Pulse

He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut. Behind him the rain slanted into the open porch in tight, rattling crescendos. Pulsed with the crashing wind.

It’s foul out there, he called, but she wasn’t in the main room.

He saw the signs of water ingress in the planks below the cabin windows. A wet stain that caught the light. Every autumn. Every autumn, he thought, we say we’ll seal the planks. She’d put towels down where the rain had been driven in.

When he stepped from the doormat onto the wooden floor he felt the damp sock under his left big toe, the result of prising off the right shoe. With the wind baffled by the walls, the spat of the rain seemed even louder as it thrashed the low metal roof.

She’ll be trying to get the little one down for an afternoon nap. That’s why she hasn’t responded. The little one whom they hadn’t expected to have—the child who was at once a present fundamental fact but, even though she was walking now, and talking, still bewildering.

He went into the middle room, knelt by the wood burner, and set the logs down, placing them loosely around the fireguard, trying not to knock them together loudly, even though that wouldn’t be heard above the weather.

Tiny drops of wet mist silvered his jumper.

I should have put a coat on. The wool won’t dry properly.

Two weeks. Nearly two weeks we’ve been waiting. No heating. Still no engineer.

It was wearing. If they wanted hot water they had to use the kettle or heat up a pan on the hob.

He went into the little one’s bedroom, keeping the arm he’d used for the logs forearm-up so specks of wood and torn bark wouldn’t fall on the carpeted floor. There she was, asleep, despite the storm.

His wife was standing at the window. He could see the concerned set of her, the tightened curve of the tensed muscles behind her jaw.

—What is it? he asked.

Her eyes were fixed on the high stand of pines at the edge of the lawn. They whipped and flailed. One of the heavier pines seemed to be leaning into the crown of the thick cypress in front of it, a few metres from the cabin. The thick, furred cypress seemed animate, wallowed in some conflict with the pine, as if it were trying to hold the other tree back.

—It’s come over, she said.

—It’s just the wind.

—No, the tree’s tipped. It’s near the lines.

Three high-voltage cables passed overhead, between the line of trees and the cabin. They’d had them assessed. A surveyor had come out and done checks, explained the readings, confirmed that there was less emittance from the lines than a microwave could give off. The surveyor said whatever hum she could hear, it wasn’t from the lines.

He watched the tree. The power lines that seemed to vibrate tightly in the gale. The branches lashing.

Years back, on one of the local farms, a line had come down on a wet field full of cattle. The farmer had to watch, wait, for the electricity to be switched off. A worker from the power company had to get to the substation and shut it off by hand. Meanwhile the animals filled with electricity, some of them immolating, burning up then in the wet field.

That was decades back. The system was different now. Centralized. It would cut out immediately.

A thwack, rattle, as a stick hit and rolled across the ridge of the roof.

There were sticks all over the lawn. Ripped whips of evergreen, bare staves of dismantled ash. Torn leaves stuck to the windows.

As the light fell, the cabin seemed encased in a translucent shell. The world through the windows melting repeatedly, running into pools of itself. Remaking. Running again.

Sporadically, the crack of a thorn log from the wood burner broke through the gray noise of the storm; the gurgle of rain choked the guttering, overspilling in silvery beads that spacked against the cabin planks.

He found it abstractly peaceful. The little one rapt in headphones, the window nearest the television glowing and coloring with the reflection of her cartoon on the glass.

He was sure the wind was dropping, that the rain had begun to abate.

And then his wife came back from the window where she’d been settled, watching the pine. As if to keep watch would stop something happening.

—It’s definitely moved.

He looked down. The floor was busy with farm toys, frozen mid-event.

—It will just knock the power off. If it hits the lines, the power will cut.

He looked out uncertainly at the soaking-wet lawn.

—Anyway, the pine won’t hit the lines. It can’t get through the cypress.

He looked at the tide lines of bright clutter all about the place. Lines pushed by the waves of play—the disarrayed plastic farm animals, a black-and-white cow.

Rain sprayed the windows.

It was like being in an ark.

—It’s like being in an ark, isn’t it?

He raised his voice for the little one to hear through the sound of the television in her headphones.

—What’s an ark?

It won’t hit the wires.

The lights in the cabin dimmed then, for a fraction of a second.

The pine was leaning farther into the cypress. It looked now not as if it were grasping stupidly, furiously at the out-of-reach power lines with the fine-needled tips of its branches. It looked now to be reaching intently toward them, with one long curled stretch.

He tried to look up at the lines.

