The Orchard of Teeth

The Things We Leave Behind The front door had always needed lifting before it would close. Bethan remembered her grandmother doing it with one hand, a shopping bag caught against her hip, and gave the handle the same upward shove she had watched a hundred times as a child. The bolt scraped along its plate. Nothing caught. She tried again, harder, until a piece of dry paint came away under her thumb. ‘You're supposed to push it with your knee,’ Milo said from the step. He reminded her of the last time they'd visited, when she'd told him the door was older than most people's grandads. He appeared to have retained the remark word for word and now regarded it as a piece of useful technical advice. Bethan tried to remember saying it and couldn't. ‘Well, I'm delighted somebody listens.’ She put her knee against the lower panel. The door shut with a blunt thud and immediately sprang back an inch. ‘Excellent. It’s decided to become a window.’ Milo considered this, then bent to inspect the gap. His school shoes were polished from the funeral, though the trousers above them had picked up a green stain somewhere between the churchyard and the car. He was nine and already inclined to investigate a problem in detail once somebody else had grown bored of it. At home he would spend twenty minutes rescuing a bent paperclip from the workings of a pencil sharpener and then leave the sharpenings scattered over the kitchen table. ‘There's a bit sticking out,’ he told her. Bethan crouched beside him. The wood was swollen around the bottom hinge, a thin curl of it raised where the door had dragged. She could see what had happened. The damp had been working its way into the frame for years, and the settling of the farmhouse had finished the job. A carpenter could plane the edge and reset the plate. She made a note on her phone, under a list already containing GUTTERS and BACK BEDROOM WINDOW. Milo peered at the gap. ‘So can we leave it open all night?’ ‘No, it means we use the back door.’ Bethan shut the note on her phone before Milo could inspect the list. ‘What if that one breaks too?’ he asked. She suggested standing outside until Monday, waiting for someone to let them in. He smiled, properly this time. He had barely spoken on the drive from the funeral, despite eating most of a packet of crisps, and she was glad to hear him being difficult about something ordinary. The farmhouse stood beyond a narrow lane with grass growing down its middle. Enid had called it the old place even when it was painted regularly and the kitchen tiles were clean, as though its age excused every fault. The front garden was no longer much of a garden. Rosemary had grown woody against the wall, an empty stone trough lay on its side by the path, and the climbing rose Bethan remembered had spread over the downstairs window. It had flowered once, perhaps twice, in the previous few years. Now there were only red hips and long, thorned stems that scraped against the glass. Behind the house, beyond a low outbuilding and the fields, a line of wooded hills faded into the late-afternoon haze. Bethan had travelled these roads throughout her childhood without paying attention to the names of the villages. On the drive in she had followed the satnav twice into lanes she didn't recognise, and each wrong turn had left her unexpectedly annoyed with Enid for no longer being available to tell her which way to go. She carried two overnight bags through the back entrance. The kitchen smelt of washing-up liquid, furniture polish and the faint sourness of a closed house. Somebody—almost certainly Gwyneth—had emptied the fridge, leaving a tub of margarine and three sealed jars of chutney on a shelf. The table had been wiped. A square of lighter wood showed where Enid's biscuit tin used to stand. ‘Where are we sleeping?’ Milo asked as she set the bags down beside the kitchen dresser. He was already looking towards the stairs. ‘You said we could have the big room.’ ‘I said we'd see.’ Bethan had made two beds upstairs, although she had not yet decided which rooms they would use. The big room was the one Enid had kept for guests; it was also the one whose window actually opened. ‘You always say that when you mean no.’ He had begun shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other, preparing to make his case. Bethan told him that sometimes she said it when she meant they should carry the bags in before beginning negotiations. He took his own backpack upstairs with a noise suggesting it weighed several hundred pounds. Bethan heard him pause on the landing, then open one door, then another. He was going to explore; she had known he would. She had brought him because leaving him at home with Alan would have meant spending the afternoon and evening alone in a house full of Enid's possessions. She had told herself he would be company, that the fresh air would do him good, that he might be interested in the old farm. It had seemed a reasonable decision when they were packing. The funeral had been small. Enid's friends were either dead themselves or too frail to travel, and some of the family had never quite forgiven her for things nobody was willing to specify. Gwyneth had stood beside