Felled

A feather is caught up in a web outside the window, like a tiny luminous dancer, whirling in the wind. There is not one sound of a car. Just a river pushing water over rocks and a low murmur from a wasp’s nest. Light is spilling down from the sky making paler and brighter the shoots of grass in one part. A beautiful, dappled evening.

My pen hovers on the page. In some ways my body has never felt stronger, my mind more crisp. I feel I could run across the road to the picnic bench nailed in down at the stream, climb up onto the unravelling blue rope, latch my feet into its loop and throw myself with abandon across the water, like I did as a child. I stretch my fingers out. No part of my body hurts.

I’m on the cusp of middle-aged. And yet ironically, it is not my middle age. At my middle age, I was whirling in psychedelic lights on a stage in Lisbon.

I’m a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister. A friend. I’m a good friend. I think I am that if nothing else.

Dear Eve. I look up at a painted lady perched on the stiff hedge beside me. It looks like she is watching me, dressed up in costume – majestic and jester-like at the same time. We eye each other. How bewitching her black and white wings are. How delicate they are, compared to mine. She doesn’t live very long. And perhaps I should ask, why should I?
 Dear Eve. Dear Eve.

We always wrote to each other by hand back then. To go to my tablet and compose an email would feel wrong. Too rapid. I write the letter three times, and after the third I put it in an envelope and stick down a stamp. Just for a milli second, I have achieved something.

I have moments where I forget that I’m ill. When I’m repotting a plant or struggling to get the black bag out of the dustbin, or scouring hot milk from a saucepan. At times like those, it’s simple to forget. Reading is difficult. Walking is difficult. Anything that takes too long forces it back in. I’m too distracted, too nostalgic, and the maddening tears come easily.

It’s the mundane. The chopping of the onion, the brooming of the back yard, the felling – the cool, heavy axe in hand. It’s the concentration required that frees me from my illness. I’m not trying to spot an Eagle ray on the great barrier reef or run an ultra-marathon or climb up Mount Kangchenjunga. I’m trying to grow tomatoes and polish my husband’s walking boots. I’m trying to sit tight so that I might hear the cuckoo come next year. I’m trying to find absorption. But it is an endless process of forgetting and remembering, as though my brain is a pendulum – never stilling.

I reopen the letter, to check it. To make sure there’s nothing bitter, nothing too enigmatic.

Dear Eve,

I know it may come as a surprise to hear from me after so many years. I have heard rumours of your whereabouts and I see you in the paper from time to time. I actually think I met your husband once at a party. I think of you still.

I want you to know that I’m unwell. I have a tumour the size of the plums that were growing in Nevil’s place in London – that’s how my consultant described it. A small plum. You loved to bring them in, do you remember, from outside our door in the summer? I won’t recover from it, and it’s too dangerous to remove it. So there it will remain. I understand this is horribly blunt and impersonal. I didn’t know how else to tell you and can’t sugar-coat it. I hear you have a son now. I so fervently hope that you’re happy.

With love, Mara.

Fervently. I wonder if she will think I’m being sarcastic. I wonder about asking her to meet, asking for a phone call. But then I think, asking Eve for anything, it’s still not something I can bring myself to do. I reseal the envelope and sit back, feeling the rough wooden edges of the chair against my smooth arms. The sky is almost lilac. Memories cascade, submerge me.

PART 1

1998

1

It was early Autumn of 1998 when I arrived at The Elms, a boarding school in East Devon. Conkers were falling out of spiky pouches around the horse chestnut tree at the school gate. The cover for the swimming pool was pulled over for the winter, like a giant reptile skin. An old oak on the top playing field bowed before its freckled stones and a pitched, moss-covered roof ran down to meet a row of ash trees, with gold-tipped leaves. To the left of the school, two iron windows were set beneath a decorative arched surround. In the centre right, a gilded clock dated ‘1923' was flanked by tight, twisted columns. Inside the main building a tall hammer-beam roof reclined on carved stone corbels. The doors were oak panelled, mostly, and the walls held plaques with the names of past head girls. A legacy unremembered by those that were remembered there.

If it hadn’t been for my squeaky shoes, I’m sure no would have noticed me wandering those hard-hearted corridors in my first few months at The Elms. My father wouldn’t have believed it – he said I’d always liked to teach him and my brother, Red, a thing or two. But there was something about the whole place that silenced me. Its vastness, awash with dinner ladies and cleaners and girls running down corridors – dancing, skipping, soaring over imaginary obstacles as though they were practicing for the Olympics. Open mouths chewing cobalt bubblegum, black pen stabbed around eyes and syrupy wafts made it seem like they were all acting on a stage. In classrooms there was energetic chattering, bellowing, sarcastic glances, fluffy pens stuffed into pockets and pencil tins with cats on. In dormitories girls braided plastic tubes violently into plaits beneath their duvets and veiled their possessions and sweets in huge wooden trunks, double locked with padlocks and verbal passcodes. I felt utterly quietened.

