The Whole Story and Other Stories (5 page)

Five. I switch the television off. I go through to the kitchen and try your mobile. The voice tells me to leave you a message. I leave a steady-sounding message saying I hope you’re all right and asking you to call me.

Six. I go upstairs and look out the front window. I come downstairs and try your mobile again. The voice tells me to leave you a message. I leave one which sounds much less steady than the last and regret not deleting it as soon as I’ve put the phone down. I get my own mobile out and text you. WHR R U? XXX. I press send. Message fails. I press send again. Message fails again. I phone 453 and an automaton tells me I have 6p left on my phonecard.

Seven. I open the front door. I stand in the middle of the road and check. I walk along a little so I can see all the way to the corner. I walk to the corner so I can see down the other road. I go back to the house. Light is blazing out of the open front door. I go straight through to the phone in the kitchen and try your mobile. While I’m listening to the voice telling me to leave you a message I remember: you told me your mobile isn’t working.

Eight. You are lost. You’ve got lost somewhere. You don’t know where you are.

I stand in the kitchen next to the fridge and pray, which is something I haven’t done for years. It’s so long since I’ve done it that I can’t really remember how to. I am polite and desperate.

You are somewhere I can’t reach or hear you and you are in pain.

I bargain. I promise to become a Catholic again if you will be returned safe.

You are somewhere you don’t want me to know about, with someone you don’t want me to know about.

Nine. I sit on the couch. I look at my fingernails. Then I look at my thumbnails, first one and then the other. I wonder what would happen if I didn’t have a nail on my thumb, or on this first finger, or this little finger. I know it is supposed to be excruciatingly painful, used as a method of torture. We have fingernails, as I probably know from watching something on television once, left over from Neanderthal and animal claws; they protect the nerves in our fingers and are made of protein, keratin. They grow quite fast, quite a lot per week. They even grow for a while after death, and the hair. It keeps growing regardless. Everybody knows this.

I think about how at one point a couple of years ago you tried to stop biting your nails so short by only letting yourself bite one nail a day, the thumb on Monday, the first finger on Tuesday, the next on Wednesday. I try to remember whether you are still doing this or whether these days you just bite any old nail, or whether you don’t bite them at all any more. I can’t remember. I don’t know how long or short your nails are.

Ten.

You were saying my name again down the supermarket phone. Hello? you said. Love? Are you still there?

Yes, I said.

What was it you did tonight? you said.

Oh, the usual, I said. Listen. Do you want me to come and pick you up in the car? It’d only take half an hour.

No, you said. I really want to walk. It’ll be light soon, too.

It would; it was April. After we hung up, I would phone the bank, lock all the doors, clean my teeth and go to bed, set the alarm for four hours away, lie on my back on my side of the bed and try to sleep through what time there was left with your pillow over my eyes to keep the light out.

I’ll go and phone the bank for you, I said.

Don’t go yet, though, you said.

I looked at the clock.

Five more minutes? you said.

Okay, I said.

may

I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn’t not. It was in blossom.

It was a day like all the other days and I was on my way to work, walking the same way as usual between our house and the town. I wasn’t even very far from home, just round the corner. I was looking at the pavement and wondering as I walked whether the local council paid someone money to go walking around looking at the ground all day for places where people might trip. What would a job like that be advertised as in the paper, under what title? Inspector of Pavements and Roads. Kerb Auditor. Local Walkways Erosion Consultant. I wondered what qualifications you would need to be one. On a TV quiz show the host would say, or at a party a smiling stranger would ask, and what do you do? and whoever it was would reply, actually I’m an Asphalt Observance Manager, it’s very good money, takes a great deal of expertise, a job for life with excellent career prospects.

Or maybe the council didn’t do this job any more. Probably there was a privatized company who sent people out to check on the roads and then report back the findings to a relevant council committee. That was more likely. I walked along like that, I remember, noting to myself in my head all the places I would report which needed sorting, until the moment the ground ahead of me wasn’t there any more. It had disappeared. At my feet the pavement was covered with what looked like blown silk. It was petals. The petals were a beautiful white. I glanced up to see where they’d come from, and saw where they’d come from.

A woman came out of a house. She told me to get out of her garden. She asked was I on drugs. I explained I wasn’t. She said she’d call the police if I wasn’t gone the next time she looked out of her window and she went back inside the house, slamming her door. I hadn’t even realized I was in someone’s garden, never mind that I’d been there for a long enough time for it to be alarming to anybody. I left her garden; I stood by the gate and looked at the tree from the pavement outside it instead. She called the police anyway; a woman and a man came in a patrol car. They were polite but firm. They talked about trespassing and loitering, took my name and address and gave me a warning and a lift home. They waited to see that I did have a key for our house, that I wasn’t just making it up; they waited in their car until I’d unlocked the door and gone inside and shut it behind me; they sat outside the house not moving, with their engine going, for about ten minutes before I heard them rev up and drive away.

