I
It began with the trees. In the glades of the forest where the boys would play, a sickness crept through the branches. The leaves turned black, the fruit shrivelled and fell to the forest floor, and soon the green clearings were thick with rotten plant matter. Then the animals of the farm began to grow weak, their milk turned sour and their meat became tough.
There was once a family who lived in a house set into a hillside with a small brook flowing at its base. Down the hill and beyond the brook lay a thick and altogether unknowable forest. While the father and mother dutifully ploughed and tilled the land, their two boys grew up playing with the creatures of the forest, and they never wanted for anything. But just as the moon governs the sea with its tidal kismet, their happiness was dictated by mysterious forces.
Left out the door follow the path to an opening on to a hidden green space. You liked to take our walks across it, sit on a bench on the far side, and talk, looking out across the forest. You could see for miles, the landscape like a great, sleeping beast.
The family had little need for contact with the outside world, nor did they seek it, and had, until then, spent their days oblivious to it in the paradise they had crafted. When the land became cursed, the mother and father gave a small sum of money to their eldest son, Henry, and told him to travel north, to the city. There they hoped he might make his way in the world, and return to them with riches enough for them all to survive.
II
Henry soon spent the small amount of money his parents had saved for him. After a lot of searching he found a job as an apprentice to a woman who owned a phone shop and spent his days fixing broken phones. He found he was good at it, and he especially liked peeling off the shattered screen’s skin, and exposing the network of microscopic wires that made up the phone’s brain.
One day, Henry was closing shop, when he found a forgotten phone. It was an old model, an original smart phone, and it didn’t work. It was obvious why it hadn’t been collected. He took it home and set about repairing it.
No sooner was it fixed, and he had turned it on – it rang.
On the other end of the line, uncontrollable grief, cracked and distorted, rippled metallic, through the phone’s speaker. He hung up.
There were countless messages to and from the number that had just called.
Eventually, Henry got bored of trawling, turned off the phone and put it in a drawer. Forgot about
it.
III
Henry’s mum called him once – put him on speakerphone. Henry’s dad asked if he had ever watched ‘the Road.’
“I’ve read the book, it’s on top of the wardrobe in my old room.”
“With Viggo Mortenson?” Henry’s dad continued, not listening. “Things are going to turn into ‘the Road’ sooner than you think.” Then Henry’s dad, his mum and his brother discussed what the best method of escaping the city would be in the event of a total lockdown.
dad: I think he should walk along the train tracks, follow the line and we could come pick him uphalfway mum: That’s a stupid idea, he’d be electrocuted dad: Ah yes, I hadn’t thought of that. brother: You know there’s a copy of the Road in my room?
I’d cycle obviously, Henry said, but no one was listening to the tinny little voice coming through his mum’s phone, which probably lay forgotten on the sofa next to them. It was during this period of crisis that Henry’s boss had to announce the closure of their shop. Living in a small one bed flat in the south of the city, Henry had just enough money to stay where he was a few months, but he knew that the small amount of savings he had amassed wouldn’t last long. That summer, unable to leave his flat, Henry would watch the news for hours on end, in front of his laptop which sat like another sullen consciousness in the room with him.
Then, his phone, which he had had since arriving in the city, stopped working. He tried to fix it but found that it was beyond repair. As he had no money, he could not buy a new one. He only ever used it to speak to his parents who usually called him, and he would make excuses or say he was busy and hang up. While it wasn’t important to him, it was to them. And at night Henry would dream of alternate worlds, but in the morning he would always wake, feverishly clutching after their tails.
He needed a new phone. Then he remembered the phone he had found.
IV
He takes a left out of the estate, walks past the supermarket with its tail of people growing into the car park, then follows the road to its end, where he sees a small alleyway set between a pub with a crumbling façade and an empty laundrette. After walking a little way up the alley, it opens out onto a vast green. A neat square of Georgian terraced houses with dignified windows and proud black doors hem it in, and beyond them a cluster of tower blocks peer over the tops of the trees.
All the while, in his ear:
I have been waiting
a long time
The signal is not very good, only capable of 5G, and the speech comes to him spliced and stuttering.
it’s the same
curse,
causes
tree’s leaves to
turn
black?
Despite being tucked away in a busy part of the city, the green is empty. At the far end of the field is a bench in the shade of a thorny telephone mast, with wires splayed in every direction. He has to mount a subtle incline to get to the bench and where it is, slightly elevated, he can see out across the city, see the quiet roads, the cranes frozen in steely ascension, their corporate canopy extending east. Henry avoids the bench because there is someone sat on it. He paces off the path, listening.
Let me free you
I can save the land,
Turn back everything
if not too late
She is wearing a green, brown and yellow diamond jumpsuit and a caramel coloured trench coat. Her boots are a polished black, each with golden buckles on the sides and a green stripe midway up the tendons of her feet. The pigeons flock around the bench writhing over one another to eat the crumbs she scatters among them. Once in a while, one of the pigeons hops sporadically onto her outstretched arm to nibble the grain directly from her hand, before falling back into the kit.
trapped in a mobile phone…
from 2020
How do I free you?
Simply destroy the phone. Cast all the pieces into a fire.
When Henry looks back at the bench she is looking at him. She asks him to sit and he nods. The light is almost gone on the green, and it is getting colder. The voice on the phone is silent. He sits as far away from the pigeons as possible. He slips the phone back into his coat pocket and they talk for several hours, about Henry’s family, about the curse, about the times. As the sun sets, the woman on the bench seems to fade with the waning light. Her outline becomes luminescent, the evening sunlight refracting through her as if she were water. As Henry listens, her speech takes on a thinness, lapsing into focus with his consciousness.
it seems odd to have to tell you this.
really quite odd
seeing as we’ve been breathing
the same air for the last two months
(or however long it’s been)
I really want you to know this.
I really need you to know
that this is not going to last forever.
That just as everything has its beginning,
it has its end.
By nightfall she is gone. Henry sits in silence a moment, the memory of the phone witch’s voice in his ears. He is jut about to leave when he pauses – turns back towards the bench. He reaches into his pocket and places the phone where she was sat, then starts back down the hill.
Femi Oriogun-Williams 