He knew without turning that she was back at the window. He felt an unwanted stonelike sensation that, with everything else in motion, the whole world made fluid, she was the only still thing, the middle of the gyre, around which the calamity whirled.

He looked back then.

His daughter had her eyes right on him, watching him, as the flecks came down through the sky and the rain hacked into the ground.

The storm will blow itself out. Surely. It’s going to blow itself out.

In the main room, rainwater seeped between the joins below the window frame, gathered momentarily on the upper edges of the thick, angled planks, then ran down to the floor. The tea towel she’d set there was sopping.

—It’s coming into her bedroom, too.

—Yes.

—It’s wetted the carpet.

—I know.

It didn’t use to come in. It didn’t use to get through. There’s just so much force now, in the weather.

He looked at the black clouds of mold on the double doors that led onto the lawn.

—You never did the sealant.

—I know.

—I bought it ages ago.

Water seeped through the panels in the doors, too.

She let the door of the sink unit slam.

—Where are the candles? They’re always in there. Why aren’t they?

If they send people out they’ll just butcher the ground, he thought. It’ll just be butchered. There’ll be Land Rovers and trucks. The lane will be ruined. For one branch. It’s just one branch.

—I’m going to put her down.

—O.K. I’ll just go out and check things. I’ll get more logs.

I’ll get it done. I’ll just get it done, and it will take the worry off.

It’s just one main branch.

For a moment the space within the porch felt taut, like a chest full of air—it had the pressured imminence of held breath. Then the gust dropped.

It was exhilarating, to step out. There was a sort of abandon, stepping into the storm.

He coiled the lengths of rope he’d picked up over time at the nearby beach, the salt-bleached cords almost friable, impossibly dry in the small shell of the woodshed.

It’s one branch.

No one will come out to deal with it in this.

A small, compacted wasp clung to the fibres of the blue rope, drawn in on itself, in some suspended sleep. It was possible to believe only that some outside agency had stilled the wasp. It was not possible to believe that the thing had cast itself into that state.

It seemed completely abstract with the storm raging all around.

He loosened the wasp, teased it out using the frayed end of the rope with a sort of care, and let it drop into a gap in the woodpile.

He moved the axe. He caught sight of the telescopic polesaw. The ladder rapped against the roof as a rail of wind came in.

It’s just one branch.

If he looked up, the rain drove into his eyes and sawdust dropped onto his face. The air gurned.

Each time the wind snatched the sail of the upper branches, the thin blade of the polesaw bounced on the branch. He had no control with his arm upstretched—this is stupid, what am I doing? This is stupid—tidal lurches lifting through his body. And then the ladder skidded slightly, the saw blade twisting stuck in the branch, the pole slipping from his hand to hang out of reach midair. And he thought he was down. A sickening creak—he thought he would go—as the ladder lost purchase on the wet bark and bit into the beach rope that held it fast.

His stomach dropped. Seemed to spin out into the wind and he just hugged the mast of the tree as everything tossed and broke and waved, his sodden face pressed into the skin of the trunk, and his head filling with a reptilian hiss.

He felt a pure, infantile fear. The smell of pencils. The cold metal smell of the ladder. There was a static crackle above him. And it froze his blood. His body filled with a heavy ice.

A c-cr-crackle again. The pole of the saw like some clock weight, swinging.

It flashed into his mind to leap, to hurl himself into the swell of the cypress. But he could not move.

You’re on a metal ladder.

He stared out. Crackle. His eyes dropped to the field beyond, the molehills like compact heaps of ash.

Move.

He could not look up. Move. He could not look down. In the storm light the ladder glowed against the waterlogged pine. The air rasped.

Fall. Just get off the ladder.

From deep inside the tree, he heard—he felt—a primitive, arrhythmic beat. A slow basal drumming.

Crackle.

Down. Get down.

He lowered a foot—gave up agency to the tree itself that coached him—another foot. By foot. Feet that fluttered in the chasmic moments of the depthless blank space between the rungs.

As he passed the rope he’d tied to bind the ladder to the tree, he smelled salt, the white stains of brine washed out around the trunk. A fizz to it. A tiny wildness. The sea of the storm. The crash of the wind. And above, in the dim light now, again the static crackle, like some failing radio device. A percussion of crisp sharp electrical clicks.

Down, a primal thump in the heart of the tree again, down, toward the swirling pit of the ground.

—Call someone.

—I did. I have. What were you thinking? What were you doing?

The resin would not come off his hands, the side of his face.

The rain had stopped, and against the saturated dark wet of everything the assessor, passing purposely among the trees in a white helmet and hi-vis jacket, looked like one of the little one’s toy builder figures.

