Mavis arrives after a decade’s absence, wild grey hair and weathered skin, rust-speckled motorbike burping blue smoke. She hugs us, then lifts her hands in high-priestess pose, breathing, “It’s so good to be back! Such a spiritual place!”
Apparently it’s our turn to keep an eye on Mavis, who’s getting more eccentric with age. My family think that she – widow, ex-flower child, ex-Greenham Common protestor, occasional naturist – will feel comfortable with us.
We’re OK with that. We remember what a fun houseguest Mavis was in our early off-grid days, back when the kids were small. How they used to love her schemes, the treehouses and dam-building, the elaborate treasure hunts with clues hidden under rocks and in hollow trees. And of course, her stories.
“She scared them witless, though,” Rob says. “Remember the swamp monster, waiting to drag them under if they slipped into the mud?”
“They enjoyed it,” I say. “They still talk about it.”
Now Mavis greets our walnut tree, “Oh, yes, I remember you! Old friend, old soul…” We exchange uneasy glances. We don’t remember her literally hugging trees.
She’s still on the subject later, over vegetarian casserole and elderflower wine (she puts away plenty, for someone of nearly seventy-eight.) “I feel a strong kinship, you see. I adore all the legends – which, of course, are so much more than that.” She tops up her glass. “Dryads and elves, oak knots with human faces, beech trees harbouring the souls of the departed. And then there’s Yggdrasil.”
I say “Pardon?”; I’m a little tipsy, from trying to match her intake, and Yggdrasil sounds like a belch. But Mavis goes off into a kind of bardic chant,
“Giant, mythic tree of life, hidden from human view. Only for the fortunate few who have eyes to see it, a stair to the Other Place, a portal to the Nine Worlds and the secrets of existence.”
There’s no obvious response to that, so we toast Yggdrasil.
Mavis spends the following days re-acquainting herself with our trees. Some she insists on climbing – she’s light and limber, but it still makes us nervous – others she embraces, singing or humming. On the third morning Rob finds her in the swamp, sitting naked on the trunk of a fallen willow. When he comes to fetch me he’s vibrating with hysterical laughter. I pick my way downhill and try to sound casual as I ask Mavis what she’s doing.
“Obviously,” she says with a touch of impatience, “I’m trying to merge with the essential being of the tree.” The bog willow was blown down years ago and has sprouted new stems in all directions; it now squats in the mud like a giant moss-coated spider. Mavis, lean and goose-pimpled, is straddling one trunk that points heavenwards like a ground-to-air missile.
“Do you know,” she says, “if you put your ear to the tree you can hear a kind of faint creaking? You really feel it’s trying to communicate, if only one were sensitive enough to understand the message.”
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask. “I brought a rug.”
“My corporeal comfort,” Mavis says tartly, “is quite beside the point here. How can I expect to make a meaningful connection, with layers of processed fibers between myself and the tree?”
On the fourth afternoon, I’m in the kitchen when I hear Mavis scream. I go out and see at the top of the garden a column of fire, crackling briskly. It’s at least twice the height of Rob, who’s standing with the rake in his hand and alarm on his face, while Mavis screeches, “You idiot, it’s still alive!” Rob’s lit a bonfire too close to the remnants of an old cypress that summer storms have split and almost demolished. Cypress wood contains a resin like pitch, so the fire’s taken hold swiftly and now girdles the tree’s base, devouring its reddish bark, while the twigs above are a flaring torch. Mavis is still screaming, “Get the hose! Get the fucking hose!”
We soon douse the fire, but Mavis’ face is a mask of shock and grief. She barely speaks to us after that, retreating to her bedroom and refusing wine at the usual hour. Later, we find the room empty, the window open. She must have clambered down the wisteria stems crisscrossing the front of the house; a living ladder that we used to observe, jokingly, would make a brilliant fire escape.
We search with torches, and again by daylight. We imagine Mavis unconscious in a bramble patch, lying at the foot of a tree with a broken leg or neck, a corpse half-submerged in bog-water. Finding nothing is even worse.
Missing Presumed Dead, we discover, involves a long and hellish administrative process. The personal repercussions are also unpleasant: not only do we feel guilty, but my family are furious, no longer describing Mavis as crazy and embarrassing, but as vulnerable and frail. There are other consequences: since neither of us can face using the chainsaw, we get rid of it, along with our hopes of firewood self-sufficiency. And when a friend suggests draining the marsh to make a natural swimming pool – you could have decking, exotic water plants, Koi carp, the lot – we shudder in unison.
Years later, after a few glasses too many, I tell our grandkids that mad Aunt Mavis is probably still around somewhere, flitting among the trees, or haunting the swamp. Rob says afterwards, “You’re turning into her”.
It’s true that sometimes, I’ll wipe the cobwebs from a sixty-year-old motorbike standing at the back of our garage, kick it into life, watch the blue smoke curl. And that when I walk alone in the woods, as I do more and more, I find myself looking for weathered brown faces in knots of oak-bark. Scanning the massed tree-trunks for one that’s too huge and strange to belong to this world, one that wasn’t there before.
Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany. Her stories have been published by Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Lost Balloon, Spelk, Potato Soup Journal, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. Her work can be found at www.patiencemackarness.wordpress.com
983 words.