It is late in the afternoon.
‘What would you do next?’ Bo asks, trying to move things along.
‘I would usually be still out foraging,’ Laura smiles politely, aware that time is of concern to Bo.
‘Don’t feel you have to rush everything on our account, I want to capture you as you’d normally be.’
‘I wouldn’t normally have served three people my soup,’ she smiles, and to Solomon. ‘That’s the first time I’ve done that in ten years.’
‘Four people,’ Rachel says. ‘Can I have seconds?’
Laura laughs. She likes Rachel, this is obvious. She is wary of Bo. With Solomon, everyone knows it’s a sure thing.
Laura suggests cleaning her clothes, something Bo isn’t interested in. She doesn’t scrunch up her nose but it’s a similar reaction.
‘How about we film you reading?’ Bo asks. ‘Books are an important part of your life aren’t they?’
‘Of course, I read every day.’
‘They’re your connection to the world?’
‘I’d say they are the only things that aren’t my connection to the world,’ Laura replies. ‘They’re entertainment, escape.’
‘Yes,’ Bo says, though she’s too busy planning her next shot to process the answer. ‘Where do you usually read?’
‘In lots of places. In here. Outside.’
‘Let’s go outside, show us where you’d go.’
‘It depends on the time of year, on the day, on the time of day, on the light,’ she says. ‘I walk around until I find somewhere that feels right.’
‘Let’s do that then,’ Bo says, smiling and when Laura isn’t looking, she steals a look at her watch. It’s not that Bo isn’t interested – she is, she can’t have enough information – it’s that time has never been her friend. There is too much to do, and not enough time to do it in. The aim is to do everything, quickly, so that she doesn’t miss a thing, and of course in doing things so quickly all the time, she is missing things, as Solomon constantly warns her.
Solomon accompanies Laura to her bookshelf, which is overflowing. Books are piled up on the floor all around.
‘Do you have a favourite one?’ he asks.
She picks up one, an erotic romance A Rock and a Hard Place, and shows it to him. She then makes the sound she heard from the previous night, Bo’s sounds of pleasure. She is quiet enough so that Bo doesn’t hear her. Solomon laughs and shakes his head.
‘You’re in love with her?’ Laura asks.
He’s so taken aback by the question he’s not sure how to answer. He should know how to answer, but he can’t bring himself to address it.
She mimics his awkward throat-clear.
‘I’m surprised Bridget brought you that book,’ he changes the subject.
‘I’ve never met her but I was surprised too,’ she laughs. ‘There was a whole box of them. Second-hand, church sale. A virgin named Betty Rock and naughty Nathan the window cleaner. They get a lot of suds in a lot of places.’
They both laugh.
‘No. This is my favourite. I’ve read it over fifty times.’ She hands him a picture book.
‘There’s no words,’ he flicks through it.
‘Words are often over-rated,’ she says.
‘What’s it about?’
‘A tree that turns into a woman.’
‘Just like Bo said,’ Solomon says sarcastically, studying it. ‘Your connection to the world.’
She laughs.
He looks at the cover. Rooted. ‘What’s it about?’
‘There’s a tree in a park. A busy city park. It’s hundreds of years old and it watches people every day. Children playing with a ball, mothers walking their babies in prams, people jogging, couples arguing. Life. As time goes by, the more she absorbs the life around her, the more human the tree becomes. Her bark turns into skin, her leaves to hair, her branches to arms. She shrinks. Until one day she is no longer a tree, she’s a beautiful young woman. She uproots her feet from the soil and she walks out of the park.’
‘Interesting,’ Solomon says, flicking through the pages.
‘You can read it, if you like,’ she offers it to him.
‘Does she walk out of the park naked?’ he asks. ‘Nudity is a must in a book with pictures.’
‘That’s revealed on the pop-up page.’ She smiles.
He laughs and studies her, curiously.
She looks up at him, not at all self-conscious under his greedy gaze. She doesn’t seem to mind his attention, so he drinks her in a little more.
