Extract: The Forest of Forgotten Stories by Hazel Prior

 Hope is written in the trees.

1

Leonardo Felkirk. He repeats it over and over, anxious not to let it escape. Together the two words make up his name, or so they have told him. He has to believe them, because what else does he have? Only fleeting images of a luminous white owl and a red-haired girl. He has not the slightest idea why the owl is there, gliding silently through his thoughts, or who the red-haired girl might be.

Leonardo Felkirk. He drags each syllable, once again, through the stabbing pains in his head. It seems an odd sort of name, like something made up…and he’s filled with a vague sense that he does make things up, all the time.

Time drifts, voices murmur. There is a soft bleeping, a coughing, a coming and going of footsteps. He shifts uncomfortably. His eyes drift open, seeking out the object that will calm him, a certain precious thing that should be right beside the bed… but it isn’t here. All he can see is a thickly pleated grey curtain. And the unnerving realisation lands: this must be a hospital bed.

Closing his eyes against this new, unpleasant reality, he finds, with some relief, that at least he is able to picture the absent object in his mind. It is a bright orange fountain pen lodged in a gnarled lump of wood, the two inextricably bound together.

Trees have a way of growing around things, he recalls. They will encompass almost any object that touches them for long enough; they will slowly absorb it until it becomes part of themselves. There’s that example of the bicycle that somebody left leaning against a tree during the First World War; a bicycle that is now seven feet high in the air, lifted by years of growth, bonded forever with the trunk. And he once saw an art exhibit which consisted of a giant branch with some turquoise park railings, the metal spikes (freshly painted, for effect) merged with the branch’s flesh, as if the two had become one. Even if the object gashes and hurts it, a tree will embrace it and just keep on growing.

He knows all of this, even though he no longer has any idea who he is. What did they say his name was, again?

At last, a full scene comes back, like a bird returning to nest in his memory. It is an imprint of the exact moment he discovered his most treasured possession. The discovery feels significant. It wasn’t any old pen, it was the pen. Almost perfectly preserved, its plastic orange casing hardly faded at all. How settled it seemed in its woody fissure, like a child asleep in a cot. Nevertheless, it startled and shook him.

He replays the memory in as much detail as he can muster, and this time it fluctuates as if he is viewing the whole scene through ripples, underwater.

Twilight, with only a frail sliver of a moon for company. I am a trespasser, poking around the sawn-off remains in a sentimental goodbye gesture. The mighty trunk and severed branches are a dark, bony carcass sprawled over the whole garden. Tomorrow the workmen will be coming to chop them up and clear it all away.

To rip the pen out of its bed would be another sacrilege but I cannot let it go to landfill or a fire. So I attack the branch higher up in a bid to break off a segment. I tear at it frantically, scraping my palms and fingers raw to no avail. In despair, I try to drag the whole limb away but it’s too heavy. The moon is high above the rooftop by the time I realise what I need.

I crash back to the neighbouring house, burst in and yell: “Have you got a handsaw?”

The TV is on. She is in the armchair, facing it, and I can only see her grey curls peeping over the back. She starts to pull herself up.

Concerned for her arthritic limbs, I stop her with a few words. “No, don’t move, just tell me where it is.”

“There might be one in the potting shed, Leo. It’ll be rusty but –”

The rest of her sentence is wasted because I’m already out in her back shed with a torch, scanning the trowels, rusted secateurs, plant labels and terracotta pots. The handsaw is hanging from a cobwebby nail. I grab it and sneak back through the adjoining gate.

The darkness is thicker now, but I dare not use the torch for fear of discovery. With a flurry of hectic sawing, hacking and pulling, I manage to sever the precious chunk of wood, pen and all. My yelp of victory is too loud. I scuttle back next-door to examine my prize in the yellow light of the porch. I run my sore fingers over the pen, the oak sinews that knit it in place. Pen and oak. Oak and pen…

Leo tries to figure out what the memory is telling him. All his dim senses will provide is a connection between writing and trees: Something about how stories grow.

How the tiniest fragment of a thought can take root and sprout upwards towards the light, slowly gathering strength, putting out branches, becoming something momentous and magnificent. How life and love can, over time, envelop pain. And how even the pain itself can evolve; the scar tissue can be precious, can be wise, can tell its own stories.

2

Of all the cafés in all the towns in all the world Fran Armstrong has chosen this one. She has very good reasons. They make the best frappuccinos in Bath. She can sit and sun herself outside with a view of Abbey Green. And this is the precious spot where Callum first uttered the three little words she was aching to hear, words which she had immediately and whole-heartedly returned.

Basking in the memory, Fran settles at the table facing into the courtyard. May sunlight winks and flutters in the leaves of the ancient plane tree. Her drink is lavished with cream and a dripping spiral of nutty chocolate sauce, to sweeten the day. The time after finishing a novel is always tinged with loss and a sense of limbo; she calls it the ‘book-end-blues’. She has made it a rule to leave an interval of reflection, to let the story absorb into her being before starting on the next. A coffee shop always helps the process.

She’s about to get started when a Japanese couple hail her and ask if she could possibly take a photograph of them.

“Of course I can,” she answers, standing up again.

