7
Dahlia
I’ve got a story
about a hawthorn.
Wind back fourteen years, or thereabouts. I’m seven years old. Violet
left for Leeds two hours ago to spend the weekend with her dad; he’s taking her
to a hockey match. I don’t understand hockey, and I also don’t understand why
I’ve been left behind. My throat hurts from yelling. My heels hurt from kicking
mum’s bedroom door, but it still won’t budge. The taps are on in the bathroom,
but I know she can hear me.
I’ll show her, thinks
six-year-old me.
So I get a stool and a coat hanger. The back-door key comes clinking
down and I let myself out into the garden, over the fence, into the woods. I
stamp on flowers and foxgloves as I go. I piss into a faerie ring. And when I
come to the hawthorn, with its starry white fruit, I spit on my hands like a
cartoon character and climb up amongst the branches. I take great handfuls of
berries and eat them one after the other. The juice runs down and clings to my
chin.
I’ll show her, I think.
I wait in the hawthorn branches for two hours, kicking my heels
against the trunk. At some point after sundown, something small and shambling
comes up to the tree, sniffing and growling and pawing at the ground. It seems,
for a breath of a moment, that the hawthorn’s branches tighten around me,
obscuring me from view.
Then the creature passes, and the branches relax.
Another half-hour and something else comes crackling through the
forest. A voice calls; red hair flashes through the trees. I let her cast about
for a while, waiting for that jump in pitch, that quiver in her tone. Then I
slip out of the canopy and land on the floor.
She whips round. “Were you there the whole time?”
I stick a finger in my mouth. “No.”
She marches over to me and jerks my wrist back; the finger leaves my
mouth with a wet pop.
“What’s that on your face?” she says.
I shrug, but her eyes dart to the hawthorn and its full, snowy
berries. Her pupils tremble for a moment. I know the rules. The hawthorns are
sacred, watching, alive. Every last one belongs to the caenne.
“You ate the fruit?” she whispers.
I stick my chin up. “It didn’t mind. It protected me from an unseelie.”
She slaps me across the face.
The force of it almost knocks me to the floor. It’s the first time
she’s hit me like this, and the hardest she ever does it. I’m too stunned to
cry, too stunned to do anything but to stand there, cheek tingling, as she
picks me up and carries me home. She won’t look at me. Her breaths come too
fast.
She doesn’t say another word to me all evening. I put myself to bed without
brushing my teeth.
But I wake a little before dawn, when the room is still silver-grey. I
don’t know what has woken me until I feel the mattress dip, and I smell mum’s
lingering orange-blossom perfume. She settles inch by inch, forming a bracket
around me. I stay very still, breathing slowly, keeping my eyes shut.
Then her fingers pass through my hair.
The world is soundless, and I don’t dare look round, but I feel her
shaking. She stays beside me, close enough that her breath spills over my nape,
her trembling hand moving again and again through my hair. I count the minutes.
One. Two. Three.
Her lips press against the back of my skull, feather-light. Then she sits
up and climbs off the bed, taking the warmth with her.
A minute passes before I let myself turn around. I feel the pillow in
the dark – there’s a damp patch, darkened by tears and eye makeup. I fall
asleep with my hand splayed against it, as if to trap it in place, but it’s dry
when I wake. It doesn’t even smell of her perfume.
She never explains it. I never ask.
But I don’t go near a hawthorn again.
*
I certainly don’t
want to go near this one. The longer I look at the smashed berries and warped
branches, the more my head swims. It doesn’t feel like looking at a felled
tree. I feel like I’m five years old, seeing a pheasant smeared across a
country road for the first time. I feel like I’m pushing open the bathroom
door, my pulse high in my chest, and mum's hand is dangling over the edge of
the basin—
“Let’s go,” I say, tearing my eyes away. “Come on. Someone’ll see us.”
The faer doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s not looking at the fallen
hawthorn, but at the one still standing. There’s high metal fencing enclosing
them both, a lattice of iron embellishments and bronze filigrees, clearly
crafted by human hands. One woman is looping some kind of barbed wire around
the top, perhaps to keep trespassers out.
His jaw clenches. He starts to walk.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. “Hey, what are you—?”
I make a grab for his arm, but he shrugs me off and starts running.
When he reaches the fence, he grabs the metal with both hands, hooking his feet
through the loops and hauling himself up. The woman organising the barbed wire
sees him a beat later than she should. She turns her head, maybe to call out—
His hand shoots up, pressing over her mouth. Her eyes drip shut. Her
hands slacken on the metal and she thuds to the ground on the other side.
