Part 2.1: an island and a tree

Saul woke the next day with the taste of river water in his mouth again and a dull ringing sound in his ears.

He pulled himself heavily out of bed and got himself dressed as the rest of his family buzzed cheerfully around him. Nate in particular seemed weirdly energised, considering he’d been up all night. It was as if there was a new energy in him, something extra Saul hadn’t seen before. His eyes were brighter, he was less talkative than usual, his eyes moved constantly, looking around him at everyday things with an intensity that was unsettling. It was almost a relief to leave him at the school gate, watch him toddle off to join his friends.

The rest of day passed in a dream, like night and day had swapped places. School was a jumble of impossible questions and unclear thoughts. Tiredness hung over Saul, a mean, fat creature squatting on top of his head, its flabby weight pushing his eyelids down, obscuring his thoughts, making him irritable.

Unexpectedly, though, it lifted when evening came. Something about the disappearing light in the late afternoon, the deepening cold he could feel cutting through his jacket as he walked home from his after-school club, excited him. His spirits lifted. Maybe it was that the idea of night, of what might be possible in the dark, was so different now.

But still, he was afraid. It scared him every time he remembered the feeling of falling. It scared him when he remembered how the outside sounds disappeared as water filled the holes and crevices of his head and the heavy bangs and underwater ringing of the river entered his skull. For reasons he couldn’t understand, it scared him when he remembered the off-meat gleam of the statue’s skin as he raised it to the streetlight. His thoughts jumped around the darker parts of last night like a frightened squirrel, drawn forward to something, but scared to go there. Rationally, he wanted nothing more to do with any of it, and he tried desperately to convince himself it was an unusually detailed nightmare. But he couldn’t, because at the same time he knew that if he never stepped inside the Gog again he would live the rest of his life wondering ‘what if,’ and nothing good would ever be quite the same.

That night, as they lay in bed, exhausted yet still unable to sleep, Nate reached up for his hand and squeezed it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll come.”

- - -

And Nate was right. It wasn’t that night, or the next, or even the night after that; but the night after that—the first night Saul managed to fall asleep in the normal fashion, the night after the first day on which reality had begun to feel convincing again—there came a scratching at the window and they woke in the dark to Gaia’s face outside, looking downwards in irritation as the Tall Man stumbled on the steps and she had to grab at his woolly hat to keep from toppling off his shoulders. In silence the boys retrieved the bundles of outdoor clothes and boots they had stashed beneath the bunk bed, dressed quickly in the cold and tiptoed to the window. The Tall Man lifted them down from the windowsill, and inside of ten minutes—before either of them had spoken a word to the other—they were back in the cab and back on the river, Saul doing everything he could to ignore the inner voice screaming at him to go home.

- - -

Not too long after that, engine off, the Gog passed silently under a bridge and left at a fork in the river, and drifted quietly towards a metal gate that stretched from one bricked-up bank to the other. Pushed by the current, rubbish gathered along it: sticks, bottles, leaves, bags and dark wet unidentifiable things, forced into a messy, bobbing mass. A damp smell fingered its way into the cab and the sound of the water was close and thick.

The Tall Man flicked a couple of switches, the engine coughed into life, and he pointed the nose of the boat at the middle of the gate. Saul saw one or two large pieces of wood in among the rubbish – not twigs, these, but big, splintered logs; broken trees. One of them seemed to have a moorhen’s nest on it. The gate disappeared beneath the bottom of the windscreen and Saul braced for an impact, but there was only a soft bump as the Gog pushed into the soggy mass and the gate just opened for them, smoothly down the middle. Saul heard a stifled laugh and opened his eyes to see Gaia grinning at him.

“Act like you own it,” she said. “That’s how the city works.”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking.

They had been drifting in darkness, but once through the gate, the Tall Man switched on the headlights. The effect was more atmospheric than useful. A section of river ahead was weakly illuminated by dappled light filtered through water and mud; in front of them, two glowing greenish-grey pools preceded them down the river. Now released, the sticks and the bottles that had been pushed up against the gate, lighter and faster than the Gog, were pulling away in front. Among the rubbish Saul glimpsed a doll, lit from below by the headlights, face down in the green water with golden plastic hair floating around its head. Moving more slowly, closer to the bank, was a child’s teddy bear, filthy and sodden.