He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. ‘Thanks for the book. I’ll return it to you in the same condition. Actually, I have a book for you.’ Solomon takes a paperback from his audio bag. ‘Bridget brought it here on Thursday. I’m sure it’s for you.’
Solomon had to hand it to Bo. As soon as Bridget mentioned that Tom was an avid reader, she’d known something was up. He wonders what else she can sense.
Laura takes the book from him, her energy completely changing. It’s the last book she received from her father, even if he hadn’t chosen it, even if he never gave it to her, even if he never touched it, or knew what it was. He’d asked for it for her. She hugs it close to her.
‘Let’s go,’ Solomon says. ‘So, how do you clean your clothes?’ he asks as they pick up their gear and prepare to go outside.
‘The dry cleaner’s at the top of the mountain, beside the nightclub,’ Laura says, seriously. ‘But Bo didn’t want to know about that.’
Solomon throws his head back and laughs heartily.
Laura takes a note of that beautiful sound, records it in her mind, replays it over and over.
10
At night it is astonishing just how dark Laura’s world is, how isolated and secluded she is. What during the day seems remote yet peaceful, during the night seems menacing and cruel, as though she has been abandoned. She has nobody. Nobody. Ring, the surviving sheepdog, comes to her sometimes when he’s not with Joe, perhaps feeling comfortable with her over their shared grief of Mossie and Tom. He is her only company, and the birds and creatures that move around her. She has become adept at sensing them before anyone else does, warning Rachel before she takes a step backwards and uncovers a dead badger, or a fallen bird’s nest. Her senses are so finely tuned to the natural world around her, it seems to Solomon at least, that Lyrebird, as Bo has now taken to calling her, has almost disappeared. It feels to Solomon that Laura doesn’t consider herself to be present in the environment and instead takes on the sounds, the essence, the life of everything around her, just like her favourite storybook. While the tree absorbs human life and becomes a young woman, this young woman absorbs nature and becomes a part of nature, or tries to.
‘There should be a sequel,’ he says referring to the storybook, as they stand together by a window of the cottage. Solomon can’t fight his instinct to look outside every time he hears a sound, he feels responsible to guard her, which is ridiculous as Laura easily identifies every single sound each time he flinches, to put him at ease. He’s not sure who’s protecting whom. Rachel and Bo are sitting on the couch by the firelight, looking over footage they’d filmed that day. ‘I want to know how this shoeless woman who used to be a tree gets on in the world. Does she become a hot-shot business woman in the corporate world and lose all her emotions? Turn into a robot? Or does she fall in love, get married and have five tree children, or …’ he laughs.
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Or does she step out onto the road as soon as she leaves the park and get hit by a truck, because she couldn’t see traffic from the park.’ He smiles but Laura looks thoughtful.
‘I think she just needs to find someone to trust and she would be okay.’
‘Trust,’ he says, unimpressed by the word. ‘Did tree woman learn about trust in the park?’
‘No,’ she laughs. ‘Well, maybe. She learned about humanity. You’ll have to read it. B
ut she doesn’t need to have learned it from the park. Trust is the kind of thing you feel inside.’
‘Ah. It’s instinctual.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t give away the ending now.’
‘That’s not part of the story.’
He stares at her, not caring that she sees him doing it. Her eyes glisten even in the dark, her lips so plump and soft he wants to kiss them more than anything. He’s disturbed by how powerful the instinct is, sure he’s never felt this way before. He looks away, clears his throat.
‘Do you want to sleep here tonight?’ he asks.
‘Are you going to?’
‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I can’t, Laura.’
‘Oh, I know.’ She gets flustered, but he can’t really read her eyes in the darkness. ‘I meant all of you. You’re all welcome.’
‘All of us in there?’ he asks, looking around the cottage.
‘No, you’re right, we’ll go to the hotel,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own.’
And to herself she adds, any more.
