All the Little Children Read online

  “No, absolutely not. You need to come down right now.”

  “It’s fine, the branches are really thick,” he said and climbed up another one, like it was nothing more than the rung of a ladder.

  “They’re slippy,” I warned his retreating backside.

  “Peter’s really good at climbing,” said Charlie. “His mum lets him climb trees all the time.”

  “Well, bully for her.”

  So there we stood, watching a nine-year-old perched several stories high, with nothing to break his fall but a few leaves—and me. I’d read once that it’s nigh on impossible to catch a falling child, but I could hardly stand back and let the kid plummet to his death. It would make the next PTA meeting most awkward. So I moved around the trunk, shadowing him from below, unclear of the correct heroic procedure should he actually slip.

  “Peter!” I tried again. “Come down right now. Do you hear? Peter?”

  But the boy had stopped and was staring into the distance at something visible only from his vantage point. He put his hand above his eyes, lookout-style. He glanced down as though he was going to say something, and then scanned from side to side again.

  “What can you see? What is it?” yelled Charlie, tugging at my arm and adding, “Can I go up, too?”

  I gave him a hard stare and carried on prowling the base, while Peter kept searching the horizon.

  “Peter?” I shouted, curiosity killing me. “What can you see?”

  He shouted something.

  “What did he say?” Charlie and I asked each other. Then we kept calling, “Peter? What is it? Peter! ”

  The boy wended his way back down until he reached one of the lower branches, where he hung by his arms, milking it.

  “Fires.” He dropped twice his own body length into the leaves below. “Fires and smoke all over the place.”

  Chapter Two

  We found Joni and Maggie in a clearing, where the skeletal remains of foxgloves stood in groups like crucified corn-husk dolls. A haze clouded the dell. It was only dampness—I flipped a log with my toe and it flaked apart, its core furred with mold—but the white mist made me sniff the air, thinking of the smoke Peter had seen.

  After we told Joni about the fires, she had asked all the same questions as Charlie and I. Peter’s answers were no less obscure the second time around: it looked like lots of volcanoes going off. As I had done ten minutes previously, Joni patiently explained that there were no volcanoes in this country. “Not actual volcanoes,” Peter insisted. “Like volcanoes. In the distance. Plumes.” He wobbled his hand upward to indicate smoke rising. Joni and I shrugged at each other. Whatever the truth of it, it sounded far away.

  Nevertheless, Peter’s story had given us all the willies. We agreed the clearing was creepy and followed a barely discernible path out of the trees.

  The long grass was sopping wet despite the warm air; we couldn’t hope for many more days as mild as this. Even the crickets sang about the end of summer. Maggie had light-fingered a Tupperware container that she called her “happy box” and was busy filling it with things she found lovely, such as scabs of lichen and knuckle-shaped twigs. When she snatched a pine cone from Billy, he stood his ground and screamed at her, “You little bucker!”

  “Shush, you two,” said Joni with a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “Listen to these locusts mating.” She started fishing about in the undergrowth, hunkering down to press her ear to the grass.

  “I want to see a locust.” Maggie jostled closer.

  Joni beckoned her into the undergrowth. “Come and listen to the grass.”

  Maggie got on her knees. “What’s it saying?”

  Joni nudged her down farther. “Can you hear it drinking?”

  “Yes!”

  When Joni sat up, she held a cricket in her cupped hands.

  Maggie peeped between her aunt’s fingers and let out a cry of triumph. “I got a grasshopper.” She scrabbled it into her own fist, shouldering Billy out of the way to show the others.

  Once we’d negotiated the release of the grasshopper, we followed the path to some pastureland. I’d expected to arrive back at the camp, but instead we reached a post-and-rail fence, so new it was green and sappy.

  “Are we lost?” said Maggie.

  “It is not possible to establish our precise coordinates at the current location,” I said.

  “We’re lost,” said Maggie. She pulled herself up to her full four-feet-nothing, made a great show of inspecting the sky for directions, and strode out into the field. Joni looked up from rooting in her bag and chuckled. Charlie and Peter chomped on apples. Peter asked what Maggie was doing.