Gaia climbed over Saul and disappeared into the main room. “Go with her,” said the Tall Man.

In the back, Gaia pulled the boathook from under the long desk, then tugged at the big map, which rolled itself smoothly and silently up into the ceiling. Behind it was the back door, which she unlocked by spinning a large metal wheel in its centre, before pushing it open and stepping over the raised sill. The boys followed her through.

They found themselves in a small, dirty space very different to the polished warmth of the inside. This bit of the Gog was very much still part of a working rubbish lorry. They stood on overlapping plates of raw, rough metal that was sticky underfoot, and looked out at the river through the gaps between big, scarred metal teeth. The canal fell away silently behind them, eddies in the water like sleeping muscles, flexing and relaxing. The engine noise was louder here, and Saul felt a gentle vibration up through the soles of his feet.

“We do actually do the bins as well,” said Gaia.

“Where does it go?” he glanced back inside. Out here, surrounded by steel and dark, the smell of mud and the sound of water licking softly up the side of the boat, the warm wood and brass behind them looked like a magician’s trick.

“Down,” she said. Nodding toward the floor. “The Gog eats. You can’t stand back here, these plates’d take your leg off. That’s why it’s such a heavy door. ”

Nate stomped on the floor happily. It rung for him.

“Everything just… goes under…” she gestured vaguely at the floor, “gets squashed up into little bricks.”

“Who made it?” Asked Saul, but Nate interrupted. “Teddy!” he said, pointing over the side.

Sure enough, they had overtaken the bear. It was a sad, wet little thing, face down on its slow way to who knows where. It bobbed in the disturbed water, bedraggled paws waving lazily at something out of sight in the dark.

Gaia pulled something from her pocket: two bright purple aluminium mountaineer’s clips joined together by a strip of strong-looking fabric. She fastened one end to her belt – just a normal belt – and the other to a metal ring set in the outside wall. Balancing with the boathook, she stepped up onto the lip between the Gog’s big metal teeth and leaned way out over the water, far past the point of losing her balance, letting the rope and her belt take all her weight, trusting the integrity of her trousers to stop her from bellyflopping into the cold, muddy water. Even Nate looked a bit worried.

She let herself drop unnecessarily far, all the way down until she was horizontal, parallel with the water’s surface, and with one smooth, sweeping movement, dipped the staff into the water and snagged the bear. It hung off the hook, legs and arms dripping, a poor dead thing. “Give us a pull then,” said Gaia.

The boys tugged on the rope until she was upright again. She stepped off the ledge and passed the cold, muddy bear to Saul.

He turned it over in his hands. It was slimy, too. “What do you want me to do with it?”

She unclipped herself and reached out a hand. He passed it back to her; she checked the seams and the eyes, and, satisfied, squeezed it hard. Grey water pooled on the scuffed metal between her feet. She opened her mouth to speak, drew breath, closed it again, frowned. “It’s treasure for someone,” she said, finally. She stepped back into the warmth and placed the bear carefully in a large enamelled bowl on the desk.

He was about to follow her, but something caught his attention and made him stop. Out in the thick scrub on the banks, in the corner of his eye, something moved. He turned. The trees were closer than he expected, much closer than they had been a minute ago. His night vision had been affected by the inside lights, so he shaded his eyes with his hands, trying to readjust to the dark. The solid mass of the riverbank resolved and he realised how it had got so close so quickly: he was looking at an island. The Gog slowed as he took in the sight: a dark lump on the water, small, maybe only the size of a multi-use football pitch, for the most part covered by trees. But these were big, grown London trees, 30 or 40 metres high, strong dirty trunks like pillars at the entrance to a lost temple. Great bare grey branches reached up and out and over the Gog, disappearing into the gloom. Between the trunks he saw more movement, shadows drifting in and out of the branches. A soft, low sound came close and made him jump – the sound of some night bird. He turned, looking for the source, and it came again—only now from inside the Gog. Gaia and Nate were standing on a chair beneath an open porthole. Gaia had both hands to her mouth; she took a deep breath and the sound came again, as if she was hiding a bird between her cupped hands. This time an answer came from out in the dark. She looked down at Nate. “Go on,” she said, “your turn.”

