Mischief Acts, page 28
The flower woman stood. She high-fived Laz.
What’s up, Laz asked.
Ga Ga Ga, she said.
We needed no more. We took the chant and made it as loud as the throat of a tunnel, as wide and as broad as the cry of a tunnel, we took it outside, into the manic shade, where our hair began to sparkle with rain, and our open mouths caught drops of it, gulps of it. We held the hands of our elderly friends, and what do you think we did? Slowly, raucously, we danced.
*
Laura stops running, some way down the wide path that stretches away from the tunnel mouth, and turns to watch. From the darkness they are emerging, an improbable crowd of self-consciously ragged youths and proudly glamorous pensioners. She glimpses her mother, her raised hand clasped in Laz’s, a kind of crazed energy in her jerking movements as they start to sway together. Their chanting is ridiculous. But she feels embarrassed for them, not afraid. They are all trespassers, stumbling across each other’s worlds, and they do not know it. The oldies are wildest, whooping and staggering, drunk on the rain. Ancient hooligans.
Laura keeps walking, past the sludgy hole that was a pond, and into the clearing. It is raining hard now, so that without the tree canopy for cover, her clothes are soon stuck to her skin. The water is not cold, but the feel of it, drenching and re-drenching, running off her fingertips and in between her toes, is bliss.
The clearing is a straggly patch of grass, dandelions and thistles, with a bench placed here and there, a haggard plastic bin. Will even this be filled in, planted with tottering saplings as the restoration project sweeps all human life from the wood? She pictures the new map: her mother’s garden, the square of ground that was her house, their street and all the others for miles south and east and west, all dotted with curly-topped tree symbols. They will irrigate. Those trees will have their feet kept cool, they will have dust gently sponged from their ignorant leaves. All that nurture. All that tenderness.
Restoration. Soon, the only person still resident here will be her father, the fragments of him, dry, inert, then wetted, in the endless cycle of summer and winter.
Around her the leaves crackle. Laura breathes in.
I just lay in the grass, her father says. He is this scent of the wood wetted. That musky freshness – there’s a word for it, he told her a dozen times. She’s forgotten.
In the middle of the clearing, Laura lies down in the gleaming, drooping grass. She is heavy with water. The lumpy ground holds her up. The rain comes down to meet her. She opens her mouth and lets it fill.
Then she tips her head back to look at the trees upside down, pooling into the sky. There on a trunk is the hex. It has been cut into the bark, and the gouges filled with chalk which is now dripping, upwards, into the folds of the tree’s roots.
It is a disfigurement and a summoning. It is stupid, but she is glad it’s there, that she can trespass, in the company of hooligans and crones, that the wood accepts their mark.
Petrichor, her father says. How could you forget?
Laura wriggles in the grass. That’s a made-up word, she replies.
Nothing wrong with that, he says.
Faint, beyond the rush of the rain, she catches the chant, rising and falling, tuneless and senseless, a human call: Ga Ga Ga.
CHANTALOUP, OR NAME YOUR WOLF
Odolf for the wealthy,
Hrolleif for the old.
Rollo for the famous,
Gunwolf for the bold.
Botolf for the messenger,
Weylyn for the son,
Convel for the warrior,
Fridolf for the peaceful one.
Raff is a red wolf,
Geri, Freki, greedy ones.
Ulrich is a she-wolf,
Skoll, the wolf that chased the sun.
All the little wolf cubs,
Canagan or Channon.
If you are an un-wolf,
Run, run, run!
Nilas Schwitzer
15
RESTORATION
2064
Charm: When I am made fast in chains, this song I sing to spring the fetters from my limbs.
So we’ll begin at the beginning, right back, way back when the restoration started.
And go on until we come to the end. So you’ll see how this whole thing got out of our hands.
Got out of everyone’s. But it’s Patrol like us who has to get their hams dirty.
Of course, we weren’t there right back at the dozing, real dirty work.
We’d have done a better job.
But they were wet behind the years, weren’t they? New jobs for youngers.
Even if it was knocking down your own house, your whole street.
We still find bits and bods, don’t we? Door handles, air-con units, ceiling lights.
I found a teapot once, spout sticking out of the ground like a snake’s head.
Funny how stuff won’t stay still in there. Things move around, rise up, poke through.
Anyway, those youngers did the dozing, made a pest of a bad job, REFO got the planting done. That was back in 2046.
And bingo, we’ve got a forest.
You can imagine the security.
You don’t need to, it’s still there.
Wasn’t supposed to be. They thought folk would get used to it, get bored, move away on the programmes and then they’d reduce Patrol.
But, started in ’47, didn’t we? Team Dee. And full-time ever since.
Mostly camera work, it was, after a while. Must be hardly a tree in there isn’t wired up.
But before that, it was: perimeter walk, section foray. Always armed.
Tranks only. REFO wasn’t trying to kill anyone.
But it was way worse than they expected.
