Nell

Nell ran to the woods because the trees started talking to her.

She hoped they, at least, might have the answers. No one else did. Not her friends, not her teachers and certainly not her parents. But the trees... they had such deep roots, after all. Digging down into the earth. There was knowledge down there, in every stratum, every layer of soil. They must learn a few things tunnelling through all that history.

She would have liked to blame her parents for her abrupt decision to run away. But they were blameless. Blamelessly anodyne. Blamelessly dull. She was fifteen and for fifteen years she’d been. They largely trusted her to get on with the messy business of growing up by herself. 

It could have been worse. Stacey’s parents flayed each other bloody once a week in a public spectacle. Their rows were legendary and their make-ups just as full-hearted. Stacey was Nell’s best friend and even fleeting proximity to all that drama drained Nell of any impulse for angst. She had flatlined through adolescence. Pacific calm. Little interest in boys – or girls. No drink, drugs or rebellion. Her grades were fine. Good. Her parents and the Police could find no motive, no logical reason for her to disappear one spring evening, taking the sleeping bag from the attic, one hundred pounds of her father’s cash and a horde of cereal bars and snacks.

There was nothing there. Nothing underneath it all. But Nell had thought about it long and hard, had observed her friends, had observed Stacey and her family, her teachers. There should have been something there. Something burning her up inside, something chewing at her, desperate to get out. She was an empty orchestra, a dull cover version of the teenage experience. The only things that touched her were dreams and the fleeting emotions that stayed with her for a few moments after waking. In dreams, Nell lay beneath a tree on a spring evening. Beside her was a depression in the grass, as if someone had been lying there. Her outstretched hand was warm and she lay still and listened to the bees going about industriously, heard the trees boring through the earth beneath her.

‘You have it easy,’ Stacey told her. She cycled the short ride to Nell’s house most Thursdays to get away from her parents, to get some peace and quiet, and to copy Nell’s English homework. 

‘Everything is calm here. Your parents are sane. It must be nice.’

‘It’s deathly dull,’ Nell answered but backtracked. ‘It’s good, though. Good. They’re... content, I guess. Happy.’

‘Do you think they still fuck?’

‘Stace! Urgh.’ Nell made a retching sound. 'Are you trying to make me ill?’

‘Pray they don’t. Mine... God. Thin walls.’ Stacey grimaced. ‘I could never take Jason back to mine.’

‘You mean you two have...?’ Nell let the question hang. 

‘You know I’d tell you if we did. I’ve... touched it.’

‘Ew.’

‘Stop being such a prude, Nelly. You do like boys, don’t you?’

Nell shrugged. She doesn’t not like boys and she is pretty certain she isn’t gay, either. The whole idea of sex makes her cringe. Perhaps, there was something wrong with her? Perhaps something had gone awry during puberty? 

‘What about Steve? I saw what happened. At Janine’s party,' Stacey asked.

‘I don’t know what you mean.' 

‘He tried to put his hand up your top and grab your tit, Nelly. I’m guessing you didn’t ask him to.’

Nell shrugged again. ‘So? Oh, don’t look at me like that, Stace. It’s not like I’m deeply traumatised by Steve Harris trying to cop a feel. He was trying to do it on the school bus when we were twelve and he’ll probably still be trying until we leave school. Don’t worry. It's not like I have PTSD.'

‘Alright, Jesus. I’m just looking out for you.’

Nell rolled her eyes. It hadn’t bothered her and she wondered if perhaps it should have. For a few heartbeats, she even considered just letting him. Maybe then he’d stop trying. Maybe she’d feel something unexpected, something new and electric. Adrenaline and lust. It sure as hell wasn’t going to be anything like romance with weaselly Steven Harris who had been a grinning, smug fucker at twelve, was a grinning, smug fucker at fifteen and would probably be a grinning, smug fucker up until the day life knocked the stuffing out of him. He tried to act like he’d be doing her a favour, going with her. But the sickly smile was beginning to crack and suddenly she could see the desperation behind it. There was something unseemly and barely contained beneath. Now, when she looked, she noticed the same smile everywhere. 

Nell didn’t tell Stacey about Steve Harris’s smile. Or about the trees. She couldn’t tell anyone about the trees. Her parents would freak, naturally. And even Stacey would blab around school if she told her. No, she had to keep quiet about the trees.

They had started talking to her sometime in early March. She was on her way back from school and she’d detoured down Queensway, with its twin rows of cherry trees lining the footpath that led past the town museum. It was a grand path, in its way. The row of white stone Georgian houses, the cobbled street. 