Nate tried his best. He’d stood up and straightened his back to standing like her. He lifted his hands to his mouth, took a deep breath and made a very loud sound halfway between the hiss of an angry goose and a fart. Gaia burst out laughing. Even Saul smiled. He could see his brother unsure, not knowing if he was the joke; but he saw kindness in Gaia’s eyes, and how she reached down and put an arm around Nate’s shoulders, and then Nate was free to laugh too. He stepped inside.

Up in the cab, the Tall Man was relaxed, elbow on the sill of the open window, leaning out across his wing mirror to look back along the body of the Gog, like any driver parking a lorry on any road in London. Past him, the trees were a couple of metres away. On the bank, broken shadows melted and reformed into the shade of a hooded figure. Gaia reached up and pressed a button in the ceiling that opened the cab’s sunroof. Probably not a feature of most recycling lorries, thought Saul. Though maybe it should be.

Agile and quick, she stood up on the seat, grasped the edge of the hole and pulled herself up and out into the roof. The boys followed.

Down on the bank, the figure was closer: a peaked cap under a large hood, face covered in shadow. Saul recognised the man from the other night, the man he’d watched from his window as he cut their rubbish bag open. “It’s grippier than it looks,” called the figure. The voice was soft and low—not a man’s, but a woman’s.

“Be careful,” called the Tall Man from below him. “First time she went up there, she fell in.”

The movement wasn’t too bad, but Saul took small steps all the same.

Someone had propped a ladder up against the side. Instead of climbing down it, Gaia put her hands on either side of the rungs, did a little jump backwards and slid down it like a firefighter on a pole, gripping the edge of the ladder with the insides of her shoes. It looked incredible, and Saul was certain that if he tried to do anything like it he’d be spending the next few minutes in the river. At the thought, his ears filled with that muffled ringing and his skin went cold - he could felt damp rise from the tips of his toes to his crown as if he was being lowered in on a ducking stool, as real as anything he’d ever felt touch his skin. He dropped to his knees, eyes shut tight as he tried to squeeze the sound back down to where it had come from.

There was a pressure on his shoulder, a welcome source of warmth. He reached up, found a hand and gripped tightly. He looked up and Nate was there, just looking down at him and smiling. Saul was worried Gaia had seen him, but crouched down like that, he was invisible from the bank. Nate squeezed his shoulder and said, “it’s OK.” For a reason he couldn’t understand, Saul believed him.

With a final squeeze, Nate turned and walked surefooted to the top of the ladder, rolling his hips slightly against the movement of the metal beneath him. Before Saul could say a word, he gripped either side of the ladder and dropped himself off the side, perfectly copying Gaia’s slide down to the bank. Saul stood shakily, took a deep, deep breath and looked up at the sky.

Tonight was clear and dark. Space hardware winked at him as if it was in on the joke. Exhaling the air, the tension and the memory of water from his lungs, he turned carefully and stepped towards the top of the ladder, conscious that the metal beneath his feet was wet.

The ground was muddy underfoot. The noise from the Gog’s engine had stopped again. The sounds of the night and the river took over. Branches creaked and rustled. Above and about them the wind sighed through the trees. A night bird cooed softly in the dark over to the right, and under everything was the soft lapping of water at the banks. Ahead of them was a dense thicket of brambles, chaotic and thorny, completely impassable; but Gaia moved a few steps to one side, and as they followed her a dark opening appeared. She stepped into it and disappeared. Intrigued, they followed, and found themselves on a winding path through the thorns, almost a tunnel. The path was very narrow and entered the bushes at a steep angle, so it was hard to see from further than a few steps away. They pushed forwards, trying not to snag their clothes, grateful to be wearing Wellingtons, and emerged into an open space with a flat, dry, grassy floor. The brambles formed a tall, thick wall around them, arcing off to form what seemed like a roughly circular space, but disappearing into the night so it was impossible to see how far it reached or how big the space was. Above them, the bushes stretched far above their heads and merged into the bustling gloom; in front of them, in the rough centre of what they could see, was a huge and strangely beautiful tree. A scarred, once-broken thing, it was split at the base into four or five separate trunks, at least one of which had fallen some time in the past but refused to die, carrying on the slow task of growing and bending itself back up towards the sky over years and years. Others split and grew apart as they emerged from the ground. Each was wide and as tall as a fully grown tree in its own right.

