Woodworm

Daniel wakes from the dream where he is choking. He sits bolt upright and it takes him a few moments to remember where he is. Through the bay window opposite, he can see an old tree, its spindly branches twisting towards the sky. He has always hated that tree. He thinks it looks dead. Seeing it signals that he is back in his mother’s house, in his mother’s bed. The room is stripped bare of its familiar patchwork rugs and solid oak furniture. Without them the space feels very cold. All that is left now is the bed and the side tables. He lies back down, inhaling air that tastes like dust. 

He got the call that his mother had suddenly gotten worse last week when he was on the train to Coventry. It had meant to be a slick thirty-six hour round trip. All so he could nip into the meeting with the new client. The company flew him out on the more expensive airline for efficiency. Daniel ended up attending the meeting over Zoom in Birmingham airport. By the time he had landed back into Aldergrove that evening, his mother was dead.The hospital Chaplain told him on the phone that he could take comfort in that she had not died alone. 

Daniel had been left with the responsibility of organising the funeral and sorting out the house. For the last decade of her life, Daniel had been trying to convince his mother to move into one of the more trendy folds, the ones where you were pretty much left to your own devices. Daniel couldn’t understand why she refused. Since his father had died, she had only used three rooms in the house. The rest of the rooms had the radiators permanently turned off and all the furniture cloaked in dust covers. 

Unlike a lot of people his age, Daniel did not grow up with parents who harboured hoarding tendencies. This had been a point of contention at one point when Daniel had asked his mother where she had stored his childhood soft toys and she replied that they had been donated to the church Mums & Tots group in the late nineties. Now he felt relieved by it. He didn’t have to spend months sorting through drawers filled with old magazine subscriptions and mock china tea sets. All the furniture was in good condition due to the dust covers. It would be easy to sell on. He had asked for a fortnight of unpaid leave from work. His boss had told him to take all the time he needed, but Daniel was determined to be back before the end of the month. 

Everyone said the funeral was a lovely service. It took place in one of the Presbyterian churches down the Ards peninsula. His mother had spent the past sixty years attending the Presbyterian church in Newtownards, but they already had a funeral scheduled for that day. Daniel figured his mother wouldn’t mind anyway. She had loved Strangford Lough. The Ards Presbyterian Womens’ group offered to do all the refreshments as a favour, so on the day, Daniel’s only job was to greet guests and try to remind his liver-spotted uncles who he was. No-one from work was able to be there in person. Instead they sent a card and a huge flowering table arrangement that looked out of place squished in beside the tea and coffee urns.

Daniel didn’t notice Miriam until the service began. He had texted her to ask if she would like to do a reading but she had never responded. This was standard practice. It had been five years since he had last seen her in person. Her sisters stayed in touch with him and he sometimes asked them about Miriam but their answers were always vague and dissatisfying. Yes, she was still working at the gallery. No, she wasn’t living at home anymore. He had only found out about her post-graduate trip around South America by asking the correctly phrased direct question. 

Watching as she sat leafing through a pew Bible, Daniel realised how much of a stranger she appeared to him. Older, more stern. She had lost the plumpness in her face. She was wearing a blue neck scarf that, he realised, belonged to his mother, and a large charcoal overcoat that made her legs look disproportionately thin sticking out from under it. When he opened the Order of Service he saw that she would be reading one of the Psalms after all. 

Daniel is thinking about the funeral when his phone buzzes on the bedside table. It is a text from the moving company to say the pick-up van will be there soon to take the last of the furniture to the re-sell shop. Hearing it, Daniel gets up and pads to the bathroom like it is a starting pistol. He gulps down a pint of water from the tap and tries to move away from the grasp of the dream. His throat feels dry, almost like he has spent the night screaming.

He wonders if he is getting ill from the rising damp that had been diagnosed in the house during the vendor’s survey. In the week he has been staying here, he has developed an annoying tickle in the very back of his throat that he just cannot seem to reach. Sometimes when he speaks for too long he starts to wheeze. 

He wonders if the dream is a symptom of this oncoming sickness. He had recently read an article in a Health and Wellbeing magazine about how bad cases of damp and mould in homes can cause people to hallucinate. But it is a dream he is all too familiar with. More likely it is back because he has been falling asleep every night in view of that horrible tree. And because he has seen Miriam. 

