The Silent Land

worked it out. I know where we are. We’re at the place where the laws of physics and the laws of dreaming meet.’

‘What?’

‘Exactly that. I woke up and realised it.’

She pulled him back to the bed, closer to her. ‘Go back to sleep, darling. Back to sleep.’

‘Yes.’

He did so instantly. She got out of the bed to switch off the electric lights. An almost full moon had emerged from behind the clouds to shine waxy, brilliant light onto the snow outside. It reminded her of her father. She lay there looking at the moon, as if it had secrets, as if it had knowledge.

10

Her father had said, You should hold on to every single moment of life, Zoe, because it runs away, runs away so fast. And he would know: lost both parents before he was out of short trousers, then a brother in a car smash, and then a lovely sister who had slipped on some ice on her way to church and didn’t she crack her skull? Then of course Zoe’s own mother. It can be all over like that, Zoe, like that.

He wiped two forefingers together to show what like that was all about.

Zoe had been over at his house doing the tree. She’d done the tree for him every year since her mother had died. They’d had a dispute about it. Not an argument exactly. But Archie had said what was the point when he was going to be away over Christmas? But she’d said it wouldn’t be the same without the tree.

Archie was a retired engineer from Dundee, working-class boy made good. He moved into the bungalow on a development for retired persons after selling his own comfortable house and giving the remainder of the proceeds to Zoe and Jake, so that they could buy their own house. The development had a warden and a bell-push to alert the warden if you had a fall or got into difficulty. Archie had immediately disabled the bell-push. Said it was a bloody insult.

Yes, hold on to every moment, Zoe.

But what was a moment? Spindrift on the back of a sunlit wave? A fox’s tail as it disappears through the hedgerow? A meteorite as it flares in the August night sky? Everything is ending or becoming. Zoe didn’t believe you could freeze a moment, or hold on to one.

Archie had stood watching her decorate the Christmas tree, his fists dug into his hips. He was the sort of bloke who always wore short-sleeved shirts, whatever the weather. It showed off his tanned and hairy arms, but Zoe knew it wasn’t vanity that made him wear short sleeves: it was that sleeves just got in the way and needed to be rolled up all the time.

Archie had booked a winter holiday at a hotel in Tunisia with two of his cronies from the Bowling Club. Jake was to pick them up in the morning to taxi them to the airport. He hadn’t wanted Zoe to decorate the Christmas tree because there would be no one there to see it, he said.

Zoe said, ‘If a tree falls in the woods with no one there to see it, does it still make a sound?’

‘You bloody what?’

What Zoe knew was that Archie didn’t want the tree because each year he was finding the memories harder to take.

The Christmas tree in their household had been different. Different from other people’s trees, that is. Rather than being decorated with coloured baubles it was hung with memorial objects. It had all started when Zoe’s older sister was born thirty-four years ago. Her mother and father had started to hang on the tree objects that represented some significant event in their lives. Each birthday, anniversary, family holiday was represented. If they went away on holiday they bought something to hang on the tree. If the children passed an exam or some other milestone, a symbolic object found its way onto the tree. There were silver Christening gifts, a tiny ballet shoe, a silver box containing all their milk-teeth, a swimming badge, shells and stones brought back from beaches and drilled by Archie, amulets purchased from street vendors in exotic places… and gradually there had been no room for coloured baubles as the tree became a memory map of their days together and apart. Moments of ending and becoming, hanging on the branches.

It was a Tree of Life, in the real sense. And Archie was finding it harder to look at it each year.

He stood watching her assemble the tree and shifted his hands from his hips to dig them deep into his trouser pockets. ‘Aye, we’re just snowflakes on a griddle, lovely girl. Snowflakes on a griddle.’

‘You don’t know what comes after,’ Zoe said, draping a bracelet on a branch of Blue Norwegian spruce. ‘Nobody does.’

‘Nobody wants to know, you mean. Nobody likes to know. It’s just a long dark ride with your eyes shut and your ears plugged. Anyway, it’s not about where you’re going. It’s about what you leave behind. Now the Muslim, he—’

‘You told me that, Dad.’

Archie continued anyway. He always spoke about ‘the Muslim’ as if there was only one. ‘Now the Muslim, he says you should dig a well for the generations that come after you. I like that. I do.’

Archie had dug his wells. He had built bridges and been responsible for constructing two major dams in countries abroad. No one ever needed to tell Archie to roll up his sleeves.

‘No one knows,’ Zoe persisted. ‘It’s the great mystery.’

‘Ah, you say that, but.’

Zoe waited for him to go on, though with Archie nothing ever came after the but.

Then he said, ‘See your mother? She didn’t believe in it either. See how people say they’re haunted by a ghostie? Well, your mother made me a promise that if there was an afterlife she would never come back and haunt me. So if I saw her as a ghostie ever, then I would know it was in my head.’

‘And did you see her?

Archie sighed and sat down in his favourite chair. He settled back, spread his legs wide and seemed to stare at a spot on the wall. After a while, he said, ‘Everywhere.’

Zoe stopped decorating the tree and settled at Archie’s feet, resting her head on his knee. He ran his fingers through her hair, as he would when she was a little girl. ‘Everywhere. It took me three years to stop pulling two cups from the cupboard if I wanted to make some tea. She’d be behind me. If I got out of the bath she’d be standing there holding a towel for me. Or I’d be watching the TV and I’d laugh at this or that or I’d want to say would you believe it and I’d look up at her. She was everywhere.’

‘Dad.’

‘And then it fades and you don’t want it to and remembering gets harder. And sometimes you need help remembering. I love that tree and I don’t, but. Come on, up you get, finish the job.’

Archie was a great one for finishing a job.

After she’d done the tree she helped him pack his suitcase, though he was ready. ‘Jake will be here for you at seven in the morning. Have you told Bill and Eric?’

‘It’s good of him. He doesn’t have to, you know.’

‘He wants to. He likes you.’

‘It’s good of him. You’re both too good to me.’

‘I know. You need a shave. Come on, give me a kiss, I’ve got to get back.’

‘Did they get off all right?’ Zoe asked Jake when he returned from the airport the next day. ‘I thought he was looking tired yesterday.’

‘Tired? They were like three teenagers. They’ve got bowls tournaments and afternoon tea dances lined up. They reckon they’re going to pull some old biddies. Don’t be surprised if he comes back with a girlfriend.’

‘So long as she’s over sixteen I won’t mind.’