“OI OI!” A loud shout split the silence. “Send them up on the lift.”

The voice, gruff as river gravel, came from above. From the branches came a deeper rustling sound, then a repetitive squeaking noise, like someone pedalling a rusty bike. Saul craned his neck and looked up into a gloomy mess of greenery, and was almost hit in the face as a great mass of wood and rope appeared, dropping fast out of the branches. He jumped back, startled, and a flat wooden platform, cobbled together from rough, splintery pallets, dropped to the ground in front of him. Thick ropes led upwards from each of the four corners, joining together at a great metal ring a couple of metres higher up. From the ring, another, thicker rope disappeared into the branches.

“Go on,” said Gaia. Nate jumped on to the platform. Gaia followed, and, after a second, so did Saul. The squeaking started up again and, with a jerk and an unsettling sideways shift, the platform left the ground. All three of them held tight to the ropes as they were lifted into the tree. The ground disappeared and branches fingered their clothes; they weren’t moving fast, but still the ascent seemed to take a long time. Saul was wondering just how high they were when that voice came again, right in his ear.

“Welcome to the castle,” it said softly, and laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

The platform stopped with a jolt and hung there, swaying side to side. Saul, always prone to travel sickness, felt nausea rise; taking another deep breath to quell it, he looked about him. On three sides they were surrounded by a wooden balcony made of more pallets, some painted, some not. Ivy twined in and out of the branches, so even in the trees’ winter bareness they were invisible from the outside. Right behind him, sat on a bicycle, was a small, wiry man, his face shiny with sweat. The bike had no wheels. It was bolted to a metal support fixed to the balcony floor; instead of a back wheel, the chain drove a cassette that was linked in to a system of wheels and pulleys that ended above their heads at a winch attached to a metal drum. Coiled around this, like a thick, still python in the trees, was the rope that held up the platform.

The man bent down and pulled a large metal lever that locked the pulleys in place, then swung himself smoothly off the bicycle seat. Though he moved like an athlete, he had the face of an old man. Although he was sweating he was wearing a long, waxed outdoor jacket, dark green and crumpled. Neat grey locks reached halfway down his back and he had metal rings through both his ears. Another large ring was stuck through his right eyebrow. His face was stern.

He held his hand out to Nate, who took it and jumped across the gap to the balcony. The platform kicked as he leapt, and Saul held tight to his rope. When it settled, he followed his brother across the gap. There was no helping hand for him.

The man looked at him, examining him like a find in the river mud. “I’m Cedric,” he said, and his face was cold. “Been a while since I’ve seen one of you.” It made no sense, but there was no explanation.

The next half hour or so passed in a blur. Cedric said nothing more. He just worked. For want of an explanation or an invitation to do otherwise, they helped him. He might have been grateful, he might not; as far as Saul could tell, there was no sign that he even noticed.

The task was simple. There was a large pile of things that they had to load from the balcony to the platform, then send down to the ground, where the Tall Man would carry them off.

The tree was something fantastic, and Saul regretted that they were so busy: he would have loved to explore it. The five trunks grew away from each other, so that by the time they got to this height, they framed a space between them that was about as big as the boys’ bedroom at home. Half of it was taken up by the balcony on which they were working, a flat surface sheltered by the branches and the ivy and surrounded with a single wooden rail, with a square cut out at the edge of the floor for the platform they were loading. The other half was filled with a neat, shed-like structure with a small gas stove, glass windows, a tiny table and a couple of comfortable looking chairs. The rest was filled with boxes and bags and containers spread across shelves covering all the walls, or arranged in neat tidy piles on the floor.

