THE FAIRYTALE by Andrew Michael Hurley

On a hot evening in February, as the sun was starting to go down, cottonwood seeds began to float into Skylark Street. The air was filled with tiny plumes, more delicate than dandelion ruffs, that caught on gates and fences and formed drifts against the kerbs. 

It wasn’t long before the children emerged from the houses, chasing through the swarms of down and gathering up the stuff in handfuls. Their parents followed, looking into the sky and smiling at the remembered snowfalls of their childhoods. They hoisted the smaller children onto their shoulders and showed them how to catch the wandering seeds, wanting the little ones to enjoy this long-awaited evening as much as their older brothers and sisters, who were already clamouring to go across the field to the wood. 

Jon recognised their restlessness. When he’d been young like them, he’d run outside into the dry spindrift with the same excitement. But also with the dread of missing out. He could never be sure that his mother – fretful and widowed after the last of the Calder Floods – would agree to take him to the wood. And he knew that no one else would offer. Not after the Maynards had lost Patrick Adamson amongst the trees the first year they’d all been re-housed here. 

They’d moved away after the incident, the Maynards, but no one had blamed them, not even Patrick’s parents in the end. After all, he’d been a headstrong lad and not likely to listen to anyone telling him to stay in sight, and at that time everyone was new to the estate and hadn’t really understood what was happening in the wood. 

But Patrick’s disappearance had been enough to make it an unwritten rule that children went with their own parents or they didn’t go at all. 

Sitting on the front step, Nicky watched the other children with an apprehension that she’d picked up from her mother, Ellen, who’d been frightened and mistrustful of the wood. Every year, she and Jon had argued about whether he ought to take Nicky there. And every year Jon had capitulated when he saw that it wasn’t the result of the decision but the confrontation that was making Nicky distressed. 

But Ellen hadn’t been here for six months now, and he was free to make his own decisions about their daughter. Yet because the wood had been the cause of so many fights (and with the story of Patrick Adamson so often repeated in the schoolyard) it had been built up in Nicky’s mind into a dangerous place and now that the opportunity had come it was clear that she didn’t really want to go. 

But they had to. Nicky needed – and deserved – to see what was there. 

She was taking her time lacing her trainers, pretending to be dissatisfied with the bow and starting again. Eventually, Jon squatted down and did it for her, thinking that the sooner she was on the street with the other children the sooner her worry might dissipate. She was starting to look just like Ellen. In the eyes and mouth, and in her mannerisms too. The way she moved her hair off her face, the agitated rubbing of finger and thumb that was learnt rather than inherited. 

So far she seemed to have accepted what he’d told her – that her mother had gone to get better at Auntie Deborah’s house and would be back – but whether she believed him because she wanted to, or whether she was politely consenting to the pretence, he didn’t think that it would be long before the game soured and she started to ask questions. She might even want to be taken to see her mother. And that couldn’t happen. 

She knew that her mother hadn’t been well, but if she ever demanded to know why, Jon wasn’t sure how he’d explain. Nicky had been born here on the Pasturelands estate and hadn’t known anything other than zonal health- fencing, heatwave sirens, milk shortages and a life lived almost entirely within the three square miles of free-association they’d been allocated.

But Ellen, like Jon, was old enough to recall how things had been. And to remember was to be reminded of how everything had changed and what had been lost for good – like snow or normality. 

Ellen might have gone (early one morning in a pale-yellow ambulance) but there were plenty more like her on the estate. Ones who slept most of the time, as she had done, their days shaped around the taking of the pink pills and the blue. 

For all those who came out to greet the cottonwood flurries on this evening every year, there were as many who stayed indoors with their curtains drawn. What lay in the wood wasn’t for them. This wasn’t their home. They were the ones who could still convince themselves, even after fifteen years, that this was a temporary evacuation, not re-settlement – and that while they waited in these airless pre-fabs the Calder Valley was being made habitable by the authorities. They thought that a letter would come through the post one day informing them that their houses in Mytholmroyd or Hebden Bridge were dry enough to be lived in again. They believed that the water levels had to recede sooner or later. But these were the kinds of people who’d forgotten that Lake Trent and Lake Severn had started out as rivers and that Shrewsbury hadn’t always been an island. 

Still feeling Nicky’s reluctance in the way she gripped his hand, Jon said, ‘you’ve got your bird book?’ 

