Into the Trees Read online

  They’d never camped before so Thomas went shopping and bought a tent and sleeping bags and anything else he could think of that they might need. On the Saturday night Thomas, Ann, Daniel and Harriet set off for Bleasdale Forest with a loaded car.

  ‘Are we allowed to do this?’ Ann asked, as they crested Liverstock Fell. ‘Don’t we need a permit or aren’t we supposed to ask someone?’

  Thomas shrugged, he’d briefly wondered himself, but was too tired to make any enquiries. He drove as far into the forest as he could, ending up on a tiny road that turned into nothing more than a track, and parked against a collapsing stone wall. They unpacked their gear and set off into the trees, quickly finding a spot for the tent. By nine everything was set up, Thomas and Ann were drinking tea from a flask and eating sandwiches, Daniel and Harriet were already asleep. Thomas and Ann were quick to follow the children and shortly the whole family was asleep. Harriet grumbled and moaned at times, and at four in the morning she cried for ten minutes, but Ann fed her and comforted her and she soon settled. Daniel didn’t stir. They hadn’t had a night as peaceful since before Harriet was born. At seven in the morning they took down the tent, packed everything away and walked back to the car. They were all quiet on the drive back, Harriet fell asleep and didn’t cry, even when they left the forest behind. Ann began to laugh as they passed through Shipton and between gear changes she held hands with Thomas. They were back home by eight. That night, sat in the front room, Harriet screaming above them, Ann turned to Thomas and said:

  ‘So what are we supposed to do?’

  Four

  Raymond Farren first saw Thomas and Harriet Norton on their second visit to Bleasdale Forest. They appeared in front of him in the early hours, and despite his shock at seeing someone else in the forest in the middle of the night, he managed to manoeuvre his clumsy body behind a tree unnoticed and hold his breath until they passed. He was a big, square man with a large face, thick lips and heavy hands. When he walked it was with a clumsy stiffness – as though he was dragging himself along by his neck, a broken machine of a man. He was working for a farmer called Chapman, sleeping in a caravan on his land. Despite the physical nature of the work Raymond often found it impossible to sleep, and walked in the forest at night to pass the time and encourage tiredness. He only worked for Chapman when he was needed, the rest of the time he was at home in Etherton, in his small terraced house, with nothing to do, so he did his sleeping then, spending days under the covers. Raymond believed his body stored up energy during those unhappy weeks and was so rested by the time he was required to work, it refused to acknowledge the night and allow him any sleep. On the nights it felt as if tiredness would never visit again Raymond left his caravan and walked, and because he didn’t want to be known as the mad night-walker, because he didn’t want the people of Abbeystead gossiping about him any more than they might already do, he crossed the road and headed into the trees, into Bleasdale Forest, where there was no fear of being spotted. Under cover he walked until weariness eventually began to affect him, when he would return to the caravan with the prospect of a short sleep in the early hours. In the years he’d been night-walking in the forest he’d never seen another soul. Even the forest animals were shy, and given plenty of warning by his crashing size fifteen feet. When he came across Thomas and Harriet Norton he was as shocked as if he’d stumbled on a city amongst the trees. He was in the western side of the forest when he heard a sharp cough ahead of him. He looked up and saw a man heading towards him, a bundle at his front. Within seconds the man passed a hidden Raymond, and Raymond could see that the bundle was a baby. He also saw a defeated, exhausted look on the man’s face and Raymond was filled with a cold fear.

  It was a cloudless summer evening, even under the thick canopy of the forest it wasn’t black, and the man was walking slowly, wearily, so Raymond didn’t need to be too close to follow. He stalked as stealthily as his awkward body allowed. Eventually the man stopped and rested against a tree. Raymond tensed, but the man’s arms made no movement; they remained gently around the baby at his front. After a few minutes he stood up and headed back the way he’d come. Raymond followed him to Rabbit Lane and a car, and watched from the trees. The man climbed into the car, tipped his head back and closed his eyes. The trough has been used for this kind of thing before, thought Raymond. They come here because it’s remote, so they won’t be stopped or found by the wrong people when they’ve done what they came to do. The man could do what he liked to himself, Raymond saw no sin in that, but he couldn’t let anything happen to the baby. As soon as the hosepipe was brought from the boot he would step out from the trees. During those minutes, watching, braced, Raymond was alive. More alive than when his mother had finally succumbed to the barrage of illnesses that had attacked her at the end of her life, more alert than the first time he rested at the top of Marshaw Fell and looked out on the view of Abbeystead below him.

