Down Station

9

The moon rose later and less full than the previous night, but it still resembled a huge skull of cratered bone hanging over their heads, casting its light through the canopy. Beneath its ponderous orbit, they spoke, argued, shouted and finally decided. There were tears and red faces, and eventually capitulation and sleep.

In the morning, Mary went down by the river to wash, scrubbing at her skin and scalp with her fingers. The water was cold when she wanted hot. She had sand when she wanted soap. She told herself that there was no point in wishing for things that none of them had, but it didn’t stop her wishing anyway.

Stanislav had emphasised that none of them should ever be on their own, just in case. So Dalip was nearby, and she wasn’t watching him as such. Not closely. He was downriver from her, secluded but not private, going through the ritual of washing his hair, combing it straight, tying it up and imprisoning it under his turban. Every so often, that plain steel bracelet he wore high up on his forearm slipped down, and he’d reposition it again before carrying on.

And when it was time to go, they just left. There was nothing to carry, except the net, nothing to pack, except Dalip’s sharpening stone. Stanislav raked out the fire with the end of a branch and gazed at the embers as they grew dull. With everything unspoken, he threw the stick he’d used on the ashes aside, and simply started. One by one, they followed, leaving the coast, and the door, behind.

She remembered that stupid kid’s joke◦– she couldn’t remember where from or who told it to her first◦– about ‘when is a door not a door?’ Who knew there was another answer, one which involved the door merging with a sheer cliff?

They kept to the tree line for a while, but as the estuary narrowed, so did the distance between the bank and the forest, until it became necessary to walk amongst the trees and keep an eye on where the river was.

The sun slewed around behind them, but they were shaded. It was cool under the canopy. Insects turned slow loops in the shadows, and skittered over the face of the running water. Sometimes a fish rose for one with a soft approach and a powerful escape. Birds called unseen from the upper branches.

Back when social services were still trying, they’d tried to make Mary do one of those adventure holidays◦– they said it’d be character building. The pictures they’d shown her to encourage her, the ones of stark rock ridges and barren, boggy moors where the wind and rain spotted the camera’s lens, had the opposite effect. She wasn’t doing that. Why should she? What possible purpose would it achieve? She’d started with a hearty ‘fuck off ’, and it escalated from there.

She hadn’t gone.

Perhaps the mistake they’d made was making it too safe for her. Where was the challenge in climbing a hill thousands had already climbed that year, and getting roped up to abseil a few metres down a rock?

Now, with no one to plead with her, cajole her or compel her, she was walking and camping out, foraging for food and eating with her fingers, all the things she swore she’d never do, because she wasn’t a fucking animal.

She didn’t even want a cigarette. She couldn’t normally make it five minutes after waking without one.

With slow inevitability, they became strung out. Spotting each other was easy enough, though; there was nothing that particular shade of orange in the forest. Stanislav was always out in front, Dalip not far behind as if he had something to prove◦– which perhaps he did, if only to himself◦– and her third. Elena and Luiza walked close together, with Mama in the rear.

Mama really didn’t like the idea of the journey, let alone the journey itself. Every step was further away from her babies, as she called her seemingly endless collection of children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

She could remember all their names, and their birthdays. For someone like Mary, that seemed astonishing enough, but Mama knew every part of their lives, too. Mary would have found it all too claustrophobic and oppressive, but apparently the kids were all fine with it, voluntarily surrendering every intimate detail without the threat of sanctions hanging over them.

Mary was happy being on her own, happy that no one was questioning her, happy that her life which had swung between chaotic to strictly ordered had found a third path she’d never actually known existed.

Stanislav stopped. Dalip caught him up, and the older man pointed at something ahead of them. They looked behind them and saw her approaching, and together they waited for her too.

She saw it before she had to have it explained to her. It was a house. Or at least, it was a corner of one, deep green with moss, the same colour as the forest. She moved her head this way and that. What had been a complete structure, four walls and a roof, was little more than sagging timber uprights being inexorably reclaimed by nature.

‘I don’t think anyone lives there,’ she said.

‘No. Not for many years. Twenty at least.’ Stanislav stared at the ruin as if it had been his own once.

‘How can you tell that?’

‘The trees,’ he said, circling his finger. ‘They are all younger here. This land was cleared, farmed, and then abandoned.’

‘Do you want to take a look?’ asked Dalip.

His fleeting expression told her that no, he didn’t. Really didn’t. But he looked away, then back, and he wore a different face. ‘Yes.’

