Fir Read online

  The old woman kept her back turned as she continued to pile dirty plates on to her tray. She didn’t say a word.

  “Dorothea?” Dad said again, a little louder this time. I guess he was assuming that she was deaf, which was a pretty fair assessment, under the circumstances. But the old woman could obviously hear perfectly well, because at that point she turned round and stared at him.

  “Hi,” Dad said again, with slight uncertainty. “Come and have a drink – we’d love to say hello properly.”

  The housekeeper looked over at the three of us still seated on the sofa. It felt a little like being stared at by one of those paintings whose eyes seem to follow you around the room. Then she turned on her heel and disappeared back through the door. It banged shut behind her. Dad came back to the sofa, a pained look crossing his face.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Tomas told him. “She’s a strange old stick, but no one knows this place better than she does – she’s worked here for decades. She’s stuck in her ways, but she’ll get used to you.”

  Dad smiled and sat down again. “I’ll have to launch a charm offensive against her. I’m famous for them, aren’t I, darling?”

  Mum again. Not me. Just in case that wasn’t clear to you by now.

  “In future, I can see us going back to Stockholm when the season’s over, but we’ll be staying here this winter,” Dad went on. “Mainly so I can go over the books and try to work out how to get the business restarted. I need to re-establish some of the sawmill contacts. I’ve been looking at the lay of the land and there’s a large swathe of unmanaged forest in our northern sector that I want to clear over the next year.”

  Tomas’s smile froze. He stared at Dad.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said.

  “Sorry?” Dad asked.

  “That’s the old-growth forest you’re talking about.”

  Dad shrugged. “I guess it must have been there a long time, yes.”

  “‘A long time’?” Tomas repeated with a slight edge of laughter to his voice that had nothing to do with humour. “Try thousands of years.”

  Tomas was annoyed, I realized. Not only annoyed – he was angry. I sat up straighter. Things had suddenly become far more interesting.

  “I’ve done the research,” Dad said, oblivious. “It makes far more economic sense to level that section of land and plant more managed forest.”

  “Well,” said Tomas slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s probably true – if you’re a complete Neanderthal with no sense of wider ecological responsibility.”

  Dad opened his mouth, but at first no sound came out. His eyes bugged in surprise. “Now, hold on a—”

  “Have you even seen what you’re planning to cut down? Actually, don’t bother to answer that, because I already know the answer. Of course you haven’t. Even if you did, you wouldn’t understand what you were looking at.”

  “Tomas…” Mum began, in her placating tone of voice, but Dad cut in before it did any good.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t need to see an extra hectare or two of fir trees, however old they are, to know what they’re like. Why do conservationists assume that everyone else is a complete imbecile?”

  “Well, for a start, they’re not fir trees,” Tomas said angrily. “Which, if you had truly done any meaningful research, you would know.”

  “Of course I know that,” Dad laughed. “Up here they’ll be Scots Pine or Norway Spruce. It’s a figure of speech, Tomas. They all look the same. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so what does it matter except to score some stupid self-righteous point?”

  “It matters,” Tomas hissed, “if the person who is supposed to be caring for this area can’t tell the difference – or worse, doesn’t care.”

  “They’re all trees,” Dad pointed out. “They’re all trees and they’re all on my land. Which, as you pointed out yourself, has been managed to produce timber commercially for decades.”

  “Excuse me,” Tomas said. “I need to see to the children.” Then he stood up and walked over to the kids’ table, deliberately turning his back on us.

  I was impressed. It usually takes longer for Dad to wind people up that badly. I got up, too.

  “Well,” I said, “all this excitement is too much for me. I’m going to bed. Try not to piss off any more locals, Dad, yeah? They’ve probably all got pitchforks and flamethrowers.”

  I left them there and went up to my room again. I’d only seen it for about five minutes so far, when I trailed along after the removal men with my single crate. Mum had already chosen where I was going to sleep.

  “Just to begin with,” she’d said. “You can move later if you want to.”

  It wasn’t a bad room, all things considered. It was big – of course it was, everything in this crazy house was big – and it was at the back of the house. It was pretty square – in shape as well as décor, but what else could I expect? There was a huge bed with duvets and blankets layered on top of it. My plastic crate was standing in the middle of the polished wooden floor. It was blue, floating on the ocean of wood like a confused Noah’s ark.

  I went to the window. It was dark outside, with a fat moon and weak little stars hanging in the night sky. The trees surrounded the house, the forest starting a few metres from the back wall. They definitely looked like fir trees to me, whatever Tomas had said. They all had that triangular Christmas-tree look to them, although you’d have to have a pretty big house to fit one of these in the corner of your living room. A house like this one, in fact. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that we were supposed to be living here now. That this was supposed to be our house. I mean, our place in Stockholm hadn’t been a shoebox either but this was something else. I wasn’t sure I liked it, and that wasn’t only because I was angry with my parents for disrupting my life. It was too big, too strange. It didn’t feel … right.

