For my parents, Tricia and Glenn

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with my smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

A Poison Tree
William Blake (1794)

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Lethwick, 1964

‘No one ever thinks about it, but you will. You’ll die, and as you do, you’ll look back at how you treated me, the things you said to me, and you’ll regret them. Before you go, you’ll miss me. You’ll miss everyone. And you’ll be so, so sorry. You will. I read it in a book.’

That’s what Sophie’s mother had said to her, the morning of her seventeenth birthday.

Now the girl was out here, walking with her gift. Unwashed strawberry-blonde hair curled around her shoulders.

All around, forests that had bloomed for decades were receding like a hairline. Heather grew out of the blasted, scorched, exhausted earth at peculiar angles. These plants squatted like beggars, holding out their hands toward the departing sun.

There were pines and chestnut trees, too, and … and …

Oak? Was that an oak?

Sophie wasn’t sure.

The trees seemed like they were alive that afternoon – as in, really alive. Sophie imagined them as frozen people caught up in silly shapes – dancers forming screams, shaking wigs upon their heads, posing their bodies skyward …

Red ants swarmed in their mounds, sand shifting in the barren grass.

She walked through this graveyard of trees. She had come out here to take a photograph. She bit her nails, sometimes.

There was this one tree, far along round the bend of the hills.

Sophie had noted this particular tree a few days back. She’d walked out here after an argument, as she had so often done.

The whole day changed whenever Sophie fought with her mother. She would want to leave home. She would also want to say sorry. She wished her feelings could be more consistent.

They had even argued this morning, exchanging a few words after her birthday cake. Every year, both mother and daughter mock-screamed, as if that cake could feel the knife, and they’d smile, and eat what they had cut. Every year Sophie’s mum would go to work if there was work to be done, and Sophie would not go to school because the date of her birthday always fell in the summer holidays. Every year, she’d stay at home. She would play with whatever she had been given.

This year, a camera. An Instamatic. It was the most expensive thing Sophie had ever owned. That morning, her mother had kissed her on the forehead after giving the gift to her. Fans whirred around the room, all the shut curtains rippling and bloating in their path. They had to keep out the heat.

‘Do you think you’ll use it today?’

‘Can I take your picture?’

Her mother shook her head.

‘I could take one when you don’t know I’m taking it.’

‘Don’t,’ her mother said. ‘Always ask, OK?’

‘The first ever photo of a person was by accident, you know. They just got caught in the corner of the shot …’

‘Who told you that?’

Sophie shrugged.

‘You could go out with your friends, maybe … Take your camera with you?’

‘I’ll probably sleep.’

‘What?’

‘When you’re at work … I’ll sleep.’

Her mother had found the idea of spending a birthday sleeping entirely absurd – insulting, almost. She had questioned her daughter, and had brought up her friends again, and … and …

Then it had started, and escalated.

Things had got dramatic, and Sophie knew she’d said awful things, too … about her mother’s friends, old crones, all of them … the men her mother saw … the men her mother had thrown herself at … Her mother, who’d used these same words and phrases against so many others. Her mother, who was losing everyone, little by little, year by year. Who kept a list of books she’d read the past twelve months, as if it were a thing she’d done her whole life. Whose happiness began to grow acquainted only with that list, its length, its breadth. As if words could make up for life. As if it were the quantity of her reading that mattered – the fact of it, more than the substance alone.

So here Sophie was, far from the empty fields, her house now entirely out of view.

‘There,’ she muttered.

She stared at the strange tree. She’d found it at last.

The main trunk itself was ivy-wrapped almost to the top. Around this tree there were three spheres, each composed of a mass of wood and grass, like nests. One floated from the tree top, one to the left, one to the far right. The distance they hung from the main wood seemed arbitrary, held in each case by a single twig.

