SAMPLE CHAPTER | Earthheart

The Girl

Chapter One, Earthheart

The girl raced ahead of me. Her hair was like a black cloak flying behind her, her bare legs and feet threw off a faint light against the dark earth. When she reached the fire, she looked back with a half-smile. Near to the smouldering pit, a skinned squirrel was hanging from a frame of sticks, drying in the smoke.

“I wish we didn’t have to eat that,” I whispered, short of breath.

The girl responded by pushing a strand of hair away from her face and glaring at me. She tore a piece of squirrel meat from the carcass, and crammed it into her mouth as if she hadn’t eaten for days.

I sat down on a log, pulled off my shoes, and rubbed my feet in the cold grass. The girl never wore shoes, her feet were as agile as hands. I watched them now, her toes curling over the earth as she moved one, and then the next one, in a silent rhythm. I stretched out my own swollen and bruised feet, took some squirrel meat and chewed it slowly. It tasted slightly sweet, with a hint of acorns.

“I was almost a vegetarian, you know,” I told the girl. She sighed slightly, and lifted one of the squirrel’s legs to her mouth.

Behind us the forest flickered brown and yellow. The leaves that had been bright green a few days ago were now starting to show their autumn colours, and every trunk had its own carpet of moss or lichen. Amongst it all, a tide of plants and nuts covered the earth, and there was a harvest for us to gather and eat.

“Diana told me that you’re called Raven,” I said to the girl, as I stripped some more meat from the squirrel and chewed it cautiously.

She looked at me sharply and then at the fire, where little flames fought with the air.

“Is that your real name?” I persisted.

I didn’t expect an answer to my questions, because the girl had never spoken. I had followed her for days, ever since I arrived in the forest two weeks ago and saw her hiding outside Diana’s hut, and she had not said a word yet.

“I think you are my age,” I observed, looking at her thin, sinewy body. “Fourteen. About that. We could have been in the same year at school, except that I don’t think you’ve ever been to school, have you? I can’t imagine you at school.”

I tried to laugh at the thought of Raven sitting in a classroom, but she ignored me and continued to tear little pieces of squirrel from the bone.

“My name is El.” I was still talking. I spoke mainly to hear the ordinariness of my voice over the quiet rustle of the forest. “My dad called me Ellie, and my mum always called me Ela. I use the name El because it could be short for anything, and I like that. I could be Elena, or Ellis, or Elijah.” I paused and looked at the trees. A lump in my throat had appeared and I swallowed. “My mum’s family are from India,” I said, looking at Raven again. “That’s why my hair is as black as yours.”

Raven’s toes twitched against the earth, but she ignored me otherwise and her eyes moved off to follow an invisible trail into the trees. Raven often looked into the depths of the forest as if she was hunting, or hunted: it was hard to tell which.

Far off, a second thread of smoke rose above the canopy. It came from the slopes below us; probably from Diana’s hut. “There are a lot of people down there now,” I remarked to Raven.

New people had been arriving in the forest for many days. They came from the coast, like me, and they brought remnants of that world with them: phones that no longer worked, and torn, waterlogged clothing. A couple of toys lay amongst the undergrowth, and one rescued mattress was turning brown nearby. Some of the people had started to build shelters and tipis out of branches and leaves, tarpaulin and plastic bags, and there was a constant sound of plastic sheets flapping in the breeze. Everybody hoped that it wouldn’t rain.

One woman had strung a rope between the trees and decorated it with colourful rags, like the bunting Mum hung out on my birthdays. The flags in the forest flitted about in the air like bedraggled birds, half torn up and drowned like the rest of us. Perhaps they were hung up to be optimistic, or perhaps they were territorial. I didn’t know, but one evening I took a piece of charcoal and wrote letters on each of them. I spelled out the word EarthHeart, because that is what I had called this forest when I was a little girl, and seeing the words again made everything feel a little more… connected. Raven tapped an old log with a stick, and a line of tiny black ants threaded its way out of the rotting wood and across the earth. She placed the stick in their path and once a number of ants had marched onto it, she stroked the stick with her hand. Ten or twenty ants fell into her palm and she swiftly transferred them to her mouth. “Gross,” I said, but she didn’t seem to mind.

The sun was shining brightly through the canopy now, and I stood up. “Come on,” I said. “I’m still hungry.” Raven brushed a few ants from her legs and threw earth into the dying fire. In a moment, she was ahead of me, moving deeper into the forest in search of places where the canopy thinned out and the forest floor was bright in the morning light. We often looked for the clearings, because all sorts of plants grew in them.

We had started to gather dandelions, and some scaly mushrooms, when I noticed Raven lift her head. She was like an animal, her ear tilted to capture the faint sound of far-off movement. I thought she had heard a creature, because she was always ready to hunt, but then a moment later a sound came towards us, and I saw a couple of people scrambling down the slope.

