Noticeboard

There’s a noticeboard out in the woods. It isn’t too far from the main road, really – it’s just most people breeze past at sixty. They don’t notice the dark rectangle of mossy wood poking between the birches.

I first saw it when there was an accident. Some drunk had flipped his car, somehow getting thrown out and partially trapped underneath it. A real mess. Once it was cleaned up, the police started letting drivers filter through. I remember looking out of the window in the queue and there it was, like the council had put it up years ago.

There wasn’t any path nearby, if that’s what you are thinking. Nobody wanted to walk their dogs that close to such a busy road, among other things, and even if they did they’d have to hike through a mile or two of poorly maintained woodland to get there. It was just a…nothing place. The kind of place you go past on the way to somewhere else, somewhere more important, somewhere where the people are.

So why a blank noticeboard in a place that nobody thinks to visit, that nobody even considers a place? I checked the maps. No villages or hamlets had ever graced that spot. There were a few news article referring to houses being in the way of the new road many decades ago, but that was it.

One Sunday afternoon, when the light was already low in the sky, I got the idea in my head to go out there, to see for myself what it was about. I pulled on my wellies and entered the woods from a hole in a hedgerow where I parked my car. The woods were quiet and unhealthy. Those trees have been raised on a diet of rainwater and highway litter. Again, it was just that sense of…nothing. Like it was an interstitial space, one that could collapse at any moment and all the roads and fields and bogs knitted around it would just join together seamlessly, like a jigsaw piece.

After a while I began to hear the roar of white noise on concrete and I knew I was close, but I  still couldn’t see the noticeboard. There was only a craze of colours striated out between the peeling birches, the coppiced spiders of trees.

A blur of pink and blue and white feathers. Then as I got closer I saw that it was paper, the glossy kind you find in magazines, and that the noticeboard was never blank, that all those time I drove past I had been staring at the back of it. It was completely covered, in fact. All the way down to the feet small pins had been driven into the mushy wood, holding those scraps of pages in place, ragged-edged like they’d been torn out by the handful.

They were all advertisements, pictures of smiling men and woman enjoying the high life. Some were laying on the beach, others driving expensive cars. All with their eyes cut out, carefully, as if with a steady hand and a scalpel on a workbench. I didn’t go back to the woods after that. When I’m driving past I try not to look. I’m worried it won’t be blank anymore.