The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER ELEVEN





HAILEY WENT TO her room early that evening. She was tired, washed-out. Her stomach felt oddly empty, as if she hadn’t eaten for days, and her throat was parched. No matter how much water she drank – and she had consumed at least a litre of the stuff since returning home from school – she still felt thirsty.

She lay low down on her bed with her arms by her side. Her bare feet hung over the edge of the mattress. There was a breeze coming in through the open window and it felt good against her body. She was naked. She didn’t know why she had not put on her pyjamas, but it had something to do with a vague yearning to feel the air on her skin, allowing it to breathe.

Tomorrow was Saturday. Apparently Tom was coming to take them out for the day, to Hadrian’s Wall. Her mum had seen him earlier today, and they had discussed the outing. She said that Tom wanted them all to be together. In fact he had insisted that Hailey come along.

Hailey knew that Tom was married, and that his wife was ill. Her mother had let it slip, and then tried to lie her way out of the situation.

Tom wanted to f*ck her mum. It was obvious. The way he looked at her, with hungry eyes and his lips slightly parted. He’d looked at Hailey the same way, when she had first met him. He probably wanted to f*ck her, too.

She wondered about his wife: whether he still slept with her, or if her condition denied him a sex life. Maybe he was sick of masturbating, and saw her mother as a viable receptacle for his desires.

Hailey smiled. These thoughts – illicit, virtually obscene – were new to her. Never before had she considered such things. She’d kissed a couple of boys, one at a school party who had been all hands, and the other on her way home from school just for the hell of it, but still she failed to see the appeal of tasting the spit and enduring the clumsy touch of a classmate. Some of the girls in her class talked about giving blow jobs and hand jobs, and one or two of them claimed to have gone all the way with their boyfriends. Hailey suspected that most of them were lying, just to give the impression that they were grown up, women of the world instead of blinkered little girls from the estates.

She smiled, reached down and stroked her flat belly. It pulsed softly. She liked the sensation: it was erotic, how she imagined the touch of a grown man’s hand in the same place might feel – a man rather than a silly schoolboy. Somewhere deep inside of her a door had opened, and the woman she would soon be was peeking out, taking stock, getting things in order before she stepped across the threshold.

It started to rain. She turned to face the window, the gap where the curtains had not been fully closed. Street lights. Rain. Shimmering on the glass. The sight was like a promise of beauty, but one from which she was separated, as if by physical barrier.

She closed her eyes and fell into sleep as if it were a hole in the ground. One second she was awake, the next she was dreaming.





SHE IS STANDING before the Needle, still naked. The ground is wet beneath her bare feet but the rain has stopped. Lights move beyond the unbarred upper storey windows of the tower block; unstable figures move within the spots of illumination, waving their hands like stage magicians.

She walks towards the building, feeling the cold air as it caresses her skin. Her legs feel long, lithe, and her nipples stiffen because of the chill. She enters the building through the front door, but is not aware of doing so. She simply takes another step and she is inside, standing in the foyer. The concrete floor has cracked open in several places, and thick, gnarly roots poke through the gaps. Large patches of wall inside the foyer are covered in thick swathes of bark; it feels like she is standing inside a hollowed-out tree.

The sound of humming is everywhere. She looks up and around, at the branches forming a lattice across the shattered concrete ceiling and the rough bark that covers the walls. Hummingbirds have made strange conical nests. She moves towards one of the walls, reaches out and touches the bark. It is hard, rough. One of the nests is within reach, so she runs her fingers over it. The nest is made of human hair and what look like finger bones – she can make out the gristly knuckle joints. A tiny blue hummingbird flies out of the hole at the narrow end of the cone, and then it hovers before her face. Its wings move faster than she can see; there is just a blue-grey blur, a glorious vision of rapid movement. The hummingbird’s eyes are black. Its beak is ruby red.

“Hello,” says Hailey, moving her hand, trying to catch the bird on her palm. “I won’t hurt you.”

The bird flies backwards, gliding like a smaller dream within the larger dream she inhabits. It opens its red beak and unfurls a long, thin tongue or proboscis. Like a soft, hollow tube, the tongue unrolls, growing longer and longer, until eventually it reaches the floor, its end scraping in the dust. More hummingbirds join the first, flying from other nests, some of which are located high overhead. The walls no longer contain any trace of concrete; they are all dark brown, an armoured layer of bark. The floor has turned to vegetation. The roots crawl and writhe, like snakes, around Hailey’s feet. Weird insects burrow beneath this mulch, their bodies displacing the earth and making small heaving tracks across the ground.

“Where am I?” It seems like such a huge question. The answer must be equally as large, perhaps so big that the universe cannot contain it.

The birds form a circle around her, like the flipside of a Disney cartoon, where the magic animals arrive to help the princess. But these birds, she knows deep inside, are not here to offer her aid. They are trying to warn her, or perhaps to scare her away. They are the harbingers of something else – something large and old and terrible. Like the small fishes that feed on a shark’s back, these things co-exist alongside the monstrous, and by doing so have become like tiny monsters themselves. Their beauty is not joyous; it is terrifying. It is the beauty of decay and degradation, the empty grandeur of destruction.

Hailey does not know where this knowledge comes from. It is just sitting in her head, waiting to be accessed.

“You’re old, aren’t you? So very old.” Her voice echoes within the tree-chamber. When she glances away from the birds, once again inspecting her surroundings, she sees that she is now standing at the centre of a small grove of tall oak trees. She knows they are oaks because she recognises them from school, when she and her classmates did a nature project and had to draw the leaves of different species of tree – oak, maple, pine, willow. The oak tree was her favourite: there is something mysterious and majestic about the oak. It is one of the bones of England.

The trees lean in towards her, as if attempting to pass on some secret knowledge. They grow as she watches, dwarfing her, becoming the likeness of what they used to be, thousands of years ago, when this land belonged to nature and contained some kind of indigenous power. But man came along and dug up the land, shattered and fragmented whatever power was buried here, and poisoned it.

“Is this home? Is it where we belong?” She isn’t sure if she means her family or everyone else, perhaps she is referring to all of humanity. “Is it where we started? Where we’ll end up?”

The trees shudder, as if her words have made an impact. Then, slowly, they draw back, moving away. Leaves fall like solidified tears upon the ground. They turn dark as they tumble, crisping as if they are being dried out in an oven. The fat roots slither across them, folding over the fallen debris, crushing it and turning it to compost. Great slabs of concrete erupt through the mat of knotted roots and branches, noisily reclaiming the space, raping it and making it unfit for anything but human habitation. The only animal corrupt enough to live here is man.

Suddenly Hailey understands everything. Then, just as quickly, she realises that she understands nothing. She begins to cry but doesn’t know who – or what – the tears are for. The trees diminish, shrinking, shedding their leaves, going to ground. The hummingbirds take frenzied flight above her head, performing wild, graceless loop-the-loops and almost crashing into each other in their haste. The sound of their wings is that of a million little heartbeats; their vibrant colours are like paint splashes in the air.

Far off, somewhere deep within this ravaged primeval forest, a beast cries out in the throes of either hunger or despair.