There was sparse light left now.

—I’ll go out.

He stepped into his boots and pulled up the waterproof trousers he’d left attached around them.

—It’s better if I go out.

It had been an hour since the storm had lost force. Abated. But the air seemed laden, held a sense it was not done.

Fat drops fonked onto the cabin’s roof, fell heavily from the surrounding trees; the lane ran with rills of water, deepening channels in the softened mud.

—You tried to go up it?

The assessor’s question was accusatory.

Seeing the ladder against the trunk now, he recognized how big the tree really was. How short the ladder was against the thick pine.

The polesaw swung above them. Negligible.

—Yes.

—Hear those clicks?

Crisp taps in the air.

—That’s arcing. That’s electricity jumping from the wires.

A sort of motion sickness came over him.

—Two metres that current can jump. At least.

Again, the ground seemed to lose its certainty. An illusion—just the wind, pushing through the cluster of bramble at the foot of the trees—exaggerated as the fluid wake of adrenaline went through him.

Then he saw that the ground was actually moving. The earth around the pines lifting. It seemed to swell and exhale deep within the brier. To pulse as the wind swayed the high trees.

In the crepuscular light, each tree trunk seemed to be growing from some breathing, harbored animal.

The assessor walked past the tilted pine and stopped at the neighboring tree. He watched the pad of its base lift, the root ball loosened in the soaked ground, the weight of the mast pitching in the wind.

Then the assessor went off, kicking through the bramble as if it disgusted him, already on his phone.

—It’s a switch-off. I don’t need to see it, I can hear it. I’ll give you the pole numbers.

It was dark by the time the three trucks from the power company came up the lane, and from the cabin they saw the beams of the lights swirl and scan in the field beyond the line of pines.

The wind was lessening all the time now. It had lessened, but still it gusted. Gusts that landed thick and heavy.

He thought of the lane. The mash of it, with the fat tires of the heavy vehicles, the wet ground at the field gateway.

When the tree surgeons saw the ladder—as they came into the line of pines, with head torches and handheld floodlights, voices loud over the wind, swearing as they went into the bramble and the overgrowth—twice he heard the word. Twice he heard them say “hero.”

The little one flinched when the carack of two chainsaws ripped out, looked about to wake. But she stirred only, adjusting her position on the sofa cushions they’d laid down as a bed in the middle room. With the electricity off, in the light of the fire, she looked not softened but smaller and more serious.

The quick throttles of the saws told him that they were cutting away the bramble, the spurs, ridding the area of the thin thorn first.

The wind was a low hiss. It gave the sense it was circling the place, an uneasy beast stalking a clearing, at the center of which was the pine. As if the pine were some quarry that it wanted to rush, and take down.

Everything seemed unreal in the whiteness of the floodlights.

He watched the tree surgeons. The groundman and the climber, and two younger-looking lads who were clearing the brash, every so often looking nervously at the swaying tree and the lifting bubble of the ground around its trunk. He saw the climber kick his foot spikes into the trunk and lean back into his rope. Saw him flick the looser second loop higher up the trunk with a quick, snapped action and then lean out again into the tension of the line as the groundman below him took in the slack.

Above them, the polesaw hung, still bitten into the tree, swinging in the wind, knocking against the trunk. Dull, redundant thuds, jeered by the bright metallic clinks of the climber’s gear.

Thunk. The climber kicked his spikes into the trunk. Stepped. Flicked the first loop over the second. Leaned. Thunk. Stepped.

When he came level with the ropes that bound the ladder to the tree, the climber took a pruning saw from a scabbard at his waist and cut them. The ladder came down.

Thunk. Spike.

The climber climbed slowly, rhythmically. The only break in his rhythm came when he stopped to remove a broken spur, a partial branch, the awkward side shoots that disrupted his route up the thick trunk.

As he climbed, he seemed to be further quelling the wind. It was his pace, the controlled process, as if he were some sort of handler.

When he got to the branch, the climber wrested the blade of the polesaw from it and let the saw drop. He secured himself, and began to rearrange his clips.

The rain that blew from the branches caught the mesh of his visor, made the visor look like some medieval face guard.

It’s moving, the climber said. And then, in Welsh, Mae’n symud digon.

The others were just standing watching now. Watching him get set.

He was right at the edge of the light that welled up from the work flood, the pine reaching away into the dark above him, his chainsaw slung from a short rope off his belt.