Sophie wished she had a tripod. She wished she had her own darkroom, her own expensive film she’d read about in a magazine. She had declared herself an enthusiast, using her school’s equipment. She always had these obsessions, always threw herself utterly into the next pursuit or interest. There was something about her that was profoundly ungrateful, she knew. And she knew there should be guilt. She loved the camera, really she did. She loved it because it was hers.

‘Steady …’

After a few moments trying to steady her hands, she took a photo of the spheres.

She stood back, satisfied with the shutter’s click. She kept going towards the lake, over a mile from her home, now. The trees began to run thicker. Sometimes there were boats out. Maybe there would be some today. A few leaves rattled across the land. The smell grew fresher, the old oaty musk replaced with the scent of water, though it was still far off.

After a while, Sophie came across a piece of pipe, stuck down in the half-ashen soil.

It was a grey plastic cylinder. It did not appear to have been here for very long, or else it would have been dirtier, scratched up, maybe. Just a few inches wide.

Sophie stared at it for a time, shifting her weight. A fly landed on her calf. It walked along the bare skin below her shorts, above her socks.

She bent down, hesitating before she ran her index finger and nail-bitten thumb along the plastic’s edge. Looking down it, there was only black darkness, nothing to be seen, to be heard, to be smelled.

She pulled at the plastic pipe, but it did not shift. It appeared to run deep, wedged tightly into the earth.

She put her eye to the pipe, so close that the plastic almost jabbed her in her socket, almost left its print in her skin like a monocle. She held her ear to it, letting the plastic touch her flesh once more. She thought for a moment she heard sucking, shifting, but then realised, on reflection, it was most likely just the noise her own contact had brought.

She rose to her feet.

She held her camera over the pipe. The silver metal of her device shone in the final hour of sunlight. She took a photograph of the pipe from above, a bird’s eye view just as a cloud drifted overhead.

She walked on. She wanted to see the lake before the sky grew dark.

She wanted her mother to worry.

She didn’t know what she wanted.

The rest of her walk, Sophie encountered more ants. More plants. More trees.

She saw the ridge of the lake, just sixty feet away.

Near the water sat a pale girl. The pale girl dressed like mothers dressed. She sat with her legs hunched up, long arms bracing her either side, as if, when she lifted them, she might then slide down right beyond the shore and beneath the surface. She looked like she was sick, her skin was so drained of colour. Maybe she’d always been sick, or maybe her skin was misleading, a lie.

There was someone else, further away at first.

A man – a much older man.

His walk was deliberate, mechanical, slow.

He came and said something to the pale girl. She didn’t answer or turn her head. He spoke again, or his lips moved anyway.

Sophie tried reading them, whispering under her breath, imagining things her eyes could not possibly see. ‘Flowers … passing …’

No one heard her whisper.

The pale girl rose to her feet.

More details became clear now. There was a dirty white sock on her right foot and nothing else. There was a green leather shoe on her left.

Sophie took a photograph.

There was something pretty about the absence. Neither of the strangers seemed to hear or notice the click. Neither said anything. Neither turned to Sophie, so far away as she was.

She went home.

That night, they ate sausages and chips. Her mother didn’t say sorry for the argument in the morning, but it was all right. Sophie loved sausages, bacon, everything.

In the morning, Sophie went into town, walking the forty minutes along the hill paths, then down the main road when she had to. The whole region was Lethwick – the A-road running through to the north, the farms and forests, the hamlets and outer shops, and then what people really meant when they spoke of Lethwick – the cobbled mass, sucking tourists in like gravity. Sophie wasn’t allowed out here after sundown. Drivers sometimes cat-called her, they did so whatever the time, but something about night was presented as more dangerous than the day. Such behaviour from others had started back when she was twelve. Or maybe she only started to notice it then, she didn’t know. After a certain hour, the world was not to be trusted. But somehow the valley itself was always safe. It was their home. No one came there. No one but those who had hung those spheres in the tree. No one but the pale girl with the missing shoe.

In town, Sophie took her now full roll of film into the pharmacy.

An old woman murmured past the shelves, ‘What are you doing out here?’ Sophie couldn’t see her face or who she was talking to.

