Gene McCaffrey came from a long line of soothsayers. His mother, Maureen, read the tea leaves.
“Not that I need them,” she’d say. “The leaves are a prop. You’ve got to add just the right amount of bullshit, so as not to scare the punters.”
She specialised in suspicious wives and her predictions were remarkably accurate. “Sandra should cover your shift Wednesday afternoon. You’ll catch him next door,” she might decree, or “I see the letter H. His receptionist perhaps – Helen, Harriet?”
Inevitably, her clients would go on to confirm the worst. Maureen McCaffrey never missed.
“Responsible for more broken homes than drink,” Auntie Irene, his mother’s twin, sniped.
She was standing half in, half out of the back door, blowing smoke half in, half out of the kitchen. She leant against the doorframe, her elbow resting on her hip, bunching her tabard.
“I can’t help what the gift sees!” Maureen replied.
“Gift?! Gift is right. It’s all laid out for you on a platter. Hardly psychic if they’re all at it. There’s no good men left in Cheshire.” “Don’t listen to her,” Maureen patted Gene’s hand reassuringly, “she’s just mardy because she doesn’t have the gift… or a fella.”
“I’m better off with neither.” Irene dragged at her cigarette and blasted the smoke out the corner of her mouth. “Two short roads to the nut house.”
“Don’t be bitter, Irene! It’ll give you wrinkles… more wrinkles.” Maureen winked at her son.
“I’m not bitter! It’s the truth! Sure, go and look at Grandad if you don’t believe me! Nuttier than squirrel shite—”
“Language in front of the boy!”
“—blathering about angry trees all day. And we both know he sent Ma’ round the bend with it. Men and psychics, see? Crazy makers! Promise you’ll become neither, Genie!”
Gene peered at the constellation of soggy leaves inside his mother’s fortune cup. He prodded it pensively.
“We don’t all get the gift, then?” he asked.
“Of course you’ll get the gift,” his mother reassured him, scowling at her sister. “I didn’t get mine until I was 10. You’re months off yet. Look what you’ve done now, Irene. You’ve scared the poor lad!”
“I’ve scared him? How about you with your gypsy routine? We’re not even Romany! You’re confusing the boy.”
“He’s got to learn the tricks of the trade. We come from a very long line of soothsayers! There might be Romany in there somewhere.”
As the sisters squabbled, Gene excused himself and went into the parlour where Grandad dwelled in an old “mahogany” armchair, its peach tweed cushions worn white in places.
Light streamed in through the nets, gilding the dust particles that danced here and there.
Beneath cirrus cloud eyebrows, Grandad McCaffrey stared unblinking into the middle distance, his wizened fingers gripping the wooden arms as though he might rise at any moment.
“Grandad?” said Gene, peering around the door frame at the old man. “I
think I had a premonition.”
“The trees! The trees are coming,” Grandad muttered.
“Only I hope it wasn’t a premonition.” Gene ventured a little further into the room. “It was this morning and I— well, I’m scared.”
“The town! They’ll take back the town!”
“I woke up… in a…” Gene glanced down the hall into the kitchen where his mother and aunt were still at each other’s throats. “Hospital…” he said at last in hushed tones. “And there was a doctor, and he says ‘Don’t worry sir, we’ll take care of you,’ or something. And then he grins and says ‘We just want your blood!’ and comes at me with a needle.”
“Beware the trees!”
“I managed to fight him off and get away through a door, but it’s not the outside, it’s just an out-house? But it’s inside, you see? There’s a toilet and a sink, and there’s a mirror on the wall. I see my face in it and I’m old, as old as you, Grandad!”
“The trees, the trees will take back the town! Beware! The trees! The trees will take the town!”
“Then some people jump on me and drag me back to the room, and I could see myself screaming in the mirror. ‘But I’m only nine!’ I’m screaming. ‘I’m only nine! Where’s me mam?! Where’s me mam?!’ But no one will listen… and then I wake up.”
As if this last phrase were an incantation, Grandfather McCaffrey’s eyes changed. He looked directly at Gene aware and alert.
