Like every year since, we spend the summer in the tree.
We read books perched on the huge branch jutting out from the ancient oak at the rim of the field. The sheep beneath our feet stare past us. They chew. We read. I think we all want to swap.
From our perch we can see the Nuns' Causeway where we'd walked as a family in '75, retracing their steps to the hilltop village. We could see our caravan, our car and our Father's failed attempt to chop logs for the campfire.
We could see the Benedictine Priory by the Swale, wrecked by Henry's brutish reformation, their fallen convent at the end of the fence yet somehow remained, pinned down by the terrible sin that befell it. Oh, had it but been forgiven ages ago and not left to fester. Yet I think we understood it's stoic indifference to the tide of time whispering through the valley, soothing it's past agonies at the hands of the wielding King.
Beyond our branch, the endless slopes of the hills shoulder the horizon like titans and the clouds slip by like frightened crowds.
We read everything that July and enjoyed lazy days in the caravan, a hide-away of sorts from our troubled life back home.
Crows wheeled like sorcerers as greater forces gathered in the valley till the very day itself. Lambs lay among the tussocks round the ruin staring into heaven like putti. If there was an evil aura evolving then those Lambs felt nothing. Their lonely cries were for the here and now, the hot frothing teats of their tired mothers hiding from the raving sun.
We hardly ever come down from the tree these days, except to make imaginary sandwiches and tea, which we take back to the big bough. A small wooden crate which we'd nailed onto the trunk back in the day houses our copious reading, our very own tree library from that holiday long gone.
I liked to read the poetry this year. Larkin, Hughes, Plath. The moderns. Mable is much older than me and prefers gothic fayre. Percy and Mary Shelley. She said she would have loved to have been there that night they took to opium and penned their darkest bulwarks borne of dreams.
Back then we discussed what we were reading like this, often late into the night, as the chill of the Yorkshire hills descended like an unwelcome gurgling fiend forcing us to seek the solace of inside.
Spiders now ruled the caravan. Large house creatures residing in webs like bandages stretched across the mouldy furniture. Mable and me dont mind. We had no idea what they ate. Probably each other. Dog eat dog among the filaments. Sometimes we find dried husks still clinging on, the juices of existence long gone and only the papery skin left behind, as if life had simply drained away into the stream on the valley floor like ours.
The bath often holds a desperate spider. We lie down together with it and try to lift it out but simply can't, it's beady eyes pleading with us, it seems, to try one more time. If we blow hard enough the air would actually swirl and catch the spider like a sweet wrapper and fly out of the tub to freedom. Mable and me howl with laughter, pretending to turn on the taps and bathe like we once had in the splendour of our lives.
When Summer fades and the first whispers of Autumn tell their tale of change and something far worse on the way, we stroll together through the convent's carcass holding hands and wonder what the nuns were like hundreds of years before us. Now dead, infused in the stones, we hum evensong as we saunter among their degraded pews, rosaries rattling like bones on our threadbare shoes.
Somewhere in the dereliction, a thrush hammers a snail to smithereens, the mollusc's silent scream lighting up our ears as it's house is ransacked and it's eaten alive.
A little like us that summer break so long ago, the caravan holiday in the Dales that should bring us back together as a family. The bruises gone, the bottles emptied in the sink. Solemn vows. No more drink.
Promises promises promises.
It split us up. Forever.
I see so clearly my father drunk, reaching for his camping axe and more deranged by his liquored demons than before, trudging like a Golem towards us standing by the tree.
We see the unstoppable fury in his eyes, more hateful than ever and we drop our books.
No Father. No! I beg.
Buts it's no use. This pet of Hell isn't listening to us. My Dad's curse comes to roost and darker voices rule.
As he raises the blade high above his head I shriek and cower, Mable hurling herself towards his soured bulk but to no avail.
As the sheep stare in the field and the Jackdaws chortle, the axe descends repeatedly in an arcing spatter of madness and gore.
The job done, my Father's devil pats his shaking shoulders, ecstatic with the outcome, having this time finally given us up in ragged pieces to his fiends to feast on, the bloody ruins of my poor mother Mable and me beneath the big bough of our beloved oak.