  The man closed his eyes.

  ‘He’s thinking about it,’ Raymond whispered under his breath. ‘He’s rallying himself.’

  Suddenly the man jerked forward, his eyes sprang open, he looked confused, and then his shoulders dropped. He kissed the small head in his arms, strapped the baby into a car seat and drove away quickly. Raymond walked back to the caravan, knowing sleep wouldn’t come at all that night. He would feel the last of the adrenaline twitching its way through his body as he led the cows for milking at half past five in the morning, still wondering what he’d been witness to.

  Five

  Thomas spent the weekends walking and driving the roads in and around Bleasdale Forest. It was a huge place, miles wide and deep, and many times he found himself lost. On his wanderings he came across houses, tucked away up a lane, hidden in a sudden dell, but none of them displayed sale signs, and no local estate agents knew of any properties available within the forest boundaries.

  ‘We’ll put you on a list,’ he was told, but Thomas shook his head at that. He didn’t have time to sit on a list.

  Instead of staying at the guesthouse midweek, Thomas would spend a night camping in the forest, and on Saturday nights the whole family packed up and headed to the trees with their tent and sleeping bags. Harriet did cry on these nights, but it was the crying they’d been used to when Daniel was a baby, crying that could be soothed away, or would eventually end of its own accord. Ann, who’d never been camping before these last few weeks, found herself longing for the Saturday nights in the trees, where she would finally be afforded a few hours of deep sleep.

  The Nortons were at a loss. Sat in their front room in Maltham, lying in a tent underneath the trees, the conversation varied little.

  ‘What is it about the forest?’

  ‘The trees? The smell? Maybe it calms her, soothes her.’

  ‘I know, but every time? It works every time. She screams the house down every day and as soon as we take her to the forest she’s silent. How?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘You don’t think we’re imagining it, do you? You don’t think we’ve lost it?’

  ‘It had crossed my mind, but both of us imagining the same thing?’

  They began to experiment. They walked Harriet through a local wood, they bought pine air freshener for her bedroom, they bought two small indoor trees and put them on either side of Harriet’s cot. None of it worked.

  Thomas found the barn on one of his walks. It was in the southeast corner of the forest, set back from a small road, which dipped, rose and twisted through the trees. The barn was almost a ruin. There was a huge gaping hole where the door would have been and only half a roof. It was a big space, tall and deep. In one corner stood a rusty tractor with flat tyres, old oil cans were thrown together against the back wall and a washing machine sat abandoned in the middle of it all, somehow still white, vulnerable in the dirt. The barn was a wreck. But it was surrounded by trees. Without allowing himself to think too much about what he was doing Thomas walked further along the road, heading for the nearest
house, looking for somewhere he could ask questions.

  Back at home that night Thomas waited until Daniel and Harriet were in bed before he said anything.

  ‘And she would be prepared to sell it?’ Ann asked.

  ‘She didn’t seem against it. But it’s a shell; it would need a lot of work. We would have to strip it down and start again.’

  ‘Why would we want to buy a shell?’

  ‘We can’t wait for a house to come on the market, and it’s unlikely we would get planning permission for a new building out there, but because there is already a structure standing, just about standing, we can ask for permission to renovate it.’

  ‘How much does she want?’

  ‘It wasn’t discussed. I think she would probably want to meet us before she decided to sell. The cost would be in the building work though.’

  Ann looked at the wine in her glass.

  ‘What did you say? You just walked up, knocked on her door and asked if you could buy her barn?’

