would never forget. Of that I was certain. He was older, and this experience was too intense. And a thought dropped into my mind like a brick: What if this is our life now? Any hope of forgetting presupposes change, that the horror will stop. We go back to normal, and this becomes some traumatic event that we survived, like a plane crash. But maybe this is it. Charlie and I clung together in the wet grass. Eventually, our heartbeats slowed, and Charlie’s muscles softened. He folded into me, and I gathered up his long limbs in my arms.
“Say good-bye,” I whispered as we walked away.
“Good-bye, Peter,” he said. “You’re my best friend.”
As we pulled into the camp, I heard screaming from the tents. I raced up the slope to find Joni tearing down the yurt, bellowing like a pierced bull. Standing nearby, with one hand spread over her mouth, was Lola.
Maggie and Billy flung themselves around their cousin’s legs. Charlie followed, more subdued. I put my arms around Lola, as best I could with all the kids in the way, and crushed her slender shoulders into a hug. When I released her, ready to ask a dozen questions, she got in first.
“Mom’s incensed.”
Joni wrenched the canvas from the poles, and a loud rip came from one of the seams.
“So I see. Can I assume, then, that you weren’t kidnapped and held against your will?”
“I met a boy.”
I put my hand over my face to hide a snort of laughter.
“A whole group of boys, actually. After Billy disappeared, when you went off by yourself, we drove around for a long time. I found a bike by the side of the road, and Mom let me cycle up to the Bury Ditches, to check if Billy was there, while she brought the young ones back for dinner.”
Joni hadn’t mentioned that she let Lola go out alone.
“I met some little kids behind the hill, and they took me to the Hoar Wood. And that’s where I met Jack.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. He’s looking after those boys all alone. Trying to.”
“You were gone for two days, Lola. Three nights.”
“I know. I’m sorry, it’s just that—”
“Your mum’s been crazy with worry. We all have.”
“I’m sorry, I am. But the first night I was kind of mad with her. With both of you. You told me to fuck off!”
“Lola, I was—”
“I get it. You were scared about Billy. Just listen, please.”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“So right after the first night, I meant to come back, but then when we woke up in the morning—”
“We woke up?”
“It’s not what you think. We didn’t—look, when we all woke up, some of the boys had run off, and Jack asked me to stay with the younger ones while he found them. And then we saw these helicopters, and Jack said we needed to get under cover. So I helped him move everyone to another camp. And then it just got crazy with all the little kids. God, just feeding them and keeping them out of harm’s way. Surely you of all people understand how it gets. Time just goes.” She snapped her fingers in the air. The way Lola stood, hands on hips, flicking her hair away from her face with the back of a hand, she reminded me of every mum I’d ever met at the school drop-off. Harried. Exhausted. Furious at the day for having so few hours in it.
“I do understand. But you could have sent someone with a message.”
“The new camp is quite far—”
“We’ve been out looking for you the whole time. If we’d known—” I stopped myself, but the implication hung in the air.
“That’s what Mom said. Because you were looking for me, Peter died.” She raised her chin a fraction, but blinked back tears.
“It’s not your fault.”
Lola nodded rapidly. “But if I’d been here—”
“It’s not your fault.” I pulled her against me, and she kept her arms folded across her chest, but let her head drop onto my shoulder.
“He really died?” she whispered.
“Seriously, Lola. That wasn’t the worst of it.”
Joni seemed to have disappeared, leaving the yurt in a pile of string and fabric, as if a parachute had descended in the middle of our camp. The kids were busy scaling its peak. I gave Lola a we-have-not-finished look and followed the path into the forest. It took a few minutes to find Joni. She sat against a tree, her head slumped forward to rest on her bent knees. I sat in the leaves next to her.
“Thank God Lola’s safe.”
Joni didn’t say anything, and I realized that she wasn’t resting her head on her knees: she was looking down between them at her phone, which she cradled in her hands. She was flicking through photographs.
“You all right there, Joni?”
She pressed the switch and the phone went blank. She slipped it down her top inside her bra.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Everybody you care about is either here or dead.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it.”
She shifted her hips so she could look up the long trunk of the tree to the canopy and the blue sky beyond. I watched scudding clouds until she spoke again.
“I can’t stop looking at this damn phone. I keep thinking it might ring. David might call. I’ve been keeping it charged in the car just in case. Even though I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid—”
“And there’s all these photos of home. I don’t know if it makes me feel better or worse. It’s not so bad at night. If I can see the stars, then I convince myself I’m home.”
“Let’s go home then, if that’s all it is. We’ll go back to your place, regroup, and work out what to do next.”
She snorted. “I don’t give a fuck about that shitty house. You think I like that dump? The rattling windows and the shitty cars outside and the fricking warped doors that won’t even close. Why do you think I didn’t fix it up, huh?”
“Cos you were busy with more important things?”
She guffawed into the treetops. “How generous of you. You thought I was a slob. But it was my little rebellion against this shitty country. Fucked if I’d put my energy into that hole. David promised we’d come to England for two years, tops. It’s been a decade. And now he’s home and I’m stuck here? That piece of shit.”
“I always thought you were settled here.”
“Well, now I want to go home. To Mom’s place. Pennsylvania.”
“David’s in New York.”
“But he could get there. He could walk if he had to, if it’s that bad. He could just walk for however long it would take. But how can I get there? I’m stuck here. Marooned.” Joni grappled her phone out of her top and scrolled rapidly through to an image, which she held out to me. Corner of a picnic table in the foreground before a long view over mown fields, forest, huge sky. But strangely familiar, bucolic. It could be right here in Shropshire. “We could really live there. Thrive. We did it before, my mom and me, when Lola was born. After my father left and then my brothers, both of them one after the other. And I promised I wouldn’t leave her, but of course I did, soon as I met David. I left and took her only grandchild away.”
“You’ll see her again,” I said. Unless this is all that’s left. I didn’t dare say it out loud. Might come true. I shooed the thought into a corner.
“All her children left her,” Joni said.
“That’s what children do. We know that when we sign up.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You don’t have to be. Lola’s right here. She’s fine.”
Joni shook her head, scrolling through pictures, the images flashing by too fast to take them in. “I thought I could do it all again,” she said. “Raise another child. But I can’t.”
I picked up some sticks and a strip of thin bark. I tore away a long shiny ribbon and fiddled with the sticks until I’d made a wonky sort of cross. Then I made another. One for the boy’s grave and one for Peter’s.
“We need you, Joni. I know it feels like it’s all going wrong, what happened with Peter, but we need you.”
“I’m done.”
“You can’t be done. We’re only just starting.”
She didn’t answer, just sat with bucolic images flashing past her eyes. At least she was up, out of the tent. And now that Lola was back, we could leave. I picked up my crosses and set off to find out where to go next.