  “Showing me what’s what.”

  Charlie kept his eyes on his sister long after the rest of us lost interest. Joni finally found what she was looking for amid the chaos of her bag: a compass and an Ordnance Survey map. She and Peter crouched over it, pointing out the contours of hills and landmarks, and even Charlie was divided in his loyalty. “Aren’t you going after her, Mum?” he asked as he got down on his knees beside the map. Maggie strode, up-tiddly-up-up, to the crest of the field and disappeared, down-tiddly-down-down, without looking back once.

  I heaved myself off the fence and set out into the long grass, which sopped through my canvas shoes in an instant. I ploughed along until I heard Maggie calling. She was pointing across the valley at an eyesore of a farm, where a Georgian house that could once have been prettified to have a degree of curb appeal was now dwarfed by an industrial behemoth of a shed. The function of the hulking unit was clear even to a seven-year-old: “Cows,” said Maggie.

  Their noise floated like a cloud of methane, a fat lowing punctuated by screams that sounded more like trumpeting elephants. Even from this distance, we could see the movement of the herd, with most of the black-and-white shapes in a mosh pit around the gate to the dairy shed, while a few stragglers made mad dashes—most un-bovine—around the edges.

  “Are the cows hurt?” Maggie’s hand slipped into mine, and I held her cool fingers between my warm palms. A pulse ran through her thumb, rapid from the walk across the field or maybe the unsettling sight of the cows. Neither of us took another step toward the farm.

  “I guess they haven’t been milked today,” I said.

  “But I thought the farmer milked his cows?”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Should we ask the farmer about Horatio?”

  This is what we’d set out to find: a place where someone might know the dog. But there was no one to be seen. And the cows were screaming.

  Maggie’s hand clenched. “I don’t want to go down there,” she said.

  My shoulders convulsed in a shiver, and I heard my mother’s voice: Someone just walked on your grave. I came to as though I’d been hypnotized. What was I thinking? We couldn’t go down to the farm; the kids couldn’t see animals suffering like that. The cows’ pain was as palpable as their smell. I pulled Maggie away from the sight, but I couldn’t block out the noise. The wind had shifted and the screaming swelled, washing across the land like surge waves, swiping at our ankles as we waded through the grass back to where the others were waiting, listening.

  By the time we reached the camp, dusk was leaching out of the trees, and we raced to get bedded down. We’d spent the first night squeezed into my family tent, after Joni’s yurt proved too difficult to erect without its missing instructions. Now that she’d unearthed them from her copious luggage, she wanted to put the thing up. Easier said than done.

  “Your tent is a total B-A-S-T-A-R-D,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” Joni answered as methodically as she worked.

  “What does B-A-S-buh-buh-buh spell?” Maggie called out from inside our pop-up tent. I sat on a log by the entrance, struggling to snap Joni’s poles together.

  “Mind your own beeswax, hawk ears,” I replied.

  Billy wandered over and asked to play with my phone. When I refused, he asked Lola for hers instead. She gave the canvas a shake to u
nfold the fabric and said she’d left her phone at home.

  “You didn’t bring your phone?” I said.

  “Mom said we have to unplug. I brought a book.”

  “But—” I stared at her narrow back, the canvas enveloping her legs like a crinoline. “What kind of teenager are you?”

  “I’m reading Sylvia Plath.”

  “Jesus, Lola, you’ve got your whole life to be miserable. You should be on Snapchat.”

  Her delicate fingers unraveled the guy ropes, but her smile remained beatific, like a nun remembering something pleasant.

  Our camp was contained in a corral of trees that gave the reassuring illusion of walls. We had three tents—mine, Joni’s yurt, and a mini marquee-style shelter that I’d thrown in the car at the last minute so we’d have somewhere to prepare food when it rained. We reached our little settlement from the car park up a short but steep path that was flanked by granite slabs. When we’d first arrived, I’d told the boys that the camp was remote, but its elevation meant we could better defend it in the event of attack, which pleased them to no end. Billy asked me what remote meant. It meant he mustn’t fall out of a bloody tree.

