Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detritivores. He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom, briefly pauses as a smashed fibreglass bath, stumbles and rips off the mask, feels his face and finds it made of long-buried tannic acid bottles. Victorian rubbish.

Tetchy Papa Toothwort should never sleep in the afternoon; he doesn't know who he is.

He wants to kill things, so he sings. It sounds slow-nothing like tarmac bubbles popping in a heatwave. His grin takes a sticky hour. Cheering up, he chatters in the voice of a cultured fool to the dry papery wings and under-bark underlings, to the marks he left here last year, to the mice and larks, voles and deer, to the quaint memory of himself as cyclically reliable, as part of the country curriculum. He slips through one grim costume after another as he rustles and trickles and cusses his way between trees. He walks a few paces as an engineer in a Day-Glo vest. He takes a step in a dinner suit, then an Anderson shelter, then a tracksuit, then a rusted jeep bonnet, then a leather skirt, but nothing works. He pauses as an exhaust pipe, then squirms into the shape of a rabbit snare, then a pissed-on nettle into pink-strangled lamb. He plucks a blackbird from the sky and cracks open the yellow beak. He peers into the ripped face as if it were a clean pond. He flings the bird across the forest stage, stands up woodlot bare, bushy, and stamps his spalted feet. His body is a suit of bark-armour with the initials of long-dead teenage lovers carved in the surface. He clomps through the wood, wide awake and hungry for his listening.

Only one thing can cheer up crotchety Toothwort and that's his listening.

He slides across the land at precisely the speed of dusk and arrives at his favourite spot. The village sits up pretty to greet him, sponged in half-light. He climbs into the kissing gate. He is invisible and patient and about the size of a flea. He sits still.

He listens.

Here it is.

The boy.

It would have the head of a dolphin and the wings of a peregrine, and it would be a storm-warning beast, watching the weather while we sleep.

Dead Papa Toothwort hugs himself with diseased larch arms and dribbles cuckoo spit down his chin. He grins.The head of a dolphin and the wings of a peregrine! Surgical yearnings invade him, he wants to chop the village open and pull the child out. Extract him. Young and ancient all at once, a mirror and a key.A storm-warning beast, watching the weather ...He listens to the boy for a while, his bedtime thoughts, his goodnight words to his mother, his waking mind trickling into visionary sleep. Then Dead Papa Toothwort leaves his spot and wanders off, chuckling, jangling in his various skins, wearing a tarpaulin gloaming coat, drunk on the village, ripe with feeling, tingling with thoughts of how one thing leads to another again and again, time and again, with no such thing as an ending

LANNY'S MUM

In came the sound of a song, warm on his creaturely breath.

My singing child,

bringing me gifts.

A second or two before I realise it's not him.

Lanny?

LANNY'S DAD

I sit at work in the city and the thought of him existing a sixty-minute train ride from me, going about his day in the village, carrying his strange brain around, seems completely impossible. It seems unlikely, when I'm at work, that we had a child and it is Lanny. If my parents were here they'd surely say, No Robert, you've dreamt him. Children aren't like that. Go back to sleep. Go back to work.

His school report said, 'Lanny has an innate gift for social cohesion. He will often calm a fraught classroom with a single well-timed joke or song.' I see, objectively, that this must be the case. It sounds like Lanny. But where did his gifts come from? Do I have the same gifts? What or who is supposed to manage and regulate Lanny and his gifts? Oh fuck, it's us. Who can have children and not go completely mad?

'Lanny is especially gifted with language and his World Book Day Tarka the Otter acrostic was shown to the headmaster and given an outstanding plus-stage gold elm sticker.'

What? What are any of you talking about? I want a sticker.

PETE

At that time I was into finding and cleaning the skeletons of dead things. Mostly birds. I would pull them apart, coat them in gold leaf, reassemble them wrongly and suspend them from wire frames. Little mobiles of badly made birds. I'd done a dozen or so. The gallery wanted something to show. To sell.

I was also taking casts of different barks. I was setting them in boxes with scraps of text.

Some drawings. Some half-decent prints. Sets. Quiet stuff.

She came down to the studio one morning and brought me a branch with two perfect arms. She'd seen a carved man I'd done.

We'd gone from chatting in the street now and then to her popping in for a tea once or twice a week. Sometimes with Lanny, sometimes alone. They'd only lived in the village a year or two.

She'd seen a rough-cut man I'd done, a Christ without a cross, and she'd seen the possibility of another in this fallen branch.

You are most kind, I said. Pleasure, Pete, she said.

I liked her. Good for a natter. Warm, with a good eye for things. I often showed her my work and she had interesting things to say. She made me laugh, but she knew when to piss off. Seemed to know when I wasn't sociable.

She was an actor, had done plays, a bit of TV. She told stories about all that. About all those arseholes in that business. It never sounded a million miles from the art world back in the day.

She didn't miss the acting work but she got bored sometimes, when Lanny went to school, when her husband went in to the city. She was writing a book, she said. A murder thriller.

Sounds bloody horrid, I said.

It is very bloody and horrid, she said, but thrilling.

Often she would sit with me while I worked. She'd bought one of my pieces, without me knowing, from the gallery. One of my good big reliefs. I said I would have given her mate's rates if...