Martin Edwards: The Hanging Wood

‘Silos are scary,’ Callum said. ‘We won’t be allowed in.’

Orla had dreamt of bathing in the harvest, letting the grain run down in rivulets over her face, breathing in the aroma she adored.

‘You’re lying to me!’

‘No, I’m serious. It’s too easy to become trapped. When the conveyor pumps the grain in at full blast, it works so fast, it can overwhelm you. There’s no way out. If you call, nobody would hear. Too much noise.’

Callum possessed curiosity by the wagon-load. He loved finding things out just as he loved to parade his superior knowledge, drip-feeding titbits to his sister to keep her hanging on his every utterance.

The back of her neck prickled. Was someone watching her? She glanced around, but if someone was hidden in the wych elms of the Hanging Wood, or lurking behind the buildings, she could not tell. Perhaps this sense of someone observing her every move was caused by feeling so alone. Loneliness was a cancer, eating up your confidence. After Callum vanished, she had nobody to turn to. Mum was wrapped up with her new husband, Kit Payne, who worked for the Madsens at the caravan park. The children were pawns in a bitter divorce, and Mum messed Dad about so he didn’t get the access she promised in court. Orla didn’t set eyes on him for weeks after Callum disappeared. By the time she was allowed to go back to the farm again, they had become strangers.

Before the silo tower was built, she loved to join Callum in the grain piled high in the barn. The pair of them took turns to swing on the rope that hung from the rafters and jump into the heap, where they would roll about, laughing without control as they pretended to bury each other. More fun than a seaside holiday and getting buried in sand. Sometimes they showered in the grain as the conveyor sprayed it down. As daylight faded, they emptied it from their wellies, squirming because it itched and had slipped down their shirts. The smell of dry grain fresh from the combine was the smell of summer. Not like when it was wet and fermented, and smelt like the beer her father drank.

The building of the silo tower ended the game, as Callum forecast. The children had to find other places to go, new stories to dream up. But Callum was never at a loss. They were like Hansel and Gretel, he announced. Their uncle’s cottage in the Hanging Wood became their very own gingerbread house.

She gazed at the silo. It might have been a religious monument, eerie yet inspiring awe. A shaft of light fell upon its walls as if a miracle were about to happen. For years, she’d disclaimed any faith, but now she had a fuzzy image of herself as a pilgrim, a devotee lured by the mysterious landmark. It wanted to draw her into its clutches.

Her boot crunched on something, and she came to a sudden halt. A scattering of tiny white bones lay beneath her feet. She peered at the skeleton for so long that her eyes began to water. The remains of a heron, chased to destruction by ravens or crows. She’d heard rumours that red kites were coming back to the Lakes, but if they returned, they too would be mobbed by birds determined to guard their territory.

‘Birds are like people,’ Callum once said. ‘They hate trespassers.’

Orla forced herself on. The closer she came to the farm, the more it resembled a surreal graveyard. Remnants of old farm machines were strewn around. Some must have lain here for years, dirty spikes and shards of metal like a parody of some weird work of art.

A wail from a small shed chilled her spine. The cry of a calf, distressed by the absence of its mother. It sounded hoarse, and she supposed it had been wailing for hours. She remembered teaching the calves to drink from buckets so the cows were not distracted from producing milk for market. The smell of stale milk from the calf-pen lingered in her sinuses.

She limped up to the half-door at the base of the silo. Another memory slithered into her head. The first harvest after the silo was built, the weather was wet for weeks on end, and the grain became stuck. One afternoon, Dad took his shotgun out of the cupboard, and Callum and Orla followed him to the silo. He shouted at them to stand back when he opened the grain door. Holding her breath, gripping her brother’s arm, Orla watched as their father raised his shotgun and fired into the mass of damp grain.

The blast deafened her, and she clamped her hands to her ears with a wail of dismay.

‘What are you mithering about?’ her father demanded. He’d turned round grinning, as if expecting applause, and her feeble reaction annoyed him. Callum’s face was a sly mask, as usual. ‘That’s how you do it. Moist grain bridges, and it needs to be loose.’

Most farmers loosened grain with a pole, Callum told her later, but that wasn’t thrilling enough for Dad. He relished the sense of power. It felt like a drug coursing through his veins. Shooting turned him on, Callum said.

A bolt was fixed to the grain door, a nod to safety regulations, but it was rusty from lack of use. Orla wondered about crawling into the bottom of the silo. No, she had a better idea.

The ladder up the side of the silo was covered by a safety ring, a tube made of fibreglass. A belated safety measure, added after one of Dad’s men fell off the ladder on a windy day and broke his ankle.

Once you were inside the ring, nobody could see you mounting the ladder, until you reached the top of the silo. Orla surveyed the fields. Her only witnesses were the cows, and even they were losing interest.

She wriggled into the tube, and started to lever herself up the rungs of the ladder. Her head and ankle throbbed with pain. Those cans of lager had made her so woozy she found herself dreaming that someone had begun to shin up after her. What did it matter if she took a tumble? She managed to cling on to the cool metal all the way to the top.

Orla hauled herself from the ladder ring into the sunshine. At the top of the silo was a metal platform, and she sidled behind the pipework through which the grain was blown. Until the last moment, she wanted to be concealed from anyone who might emerge from the buildings and stare up at the silo from the farmyard.

A hatch on the platform led down to the inside of the silo. The hatch wasn’t padlocked, there was no point. A rubber seal kept the grain free from moisture, and the hatch was closed by wing nuts. Orla fiddled with the wing nuts, and slid them across.

Crouching by the side of the open hatch, she peered down into the silo. The grain was deep, a darkly golden mountain. Forty tons, minimum. Cattle needed feeding all year — that was why the silo was half-full at the height of summer. Inhaling, she sucked the smell of the grain into her lungs. The odour made her think she’d stuck her face into a barrel of bitter beer.

It was like gazing into a tunnel. The sun fell on the grain, casting light on darkness. What might you find at the end of such a tunnel? But her brain was a junkyard, and she didn’t want to guess. Better find out for herself.

Peacefulness enveloped her, warm as a blanket. No question, her instinct was right. Only one way to go.

Orla stood up straight, lifted her arms, and put her hands together. Her lips moved as if in silent prayer. The sun burnt her scalp but she felt no pain.

She thought she heard a hoarse voice. Was that someone close by, hissing her name? Too late to take notice. No second thoughts.

I’m coming home.

‘Don’t you care about justice?’

Hannah Scarlett took a sip from her mug as the question echoed in her brain.

The coffee scalded her tongue, but Hannah didn’t notice. All she felt was the sting of Orla Payne’s scorn.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. A summer morning on a rare day off, and she was sprawling on the sunlounger; yet she couldn’t stop thinking about work. She never should have taken that call yesterday. Over the years, she’d interviewed rapists, paedophiles, and murderers who felt no flicker of remorse for the harm they caused. So why succumb to guilt when she’d done nothing wrong?