Human Croquet (16 page)

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Authors: Kate Atkinson

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Human Croquet
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Isobel dreamt the strangest dream. She was in a great underground cavern, warm and full of people and noise. By the light of hundreds of candles she could see that the walls and the roof of the cavern were made of gold. At one end of this great hall a man sat on a throne. He was dressed all in green from head to foot and wore a golden band round his forehead. Someone handed her a silver plate piled high with the most delicious food, like nothing she’d ever tasted before. Someone else pressed a crystal goblet into her hand, full of a liquid that tasted of honey and raspberries, only nicer, and no matter how much she drank, the goblet was never empty. The people in the hall began to dance, sedately at first – but then the music grew more frantic and the dancing got wilder and wilder. The man with the golden band around his head appeared suddenly at her shoulder and shouted at her above the din, asking her what her name was and she shouted back, ‘Isobel!’ and immediately the hall – along with the lights and the music and the people – disappeared and she found herself alone in the wood, eating a rotting mushroom from a leaf and drinking ditchwater from an acorn cup.

She woke up with a jerk, her dream evaporating into the dawn – there was no sign of crystal goblet or silver plate, nor even of rotting mushroom and acorn cup – just the stillness of the forest. Charles was snoring, curled up tidily like a small hibernating animal. The fog had lifted, replaced by a watery dawnlight, nothing had changed, they were still alone in the heart of the wood.

PRESENT
LEAVES OF LIGHT
‘Ancestral life – the bacteria and the blue-green algae – came a billion years later. The blue-green algae were the first to know how to turn molecules of light into food. The oxygen released by this process changed the atmosphere of the Earth for ever, allowing the creation of life as we know it.
‘After the blue-green algae came the mosses, the fungi and the ferns. By the end of the Devonian Era the first trees –
genus cordates
– were already extinct.

‘In the Carboniferous Era there were forests of giant ferns, the first conifers appeared and the coal fields were laid down. 136 million years ago, the flowering and the broad-leaved trees made their first appearance. Most of the trees we know today were in existence by twelve million years ago,’ Miss Thompsett’s voice drones through the classroom. On my right-hand side, Eunice is as alert as a sheepdog as Miss Thompsett writes on the blackboard in her tidy writing –

CO2 + 2H 2A +
light energy
– (CH 2) + H2O + H2A.
Miss Thompsett herself – dark green twin-set and box-pleated tartan skirt – is as tidy as her handwriting.

On my other side, Audrey is hunched up asleep, her arms pillowing her head on her desk. She has shadows as dark as bruises under her eyes and she is dreadfully pale. She’s not really here at all, as if someone had made a really poor facsimile of her and sent it out into the world without telling it how to behave, an incompetent
doppelgänger.

Miss Thompsett bores on …
outer layer of the epidermis and into the palisade cells
… she’s giving us ‘a brief history of photosynthesis’, and the effect is like a sleeping draught. Her words pour into my ear and then curl around my brain like green fog …
chlorophyll, grana, photons …

Eunice transcribes busily. Everything in Eunice’s exercise book is neatly drawn, highlighted, coloured, labelled and underlined. Her diagrams are more exact than a textbook. On the board, Miss Thompsett is drawing molecules, the molecules are the size of ping-pong balls. The world Miss Thompsett inhabits must be gigantic, her primitive organisms the small size of small towns, her elephants the size of Sirius B.

My head nods and my brain grows cloudy and soon I’ve joined Audrey in sleep. ‘Right,’ Miss Thompsett says suddenly, so that I wake up with a jerk. ‘Now draw me a cross-section of a leaf to explain photosynthesis.’ I haven’t the faintest idea what a leaf looks like in cross-section (well – green, thin, flat –

– but I don’t think that was what she wants). I haven’t even got the right textbook.
Apart from Audrey, everyone else is labouring over their leaves, and Miss Thompsett says, ‘Problem, Isobel?’ in a way that implies there’d better not be and I sigh and shake my head.

‘Audrey Baxter!’ Miss Thompsett says loudly and Audrey flinches awake looking like a startled cat. ‘So good of you to join us,’ Miss Thompsett says – but too soon, for Audrey is already out of her chair. ‘I have to go,’ she mumbles and disappears out of the door. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey, Isobel?’ Miss Thompsett asks, a puzzled (though very tidy) frown on her face.

‘She’s not herself,’ I say vaguely (but then who is?).

I bend over my biology textbook with my coloured Lakeland pencils and, to cheer myself up, draw a tree.

Not any old tree, but a wonderful, mystical tree that comes from somewhere deep inside my imagination. A tree with a gnarled and knotted trunk with bark, coloured in cinnamon and raw umber, and a huge head of leaves, parted down the middle. On the left-hand side, I draw the leaves in every shade possible from the green spectrum – the colours of soft moss and trailing willows, of tangled timothy grass, of apple trees and primeval forests.