A couple of metres or so further up each of the five trunks—all at slightly different levels depending on the shape of the trunk—were five smaller platforms, built around the branches. Each one supported a smaller treehouse structure. Inside a couple of them, Saul could see what looked like they might be pictures on the walls. It was hard to make out the details in the dark.

Nate struggled to lift the blocks, but Gaia encouraged him; Saul was sure neither she nor Cedric needed help, but he could tell that Nate was enjoying himself helping. Soon enough they were done, and the last pile of things was on the platform, ready to go down, and Cedric spoke again. “Right,” he said. “Time for a Meeting. Isn’t that right, mapmaker?” Cedric stared into Saul’s eyes as he spoke. Confused, Saul had to look away.

The platform lift was full now, the space taken up with the things they had put there. Gesturing with a metal jerrycan he was holding in one hand, Cedric indicated a spot somewhere behind Saul’s shoulder and said, “Take the long way down. I’ll be along in a minute.” Saul looked behind him. By the edge of the shed was a trapdoor. He looked back at Cedric, who just said, “it’s not heavy.”

Saul walked over the the trapdoor. It had a heavy, rusted handle on one side and big, equally rusted hinges on the other. Nate stood with him; together they wrapped their fingers around the handle and pulled. The door swung up silently. What it revealed was not reassuring: disappearing into the darkness below was a terrifying-looking ladder made of rough wooded stakes driven into the side of the tree trunk like a line of massive nails. Every now and then a branch in the right place took the place of a rung.

“Come on, down you go,” called Cedric behind them. There was an edge in his voice.

Saul looked at Nate. Was he imagining it, or did even his brother look look a bit worried? He took a deep breath and prepared to lower himself through the hole, but before he could move Nate had ghosted past him, swung himself through the hatch like a spider monkey, and disappeared into the dark below. Panicking – he was the older one, he was supposed to be looking after his brother! – Saul hurried after. For a terrifying moment he was holding himself up on his elbows, his lower body hanging in the darkness beneath the hole and his feet scrabbling at empty air—but then a toe brushed against something solid, he found a rung, placed his feet, and he could lower himself relatively safely through the hole. Once he had rungs in both hands, he took another deep breath and began to descend slowly, focussing on the rough bark in front of him and not once looking down. Hand over hand and step after step he went, until finally a foot was blocked by the floor and he heard Nate laughing in the dark.

They were on a rough wooden deck now, in the space enclosed and sheltered by the five trunks, just a step or two above the surface of the clearing. The deck was large enough for a couple of folding chairs, another camping stove, and a metal box big enough to serve as a small table. Above them, branches had been woven together to form a roof at roughly the same height as the thick brambles that surrounded the outside of the tree, over which the ivy grew to form a thick canopy. The result was a snug cave, the roof protecting them from the rain, five trunks like great pillars rising up above their heads, and outside them the clearing and its thick green wall of brambles. The sound of the river was dulled here by the soft sighs of the wind in the branches and the bushes. Deep in the brambles, something small rustled. There was a grunt and a thump as Gaia jumped down beside them. The three of them stood in silence for a moment, savouring the sounds of the island.

“Susurration,” said a voice behind his ear, quieter than the wind. Micky was leaning against one of the trunks behind him, her features still obscured by that hood. Her voice was dreamy, as if she was miles away.

“”Susssssurration,” repeated Nate, playing with the word.

“Do you know what that means?” Micky asked Saul.

“No.”

“It’s beautiful. It means whispering. Or murmuring. Like leaves. Or dry sand, running out of your hand. Did you know that makes a sound, if you put your ear close and listen?” She fell silent. Saul waited for her to say more, but she didn’t, and it began to feel awkward.

Nate walked over to her and took her hand.

“Or the voices of the dead. It’s one of my favourite words.” She smiled under the hood, gave Nate’s hand a squeeze and bent and kissed the top of his head. Then she turned and stepped off the platform into the dark, leaving Saul moved in a way he didn’t understand, standing in the gloom listening to the murmurs of the dead voices in the trees.