With the rest of her money Sophie bought some penny sweets. Newspapers talked of American wars.

Through the brickwork of the pharmacy, a record played in the distance. It repeated the word ‘love’ through the walls and through the streets. It repeated it so much that something about the voice horrified her, and—

‘Sophia,’ Sophie said, when the pharmacist asked her name.

She didn’t use this version apart from on official forms, on records. Her grandmother had had the same name as her.

It meant ‘wisdom’.

She gave her address.

The pharmacist told her the photographs would be ready within a couple of days. On the way out, an old woman started coughing in the main aisle, expelling an endless, sunken stream of stuttered breaths from wrinkled skin. Something inside wanted to escape. Some of the cough hit Sophie.

Sophie spent the afternoon wandering around the town. She saw few other teenagers around.

A couple smoked marijuana and watched her.

A girl at school had claimed to have had some once, but everyone knew it was just catnip.

People in Ancient Greece used to see things when they breathed in fumes. It was a religious experience. She’d read about it in class. She wondered what that would be like, to think you’d seen the face of a god.

Her mother had used to take her to church. Neither of them had been in years. Neither of them talked about it.

Still, they celebrated the festivals. Christmas. Easter. Midsummer and the grand mysteries.

There was no one else on the main roads. Nothing at all, not even a car.

Just silence the whole way.

She went home.

The night came and went.

The fans kept spinning round so fast you could barely see them, shifting the foxgloves, the campions, the roses, all the flowers her mother had taken and assembled on the mantelpiece and shelves and windowsills, some of them in soil, some of them in water, some of them cut, dying now.

The fans ran as the morning grew hotter. Sophie had never experienced anything like this temperature. She didn’t want to go outside.

Her mother stayed off work. In the darkness, the curtains shut, they tried to lose their heat. Sophie had told her about the old cougher in the pharmacy, about how she’d looked, how confused.

‘Old women like that …’ Her mother paused, her voice quiet. ‘They should be in homes. They shouldn’t be left to bother people.’ She lay on the sofa opposite Sophie, stretched out, her face lightly filmed in sweat.

‘Would you want to go into one?’

‘That what you’re going to do?’ Her mother half smiled. ‘Put me in a home?’

Sophie shook her head.

Her mother turned away and closed her eyes, trying to get comfortable on the rose-emblemed fabric. ‘If I ever lost my mind, I think I’d …’

‘You think what?’

‘I think I’d rather end it, if I wasn’t able to be myself.’ This, her mother said.

The television went on and on, sometimes just grey static in the midst of all these hills, but neither mother nor daughter could be bothered to go and change it.

At four minutes past nine Sophie saw people running along the hill path to their west, a small group.

At twelve to one, she began her nap.

All these days off school and nothing to do. It made Sophie wonder about life in general, how everyone wanted time off; how when it came, everything just felt empty. Maybe work was all there was – not her mother’s work, not the wage of a task you hate, but something important. Something meaningful. Something that might mean you never needed a break at all.

If you didn’t have a passion for your life, what was that life? Sophie had felt clever, thinking this, and had written it down in the margin of a book – a pot boiler, some detective story her mother had finished.

When she woke, her mother was gone.

There was no music, no sound, no light. The fans had all ceased.

Her mother couldn’t bear to be in a room without electricity, without motion. All the doors were shut. Sophie wandered through the halls, saw all these things.

There was a creak on the roof. Like all old houses, this place shifted hot and cold. It had scared her, more than once.

She went back to her room to get a magazine. She paused at her bedroom window and looked out.

Her favourite tree of all was close to the house, in the centre of an old fenced-off paddock, lately used for nothing at all but weeds. The apple tree grew in the middle of all that mass.

Her mother’s car was gone.

In its place was a yellow Ford Cortina. Two men stood in front of her home. Neither looked up. They had dark hats and dark suits, one of them sharper pressed than the other.