And on the other half of the tree – a bonfire of leaves, leaves flaming up in a conflagration of red-gold, ginger and bronze. Leaf skeletons toasted to the colour of fox-fur, leaves jaundiced to quince and sulphur, dropping like sickly jewels from the charred branches, leaves like topazes and lemons shooting up tongues of fire the colour of rosehips and blood. A leaf like the breast of a robin detaches itself and floats upward on a plume of wood-ash. And all the time that the right-hand side of the tree burns, the left half remains as green and whole as spring.

Perhaps this is the tree of life or Eve’s knowledge tree? Zeus’ own Dodona oak or the great oak sacred to Thor? Or maybe Ysggadril, the ash, the world tree, that in Norse mythology forms the whole round of the globe – its branches propping up the sky roof above our heads, full of cloud-leaves and star-fruits and its roots beneath the earth springing from the source of all matter. Trees of Life. It goes without saying that Miss Thompsett isn’t impressed by my artwork.

‘Finish these diagrams for homework,’ Miss Thompsett orders pleasantly, ‘and if you can find time, read ahead to the next chapter in your textbook.’ Find time? Where might it be located? In space? (But not in the great void, surely?) At the bottom of the deep blue sea? At the centre of the earth? At the end of the rainbow? If we found time would it solve all our problems? ‘If only I had more time,’ Debbie says, ‘then I might get something done.’ But
then
what would she do?

Eunice’s cross-section of a leaf:
Photons of light speed down sunbeam arrows for exactly 8.3 seconds and splash through the outer layer of the epidermis and into the heart of the palisade cells. The molecules of light race into the chloroplast, into the perfect little green discs of the grana. The light is drawn further and further in, helplessly attracted by the magnesium at the heart of the little chlorophyll molecules. Light and green embrace, dancing a wild jig of excitement for a tiny fraction of time while the little molecule of light gives up its energy. The chlorophyll molecule is so agitated by this encounter that it splits a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The plant releases the oxygen into the air for us to breathe. The hydrogen converts carbon dioxide into sugar which is used to build new plant tissue. ‘Unlike the plant,’ Eunice notes in bold fountain-pen, ‘we cannot synthesize our own molecules of food from light so we must eat plants or animals that feed on plants and thus without photosynthesis we would not be able to exist.’
As the tide of summer wilderness has died down in the garden, several lost objects have been revealed – an old shoe (they’re everywhere), a tennis ball, Vinny’s second-best spectacles and poor Vinegar Tom, no longer a soft-sock kitten body, but a hard dried-out felt thing, flattened into the ground. It’s not possible to say how he died but Vinny refuses to believe that Mr Rice is entirely innocent of felinicide.
Vinny is very upset by the young cat’s death, normally she restricts herself to a narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating) so that it’s quite disturbing to see her scarecrow shoulders vibrating with sobs and Charles and I try and placate her with a garden funeral. ‘Cat that is born of cat has but a short time to live on this earth,’ Charles says manfully as Vinny moans open-mouthed by the graveside. Richard Primrose intrudes, suddenly popping out from behind a rhododendron and sniggering, ‘RIP – Rise If Possible,
snarf-snarf,’
and I have the satisfaction of seeing Vinny whack him with the spade.
Mr Rice falls from grace even further when Debbie discovers him on the living-room
chaise longue
in a compromising position with a battleship-blonde called Shirley, the barmaid at the Tap and Spile on Lythe Road.
‘Doggy position too,’ Mr Rice confides smugly to Charles.

‘Doggy?’ Charles repeats, one baffled eyebrow cocked ready to go off. But now Mr Rice is lying doggo in his room waiting for Debbie to calm down. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ Gordon mumbles helplessly, “fraid you’re in the dog house.’

‘Makes a change from you then,’ Mr Rice sneers.

‘Look,’ Charles says, pressing something into my hand as I hurry out to school. A handkerchief, slightly grubby, folded in a limp triangle.
‘Hers?’
I query, rather cynically. ‘Yes,’ Charles says, unfolding the triangle, ‘definitely.’ The handkerchief is monogrammed with an elaborate embroidered ‘E’ and as we cannot think of anyone else with that initial, I suppose it must be hers. A faint trace of memory, a barely decipherable twitch along the neurons (a faint
click)
reminds me of something. Charles presses it against his nose and inhales so hard that he snorts unattractively. ‘Yes,’ he says. I sniff the handkerchief less belligerently. I am expecting tobacco and French perfume (the scent of a grown-up woman) but all I can smell is mothballs. ‘Found it in a drawer,’ Charles says. I’m beginning to suspect that he’s turning the house upside down, looking for Eliza, perhaps he’s already pulling up floorboards and ripping down plaster. But looking for Eliza is a heartbreaking and thankless task. We have done it all our lives, we should know.
None the less, I take the handkerchief and push it deep into my coat pocket before running the length of Chestnut Avenue to the bus-stop on Sycamore Street.
The bus makes its stately progression up the High Street while I try hard not to listen to Eunice, sitting next to me on the top deck, wittering on about adenosine triphos-phate. Instead, I smoke a jewelled Sobranie pretending to be sophisticated and concentrate on imagining Malcolm Lovat without his clothes.

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