I had had no idea that staring up at a tree for more than the allotted proper amount of time could be considered wrong. When the police car stopped outside our house and I tried to get out, I couldn’t – I had never been in a police car before and there are no handles on the insides of the doors in the back – you can’t get out unless someone lets you out. I thought at first I wasn’t able to find the handle because of what had happened to my eyes. They were full of white. All I could see was white. The thing with the woman and the police had taken place to me through a gauze of dazed white with everyone and everything like radio-voice ghosts, a drama happening to someone else somewhere at the back of me. Even while I was standing in the hall listening for them to drive away I still couldn’t see anything except through a kind of shifting, folding, blazing white; and after they’d gone, after quite a while of sitting on the carpet feeling the surprising hugeness of the little bumps and shrugs of its material under my hands, I could only just make out, through the white, the blurs which meant the edges of the pictures on our walls, the pile of junk mail on the hall table and the black curl of the flex of the phone on the floor beside me.

I thought about phoning you. Then I thought about the tree. It was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Its blossom was high summer blossom, not the cold early spring blossom of so many trees and bushes that comes in March and means more snow and cold. This was blue-sky white, heat-haze white, the white of the sheets that you bring in from the line in the garden dry after hardly any time because the air is so warm. It was the white of sun, the white that’s behind all the colours there are, it was open-mouthed white on open-mouthed white, swathes of sweet-smelling outheld white lifting and falling and nodding, saying the one word yes over and over, white spilling over itself. It was a white that longed for bees, that wanted you inside it, dusted, pollen-smudged; it was all the more beautiful for being so brief, so on the point of gone, about to be nudged off by the wind and the coming leaves. It was the white before green, and the green of this tree, I knew, would be even more beautiful than the white; I knew that if I were to see it in leaf I would smell and hear nothing but green. My whole head – never mind just my eyes – all my senses, my whole self from head to foot, would fill and change with the chlorophyll of it. I was changed already. Look at me. I knew, as I sat there blinking absurdly in the hall, trying to simply look, holding my hand up in front of my eyes and watching it moving as if it belonged to someone else, that I would never again in my whole life see or feel or taste anything as beautiful as the tree I’d finally seen.

I got to my feet by leaning against the wall. I fumbled through thin air across to the stairs and reached out for the banister. I got to the top, crawled from the landing into our bedroom and made myself lie down on the bed and shut my eyes, but the white was still there, even behind the shut lids. It pulsed like a blood-beat; dimmer and lighter, lighter and dimmer. How many times had I passed that tree already in my life, just walked past it and not seen it? I must have walked down that street a thousand times, more than a thousand. How could I not have seen it? How many other things had I missed? How many other loves? It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered any more. The buds were like the pointed hooves of a herd of tiny deer. The blossom was like – no, it was like nothing but blossom. The leaves, when they came, would be like nothing but leaves. I had never seen a tree more like a tree. It was a relief. I thought of the roots and the trunk. I thrilled to the very idea that the roots and the trunk sent water up through the branches to the buds or blossom or leaves and then when it rained water came back through the leaves to be distributed round the tree again. It was so clever. I breathed because of it. I blessed the bark that protected the spine and the sap of the tree. I thought of its slender grooves. I imagined the fingering of them. I thought of inside, the rings going endlessly round, one for every year of its life and all its different seasons, and I burst into tears like a teenager. I lay on my back in the bed and cried, laughing, like I was seventeen again. It was me who was like something other than myself. I should have been at work, and instead I was lying in bed, hugging a pillow, with my heart, or my soul, or my mind or my lungs or whatever it was that was making me feel like this, high and light; whatever it was had snapped its string and blown away and now there it was above me, out of my reach, caught in the branches at the top of a tree.

