Lily enjoys the walks in the park even if she never says so. We stick to a routine. The fresh air is important to me, the sunlight, the trees, they lift me. Though the house is a far more positive place now than it ever was.

  Today, something feels wrong. I don’t get the usual lift that I feel when I go for a walk. My soul is not being fed by the environment. I stop walking and look up. A tree is emitting an orange brown colour, as though it’s on fire, but there is no fire. It’s not the usual earthy brown that you want to inhale into your lungs; it’s rust-coloured, and it’s not the only tree on metaphorical fire. I look around and find the same rust colour above other trees in the woods.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Lily asks, unable to turn around to see me.

  I continue walking, faster now I’m on a mission. I head straight for the park warden’s office.

  ‘Where are we going? Bus stop’s the other way.’

  ‘There’s something wrong with the trees,’ I explain.

  She tuts and sighs.

  The park warden answers the door with a cup of tea in his hand. He puts his hat on.

  ‘Hiya, love.’

  ‘Hello, could I speak to the person in charge of the gardens?’

  ‘Lose something, did ya?’ He puts his mug down and grabs a set of keys. ‘Lost and found is just down here.’

  ‘No, I’d like to speak to somebody about the trees.’

  ‘That’d be Laurence Metcalf, the head gardener.’

  ‘Where can I find him?’

  ‘He’s not here. He has a team of gardeners though, they’re dotted all around the park. Do you’ve a question about the trees, love?’

  He’s beginning to view me as a simpleton.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, reversing and moving away with Lily. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What’s going on, Alice?’ she asks.

  ‘The trees aren’t well.’

  ‘What do you know about trees?’ she says with a snort. ‘Honestly, Alice.’

  I write to Laurence Metcalf, who, to be fair to him, responds that he has carried out an examination just three months ago of the trees in the area that I’m describing, and they’re healthy.

  I write back and tell him to examine them again. I’m no tree surgeon but the trees are sick. I can’t hear them moaning in pain but I can see their pain. The rust runs from their roots to the tips of the tree, twisted around each other like braids. They’re sick to their roots and it’s billowing out from the top like fire.

  Despite the energy that particular park sucks from me, I continue to walk through the grounds with Lily. I press my hand to the bark of the sick trees, hoping to give them some comfort.

  ‘You look like a right wally, Alice – stop it, someone’s coming,’ she’d say.

  Until one day, probably six months later, we can’t walk down our usual path. Pedestrians are being diverted due to the felling of infected trees.

  I see orange ribbons on surrounding trees.

  ‘Ash dieback,’ Lily reads the sign. ‘A fungal disease.’ She looks up at me in surprise. ‘Well.’

  Then a chainsaw starts up.

  ‘They’re cutting them down,’ she says. ‘Ah Alice, you’ve only gone and got them cut down.’

  ‘They couldn’t be helped,’ I say. ‘At least they’ll be out of pain.’

  ‘Cut me down.’

  A fierce growl wakes me up. I fell asleep on the couch watching a marathon of Homes Under the Hammer. She’s suddenly beside me, in my face; how she managed to get so close to me, I’ll never know. She must have pulled herself along like a slug.

  ‘What?’

  Her breath reeks of alcohol.

  ‘Cut me down,’ she says again. ‘Put me out of my misery like you did with them trees.’

  I look at her, wide awake now, and see her colours spiralling.

  ‘Please,’ she says, nails digging into my skin.

  ‘Did you forget to take your pills?’ I ask, standing up and trying to regain control of the situation. The two I placed on the table are gone.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What about the lithium?’

  If she doesn’t take that then her manic episodes can worsen. The lithium is the mood stabiliser. It’s happened before. The last manic episode was brought on by the antidepressant and they had to prescribe an anti-psychotic medicine to manage the mania. But I don’t want it to get that far. I need to put the fire out now.

  The lithium is gone too.

  ‘Stop it,’ she says, grabbing my arm, gently this time, almost massaging me, pleading with me. ‘Please, Alice. End it for me. End it for both of us.’