  “You’re sure these poles go on the outside of the tent?” I asked Joni.

  “I’m sure. And it’s a yurt.”

  “Goodness, I do hope we don’t run out of fermented mare’s milk.” I turned to see Billy unsnapping the pole I’d already built. “So a yurt. Why?”

  “It’s circular,” said Joni. “You know, sacred, creates good energy.”

  “The Native American thing?”

  She stopped to tie her thick hair into a knot that held itself together by magic. The sheen from damp air and hard work threw her rounded cheekbones into high relief. “It’s like day and night, life and death, the sun and the earth—all circular,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t you have a wigwam?” I asked. Joni snapped her poles together.

  My antipathy toward Auntie Joni and her easy bond with my children could never be aired. Too much depended on it. She kept our family ship afloat with all the babysitting and school runs and sleepovers. But I could never let her go unpunished, either. If she had only ever passed one judgmental comment, let slip one sneer about “having it all”—if she’d just given me a little ammunition, I could shoot her down like I did the holier-than-thou mums at school drop-off. They never skipped a chance to harp on about how I’d missed Sports Day, and then exchanged smirks when I said I’d been at my factory in China, as though I was making it up and was actually getting botoxed or whatever it is they imagine I do while they’re posting pictures of cupcakes on Pinterest. Unlike the SAHMs and MILFs, though, Joni never criticized. It was as though she genuinely relished the thankless task of co-raising three extra children alongside her own turbulent teen. I was indebted up to the eyeballs to my sister-in-law, and I had no currency with which to pay her back. Sometimes, it made me so sharp I got this sensation in my fingers like I was pressing a scalpel into flesh: the resistance of skin and a sickening release as it burst open. I massaged my fingertips together to push out the feeling.

  Once the poles were in place, we hoisted the canvas and stood back. Naturally, all the kids wanted to sleep in the novelty yurt with Joni, so I left them to soak in the sacred energy and started blowing up my air mattress now that I had enough space for it in our profane but practical tent. After a while, Joni joined me.

  “Hello, neighbor.” She opened up a side flap to let in what was left of the daylight. “You got yourself a giant window here.”

  “All the better to see the wolves with. And I just found a built-in wardrobe at the back.”

  “You are kidding me. A tent with a closet!”

  “One of Julian’s many purchases.” I switched on the million-candle integrated ceiling lamp. It burnt yellow squares into my retinas. “He researched it on the Internet for a solid week. He was all giddy. And when I got the bill, so was I. Of course, he never took the kids camping. First time the bloody thing’s been unpacked.”

  Joni looked over her shoulder to check the kids were occupied in the yurt. “So is he really going to move out?”

  I nodded without looking at her. If she wanted me to go through the motions of talking about my problems, I’d prefer to do it later, when there was darkness and gin.

  “So where’s he going?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “What’s he going to do?” She pressed together the studs that fixed the flap, making out like we were just chatting.

  “He could start by getting a job,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Sucking cocks for loose change.”

  “Marlene!”

  “What do you want me to do, throw myself on a funeral pyre? He’s the one who’s leaving his wife and three children.”

  Joni rolled her shoulders as though she could shrug off that unpalatable truth.

  “Anyway, he won’t suffer,” I said. “If he divorces me, he’ll get half of everything.”

  “You’ve spoken to a lawyer?”

  “First person I called.”

  “The way he’s let you down, that’s got to hurt. But I guess he’s entitled—”

  “Entitled is exactly how I’d describe him.”

  “—because he’s your husband, even if he doesn’t act like one most of the time. But, then, you could say the same for me. I haven’t brought home a paycheck in years.”

  “It’s not the same at all. I’m talking about partnership. David can put in the long hours because you keep the household running—you and he are two cogs in the same machine. But Julian? You know what he’s like. A spanner in the works.”

  Joni nodded her acknowledgment at the ground.

