It was warm for the time of year, and we’d both woken before dawn. Axel whispered in my ear, something about going for a walk, something about the stream, and I nodded in agreement. We eased out of the bed. Karl, who’d slept like a stone ever since I could remember, slept heavily on, one of his arms reaching to the floor, his fingers just touching it, making him seem delicate. My father was also asleep, lying on his back, with his hands folded on the outside of the blanket.
We went out through the back, past the shed where the goats were penned. Their shoe-shaped faces turned; their yellow, devil eyes slit upright at us. We told them to be quiet. Then down into the field below. The sun was still behind the ridge, though the trees up on the crown were coloured with it, as if the bark had been stripped away, as if they were down to naked wood.
The grass licked at my bare legs.
Axel wasn’t wearing any shoes. I watched his heels rise, with something of the mill-wheel in their rhythm. The left one, the right one, the left one — one after the other, they kept rising. I watched his heels, shiny with dew, as I followed him across the field.
A grey bird curved through the air like a flung stone.
We stopped above the stream. There were trees there — poplars, willows, oak and fir. That time of year, the stream was swollen, snow melting further north and running down to us. My brother sat on the bank where it lifted clear of the fast-flowing water. It was a flat place, just mud and tufts of grass.
‘If we wait here,’ he said, ‘the sun’ll come to us.’
I sat beside him. Stared at the water where it swirled around a root. The root arched out of the water and curved back down again in a kind of bow. If you looked at the root and its reflection both at once, as if they were joined, as if they were one completed thing, they made a shape that was exactly like a mouth.
The sun was above the ridge now, to our left, but it hadn’t touched us yet. We were still sitting in the shade.
‘You never kissed anyone, did you?’
I turned to look at him. His head was bent and he was scratching at the mud with a piece of stick he’d sharpened. ‘How do you know?’
‘I just know.’
He was still scratching at the mud. It wasn’t drawings he was doing, just lines that didn’t look like anything.
‘Maybe I did,’ I said.
‘Who with then?’ He looked sideways at me, his lip curling. Then he said the name of a boy who lived in the village.
I laughed in his face. I was like that sun bursting over the curve of the hill and landing on everything in the world at once and turning it a colour suddenly.
His head dipped again.
‘You didn’t do it yet,’ he muttered. ‘I know you didn’t.’
I was strong now. I could say anything I liked. Even the truth.
‘So what if I didn’t.’
His body went still. All of it. The hand with the whittled stick in it stopped moving. Even his head, which wasn’t moving anyway, seemed strangely motionless. It was as if he was listening to himself think.
‘So what,’ I said.
He lay back with his head against the willow’s trunk. He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the tree instead, its pale-yellow waterfall of leaves and branches.
‘Would you like to?’ he said, without moving.
There’s a way of holding on to a moment, of making it last almost indefinitely, but anything you do, you have to do it slowly, and in absolute silence, and you have to separate your mind from it, it’s not you who’s doing it, it’s someone else.
I placed my lips where his were and I pressed. I remember thinking of the school teacher, and the way she held that spongy pale-pink paper against a piece of writing to make it dry.
Then I leaned on one elbow, looking down at him.
He just lay there and smiled. I almost hated him in that moment. His light-brown hair falling forwards, his lazy mouth. A scattering of freckles across his nose.
‘Try it again,’ he said.
There was a bird awake somewhere near by. Its call was like a seesaw. Backwards and forwards, the call went. Backwards and forwards. It was then that I thought of Uncle Felix. I felt he was watching, even though I knew he was dead. If I looked round, he would be there, on the other side of the stream, with his knees drawn up against his chest and his walking-stick beside him. He’d be smiling.
‘What is it?’
But I didn’t look round. I looked into my brother’s eyes instead and saw the black parts widen suddenly. I seemed to be rushing down towards him.
I thought I’d startled him and so I said, ‘It’s nothing.’
Before I could move, he sat up. One of his hands was on my shoulder. Then he covered my mouth with his. I was inside him then. His face so close, it was blurred. I could taste his breath.
‘It’s your mouth that should be open,’ he said, ‘not your eyes.’
I did as he said.
We stayed kissing until the sun reached us. When I opened my eyes again, everything in the world was blue and we had shadows.
That was the morning Axel told me about the trees. He said we’d been born in a house that was made of the wrong wood. Unlucky wood, it was. The kind of wood that if you make railway sleepers out of it, the train crashes. Or if you turn it into matches, girls set fire to their dresses. Some trees were haunted at the core and if you used them to make a house, the haunting spread from the wood into the people, like a disease. Those trees were only good for burning, and even then you had to have your wits about you; a fire built out of that kind of wood might stubbornly refuse to burn, or else it might burn too well and greedily consume whole forests. Our father was a carpenter. He should have known. Which trees helped, which hindered.
‘And this one?’ I remember asking.
Axel looked up into the weeping willow. ‘You might think from its name that it’s sad. It isn’t, though.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s a pleasure tree. You don’t find them hardly ever. I’ve looked and looked and this one’s the only one I’ve found.’
‘A pleasure tree?’ I said. ‘What’s that mean?’
He looked across at me. ‘What do you think it means?’
We began to go further. The tree showed our hands new places. Always at dawn, with goats’ eyes watching as we left the house, and then that walk through wet grass to the stream. At dawn, with everybody still asleep.
Summer came. Our shadows followed us, grew longer.
One morning he undid his trousers and pulled down his pants and there was his thing, smooth as stripped wood, blond, too, like a kind of pine, and it grew in the sunlight, faster than any tree, faster than a plant, and it jumped, almost as if it was counting.
I took it in my fingers and it still felt smooth, softer than I’d imagined, it was strange, the softness of the skin and the hardness just beneath, and moving one against the other, and then I put it in my mouth and closed my eyes, and my eyelids burned as the sun lifted over the ridge, reached through the trees, another day.
‘Who else have you been learning from?’ I heard him say.
But because there was admiration in his voice, I didn’t need to answer.
There was a moment just before the juice from him was in my mouth, when I had already the taste of it: I could see his head on the ground, turned sideways, and his left eye narrowed, almost closed, the tip of an arrow drawn in charcoal, and his back arching away from the earth, just shoulderblades and buttocks touching, and as his body twisted, a hollow appeared between the raised muscles of his stomach and the bay where his hip-bone was, and his ribs pushed upwards through his soft, tea-coloured skin.