The long light of the morning sun sliced through the trees, and threw their shadows forward in dark stripes every metre or so. Raven had already disappeared into the rustle of the dense forest. She always shrank into the cover of trees at the slightest crack of a twig, and she could disappear in a second, like the shadows when the sun went in. I didn’t know how she did it, because I was quite different. I waited for others. I hoped to be seen, and I wanted to speak to someone.

An older boy came first, and behind him was a child who was about ten years old, with wild, shoulder length hair that was almost orange in colour. When the sun shone on it, it was as if someone had lit a fluorescent bulb right in the middle of all the greens and browns and yellows of the forest. I guessed it was a girl, but I wasn’t sure. She was wearing denim shorts and a plain blue T-shirt. Everyone wore whatever they could out here, and hair just grew.

The older boy must have been about fifteen, and his hair was shoulder length too. Perhaps he had been out here for a while, enough weeks for a short cut to grow long. He climbed down the slope quickly, he had a way of scrambling and balancing at the same time, so that the movement looked easy. He carried a bag over his shoulder which looked full, and I guessed that the two of them were returning from a long forage.

They helter-skeltered down the steepest slopes, sliding at times, and I stood still and watched them. I had become hawkish, existing here for all these days, and I noticed the way the younger child kept her eyes on the older one, and lifted her shoulders towards her ears because she was tense. I noticed that the older boy was trying to reassure her by smiling and talking and waiting. I felt a pang of envy as I guessed that they were siblings.

I tried to hear them, through the soft whispering sounds of the forest, and snatches of their conversation reached me, when their voices were raised or a thread of wind carried words from them to me.

“… I want to find out why, Maisie…” the older boy said. “… please don’t leave me…” came the child’s voice. Maisie. Her voice was full of tears, and fear.

They were coming closer, but the wind whipped their sounds off in another direction. They had seen me. They hushed their voices, and then, when they were very close, the older boy paused and looked at me inquisitively. His face was slightly sun-burned, his clothes were streaked brown and green like the forest, and he was dirty and muddy from his tangled hair to his earth-caked trainers. I watched him raise his hand. It was almost a wave. He half-smiled and laughter lines creased his cheeks, like a reminder of the fun he used to have.

The girl stopped too and tucked herself into his shadow. Her hands were full of hazelnuts and sweet chestnuts, and she stood behind the boy and peeped at me from one side. Under the stains from her recent tears, her face was covered in freckles, and she seemed to want to smile at me, but wasn’t sure.

I looked back at them. I didn’t know what expression to make either, so I raised my hand like the boy had done. I was wondering how long they had been here, measuring time by how many weeks it had taken them both to get as dirty and tangled as they were. It was hard to guess. I’d seen new arrivals in the forest change in days, until they were hardly recognisable.

“Hello, I’m Sonny,” the boy said.

The sun caught his face at that moment, and a few strands of tangled hair fell across his cheeks like gold flecks of light. I knew he was wondering who I was, and I saw the determined lines between his eyebrows. Somewhere in him I recognised the darkness, the struggle, that we all shared, and yet, standing there surrounded by trees and with a full bag of food on his shoulder, he didn’t look broken. He almost looked like he was thriving.

“I’m El,” I said, forcing myself to smile at him this time. At first it was an effort, because I hadn’t smiled properly since arriving in the forest, but then suddenly it felt good.

Sonny grinned back at me and the happy creases appeared in his face again. I felt something move inside me like a little spark; a little jolt in my mind. I thought of the past, and of feelings I hadn’t had for a while.

The moment didn’t last long, and in a few seconds the two of them had walked by. The girl looked back over her shoulder and said, “My name is Maisie,” and then they were gone.

Usually, after I left Raven, I would go to the spring to get water. I had to climb the steep slopes to the spring a few times a day, but I liked it there too. People came and went with their bottles, but nobody stayed because it was too steep to camp, and so the spring remained a quiet place. I sometimes sat there for hours, listening to the sound of the water rushing out of the rock and the wind moving the branches like wind chimes.

This morning was different though, and I kept looking back the way I had come, thinking about the boy and the girl. My eyes wandered in the spaces between the trees, half expecting them to come back into view and to catch a glimpse of a bright orange streak of hair.

I could count all the people I knew in the forest on two fingers: Raven and Diana. When you are surrounded by people you know, like I used to be, it isn’t possible to understand what it means to be on your own. But when, suddenly, they are all gone it is very different and that’s when you know how it really feels to be alone. Memories of my family, my friends, and even my teachers and neighbours and everybody I had taken for granted, rose inside me, but I forced my thoughts to take a different course. I abandoned my hike to the spring, and began to run down the steep slope.

I was still clutching the crop of weeds and mushrooms in a bag in one hand and I spread my free hand outwards to help me balance as I ran, weaving through trees and stumbling over roots and decaying logs. The air was getting warmer, and the sun higher and after a few minutes I stopped and looked carefully at the ground. I could see the places where the grass had been flattened by feet, and every so often I noticed a crushed leaf or a snapped twig, or a fallen seed. Sonny’s trainers had made faint ridges in the earth here and there, Maisie had dropped a hazelnut, and the trail led down towards the river.

