Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Orchard Close ·
It Burns for the Awake
At midnight the hawthorn hedge of Orchard Close lights every thorn, and the district cannot agree whether it is lit for the sleepless or for the sleepwalkers.
- status: disputed
You will hear two versions of this in Orchard Close, and the close keeps both the way it keeps rain — without appearing to make an effort.
The hedge is a hawthorn, both sides of the one long lane, planted the year the trams came, waist-high and then higher, and for most of the week it is only a hedge. But after midnight, on the dark months, every thorn carries a pinprick of cold white light, steady, not guttering, and the lane shows you its own feet without a torch.
The first version is the Survey's, and the Survey has numbers. A man from the department came with a folder and walked the lane after dark for a season, took readings, and wrote it up fair-copied so that each page had its carbons under it. What the Survey found was this: the brightness of the hedge matches the lit bedroom windows of the close. The more of the district lies awake in bed, the brighter the thorns. He put the correlations in a table and signed the table, and to this day there are people in the close who will show you the table if you stand still long enough, and say that the hedge is company, that it marks the sleepless hours, that it burns for the ones who are awake in the dark. The brightness peaked, the Survey says, in the week of the harvest failure, and in the week of the great cull, when the close did not sleep at all — and there is nobody in Orchard Close who will argue with those two weeks. They remember the hedge giving off heat like a radio left on.
The second version is the lane's. The lane says: the light is not company for anybody in a bed. The lane says the hedge burns for the walker — the sleepwalker, the one whose sleep has got out through the front door without them paying for it. Over the stretch the walker is passing, the thorns go brightest; ahead of them they burn; behind they fade. The hedge paces them the whole length of the lane, patient as a lamplighter, and when the walker reaches their own door and it shuts, all the thorns go out together, that minute, like a clerk's pen coming down. The lane's rules are still kept by the people who keep lanes: you do not wake a sleepwalker inside this close, whatever you were taught in the city about waking sleepwalkers. You follow the bright stretch. You keep your voice for indoors. You see them to their own door, and you wait for the click, and then it is over and you go home through a lane gone black, saying nothing to anybody, because the tale says the walker must not be told the route they took, or they will take it again with their eyes open.
Steep the haws from the glowing stretch, the lane says, and give the tea to whoever in your house cannot sleep: it eases them, without dulling what they dream. That much the two versions agree on, which the close finds interesting.
And then there are the two nights. Twice, on nights when every window in the close was lit — every one, the whole district standing at its windows or sitting up in bed, nobody asleep to burn for either — the hedge went out anyway, all together, in the small hours, while the district was awake to see it happen. Both mornings after, there was a ring of pressed grass in the lane, as if a very large animal had lain down there for an hour. The Survey man called it deposition and put a page number on it. The lane has no word for it, which for a lane that keeps its own versions is saying a great deal. The dog would not go near the ring, and the dog knew both tellings.
You will get the Survey at the bus shelter, from anyone carrying a folder, and you will get the lane's version at the allotment gate after dark, where the rule about sleepwalkers is treated as something between etiquette and law, and where the tellers do not sit down at the Survey's fire and are not asked. Both are told as certain. Only one can be the whole of it, or so the district maintains, which maintains nothing else this firmly — and the question the two tellings leave standing out in the lane with the light going is which of them the hedge keeps itself alight for: the ones lying awake in the dark listening for the gate, or the ones already out in it with their eyes shut, walking. The Survey keeps its answer in the folder. The close keeps telling its version, all weathers, at the allotment gate, to anyone who has ever stood at a window at three in the morning watching for somebody to come home.