Green wood

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Eighteen years of wanting one specific thing, and then a Saturday morning in April with a pair of secateurs and the tree at the end of the garden. Most of this story happens before anybody is hit.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I read about the birch in a library book when I was twenty-three and I have never really put it down since.

It was a history, nothing to do with any of this. Naval discipline, and a chapter on the Victorian prison service with a paragraph about how the rods were made up fresh and soaked before use. None of it was written to be arousing.

What caught me was the making. Somebody had to go out and cut them. Somebody had to sit down and bind the handle. The thing did not exist until a person decided it should, and then it existed for one afternoon, and then it was thrown away.

I thought about that paragraph on and off for eighteen years.

I want to be careful here, because it sounds absurd written down. I was not walking around wanting it. It sat under the floor of ordinary days and I could go months without it surfacing. But it was the biggest thing I had. Everything else I had ever asked Martin for had a domestic scale. This did not.

I told him in February, in the kitchen, facing the sink. Twenty-two years married and I still made a complete mess of the sentence.

He did not laugh, which I had braced for. He asked what a birch actually was, physically, because he genuinely did not know, and I found I could tell him. Length. Thickness. How many rods. The soaking, and why. Eighteen years is a long time to read about something.

Then he said, "Right. So where do we get one?"

Nowhere. That is the answer. You can buy something a shop calls a birch and it arrives as a synthetic bundle with a lacquered handle, which is fine for what it is. The thing in the paragraph was green twigs cut that week.

There is a birch at the bottom of our garden. It has been there since we moved in and I had never looked at it as anything except the tree that messes up the shed roof.

He went out on a Saturday morning in April with the secateurs and his gardening gloves and came back forty minutes later with a bin bag, and I have never loved him more stupidly than at that moment. A man on the back step in a fleece with a bag of sticks, saying, "I have no idea if any of this is right."

The twigs were about three feet long and no thicker than a pencil at the base. April is the right month, apparently, because young wood bends instead of snapping. He had been reading too, which he did not admit until later.

We did the binding at the kitchen table that afternoon with the radio on.

This is where I lost hold of the mood entirely. You cannot maintain any sort of dread while your husband is arguing with you about garden twine.

He wanted seven twigs. I wanted more, because the thing in the book had been thicker than seven, and I said so, and he said the man in the book did it for a living and did not have to live with the woman afterwards. We settled on eleven. I cannot account for eleven. He bound the last eight inches tight, unwound it and did it again because the first attempt slipped, then swished it once through the kitchen air.

It made a noise I was not ready for. No crack to it at all. A rush, like somebody shaking out a wet towel, and then nothing.

We both went quiet. Then he said, "That is a horrible sound," and put it down next to the fruit bowl, and I said it could not stay there because my sister was coming on Tuesday.

Then the soak. Overnight, in the bath, in cold water, because green wood dries out fast indoors and dry wood breaks. That was the theory. We ran four inches, laid it in, turned the light off and went to bed.

I got up at two. I told myself on the landing that it was the usual reason, and it was not.

Our bathroom light is the harsh one so I left it off. Enough came in from the landing to see by. The birch lay along the bottom of the bath in four inches of cold water, the twine gone dark, one twig floating slightly proud of the rest. I stood on the mat in bare feet and understood something that had not reached me in the kitchen.

Nobody was going to stop this.

Fear is not quite the word. What it was, I think, was the shock of a thing coming out of your own head into the world, where it takes up space and gets in the way of the taps. For eighteen years it had been an idea. Now it was an object in my house, made on purpose, by a man who had gone outside in the cold to do it.

I sat on the edge of the bath for ten minutes and put one finger in the water. Then I went back to bed, and Martin said, without opening his eyes, "It will still be there in the morning," which is the least comforting sentence in the English language and made me laugh so much I had to leave the room.

Sunday evening. Twelve, agreed, over the arm of the sofa, with a towel down, because he had read about the mess and I had not.

Almost nothing about it was what I had spent eighteen years picturing. I had built it in my head as a weight, something that lands and goes deep and takes the breath out of you. That is a cane. A birch stings. It arrives across the surface in a spray of small hot points and carries on arriving for a second or two after the stroke is over, so the next one lands on skin that has not finished reporting on the last.

It is also filthy, and nobody writes that down. Bark and leaf came off it from the first stroke, and by the sixth there was green litter all over the towel and a good deal on the carpet. At one point he stopped to lift a piece off my back with two fingers as though he were taking a hair off a jumper.

On the fourth stroke one of the twigs went. I heard it break and felt it go somewhere it had not been sent, a thin line across my hip that he had not aimed within six inches of. I said the word "hip" out loud. He said, "I know. Sorry," and had a look, and we carried on.

Eight was as far as we got.

He stopped there, put the birch down on the floor and said, "You have got a bit of blood on you." One bead of it, on the outside, where the broken twig had been landing. He was not asking my opinion about going on to twelve, and I am glad, because I would have argued and been wrong.

Here is the part that would not leave me alone afterwards.

I was not disappointed. Eighteen years of wanting, four broken twigs, eight strokes out of twelve, a stripe across a hip nobody had asked for, and I lay there with my face in the sofa cushion feeling entirely full up. That surprised me more than anything else in the evening.

The best I can work out is this. The wanting was never about the sensation. If it had been, I would have been furious about stopping at eight, and I was not. What I wanted was somebody to take the strangest thing I own and treat it as a job to be done properly.

Go out with the secateurs. Mind the month. Argue about the number. Leave it in the bath overnight next to the shampoo. By the time he lifted his arm on Sunday evening the thing I had come for had already happened, and most of it had happened at the kitchen table with the radio on.

We ended up on the bathroom floor at about eleven. I sat on the mat with a towel round my shoulders and he knelt beside me with the antiseptic and cleaned a graze the size of a grain of rice, with a level of care frankly out of all proportion to it.

I said, "It is not going to fall off."

He said, "Be quiet."

He had already taken the birch out to the bin. You cannot keep one. In three days it is a bundle of dead sticks and in a fortnight it is kindling, and there is no drawer in any house where you could put it. I knew that in advance. Knowing it and watching it go into a wheelie bin at half past ten at night are separate experiences.

I do not think I need to do it again.

I said so to him about a week later. He took it better than I expected, then asked whether I felt cheated, and I had to say no four times before he believed me. The thing came out of me, got made, got used and went in the bin, and all of that is finished in a way that eighteen years of turning it over in the dark never managed.

I would not swap any of it for the sight of him on the back step in his fleece with a bin bag of sticks, telling me he had no idea whether he had done it right.