In the Woods

by Tana French

“Probably just somebody’s nasty black poodle. But I’ve always wondered…What if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn’t worth it?” —Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland’s subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur’s palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue.

Fantastic first lines

The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises—rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.

The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her.

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

Humans are feral and ruthless; this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.

She was wearing combat trousers and a wine-colored woollen sweater with sleeves that came down past her wrists, and clunky runners, and I put this down as affectation: Look, I’m too cool for your conventions. The spark of animosity this ignited increased my attraction to her. There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me.

What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely.

All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals’ rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.

She doesn’t approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps.

In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

"We think about mortality, so little, these days."

Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

More on how our culture in this day and age reacts to death.

I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;

The terrible thing about the sitting room was how normal it was, how straight out of some satire on suburbia. Lace curtains, a flowery four-piece suite with those little covers on the arms and headrests, a collection of ornate teapots on top of a sideboard, everything polished and dusted to an immaculate shine: it seemed—victims’ homes and even crime scenes almost always do—far too banal for this level of tragedy.

Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

Homicidal satanic cults are the detective’s version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,”

Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard.

In the early stages of an investigation, unless you have an obvious suspect, all you can do is find out as much about the victim’s life as possible and hope something sets off alarm bells;

We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened.

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. To an outside eye there is basically no difference between the two main parties, which occupy identical self-satisfied positions on the far right of the spectrum, but many people are still passionate about one or the other because of which side their great-grandfathers fought on during the Civil War, or because Daddy does business with the local candidate and says he’s a lovely fella. Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonized is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.

On Irish politics. Very interesting.

I coped, in the grand tradition of children everywhere, by retreating into my imagination.

Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had—simply by surviving—become a freak of nature.

There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that isn’t readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a level it becomes almost invisible.

Even after all this time I knew there were rooms inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone enter. There were questions she wouldn’t answer, topics she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a figure skater.

“Exactly. If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.”

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”

I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.

I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better—Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos—so that when I finally resurfaced...

We developed an intense, unhealthy relationship with caffeine and forgot what it was like not to be exhausted.

I wanted to say something to her, something wise and profound about how few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind, something that she could remember when she was alone and sleepless and uncomprehending in her room; but I couldn’t find the words.

Cassie has a mind like a cloverleaf flyover: it can spin off in wildly divergent directions and then, by some Escherian defiance of dimension, swoop dizzily back to the crux.

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography.

The truism says it’s against all the odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling.

These are stories I like to think about, small bright currency and not without value; but above all that, and underlying everything we did, she was my partner. I don’t know how to tell you what that word, even now, does to me; what it means.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.

Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.

Okay I've fallen in love with this book.

I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.

Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.

Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open.

All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space.

“Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.