  I reach out to Dave the following day. He talks endlessly of support groups for carers, tea and coffee mornings that I don’t have the remotest interest in joining, but maybe I’m failing as a carer. When the person you are caring for no longer possesses the desire to live, surely it means you’re not caring enough. I can recognise the pain in a tree more than I can in my own mother. I’m blind to it; the very pain that brought my senses to life is now the only pain I no longer see.

  There’s a carers’ meeting in the local library. Coffee and chocolate muffins, he informs me with lots of exclamation marks in his text message. Lily’s right, it’s sad that chocolate muffins have a young man so excited.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lily asks as I turn into the library and wheel her up the long winding ramp.

  ‘In here for a minute,’ I say. I have decided not to give her warning because she has just as much interest in this kind of thing as I do.

  ‘What for? A book?’

  We take the lift to the second floor and as I push the door open into the gathering and we see the gang in front of us, she throws me a look of loathing.

  Dave is super welcoming; it makes me cringe, and I don’t know why I can’t open up to his genuine warmth. It makes me fold in on myself in the same way a sales assistant in the Disney store makes me feel. Is it because it’s not real, or is it because it really is?

  He reminds me of a children’s TV presenter, so upbeat and full of cheer, so innocent, so kind and simple, and yet his life is anything but simple. He cares for Christopher with such confidence, reaching into his eye socket to remove sleep, taking fluff out of his hair like they’re two gorillas. Christopher is hugely overweight, and I don’t know how Dave physically does it, but I watch the colours between them, transferring and mingling more than I’ve ever seen with two people before. It’s fascinating, so intermingled it looks like they’re conjoined twins.

  Dave’s base colour is grey, but with Christopher he sends his pink energy out. It throbs like a heartbeat, a living, breathing entity. Christopher takes it, adds his own pink mist to it, makes the throbbing heart bigger and sends it back. Dave adds to it and passes it on. It’s the opposite of a game of pass the parcel; when the music stops, an extra layer is added at each turn.

  Christopher wants to hug me. ‘Christopher loves hugs. Is that okay?’ Dave asks, not expecting me to say no.

  But I don’t love hugs and Lily knows this. She watches with a twisted smile on her face, curious to see what will happen.

  I take a few steps back. ‘No, I’m sorry, I … don’t do hugs,’ I mumble, and find myself face to face with a young woman named Beatrice, who’s caring for her aunt and who launches into a militant rant about how under-represented and underappreciated carers are. Her stress is coming out of her in buckets, and droplets of colours hang around her, like rainbows caught inside the rain.

  Christopher’s energy colour movements are like a jellyfish, the smooth in and out movement. Perhaps it’s awareness coming and going, Christopher moving from knowing himself to drifting to another space. It has no rhythm, just in and out at its own tempo, then it holds for a moment. Christopher is here; he’s engaged with Dave, with the chocolate muffin, he eats it, attention solely on the muffin, then slowly but surely the jellyfish flexes and he’s gone again. Though who’s to say whether he’s gone or whether he’s merely arrived someplace else that we don’t have access to. Perhaps I should have hugged him, to figure out where that place is, or what it feels like.

  By the time we leave, my head is hot and I’m sweating. I can smell my armpit sweat and I hope no one else can.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I say, pushing Lily out. ‘We won’t go there again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going back again,’ she says to my surprise. ‘He was a nice man, Gregory. His wife has dementia. She didn’t say boo. Just sat there with a smile like she knew what she was doing, but you could tell she hadn’t a clue. Were the muffins free?’

  ‘Eh yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Good,’ she says with a cackle, one appearing from inside her hoody.

  ‘Hey, Alice,’ Dave says behind us, out of breath. Christopher isn’t with him. He looks different without him. Like a teacher outside of school, a police officer out of uniform, or seeing anyone you know in their swimwear.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ I thought we did talk. ‘Sorry about the hugging thing. I just don’t do it.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he says chirpily, as if I’m the tenth person he’s met that day who has a phobia of hugs.

