“I do. We’ll go.” Now that we’d fixed on an activity I was anxious not to let him lose enthusiasm. “I’d like to see what she saw in it,” I said, and at once I began to remember.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

A Voice in the Trees

As I drove past the house that had been my aunt’s the upstairs windows snatched at the afternoon sun. The light on the glass erased the room where I used to sleep, as though the anonymity of the suburb had spread into the house. My mother had expressed surprise not far short of a reprimand that Thelma and my uncle lived somewhere so lacking in character. My aunt had valued the northern light that the generous windows afforded her studio, but now I wondered how much the view had meant to her – the view of Third Mile Wood.

The suburb might have been designed to hold the forest back, in which case it was failing in its task. One roof sprouted a small shrub like a feather in a cap, however little of a token of achievement. Some of the fences behind the houses were scaly with ivy that had climbed out of the woods. In a drive a paving stone had tilted up, exposing a contorted knuckly root. A few cars were parked on an expanse of gravel by an entrance to the woods. Flyers for a local folk festival lay beneath the windscreen wipers, fluttering in time with restless foliage as Roy and I left the car. A board above the stout fence bore a map of the woods, so vandalised that the diagram of paths was indecipherable. It was just possible to discern four walks, often crossing one another: red, blue, yellow, green. “Let’s go green,” I said.

That path led directly behind my aunt’s old home, where the shadows of the houses spread an unseasonable chill. The window that had belonged to her studio was full of leaves, a reflection of treetops. In my teens I’d thought this looked as if the woods were reaching for her. I was about to follow the path into the woods when a head reared up above the fence.

It belonged to a child on a swing in the back garden, but the sight reminded me of a remark Roy had made at Thelma’s wake. I was making to ask him about it when the little girl sailed up again. Her pigtails were the last of her to vanish, and she left her voice behind. “You’ll get lost in the puzzle,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Are you talking to us?”

Her voice reappeared before she did, pigtails flailing. “Get lost in the woods.”

As I wondered if this was a clarification or a directive, another voice joined hers. “Are you talking to yourself again, Francie?”

“I don’t ever, mummy. Now it’s a man.”