The three of them converged on the house from different angles. It wasn’t big, but big enough for a few people who really didn’t mind seeing each other every waking moment. The roof had collapsed completely, and a single sapling poked out above the tottering walls.

The rude wooden door was still in place, but only for as long as it took Dalip to rest his hand on it. It fell, neatly and cleanly, backwards to join the ferns and fungi that were growing out of the scattered shingles and beams.

The walls were rough timber, overlapping split logs on a frame with the bark facing outwards. For all that, it was carefully and skilfully made, and it would have been dry inside.

‘I wonder what happened?’ said Mary. She ducked under Dalip’s arm and stood on the fallen door. There wasn’t any evidence of furniture, or anything on the walls.

‘The wolfman said—’ started Dalip, but Stanislav interrupted.

‘We know what the wolfman said. It is very convenient that he told us about the possibility of empty houses before we found any. As he knew we would, because he also told us the direction to go to find this geomancer.’

Mary walked in further, and began kicking through the debris with the toe of her boot. ‘You think he’s lying?’

‘I think it is convenient, that is all. If we accept his explanation, all we think when we see these falling-down walls is that the people who lived there have moved somewhere else.’ He looked up at the sky, at the trees reaching out over the ruin. ‘There are other reasons for houses to be abandoned, not all of them good.’

‘You’re very suspicious,’ said Dalip. ‘Sometimes an abandoned house is just an abandoned house. We see them all the time on London streets: you know, with those steel shutters over the doors and windows.’

‘How often were the occupants forced to leave?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose that happens sometimes.’

‘It happens a lot,’ said Mary. She’d made a hole in debris, and had dug as far as a layer of thick bark sheets. ‘In squats, or you can’t pay your rent. Bailiffs come round and give you the evils, throw your stuff out on to the street, and it’s fuck you very much.’

Dalip conceded the point with a shrug. ‘Okay. But it’s not like anyone owns this bit of the forest, do they?’

‘So you believe,’ said Stanislav. ‘What if they do?’

‘I don’t know. We can’t go back, because we’ve nowhere back to go to. We can go in a different direction, but then we’re more lost than we are already, which would be saying something. At least we have a destination at the moment.’

‘Which the wolfman gave us.’

Mary bent down and pulled at the bark tiles: the original floor, like the walls, was made of split logs, but these were flat side up. As she exposed more, she started to find things that had been protected from the elements. A wooden platter, with rounded chisel marks across it. What looked like a broken stool, a sawn piece of trunk and three stout legs splayed around it.

She passed them back for the others to examine.

‘If the people who lived here had moved of their own accord,’ said Stanislav, ‘they would have taken their plates, if not their chairs.’

Dalip turned the platter in his hands. ‘We don’t know that. For all we know, the farmer was old, out working alone in his fields, had an accident or just died, and everything just fell apart with no one to keep it up.’

Mary stood up and wiped her hands. ‘If this was a farm—’

‘Twenty years ago.’

‘Then is there still going to be food here? I don’t know how these things work. Are we going to find chickens and things like that running around? Or potatoes. They grow in the ground, right?’

‘We don’t even know if they have potatoes here,’ said Dalip, but Stanislav nodded in agreement.

‘It might be food we do not have to work for, which is always worth collecting.’ He checked the position of the sun and pronounced it midday. ‘We need to rest for a while anyway. Here is as good a place as any.’

‘You realise I don’t know what I’m looking for. Veg comes out of packets.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘do you know what a chicken looks like?’

She thought about it. Probably. It wasn’t going to arrive in breadcrumbs, but yes, she’d seen one before. ‘Sure.’

‘Then we are all agreed. If there is any sign of Grace, or if she has been here, tell me immediately.’ Stanislav stepped back out of the doorway and walked off to catch the others as they arrived.

‘Your mate’s a bit weird,’ said Mary.

‘Weird? In what way?’ asked Dalip, and added, ‘And he’s not my mate.’

‘He’s closer to being your mate than anyone else here. And weird in a serial killer sort of way. Paranoid.’ She went to the other corner of the room, picking her way between the leafy ferns. ‘No one’s tried to kill us yet, unless you count your sea serpent. So why’s he got the fear?’

‘Fear? I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I would. It’s like he’s seen all this before. Where did you say he was from?’ She bent down again, and started pulling up plants. They came away easily, and she threw them to one side, creating a shower of soil that made Dalip step back.

‘I didn’t say he was from anywhere, and I don’t know. Eastern Europe somewhere, I suppose.’ He shook the dirt from the uppers of his boots. ‘What if he’s right? What if we’re trespassing on someone else’s land?’

