‘Bitter.’
‘I could manage it with a liberal sprinkling of sugar but I fear that would be missing the point.’
The Rev gets this way with food. Some people need things to feel guilty about. ‘I don’t fancy it,’ he says. He sloshes milk into his breakfast cereal, hears it pucker and snap. He doesn’t fancy this, either, but he needs to get something inside him.
‘Rough night?’
‘Why, d’I wake you?’
Rachel shakes her head. Sneaking a peek in her room that time, he saw the earplugs lying bent and mottled on her bedside table. ‘Have you given any thought,’ she asks, ‘to my suggestion? I have that number at Veterans Aid.’
‘I’m not a charity case.’
‘Aitch, you literally are right now, and you’re welcome, but staying here is no life, is it?’
‘You want me to leave.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘You can stay as long as you’ve nowhere else, but we need to come up with a long-term plan. Where do you see yourself, three-four years from now?’
‘Dunno, dead?’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘All right, stacking shelves, driving a forklift truck, working in a call centre selling shit to people who don’t need it.’
‘In a home of your own. Maybe with a partner, a kid.’
‘I don’t want kids.’
‘Fine.’
‘I’m not having kids.’
‘Aitch, I’m being hypothetical. My point is, organisations exist to help people like you.’
‘I’m dealing with it.’
‘You scream in your sleep. You get up looking like you’ve been on a three-day bender and I know you haven’t, it’s just what sleep has done to you, it’s what your dreams have done to you. There’s nothing wrong with accepting help.’ Her plump hands cup her mug of coffee that has COFFEE written on it. He stares at them because he feels the pressure of her watching and there’s no way in the world he can push his eyes up to meet hers. ‘Tell me you’ll think about it.’
‘Right.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I can do all the preliminary work – the talking, the forms …’
Christ. She lifts her mug to drink and he feels the weight of her attention lift, so he looks up and sees red hair and the pink of her face, and in the garden the apple blossom is getting picked apart by the wind and he has to get out, into the woods. He looks directly at her, and if only he could pin her down on the table, his thighs slapping against her bare arse, pounding her till she shouts his name like it’s not a sad puppy.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘What for?’
‘For being willing to listen.’
‘It’s your house.’
‘Technically it’s not.’
Aitch fiddles with his shemagh, drapes it across his shoulder. ‘Reckon I’ll go see Bekah,’ he says.
‘Is that wise?’
‘Stu’s at work. Then maybe I’ll go for a run.’
‘Okey-doke,’ says Rachel. She drains her mug, gets up and puts it in the sink. Job done, parishioners to see. ‘Will you be going through the heath?’
‘Eh?’
‘To your sister’s?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s just the ground’s very dry. We’re supposed to take care not to drop cigarettes.’
‘“Don’t burn everything, Aitch!”’
Rachel hiccups a laugh. ‘I don’t mean that.’
‘Cross my heart, Rev, hope to die, I promise I will not burn down the heath.’
Locking the front door, she tastes the air. Nothing but the exhalation of flowers and, fainter, diesel fumes from a ride-on mower. She walks to the junction with College Ride. Putting Bagshot behind her, she follows the holly hedge as far as Pennyhill Park Hotel and its pungent hinterland of skips. At the crest of the hill she turns right, scaling a low bank of gravel shored up by oil drums. She pushes through holly and laurel, looking out for dog mess underfoot or bagged and hung from branches.
In the wood the footpath is obstructed with logging debris. Someone has been grubbing up rhododendron, leaving the wrack snagged in trees as if deposited by a great flood. She walks among roots and torn branches. Machines have carved deep ruts in the mud.
She drags a stick through the skeletons of last year’s bracken, knocking tentacles of new growth. Everywhere the understorey is in leaf – rowans with their stems nibbled by deer, birches spangled with sunlight. A blackbird, threshing leaves in search of springtails, flies scolding at her approach. Birds seem to call from every corner – chaffinch, robin, wren – and she imagines their song as silver threads tying up the wood. Above the trees the sky is raw with the rasp of jet engines.
Bobbie enters the beech plantation. Her father has shown her the damage done to it by deer and squirrels. Inattentive, she treads in a rare puddle and tiny insects rise like vapour about her ankles.
Has she ever known the woods this dry this early? She thinks about the fire on the ranges. They were in the Vauxhall at the time, taking more of Grandpa’s stuff to the dump. ‘That’s smoke,’ her father said. The air flashed blue and they bumped onto the verge to let a fire engine pass.
‘Could be a bonfire,’ said Bobbie, seeing the expression on her father’s face.
‘It’s not a bonfire.’
After that, he swerved as he drove because he was fiddling with the car radio to find a local news station. He swore at Dolly Parton, he swore at travel updates.
When they got back to Grandpa’s house, he left Bobbie in the hallway and ran to fetch his iPad. The heath in Pirbright was in flames. Sparks, they reckoned, from ordnance or a soldier’s cooking fire. Her father was scrolling in a sweat. ‘Says here a thousand acres.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘That’s the lot. Jesus.’
It was because of drought, he said, and the winter dieback. Spring is the worst time of year for it – nestlings in the heather eaten by flames, lizards cooked on the blackened soil. Bobbie listened but she failed to make the necessary noises. It made her father sullen all evening.
She picks at shreds of bark torn from a beech by a gnawing squirrel. He reckons she doesn’t care about the land, but that’s not true. Didn’t they come here every summer, and every autumn half-term, to endure Grannie’s cooking and Grandpa’s lectures? And weren’t things easiest on those visits when all together they took off on long hikes, picking blackberries in August and mushrooms in October? Sometimes they found Sparassis, or brains as Bobbie calls it, spongy growths from pine stumps that you bake in casseroles or use to flavour omelettes. Deep amid the trees, they found boletus mushrooms with slimy caps. Best of all were the cep, so mild and nutty, filling her grandparents’ house with the smell of autumn woods.
Those were among the few occasions when her grandfather, who considered