He was the older of the two, had a grey-black beard. The other, thin-faced, walked around to the lounge window and tugged at the frame. The window was open, it turned out. The older man just stood where he was, right at the door.

It was then that he began to hammer on it.

Two days after her birthday, the men took Sophie out to the woods.

She walked ahead of them in the dying light. It was almost the same hour she’d come out here that last time, an unintended coincidence on the men’s part, though it was helpful to their task. The same silly trees swayed, ooh-ed, aah-ed. The same ants swarmed the same sand. The smell of meat and oats and earth filled the hot air.

She walked, and the two strangers followed.

They said they were from the police.

She went with them.

They weren’t allowed to speak to her without her mother present.

She went off with them anyway.

It made her feel important. It made her feel scared.

They said they had to know. They said they needed her.

They came to the lakeside. There, the grey-black bearded man nodded, holding a photograph in the air before him. ‘Same place,’ he said, and Sophie wasn’t sure if it was a question. This was where she’d taken the photo of the pale girl by the lake, yes. She just said, ‘Yes.’

The other turned on his radio and muttered something.

The two policemen spent a while here, asking questions, watching Sophie’s face.

What did you hear?

What did you see?

What direction did they go in?

Where did he come from?

What was his accent?

Did they see you?

Did—

She wanted to go home. It was getting late.

‘The pipe,’ they said, eventually.

She tried to find it for them like they asked.

She searched through those trees, through the wooden arms that brushed her, the fingers that scraped at her legs. She searched, these men watching her, these silent men.

The older one grew frustrated with her.

‘You’re doing well,’ he said, but this was a lie.

She knew lies. Her family had told so many.

The next day, the officers would discover a shallow pit of loose soil, around it dug a seven-foot by seven-foot pit, almost precisely square. Dirt had been dumped in to fill the hole.

It was not a grave. There was no body. A large container had been removed from the earth, apparently long before the authorities had arrived.

The same place Sophie had seen the pipe in the ground. The same place Sophie had taken one of her photos. The pipe was gone too.

For now, the search ended without success.

They went back home after it was dark.

Her mother was there crying, uniformed officers by her side.

Her mother got up and hugged her.

It was so surprising, so sudden a motion that it felt as if it could not be real. It felt staged, like so many other things her mother staged for the benefit of outsiders.

But the woman’s skin was cold, even in all this heat.

Was the concern real? And why? She had been out a thousand times before – there was no curfew, no prohibition on exploring these woods.

The police officers questioned them both for a few hours: who Sophie had seen in those hills, why was she out taking photographs the day before …

‘There were things in the trees,’ Sophie told them. ‘I wanted to …’ She hesitated. ‘I wanted to know what they were.’

It all felt small, saying these things out loud.

They found the image in question. The pharmacist had processed her film cartridge. What he had seen within had caused his arms to slow, his lips to quiver. He’d contacted the authorities. So here they were.

‘This photograph?’ the thin detective asked.

Sophie nodded, staring at the three orbs hanging from the bark.

‘It’s just mistletoe.’ He grinned. ‘It’s what it looks like in the wild. You kiss people under it.’

The most peculiar photograph, and the police didn’t even care.

Only accidents gave Sophie importance.

They took all the prints, the pale girl, the pipe. They asked her not to discuss them.

It took her a while to understand the enormity of what she’d seen.

It was about hope, in part, the older policeman said. It was about not letting others know what they knew, until the time was right.

‘Keep it to yourself.’

Sophie nodded.

They left her home.

The older man with the grey-black beard, he’d left his card – and his mother put it on the fridge with a magnet. ROBERT KELLY, it read.

The next day Sophie went to the pharmacy. She was relieved when they confirmed the negatives were still in their possession. After all, why wouldn’t they be? A different person was on shift, one who had not dealt with the police. He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to give Sophie the pictures. After all, she had ordered them in the first place, hadn’t she?