  “I can forgive the fact that he doesn’t work—never has, never will—what I can’t forgive is that he doesn’t contribute anything. Never cooks. He won’t attend school meetings or help with homework. He refuses to collect our dry cleaning even though he walks past the place every day. You do little things like that for David, right? But Julian . . . he acts like it’s beneath him.” I rolled out the flaccid air mattress. “Believe me, having a husband is not the same as having a wife.”

  Just looking at the foot pump lying next to the mattress filled me with exhaustion. Joni placed one hand on my shoulder blade like a warm compress. “And it costs me,” I said. “That detour on the way home, the time it takes to pick up my shirts or buy a pint of milk or whatever—something he could easily do during the day—that costs me the chance to read the kids a bedtime story.” My voice started to thicken, so I bent down to screw the nozzle into the pump, but the thread spun and wouldn’t catch. “Fuck’s sake!”

  “Go easy on yourself, Marlene.” Joni took hold of the nozzle and twisted it into place. She started pumping, slow and deliberate. “For the record, David and I won’t be taking sides, even though they’re brothers.”

  I was about to point out that Julian avoided his brother whenever possible, but one of the kids fell over in the yurt, and Joni ducked off to see to it. “Sorry, later—” she said. I wasn’t sure if her wave indicated me or the mattress.

  The forest was poised in anticipation of the night, like a playground in the moments before the school bell rings for break. The kids had accepted the crushing news that it was bedtime. Even Lola disappeared into the yurt with her book, and Horatio was snoring beside the fire. I had my hand in the cooler, hoping to chance upon a ready-mixed can of gin and tonic, when Joni whistled from down by the cars. I grabbed two cans and picked my way down the slope, the granite slabs black as sleeping dogs in the darkness. “Look at the stars,” Joni said as she accepted the drink. I tipped my head back, gazing up through the canopy, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Joni grunted as she lay down on her back. I did the same.

  Layer upon layer of stars revealed themselves, shyly at first and then—as though veils were being drawn aside—in droves: some twinkling, some shooting, some strobing through colors, some that weren’t stars at all
but satellites, some so tiny and numerous they formed shadowy dust-cloud galaxies.

  “That must be north,” said Joni, “because there’re the two bears, Ursa Minor and Major, dancing around the polestar.” She pointed out planets and a galaxy where baby stars are formed.

  “How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

  “There wasn’t a lot to do, growing up in rural Pennsylvania.”

  “There wasn’t a lot to do in rural Kenya, either,” I said, “and even less in bloody Burma.” Although, come to think of it, I had spent some time stargazing as a kid. My father bought a telescope once on a camping trip to the Ngorongoro, and we had seen stars like this then. I remembered how he’d told me that we could see so many stars—a picture book of stars like the ones we could see now—because there was no light pollution for miles around.

  “Is there still no phone signal?” Joni asked.

  “I’ve had a couple of messages, but nothing since this morning. A call came through from China earlier, but the connection was so bad we couldn’t speak. We’re a long way out here and the signal seems to come and go—”

  “You know what I saw on the map earlier? Up on that ridge?” The dark shape of Joni’s arm pointed toward the skulking hills that surrounded our campsite. “A phone tower. The signal should be fine.” The abyss of space daunted me into silence. Chattering bats skirted our orbit. Sighing wind. Shallow breath in my chest. Joni sat up to loom over me in the dark. “We’re only fifteen miles from Church Stretton—that’s a big enough town—and thirty miles from Shrewsbury, and that’s a city. We should be able to see lights, even if it’s just a glow behind the hills.”

  We got up and went to the Beast to get my phone and check the signal. Joni was right: there was coverage, but when I tried to call a couple of numbers—her phone, my home—the line was permanently busy. I left the handset on charge, just in case.

  The glow from the car’s interior light made the darkness all the more intense, as though it had taken a step closer. I flicked on the headlights and they shot out into the night, a pure white lance whose tip faded before it could pierce the heavens. Joni and I stood in the streams of light while long shadows of ourselves strained to get away. Common moths glinted through the beam, shining briefly before blanching to nothing.