When he swung the climbing rope up toward the next strong branch his eyes followed the throw, the beam of his head torch cutting a bar like a searchlight, illuminating bright gems of resin on the bark, making the moisture the wind blew from the surrounding trees shine like diamond spits of rain.

Then the beam settled on the wet grasping arm of the branch that reached for the wires. Circled in compact, fluid loops of light with the uneasy movement of the tree.

He was thinking of the wasp. He could not move it from his mind. The strange astral sense that had emanated from it, motionless, in the lash of the storm.

The chainsaw kicked in then. Raw, gruelling yowls, splitting in short, saurian bursts amid the fall and crash of dropped branches. A clang, sometimes, from the ladder, as it became more and more buried.

The gap in the line of pines was blatant. The air smelled of resin, of spent fuel.

On the ground, the severed branch looked oversized. Looked so big now it was down.

A truck started up, and over the small belling sounds of the climbing gear being packed away he heard the ground mash under the vehicle as it turned in the field, briefly lit the trees in silhouette, and then slushed through the field gateway, spattering onto the lane and away past the cabin.

The groundman looked at his watch.

—Should get you back on now. Won’t be long. They want us to do it within an hour. Sixty minutes. We get fined otherwise.

It seemed that cutting off the branch had stopped the storm. It was strangely quiet.

—Do you want tea? Something? he asked the groundman. We can make tea on the gas.

Away from the felled timber, the climber got out of his harnesses. Stepped out of the straps and belts.

On the ground he seemed oddly proportioned. Two-thirds leg. He looked tall and thin and very strong.

He took off his helmet.

Without the helmet, he seemed older. He didn’t look as if he had come down fully from the tree.

Another of the trucks started up. It spun briefly on the wet field, then got onto the lane, and he saw the two younger tree surgeons as they drove past, white-faced in the light that was on in the cab.

The climber sat on the high stool in the cabin. He was tall enough that he had to extend his legs out and away from the stool. The groundman was on a chair at the kitchen table.

She’d found candles, and everything was softly lit.

—Sugar?

—Three. Diolch. Thank you.

Three.

There was not a fleck of fat on the climber. His hands, which were resting on the worktop, looked astonishingly strong but not thickened up like a farmer’s might be, or blistered and dirty; there was no visible middle age around his jaw, his cheeks.

His very pale blue eyes moved slowly around the cabin, as if he were waiting for something to pass, or to leave him.

He was looking at the construction. At how the logs fitted one onto the other.

The pan sissed as she lifted it from the gas hob and poured the boiled water.

—Ta. Diolch. He lifted the tea immediately, his hand around the hot cup, and took a sip.

It’s the sugar. He wants the sugar. He’s in a sort of self-controlled shock.

The groundman, too, was looking around at the cabin.

—Lot down tonight.

—People don’t manage them is the thing, the climber said.

He saw his wife watch the climber take a measured mouthful of tea. Controlled.

She looked flushed. Her pupils widened in the candlelight.

—New storms, see. Twenty-year storms all the time now. With the climate, said the groundman.

Then the climber spoke.

—You’ll have to sort the others. Those other pines. They’ll all be over.

Her question came, a glance at him.

—Once you get one, like that, they’ll all go. If they’re planted together in a stand like that. If they’ve grown together for years, and one goes over.

He couldn’t help but think of his grandparents. How they’d died within weeks of each other.

The climber seemed momentarily distant again. He took another measured sip of the tea.

—It’s not the trees that go. It’s the ground.

Then the lights blazed on. The cooker clock. And the television box whirred.

By the early hours, there was barely a murmur.

A soft sheet of wind. A sense of fatigued relief.

The electrical noise of the house. Quiet, persistent. Over-present.

After the tempest, it was unnerving.

Since the child had been born, sleep was like some sort of raft he just had to climb onto. But tonight it lapped away beyond reach on his ebbing adrenaline.

He got up from the pullout bed where most nights now he slept, threw on the waterproofs and coat over his sleeping clothes, and went outside.

With the wind dropped, in the light from the porch the lawn looked brushed as if with some deliberate care.

The lopped-off branches of the pine were heaped around the foot of the trunk, the several yards of the tree left standing thick and scaled in the beam of his torch. Great flanks of cut cypress lay lividly green in among the dropped brash.

The field beyond was marred with dark tracks. The ground at the gateway mutilated.

He turned the torch back to the sprawled offcut. The sheer quantity of foliage he would have to clear up. The springy, wrinkled cables of pine. The spiked, needled brush. The sectioned heavier boughs.

There was a sense of murder, of an attack that had passed.