Weeks later, unable to sleep, Sophie held one of these images. It was not the first time she had held it. All around were cut-outs from newspapers, from magazines, from doodles. These past years she’d decorated her wall as best she could, the sedimentary layers of all her phases, all her brief flirtations of interest in different authors and animals and singers, her prototype personality.

She held the photograph under her desk light. It shone above the glossy card, as if it were a sun.

The photograph showed the grey plastic pipe, the soil all around, the camera lens hovering above at a perfect angle.

The pipe was dark within, but for a flicker of light, reflected along the tube.

Sophie had looked at it, again and again.

She looked now.

The public was given only the photograph of the pale girl at first, how she had walked with a man against a grey lake, a setting sun.

A girl who had been missing for three years, frozen in a moment.

The Earlsham family would deem this sighting a miracle. They would want to meet the photographer. They would want to ask her so many questions. Within their lifetimes, their daughter would never be found. Sophie was their last connection to the lost, the same age their pale girl would be, if she still lived. Any previous attempts to accept their daughter’s death had forever vanished with that one brief proof of life.

The image of the missing girl would adorn newspapers and magazines in the months to come, an appeal made by the family itself. They wanted their daughter to know they still loved her, that she could still come home, that if she came back to their house, or even just Lethwick once more, they could heal, and she could heal too. They wanted to know if this man had taken her, if he still had her, whoever he was, his face so unclear … They wanted him to know that he was forgiven. They just wanted everything to be as it was.

The second photograph, the pipe, would not be published until October.

One day Sophie’s mother had showed it to a broker without her daughter’s knowledge. They discussed a price. A deal was made. The proceeds would be invested. They would have got more if they’d given up moral rights, too, but Sophie’s mother insisted.

Sophia Bertilak would be listed as the photographer. Sophie would be listed wherever the image was licensed, wherever its rights were paid.

It would be the most famous photograph of her career, the front of book covers, the head of each ensemble collection as the decades rolled on, as she moved on from Lethwick to job after distant job, home after distant home.

In the dying days of the war, Sophie would go across the sea to Vietnam. She would capture horrors. She would see the world as it really was, as it could be, as it should have been. She would show all of these things, mastering light and subject, learning the things you had to do.

She would learn so much, and still that photo – that day in the woods, that birthday beneath the trees – would define her whole life.

It would eclipse all that she was.

She had no pride in it. It had just been an accident. It made her sad to take credit for it.

At the time, she’d held her eye against a pipe in the soil and had seen nothing but darkness.

‘You didn’t see anything there, did you?’

‘It was dark. When I put myself against it, I blocked out more light, and—’

‘It was luck?’

She shrugged, the television cameras all around. ‘It was light.’

‘What made you want to take a photograph of it in the first place?’

‘It was—’

‘It was intuition, wasn’t it? It was your eye—’

She nodded.

It was like a Magic Eye puzzle. At first it was hard to notice, if you didn’t know what you were looking for. The soil all around, patterned in swirls of chalk and dust and root and brown, made it hard to distinguish what was within the pipe and what was without. Light caught on it all.

The grey plastic, too, caught light.

All that was left of that moment was this photo, carried throughout the years.

Half an eye, red-rimmed and terrified, stared forever at the sun.

Up at the lens, half a face peered from under the earth, alive. Its skin pallid, chapped, smeared with dust and soil. What hair could be seen, long and wet and dark in the black and white. Hints of fingers in the corner of the plastic, whether to scrape above, whether to attract attention or help, whether to try to touch the girl above, no one knew. Its mouth, silent, afraid, quivering.

A child had sat beneath the world. It all came back to eyes in the end, the window of souls, of worlds, of animals. The first crime, and the last.

The light faded.

Decades passed. Sophie grew older, and had her own children until these children were no longer children, losing some in her womb, losing one in the world, and the others, far away, Lucy and Matthew and Joanna, barely speaking to her or one another, as if they’d never meant a thing to each other, as if their time with her had been a lie.

Sophie grew old, and she’d look at it again, one day.

She’d look at the picture one final time.