Terra Incognita

1

The first time it happened, it happened completely by accident.

It happened on the last day of term, a hot day in late March that banished the memories of January’s darkness and the windswept and frozen playing fields of February. Jimmy had taken advantage of the unseasonal heat in as many ways as he could: walking home with Terry instead of cramming onto the noisy bus; stopping in at her sister’s to play with her baby nephew in the garden; wandering past the football pitch and joining a game of heads-and-volleys with Roger’s son and some other kids from the year below. But he couldn’t put it off any longer.

Standing outside his front door, Jimmy felt the quiet pulse of panic that usually accompanied taking home his report card. He fished through his bag and took another look at it.

The Cs and occasional Ds weren’t great but it was the 4s out of 5 for effort that would get him in trouble. Did he deserve them? English, probably; History, definitely; Science! A “4/5”! Thanks, Pricey! Although, come to think of it he couldn’t actually remember handing in any homework on time, or maybe there was that once? He sighed and reached for the door handle.

It was locked. No-one was home. He remembered with a rush of hope that his mum had picked Nyota up to go into town. How had he forgotten about that? It was the perfect opportunity! Everyone out the house so he could take his time changing the grades, carefully peel away a layer of card, replace it with another…

His jumper fell to the ground as he rifled through his bag for the keys. As soon as he was inside, he kicked off his shoes by the door and flung open the kitchen drawer. Grabbing the smallest, sharpest scissors, he raced up the stairs and on, up the ladder to his room in the loft. He slammed everything down on his desk – scissors, card, blue pen – and took a deep breath to steady himself.

“Jimmy!”

The scissors were poised and ready but he hadn’t even made a single cut.

“Jimmy! Come on, we’ve brought dinner!”

The chip-shop smell wafting up the stairs was his only consolation. He would leave the card up here; she might forget at least for tonight. Tomorrow was better than now.

“And bring your report card down with you, please?”

He let out a huge sigh and went back down the ladder. On the landing, he heard the hollow whump of an extracted cork, waited five seconds for the glug and tinkle of wine in the glass and started down the stairs.

“Hi mum! Hi Nyota!” His voice was upbeat and breezy – that was the way to deal with this, breeze through it, keep it light. “How was town? Did you get those revision books you wanted?”

“Yes we did, thank you, darling,” his mother began. She was facing away from him, removing the wrapped food from its bags and putting it on the plates on the table in front of her. She turned slightly. Jimmy could see the corner of her large glasses through the wisps of hair escaping the clasp at the crown of her head. Maybe he could see the hint of a smile. He felt a pang of guilt. “You should have come with us, sweetie, it was so lovely in town – wonderful weather.”

He left it on the table next to him as he sat down, trying to avoid it for a while longer. It worked, for a bit. He pulled his hair over his face, ate his sausage and chips and they chatted for a bit about the weather – so unexpected at this time of year, the traffic – truly di-a-BOL-ical, town – glorious in the sunshine, and the revision books – SO expensive but worth it, of course. Nyota was only going to take her GSCEs once, wasn’t she? Of course, she was on course to do wonderfully based on her coursework, her teachers were ever so happy with her, but who wouldn’t be with such good grades? Grades?

“Oh yes! Your report card – let’s have a look, Jimmy.”

At least I got to finish my dinner, he thought as he slid the card across the table. Nyota looked at him to get some sort of signal; Jimmy shook his head forlornly.

Sandrine Lee took the card from the table and gently adjusted her glasses. She took a sip of wine and she gave Jimmy a quick smile before she opened it. It was a smile that was meant to convey reassurance and also a little excitement. It was similar to the smile one gave just before opening a present, which obviously made Jimmy feel worse. Some present.

He knew how it would go. He knew there were two types of reaction in this situation: ‘outraged and angry’ or ‘disappointed and incredulous’. He knew that, even before these last few dreadful years and their effect on her, his mother would never have fallen into the angry camp. She was too refined to show such raw emotion, a product of her upbringing. Sometimes she would show flashes of the cold reserve of her father, her blue eyes recalling his infamous icy stare, but mostly she was her mother, calm, French and elegant. Even when those wisps of hair inevitably fled the loose clasp on her head, it seemed stylish; even in her despondency after being left alone, her posture remained upright and unbowed. Jimmy just hoped she wasn’t so disappointed she reverted to talking in French.

“James Tiberius Lee! Je ne le crois pas!”

Oh man. “Yeah, but look – maths, French, computing…they’re pretty good. Geography is ok and I got an A in P.E.”

To his left, Nyota rose silently to take her plate to the sink.