I stuffed my crop of weeds under my arm and followed their path.

The forest that we were living in sloped down to a river. The river used to be a stream, and now it cut through the quiet green slopes like a wild cry of grief. I remember the stream, from the days when I visited the forest with my family. “Can we go to EarthHeart today?” I used to ask when I was little. I could recall the light dancing on the silver water and my feet, cold and pale, under the surface. Mum and I drew hearts in the sandy earth beside the stream: earth hearts we called them, and that is why I gave the forest its name. That was so many years ago, but the stream had been there forever, until just a few weeks ago. The storm changed it: the sea had thrown itself back over the land, and the stream had burst with the floods, and then the debris from the coast sailed along it like ships.

It was a scramble down to the river. The forest banks were even steeper here, and I had to be careful because the muddy sides were slippery, and the river was so swollen and fast flowing that it was almost violent.

I saw Sonny and Maisie after a few minutes. She was standing on the bank and swinging her arms from side to side, as if she was dancing, and Sonny crouched by the water, holding a long stick in his hand. I paused a little way off and watched, his stick was going round and round in the mud, making circles, which spread outwards in ripples, or aftershocks. He was engrossed in the patterns he was drawing, as if it was an image of something important.

The water made a lot of noise, roaring by us, and it wasn’t until I got closer that I heard that they were both singing. They were singing in quite absent-minded voices a song that I recognised, a song that I had listened to every day and knew all the lyrics to; it was a song that reminded me of putting on my make-up and talking to my best friends. Maisie saw me coming and pointed, Sonny stopped drawing with his stick and turned around. He lifted his arms in a welcoming way, and I walked closer to them.

“Hello,” I said. “Again.”

Sonny smiled. It was a big, wide smile, almost a grin, which took me by surprise. “Hello again,” he said, and he added a few more lines to his drawing. “There,” he said, as if he had completed something.

“What is it?” I asked.

Sonny shrugged. “Hydro power,” he said. Then he laughed. “Ideas,” he added.

“Are you going to build something?” I asked him. “One day I will,” he said. “We can make things better, you know.”

I nodded, because I really wanted to believe him.

Sonny sat down on the bank and I went over and crouched next to him. It felt like the natural thing to do, and we remained side by side watching the water thundering past. It was fast and even louder up close, and I kept thinking about how this was the same water that had covered my home and taken my family.

“It’s the sea,” Sonny observed.

I pictured my house, and the quiet bay I had grown up beside, and the boats that had been moored there, dipping up and down on the waves. At low tide the sand was almost endless, shining and reflecting the sky like a vast mirror. That is where I had most liked to draw, on the beach. My friends and I would go down to the coast sometimes, after school, and draw pictures in the sand, leaving our images and a trail of footprints that would be there for hours. Sometimes we’d jump into the sea and swim until our fingers looked like prunes.

“This is the water I used to swim in, on the beach at home,” I said, sharing my thoughts.

Sonny sighed. “Me too,” he said.

I thought for a moment, and realised that I must know his home place. “Did you live on the coast?” I asked. “When I was younger we lived at Coombe Beach,” he said, “but we moved a few miles inland. To Maybury. You know, that is what we were all advised to do, wasn’t it. Move inland.” I knew those places, not far from mine. Maybury was where rich people lived.

“I still used to go to the sea,” Sonny said. “At night too, sometimes, I climbed out of the window when my parents were asleep, and rode to the beach. I went windsurfing.” He laughed and rubbed his tangled hair.

“We always lived really near the coast,” I said. “My parents wouldn’t move. They never believed it would happen…” I recalled the sound of the sea when I opened my bedroom window, the smell of salt and the breeze flooding in, and the call of the gulls. I used to love it there.

“It didn’t make any difference,” he said, “did it? I mean whether we were a bit inland or not.”

“Your home was covered too?” I asked.

He didn’t reply, and I wished I could take back the question. People didn’t waste words here in the forest, like we used to, and I knew that the flood had taken his home. Why else would he and Maisie be here, living on nuts and weeds? There were days when it seemed that talking at all was pointless, as irrelevant as caring about your hairstyle or the shape of your legs. None of that meant anything now. Everything essential was precious, everything had to be used sparingly, and even speaking felt that way, as if our words too might run out. Perhaps Raven had the same idea, and just stopped talking one day.

We were silent for a while. I kept remembering my home, thinking about my parents and my little brothers, and a choking feeling grew inside me. When Maisie came over I felt relieved. She had a purple stain around her mouth and I guessed she had been eating blackberries because the forest was full of them, and they were our sweets. She held out her hand and offered me one crushed berry from her palm.

I smiled at her and shook my head. She gazed at me for a moment and then she said, “Would you like to be our friend?” I laughed. It was a very innocent and direct thing to say; the kind of thing we said when we were four. Sonny was grinning at me too.

I nodded my head. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course I would.”

I smiled too, and felt a little beam of light reach inside me. It was late morning now. The sun was high in the sky, and its rays danced over the water, throwing bright diamonds of light everywhere.