The girls all laughed at me from the moment I introduced myself as Marmalade. Ms Snippet, the form teacher, with her long, stiff face had asked whether there was a more appropriate name I could go by. It appeared I would not as easily be accepted as Marmalade, as I had in my family. I’m Mara, I’d said, in my new, quiet voice.

My father had once told me that a new experience seems to elongate time. He was right. In just a few weeks at The Elms I felt I had lived a whole era in someone else’s life.

I wasn’t used to wearing shoes all the time or tying my hair back for sport. My brother Red and I, home-schooled by Mary until our teens, had worn what we liked. There were subjects I hadn’t learnt before. History, Latin, DT, music. Memories of my mother came in Geography. Of her spinning an atlas in her lap, wistfully by the fire, stopping it still with her finger and reading out the place she’d travel to next. My mother had always seemed to desire for someplace else. Not like my father who rarely wanted to leave the house.

Girls with ponytails and playing cards tucked into socks and neat knee-length skirts and badges pinned into immaculate navy jumpers. Little cookie cutter versions of each other. At home in Lower Hope, there were rollerbladers on our road that darted up and down like water striders. I’d never joined in because they didn’t seem like the kind of girls who would want to muddy themselves up in the woods.

When I got to The Elms I realised that perhaps it was just me – I just didn’t like joining in.

Nothing quite prepared me for the cavernous corridors, the shared showers, the nights lit by inadequate curtains, and sounds of sniffing from under duvets. At breakfast, I looked down long tables at rows and rows of children, trying to spread hard butter onto toast, and failing – making holes as big as fists in the middle of their bread. The floors were also hard, and topped with brown, scratchy carpets – solid as bark. The worst for grazed knees, and many of them. There were small plastic hoops that we had to drag our socks through every night and a vast laundry where items were lost forever unless they were labelled individually. There was a phone booth where girls lay on the floor with their legs up the walls, telling their parents lies. A fir tree on the lawn was a makeshift slide, where I witnessed three children being rushed to A and E with cuts and broken limbs. There were so many people in my year group that I didn’t even recognise everyone that was in it. We got made to write letters on Sundays until our arms brutally ached. The wooden slab in the vast main hall was where post came from home, and my father wrote to me every week, sometimes twice. I wrote to him and Mary, and occasionally I wrote to my mother too before hiding it away in my trunk. One day Ms Snippet asked me why my mother was no longer with us, and I stared at her until she turned away, a pale fuchsia. Her use of the word us had unnerved me. My mother was of course with me but she had never been with Ms Snippet.

From the Marmalade incident, I continued to be a source of amusement to the other girls, and that suited me better than having to make friends with them, but worse than being ignored entirely.

Those first months at boarding school without Mary, Red and my pa, it was my father’s letters – that familiar curly writing – that coiled like the nearest thing to love inside me. Sometimes I traced the stitches on the back of the name tapes softly with my finger. I thought of Mary hunched over them sewing beside a fire with her veiny hands and it made me ache for home.

I stepped on gravel that my mother had once stepped on, I played hockey on fields she had run across, and when a doorway looked old, I lingered on the handle to try and imagine how her hand felt holding it. Whenever I saw a book of accolades, a plaque or a notice board, I looked to find her name. I rooted through books in the school section of the library, looking for her face. I cried silently into my pillow some nights. I laughed to myself about the other girls, I laughed loudly on my own in the cold, quietness of the playing fields. I laughed into a scarf, making funny bubbly noises – liking the way it felt against my lips.

Whenever I spoke to my father on the phone I asked him more questions about my mother and he evaded them. Have you made any nice friends yet? Which subject do you like the most? Have you started sports? Which ones? His questions came at me in a spate, he never stopped frantically asking them, and they sat uncomfortably inside me. Yes, I said to all of them. And then always I miss you and love you Marmalade.

Late at night, when the lights were dimmed and I could hear the hushed breathing of children in bunks around me, I thought about mummy, her long wavy hair on her wiry, tanned body. Her atlas. Her kind brown eyes. Sometimes, I imagined her with glasses on, the purple ones, holding an old calculator with lots of keys on it, where she tapped out things like Sin and X cubed. That made me smile. I imagined she was scholarly and admired, and all the things that I was not. I would push my fists to my eyes to push the tears back down inside me, and fall asleep that way with her beside me, filling in all the furrows that were cut when she died.

2

It came to my attention that I was being laughed at in Biology.

I had just walked up the wide stone stairs to the science labs one afternoon before Christmas of my first term. It was cold and white fluff was starting to form on the edges of the steps. I bent down to look and there was a slug stuck between two sections of drain piping. I reached in and took it in my hands. “Hello fellow,” I said and laughed to myself.

“Did you hear that?” said Ellie, who wore gold hoop earrings and purple trainer socks under her Kickers. Alison and Brenda were looped in against her like pieces of chain mail.

“Hello fellow,” said Brenda and laughed. I looked up at them, right into the eyes of Brenda who turned a violent rose and looked immediately back down. And then I looked at the slug who was tickling the squashy bit on my hand. I smiled at him. They swung through the doors giggling, leaving a gust of cool air to ricochet back out at me on the steps.