“P.E.? P.E?” Her voice rose in pitch and volume. Maybe Jimmy had been wrong about ‘outraged and angry’. “You don’t go to school to learn P.E., Jimmy. You go to school to learn to express yourself correctly, to learn about the world around you, but you can’t be bothered to make the effort! 4/5 – what does that even mean?” She flipped the card around in her hand to search for the explanation of the grades. “’Cause for concern’ and ‘unacceptable’? So your application in science is unacceptable? How did this even happen? Oh, if only your father…”

Jimmy jumped in. “Don’t! Don’t say it, mum. It’s nothing to do with dad. It’s to do with…I dunno…it’s to do with where I sit in history, it’s to do with the book we were doing in English, to do with Mr Price and his stupid ‘mind-webs’. It’s to do with all those things, not to do with dad.”

But she had already looked away, shaking her head. She clutched the stem of the wine glass as her body prepared to sob but Jimmy didn’t stay to see the tears start falling. He didn’t put his shoes on properly, he didn’t put on a coat and when he looked back from down the street, he realised that he hadn’t even closed the door. He wrenched the downtrodden backs of his shoes up and set off towards Terry’s without thinking.

When he did start to think, he remembered she was staying at her sister’s. He turned back on himself, up the brick-paved roads parallel to his house until he reached Vine Cottage. The quaint little building marked the edge of Summerby. After that, there were just fields – playing fields, farmers’ fields, overgrown fields – for a mile or so until the houses started up again. It was a small, old house wreathed in ivy. In the winter, it seemed creepy but sometimes, like now in the glowing sunset, Jimmy liked to think it was being embraced, claimed in a loving way by the trees and bushes around it. He sat on the bench and stared towards the water tower in the distance, the sun setting away to the left.

He glanced around every so often to check if anyone was coming. After a while, he saw a single figure walking up the pavement. Baggy jeans swishing on the floor, tying up her hair once, twice, three times. She reached him and sat down.

“Is mum all right?”

Nyota pulled her legs up to her chest, feet on the bench. “Yeah. On the sofa now.” They sat for a while in silence.

Jimmy stood up abruptly. “Can we walk? I’m getting a bit cold.”

Jimmy set off briskly and Nyota caught up with some quick bounds. They walked for a while in silence, all the way down to the lookout over the river. On the way back, they diverted through the playing fields and lay down on the freshly mown grass. Jimmy looked up at the stars and closed his eyes and talked about life in a galaxy far, far away.

And that was when it happened. The thing that would change their lives forever.

2

Suddenly, it was hot.

Nyota sat up, startled. Moments later, her brother did the same. One minute, they had been lying in the middle of an open field; now, they were sitting next to each other in the middle of a humid forest. Trees had appeared from nowhere. The leaves themselves looked strange, much larger and heavier than the leaves she recognised on the beeches and oaks around Summerby. And when they moved, eventually, standing up slowly, the forest floor seemed spongy under their feet rather than the hard-packed soil that they had laid down on to look at the stars only minutes ago.

They both started to spill out half-questions:

“What the…?”

“Is…?”

“When did…?”

Jimmy was the one who stopped it all by managing to complete a sentence.

“What’s going on, sis?”

“I…I don’t know,” Nyota stuttered. “It’s all…I mean, everything is different. It is different, right?”

Jimmy looked around for another brief check and then turned back and nodded at her. Vigorously.

She tried to compose herself. “Well, these trees have just…grown really suddenly, I suppose, and it feels warm because of that, because of the trees being here and keeping in the heat, and…that’s it. That’s all that’s happened.” She gave what she felt was, all things considered, a brave and confident smile.

Jimmy smiled back. He kept smiling until his eyebrows raised and his shoulders began to judder and his machine-gun laugh was cackling madly all around her.

“James!”

Nyota looked at her brother in disbelief. Stuck in this terrifying situation, all he could do was laugh. Actually, she wasn’t sure why she was surprised. His response was the same to all of his difficulties, whether at school or at home. And the outcome was pretty much always the same as he joked his way out of it somehow, grinning and arguing and pushing his wavy black hair away from his face. But this was no laughing matter. She had tried to give a reasonable, rational explanation for something that wasn’t at all reasonable or rational. If that wasn’t the truth, then what was?

“Where are we then, James? It’s not funny because if we can’t figure out where we are and how we got here,” she said, her voice getting louder, “then we’re deep in trouble because we can’t get home. So what’s your explanation, smartarse?”

He at least had the grace to stop laughing, but instead of answering, he just lay back down.

“What are you doing?”

“I was lying here, you were there, and we were talking about…what was the name of that programme we used to watch with dad?”