Wasn’t just the Turfers, breaking in, setting up camp, saying they had nowhere to go, didn’t like the programme communities, calling the forest home.
It was Earthies too. Madus hattus, that lot. Said they were rewilding themselves, they wanted to be part of the forest.
Like they were tree spirits. Saw a few curious costumes on them, didn’t we?
So we had a time of it, all these new bees on Patrol, pulling Earthies out of the forest almost every night, packing Turfers off to the programmes.
And all the media coverage, it gave youngers ideas. It was like a dare, for a while.
Go in and see how long you could last.
So the boss went one up. It was good for the PR, but it was also a chance to do what she’d really wanted from the start.
Every clown has a silver lining.
And REFO started introducing wolves.
It was 2049 by the time they got it set up.
Same year my daughter was born.
They were something, those beasts.
Beautiful things, strong and graceful, you know? I named my daughter Ulrika. It means wolf ruler.
But it was a worry. We thought, if it worked, we’d be out of a job.
Because who wants to go and live in a forest full of wolves?
The trees weren’t that big yet, and the whole place was a mess, all tangled together.
You wouldn’t have been able to run, not fast.
We hoped they’d be scared.
We were. Got upgraded to real guns, quad bikes, chain mail.
And put on a buddy system. Just in case.
Well. It did put some Turfers off. But the Earthies were mad for it.
The wilder the better, that was their view.
Didn’t stop them taking in tarps, camping kit, bags of food, though, did it? Bending trees and building shelters.
Digging holes to hide in, like rats, when Patrol came through.
So, the wolves didn’t help much at all.
And they weren’t going to bother with bears, not after that commotion in Bristol.
Thing was, if you were on cameras, in that booth with all the screens, you’d be hoping for a glimpse of wolf.
The way their eyes glowed white, that look like they could see you, somehow, watching through the lens. It was magic.
But it was distracting.
That first few months, when we realised the Earthies weren’t going home, we dreaded what we might find on our rounds.
Like we should’ve been guarding the people in there from the wolves. But it was vicer verser.
The boss, she loved the wolves like they were her kids. And fuck anyone who got in their way.
That’s why we were scared.
That’s why we’re here, really, talking to you.
Anyway. You’d expect a few incidents. Got to make a few eggs and all that.
Team Bee pulled out a bloke with a couple of fingers hanging off. He’d been playing with a she-wolf, feeding her scraps.
Then there was that couple. She was covered in scratches, bite-marks. He couldn’t walk. Teeth had gone right through a tendon in his knee. Said they’d be going straight back in soon as he was fixed up.
So, a few injuries. Quite a few, really.
But no deaths. Even when the wolves started breeding, multiplying.
I remember watching the cubs on cams, deep in where we couldn’t get the quad bikes.
Just lovely, they were. Rolling about, playing like puppies.
So it could have gone worse, the wolf thing, but it could have gone better.
We kept our jobs. Just as many breaches as before, just as many Earthies playing at going back to the land, needing patching up when we found them.
And it had only been a year or so of the new normal, when the PR went bad.
It was one of our own team, Susmita, who pulled them out.
Tough as all boots, that Su was.
She’d found a couple with a baby, who reckoned they’d been in the forest two years and they were doing all right.
We’d never seen them before, not even on the cams.
But they also reckoned, once they’d come round from the tranks, that the mother’d had two kids in there.
Twins. And one had got left behind.
Ten-month-old girl, they said, all alone in the forest.
And that was it. All over the media. Remember? The Bearman Controversy.
‘Baby at the mercy of wolves’, total take-down on Susmita, the whole tranks method.
The father, he was out there like a wrecking bull, attacking everything and everything. REFO, the entire restoration project, the boss. It got massive.
The protest got so big, we were put on Patrol at Whitehall for a week.
But the boss was having none of it. She said, if it was true, about this baby, we’d have found her easily.
There was nothing REFO didn’t have access to. Thermal imaging, motion detection, all that. She said the Bearmans were lying, that it was all a trick, a sneer campaign.
Right out and said it.
Someone on Team Bee said REFO paid the Bearmans to shut up, in the end.
And they did. But on the condition that Susmita lost her job.
So, they made an escape-goat of Su. Said the father had made up the claims out of revenge, that Susmita had broken the rules and used restraint on the other kid and hurt them.
It would never happen again, there’d be a review of practices, the usual stuff.
But the boss hoped that would scare people, too. Put them off.
And it did. For a while.
Lucky, too. Because that’s when things started going properly wrong.
Any given night, a bunch of cameras would go. There were nearly eight thousand by then, fixed and remote control.
Even where Patrol could still get through.
It was belting braces after the baby thing, boss couldn’t take any risks.
But we were losing sometimes a hundred cameras in a night.
Repair team couldn’t keep up, so on top of Patrol they wanted drone cams.
Not much use when the leaves are on, but there’s thermal, and the wolves were all chipped, too. So, they got them up, but they just couldn’t get the feed straight.
Cams would blank for whole minutes. Drones would ignore the controls and fly out over the city.
