Imbolc by Cate West

If you drove that route, you'd hardly recognise it. And it’s still changing. The trees forever fringed that roadside; you didn’t see them, and now they are gone: a row of shaggy heads fallen, a row of blushing stumps still moist at the avulsion site. Hayden and Nell locked on by the Heras fencing in front of the main gate, forehead to forehead on the concrete like tombstone statues, hands clasped, not in prayer, but together, through a concrete pipe. By the time I got there, the two of them looked cold and a bit foolish. We took it in turns to bring them bottles of water and to stand by filming, while security, padded and high-viz, folded beefy arms, but it made no difference. HS2 was going through — it made no difference. Not even Nell could win these geezers, or their masters, round.

What if trees could rise like ghosts, march shoulder to shoulder across the hill? Who can tell the trees to walk? It was the wind that swung in them that spoke. It rushes unopposed now, taking a little more earth away each time. The wind is a voice without words. And I feel ghosted, a little vanished, too.

Hayden and Nell, sawn from their bonds, retreated like heroes to base camp. A game for the young, this one. Shelley and Bob and Julie Doodah, my old friends, gave up the circuit, moved to France, retired. I heard that Bob plays golf, even. You don’t think they will change, but it happens.

You can see the beginning of the tents from the road now, the woodland is so thin. Soggy tarpaulins and banners made from bedsheets. Honk if you stand with us. Stop Ecocide NOW.

My next-door-neighbour looks at me and she is at it, too. Danielle moved out Christmas-time, and her little girl Isla. They were never here, not really. Danielle sold up, went back to her ex. Surprisingly common, they say. The new one moved in last week, head full of plans, decking and French windows, and she is in love with the view. Or the thought of the view, because it’s yet not up to standard. The Western Red Cedar, as untidily tall as the mast of a ruffian ship, is rooted on her land, which is its death sentence. She’d like to cut me out of her view, too, with my long witchy plaits and my dungarees and my pots full of truanting plants. But I’m not going anywhere.

'I’m cutting that tree down', she said, disgusted, as if the countryside isn’t torn up enough already. She just came out with it. No shame. Rooted in the little rectangle of earth she’s purchased, so it’s bought and paid for. Hers to murder. What can you do? Absolutely nothing. There won’t be time to grow another.

Autumn passed. The tree’s branches turned to rust. It shed what needles it could spare. Danielle untied Isla’s rope swing, wound it into her car boot. Isla used to hang there for hours, last summer. She could just touch the top of the garden wall with her toes. Winter came, and Christmas. The year turned. The tree is sleeping now, waiting. The murderess will have to get moving. It won’t be long before the birds come back. I’d lain afternoons, watching the clouds filling and the tree billowing blackly, waiting for the rain to begin. It used to be quiet, our road. Now it clatters with gentrification. The tree is asleep, half dreaming. All the same, it knows.

I took a food shop to the woods. It was my day off. I parked in the lay-by and made my way down the sodden path to the heart of their encampment. The ground was freezing, it was hardly light, and I wished I’d worn another layer. My boots began to leak. I wouldn't last a week out there, not a night, I knew it. I do what I can, don’t I? Even though it will never be enough. The campers can’t win. Even they know it. Not against trucks and saws and woodchopping machines and money.

A bearded man came loping out of the undergrowth. He stopped short when he spotted me through the leafless trees, a grin flooding his hairy cheeks.

‘Well met, friend!’

I’m scruffy. I look like they do. Only older.

‘I brought food’, I said. ‘Tomatoes and pearl barley, like it said on your call out.’

‘Great, come with!’

I knew the way but I followed him meekly. The floor was inlaid with last year’s leaves like a dirty mosaic. Tents and tarps huddled at the edge of the thicket, around a great heap of rocks, scarred and blackened by fire.

‘Most of them are out today,’ my companion said, turning to walk backwards so his voice found me. ‘Those bastards are cutting down the tall trees before spring. We’ve got climbers among us who’ll bed in the branches. We’re getting them into place.’

‘Hayden?’

‘Yeah he’s gone. You know Hayden?’

‘Yeah.’ He’s my brother, I felt like adding but I was afraid this guy would take it metaphorically. I never say step-brother. Hayden’s all the blood I have left. ‘He’s not too good with heights,’ I said, instead. Hayden would be just the one to fall and break his neck and cause some kind of lawsuit.