She looked down at him. It felt difficult to suck in a breath but she couldn’t tell whether it was the heat, the panic or the exasperation. “I don’t know. I didn’t know five minutes ago and I don’t know now. Answer the question.”

She felt herself getting sucked into one of their usual arguments that most often ended with her storming off. But there was no storming off from here. There was nowhere to storm off to.

“I don’t know why there’s trees here but we can’t stand here. I’m going this way because it is downhill, for a start, and it’s kind of the way that we came up, along the edge of the playing field,” Jimmy said. Nyota had little choice but to follow him.

--<>--

Nyota had been following Jimmy for many years. Even though she was older than him, he had more of the natural confidence that she lacked. It was different to intelligence – her grades had always been better than his – but he had a sense of ease in his surroundings and in making decisions. School questions made sense to her; she knew how to respond and she could use the things she had read about and studied to create a good answer. When she was confronted with a real-life situation, then the answers became less clear and she felt more cautious.

Often, Jimmy would help her in situations like that. She could tell, on the few occasions when they ever went to a restaurant, that his questions about the menu were really for her; he always knew what he wanted before they got there. He also seemed to be a much better judge of character than her – he knew long before she did what her boyfriend, Duncan, or ‘Dunc-the-Punk’, was like. He had always shown her little kindnesses, but even more so since the day three years ago when their dad had gone missing.

Bowen Lee had been fortunate enough to have created a job that was also his passion, or, some might say, obsession. Having kids had allowed him to indulge his great love of science fiction, new and old, and together they had scoured shops, fairs and car boot sales for the right model or figurine. Granted, no-one was allowed to take most of the toys out of their packets, but his passion had been infectious. Eventually, Bowen had compiled a sufficient collection that it had taken over their garage, consigning the car to the roadside, and allowed him to work full-time selling items at the fairs he continued to visit long after her and Jimmy’s interest faded.

It was whilst travelling to one of these events that Bowen Lee had vanished. More accurately, it was whilst travelling back from one, since he had rung the house from a payphone half an hour away to say he was nearly back and did they need bread or milk or anything? His car had been found outside the shop down the road because, as his daughter had told him, they did need milk actually and maybe some chocolate. But he had never gone into the shop to buy those items nor had he returned home.

The search had gone on for over a week and had even made the national news, pictures of volunteers and police walking slowly in long lines across fields accompanying the sombre narration of the presenter. There was no trace of him, no sightings at airports or on boats and, after what felt to Nyota like almost no time at all, no more help or hope.

Certainly their mother had given up. The brief storm of emotions which she displayed at first had been reassuringly terrifying for Nyota. Sandrine Lee had never previously lost her temper or done anything more extreme than wipe away bittersweet tears watching a film, so the wild force of her grief had let her know both that she cared and that Nyota’s own bewilderment was justified. However, it had quickly passed with the medication her mum was prescribed by the doctor to help her be calm and rest. These days, Nyota often thought, it was as if she couldn’t drag herself out of a dream, like she spent all her time awake but only through a fog of sleep. Lost in the strange land of her grief, just like her kids were now lost in this forest.

In front of her, Jimmy stopped. They were standing next to one of the larger trees, although there were plenty to choose from: huge, thick-trunked trees with deep ridges in their bark, reaching up over fifty metres above their heads; thin trees with delicate branches and light-green leaves; trees with twisted branches sticking out at improbable angles from the side of a slope. As well as their leaves and the floor covered with ferns and grasses, the branches and trunks were decorated with deep-green mosses and creepers whose small, round leaves were like a parade of bright green insects in the dappled moonlight.

“Actually,” she said, looking at the creepers’ leaves, “come to think of it, I can’t really see many animals. You know, insects on the trees. Or hear any birds or anything.”

They both began to twist their heads to check for sound. The depth of the silence was a dark well down which she had thrown a terrifying coin. No splash. Not even a whisper of wind.

“Well,” began Nyota, “it’s night, so naturally you wouldn’t…”

HOOOOOOOOO…

It was quite a loud sound and a trembling one, so it was difficult to tell what made it. Was it the beginning of a growl, some sort of cat? Except the ‘hoo’ part of it sounded like it was in something’s throat, more like a dog. Or a wolf? But most of all it was a long sound, which meant that she could think about these things whilst the noise was still happening and watch her brother’s eyes growing wider and wider.

Eventually, it stopped.

“Owl?” ventured Jimmy hopefully.

“Owl,” nodded Nyota, even more hopefully.

It definitely wasn’t an owl, she thought. “Shall we…?” She pointed in the opposite direction to the sound.

“Yep.” All of a sudden, the path through the forest didn’t seem so difficult to find.