‘He’s going to use that gun for bigger things than little birds in the forest. When things start to change.’
‘I don’t know that things are ever going to change,’ I said. ‘I mean in our lifetime. I’ve seen too many moments when things could have changed. And then they didn’t.’
‘We’ve done what we could have done.’
‘And it wasn’t enough. It hasn’t been enough.’
‘That I don’t believe.’
We fell into silence. The dead had spoken once more. And the dead are worse than the aged, as I have been told. Once they begin to speak, they will not be silenced. The bus stopped every two minutes at a different town or village, or sometimes at a crumbling concrete bus shelter surrounded by woodland. No one got on. The bus driver paused, consulted his watch. He started to drive again. At one point he must have realized he had gained more than a few seconds. At a woodland halt he turned off the engine to wait. He opened the doors of the bus. There was a breeze. The forest was rustling like a sibilant crowd. It must have rained in the night. The smell of pine was everywhere. It was extraordinary to me that these woods had been there for decades, perhaps centuries, before either of us had been born. We had been driving through them for half an hour. Until two days ago, I had not had the slightest suspicion that they even existed. I still had no idea about anything that had ever happened in them. The world, it seems to me, is full of things we know nothing about. Mystery and obscurity are the most banal things in our existence. The narrow tarmacked road of our lives is a thin ribbon, laid out in front of us, that most people follow without question, the forests to either side catching only the edges of our vision.
I raised my head. I looked out of the open bus door, beyond the bus shelter. I looked into the layers of light and darkness, of tree and shadow. I looked into the forest as far as I could see. Deep within it, it appeared to me that something had changed. It was a steady movement in the deepest shade. It might have been an animal of some sort, or something inanimate falling, or the movements of a man cutting a tree. Something that had had its back to me had turned, as if preparing to howl in rage or despair. But from here it was no more than a movement in the forest dark, and perhaps I might have been mistaken altogether in what I thought I had seen.
Champel-Battersea, October 2018
Also by Philip Hensher
FICTION
Other Lulus
Kitchen Venom
Pleasured
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife
The Mulberry Empire
The Fit
The Northern Clemency
King of the Badgers
Scenes from Early Life
The Emperor Waltz
Tales of Persuasion
The Friendly Ones
NON-FICTION
The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting
About the Author
Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012, and The Friendly Ones. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in south London and Geneva.
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