Cecelia Ahern - Lyrebird

He’s so taken aback by the question he’s not sure how to answer. He should know how to answer, but he can’t bring himself to address it.

She mimics his awkward throat-clear.

‘I’m surprised Bridget brought you that book,’ he changes the subject.

‘I’ve never met her but I was surprised too,’ she laughs. ‘There was a whole box of them. Second-hand, church sale. A virgin named Betty Rock and naughty Nathan the window cleaner. They get a lot of suds in a lot of places.’

They both laugh.

‘No. This is my favourite. I’ve read it over fifty times.’ She hands him a picture book.

‘There’s no words,’ he flicks through it.

‘Words are often over-rated,’ she says.

‘What’s it about?’

‘A tree that turns into a woman.’

‘Just like Bo said,’ Solomon says sarcastically, studying it. ‘Your connection to the world.’

She laughs.

He looks at the cover. Rooted . ‘What’s it about?’

‘There’s a tree in a park. A busy city park. It’s hundreds of years old and it watches people every day. Children playing with a ball, mothers walking their babies in prams, people jogging, couples arguing. Life. As time goes by, the more she absorbs the life around her, the more human the tree becomes. Her bark turns into skin, her leaves to hair, her branches to arms. She shrinks. Until one day she is no longer a tree, she’s a beautiful young woman. She uproots her feet from the soil and she walks out of the park.’

‘Interesting,’ Solomon says, flicking through the pages.

‘You can read it, if you like,’ she offers it to him.

‘Does she walk out of the park naked?’ he asks. ‘Nudity is a must in a book with pictures.’

‘That’s revealed on the pop-up page.’ She smiles.

He laughs and studies her, curiously.

She looks up at him, not at all self-conscious under his greedy gaze. She doesn’t seem to mind his attention, so he drinks her in a little more.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. ‘Thanks for the book. I’ll return it to you in the same condition. Actually, I have a book for you.’ Solomon takes a paperback from his audio bag. ‘Bridget brought it here on Thursday. I’m sure it’s for you.’

Solomon had to hand it to Bo. As soon as Bridget mentioned that Tom was an avid reader, she’d known something was up. He wonders what else she can sense.

Laura takes the book from him, her energy completely changing. It’s the last book she received from her father, even if he hadn’t chosen it, even if he never gave it to her, even if he never touched it, or knew what it was. He’d asked for it for her. She hugs it close to her.

‘Let’s go,’ Solomon says. ‘So, how do you clean your clothes?’ he asks as they pick up their gear and prepare to go outside.

‘The dry cleaner’s at the top of the mountain, beside the nightclub,’ Laura says, seriously. ‘But Bo didn’t want to know about that.’

Solomon throws his head back and laughs heartily.

Laura takes a note of that beautiful sound, records it in her mind, replays it over and over.

At night it is astonishing just how dark Laura’s world is, how isolated and secluded she is. What during the day seems remote yet peaceful, during the night seems menacing and cruel, as though she has been abandoned. She has nobody. Nobody. Ring, the surviving sheepdog, comes to her sometimes when he’s not with Joe, perhaps feeling comfortable with her over their shared grief of Mossie and Tom. He is her only company, and the birds and creatures that move around her. She has become adept at sensing them before anyone else does, warning Rachel before she takes a step backwards and uncovers a dead badger, or a fallen bird’s nest. Her senses are so finely tuned to the natural world around her, it seems to Solomon at least, that Lyrebird, as Bo has now taken to calling her, has almost disappeared. It feels to Solomon that Laura doesn’t consider herself to be present in the environment and instead takes on the sounds, the essence, the life of everything around her, just like her favourite storybook. While the tree absorbs human life and becomes a young woman, this young woman absorbs nature and becomes a part of nature, or tries to.

‘There should be a sequel,’ he says referring to the storybook, as they stand together by a window of the cottage. Solomon can’t fight his instinct to look outside every time he hears a sound, he feels responsible to guard her, which is ridiculous as Laura easily identifies every single sound each time he flinches, to put him at ease. He’s not sure who’s protecting whom. Rachel and Bo are sitting on the couch by the firelight, looking over footage they’d filmed that day. ‘I want to know how this shoeless woman who used to be a tree gets on in the world. Does she become a hot-shot business woman in the corporate world and lose all her emotions? Turn into a robot? Or does she fall in love, get married and have five tree children, or…’ he laughs.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Or does she step out onto the road as soon as she leaves the park and get hit by a truck, because she couldn’t see traffic from the park.’ He smiles but Laura looks thoughtful.

‘I think she just needs to find someone to trust and she would be okay.’

‘Trust,’ he says, unimpressed by the word. ‘Did tree woman learn about trust in the park?’

‘No,’ she laughs. ‘Well, maybe. She learned about humanity. You’ll have to read it. But she doesn’t need to have learned it from the park. Trust is the kind of thing you feel inside.’

‘Ah. It’s instinctual.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t give away the ending now.’

‘That’s not part of the story.’

He stares at her, not caring that she sees him doing it. Her eyes glisten even in the dark, her lips so plump and soft he wants to kiss them more than anything. He’s disturbed by how powerful the instinct is, sure he’s never felt this way before. He looks away, clears his throat.

‘Do you want to sleep here tonight?’ he asks.

‘Are you going to?’

‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I can’t, Laura.’

‘Oh, I know.’ She gets flustered, but he can’t really read her eyes in the darkness. ‘I meant all of you. You’re all welcome.’

‘All of us in there?’ he asks, looking around the cottage.

‘No, you’re right, we’ll go to the hotel,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own.’

And to herself she adds, any more.

The following morning, they visit Laura’s grandmother’s house where she and her mother were raised. Far from the main road, twenty minutes from town, it is a remote bungalow away from prying eyes. Like so many homes in the rural area, you wouldn’t see the small track leading to the house if you didn’t know it was there. Even if you did happen upon it, it lacked enticement, and belied the warmth and love that lay within its boundaries. It hasn’t been inhabited since Hattie’s passing nine years previously and it shows. Despite not having been there for ten years, Laura guides them as though she were there yesterday, Bo talking to her delicately as they make their way, aware how fragile this moment is.

Bo parked on the main road, she wanted to capture Laura’s reaction as she walked home for the first time in ten years. Just inside the entrance to the trail there is a gate, which Laura tells them her grandmother added shortly after her grandfather died, for protection.

‘Do you know if your mother or grandmother wrote a will?’ Bo asks, as they walk the long driveway through tall trees to the house.