Out of everyone in the bustling vicinity, they have picked her. That always happens; she has that sort of face. She takes several photos, ensuring she hasn’t cut off anything important, passes the phone back to them and returns to her own photoshoot.

She positions the frappuccino and props her paperback against it, in the background a hint of honey-toned Georgian architecture and a splash of scarlet from a hanging basket of geraniums.

She is about to take the picture when her phone rings.

Her mother sounds excited. “Dad and I are hatching a plan,” she tells Fran without any preliminaries.

“Should I worry?”

Teasing has always been knitted into the fabric of Armstrong family life, and her mother concedes a quick snort of laughter before running on, as if the plan can’t possibly be contained for a moment longer. “We’re getting desperate to meet Callum, after everything you’ve said. How about you bring him here for a weekend? I know it’s a trek up from Bath to Hereford, but you can stay over and I’ll make my tasty pastry pinwheels.”

“That is blatant bribery.”

“I know. And it’s never yet been known to fail. We were thinking the last weekend of the month.”

Fran makes a few mental calculations. The pastry pinwheels might just tip the balance.

“I’ll ask. But you must promise to like him.”

“Whyever wouldn’t we? Assuming he really is as thoughtful and clever – and, of course, as dishy – as you say he is.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll broach it with him next time I see him.”

In theory it won’t be a problem, but it’s always delicate when people you love this much are introduced to each other. Logically her parents are bound to adore Callum, with his retro Tintin T-shirts (always a talking point) and his clean-shaven charm. However, they already resent him a little for claiming so much of her attention, and if they choose not to like him, he’ll realise straight away. It’s an unfortunate family trait that feelings are written large on all their faces.

And what if Callum doesn’t like them? Supposing he finds her father’s jokes too corny, her mother’s eagerness too intrusive?

       A ladybird has dropped onto the table from somewhere. It is struggling on its back, legs waving in desperation. Fran absently flips it over with her serviette.

“How’s the paying guest?” her mother asks.

“Oh, him? Yes, fine. He’s a Leonardo, no less!”

“Gosh. Italian?”

“No, I think not since his surname is Felkirk. And there’s something quintessentially English, almost Dickensian, about him.”

An image of her lodger drifts across Fran’s consciousness. His hair spikes upwards in red tufts and he wears thick, tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. His eyes are a warm hazel. His voice has an unusually warm timbre too, as if every topic enthrals and fascinates him. During their two conversations she has discovered he works at Balfour Haven, but she knows nothing more.

“He’s smiley and bubbly,” she tells her mother but, as she says it, she half-realises there is something else about Leonardo Felkirk, something crushed that lies under the surface. “He’s got a big, bouncy spaniel and brought in a load of potted plants, which are now sitting in my back yard.”

Her mother seems to interpret this as evidence of roguishness. “I hope he’s behaving?”

“He’s polite, doesn’t get in the way and hasn’t broken anything as far as I know, so all good so far.”

“I’m glad you have Callum to check up on you,” her mother tells her. “Even though we bought the flat to give you an extra income, I was ever so slightly paranoid about you opening it up to a strange man.”

Although she’d never admit it, Fran has been anxious as well. Especially since Leonardo Felkirk booked in for a full three weeks.

“Anyone who works in a care home has to be all right, don’t they? And I have a lock on my door. Anyway, can I call you back when I’m home? I have a photo to take before I can drink this Frappuccino.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say?”

Her mother promptly rings off.

The ladybird is crawling about the tablecloth, looking lost. Fran gently scoops it up on the corner of the serviette. She can’t just leave it on the ground to be trampled by all the passers-by, so she gets up again and walks it over to the tree. The leaves are too high up for her to reach, so she deposits it on the knobby bark of the huge trunk. It seems bemused for a moment, then opens its wings and flits up into the foliage.

At last Fran is able to take her photos and down her coffee. Unlike many book bloggers she isn’t a budding writer herself. Reading and reviewing, along with Callum, the Airbnb and her job at the Theatre Royal are enough to fill up every corner of her life.

She heads back past the array of exclusive boutiques, jewellers, cafés, florists, gift shops. On Pulteney Bridge she is swept up in a flow of tourists. Bath is, Fran has often told herself, the most beautiful place to live, but it can be impossibly busy at times.

As she turns the key in the lock, she hears barking inside the Airbnb. She hopes it isn’t going to be an issue with the neighbours.

Once upstairs, she kicks off her shoes and goes straight to her laptop. She yawns and types a few lines. ‘A compelling, exquisitely written debut’ isn’t good enough. She deletes ‘compelling’, and substitutes ‘compulsive’ but the sentence still looks trite and clichéd. How hard it is to produce review after review without using the same adjectives. Fran refuses to ask AI for help – she’s always suspected her brain will rot if it doesn’t get a regular work-out – but the noise below is shattering her concentration. She’s never heard the dog bark before. Leonardo Felkirk is normally very good about walking it.

The phone rings, and she snatches it up. Callum? Her mother again?

No. It’s an unknown number.

“Hello, you don’t know me, but my name is Roz Gilbert. I’m afraid I have some worrying news. It’s about Leonardo Felkirk.”

The Forest of Forgotten Stories is out 13th May 2027.