The day after that phonecall…

The day after that phonecall with the story about the historic lock happened to be my father’s birthday. I’d struck a match in my front room. I’d lit a candle.

But when I did it was a bit like I was acting like I would if he were dead rather than just in a hospital I couldn’t visit.

So I blew the candle out.

Only the day before I’d been past caring, though unequivocally not past despising myself. I’d got so used to both of these states that I was surprised to find myself thinking to light a candle, then surprised again when I could smell the match on the sandpaper then smell the blown-out candle and yet didn’t despise myself because I could smell these things and my father couldn’t smell these things.

Now, for a reason I couldn’t fathom, I no longer despised anything.

I left the dog at home. I didn’t want the responsibility. I drove out of town past the supermarkets and the flyover, out past the flower nursery where the unpicked daffodils were heaped-up dead and rancid on the verge of one of the flowerfields.

I parked the car where we always parked.

There were no other cars parked there.

I took the path we usually took.

There were no other people on the path.

There were no logs this year cut and waiting at the side of the path where the logs usually were. There was no sign there’d been anyone working in the woods and no point in me heading towards the garden centre; the garden centre’d gone out of business. I’d have given a lot to have my father yell at me over the garden centre rosebushes this year, us rowing as usual over row upon row of roses alphabetically arranged and waiting to bloom, The Ancient Mariner, Atomic Blonde, Beautiful Britain, Charles Darwin, Cliff Richard, Dame Judi Dench, Scepter’d Isle, Thomas à Becket. Maybe they were all still in there untended, wild-intertwined.

Maybe the closed garden centre was a riot of life now.

In fact, there was no point, I thought as I walked the path we always took, in taking this path through the woods at all. Which is maybe why I stepped off it – that, and the fact that I’d seen or thought I’d seen moving

freely through the trees a deer? a small horse? did horses wander about by themselves in these woods? Unlikely. I followed what I thought I’d seen to see if I could see what it was.

Then I stopped. Any path was gone.

I turned a full circle on my heel.

Turning a circle made almost no difference. All round me were the same different slim tall trees leaning towards other slim tall trees, threshold after possible threshold made by the ways they bent towards and away from each other.

It had taken me thirty seconds to get completely lost.

It was as strange as I’d heard people say it is when someone goes into one of those rooms so soundproofed that all they can hear is their own heart, the blood going round their body, the movement of their own guts and saliva. Except, what I heard was what was there when we’re not there to hear it. I heard trees creaking, not something I knew till then that trees in a wood did, like they were speaking a language to each other. Beneath that the sound of the wing movement of an invisible bird, the call of another then another and below me the noise that grasses make when they move.

Yes, like a shift of sound, an apparent absence of sound becoming a new sound palette in itself. People also chose, didn’t they, to go into a room designed to cut them off completely from any light source so they could experience ‘real’ darkness. Why would you? When there was so much darkness in light itself, like the endless shifting moving ever-changing lights and darks right here.

Not for nothing so many folktales and fairy stories took place in woods.

For a short while somewhere foolish in me expected what would happen next to be something like:

and then I heard what sounded like people working somewhere off to the left of me so I turned towards them and when I found them they pointed me towards the path back,

or

but soon I could smell the scent that meant that someone not far from here had lit a fire so I followed the smoke and my nose and came across a clearing with people in it who live in the woods / work in the woods / were having a day out walking in the woods / were cooking something over the fire and offered me some and were extremely good company,

but none of this happened.

What really happened was, I was lost.

I was alone.

I couldn’t hear the traffic noise from the motorway any more.

Dusk was falling.

I had no idea where I was or which direction to begin to take.

All there was was all there was.

I dropped down on my haunches in the new long grass and the old bramble tendrils. I unpicked a tiny thorn from my sleeve and reached to drop it away from me on the moss. Then I stopped. I held it up to my eyes and looked at it as closely as I could.

It was small enough on the tip of my finger to make the ridges in my fingerprint look quite large. It was black, tough so that when I pressed it between fingers there was no give in it at all. It had a little hook on its end and against the lighter colour of the tip of my index finger I could see this hook had a curve in it and a cunning way of doing what it was meant to do, dissuade by piercing and hooking under the surface of whatever would try advertently or inadvertently to devour, hurt or mess with whatever plant it had come off.

It looked a piece of perfect engineering.

I hooked it back into the place it had caught in my sleeve. It disappeared into the material.

I sat on a felled dead tree alive with ivy. Above me the trees were bright with the beginnings of their new green. A bird hurled across the piece of sky through the greenness, called beyond itself.

The trees spoke their language.

The light and dark took turns.

What I knew was my own absence.

What I sensed, clear as unruined air, was the ghost of a chance, a different presence.