In the remaining trunk, the climbing spikes had made repeated, triangular cuts, like bite marks in an animal’s neck.

He angled the branch into the drum, thick end first, and the branch bucked and sprung as if consciously flinching from the spinning blades. More than a week had passed since the storm while they waited for a wood chipper to come available.

He pushed the branch deeper, until the blades themselves chewed the remaining length through. Bent again for another from the pile he’d so far dragged to the gate.

He felt strangely detached in his earmuffs, the white chips loosing from the chute and escaping out onto the gateway that was all turned to mud.

The heavier chips had flown farther from the machine, taken through the air by their own weight. Then there were progressively smaller chunks. The patch closest to the chipper was little more than sawdust, floured around by the slightest breeze.

He pressed the red Off button, pushed the earmuffs to his neck. Listened to the declining spin of the blades as the residual energy went from them. Took off his gloves. They were sticky with resin, the marks like those a sticking plaster would leave on your skin.

He looked at the piled branches and offcuts by the fence. The stuff he could chop into logs he’d put to one side.

He’d barely made a difference to the mess around the tree. He hadn’t even done enough to free the polesaw from the cut-away brash.

You just have to keep going. You just have to keep going until it’s done.

Late in the afternoon, he noticed the floury sawdust blow back across the machine. Settle on his sleeve, his fleece. The wind had swung.

He took off the earmuffs. Looked up at the high line of trees. Noticed, overhead, a countless crowd of seagulls cutting inland steadily.

No one had come to tend to the other pines. No one could come for weeks. Everyone with a chainsaw license was clearing the wind strikes and the fall from the storm.

And then, from somewhere, the memory rose. The rabbit burrow they’d dug into last summer, while trenching the potatoes. The curved shallow run they’d found within the soil. The collapsed earth dropping and rising, seeming to lift with the rhythm of breathing. He’d felt a primeval disquiet, some anciently imprinted caution that he had to breach, and then a protean jolt when the thing moved, when he saw the black globular eye of the exposed kit, itself some hole, the entrance to some compact endless tunnel.

An unnerve welled in his stomach. A slow whelm like the ground moving, the slow rock of the trees.

It’s the ground. We just have to hope that the ground holds.

He went to their bedroom, looked in on the little one, asleep, small on the double bed.

He remembered how he’d stood like this, watching her sleep, just after the electricity had been turned back on following the storm. And then he’d seen what he thought must be the tree surgeons’ torches, flashes of light that played across the window. He’d moved the curtain to one side and seen a cackle of small lightning lick up around the ceramic insulators on the power lines, blaze around the top of the pole that carried the wires.

He remembered how the dizzying fear had hit him, as he ran out to the groundman and the climber, who were walking back to their truck. The water rilling in the lane. The lips of the churned mud. How he’d called, It’s lighting up, it’s lighting up. It’s sparking. And how the groundman had just said, It’s the salt. From the wind. It’s burning off the salt.

He looked at the little one now for a long while, listening to her strong, purposeful breaths and the sea sound of the air shifting the pines. He heard the wind picking up, intensifying again. From the same direction the last storm had come.

He looked at his wife as she came in, at the expression he’d seen in her eyes before, on a plane during the dropping thump of turbulence, at the thick dressing gown she wore, the pelt that covered the hot-water bottle in her hands.

—Shall I lift her into the cot?

He could tell before she answered. He understood, because he, too, felt that the little one had become, to each of them separately, their most safe point. That if they were within reach of her breath the rest of the world went away. Nothing more mattered, not even each other.

I miss you, he wanted to say. I miss you beyond any means I have of coping with the distance you have gone.

—I’ll go on the pullout. It’s fine, he’d said.

He shut his eyes. He expected to see again the bright, white wires of electricity playing through the dark. But all he saw was his child, asleep under her blankets, her eyes moving quickly below the thin lids, as if she looked out at some incoming weather front.

Her scream smashed him from sleep. Her scream and a wakening to a flash so total there were no shadows, her skin and the little one’s skin bright electric white, her screaming his name, then a pitch blackness, a shotgun blast, and again the light, and her screaming, It’s down, there’s another one down, it’s down on the line.

It’s come down. It’s come down on the lines.

As he lifted the little one, the flash came again, and a searing crash. A haptic infrasound through their bodies. Zrum. Then again. Then again. Light. Three times, the snatched glimpse of them so forcefully burned into his eyes that he thought he’d been killed each time, that he had grabbed that look at them just before he burst into flame.

Get out. It’s over the roof. Get out!

The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water.

If the power’s in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.

The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms. ♦