‘We’ve walked for half a day and we’ve seen no one. We’ve been here two days and there’s only been the wolfman. There’s no one here. This place is empty.’ In London, everywhere was someone’s; the council’s, developers, some rich Russian bloke, it didn’t really matter◦– there were rules wherever she went, even in places that seemed to have fallen down the cracks of the city. Here? No.

She uncovered a few more pieces of detritus. Shards of a small stone bottle. A wooden handle, worn smooth with use, but no clue as to what it was attached to. Something that may have been once string, but fell apart on being picked up.

There was nothing to indicate one way or the other whether the farmer had simply upped and left for pastures new, or been forced out by some crooked landlord.

By the time the rest of the group arrived, Mary was already out in the forest. She could see, now that it had been pointed out to her, where the former fields had been: thinner trees this side of the line, fat trees, the other. In places, she could even see the remains of a fence, now only a series of rotten posts in the ground.

She couldn’t see any chickens, or pigs, or cows, or sheep. That exhausted her knowledge of nursery rhyme animals, but there didn’t seem to be anything moving except the occasional flash of orange boilersuit on the ground, and glossy feathers in the air.

She followed the old fence around. It wasn’t far, enough to encompass the land that someone could reasonably work and live off. It went in a strip from the river to beyond the house, roughly square. And as she walked the boundary, she saw another structure in the distance, between the straight trunks and slanting branches of the trees.

Looking around, Mama was closest to her, but she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like it was important. She stepped over the fence line and through the mature wood until she came to it. The house was also a ruin, roof gone, walls sagging, but there was no evidence of fields around it. Instead, there were jumbled piles of logs, slowly returning to the soil.

She poked her head inside the rectangle of wood. There was nothing remarkable to see, just a chaotic mix of rotting debris and new life. But outside, she found an axe embedded in one of the logs: an actual hand axe, haft as long as her forearm, brown blade the size of her fist.

She worked it free. The head wobbled slightly on the handle, and it was badly rusted. It was, however, an axe. She made a few experimental swipes with it, then let it hang by her side as she slowly turned.

There was another house even further away.

It looked to her like the whole village had just packed up and gone, leaving things behind that shouldn’t really have been left. Perhaps Stanislav was right after all. She walked halfway over to the third ruin, growing increasingly uneasy for no reason at all. Everything around her was green and brown, with even the man-made structures being eaten by nature.

Perhaps that was what had happened. The plants themselves had risen up at the order imposed on the land and dragged the people down, into the ground, burying them with roots and vines. Flowers grew on their graves and rot consumed their houses. All that remained were ghosts.

She stopped. She could feel her legs start to tremble. Concrete was what she knew, concrete and glass and tarmac and noise. Not this. Not the forest.

She turned around, and hurried back to where she’d found the axe. She was breathing fast and shallow, and leaned against a tree to recover. Orange in the distance meant that she was safe, back in sight of the others.

A crash, a shout, and she raised the axe instinctively.

Dalip stumbled back from the house, which he’d accidentally partially demolished. Then he heard her, or sensed her, because he spun around, hands up, ready to defend himself. For a moment, they didn’t recognise each other, seeing only a threat. His gaze went from the axe, to her, and his shoulders sagged with relief. She looked up at her hand, and lowered it.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You, you… What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘Just looking. Just… looking, that’s all.’ He held his hands up again, but this time palms out. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

‘Well, you did.’ She wasn’t angry, but startled and scared instead. ‘I, I found this. And there’s another house further on. There used to be people here, loads of them, and now there aren’t.’

Dalip didn’t seem to want to get close to the axe, not when she was still waving it in front of her.

‘Everyone’s going to keep looking for a bit longer. I came over here because I hadn’t seen you for a while.’

‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said automatically. ‘I’m fine.’

He didn’t believe her, but at least he pretended he did. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you alone.’ He pointed towards the river and slightly upstream. ‘I’ll be over there. Call if you find anything.’

He left her, moving off between the trees, every so often slowing and examining the ground by his feet. She leant back against the tree again, the back of her head resting against the bark. She started to realise that freedom for her meant freedom for everyone and everything. She was at their mercy, and they were at hers.

It wasn’t that no one could tell her what to do anymore. It was that she couldn’t tell anyone what to do anymore; that all she could rely on now was either trust and friendship, or fear and coercion.

She weighed the axe in her hand, and wondered what to do.