In the Woods (45 page)

Jamie had stayed in the road, bumping her front tire rhythmically off the edge of the ramp. She dropped her bike, took a running jump at the estate wall and swung herself over.

Peter and I forgot about Tara (“You haven’t a titter of sense, so you haven’t, Peter Savage, just you wait till Mammy hears about your carry-on . . .”), braked and looked at each other. Audrey grabbed the hat off my head and ran, checking to see if I was chasing her. We left our bikes in the road and climbed the wall after Jamie.

She was in the tire swing, kicking herself off the wall every few swings. Her head was down and all I could see was the sheet of straight pale hair and the end of her nose. We sat on the wall and waited.

“My mam measured me this morning,” Jamie said in the end. She was picking at a scab on her knuckle.

I thought, puzzled, of the door-frame in our kitchen: glossy white wood, with pencil-marks and dates to show me growing. “So?” Peter said. “Big swinging mickeys.”

“For uniforms!” Jamie yelled at him. “Duh!” She slid out of the tire, landed hard and ran, into the wood.

“Sheesh,” Peter said. “What’s her problem?”

“Boarding school,” I said. The words made my legs feel watery. Peter gave me a disgusted, incredulous grimace. “She’s not going. Her mam said.”

“No she didn’t. She said, ‘We’ll see.’ ”

“Yeah, and then she didn’t say anything else about it ever since.”

“Yeah, well, now she has, hasn’t she?”

Peter squinted into the sun. “Come on,” he said, and jumped back down off the wall.

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer. He picked up his bike and Jamie’s and managed to wobble them both into his garden. I got mine and went after him. In the Woods 277

Peter’s mam was hanging out the washing, with a line of clothes-pegs clipped to the side of her apron. “Don’t be annoying Tara,” she said.

“We won’t,” Peter said, dumping the bikes on the grass. “Mam, we’re going in the wood, OK?” The baby, Sean Paul, was lying on a blanket, wearing nothing but a nappy and trying to crawl. I poked him tentatively in the side with my toe; he rolled over, grabbed my runner and grinned up at me.

“Good baby,” I told him. I didn’t want to go find Jamie. I wondered if maybe I could stay there, mind Sean Paul for Mrs. Savage and wait until Peter came back to tell me Jamie was going away.

“Tea at half past six,” Mrs. Savage said, reaching out absently to smooth down Peter’s hair as he passed. “Have you your watch?”

“Yeah.” Peter waved his wrist at her. “Come on, Adam, let’s go.”

When something was wrong we mostly went to the same place: the top room of the castle. The staircase leading up to it had long since crumbled away, and from the ground you couldn’t even really tell it was there; you had to climb the outer wall, all the way over the top, and then jump down onto the stone floor. Ivy trailing down the walls, branches tumbling overhead: it was like a bird’s nest, swinging high up in the air. Jamie was there, huddled up in a corner with one elbow crooked across her mouth. She was crying, hard and clumsily. Once, ages before, she had caught her foot in a rabbit hole when she was running, and broken her ankle; we had given her a fireman’s lift all the way back home and she had never cried, not even when I tripped and jolted her leg, just yelled, “Ow, Adam, you thick!” and pinched my arm.

I climbed down into the room. “Go away!” Jamie shouted at me, muffled by her arm and tears. Her face was red and her hair was tangled, clips hanging off sideways. “Leave me alone.”

Peter was still on top of the wall. “Are you going to boarding school?” he demanded.

Jamie squeezed her eyes and mouth tight, but choked-up sobs broke through all the same. I could barely hear what she was saying. “She never said, she acted like it was all OK, and all the time . . . she was just lying!”

It was the unfairness of it that knocked the breath out of me. We’ll see, Jamie’s mother had said, don’t worry about it; and we had believed her and stopped worrying. No grown-up had ever betrayed us before, not about something that mattered like this, and I couldn’t take it in. We had lived that whole summer trusting that we had forever.

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Peter balanced anxiously along the wall and back again, stood on one foot. “So we’ll do the same thing again. We’ll have a mutiny. We’ll—”

“No!” Jamie cried. “She’s paid the fees and everything, it’s too late—I’m going in two weeks! Two weeks . . .” Her hands balled into fists and she slammed them against the wall.

I couldn’t stand it. I knelt down beside Jamie and put my arm around her shoulders; she shook it off, but when I put it back she left it there. “Don’t, Jamie,” I begged. “Please don’t cry.” The green and gold whirl of branches all around, Peter baffled and Jamie crying, the silky skin of her arm making my hand tingle; the whole world seemed to be rocking, the stone of the castle rolling beneath me like the decks of ships in films— “You’ll be back every weekend. . . .”