  I stared out at the trees for a while. They were massive, all packed close together. There was a slight wind moving their spindly tops, but under that they were one dense, black mass. There was a sound, too. I thought it was the wind at first – but it was sharper than that: one single high note, rising through the trees to pierce the sky. It seemed to go on and on – more than a whistle, less than a song. It soared towards the stars and then suddenly dipped again, lower, lower, only to hike higher again.

  Then the trees stopped moving. All of them.

  They just … stopped.

  It must have been the wind dropping but still, it was creepy. Then I realized that the sound was still there, rising and falling. So it definitely wasn’t the wind. Then it stopped, too. Everything outside my window was silent and dark. Empty. A void. A second later the fir trees started moving again, all at once, like they’d never stopped.

  I tugged the curtain shut and turned my back on the window. Then I went to the bed and got in. I didn’t even undress. I pulled the duvet over my head and took my phone out of my pocket.

  Not a single bar. Not one.

  There’s a song in the trees.

  They whisper rage,

  whisper murder.

  It is time, they say.

  Do you remember?

  Do you remember what must be done?

  Do you remember what is owed?

  Chapter Three

  My wake-up call the next morning was laughter. Not the pleasant, happy-go-lucky kind. This was the hysterical horror-film kind from something that needed to be put out of my misery. It rolled through the hallway outside my room along with the manic beat of running feet, as performed by a drummer with zero sense of rhythm. I’d just decided that I was about to be eaten by zombies when an exasperated male voice yelled something. The racket descended to a harsh whisper and I remembered the children. Then I remembered everything else. If I hadn’t been seriously starving, I would have pulled the duvet over my head and gone back to sleep. Instead, I dragged myself out of bed. It’s safe to say that my feelings about this move had not improved.

  There was a mirror on one wall of the room, large and oblong, about the same size as me. It was pretty ancient. I think the frame had been gold once but now it looked the way an old coin does, rubbed dull. It also had those weird age spots all over the glass. Maybe once it’d had sentimental value and that’s why it hadn’t been thrown out, because as something to check your reflection in it was pretty useless. Not that I cared. I rarely looked at myself in the mirror and whenever I did I wished I hadn’t bothered. I thought about changing my clothes, but I couldn’t be bothered to do that either. It wasn’t as if anyone would be able to tell the difference. Everything I wear is black or grey, or was once black and is now grey. And even if I had cared, there wasn’t anyone in this forest to impress anyway.

  Downstairs the same table was surrounded by the same mass of kids, all talking at once as they tried to stuff food into their mouths. There was no buffet this time and I stood in the doorway for a while, wondering whether the people who actually owned the house were likely to have a chance to get breakfast. Then, as it dawned on me that I didn’t know where the kitchen was and that it was entirely possible I’d get properly lost if I went looking for it, Dorothea appeared. She scuttled out of a door across the other side of the hallway with that weird walk, wearing an old pea-green dress, flat shoes that may once have been brown but were now scuffed a dull white, a brown cardigan and an apron. The apron had big cheery red flowers on it. That gave me the creeps. It was as if Cruella de Vil had decided to put her hair up in bunches with pink spotty ribbon.

  “You’ll be wanting breakfast, I suppose,” she muttered as she passed me. Then she jerked her head, which seemed to be saying that I should follow her.

  Beyond the next door she opened was an oasis of calm, populated by my parents. They wer
e sitting at a small round table covered with a white tablecloth. For a moment I had a similar feeling to the one I’d had the night before in my room: that we were in a hotel rather than somewhere that was supposed to be our home. Everything felt slightly skewed. I stood there stupidly. My parents looked up and seemed as awkward as I did.

  The old woman jerked her head at the table. There was one empty place setting.

  “Dorothea,” my dad began as I sat down. “You really don’t have to make us breakfast every day. We’re very happy to do it ourselves.”

  Dorothea gave a half shrug but didn’t say anything. She sloped off through yet another door, appearing a few minutes later with a plate of bread rolls and some cheese and ham. She plonked them down in front of me. In his usual head-in-the-sand way, Dad seemed oblivious to the nuclear levels of hostility she was emitting and carried on speaking in a forced, cheery tone that made him sound like a totally patronizing idiot.

  “So, we were wondering, Dorothea, if you could give us some information about the history of the place? I mean, you’ve been housekeeper here for so long, and—”

  Dorothea turned her back and walked away. She was halfway to the door before her mutter made it back to the table. “Got to get the bread out of the oven.”

  My rolls were very definitely fresh. They were still hot, in fact, suggesting that there was nothing left in the oven to come out, but I didn’t tell Dad that. He looked crestfallen. I felt bad. OK, so sometimes he can be an idiot but I have to admit that he does mean well most of the time.

  “There are showers, you know,” Mum said, looking me up and down.

  “Good morning to you, too,” I said.

  “A shower every morning would probably put you in a better mood,” she said.

  “I’m the one that needs to be in a better mood?”

  Dorothea appeared again, this time with coffee, which she bashed down on the table so hard I was surprised that the cafetiere didn’t break. Then off she went again, with that strange fast-slow skitter, back through the door into the kitchen.

  “Why is she here?” I asked.

