The Bramble Wall
The Gap in the Bramble Wall
Felix and Alex find a hidden gap in a bramble wall and race a summer storm to build a den before the rain arrives.
The Bramble Wall
Book One — The Gap in the Bramble Wall
It was the first proper Saturday of the summer holidays, and Felix was already at the back door with one welly on, hopping.
"We're going to the forest," he told Alex. "Properly in. Not just the edge. Today."
Alex was by the shelf near the door, checking his radio, the way he always did before the forest. There were four radios in a row on the charger — one for Mummy, one for Daddy, one for Felix, one for Alex. Each person had their own. Each person looked after their own. That was the rule.
Alex picked his up. The little light on top glowed green. Full. Ready. He clicked it on and it gave a soft, friendly hiss, like the sea in a shell.
"Mine's charged," said Alex.
Felix grabbed his and clicked it on. It went bip — and the light glowed a sad sort of orange.
"Mine's a bit charged," said Felix.
"You didn't put it on last night."
"I put it near the charger."
"Near isn't on," said Alex, which was true, and which Felix decided not to argue with, because there wasn't really a way to.
Daddy came through in his espresso-drinking, not-in-any-hurry sort of way, mug in hand, and looked at the two of them.
"Forest?" he said.
"Forest," said Felix. "Both of us. You too — but not with us."
"That's the arrangement." Daddy took a sip. "I'll be out on the bike. Shout or radio if you need me." He nodded at the radios. "And remember the red button on top. That one's not for chatting. That's the emergency button. You press that, and everyone's radio shouts, all at once, so we come running. Then you tell us where you are. Only for a real emergency, though. Not for finding a good stick."
"We know," said Felix.
"Say the rule."
"We always go together," said Felix.
"We always have someone on the radio," said Alex.
"Good." Daddy glanced out of the window, at the sky over the trees. It was blue — but far off, past the hill, there was a low grey line, like a smudge someone had left there. "There's weather coming later. Keep an eye on it. If it starts, you come home."
Felix wasn't really listening. Felix had already got his other welly on and was halfway out the door.
The path started right outside the front gate.
That was the brilliant thing about where they lived. You didn't have to get to the forest. You walked out of your own gate, onto the footpath, and there it was — a great dark-green wall of trees, getting closer with every step. It only took a few minutes. Less time than cleaning your teeth, and much more fun.
Then the trees came up and over them, and the sunshine broke into pieces on the ground, and the sound went quiet-and-big at the same time, the way it does under a lot of leaves. And it was, exactly and completely, a whole new world.
It was a good forest for two boys. Not a tangly, lost sort of forest — the trees stood apart, with room to walk between them, room to run. The ground was open and bare underfoot, because in the winter this whole wood filled up with water for months and months, and by summer the leaves overhead drank up all the light, so not much grew down low. You could see a long way between the trunks. Somewhere off to the left, faint, Felix could hear the buzz of Daddy's bike, moving through the far trees.
Felix took a big breath in through his nose. "It smells green," he said.
It did. Bark and earth and cool growing things.
Alex didn't say anything. He was looking — at the way the light came down in long stripes, at a bird he could hear but not see.
They found the wall about ten minutes in.
Not a proper wall. A wall of brambles — a huge, thorny, tangled heap of them, taller than Daddy, running along under a stand of old oaks. Old, and thick, and woven together like somebody had done it on purpose.
"Ow," said Felix, who had walked into it.
"I was going to say," said Alex.
But Felix had gone still now, which for Felix was rare. He was staring at the very bottom of the bramble wall, where a big oak root pushed up out of the ground. Down low, in the dark, there was a gap. Small, and just about big enough to crawl through. And through it, on the other side, Felix could see green. Open green. Another place, hidden away.
"There's something back there," he breathed.
Alex got down flat on the ground, no fuss, and put his eye to the gap. He was quiet a moment.
"It's a clearing," he said. "A little one. Hidden. There's a huge fallen tree, all covered in moss." He looked closer. "The gap's nearly grown over, though. The brambles are creeping across it. Another summer and it'll close right up."
Felix's whole face changed.
"Then it has to be today," he said. "We go in today, and we make it ours, before it closes and we can't ever find the way back. Come on."
They went through one at a time, flat on their tummies, elbows doing the work.
Felix went first and got his hood caught on a thorn and said "ow" and then "I'm fine" and then he was through. Just inside the gap, on the old oak that stood beside it like a gatepost, Alex — going second, slower — noticed a hollow. A little dry hole where a branch had come away long ago. He stopped and looked in, the way Alex looked into things, and saw it wasn't empty. An acorn. Three small smooth stones in a row. A scrap of bark, folded once, soft with age. Somebody had put them there — not this year, maybe not for a lot of years. He didn't touch them. He just looked, and wondered, and tucked it away in the quiet place where he kept things. Then he followed Felix in.