  I look to Lily and away again, wishing I could have a moment of privacy.

  ‘I was wondering if we could meet up again? Just you and me? Christopher has a day centre on Wednesdays. He goes at noon for two hours a week, if you want to catch up then?’

  His face is flushed, he’s so bright and eager. I can’t bring myself to look in Lily’s direction even though she’s got her back to me. I can only imagine the look on her face. If I let go of the chair she could roll down the ramp, all the way down, onto the path, out onto the road.

  ‘Eh …’ I look down at the back of Lily’s head. ‘Yeah, I just need to check that out first,’ I say awkwardly.

  ‘Sure, yeah. No problem. You’ve got my number so just text, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He grins, baring two dimples in his cheeks. ‘Cool.’

  I don’t like to touch people. I don’t like people to touch me. Which makes sex difficult, but not impossible.

  If they want me, really want me, I can get lost in their desire, confuse theirs for mine and touch becomes okay. But if their desire is desperate, as Dave’s is, sad and lonely and desperate, hungry and greedy, panic-stricken and conscious of time, then it does not spark joy in me. Like somebody breaking a diet to wolf down a slice of cake. That sad, lonely want comes through to me and leaves me feeling every morsel of it. Not an aphrodisiac; it’s like I’m doing them a favour as opposed to being desired.

  It matters.

  When you’re naked with a stranger, allowing them to go to places only you can allow them to go, those things matter.

  He kisses me a few times hungrily, greedily. I let him touch me a few times. He grabs and pulls, pinches and squeezes as if he’s running out of time. Then when the touching has brought it to where it needs to be, I explain the rules. No more touching.

  He nods and lies back, hands to himself. I take over.

  ‘I want to start rehab,’ she announces the following day, suddenly.

  I have a thousand questions but I don’t ask. She did a minimal amount of rehab at the beginning, enough to learn to crawl. I suppose that was no small feat, but while they said she would never walk again, the physio wanted her to continue. He was a young positive lad who insisted nothing was impossible – apart from actually getting her to continue to do rehab, it turns out. I’m happy she’s made this decision, because if she wants to walk, it means she wants to live.

  I receive a letter from Laurence Metcalf, the head gardener at the Ormsby Estate and Private Gardens. He thanks me for letting him know about the trees. He says they re-examined them and found ash dieback, a highly destructive disease of ash trees caused by a fungal species known as Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. He tells me that the gardens have been accepted for an ash dieback replanting scheme and they have begun the process of clearing the ground, removing all leaf litter, and replanting an alternative species to ash. He thanks me for my recognition of the trees’ disease and wonders how I knew at such an early stage, even before the experts? He encloses a membership card to the Ormsby Estate and Private Gardens, which allows me five years’ free access as a token of his sincerest gratitude. A thank you from the trees, he says.

  Green potted plants line every windowsill of the house. I haven’t killed any. Vera lives on, watching the empire grow, and my slow, increasingly competent progress in the back garden.

  ‘Feels like we’re living in a jungle,’ Lily says, on more than one occasion.

  She never forgets birthdays. For all her shortcomings over the years, her dark moods and disappearances, she would always remember our birthdays. Usually it was a birthday card with a fiver inside. But this year, on my twenty-fourth birthday, she surprises me.

  When I come downstairs, she’s already up and dressed, in her wheelchair, sitting with the front door wide open.

  ‘What are you doing? It’s freezing in here.’

  ‘Waiting for Ian. He was supposed to be here an hour ago,’ she says, fuming.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ I glance at the kitchen table: there’s no envelope where there usually is one for the birthday person to collect. I genuinely believe that she has forgotten my birthday, and then I remind myself I should be too old to care.

  ‘No. Ah, here he is!’

  Uncle Ian pulls up outside in his minivan.

  ‘Late as usual,’ she shouts out the door as he climbs down, flustered.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he says. ‘Where do you want them? Outside?’

  ‘No, in here.’

  ‘In the house?’