The following morning, they visit Laura’s grandmother’s house where she and her mother were raised. Far from the main road, twenty minutes from town, it is a remote bungalow away from prying eyes. Like so many homes in the rural area, you wouldn’t see the small track leading to the house if you didn’t know it was there. Even if you did happen upon it, it lacked enticement, and belied the warmth and love that lay within its boundaries. It hasn’t been inhabited since Hattie’s passing nine years previously and it shows. Despite not having been there for ten years, Laura guides them as though she were there yesterday, Bo talking to her delicately as they make their way, aware how fragile this moment is.
Bo parked on the main road, she wanted to capture Laura’s reaction as she walked home for the first time in ten years. Just inside the entrance to the trail there is a gate, which Laura tells them her grandmother added shortly after her grandfather died, for protection.
‘Do you know if your mother or grandmother wrote a will?’ Bo asks, as they walk the long driveway through tall trees to the house.
Laura shakes her head. ‘How would I know?’
‘By asking your grandmother’s solicitor, or the executor of her will.’
‘Gaga didn’t have showers, I doubt she had an executor.’
Rachel and Solomon look away from one another to avoid laughing aloud.
‘If there was no executor, then an administrator would be appointed. An administrator would be next of kin. The reason I’m saying all of this is because you could be entitled to this land and property, Laura. If there’s money in a bank somewhere, or investments or a pension, then that could be yours too. I can help you look into it, if you like.’
‘Thank you.’ She leaves a long silence. She stops and bends to pick a freesia, she twirls it around in her fingers. Rachel moves to capture Laura’s shadowed silhouette in the path of the sunlight, the sun’s harshness dims and then burns behind the trees as they move, like the light on a lighthouse.
Laura moves again, faster this time. ‘Gaga didn’t have anybody else. She was an only child. Her parents long gone. She was born in Leeds, she left school at fourteen, worked in a factory, sewing. She moved to Ireland to mind children for a family nearby, but she didn’t stay with them for long. The summer she arrived, she met Granddad …’ She looks up at the house as it comes into view. She catches her breath.
Solomon gets ready to steady her. At any moment he will reach out, dive forward to catch her.
Silence.
Rachel moves behind her. Dips the camera low. Laura’s view of the house.
Solomon wants to see her face, but he must stay behind the camera. He studies her, takes in everything about her. How her shoulders have risen, frozen, stiff. Her fingers have stopped twirling the freesia. It falls to the ground, lands beside her boot. He listens to her breathing in his headphones. Quick shallow breaths.
Solomon drags his eyes away from Laura to take in the view. The grass has grown so tall it reaches the windows of the bungalow. It’s far from a fairytale: brown bricks, flat roof, front door and two windows either side. Nothing enchanting about it and yet, for Laura, it’s a treasure trove of precious moments.
He expects her words to be as predictable as Bo’s words when she lifted her first award: ‘Gosh, it’s heavy,’ words he teased her about as soon as she’d returned with the first piece of crystal in her hand. She never said it after that, more eloquent, more trained, less surprised. He imagines Laura’s gentle wonderment – ‘It’s shrunk, it’s smaller than I imagined,’ the usual words of an adult returned to a childhood place – but the sight of it brings her somewhere else, a surprising comment.
‘Gaga wouldn’t have left this for me,’ Laura says firmly, ‘Because there is no record of me. The only people who ever knew that I existed are dead.’ She speeds up away from them and wanders through the long grasses towards the house. Rachel looks at Solomon in alarm.
‘Did she just say nobody knew she was alive?’ Rachel asks in a low voice, as they cut for a moment.
Bo nods, not at all surprised, but her pupils are large and dilated with excitement. ‘I’ve been asking around the town and not one person I spoke to knew that Isabel Murphy or Isabel Button as she preferred to be called, had a baby. In fact they all found it laughable.’
Rachel frowns. ‘So is she lying?’
Solomon looks at Rachel, at first angry at her disloyalty but then remembers Rachel is always rational and her question was a sensible one. He panics a little, at the thought that this woman he has grown so attached to, in his mind at least, could be concocting this entire story. He was completely sucked in. While everything spirals away from him, Bo rescues him, reins him in and says something to make him love her all the more.