  “She lives here,” Dad said. It was a useful clarification because obviously, before he’d told me that, I’d been under the impression that she teleported into the house every day from somewhere else. “She’s got a bedroom in the attic.”

  “But why? We bought the house, not her, right? Can’t we sack her or something? She gives me the creeps.” Although I had to admit that her bread rolls were pretty good.

  “Dorothea’s lived here at Storaskogen for most of her life,” Mum said, looking as annoyed as she sounded. “She doesn’t have any family left and she’s an old woman with nowhere else to go – we can’t turn her out. I can’t believe you’d even suggest such an unkind thing.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “She can keep working as long as she wants to,” Mum went on.

  I saw Dad cast a glance at her, which she avoided. It made me think this was an argument they’d already had. It was probably one of those weird adult compromize things. Dad had won the ‘let’s move to the middle of nowhere and completely screw up our lives’ argument and Mum had won the ‘let’s keep the creepy, rude old bat’ argument.

  “Or until she’s too frail,” Mum added. “Then we’ll work something out. But I’m not just turning her out of her home. Who would do that?”

  I opened my mouth to answer but Dad had apparently decided that it was a rhetorical question and cut in instead.

  “So, Tomas and the children will be out of the house most of the day,” he said. “I want you to help me take an equipment inventory, starting with the outbuildings.”

  I sighed. “Stocktaking? Really? Do I have to? Can’t Mum do it?”

  “Your mum’s tired after the journey yesterday. She needs a rest. Anyway, she wants to do the same inside the house, don’t you, darling?”

  Mum nodded. She was looking pretty pale and tired, I had to admit, but hey – weren’t we all?

  “What’s the rush?” I asked. “Aren’t we here for, like, ages? Can’t we take a breath first?”

  A familiar line furrowed between Dad’s eyebrows. “I would have thought you’d like to learn more about our new home and its surroundings.”

  “Er, no. What I’d really like is an internet signal.”

  Dad sighed. “Do you have to be so difficult?”

  “I’m the one being difficult? Because I want to be connected to the outside world, that’s being difficult?”

  “You could try making a bit of an effort…”

  “Why should I? You brought me here. I didn’t have a choice. Why do I have to make the effort?”

  Dad said nothing. I knew I hadn’t won the argument – he’d just got tired of having it.

  I didn’t really listen to the rest of their conversation over breakfast. I munched my way through my food, wondering what Poppy and Lars were doing at that very moment. I kept checking my phone in case it miraculously generated its own signal but of course it didn’t.

  I left our breakfast room as the children were preparing to head out for their morning activity. They were all in the entrance hall, making so much noise that I swear I could feel the floor juddering under my feet. As I was trying to work out how to get to the stairs without having to negotiate a mass of flailing feet and arms, Tomas waded into the centre of the maelstrom and held up his arms. The noise level dipped slightly.

  “Right!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

  Watching the expedition leave the house was like observing some insanely excited military operation in one-third scale. At their tutor’s shout the kids all lined up in twos with their matching bright red jackets and little packed lunches. Then Tomas led them out and they all trooped through the double doors and away into the line of trees beyond.

  Of course I ended up helping Dad. He has this knack for guilt-tripping. It works on everyone, so well that they usually end up going along with his plans whether they want to or not. It was another possible explanation for how we ended up at Storaskogen in the first place. If I hadn’t been so mad with Mum for letting it happen, I’d probably have asked her about it. Anyway, the alternative to helping Dad seemed to be starting the homeschooling shenanigans he’d mentioned before we left Stockholm. A pile of algebra textbooks had been strategically placed in an ominous position on one of the hallway tables. After I’d seen them, stocktaking didn’t seem like too bad an option after all.

  There were three outbuildings: one large metal barn that looked quite new and two slightly smaller wooden structures that could have been in the same place for a hundred years, they looked so old. The newer barn had been built between the older two so that they formed a line that faced one side of the house, with their backs to the surrounding forest. Between the house and the outbuildings someone had poured gravel to make a driveway as wide as the road that led in through the plantation.

  It was the newer barn that Dad marched towards. I trailed behind, wondering how my life had come to this. It was a gloomy day with heavy cloud overhead, hanging so low that the tops of the firs seemed to press right against it. Whatever sun was up there looked like I felt – as if it’d rather go back to bed and do this whole getting up and existing thing another day.

  “Right,” said Dad as we reached the barn doors. He thrust a clipboard towards me. “You hold that. Let’s get going.” He unlocked the door and dragged it open. I peered into the slatted dark inside.

  “Wow,” I said, despite myself.

  Dad moved to stand beside me with his hands on his hips. He nodded. “There’s some pretty serious stuff in here.”

  For once he was right. Inside the barn was a series of huge pieces of machinery that would have had engineering geeks wetting their pants. We wandered in and looked around. Everything was clearly designed for felling, stripping, slicing and dicing trees in the most efficient way possible. The biggest chunk of change was a truck-like thing with six caterpillar wheels and a mean-looking grabber on the front. The grabber was obviously detachable as there were other fittings dotted around – some that looked like giant scorpion pincers, others with large circular saws. There was also what seemed to be a portable conveyer belt with wheels and two caged trailers.