“It won’t be the same!” Jamie cried. Her head went back and she sobbed without even trying to hide it, frail brown throat turned up to the fragments of sky. The utter wretchedness in her voice cut straight through me and I knew she was right: it was never going to be the same, not ever again.

“No, Jamie, don’t— Stop . . .” I couldn’t stay still. I knew it was stupid but for a moment I wanted to tell her I would go instead; I would take her place, she could stay here forever. . . . Before I knew I was going to do it, I ducked my head and kissed her on the cheek. Her tears were wet on my mouth. She smelled like grass in the sun, hot and green, intoxicating. She was so startled that she stopped crying. Her head whipped round and she stared at me, wide red-rimmed blue eyes, very close. I knew she was going to do something, punch me, kiss me back—

Peter leaped off the wall and dropped to his knees in front of us. He grabbed my wrist in one hand, hard, and Jamie’s in the other. “Listen,” he said. “We’ll run away.”

We stared at him.

“That’s stupid,” I said at last. “They’ll catch us.”

“No, no they won’t, not right away. We can hide here for a few weeks, no problem. It doesn’t have to be forever or anything—just till it’s safe. Once that school’s started, we can go home; it’ll be too late. And even if they send her anyway, so what? We’ll run away again. We’ll go up to Dublin and get Jamie out. Then they’ll expel her and she’ll have to come back home. See?”

His eyes were shining. The idea caught, flared, spun in the air between us.

“We could live here,” Jamie said. She caught her breath in a long, hiccuppy shudder. “In the castle, I mean.”

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“We’ll move every day. Here, the clearing, that big tree where the branches do that nest thing. We won’t give them a chance to catch up with us. You really think anyone could find us in here? Come on!”

Nobody knew the wood like we did. Sliding through the undergrowth, light and silent as Indian braves; watching motionless from thickets and high branches as the searchers clumped past. . . .

“We’ll take turns sleeping.” Jamie was sitting up straighter. “One of us can keep watch.”

“But our parents,” I said. I thought of my mother’s warm hands and imagined her crying, distraught. “They’re going to be really worried. They’ll think—”

Jamie’s mouth set. “Yeah, my mam won’t. She doesn’t want me around anyway.”

“My mam mostly only thinks about the little ones,” Peter said, “and my dad definitely won’t care.” Jamie and I glanced at each other. We never talked about it, but we both knew Peter’s dad sometimes hit them when he got drunk. “And anyway, who cares if your parents worry? They didn’t tell you Jamie was going to boarding school, did they? They just let you think everything was fine!”

He was right, I thought, light-headed. “I guess I could leave them a note,” I said. “Just so they know we’re OK.”

Jamie started to say something, but Peter cut her off. “Yeah, perfect!

Leave them a note saying we’ve gone to Dublin, or Cork or somewhere. Then they’ll be looking for us there, and we’ll be right here all the time.”

He jumped up, pulling us with him. “Are you in?”

“I’m not going to boarding school,” Jamie said, wiping her face with the back of her arm. “I’m not, Adam. I’m not. I’ll do anything.”

“Adam?” Living wild, brown and barefoot among the trees. The castle wall felt cool and misty under my hand. “Adam, what else are we supposed to do? Do you want to just let them send Jamie away? Don’t you want to do something?”

He shook my wrist. His hand was hard, urgent; I could feel my pulse beating in its grasp. “I’m in,” I said.

“Yes!” Peter yelled, punching the air. The shout echoed up into the trees, high and wild and triumphant.

“When?” Jamie demanded. Her eyes were bright with relief and her mouth was open in a smile; she was poised on her toes, ready to take off as soon as Peter gave the word. “Now?”

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“Relax,” Peter told her, grinning. “We have to get ready. We’ll go home and get all our money. We need supplies, but we have to buy them a little every day, so nobody gets suspicious.”

“Sausages and potatoes,” I said. “We can build a fire and get sticks—”

“No, no fire, they’d see it. Don’t get anything that needs cooking. Get stuff in tins, spaghetti hoops and baked beans and stuff. Say it’s for your mam.”

“Someone better bring a tin-opener—”

“Me; my mam has an extra one, she won’t know.”

“Sleeping bags, and our torches—”

“Duh, but that’s not till the last minute, we don’t want them noticing they’re gone—”

“We can wash our clothes in the river—”

“—stick all our rubbish down a hollow tree so no one finds it—”

“How much money have you guys got?”