‘I’ve listened to everything that everyone has had to say about this family, which believe me is a lot of crazy shit, and it’s not that I don’t believe them but I do believe every single word Laura’s saying,’ Bo says firmly. She hurries away to keep up with Laura.
Laura tries the handle on the front door but it’s locked. She looks in the windows of the bungalow, every single one, pushing her face up to the dirty glass, hands blocking out the sunlight. The glass is so grimy you can barely see inside. She walks around the back of the house.
‘Which was your bedroom?’ Bo asks, appearing.
‘This one.’
Inside is an iron bed, no mattress, a wardrobe stripped of its doors. The rest is empty, no trace of Laura’s life. Solomon tries to read her face, tries to get the best angles, but Rachel looks at him annoyed, he’s blocking the light, getting in her way, straying off course.
Finally, he places his equipment down. He unties his sweater from around his waist and wraps it around his arm and elbow.
The glass smashes. Bo, Rachel and Laura turn to him in surprise.
‘Now it’s open,’ he says.
Laura grins at him.
‘Tell us about living here, in whatever way you like,’ Bo says as they settle down outside, after their walk around the mostly rat-infested bungalow. Bo finds a beautiful setting in the long grass, the house and forest behind them. It’s a warm summer day, it’s heavy, as though a thunderstorm looms, and the sky is filled with fast-moving clouds that disappear quickly into the next parish, as if they know something that everything that’s still doesn’t. It looks great on camera. Laura sits on a stool, Bo before her, but off camera. And with the usual prompts to tell the interviewee to try to put the question in their answer for the ease and flow of the documentary, they begin.
‘It hasn’t changed at all,’ Laura says closing her eyes and breathing in. ‘It feels the same. When I close my eyes anyway.’
‘How do you feel about seeing the house like this?’
Laura looks at the house as though it’s a stranger to her. ‘It’s not how I remember. It was never immaculate, Gaga and Mum were house proud, but in a different way. There were alw
ays things everywhere: glass jars, collections of things in them, twine, buttons, herbs, stones, fabrics. Potions, lotions, emotions …’ She smiles as if remembering a private joke. ‘That’s what Gaga always said about the house. The three of us filled the house with potions, lotions and emotions.’
‘Gaga and your mum – can I call her Gaga? – ran a dressmaking and alterations business. I spoke to people who live locally, they said it was a successful business, popular.’
Both last night and this morning, Bo had disappeared from the hotel to do ‘research’. It had been left to Solomon to entertain Laura, they’d played cards until Bo returned at midnight, with the smell of beer on her breath and smoke on her clothes. Solomon had been disappointed when she’d returned. He’d wanted more time with Laura, listening to her sounds, her mimicking the sound of the cards shuffling, the ice in his glass melting to find a new place to settle. It was like music. Her company was relaxing, slow, nothing urgent or panicked. Time was no issue, it was as if it didn’t exist. She’d no phone to check, no watch on her wrist. She was simply there, present in the now, the soft line of her mouth, the way her long hair brushed and tickled his arm as she reached across for the cards. Everything subtle was big. His heart had never felt so content yet fluttered so much at the same time. It is only when he is away from her that the guilt, the conflict, the comparison to Bo begins, the inner silent terror that leaves him feeling cold.
‘They ran a successful business,’ Laura agrees. ‘They had a loyal base of customers that they made dresses for – weddings, communions, parties … With so many huge families here, there was always some occasion. I loved the dressmaking. They used me when they were pinning, they couldn’t see movement on the mannequins. I used to love twirling around in them, pretending it was my wedding, or my birthday, and it would drive them crazy.’ She smiles at the memory. ‘When the dressmaking side died down, it was just alterations, and then Mum did some housekeeping for a few elderly people living alone, shopped for them, washed and ironed their clothes, whatever needed to be done. There were a lot of people in remote places, here. Most of their children moved to the cities for university or work. People stopped coming home. Work dried up for Gaga and Mum.’