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I wandered a bit further into the woods, following the route we took last night when we were looking for Mum. Dad had slipped slightly on the wet ground as it turned into a slope, and there were marks where he must have skidded. I followed them, realising where I was going, but it was still a surprise when I reached the water and had to stop myself walking on. I raised my eyes from my shoes and looked ahead at the river, the water smooth and still, though obviously moving. The trees hung so low and the cloud so thick that there wasn’t much difference in light here than there was deep amidst the trunks of the trees.
‘Be careful,’ said a voice. ‘You’ll be swept out to the ocean.’
I looked around me and saw a girl over on the other side of the stream. She looked about my age, and was dressed like me too, in a cardigan and boots. But her hair and skin was deep dark brown, rather than light like mine. She was smiling, and seemed to be waiting for me to respond to her warning of peril, so I looked down at the water and asked, ‘Does it really lead out to the ocean?’
‘I’m sure all rivers do,’ she said, knowledgeably. ‘And this one moves quite quickly. Isn’t it strange how it runs through the woods so quietly? It’s like a secret.’
These words made sense to me instantly. I liked this girl.
‘My mum said it is poison.’
The girl laughed. ‘She probably just doesn’t want you to go into the water. Maybe she’s heard about the enchantments.’
‘Enchantments?’ I looked up at the girl now. She was throwing things – acorns, by the look of them – over the stream towards me so that they landed with a scatter-thud by my feet.
‘Yes. Apparently a witch placed an enchantment on the stream. Anyone who disturbs its calm surface will be cursed with terrible, painful skin for the rest of their life. Apparently it will speed up ageing too. In some cases, you die instantly.’
I picked up one of the acorns out of interest. There was a hole in it. A hole possibly made by a creature. ‘Who told you these things?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘People talk. I listen.’
I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.
‘Walk down the river with me and you’ll come to a bridge. Then you can cross over to my side.’
‘OK,’ I said, and started to walk in the direction she was, moving along the side of the river bank.
It didn’t take that long to get to the bridge; an old wooden thing that creaked as I stepped onto it, but didn’t look like it was going to break. At least not just yet. When I reached the other side of the stream, the girl offered her hand, as if we’d only just met. I suppose we had.
‘My name is Adah,’ she said.
‘My name is Kitty,’ I said.
We shook hands.
‘You look serious,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know there were other young people around here.’
She laughed. ‘Well, there aren’t many. And I’m only here while my aunt decides what to do with me.’
Adah sat down on the raised end of the bridge and I sat next to her, taking care not to squash a woodlouse that had appeared from the depths of the folds of wood. I let the woodlouse run over my hand and then asked: ‘Why does she need to decide what to do with you?’
She let out a sigh, but it didn’t really sound like a normal sigh. Not like the ones Dad did when he was stressed. It sounded almost pretend, like she was doing an impression of an adult.
‘My aunt has been looking after me since last year when my parents died.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, surprised by how calmly she said this.
‘Yes. It is a bit of a nuisance.’
I was surprised again. Surely she should be upset? She looked about my age – I didn’t think she was more than ten – but the matter-of-fact way she spoke reminded me of an adult more than a child. At any rate, there weren’t any tears in sight. Just a calm face.
‘Why is it a nuisance?’
Another sigh. ‘Because she doesn’t care about me. She’s awful. She’s called Andrea.’ When she said this name, she made a twisted shape with her mouth, like she had just tasted something sour. ‘She keeps telling me to “fuck off and get lost”.’
‘Does she hurt you?’ I asked, very curious about the answer. I’d never met a child like Adah before.
‘No, she doesn’t hit me. Just tells me I’m a waste of space. I ran away once to a big city. She didn’t come to look for me. I stayed away for a night. I slept in a disabled toilet in a park.’
I frowned. ‘Didn’t the police send you home?’
She shook her head. ‘Nobody saw me. I did wonder if the police would come looking for me, but nobody seemed to care. The next morning I felt too cold, so I went home. My aunt was in the lounge watching TV and just said “Christ, I thought I was fucking shot of you.”’
‘She sounds horrible.’
‘She is.’
‘Were your parents nice?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose. Nicer than her.’
‘What were their names?’
‘My mother was called Nikki and my dad was called Jep. I’ve got my mum’s hair and my dad’s eyes. I’m pleased it’s that way round. My mum was black, so I’ve inherited her hair and I can do fun things with it when I’m bored.’
I looked at the beads she had in it now. She was right – it did look fun. ‘Was your dad not black?’
She shook her head. ‘No. He was white and Jewish.’
I nodded. ‘There’s a Jewish boy in my class at school.’
‘Where do you go to school?’
‘A long way away. In Grays.’
‘I don’t know that place. Is it all grey there?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. Very. My parents have always lived there, I think. Even before I was born.’ I shuffled a little and reached forward to put the woodlouse on the ground. He had died in my palm. I didn’t kill him. It was just his time.
‘What are their names?’
‘Marjory and Nathan.’
‘And what are they like?’
This was a question that could not be answered in my usual short way – not properly – so I opted with: ‘Like normal parents who are suddenly not normal any more.’