She patted her pocket, and he kissed the top of her head and they went out to join their neighbours in the drifting seeds. 

He said hello to the Chaudrys and then the Mortons, whose children offered Nicky guarantees that there was nothing to be afraid of in the wood; that there were only good surprises. Their eldest, Joanna, had a pair of binoculars around her neck to spy out the various animals that she hoped to see. Her little brother took photographs with an old mobile phone. Or pretended to, at least. They were only any use as toys now. With gestures he’d probably seen on television, he ushered Nicky and Jon into position and framed the shot so that the wood was in the background. 

While Nicky squinted into the sunlight and tried to find a smile, the Adamsons came through the crowd. Although everyone was in a festive mood, they kept their voices low, knowing that this evening brought about a renewal of their grief. Every year, they went calling for Patrick in the wood – out of habit now rather than hope, perhaps – but he never came back. 

With the Adamsons amongst them, even the most boisterous children were subdued as they set off. Before they came to the gate at the end of the street, they were already holding hands and staying close. Nicky even more so, with her arm around Jon’s waist and her head nestled into his side. 

‘Quietly’, he said, ‘it’ll be like stepping into a picture book, pet. That’s all.’

But a picture book was a bad analogy. The woods in picture books were full of wolves and witches.

‘A picture book of birds,’ he said. 

‘Yes,’ she said without looking up. 

He wished that she’d stop being so nervous. Then the lie that they were simply going bird-spotting would be far easier to bear.  

Once in the field, out of the shelter of the estate, the wind stirred the cottonwood seeds into a blizzard. The acres of thistles and weeds were dusted white and parents told their children that winter had once been something like this. 

They recalled snowmen and sledging – and the children had seen such things in books and on films but were baffled by descriptions of whole roads being buried on the moors, or how it could be so cold inside a house that it became necessary to light a fire. To Nicky, to all children her age, chimneys were objects of great fascination. 

‘Well,’ said the elderly Mr Buckrigg, ‘what’s past is past. We have to be thankful of the here and now.’

And his wife agreed, along with the rest of their Wednesday night prayer circle. 

‘We’re so lucky that they moved us here,’ she said. ‘The wood is a miracle.’

On the official map that was pinned up in every house and showed the boundaries within which the residents of the estate were free to move, the wood was an unnamed rhombus of trees that could not have spread more than a quarter of a mile from one side to the other. And yet, on this evening when the air teemed with a million seeds, the wood grew and was vast inside. 

It seemed that the old forest, of which their wood was only a poor descendant, returned and lingered long enough for them to walk for hours beneath the knotted boughs and branches. And while they were under the canopy, the sun would never quite set but continue to wink into the glades when the wind parted the trees. 

The Buckriggs and their friends claimed that it was an endowment from God, a consolation of some sort for their displacement. And while their view was tolerated in public and ridiculed in private, the rest of the estate, including Jon, could not offer anything more satisfactory. The explanation he’d given Nicky approached something scientific but fell so short that it might as well have been fable. 

Time became confused, he’d said. In that it mistook the cotton seeds for snow and things overlapped and for an evening the past stopped being behind, so to speak, and was, well, everywhere. Time unfolded, he said to her, like a present – or the present – being unwrapped. 

That he couldn’t quite find the words had made her more uneasy than captivated, but however he might have rationalised it all, it felt inappropriate to examine everything too closely and people took what was offered with grace and appreciation. Especially the Buckriggs, who were wont to remind everyone that there were plenty of other folk across the country who had nowhere to go, whose allotted living space contained nothing other than houses, factories and the regulatory schools and shops. There were no trees at all anymore in some parts of the south. No shade other than the shade of buildings and barriers. 

But the Buckriggs were deluding themselves if they couldn’t see that things were changing here too. Even in the time they’d all lived on Pasturelands, the birds had become fewer in number and variety (not that there had been much of either in the first place) and now there were only crows scavenging in the field which contained more rats than rabbits. 

It had once been a meadow, so the Buckriggs said, but no trace of it remained other than in the name the government had given to the estate. And in the same way, the kestrels, swallows, pipits and skylarks that the streets had displaced and then commemorated on road signs were now ghosts too. Which was why they intrigued Nicky so much. Why the promise of seeing them was strong enough to persuade her – no, lure her – into the wood. 