‘Do you want to wait for him? The ones coming back tonight will return for supper. We’ll get supplies up there, once they’re secure. Here, come in,’ and he flipped aside the rug which covered the doorway to a makeshift yurt.

I was pleased to see it had a wood burner inside. A rug where a girl lay knitting. It could almost have been cosy, if it hadn't been cluttered with placards and rucksacks and rope stacks and piles of cardboard.

‘Nell!’

‘Miriam! what are you doing here?’

‘I brought food.’

‘OK, wow, well. Hayden’s with the climbers.’

‘So your friend said.’ I put my carrier bags down on the carpet, rubbing the indents they’d left on my fingers. ‘Aren’t you worried ?’

‘Miriam! He’s in good hands.’ Nell was ever so pretty, even in this dismal lair. Nell left me lost for words. I hoped my brother realised his luck. Easy come, easy go Hayden.

‘Stay for supper, why not?’ Nell asked, as if the yurt was her parents’ drawing room in Gloucestershire.’

I shook my head. ‘I should get going.’

Nell carried on smiling. ‘Miriam. What do you have to get back to?’

Hayden’s the rebel nowadays, but I was always the black sheep. I left home long before he was grown, and because of that we never had a chance to become close. They didn’t bring him to visit me. It wasn’t the kind of place you take a kid. Outside the encampment the workmen were prowling in orange, high-viz lines. I could feel their eyes on me, and I could feel them turn away. I was nothing of note. A middle-aged woman in a parka and a long tasselled skirt. Going home. Back to my house, my job, my bills. I might as well be one of the guards, these days. The world is burning and all I can manage is a tiny food shop and turn my back.

It’s different for Nell, long and green eyed, woollen yoke on bare shoulders, knitting beautiful garments in the firelight. Nell would never worry about bills. It’s even OK for Hayden, my reckless young brother, scared of heights but still devoutly climbing.

I sat in the driver’s seat and thought of him up there, laying his head down in darkness, swaying and frightened, but scowling up at the starlight with the determination of a disciple. What would it achieve? The workmen would put down their tools, but only for a instant. Once the paperwork was done, the climbers would be starved, cajoled, arrested.

In my road the cedar was still standing. Good.

Hayden texted from his treetop. He was coping with the simple things. He hadn’t seized up or fallen.

‘Thanks for the food M.’

‘Good view?’

‘We need bodies. Come join us.’

I didn't reply. I didn't go. He’d learn. You can’t take on so many.

I looked out of my living room window at the dreaming spire of the cedar tree. A protest is always more effective when it’s personal. Look at Bobby Sands.

Fire is magnificent, from its first crimson spark and flutter. I know how to make a fire.

I used to make them all the time, growing up. Ribbons of flame. I like the sounds, too, the sooty roar as it gets going, the choking blue silence of its final breath. Fire ate whatever I fed it, papers rising and twisting in its grasp. Fire wasn’t afraid of touching the world with its fingers. Fire gave life, didn’t it? I began by filching Duncan’s matches, and then his silver Zippo. He had my mother looking for that for weeks. I began setting little fires outside on the rocks, and then I moved closer. Closer and close to home. There’s sometime spectacular, something dizzying, about flame. The bonfires on the beacons, warning of enemies. The fires of Samain and of Imbolc. I’m glad I got to know Hayden, in the end. I bet our mother would have been proud of him.

I didn’t stop learning, whatever they intended. Learning is lifelong. I learned more and more, in the place they sent me to. There was plenty to listen to and to remember. I learned which powders and potions to mix in an envelope, so that burning starts slow and the evidence burns away. The knowledge glowed inside me like the embers in the hot heart of an ash pile. I hadn’t thought to use it, but I always knew it was there. Risky. Nell was right.

What do I have to come back to, really? That night I posted my neighbour a little letter. A letter of flame. When I heard the hissing begin, and the fire start to pour like rain, I came outside, passing through the sparks in my innocent night clothes. I leaned my back against the cedar, feeling its bark warm my shoulder blades, and I watched our houses burn.

………………..

Cate trained in Fine Art and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2019. She was shortlisted for York Festival of Writing’s Friday Night Live and longlisted for Mslexia’s Novel Competition in 2019. Cate teaches Creative Writing, and is passionate about outsider narratives. She lives and works in the Midlands.
Twitter: @c8west