She chuckled. ‘That doesn’t sound very normal.’
I nodded. ‘I know.’
Adah seemed intrigued. ‘Tell me something that they’ve done that isn’t normal.’
Part of me didn’t really want to go into details with someone I’d just met, but almost against my will, I could feel examples crowding to the front of my mind, keen to break out. ‘OK,’ I said, slowly, ‘well, there was a time last year, when my dad got me a programme about whales from the video shop in the high street, and it was one of those big video cases with two tapes in. Well, one of the tapes wasn’t the right video. It was this film called something I can’t remember – something like The Heretic but it may have been called something else. Anyway, Mum discovered it just as I was putting it in the machine, and she burned it. Not just the tape, the whole video player. She did it in a bucket in the garden. My dad was furious. It took us months before we got a new player.’
Adah watched intently throughout this story, but once I’d finished she just shrugged. ‘It was probably a naughty film.’
I didn’t feel Adah quite understood what I was trying to say. How the whole thing had been so frightening: how Mum had ripped out the video machine from its sockets; how she’d filled a bucket with some liquid she’d found in the shed; how she’d made the tape machine, with the cassette inside it, burn so bright and with such black smoke that one of the neighbours had threatened to call the fire brigade. Dad had arrived home amidst the chaos. He said it was just a bonfire gone wrong, but once he and Mum were alone they’d had a shrieking row in the kitchen.
‘There have been other things,’ I said, feeling a need to impress upon her the sense of spiralling disorientation I’d felt over the past two years. ‘One time she wouldn’t let me go to school swimming lessons until the local priest came and did something to the swimming pool. I don’t know what she wanted him to do, but in the end my dad told her the priest had visited the pool the previous day and done whatever was needed.’
Again, Adah seemed resolutely unmoved. I couldn’t quite work out if I was frustrated by her or admired her. ‘Well, at least you got to swim,’ she said with a little shrug. ‘I’ve never learned. They tried to teach us at school, but on our first time in the water I got in a scrap with a girl who threw my shoes in the water. We both had to sit on the poolside from then on.’
I nodded, trying to look thoughtful, deciding not to continue trying to make Adah understand the strangeness of my home life.
We walked about her side of the forest for a while until we got to a winding track that clearly led somewhere proper. ‘Where does this go to?’ I asked.
‘To the street, eventually. Where the houses are. But it’s still a long way, even once you’ve got through the trees. It’s where I live. I’m going that way.’
‘I don’t think I should follow. I think my dad would worry if I was away from the house for too long.’ I looked at my little red watch Mum got me for my birthday when I was eight. I wasn’t completely sure what the time was when I left, but I could see at least a couple of hours had passed.
‘Where is your house?’
I turned back, about to point, but then decided it was pointless, since we’d come quite a way and you couldn’t even see the river from here, let alone the house. ‘Back there somewhere. It’s in the middle of the woods. Perhaps not quite the middle, but it feels like it.’
She nodded. ‘The house in the woods. I know it. I didn’t think anyone lived there.’
‘People do now. Us.’
‘I’ll have to come and see it soon.’
She looked as if she was about to say goodbye, but she grabbed me and pulled me off the path and behind a tree. ‘Shhh!’ she said.
‘What?’ I whispered.
She peered out from behind the tree, looked for what felt like a long time, and then pointed. I followed her hand and could see something; something moving. Up a tree. It was climbing up the branches. I couldn’t work out what it was. Was it an animal?
Then it became clear: it was a human. A teenage boy, quite a bit older than me and Adah.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘Levi. He’s always climbing trees.’
I stared at the boy, who was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt that looked rather too summery to be worn at this time of year. He had a thin face, with a harsh jaw. I imagined he could be quite cruel or rough if he wanted, although of course I didn’t have anything to back up this assumption. ‘Does he live in the woods?’ I asked. It seemed like a reasonable question to me – after all, I lived in the woods – but Adah laughed and said ‘No, he doesn’t live in trees. Just climbs them. He lives in one of the houses, not far from me.’
I nodded, even though I still didn’t really know where these houses were. In spite of her descriptions, the woods felt like they took up the whole world, and everything else outside them had vanished as soon as Dad had driven us up that winding road towards our weird cottage.
‘I should go,’ I said.
Adah nodded. ‘OK. Just follow the river to the bridge and you’ll find your way back. Make sure you don’t fall in though. Or touch the water at all.’
I looked at her, confused.
‘It’s evil,’ she explained. ‘One touch of it, and bad things will happen.’
I didn’t like this. It was too similar to what I’d heard Mum say when she came out of the water. Thinking about it made the back of my neck go prickly, so I changed the subject. ‘Is it safe to walk past the Levi boy? Will he throw acorns at me?’
Adah giggled again. ‘It’s safe. And if he follows you, you can always just scream.’
I looked back over at the tree and could see his eyes, little dark holes watching me as I took a few tentative steps away from Adah.
‘All right,’ I nodded. ‘If he follows, I’ll scream.’
I’d never properly screamed before, but as I left Adah and turned to walk back into the depths of the wood, I got the feeling that I might be rather good at it.
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