It pleased her that she knew more about history than most people twice her age. In fact, very few of Jon’s peers could say what these birds had looked like. Not that it bothered them too much. Nor did they seem to care that the cottonwoods started their seed dispersal earlier now than they had even just five years ago. And while they were thriving, the other trees – the maples, the hawthorns, the sycamores – seemed to be slowly expiring. There were a few corpses in the wood already, leafless and stricken. Soaked and desiccated and then drenched again as the months passed. 

Year on year, the cycle of downpour and drought was taking more of a toll. The field was baked solid from March to July so that when the storms came in August the rain didn’t settle but ran off immediately. The deluge was channelled into large drains at the threshold of the estate but the previous year even these had been overwhelmed and tongues of brown water had washed into Skylark Street for the first time. 

Eventually, around October, the ground became saturated enough for a mile-wide pond to form. It grew further still over the months that followed and remained until early February when the weather turned and a succession of gradually warming days dried up the sludge and propagated the weeds again. 

By the time the cottonwood seeds came down, the ruts were already hard underfoot and the only wet mud that persisted was in the places that spent most of the day in the shadow of the trees. 

Those shadows had lengthened since they’d set off, but there’d been enough heat left in the sunlight to make everyone sluggish and sweaty by the time they came to the fringes of the wood. 

The moistness of the dappled, boggy patches here put a welcome coolness into the air and Nicky uncoupled herself from Jon and wiped her face with the sleeve of her tee shirt. The rest of them breathed hard or fanned themselves with their hats as they watched the seeds falling and waited for the Adamsons to catch up. 

It had become customary for them to go into the wood first and, their hands and shoulders touched affectionately, they struck off in the direction Patrick had last been seen.

With them gone, the adults talked more freely and the children began to vent their excitement as they were finally taken into the trees. Looking inward from the edge here nothing appeared to be any different, the bracken and hogweed being too thickly packed to see more than a few yards ahead. It was only when the children began to shout and whistle that the depth the wood acquired on this evening each year made itself known. When the crows above stopped cawing for a moment, everyone could hear the reedy twittering of birds that had been woken far away. 

‘Nicky will know what they are,’ said Joanna Morton.

And after Jon had nudged her, Nicky said, ‘blackbirds,’ and her knowledge was rewarded with smiles and a ruffle of the hair by Mr Buckrigg. 

But she was too shy or distant to accept their praise, and didn’t respond to the bravado of the other children who were boasting to her about how far they were going to walk and how they would see the blackbirds first. 

Some families headed off in the directions they always took, quickly disappearing amongst the trees, their voices echoing. Other families stuck together in large groups, the mothers swinging hands with the younger ones, the fathers sauntering behind drinking bottles of beer and laughing with the high spirits of a holiday outing. 

 ‘Look,’ said Jon, showing Nicky the cross scored into the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. ‘And here.’

He stamped down a thicket of nettles and took her to a tree into which another mark had been gouged.

‘You find one,’ he said. And after scanning the trunks, she did.

‘Who put them there?’ she said. 

‘I did,’ he said. 

‘How many are there?’

 ‘Enough for us not to lose our bearings,’ he said. ‘We’ll easily find our way out later.’

It pained him that he was having to deceive her into thinking that that meant going back, but he knew that Nicky wouldn’t venture very far into the wood unless she thought that they would be able to retrace their steps. 

There would be a right moment, he thought, to explain to her that the way out lay forward. 

For an hour they walked slow and straight, passing from the wood to the older forest, where Jon had carved the markers into fatter, heavier trees, hundreds of years old. They were each so characterful that Nicky stopped fretting over trying to locate the crosses but noted instead the oak with the face, the two beech trees in each other’s arms, the fallen elder listening with a dozen jelly-fungus ears.

She had stopped jittering with her thumb and finger, and having been diffident for so long, she wanted to talk. About school, about some of the other children. About her grandparents, whom she’d never known and belonged to a human past that Jon didn’t think she could quite comprehend. In comparison to birds, she found people too complicated, even her own ancestors. She wasn’t being insensitive when she asked how they died. They were as ancient as Victorians or Pharaohs. 

Jon told her directly – grandma had a cancer that they’d got close to curing, grandad drowned – but braced himself for the topic to change and for Nicky to press him about her mother. She was quiet for a while and he knew that she wanted to ask something – or wanted him to save her the difficulty and just tell her – but when she spoke again it was about a different missing person. 