The tree in the middle of her grandmother’s garden was a point of especial for Miriam. Just as Daniel hated it, Miriam loved it. She did drawings of the tree, wrote poems about it. When she was seventeen, she oriented the entire theme of her art A-Level project so it could be an exploration of the ecosystem in her grandmother’s garden. She had even moved in with her grandmother for her final term of Upper Sixth to complete it. Miriam called it a practice of immersion. Daniel had thought this a little over the top for anything below University level. 

When she was growing up, Miriam had cycled through brief but intense interests. Finger knitting, Super Mario Bros, the French monarchy, the mystery of the Mary Celeste. Daniel was always six months out of date with the theme of her birthday presents. She was never insolent about it, but would thank him a little too earnestly, smirking at her sisters when she thought he wasn’t looking. His mother always knew what to get her, had a sixth sense about what was going to come next in the cycle of interests. She predicted with crochet hooks and biographies about patron saints and charcoal pencils. Once Miriam’s interests began to merge in a kind of symbiosis, Daniel felt relief. He wouldn’t have to guess anymore. She was becoming someone he could categorise and understand. 

Miriam went overboard for her art A-Level. She created an entire interactive display around the nature drawings and paintings. She built a treehouse canopy simulating the old tree. A timelapsed video of the garden coming into bloom was projected onto the trunk which was covered in intricate drawings replicating the exact texture of the bark. The video overlaid with audio recordings of birdsong and conversations between Miriam and her grandmother. It had inspired the school to introduce a prize for curation in Miriam’s name. 

Daniel did not see the showcase on the night it launched. He had been on a work retreat to the Netherlands. His mother had rang him one of the nights to chastise him when he was at a whiskey tasting class. “There are some things you do not miss, Daniel,” she said, her voice was tinny, faraway. “One day these things won’t be so easily forgiven.” 

But Miriam did forgive him. She set up the full display for him at home and played him all the videos on her laptop. In one clip, Miriam appeared onscreen and tied scraps of fabric to the tree branches. She paused it here to explain these scraps were found items from around the garden. They were pieces of rubbish or fabric or feathers or straw used by rooks to build their necks. Giving them back to the tree was a marriage of nature’s impact on us and our impact on nature. Daniel remembered looking at Miriam in that moment, nodding at her whilst her intelligent eyes flashed, and not understanding a word she was saying. 

One of the later snippets of conversation featured his mother recounting a story that he hadn’t heard since he was a child. It was a folktale about a man who ripped out a holy tree by its root. The story played over a clip of the garden as it faded into night. That night, his mother said in the voiceover, as the man lay in bed he felt an itch in his throat and he began to cough. He fell into a restless sleep but was awoken when he felt something in his mouth. He moved it through his lips with his tongue. It was a leaf; green, silky. Then he felt something else, something sharper. He opened his mouth; twigs, branches began to push up and out from his throat, suffocating him. 

This was Daniel’s dream. The story was so gory. It had scared him when he had heard it as a child but those nightmares had not resurfaced until he heard it retold in this video. Now he tries to remember its origin, if it was a real story or one his mother just made up to scare him. As he brushes his teeth in the bathroom mirror, Daniel shivers. He opens his mouth and tilts his head back. All he can see is white foam, his own saliva. He coughs and spits out into the sink.

The moving company is a small local operation with only two employees. Because there are only a few final pieces of furniture to move, they have sent the young woman to help Daniel load the van. She arrives within ten minutes of the promised arrival time which Daniel appreciates. Daniel offers her a coffee before they get to work which he makes in a ceramic Le Creuset cafetiere. 

The girl is easy-going. She asks about the house and the furniture and responds without forced sympathy when Daniel tells her about his mother’s death. She helps him take apart the kitchen table, laughing at his jokes, telling him the tell-tale signs of woodworm. “Looks like your mum kept everything nicely treated,” she tells him encouragingly. 

Daniel again finds himself thinking of Miriam. He wonders if this woman reminds him of her because they look alike or if he is trying to work out if they are of a similar age. Miriam would be - is now - twenty-six he thinks. Twenty-six is an age he never imagined his daughter becoming. It feels very grown-up. He thinks back to himself at twenty-six and feels his mouth turn dry when he calculates that by then he had been married for three years. 

In his head Miriam is still eighteen, and fourteen, and twelve, and five. She had brought a man with her to the funeral. Daniel had watched them together out of the corner of his eye. The man had held Miriam’s hand when she teared up after her reading. Her voice didn’t waver during her oration but afterwards, on the walk back to the pew, Daniel saw her eyes were glassy. 