If you looked at the drone stream, it was always full of black holes.
And guess what? They were the same spots where the cameras had blown.
Boss called it a blip. But honestly, we never did manage to properly fix it. Workarounds, that’s all we had.
Plus targets. If you could catch an Earthie disabling a camera, you got a bonus.
When a black hole showed on the network, we’d get sent straight in there.
If we could cut through to the site, what would we find? Sod all. Wolf droppings maybe.
So, we did the odd deal. Persuade an Earthie to let themselves be marched out, confess to destroying REFO property, then slip them back through the fence with a sack of biscuits and vodka.
Bonus for us, results for the boss.
Everyone did it. Felt we deserved it, for the extra stress.
Extra duties.
Because it wasn’t just the cams outing, and the drones going hop the wall.
Stuff was turning up that wasn’t meant to be in there.
And we don’t mean teapots, or old kitchen taps. Though there was plenty of that.
No. It was plants at first.
June of ’52, when spring came, there were all these flowers.
Course, we didn’t know any better, did we? We’re Patrol, not scientists.
But we noticed because of the colours.
Never seen anything like it. But then I’d never been in a forest till this job, neither.
A patch up in one of the east sections, the whole thing was just purple. Like a carpet. Another bit further south, where it wasn’t too overgrown, was covered in these little yellow ones, like stars.
So there was a lot of that kind of thing. Pink ones here, white ones there.
Sometimes a lovely smell, very soft.
But we thought it was just the forest bedding in.
The Earthies – we knew a few of them by then, what with the bonuses – they loved it. One place, they put up a kind of fence, from fallen branches, so the flowers wouldn’t get trampled.
Gardening in a forest!
But the next year, there was way more. Vine-type things.
Climbers.
We didn’t know what they were. Flowers on them like orange trumpets, or big clumps of white foam.
Only in certain spots. But when you found them, they looked nice, just odd.
The next year it was saplings that didn’t match what REFO had planted.
That was when we got put on training.
Us, learning about plants.
But the boss said, we knew the forest like the packs of our hams.
Which was true.
And she didn’t want any science types poking around, saying she’d got the restoration wrong.
She certainly didn’t want any science types bumping into
Earthies and reporting it.
She’d had to accept them, by then. As long as they didn’t damage anything, or rile the wolves, it was living let live.
So, we got an education.
Silvology. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The study of forests. And we were meant to identify the flowers, and the new trees, while we were on Patrol.
Take photos, take samples.
I used to sneak some home for Ulrika, sometimes. Show her something she wouldn’t get on the school feed. There was one she especially liked called dog violets.
Latin name, Viola riviniana. Isn’t that lovely?
Earthies would lead us to new plants when they came up, in exchange for stuff. Sweets, meds, waterproofs.
So our data was pretty good.
Team Dee, we were the experts. Silvologists supreme.
But apart from the extra work, it didn’t change anything.
The boss sat on it. Our non-disclosures got updated.
Only way anyone out there got to know about it was when the odd Earthie got pulled. Which was their own doing, by then, if they’d had enough of the wild life.
The black holes were still a thing. So she couldn’t keep track of wolf births, couldn’t keep them all chipped.
REFO was on lockdown. Wouldn’t let any new bees in, or ask for any help.
Boss was losing her grip. You make your bed, you line it.
That’s why we’re here, talking to you.
Anyway.
So, you can keep flowers secret, because they don’t go anywhere on their own, do they?
But it was insects next.
2056, I recall. It was a retired naturalist in Camberwell reported that butterfly.
Nobody, including him, had seen a live one in twenty years.
That’s what he said.
And it was a whopper.
Twice the size of the old kind.
Boss claimed it as a REFO success before we’d even spotted the same ones in the forest. Talking up rewilding, the whole biodiversity business.
Of course, the media didn’t know the half of it. We were finding the crazy things everywhere in there.
Got home from a shift once with a bright orange one in my breast pocket. Ulrika was six by then, thought I was a magician.
Then it was, what? Stag beetles, bees, ladybirds, all the creepy-crawlies.
But big, you know? Had an incident in Battersea with a spider’s nest, evacuated the block and everything.
You’d think it wouldn’t have bothered us, seeing as we patrolled a forest full of wolves.
But we hardly saw them, and these bugs. They get in your clothes.
All right when it’s a butterfly, isn’t it. Not so keen on woodlice.
But, food chains and all that, you can guess what happened next.
I remember it. When we changed to earlies, July of ’58, I heard my first dawn chorus.
Me too. It was like the whole world was singing.
Better than music.
Nothing like it.
REFO had tried with birds, back at the start, but they hadn’t taken.
They’d had to fly them in. Imagine that. An aeroplane full of birds!
And now, we were busting all the projections.
It was starting to look suspicious. Kinds of birds that were long gone, suddenly nesting all over the place.
And then flying about. There were spotters all over London, couldn’t believe their eyes. It was a craze that summer.