‘Patrick Adamson?’ said Jon.

‘What was he like?’

He’d been older than Jon by a few years; fifteen or so when he went missing. Before they’d been moved here, he’d lived next door and Jon had heard every argument through the walls. He’d run away from home a few times, Patrick. Landed in court once or twice. After the last of the Calder Floods had forced everyone to move to Pasturelands, he’d become even worse, always doing damage to the fences, getting into fights. His parents had despaired but the Maynards had seen some potential for redemption in him. They’d run a youth club in those days and encouraged Patrick to join them for walks, thinking that the fresh air and friendship might take the heat out of his aggression. Which it seemed to do now and then, but he often spoiled the games in the field when he didn’t win and then of course there had been that evening in February when he’d knocked Mr Maynard aside and run off into the trees as the cottonwood seeds fell. 

His violence had seemed unusual then, when everyone else had looked out for another and mucked in together. Now, it was commonplace. A few months ago, the estate had recorded its first murder. The place was changing. People were changing, just as Ellen had done. Tempers were strained, despondency was virulent, and the pale-yellow ambulances came more frequently now.

‘Do you think he’ll ever come back?’ said Nicky and Jon was ambiguous in his answer. He didn’t want her to think that someone could be lost forever. Yet, he was convinced that Patrick hadn’t got lost at all but taken the opportunity to escape. Perhaps that was what everyone else secretly suspected had happened, or even fantasised about doing themselves. 

But they all left the wood when their children started to yawn, or the beer ran out. They went back to their jobs the next morning, back to their ration books and memories that were as bad for them as drink. 

Faintly, he could hear some of the families sounding off to let everyone know that they were heading home:  Rogers…Wozniak…Hussain.

He looked to see if Nicky had heard them calling too, but she was being beckoned out of the clearing by the birdsong that had become louder the deeper they’d gone.

Standing under the cradle of an oak tree, she glimpsed for the first time the birds that she’d only ever seen on a screen or in her book: a robin, and the blackbirds that she’d picked out earlier. From nearby came other songs long extinct in England – the cuckoo, the silvery hammering of the wren, and the despairing cry of the tawny owl, which Jon didn’t think he’d heard since he’d been Nicky’s age. Lying in bed at home in Todmorden, in the years before the river rose. 

The memory being a surprise to him he thought to share it with Nicky, but she was too distracted by the grove they’d come to, thick with celandine and campion. Another was full of bees. The next, mistletoe. In the meshing of time, each new place they found was dressed by a different season. 

They chewed on wild garlic leaves, thumbed apart conker shells, patted their faces cool with the butterbur that grew on the banks of a fast, wide stream. 

A handful of blackberries grew there too and as Nicky had never tried them before, Jon plucked some from the brambles and watched her working out the sweet sharp taste. There were far more on the other side. But with the depth of the water occluded by the overhanging trees, he expected that Nicky would consider this the extent of their walk and want to turn back. 

Until now, Jon had been trying to gauge Nicky’s mood and time his confession as best he could. But he couldn’t wait any longer. 

He began to speak but Nicky cut him off with a smile.

‘We could pick some to take with us,’ she said.

She nodded across the stream to the blackberry bush and beyond, and he realised that she had guessed his intentions from the start. 

‘As long as you want to go,’ he said.

She sat down and began to take off her trainers.

‘Have you been there before?’ she said. 

He had. A year ago. After he and Ellen had quarrelled and after he’d put Nicky to bed, he’d walked through the cottonwood seeds and come to the wood alone. He’d gone further than he had before, waded through this stream and with the forest gradually brightening as the trees thinned out, he’d come to the other side. Just as he thought Patrick Adamson must have done. 

‘Is it far?’ asked Nicky, rolling off her socks. 

‘We’ve got time,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

The angle of sunlight hadn’t changed since they’d set off.

She said, ‘what will we see when we get there?’ 

‘A meadow,’ said Jon. 

In which midsummer was held in its natural place, between a bright-washed spring and a smoky autumn. But both seemed as distant as they once used to do on such days in June – and for a few moments that Jon hoped would seem eternal, they would neither have to remember or anticipate but simply watch a skylark climbing note by note into the air, lifted by its own joy.