If slugs don’t have teeth, perhaps they don’t have mouths either, I thought. I peered in to look at his dark face, antennae with small globules on the end and prongs like a moustache beside what should be a mouth. I was still looking when the doors opened again and Alison came out.

“Mr Langmead wants you inside. He asked why you were late. You were being sluggish – that’s what Ellie said.”

I stared at Alison until she looked away and then I slowly lowered the slug to the ground, picked my books back up and went into class. I thought about home and the rollerblading kids. I thought about how they shouted and called each other names and how Red and I wished we could join in. I thought about the cool, dark canopy of trees behind the house and my father’s squeaky jacket. I thought of Mary and her magic pens. A dull ache centred inside me, that came out of nowhere.

“She’s like a nest, look at her,” Ellie said. I could see her looking at me brazenly out the corner of my eye.

“You think a bird might escape any second.” Brenda snorted.

“Shut up Brenda,” Ellie said. Brenda went that terrible pink again.

Mr Langmead was still at the front of the class sorting out worksheets and I made my way around piles of folders to a free desk by the window, next to Sabrine, a student with pale skin and large kind eyes.

“Moths are fecund invertebrates. They produce many thousands more eggs than will survive. Do you know which other creatures do the same?” Mr Langmead began the class.

“Snakes,” someone at the front shouted out.

“No,”

“Bears.”

“No. Invertebrates do not have spines Alison.”

Wasps, bees, flies, I thought to myself but I remained silent.

He went on to talk about the Gypsy moth in Epping Forest. I’d heard about it from my father. The Broadleaf tree pest, threatening to bring down the hardwoods. Similarly, father had to fell half the beeches in the forest behind our house, because of a beetle. My father was out in the woods all day, where he worked as a forestry ecologist. As a child, he took me out and taught me all about the trees. I knew what most trees were at a glance. I knew the five-pronged leaves of a sycamore maple, and the tiny hawthorn. I knew that gray poplars were either male or female, that they spread by root suckering, that fertilisation was rare. And the black poplar, the pointy diamond leaves, toxic to livestock. And the wild cherry, sustenance for bees – small like an arrow.

“Now, I’ve got a test for you today. It’ll count towards your assessment.”

“You didn’t tell us about it,” someone squealed.

“No, I didn’t.” Mr Langmead was winding up the clock at the front of the room.

I could tell almost at a glance that I knew most of the answers, but I didn’t want to write them down. Instead I looked around me. I noticed the shininess of Mr Langmead, his nose glimmering in a pool of sunlight, and the rows of girls, with arms curved like city walls around their work. If it hadn’t been for their bobbing shoulders, I might have thought they were all sleeping on their desks. Again, a sweeping longing went through me for Mary.

Mary was circular and always wore flowery, short-sleeved shirts and black trousers with a snappy elastic waist. She lived up the road. Her husband died of a heart murmur, which is why she didn’t have children of her own, and why she wanted to teach us and spend time with us. On her feet, a pair of colourful socks and brown leather sandals – because of her arthritis. Her hair was wonderfully white like a crown of cloud. In her ears she wore small emeralds that I never saw her take off and on the air around her, the smell of soily philadelphus.

Mary had made class exciting, because she brought in old, tattered books with gold edges that we were allowed to keep for weeks and pens with lots of different colours on the ends, so you could press down whichever you wanted. If you continue to write in orange my dear girl, I’ll have to give you a simple black pen, as I can barely read it anymore. I’d laugh and she’d laugh and then I’d choose the yellow one, knowing she’d shake her head at me and roll her eyes. She had a very loud laugh that seemed to accelerate as it came out. People sometimes looked at her crossly in the street when she was laughing. My father said she talked too much at times and that we mustn’t wind her up or she’d give herself a hernia. I didn’t know what that was, but I thought about the elusive consequence every time one of us set her off.

Mary hadn’t made me do tests growing up and my pa didn’t believe in them. It was my mother who had wanted me to go to her school, not him.

When the bell went, girls started cramming their pens into pencil cases and snapping folders shut. Alison said she thought the name gypsy moth sounded quite romantic, that she might want to call a child gypsy moth one day. Ellie laughed loudly and Brenda looked at them both with a hankering.

I made to leave, but Mr Langmead stopped me. “Mara, stay please.”

“What’s this?” he said, pointing to my empty test, his small bottom perched on the edge of the desk, in sheet smooth grey chinos. He was really very oily. I thought of the slug in the crevice, coming out of one of his nostrils and forging smeary tracks across his cheeks.

“It’s the test you put on my desk.”

“Your test that has no answers on it.”

“No that’s right.”

He sighed and twiddled the piece of paper between his perfectly-manicured fingers and then put it neatly at the end of the bench, lining the corners up.

After a moment he said, “do you think that’s what your father is paying out his money for when he sent you here? For you to fail all your tests?”

“It’s not his money. It’s my dead mother’s.”

Mr Langmead fidgeted around. Quietly he said, “one day you might regret this,” and moved around the desk to sit in his chair. “You only get one chance in a school like this.”

“A school like what?” I said, picking up my pencil. Mr Langmead said nothing as I walked away.