A Country Road, A Tree Read Free

of the wound-out thread. They would sit, and scuff up stones, and pluck at cotton-grass and stare.
    And then his father would say, “She’ll be wondering where we are.”
    And they’d heave to their feet and begin the long trudge that would bring them down and round and back and all the way to the grey box of home. Not Ariadne’s thread. Nothing so gossamer as that. Sinewy, this pull she has, and tough.
    And now he is alone, and his father planted in a trough of moss, and nothing grew from it at all except the ache of missing him. He turns away from the gate and walks on. The lane climbs between fields, shaded by high hedges that drip with fuchsia like blood, and every bit of gravel is felt through his boot soles as he goes, and sheep call and gulls weave and hang overhead.
    He swings over a gate and out into the open ground beyond: gorse rattles its seed pods in the wind and his own breath rattles in his chest, and with exertion now the scar pulls. But he carries on and up through the grey scabs of limestone, and as he reaches the crest the ground falls away to reveal the sweep of the coastline beyond, the fungal growth of suburbs crawling up towards the rust-grey city. To the left, the mountains swell, and the wind pummels down from there and snatches at his jacket and makes his eyes water. He turns his back on it and blinks out towards the wrinkled slate-grey sea, and the old world that lies beyond it.
…You hear the grating roar
of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling…
    But you don’t, do you? Not from here: there’s just the wind, and his own blood pulsing and the rasp of his own breath. The sea far below mouths silently; a sly lick towards the town, the graveyard, the roots of this dark hill. And over there, out over the horizon, beyond that wedge of Britain and deep into the expanse of Europe, a tidal wave is gathering, and any moment now will come the tipping point, the collapse and rush, the race towards destruction.

    He turns to pick out the rooftop, the particular skirl of smoke, where his mother waits by the fire and looks at seed catalogues and can’t bear to have the radio on.
    He knows he cannot stay. He can’t help Frank. He can’t write articles to order for the Irish Times. Sleep would fail him; he would drink to calm the shake in his hands, to soften the thud of his heart. Soon it would be a conscious effort to breathe at all. There had been nights, and even days, before he went to Paris, when he would have unwrapped a new razorblade and neatly opened his wrists and had done with it all, if it were not for the mess that he’d leave behind him. The bloodstains on the floor. Her outraged grief.
    He will have to tell her that he’s going, though he cannot tell her this.
    He tugs his cuffs down straight. He pushes the glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. He begins the inevitable lope back down towards the precarious little town, to all the things that can’t be said.
    —
    “Will you be joining us, May?” Sheila asks.
    His mother’s reply from the dining room is a deal more soft than it would have been, had it been he that asked.
    “I am fine here, thank you.”
    Bent into the smell of hot dust and electricals, he twists the dial through squeals and fuzz until he catches and settles on the signal from the BBC in London. He goes to lean against the sideboard, arms folded.
    Sheila sits herself down; Mollie perches on the arm of her chair.
    “Where are the girls?” he asks.
    “Still out,” Sheila says.
    The three of them gathered here know what’s coming, more or less; they know how the pieces stand on the board. The broadcast begins, and the British Prime Minister speaks, in his precise, quavering way, from London. They each stare at the carpet, each lost in the darkness of the transmission.

    This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note…
    There is movement outside the open door. His mother stands there, in profile. Behind her Lily