WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, my daughter, Harriet, would go missing in the back garden. She would disappear into the bushes, hide behind the sheds and clamber up the trees. One tree, a fat English oak, was her favourite. Its tumorous bulges and thick branches made for good climbing. I’d once offered to build her a tree house in it and she had looked at me in horror.
Once, when she was eight, she disappeared completely.
My wife and I had called several times into the garden but with no luck. It wasn’t unusual for Harriet to pretend she hadn’t heard our calls, so eventually, with her dinner getting cold on the table, I put on my boots and I marched out into the garden. I meant business.
Little boys and girls seem to think that their hiding places are deep dark secrets known only to them, but I knew all of Harriet’s favourite haunts. I knew that she sometimes squeezed behind my little hut and into the open crevice behind it. I knew that there was a hollow in the bushes behind the rose patch and that she gently crawled in to read her books. I knew that she loved to be in that fat English oak tree, high in its branches looking out and into other people’s gardens. So I visited each place, calling as I went, but with no luck. In desperation, I even checked places in which she never usually played.
As a parent, this is the worst thing that will ever happen to you. And when you look back at it, it’ll always be in fragments: we ran outside into the road and asked neighbours and passersby if they had seen her. We called the police. Night had fallen and my wife was crying. My forehead was slick with sweat. The entire neighbourhood was out with torches, walking up and down the streets. Then, after a couple of hours, she was suddenly there. Standing at our front gate, wondering what the commotion was.
‘Where have you been?’ my wife screamed at her, tears in salty ribbons down her cheeks. ‘We’ve been worried sick.’
I said nothing. I picked her up and held her tightly.
The police asked her a couple of questions, but no one could get the truth out of her.
‘I was in Selyador,’ she would say. ‘The Bird King says I must go back to help him save the Kingdom from evil. He says that a cancer plagues the land.’
‘Listen to me carefully,’ I responded. ‘You must promise me never to go back to – wherever it is you went. Do you hear me, Harriet?’
She heard me, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to return to her mythical kingdom. I told her that she may, but she must stay in my sights at all times.
Over the next couple of months, Harriet would continue to bring up her return to the fantastical Kingdom of Selyador, where a “Bird King” had requested our eight-year-old daughter for help. She would go into great detail about the funny characters she had met and the adventures she had been on. She spoke at length about Abisnian, who had told her that he was a Nightjar (I even had to look up what that was), and that he had found her to complete a prophecy. The intricacies of her tale were disturbing, often seeming far too realistic or meticulously detailed to be imagination. At times, I almost wondered if I was being close-minded, but I realised at once that the imagination of a child is unfathomable.
Many a time, I caught her near the old English oak and knocking at its wood, asking for Abisnian, but I was always there, watching, and nothing ever happened. She would climb into the tree and speak to the birds perched there as if they could talk back. My wife would tell her to stop her silly pretending.
As the years wore on, she grew older and lost interest in the garden. She lost herself instead in boys, cigarettes, TV and drink. She forgot all about the tree and her adventures. Eventually, she had a daughter of her own, Abigail, although the father was nowhere to be seen.
Harriet was 36 and Abigail 8 when they came to live with us. Harriet’s skin had been weathered by cancer and her hair wispy thin from chemo. Abigail was the spitting image of Harriet when she had been that age and her interest in the garden was just as fierce.
The garden was less plentiful now than it had been in the past. Lack of diligence and a waning passion were to blame. I had become old and easily exhausted. The rose bush rarely flowered these days and the old English oak tree had turned rotten. It still lived on, but a gaping hole had funnelled it out from its base and right up through the trunk until branches spread out above the lawn.
Abigail would run and play in the garden whilst Harriet watched her from the decking. Her smile was weak but loving. We watched as Abigail climbed inside the hollow tree and made her way up the trunk, her feet disappearing through the hole. And we watched and we waited, but she never emerged from the top.
Harriet got to her feet and her mouth gaped. Weak and unsteady, she grabbed hold of me and we walked over to the tree and we looked up inside, but Abigail wasn’t there.
‘Selyador,’ Harriet muttered. ‘It’s real.’
Our eyes met, and I couldn’t help but believe it must be true. Where had my granddaughter gone? How had she gone there? But the magic seemed to fade from Harriet’s eyes, and a moment later she had collapsed into my arms.
‘Call an ambulance,’ I shouted. ‘Call an ambulance.’
Someone must have, because minutes later my wife guided paramedics into our garden with a stretcher. I stayed in the garden at the base of the tree whilst my wife went with our daughter to the hospital. I would wait here for Abigail to return from that mystical place in the tree, while my wife would sit and hold our daughter’s hand, wishing her back to health. Hours passed.
‘What’s wrong, Grandad?’
At the top of the tree, where the branches split and parted from the trunk, Abigail sat, dirt smudged on her cheeks and a scratch down the length of her temple. I wiped away at the tears creased in my eyes and slowly got to my feet.
‘Where’ve you been, Abi?’ I asked.
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ she said, plainly.
‘You never know, dear. I just might.’
‘Well,’ she said, and rolled her eyes. ‘I went to a place called Sel-ar-dor.’ She pronounced it carefully, mindfully. ‘I didn’t expect it to be there, of course. I’ve never been inside a tree before, though. Are all trees like that?’
‘I don’t think so, darling. What did you see in Selyador?’
‘Sel-ar-dor,’ she repeated. ‘It wasn’t a very nice place.’
‘Oh?’
‘There were lots of machines and a lot of smoke. And this really big dirty bird called Abyssinian. He was really mean. He told me I was never to come back again.’
‘That is strange. And did you hear about a Bird King?’
‘Have you been to Selardor too? I heard about the King. They say he is dying of a strange disease. That it started a long time ago, but it is too late to save him now. I thought it was very sad, but that’s when Abyssinian told me to leave.’
‘I’ve never been, but I heard it was a magical, beautiful place,’ I said.
‘It’s not any more. One bird said that a little girl just like me was meant to save Selardor many, many years back. But she never came back like she promised. I don’t think she’ll ever come back,’ Abigail said with a frown.
‘No, my dear. I think you might be right.’