And they stood up on the other side, and they stopped talking, both of them, even Felix.
The clearing was small, and quiet, and completely its own world. Three sides were old oak trees, huge and close, making walls. The fourth side was the bramble wall they'd just come through. The floor was deep soft leaves, springy under your wellies, on ground that sat up a little higher than the rest of the forest — dry ground, good ground. And the light came down through the leaves in long gold stripes that moved.
And along one side lay the fallen oak.
It was enormous. Not a little fallen tree — a giant, lying on its side, as thick across as Felix was tall. It had been down so long that the bark had gone soft and the moss had covered it completely. Deep, deep green, thick as a carpet. It came up to Felix's chest. It came up to Alex's shoulders.
Alex put both hands flat on the moss and just held them there.
"Don't pick it," said Felix, who didn't know why you shouldn't, but felt strongly that you shouldn't.
"I'm not," said Alex, who wouldn't have anyway.
Felix turned slowly, taking it all in — the mossy giant, the oak walls, the gold light, the soft floor.
"This," he announced, "is the base. We're building a den. Right here, against the big tree. Today."
Alex looked up. Above the oaks, the blue had gone a little thinner, a little whiter. The grey smudge from beyond the hill had grown.
"There's weather coming," said Alex. "Daddy said."
Felix looked up too. And instead of worrying, his eyes lit up.
"Then we build it before the rain," he said. "And it has to be good enough to keep the rain out. A proper den, that stands up, before the storm gets here." He grinned. "We can do it. It's easy. Lean branches on the tree, put ferns on top. Done."
It was not, as it turned out, easy.
Here is what Felix did.
Felix found branches — good dead dry ones, all over the open floor — and leaned them against the fallen oak in a big hurry, one after another, thunk thunk thunk, building a wall of sticks as fast as he could, because in Felix's head the den was already finished and he was just catching up to it.
Then he threw armfuls of fern on top for a roof.
Then he stood back to admire his brilliant finished den.
And the whole thing slid sideways and fell down. Whump.
"Right," said Felix.
He built it again. Faster. Thunk thunk thunk, fern on top, stand back—
Whump.
He built it a third time, and this time he wasn't saying anything at all, which for Felix was how you could tell he was getting upset. His face had gone red. His good idea wasn't working and he didn't know why, and the grey was climbing up the sky, and the den was just a heap of sticks on the ground.
He felt the hot, cross feeling coming up in his chest — the one that used to make him shout, or kick something.
But Felix knew that feeling now. He'd been learning what to do with it.
"I need a minute," he said.
He walked to the edge of the clearing, stood with his back to the sticks, and took a big breath in through his nose — the green smell — and let it out slow. And another. And another. The hot feeling got smaller. It didn't go all the way. But it got small enough.
"Okay," said Felix, mostly to himself. "Okay."
Then he came back.
Alex had been quiet all this time. Not doing nothing — Alex was almost never doing nothing — but watching. Watching the sticks slide. Watching where they slid. And now that Felix was back and breathing normally, Alex crouched by the fallen heap and began, slowly, to do something with it.
He didn't rush. That was the thing about Alex — he could stay with one small job a long, long time, turning it over, getting it right. He took two branches and leaned them against each other first, so they held each other up, like an upside-down V. Then he leaned the next branch into those. Then the next. Each stick holding the one before it, all of them leaning the same way, all their weight going down into the ground instead of sideways.
It took ages. Felix watched, calm now, waiting.
"Try one," said Alex, not looking up.
Felix leaned a branch on, carefully this time, where Alex pointed. It stayed. He leaned another. Stayed. Another. Stayed.
"It's staying," Felix whispered, as if being loud might knock it over. "Alex. It's staying."
Then they did the ferns together — and Alex showed him how to lay them overlapping, each one tucked under the one above, like tiles on a roof, so the gaps disappeared and the rain would run off instead of through. When they'd finished there was one small hole near the top where a coin of light shone in. Alex slid two more ferns under the thatch. The coin of light vanished.
"Now it works," said Alex.
Felix crawled inside. There was just room for both of them. It smelled of crushed fern and cool earth, and it held up over their heads and did not fall down.
"It'll keep the rain out," said Felix, from inside, sounding enormously pleased.
"Most of it," said Alex, crawling in beside him. "It's not a house. It only has to work most of the time."