  ‘Pretty much. I explained that we lived in Maltham, that we loved the area and it was just what we had been looking for.’

  ‘And she said “OK”?’

  ‘Not exactly. She was worried it would be too dark, with all the trees, so I explained we loved trees. That we are a tree family.’

  ‘We’re certainly that,’ Ann said, and put her glass down. ‘So what do we do next?’

  ‘We see what happens with Harriet. There’s no point in doing anything if Harriet isn’t happy with it.’

  The next evening Thomas drove Harriet to Bleasdale Forest and the barn. He took her from the car and walked through the gaping wall and over to the washing machine. Harriet wriggled in his arms but made no sound. Thomas rested against the washing machine and within minutes Harriet was asleep. They stayed there for an hour. Thomas took Harriet to the barn several times over the next week, each time with the same result, and so, on the next Saturday afternoon, the four of them went to see Mrs Silverwood. During the drive Thomas tried not to think about what he was attempting, it seemed ridiculous when he considered it in any detail, so he chatted with Ann and kept his thoughts away from the reason for the visit.

  It was a quiet afternoon for Harriet, she was in the forest, and Daniel was on adorable form, smiling at Mrs Silverwood, chatting away in gobbledegook. It seemed to Thomas that nobody wanted to broach the subject of the barn. They spoke about Thomas’s job at the bank, if Ann would go back to work when the children were older. Mrs Silverwood told them about her children, now moved away, about her dead husband, Harry. How he’d been born in the house they were sitting in, and had lived and farmed in Abbeystead all his life. It wasn’t until everyone had finished their drinks and eaten the biscuits from the offered plate that the barn was mentioned.

  ‘Do you really want to buy it? That wreck?’ Mrs Silverwood asked.

  ‘We do,’ Thomas said, and Ann nodded.

  ‘It can be lonely out here,’ Mrs Silverwood warned, ‘and the winters can be hard. Cold and long.’ She turned to Daniel. ‘What about you, Daniel?’ she asked. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Biscuit!’ he shouted, and Mrs Silverwood laughed.

  Thomas leant forward with his arms resting on his knees. ‘But we don’t want to cause you trouble,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to inconvenience you. You’re not that near the barn, but there will be lots of work going on, traffic coming and going on that small road when the work is being done.’

  He was thinking – I don’t mean that at all, I don’t care if it causes you a world of trouble. I want that barn for my family.

  Mrs Silverwood wasn’t concerned. ‘As long as you are sure it’s what you want,’ she said. She went to make more drinks and brought out another plate of biscuits.

  Thomas set to it. He was imbued with an energy he’d never known before, a desire to get things done. He was ready for the battle and became single-minded in his aim. He found an architect and paid him extra to draw up plans as quickly as possible. He delivered the plans to the planning department and hounded them until they grew sick of him. In record time, although it felt an age to Thomas, the plans were approved. He didn’t allow himself a second’s celebration, instead he phoned builders and negotiated and haggled and checked what they said with other tradesmen and pulled them up when he thought they were trying it on. He made a receptionist at the solicitor’s cry when he thought she was stalling him. He felt remorse only for a second before his brain moved on to the next thing that needed to be done. When timescales were suggested he cut them in half, saying he was sure it could be done more quickly, and he found that he was right – in most cases the work could be done more quickly, if he was willing to pay. He started each morning with a list and enjoyed pushing a thick black line through each task as he pushed his family, as quickly, as strongly as he could, closer to a new home in the trees.

  Selling their house was easy. It was a good house in a good town with popular schools close by. They had four offers and accepted the one from the couple with no chain. It wasn’t the most money, but the buyer was prepared to wait until the Nortons had a house they could move into. The visit to Ann’s parents to ask for money had been awkward. The Steads had the money and would give anything to see Ann and their grandchildren happy, but they couldn’t understand the move at all.

  ‘You already have such a lovely home. You were so happy to find it and you’ve spent so much money on it,’ Judith said.

  ‘And why out there?’ George asked. ‘What will you do, day in day out?’