My insides jump. What is he doing? I glance longingly back down
the boulevard, to where the wooden blockade rises half as high as the houses,
but my feet won’t carry me back to it. They take me to the fence instead, and
my hands pull me up and over the top. Flakes of rust gather under my
fingernails.
I roll over as I land. The ground is furred with grass and
shrivelled foxgloves; it puts me in mind of a badly-tended municipal garden,
the air clotted with the stink of rotting vegetation. It’s a smell that gets
into my mouth, into my eyes – I can’t think for it, can hardly put one thought
in front of another. I spot the faer kicking his way through the dry grass,
towards the white-berried hawthorn. Two more abair try to ward him off, but they drop to the floor at the touch
of his hands.
I creep after him at a distance, hiding in the long, sunset shadows
and the dry shrubs. There’s a figure at the base of the tree, too
warped-looking to be an abair. Their face is the same off-white as the shrivelled
berries, their black hair meticulously braided with gold and silver thread. As
the faer approaches, their eyes narrow.
“That’s quite near enough,” they say, holding a hand up. “I can only
abide gloating at a distance.”
“You’re turning the soil?” the faer snaps. “You’re letting abair turn the soil?”
“Somebody had to. Most of my fellows left for the inner rings months
ago.”
The faer snarls something. I don’t know if it’s English or if I just
can’t hear it. I creep a little closer, clamping my nose over my mouth to keep
the worst of the smell out. Berries turn to mulch beneath my trainers.
“...to mind your manners. I stayed, at the very least,” Off-white is
saying. “You have no say in how I tend these hawthorns. I am their ward.”
“You couldn’t ward a cabbage. I warned
you—”
“Yes, you warned and warned and warned, yet not a single workable
solution passed your lips.” Off-white glances briefly at the slumped bodies on
the ground. “Kindly rouse my abair and be on your way. Save your parlour
tricks. If I see you on this side of the blockade again, I’ll strip the skin from
your back.”
Off-white turns back to the hawthorn, pressing their hands up against
the withered trunk. They sing in a tinny voice, tracing patterns into the bark
with their fingers, while the surrounding abair flash their trowels andspread the soil with compost and
mulch.
The faer’s eyes are little slits. He bends to the ground. His fingers
close around a clod of mud.
And he throws it at Off-white's head.
It hits with a resounding splatter. Wet soil clings to their hair, spills
over their shoulders. They straighten up, very slowly.
“Right,” I think they say.
I don’t see them move, but suddenly they have the faer in their grip, an
arm locked tight around his throat. He kicks and writhes and pulls – I see him
half-disappear, but then Off-white shakes him, wrenching him round into the
full glare of the sunset, and he solidifies again.
“We’ll have none of that,” Off-white says. “How rude it would be, to
slip away without a farewell.”
They explore the faer’s hair with their free hand, combing the curls
through their crooked fingers. Then their grip finds one of the snapdragons.
Tightens on the stem.
They rip it out like a weed.
The faer screams, loud enough to split the world. I jump to my feet,
pulse thudding, blood coursing, cold and hot and cold again. Off-white seems to
have enfolded him, grown taller and vaster and filmier at the edges. The abair are clustered in a loose circle,
ready to close in if he slips away. I don’t want to be seen here. I want to
run. My feet shift; I’m not obliged to save him, just not to obstruct him.
I could run.
But he’s still screaming.
And I don’t know why I do it.
I turn my eyes to the white-berried hawthorn, and I feel the feathery
pressure of it looking back. Its branches twitch in a non-existent breeze,
stark and black against the orange sky. Its shadow lies flat and long across
the browned grass.
And I say: please.
The tree moves. It’s like what happened when I was six, except the
trees breathe outwards rather than inwards – the shadow grows, expands, and
throws Off-white and the faer into darkness.
It’s only for a second. But when the branches settle back into place,
the faer is gone.
I drop to the floor, my vision spinning. My head feels spongey,
dented, like a wad of plasticine pierced by blunt fingers. Off-white shouts,
directing the abair this way and that,
and I feel their scattered footsteps in the heels of my hands. I need to move.
I have to move.
I try to pull myself up on a handful of bush. The world lurches
sideways, and I slam back to the ground.
Footsteps rattle beneath me. I can’t get up, can’t focus, can’t think
but for the smell of rotting berries and wood. A foot comes into view on my
left, filling my vision, and I raise my eyes to a round, moonlike face. One of
the abair.
The moon opens its mouth. But then two hands clamp my shoulders, and
I’m pulled into the dark.
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