After The Fire

3. The Wind In The Trees

The wind plundered the Scots pines above their heads as they ran. They raced along the towpath and the branches bowed and swayed, the needles in motion in a slow-rolling sigh. Coniston water lapped black and icy at the jetty, but Sean Garner was on fire, chasing his son Callum along the lakeside path to the second mile post, and, subtly, letting him win.

He arrived second, pleased he still had it in him to beat this 28-year-old, who, even with his illness, was a fierce competitor. He high-fived Callum, who, flushed and grinning with his victory, turned to jog back to the car. As he went, he threw out a winner's challenge to his old dad: 'Last one back to the car washes up for mum'.

'No chance. It's your turn and you know it!' Sean yelled after him.

Sean was watching the pines. The motion of the trees was compelling, and disturbing. The rushing force that shook these enormous branches was invisible, came from who knows where, yet produced such dramatic results. And then he saw it happen. A high-up branch, rotten inside no doubt, pulled too far by the wind, finally gave up. It splintered free, toppling downwards, breaking a slow-motion path through the foliage, coming to a stop lodged in a fork where it would rest indefinitely. The trunk left behind wore a flash of raw yellow. Sean knew the sap would bead soon, sealing off and protecting the tree against the rest of the winter, but he still didn't like it. That healing would be too small. The outline of the tree was spoiled for this coming season, and for many years to come.

More upset than he expected to be, he turned to follow Callum.

He loved running with his son. It had started when Callum was six and wanted Sean to time him as he raced from tree to tree in their garden. It had gone on through training for track events, through athletic clubs after school, through the years away, and had lasted till now, when Callum was 28, and a doctoral student at Glasgow University, studying something important to do with organic chemistry which Sean accepted he would never understand.

Home for the holidays, Callum and his younger sister Billie usually brought life, energy and wholeness. Yet this Christmas Sean had felt something more fractured about both children. Their happiness was brittle, their focus split, they were both more subdued. They were both rowing in a way they hadn't done since they were teenagers. Callum disapproved of Billie's new boyfriend Thomas for being too possessive, and Billie disapproved of Callum in general. 

Christmas Day, usually joyful, had been particularly scratchy. Rebecca had been combative over cooking the lunch, at sea in her new kitchen although she'd never admit it. One oven was too hot, the other too low, and when she burned the gravy and discovered Billie had forgotten to buy the cranberry sauce all hell let loose, leaving Billie shut down into silence. Callum had just been moody throughout. 

As the day had gone on a cord of irritation had tightened around them. The tension only built, pulling tighter, and thinner. 

As the afternoon rolled on into the evening and the wine came out Sean felt more and more detached from them all. The kids' constant checking of their mobile phones was aggravating, the escalating bickering between them less and less endurable, and the board games interminable. They all felt it. Billie gave up first and went to bed to call Thomas. Callum and Rebecca followed soon after, because without Billie the whole dynamic, bad as it was, had evaporated. 

Sean had ended the day alone, watching an old film on through midnight into Boxing Day as the house settled. Despite his family in the bedrooms above his head, his family home of twenty years around him, he had felt the noise of the family turn into solitude, the solitude turn into loneliness, until he was abandoned, derelict, lost in a rubble-strewn landscape.

He already knew there was something wrong with him. On the outside he was warm, energetic, and (perhaps too) competitive, but there was a vacuum at the heart of him, and there had been for years. However, this sharp peak of self-pity was new. He had told none of it to Rebecca. What could she do? And it would incentivise an already painful situation. Her latest course was an Open University Introduction to Psychotherapy, and she had been testing her new diagnostic ideas on Sean in an alarmingly energised way. Protecting himself from the unsettlingly accurate intrusion, he sabotaged each questionnaire as it came, and fabricated an inner life of happy abundance in the free-writing experiments. But keeping consistent was tricky work, and from the increased puzzlement on her face as she worked out his latest results it was clear the wheels of his fraud were coming off. He thought it was her pushing and probing that was bringing him down. He wished she had stuck with the dressmaking. Or the Roman History. Or the lake-swimming.