  ‘Yeah, would you hurry up? I told you eight o’clock.’

  ‘Traffic, Lily – Jesus!’ he says, opening the back doors of the van. He walks towards us with a tray of flowers and sees me. ‘Hiya, love.’

  ‘Give them to Alice,’ she says. ‘They’re for her birthday. I’m putting the kettle on, want a cuppa?’

  ‘Yeah, go on. Happy birthday, Alice.’

  ‘They’re not from him,’ she calls from the kitchen. ‘Ian, come in and fill the kettle, will you?’

  He rolls his eyes at me and scurries to the kitchen. ‘I thought you asked me for a cuppa and now I’m the one making it.’

  ‘Well, I can’t reach, can I?’

  ‘You should get lower counters.’

  ‘Want to pay for them for me?’

  They bicker back and forth while I stand in the living room with a tray of beautiful red and pink flowers.

  ‘Geraniums,’ she says suddenly, and I look up to see her watching me. ‘For your garden.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, through the lump that’s formed in my throat.

  On Sundays we visit Ollie.

  He’s in Mountjoy Prison with over five hundred inmates. He’s filled out over the years, moved from gawky teen to young man, lean and muscular because his favourite thing to do is to work out at the prison gym. His acne is bad, nothing he can do about the quality of food. He’s had opportunities to learn by having access to classroom learning, but he’s avoided all of that since moving to the men’s prison, saying what could be worse than school in jail. He has coped well in prison and this concerns me.

  He talks of his current job in the laundry.

  ‘You’ll be well trained for when you come home,’ Lily says.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere near your dirty knickers,’ he says, and they both kind of smile, as ever sharing the same destructive, weird humour.

  He asks her about her chair and her back.

  She tells him how horrible it is.

  They talk about how bad the weather is, so grey and cold.

  She never discusses our lovely walks, our routine, our new meetings with new friends, how she’s improving with each session at physio, how she can pull herself along on the bars with no chair. She doesn’t bring any light in with her for him. You may as well be in here, is the projected message, you’re not missing out on anything out there. You could say that she is doing this for him; maybe she would say that if I asked her, but I don’t think so. I think they have always bonded over what is collectively crap and dark about this world.

  The only thing I can ever think to tell him is about Gospel. How he’s playing and how the team are doing in the league. I don’t even speak to Gospel, I haven’t since the day we said goodbye for good, but I use whatever quotes I can glean from him in the press or on TV, things I hear from commentators, other players, coaches and managers.

  Ollie doesn’t want books, he’s not interested in studying, he’s counting down the days until he gets out. I remember visiting him in juvenile prison those first few weeks; he was counting up the days until the halfway point of three years and four months, and then he was going to start counting down.

  ‘He seems all right,’ Lily always says when we leave, and she’s right. He does seem okay. Prison life seems to suit him. He’s with a crew of lads that have his back and he has theirs. He seems to enjoy scheming and planning for the hell of it, concentrating on petty issues instead of seeing the world as a bigger place, or of seeing a bigger place for him in it.

  I told her after the first few visits that he was on something, but she didn’t want to know about it. ‘Stop it, Alice,’ she’d snapped.

  So I stopped. But he didn’t.

  I would be happy not to visit Ollie, and he obviously feels the same about me, but Lily physically needs me to go with her. It’s not an easy journey in a wheelchair, she would never make it through on her own. I hold my breath inside as much as I can. It’s stuffy. It smells. All the bodies clustered together, sad, scared, all the worst and lowest versions of people in the room.

  I’m thankful for the physical distancing from everyone, but the fear and despair hangs in the air: who’s had a bad night, a bad week, who is dreading the walk back to the cells to hear those doors bang closed and lock. Sometimes there’s an air of excitement to see Daddy, sometimes there is so much love in the room you could almost forget where you are. But I don’t. The orange-brown coloured fog above the prison doesn’t just carry the energies of the men locked away that day but all those who have been incarcerated over centuries. It is a building of bad light and bad energy, of rust and rot.