the grave with her handbag held in both hands. Ffion had arrived with Aled and sat with him near the front; Sioned had sent flowers and stayed away. Bethan had been surprised by how little she felt when the coffin disappeared. She had spent the past fortnight making telephone calls, getting the death certificate, trying to determine what the insurance covered and arguing with a funeral director about an invoice that plainly contained the same charge twice. Grief had become another item on the list, something she could not yet get around to doing. Milo called down from the landing to ask whether the farmhouse belonged to them now. Bethan explained about the solicitor and the paperwork, and he reminded her that Granny Enid had said she could have it. ‘So you can keep it?’ he asked, hanging over the bannister far enough that she wished he would move back. ‘If I want to.’ She heard him go away, then come back almost immediately. From the landing came another question: ‘If we keep the house, would we have to live here?’ When she asked why, he pointed out the distance from his school and, after a pause, from all his friends. Bethan assured him that nobody was proposing to move him to a farm. He took this seriously enough to stop worrying about it and returned to inspecting the bedrooms. He seemed satisfied. A moment later something creaked above her head. Bethan put the kettle on, thought better of it, and checked the cold tap. The first water came out brown for a second before clearing. She let it run while she unloaded bread, cheese, milk and a packet of chocolate biscuits into cupboards that were still crowded with Enid's things. The crockery was almost entirely mismatched. Enid had loved the idea of a good set but had never been able to resist keeping the plates from broken ones. At the back of a cupboard stood a mug with a yellow daffodil, its handle repaired with a thin, dark seam of glue. Bethan took it out automatically, then set it on the counter. It was Enid's mug. For as long as she could remember, nobody else had used it. Its presence made the rest of the kitchen look momentarily occupied, as if her grandmother had only gone outside to shut a gate. Milo came down dragging a duvet cover behind him. He said there was an enormous wasp on the window in the little bedroom. Bethan suggested opening it to let the creature out, but he had already tried and found the catch immovable. He laid the duvet down in the middle of the floor as though that settled the sleeping arrangements. Bethan looked at the new entry she had just made about the back bedroom. ‘Right. The big room it is.’ They ate their late lunch standing at the kitchen counter because the table was covered with files. Milo checked that the biscuits were actually for him, then complained that the bread tasted of the bag. Bethan found a butter knife that was still sharp enough to take a slice off the cheese without bending. She gave him half a sandwich, which he ate, then left the second half on his plate. There was a fading bruise on his forearm, yellow at the edges. Another, smaller one showed at the top of his sock when he sat on a stool and swung his legs. ‘Where did you get that one?’ she asked, pointing to the bruise above his sock. Milo had to look down before he understood what she meant. He couldn't remember where it had come from and didn't think he had fallen over at school. He seemed much more concerned about whether he could go outside than about the mark itself. Bethan considered pressing him. He had been tired recently, but the start of term always did that to children; his evenings had become busy again after six weeks of late nights, football in the park and sleeping until nearly nine. There had been a nosebleed the previous weekend, enough to bother her but not enough for Milo to remember it now. She had already booked an appointment at the surgery. Her mother had asked about it twice and made the same point about childhood illnesses twice, which had irritated Bethan beyond what the question deserved. ‘Stay where I can hear you, and keep away from the old machinery,’ she told him. ‘What old machinery?’ Milo asked. ‘Exactly,’ Bethan said. She had seen only the parts of the outbuildings closest to the house; she wasn't making any promises about what might be behind them. He went through the back door, leaving it wide. Bethan called after him to close it and heard it bang. A few seconds later it banged again, more convincingly. She returned to the piles on the table. There were accounts, correspondence from the solicitor, a stack of old bank statements and several envelopes in which Enid had saved newspaper cuttings. Bethan was used to dealing with records. Her work for the housing association involved getting repairs authorised, checking invoices and following up on contractors who said a job was complete when the tenants had photographs proving otherwise. At least that work generally came with dates and names. Enid had kept useful documents in the same folders as handwritten recipes, birthday cards and receipts for things bought decades earlier. One envelope marked INSURANCE contained a photograph of Gwyneth in a bridesmaid's dress and a receipt for replacement slates. Bethan made three piles: keep, check, recycle. She opened a fourth folder, discovered it held nothing but Christmas cards from 2008, and placed it under the table. At six o'clock she intended to phone Alan with an update, and before then she wanted to be able to say she had achieved something besides finding the wrong key for the front door. She had worked for twenty minutes when Milo appeared with both hands cupped around something. ‘Guess what?’ he said, in the voice he used when he was certain his news would interrupt whatever she was doing. ‘If it's alive, take it back outside.’ Bethan reminded him of the beetle he had once assured her was harmless, despite the fact that he had released it into the kitchen during breakfast. Milo insisted that this was different and opened his hands to reveal a small grey-green snail inching across his thumb. He had found it on the washing line, which he took as proof that it would be happier indoors. Bethan sent him back to put it where he had found it, congratulating the snail on its imminent return home. Milo went carefully, shielding it between his palms even as he protested that it wasn't likely to bite anyone. Milo went, taking care not to crush it. From the kitchen doorway Bethan watched him cross the yard towards the low stone wall. He moved more slowly than he usually did, and sat on the wall for a moment after returning the snail. She wondered whether the funeral had been harder on him than he was prepared to admit. He had known Enid as a thin old woman who often forgot his birthday but remembered precisely how he liked his toast; he had never seen her young enough to lift a child onto the top of a gate or run through the rain carrying towels. Those belonged to Bethan's childhood, which was another thing the house seemed to have kept. She found a framed photograph tucked behind a saucepan in one of the cupboards. The glass was cracked. It showed Bethan at six or seven, sitting on a blanket in the sunshine with Enid beside her and a woman just outside the frame whose hand rested on Bethan's shoulder. The child in the photograph had very little hair and wore a sunhat tied beneath her chin. Bethan knew the picture. Gwyneth had kept a copy at home for years and then, at some point, put it away. Here was the original, apparently kept close by Enid until she died. Bethan sat down. In photographs from the worst months of her treatment she looked unlike herself, and she could rarely place the actual memories in the right order. She remembered plastic cups of medicine, the soft rustle of hospital curtains, Enid making a game of counting red cars on the journey from a clinic. She remembered being told she was brave and growing to hate it, because bravery appeared to make no difference to whether she felt sick. Most strongly she remembered the long days at this farmhouse between appointments, when Enid let her paint stones from the garden and never seemed annoyed if she fell asleep halfway through something. The back door clicked and Milo returned with a stick nearly as tall as himself. He wanted to keep it as a walking stick for when he was old, an eventuality he had apparently considered in some detail. Bethan suggested they could store it for the next eighty years, but he thought she might need it sooner. He wasn't even trying to be cruel; at nine, he found the difference between forty and eighty reassuringly small. ‘Out,’ she told him, smiling despite herself. ‘And don't bring anything into the house that's longer than you are.’ He carried it away without argument, stopping at the threshold to work out whether holding it diagonally would satisfy the rule. He took it away without protest. Bethan put the photograph on top of the keep pile and carried the empty plates to the sink. A little later she went looking for him. She had tried his name twice from the doorway and heard no answer. The yard, which seemed perfectly manageable when he was visible at its far side, now contained too many places to disappear: the collapsed shed, a low doorway into the old feed store, a narrow path that ran alongside the orchard wall towards the lower field. Bethan picked up her phone. There was no reason to panic. Milo was probably investigating a spider or the remains of a tractor and could not hear her from where he was. ‘Milo?’ She called a third time, louder now, and heard him answer from beyond the feed store that he wanted her to come and look. His voice was perfectly cheerful, which made her irritation return almost as quickly as her relief. Bethan followed his voice along the path. Nettles brushed against her trouser legs. At the end of the wall a rusted gate stood hooked open, giving access to a small orchard she remembered from childhood as a place of long grass and shade. The trees had grown larger and more misshapen. Some branches stretched almost to the ground, and the trunks were ridged with lichen. Though it was September, Bethan could see no fallen apples, no fruit left on the branches, not even the hard green ones that used to litter the grass before they were ready. Milo stood under the nearest tree. He had something in his hand and was examining it with the concentration he usually gave to stones he thought might contain fossils. ‘You need to answer when I call. I couldn't see where you'd got to.’ Bethan came to a stop in the grass beside him, ready to steer him back towards the yard. Milo protested that he had answered, but admitted he had been busy trying to get something off the tree. When she asked what, he opened his fingers without another word. He held out the object. At first Bethan thought it was a small piece of pale stone, perhaps a chipped bit of china. Then he turned it in his palm and she saw the uneven edge, the smooth crown and the long curved roots. ‘Is that a tooth?’ she asked. Milo turned it over to show her the roots, handling it with the confidence he gave to fossils and stones. ‘Definitely a grown-up one. Look.’ He made her inspect the longer root, and when she asked where it had come from, he pointed up into the branches. ‘On the tree.’ ‘Somebody must have put it there.’ Bethan was still looking at the thing in his palm when he pointed over her shoulder. The second tooth was hanging from the branch above them. A white shape protruded from the underside of a branch. It was not dangling from thread; Bethan could see that immediately. She stepped closer, pushing aside a thin spray of leaves, and put a finger against it. The surface was hard and cold in the shade. She tried moving it and felt the branch move with it. ‘Don't pull it,’ Milo warned, pleased to find himself in a position to give her instructions. Bethan bent for a better angle. Around the tooth's roots, the wood rose in a raised, pale collar. The enamel appeared to emerge directly from the branch, as naturally as the stub of a broken twig. She searched for glue, a hole, some kind of fitting. The bark was unbroken around the growth. Whoever had done this would have needed more patience than sense. ‘It's disgusting, isn't it?’ Milo said, with an enthusiasm that suggested the opposite. Bethan asked for the one he had already removed. He opened his hand to show it to her and explained that it had been growing lower down, loose enough to come off when he wiggled it. Bethan took it from him. It was heavier than she expected. Real teeth had this weight, she supposed; she had not held one since Milo began losing his baby teeth. There was a tiny scrap of fibrous material against one root that looked disturbingly like part of a plant. She rubbed it with her thumb and found that it did not shift. ‘Did you see anyone among the trees? Someone from the farm by the gate?’ Bethan asked. Milo said no, then gave her an incredulous look when she suggested one of Granny Enid's friends. ‘Who'd bring teeth here?’ he asked. She couldn't think of a satisfactory answer. It was a fair question. Bethan put the tooth in a tissue she had in her pocket, folded the corners over and tucked it away. She considered ringing Gwyneth, then decided she wanted another look before inviting her mother's opinions. There were peculiar people in the world, and Enid had known several, but the idea of somebody decorating an orchard with human teeth was unpleasant enough to justify keeping Milo close. ‘Right. Back inside,’ Bethan said. Milo protested that he wanted a photograph for Alan, who would be interested in a tree that grew teeth. She told him she would show his dad the one they'd already collected and moved towards the gate before he could start bargaining over her phone. Milo moved away reluctantly. He walked as far as the gate, then stopped and looked behind him. Bethan was about to tell him to hurry when she followed his gaze. He had been standing beneath the first tree, where the leaves concealed most of the branches. From farther back she could see across the orchard towards the wall, and several other pale shapes caught the light: one near the end of a narrow branch, two close together on a tree bent almost double, another lower down where a trunk divided. She went back far enough to be sure they were not scraps of pale lichen. The nearest was unmistakably the smooth crown of a molar. Milo came back beside her and tried to count the pale shapes. ‘More than ten, do you think?’ He had reached eight twice and was convinced that some of the teeth were hiding behind the leaves. She looked along the row of trees, where the light was thinning and the shadows under the branches had begun to join. ‘We'll come back tomorrow. I want to see what's in the house first.’ ‘Are we allowed to take them?’ Milo asked. ‘We’ve taken enough for today,’ Bethan said. She shut the gate properly behind them. On the way to the kitchen he wondered aloud if it might be a dinosaur tooth, then asked if planting a human tooth would make a new one grow. Bethan answered the first question and told him that adult teeth did not grow back. ‘They seem to on trees,’ he said. She said she'd have another look once she'd sorted out the house, which was an answer Milo appeared willing to accept. By the time they reached the house Milo was talking about what he wanted for tea. Bethan washed her hands in the kitchen sink and felt the folded tissue pressing against her leg. She took it out and set it on the clean corner of the table, a little way from the photograph of herself in the sunhat. Then she went to look for the key to Enid's cupboards.