“Genie?!” he said, suddenly lucid.
“Yes, Grandad, it’s me!” Gene staggered back a step into the hall and was about to call for his mother when the old man began tremulously to rise.
“Gene, what have you done, lad?” he said. “You don’t belong here. You need to go back.”
“Grandad!” Gene cried as the old man sprang from the chair. In the next instant he was looming over the boy, glaring into his eyes, wringing his
collar.
“Send him back!” old man McCaffrey wailed. “Genie, can you hear me?! Beware the trees, lad! Beware when the trees reclaim the town!”
***
As the decades came and went neither his or his Grandad’s premonition came to pass. Gene’s fear of prophecy and his faith in the family gift dwindled. The trauma of his mother and aunt wrestling with their father – trying to subdue him – faded, and soon all that remained of it was the distant miasma of fag ash, incense, and urine.
As Gene grew, so did the surrounding conurbation – from a handful of buildings housing railway workers and the staff of a bustling station, to a vibrant market town, pulsing with music and commerce. Eventually, as Gene began to decline in his old age, the town followed suit. The chain stores that had replaced family businesses were in turn usurped by charity and pawn shops. Eventually the buildings were abandoned altogether – familiar monuments lost to time.
“Open up!” Gene grumbled, wrapping his cane against the graffitied shutter. “I’ve to cash my pension, you can’t keep it from me!”
“How many times have I told you, sir?” Came a beleaguered voice from behind.
It was a gaunt young man with intricately ripped skinny jeans and several gold embellishments on his fingers, neck, and teeth. He was standing arms folded in the doorway of a vape shop.
“Post office is closed down,” he said. “You can use the one on Goddard Street at McColl’s.”
“This is my post office!” Gene made a shooing motion towards the young man with his cane. “I’ve been coming here forever, I aught to know if it
closed down.”
“It’s been closed for years, you old—”
The young man crossed himself and whispered the words “Sorry, Babcia” to the sky. Composing himself, he started again.
“Just look at the state of it. Does it look like they’ll be delivering any letters or cashing cheques any time soon?”
Gene took a step back, fumbling around his breast pocket for his wire framed glasses. When his eyes eventually focussed, he dropped his cane and stumbled back, clutching his chest.
“Are you alright?” The young man asked, seemingly in slow motion.
Gene stared down the street at a long line of derelict storefronts. The young man’s vape shop was the only business left. Each of the vacant
buildings had gone to ruin, each overrun by weeds and other verdure. Finally, from the roof of the old post office, clearly visible, was a small copse of young saplings.
“The trees will take the town!” Gene cried as he tripped backwards on a pothole and into unconsciousness.
***
When Gene came to, stooping over him was a young male nurse. A thin, wispy moustache stretched across his practised smile.
“Welcome back, sir,” he crooned pleasantly. “You’ve had a nasty fall I’m afraid. We’re going to take some bloods and make sure everything is
alright.” With this, the nurse began to prepare a fresh syringe. At the sight of the glinting needle, Gene bolted from the hospital bed.
“Sir?!” cried the nurse, as the little tin tray of vials and cotton pads clattered across the tiled floor.
There were doors at either side of the ward. Gene knew from his vision that one led to a bathroom, the one to his right, he thought. He couldn’t quite remember.
Think!
He staggered left, still dizzy from the fall.
This must be the exit!
He shuffled towards it, fighting concussion, the nurse and now a brace of security guards pursuing. They were almost upon him when he reached the door. He opened it, and was instantly struck by the strong scents of cigarette smoke, incense, and urine.
Before him was not the bathroom he had seen in his premonition, nor any other part of the hospital. Instead, a copse of sapling Alder. Compelled by fear, he pushed through to a clearing, where an old man was sitting on a faded arm chair, streamed in sunlight.
In the distance Gene could hear his mother and her sister, both long since passed, squabbling in the kitchen of his childhood home. The perfumes of the past intensified, fragrant and odorous. The old man’s clouded eyes cleared.
“Genie?”