  Ann and Thomas did their best to sell the idea. They spoke about the countryside, the fresh air, the nature, the kids being able to explore without fear, but Ann’s parents remained nonplussed. The money was not withheld however and Thomas and Ann thanked them sincerely for it.

  ‘We could just tell them the real reason, you know,’ Thomas said. ‘They know we’ve had problems with Harriet.’

  ‘I would happily tell them the truth if it didn’t sound so insane,’ Ann said, and Thomas nodded. The fact that it was a simple truth didn’t make it sound any less absurd when you spoke it out loud. They were renovating a wrecked barn, in the middle of a remote forest, because it was the only place they’d found that their baby daughter didn’t cry.

  Six

  Raymond was considered an oddball in Abbeystead not only because of his size and appearance, but because he was never seen in any of the local pubs, didn’t socialise at all, and on the rare occasions he was spotted in the village, avoided eye contact and didn’t nod or offer a greeting to anyone. Frank Chapman, the farmer who employed him, would sometimes be questioned about Raymond at the bar of the Tillotsons in Keasden. A terse man himself, he would say, ‘He works hard and doesn’t say much.’

  Sheila Chapman would offer a little more when she accompanied her husband on a weekend night. ‘He’s a good man, he’s just not good with other people. He’s not sure what to do around them, he’s very shy. We’ve never had any problems with him at all. And he’s a good worker, isn’t he Frank?’

  Frank would nod at that, and think, cheap too. He sometimes worried that Raymond would be offered more money for less work elsewhere, but whenever summoned, Raymond would turn up, bag over his shoulder, and always within twenty-four hours.

  Raymond needed the meagre wages, but he didn’t work at the farm just for money. He had to escape his house. Home was a rundown terraced house in Etherton, a damp mess he’d inherited from his mother. The damp patches had first seeped in through the downstairs front room, but over the years they’d spread, along with the black mould. In the small back bedroom, which had been Raymond’s as a child, the mould ran from the bottom of the wall, up to the ceiling and across to the door, like a colony of escaping wasps. Raymond kept the door shut on that room and only went in if he had to. Wallpaper flaked off the walls in the downstairs rooms, the brick underneath crumbling a little too. For a couple of years Raymond repapered when the wallpaper hung loose, but within weeks, sometimes days, the
paper would curl away from the wall again, as if in disgust, and Raymond could sense the dampness pouring through and his pulse would quicken. The house was dying. With him inside. The place smelt dank, an odour of old vegetables clung to the air. It was a greasy smell which embedded itself into the fabric of Raymond’s clothes, worked into the pores of his skin and was so familiar to Raymond he didn’t notice it when he was living at the house, was surprised by its pungency when he returned after a few weeks on the farm. The smells of the farm, even at their most ripe, smelt of life, whilst 11 Granville Road smelt of death and nothing else. Raymond would have gladly swapped the house permanently for the old caravan behind the farmhouse of a farmer who paid him too little and didn’t seem to like him very much at all.

  Raymond loved to escape his house. He loved to escape Etherton. He once heard the town described as ‘an armpit of a town’, a description which summed up his feelings with precision. There were streets of abandoned houses, blocks of flats built only twenty years before and already condemned, empty, crumbling mills on the fringes of the town, high, dark hills behind them. In winter the hills trapped the rain and mist, leaving the town to wallow for months in a damp bowl of cold moisture, Raymond’s house a sponge in the middle, sucking it all in, swallowing it down. In summer the hills funnelled the sun’s beams firmly, refusing entry to any cross-blowing winds, and the town cooked like an egg on a scalding pavement.

  Abbeystead was Raymond’s haven. Fifteen miles away – a million miles in his head. Even on a black winter’s day, the landscape ugly and raw, rebuilding a stone wall in a high field when none of the stones were the right stones and his fingers were so cold it hurt to touch anything, he didn’t want to be anywhere else. He sometimes imagined a police car turning up at his caravan in the middle of the night to take him away, his crime to believe a man like him would be allowed to spend time in a place like Abbeystead.