Miriam had approached Daniel in the community hall following the service. He had been surprised at this. He had expected her to churlishly avoid him just to make a point. Instead she shook his hand and graciously kissed the air beside his cheek. She asked him how he was feeling. Daniel had told her the house would be sorted soon. He wanted to ask about the man but didn’t. Miriam nodded and looked into his face pleasantly, blankly. 

She said that she needed to ask a favour from him. She asked if she could come by in the next week or so to take a clipping from the old tree. It was not so much a real question as a courtesy. She wanted to honour her grandmother’s memory and allow the tree to continue to grow in her own garden. She said it was something they had discussed at length during the last days in the hospital. Daniel had not realised Miriam had been visiting that regularly. In a flash he thought of the Chaplain reassuring him that his mother had not died alone. He had presumed it was the Chaplain himself who had been there but maybe he was mistaken. 

When Daniel agreed Miriam thanked him, took his number down on a small piece of paper, folded it and put it in the pocket of her big coat. He had frowned then. She hadn’t even had his phone number, he thought.

The moving girl is quick and strong, so the house is cleared by lunchtime. Daniel can see her leg muscles flexing under her well fitted trousers as she squats down to lift the slats from the bed. A few times he feels breathless and has to sit down. He feels old as he watches the woman continue without him - and then he feels embarrassed when a dull arousal stirs in his stomach as she sets the final pieces into the van. 

With everything packed away, the woman writes an invoice with the removal charge out on a notepad. Her cheeks are flushed pink from the effort of the morning. Daniel says he has plenty of funeral food left over and invites her to stay for lunch. She says sorry, but she has to be getting back. 

After his lunch, Daniel takes a walk, retracing a route he hasn’t taken in what feels like decades. As a teenager he used to take himself along these back streets to sneak cigarettes and commit small acts of arson along the hedgerows. Once he had even found an empty fox den tucked out of sight of the road. The foxes are long gone now. Where there used to be rolling fields, instead there are new housing developments. In these new-build estates, the next street is always built just a little too close together; little symmetrical boxes with squares of lawn trapped in perpetual shade. 

As he gets back to the house, Daniel’s phone buzzes with a text message from an unsaved number. He opens it and reads it in full before realising the text is from Miriam.

It is curt, says only: `Hope clearing house is going okay. Just following up re: getting a cutting from the tree. Could you let me know a time that works best for you for me to come by? Sending well wishes, Miriam 

Daniel reads it a few more times and then locks his phone without replying. He thinks back and wonders when she stopped calling him ‘Dad’. 

The house feels completely different without the final pieces of furniture to hold the space into a familiar shape. Daniel moves from room to room, packing his overnight bag for his stay in the B&B down the road. He is looking forward to a hot shower and clean sheets. In his mother’s bedroom there is a stained outline of the bed and the side tables marked on the wooden floor. He glances out the window at the old tree. Now the house is neatly empty, the tree seems even more barren. 

Daniel doesn’t know much about propagation. He goes out into the garden to inspect the tree. He snaps a twig off one of its branches. The wood inside is damp and supple. It is tinged green. Seeing it makes Daniel feel nauseous. He breaks off another, larger branch and sees the same thing. The sap stains his fingers and he throws the branch down in disgust. 

He hates that this tree keeps growing every year. He cannot believe that something that looks so dead keeps on going. There must be something wrong with it. He thinks about what the moving girl said about woodworm. The tree must be rotten, Daniel decides.

There must be something decaying or wrong inside that keeps it growing. He goes into the garage and after looking through the drawers, finds a blunt but usable axe hanging above the lawnmower. 

Afterwards, as Daniel washes his hands he remembers to check the bathroom cabinet for his mother’s out-of-date diazepam prescription. He makes a note to bring it back to the pharmacy tomorrow. When he closes the cabinet again, his eye in the mirror is drawn to the reflection of where the old tree had stood. 

There had been no rot, only new, dense heartwood. He had sliced it right down to the root to check. He had left the wood in an ordered pile next to the trunk. The view of the garden is much more pleasant now it is unobstructed. He thinks about ringing Miriam but doesn’t. He considers sending a text with instructions about picking up the house key but doesn’t. He goes to put the diazepam into the side pocket of his bag when, out of nowhere, he feels a strange tickle in his throat. He coughs violently, gripping the bathroom sink to steady himself. When he recovers himself he spits up into the sink and blinks, horrified, at what lands there.

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