Two things collide in my brain right then. My immediate first thought—not in a million years, pal—is swamped by another, something Andrew had said to me less than an hour before—between here and there is aboutfiftymiles of forest. I’d thought by coming out here I could clear my head and intercept the melancholy which has beenswamping me every evening since I came back to Idless. Today, though, that feels impossible. Already there are black wings folding around me.
Andrew reads my hesitation for refusal and nods. “No bother, Hazel—just thought I’d ask! It seems crazy to drive past you in the rain and not offer, especially with the way this weather is getting.”
I look up at the sky. The clouds have grown darker since I left town, thickening overhead. A skitter of wind blows dead leaves across the deserted road. Andrew raises his hand and pulls away from the curb, kicking up a spray of water from his back tires. Before I can even think about it, I’m waving my arms over my head for him to stop. I step out into the road as his brake lights flash, and then I’m running toward the truck, throwing my bag into the footwell as I climb in.
“Did you look me up?” he asks as we rattle over the packhorse bridge that spans the surging River Idless. Below us the water runs clear and silver, bubbling like liquid mercury.
I laugh, embarrassed. “Yeah. Of course I did. Andrew Garrison. You bought the farm in 2013.”
“Told you. Here.” He fishes for an old cloth in the glove box and hands it to me. “Can you wipe the windscreen? It gets misted up something hellish.”
I nod, leaning forward to do so. The road is rising steeply, gutters full of churning water.
“You lived here all your life, Hazel?”
“Uh-uh. Moved away when I was seventeen. How about you?”
“On and off. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else now, though. It’s the trees, the sound they make when the wind gets up—it’s like singing.”
I know what he’s talking about. It’s something to do with the way the tall spires of the pines are positioned on the hillside. The wind runs through them with a sound like many voices lifting. It’s eerie and a little unsettling. On stormy nights when I was little, I’d put my hands over my ears to get away from it.
“The location is the second reason I bought the farmhouse.”
“Oh yeah? What was the first?”
Andrew grins as he twists the wheel to take the little turning onto a narrow switchback lane. “First reason was the price. It was dirt cheap. The place is a mess, and the renovations have been slow because I’ve been doing them all myself. Poor house was sitting up in those hills rotting a long time before I took it on. But wait till you see it, Hazel. There’s nothing for miles around except birdsong and that smell you only get when you’re deep in the woods.”
I nod. Me and Cathy used to go exploring off the paths until our parents told us we weren’t to do it anymore. Too dangerous, they said. If you fall out of a tree and break a leg, there’s no help for miles around. Cathy and I had ignored them, of course, but they always knew when we’d done it because the smell of the sap-soaked trees clung to us; damp bark and green moss, deep and fungal. Thinking about it makes me reach into my bag and pull my phone out. I’m going to AirDrop my location to my sister and let her know where I am. Do the sensible thing for once. There’s not much signal up here, the single bar flickering slightly, but I’m not worried. It’s not like the old days when you had to climb the hill to make a call else you’d lose connection. There are phone towers everywhere now.
“Do you plan to live in the farmhouse when it’s done?”
He considers the question, his tongue probing into his cheek. “Yeah. It’s been so long, it’s a part of me now. Like Idless, like the trees. These places grow on you, don’t they?”
I nod, but I’m not sure that’s right. Places like Idless get under your skin, but that isn’t quite the same thing. They’re like an irritant, something invasive. I don’t know how else to explain it. It makes me think of the scar on my back and I reach around to touch it as Andrew takes another turnoff onto a narrow lane. Here the walls are herringbone slate dusted with lichen and long, curling ferns. We pass a red telephone box in the overgrowth, windows clouded with age. A hand-painted sign hangs over the door:LAND 4 SALE—238M2—THE SPIT. Underneath that, a phone number half-obscured by nettles.The Spit.Wow. Seeing those words unlocks a memory in me, of tongues crammed into mouths, hot breath in the dark. The radio playing something forgettable and the whole world smelling like sticky pine resin and Wonderland gum.
“‘A spit of barren land with no use for farming or fortitude.’” Andrew nods toward the window. “That’s how the Spit was described in the Domesday Book.”
“I used to go up there as a teenager all the time.”
“What for?”
I lift my head to see if he’s joking, but Andrew simply stares at the road. I shift in my seat, embarrassed.
“Well, uh, we were teenagers. Mostly we’d drive up there and just, you know…” I tail off, looking out the window, hoping he gets my meaning.
“Ah. You mean to get laid?”
I’m surprised into a laugh and Andrew gives me that big gap-toothed grin again. There are deep pockmarks on his skin, as if he’d suffered a bout of measles or chicken pox when he was younger.
“I’m teasing.” He tells me, “I know all about the Spit. I came up here a time or two myself back in my wilder days. You can just see it down there through the trees if you look.”
He points toward my window and I look down into the dense forest that covers the hills like a green quilt, surprised at how far we’ve climbed. For a moment I see nothing except the canopy of trees, and then there’s the Spit, a smudge of brown wasteland below. It’s unremarkable, parched earth with nothing growing on it. Of course, none of us saw it in daylight, not back then. We were young, and looking for privacy, incendiary with desire. Cathy had turned to me once, stoned and glassy eyed, pinching the butt of a joint between her thumb and forefinger, asking me, “Do you think Mum and Dad ever went up to the Spit?” and we had collapsed in horrified shrieks.
“It looks so small,” I whisper, pressing my fingertips against the glass. “Hard to believe what a hold it had on us at the time. I suppose no one goes up there much now, not after what happened.”
Andrew changes gear and the transmission grinds, the engine panting as we climb uphill. “The girl going missing, you mean?”
The trees are growing closer overhead now, dimming the light. The windscreen wiperstick-tickin the silence.