They needed one last post to hold the door end, and that was when Felix found the thing.
He was scraping a little hole with a stick to wedge the post into, digging out the soft dark soil, when the stick went clnk on something that wasn't a stone.
He stopped. "There's something down here."
He put the stick down and dug with his fingers instead, careful, scooping the cool soil away. Then he lifted it out and rubbed it clean with his thumb.
It sat in his palm. Small. Heavy — much heavier than it looked, heavier than a stone that size had any right to be. Hard and black, with a shine to it in places like dark glass, and little bubble-holes all over it, as though it had once been melted long ago and gone hard again.
Felix had never seen anything like it. Neither had Alex. It wasn't a stone, and it wasn't glass, and it wasn't anything from a shop.
"What is it?" said Felix, quietly.
Alex took it, turned it over, felt the weight. He didn't know. But he had a feeling — he couldn't have said why — that it was old. Not old like last year. Old like before.
"I don't know," he said. "But I want to keep it."
Felix pushed it deep in his pocket and pressed his hand flat over the outside to feel it was still there. It was. A small heavy secret.
And then, far off, the first low grumble of thunder rolled over the hill.
The light in the clearing had gone soft and grey. A cool wind moved the tops of the oaks. The storm was nearly here — but the den was built, and it was standing, and they'd done it in time.
They sat for a moment on the moss of the fallen oak, side by side, looking at what they'd made, while the wind grew and the first fat drops began to tick down through the leaves.
And that was when Alex heard it.
His radio was clipped to his chest, turned on, quiet. And in the soft hiss of it — the little sea-in-a-shell sound — there was something else. Under the hiss. Far away. So faint he had to go completely still to catch it.
Tock.
A pause.
Tock.
A pause.
Tock.
Slow. Steady. Like someone, a very long way off, hitting something hard, over and over, patient as anything. Not on the radio's channel — nobody was talking. Just there, in the quiet, under the rain, coming up out of the old ground and the old trees and the soft green moss.
Alex went still. He held his breath. He listened with his whole body.
Tock.
Then nothing. Just the hiss. Just the rain.
"You alright?" said Felix.
Alex looked at him. He nearly said it — I heard something, listen — the words were right there. But then he thought, the way you sometimes just know a thing, that he wanted to keep this one for himself a little while first. Not to hide it. Just to hold it, quietly, and turn it over, like the heavy black stone in Felix's pocket. He'd tell him. Just not yet.
"Yeah," said Alex. "Come on. Rain's here. Time to go."
They crawled out through the gap — Felix's hood catching again — and ran home through the warm summer rain, laughing, wellies slapping the path, as the sky opened up behind them and the storm came down on a forest that had a brand-new den in it, holding.
They dripped in through the back door, soaked and glad, with leaves in their hair and mud on both knees and a small heavy secret in Felix's pocket.
Mummy was home, music playing in the kitchen, and she took one look at the two of them and laughed and got towels.
At the shelf, Alex clicked his radio off and put it straight on the charger. The little light blinked red — filling up — ready for next time.
Felix put his on the shelf. Near the charger.
Alex looked at it. Felix looked at Alex. Then Felix picked it up again and plugged it in properly, and the light went red, and neither of them said anything, which was its own kind of victory.
They flopped on the sofa, warm and tired, and told the whole thing — both at once, tumbling over each other. Felix told the big bits: the secret gap that was nearly closed, and building the den, and racing the storm. Alex told the true bits: how you lean the branches so they hold each other up, and the little hollow in the gatepost oak with the acorn and the three stones that somebody had left a long, long time ago.
And Felix took out the heavy black stone and put it on the windowsill, in the light, to keep it safe.
Daddy came in from the bike, rain running off his gear, and saw it there. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand, and looked at it a moment longer than you'd look at an ordinary stone.
"Where'd you find this?"
"In the ground. By the big fallen tree. Is it okay to keep?"
"Let's have a proper look." Daddy turned it over, checked it wasn't sharp, checked it wasn't anything it shouldn't be. "Always show me what you dig up, alright? But this — this you can keep. This is a good one." He handed it back. "That forest's been the forest a very, very long time, you know."
Felix didn't really hear him. Felix was already deep in plans for next Saturday.
But Alex heard him. Alex was looking out at the window, at the rain on the glass and the grey trees on the hill, thinking about a slow far-off sound in the quiet of a radio, and a stone that was heavier than it should be, and a feeling he didn't have a word for yet.
Tock, he thought. Tock. Tock.
Then the storm drummed on the roof, and their den stood dry in the forest in the rain, and it was a very good end to the first proper Saturday of the summer holidays.
The End.