She’d gone for the cherries, for the blossom, which had just come out, but also because no one else went that way. Enjoying the solitude, a spindly cherry tree—a deep brown bark, almost purple, cut with orange-tinged lines—whispered to her as she passed. It was a puny thing, locked in tarmac. A black plastic watering tube dangled loosely from its base, like something prehistoric emerging from the earth. 

Alone.

It was a single word at first. She put it down to the whispering of the wind, a trick of the senses. Some mixture of the buffeting breeze and the rolling traffic throwing up errant sound waves. Audio pareidolia. Like that crap about disembodied voices in radio static. There was art there somewhere if you listened closely and with the right kind of ears. Normally, Nell loved that kind of stuff.

At first, she assumed the talking trees were an auditory processing problem, something she’d always had, an inability to discern coherence from multiple sources of sound. Too much going on, too much noise and it was just chaos for her. It was why she stayed away from the Common Room. 

But soon enough, the larger trees started talking, and she couldn’t dismiss those.

Rippling the footpaths with their roots, bark like camouflage, peeling plates of greens and browns. Spiked and furry catkins. How no one else heard them yelling down the High Street, she doesn’t know. Later, she discovers they are called London Planes and they are by far her least favourite.

There was something wrong with them, but they didn’t quite know what, didn’t know about woods or forests. They were confused and they took it out on Nell, said obnoxious things, dull things, and occasionally rude things. She took their hurled abuse silently for weeks on her walk to and from school. 

Now, as she hauls her backpack and trudges through the town centre on her way to Crofton Woods, she can’t contain it.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ she yelps, but it’s Saturday night and there is so much going on that no one pays her any mind. Life on the High Street is young and the night is flexing itself, ready to spring loose, ready to capture her and drag her with it. She wishes it would. 

People spill out of bars and from across the street the Plane trees voice their disgust at all this unseemly activity, all this high-speed movement and unnecessary noise. Along Queensway, the evening threatens to devolve into a molar-fracturing ruck and the cherry trees let out a wordless, anxious whine as crowds of people pass underneath them, push each other into them, urinate against them. Nell quickens her pace and crosses the town centre and out through the other side in five minutes. 

Three centuries ago, the centre of town was a hamlet surrounded by trees. Nell could have walked for miles under canopy. But suburbia grows fangs and takes bite after bite out of the ancient woodland. The Sprawl engulfs the wild places one by one and now it is a half-hour walk from her home to the woods. Urban expansion envelops Crofton Woods, breaking it off piece by piece until only a hard-won core of eighty hectares remains, unbowed. 

It is Spring and for weeks Nell has been watching the woods redefine its harmony, colouring itself in infinite variety from a palette of only brown and green. Blues, purples, yellows, reds – they would unfurl themselves soon enough, but for now the colour scheme is fizzed through with a simple vitality. The voices are buoyant, a never-ending background chatter with the oak trees thundering through it all, low and bass, yawning as they wake. 

But as she walks back to the woods, the thickening dusk gathers and under the cover of night, the oaks will be daubed monochrome.

Nell navigates a warren of residential side streets. Halfway along, there is an alleyway that sneaks between a gap in the terrace housing. Nell finds it after doubling back a few times. The orange street lights peter out about halfway down and Nell finds herself staring into the blackness beyond, down at the end of the alley where the houses end and the woodland begins. It was darker than she imagined it would be. She digs in her bag and finds her torch.

She wades in and soon loses the path. Brambles catch at her ankles and the realisation that she is completely alone rasps at Nell’s tenderfoot soul, burgeoning now for the first time, opening up and out.

In the dark, the oaks whisper indistinctly and she finds herself longing for the vulgarity of the street trees. For the first time, she even tries engaging them, talking to them, asking them questions. But there is no solid reply, only wisps of some lost language. 

Nell stumbles on, not knowing what she is searching for. A sheltered spot, somewhere open yet secure to pitch the one-woman tent she has stolen from Stacey’s garage. In the woods, she loses context, loses the run of time and distance. She doesn’t know how far she has gone, how deep in she is and before long she is cursing herself and her rebellion against nothing whatsoever. 

She spills out into the glade and her torch alights on the silver-shot bark of a great tree, welcoming limbs spread wide and low in the clearing. It is a mighty thing, dominating the centre of the glade. An oak, five centuries old, wide enough that Nell could comfortably wrap herself up and sleep in the hollowed-out trunk. Alone, here, surrounded by tall grasses and rosebay on all sides, but filled with a million living things, its branches reaching out to touch the outflung branches of oaks eighty feet away, its roots twisting and entwining with the roots of every tree crowding the glade’s edge.

This, then, is the woodland’s grand gesture.

'Hello,' the tree says. 'I’ve been waiting for you.'

The tree, the glade, and the woods let her in, briefly, and for one golden moment, she belongs.

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