“My confirmation money’s all in the bank, I can’t get it.”

“So we’ll get cheap stuff, milk and bread—”

“Eww, milk’ll go bad!”

“No it won’t, we can keep it in the river in a plastic bag—”

“Jamie drinks chunky milk!” Peter yelled. He jumped at the wall and started scrambling up to the top.

Jamie leaped after him. “I do not, you drink chunky milk, you—” She grabbed Peter’s ankle and they tussled on top of the wall, giggling wildly. I caught up with them, and Peter shot out an arm and dragged me into the scuffle. We wrestled, yelping and breathless with laughter, balancing dangerously half over the edge. “Adam eats bugs—” “Screw you, that was when we were little—”

“Shut up!” Peter snapped suddenly. He shook us off and froze, crouched on the wall, hands out to silence us. “What’s that?”

Motionless and alert as startled hares, we listened. The wood was still, too still, waiting; the normal afternoon bustle of birds and insects and unseen little animals had been cut off as if by a conductor’s baton. Only somewhere, up ahead of us—

“What the . . .” I whispered.

“Shhh.” Music, or a voice; or just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all. In the Woods 281

“Come on,” said Jamie, her eyes shining, “come on,” and launched herself like a flying squirrel off the wall. She caught a branch, swung, dropped and rolled and ran; Peter was leaping after her before the branch stopped swaying, and I scrambled down the wall and chased behind them, “Wait for me, wait—”

The wood had never been so lush or so feral. Leaves threw off dazzles of sunlight like sparklers and the colors were so bright you could live on them, the smell of fertile earth amplified to something heady as church wine. We shot through humming clouds of midges and leaped ditches and rotten logs, branches swirled around us like water, swallows trapezed across our path and in the trees alongside I swear three deer kept pace with us. I felt light and lucky and wild, I had never run so fast or jumped so effortlessly high; one shove of my foot and I could have been airborne. How long did we run? All the familiar loved landmarks must have shifted, turned out to wish us good speed, because we passed every one of them on our way; we jumped the stone table and soared through the clearing in one bound, between the whip of the blackberry bushes and the rabbits poking up their noses to see us go by, we left the tire swing swaying in our wake and swung one-handed round the hollow oak. And up ahead, so sweet and wild it hurt, drawing us on—

Gradually I became aware that under the sleeping bag I was drenched in sweat; that my back, pressed against the tree trunk, was so rigid that I was shaking, my head nodding in stiff convulsive jerks like a toy’s. The wood was black, blank, as if I had been blinded. Far off, there was a quick pittering sound like raindrops on leaves, tiny and spreading. I fought to ignore it, to keep following where that frail gold thread of memory led, not to drop it in this darkness or I would never find my way home.

Laughter streaming over Jamie’s shoulder like bright soap-bubbles, bees whirling in a sunbeam and Peter’s arms flying out as he leaped a fallen branch whooping. My shoelaces coming undone and alarm peals rising fiercely somewhere inside me as I felt the estate dissolving to mist behind us, are you sure, are you sure, Peter, Jamie, wait, stop—

The pittering sound was catching all through the wood, rising and falling, drawing closer on every side. It was in the branches high overhead, in the undergrowth behind me, small and swift and intent. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Rain, I told myself with whatever was left of my mind, just rain, though I couldn’t feel a drop. Off at the other side of the wood something screamed, a shrill witless sound.

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Come on, Adam, hurry, hurry up—

The darkness in front of me was shifting, condensing. There was a sound like wind in the leaves, a great rushing wind coming down through the wood to clear a path. I thought of the torch, but my fingers were frozen around it. I felt that gold thread twist and tug. Somewhere across the clearing something breathed; something big. Down by the river. Skidding to a stop; willow branches swaying and the water firing off splinters of light like a million tiny mirrors, blinding, dizzying. Eyes, golden and fringed like an owl’s. I ran. I scrabbled out of the clutching sleeping bag and threw myself into the wood, away from the clearing. Brambles clawed at my legs and hair, wing-beats exploded in my ear; I shoulder-barged straight into a tree trunk, knocking myself breathless. Invisible dips and hollows flicked open under my feet and I couldn’t run fast enough, legs crashing knee-deep through underbrush, it was like every childhood nightmare come true. Trailing ivy wrapped my face and I think I screamed. I knew beyond all doubt I would never get out of the wood, they would find my sleeping bag—for an instant I saw, sharp as reality, Cassie in her red sweater, kneeling in the clearing among falling leaves and reaching out a gloved hand to touch the fabric—and nothing else, ever.