I fell asleep. I dreamed of trees. In my dream I had climbed to a room which was also an orchard; it was at the very top of a massive old house whose downstairs was dilapidated and peeling and whose upstairs was all trees. I had climbed the broken dangerous stairs past all the other floors and got to the door of the room; the trees in it were waiting for me, small and unmoving under the roof. When I woke up I could see a lot more clearly. I washed my face in the bathroom, straightened my clothes. I looked all right. I went down to the kitchen and rooted through the cupboard under the sink until I found your father’s old binoculars in their leather case. I couldn’t make it out from the bathroom window or from either of the back bedroom windows but from up in the loft through the small window, if I leaned out at an angle so the eaves weren’t in the way, I could easily see the white of the crown of it shimmering between the houses. If I leaned right out I could see almost the whole of it. But it was tricky to lean out at the same time as balancing myself between the separate roof struts so I fetched the old board we’d used under the mattress in the first bed from the back of the shed, sawed it into two pieces so I could get it through the loft hatch, then went back down to the shed, found the hammer and some nails and nailed the pieces of board back together up in the loft.

Birds visited the tree. They would fly in, settle for a moment, sometimes for as long as a minute, and they would fly off again. They came in ones and twos, a flutter of dark in the white. Or they would disappear into the blossom. Insects, which are excellent food for birds, tend to live on the trunks and the branches of trees. Ants can use trees as the ideal landscape for ant-farms, where they breed and corral and fatten up insects like aphids and use them for milk. (I found these things out later that evening on the internet.) Traffic drove unnoticing past the tree. People passed back and fore behind it. Mothers went past it to fetch children from school, brought them home from school past it the other way. People came home from work all round it. The sun moved round it in the sky. Its branches lifted and fell in the light wind. Petals spun off it and settled on a car or a lawn or fell maddeningly out of range where I couldn’t see them land. Time flew. It really did. I must have watched for hours, all afternoon, until you were suddenly home from work yourself and shouting at me for being up in the loft. I came down, went online and typed in the word
tree
. There was a lot of stuff. I came off when you called me for supper, then went back on again after supper and came off again when you told me that if I didn’t come to bed immediately so you could get some sleep then you would seriously consider leaving me.

I woke up in the middle of the night furious at that woman who thought she owned the tree. I sat straight up in the bed. I couldn’t believe how angry I was. How could someone think they had ownership of something as unownable as a tree? Just because it was in her garden didn’t mean it was hers. How could it be her tree? It was so clearly my tree.

I decided I would do something; I would go round now in the dark and anonymously throw stones at her house, break a window or two then run away. That would show her what she didn’t own. That would serve her right. It was quarter to two on the alarm. You were asleep; you turned and mumbled something in your sleep. I got out carefully so as not to disturb you and took my clothes to the bathroom so my putting them on wouldn’t wake you.

It was raining quite heavily when I went out. I scouted about in our back garden under our trees for some good-sized stones to throw. (It wasn’t that our own trees were any less important than the tree I’d seen; they were nice and fine and everything; it was simply that they weren’t it.) I found some smooth beach stones we’d brought back from somewhere and put them in my jacket pocket and I went out the back way so you wouldn’t hear anything at the front. On my way round to the woman’s house there was a skip at the side of the road; someone was putting in a driveway, digging up a front porch. There were lots of pieces of brick and half-brick in the skip and a lot of smashed-up thrown-away paving slab. Nobody saw me. There was nobody at all on the street, on any of the streets, and only the very occasional light in a window.

When I got to the woman’s house it was completely in darkness. I was soaked from the rain and there were the petals plastered wet all over the pavement outside her garden gate. I tucked my piece of slab under my arm, soundlessly opened the gate. I could have been a perfect burglar. I crossed her lawn soundlessly and I stood under the tree.

The rain was knocking the petals off; they dropped, water-weighted and skimpy, into a circle of white on the dark of the grass round the edge of the dripping tree. The loaded branches magnified the noise; the rain was a steady hum above me through which I could hear the individual raindrops colliding with the individual flowers. I had my breath back now. I sat down on the wet grass by the roots; petals were all over my boots and when I ran my hand through my hair petals stuck to my fingers. I arranged my stones and half-bricks and my slab in a neat line, ready in case I needed them. Petals stuck to them too. I peeled a couple off. They were like something after a wedding. I was shivering now, though it wasn’t cold. It was humid. It was lovely. I leaned back against its trunk, felt the ridges of it press through my jacket into my back and watched the blossom shredding as the rain brought it down.

You sit opposite me at the table in the kitchen and tell me you’ve fallen in love. When I ask you to tell me about whoever it is, you look at me, reproachful.

Not with
someone
, you say.

Then you tell me you’re in love with a tree.

You don’t look at all well. You are pale. I think maybe you have a fever or are incubating a cold. You toy with the matting under the toaster. I pretend calm. I don’t look angry or upset at all. I scan the line of old crumbs beneath the matting, still there from god knows how many of our breakfasts. I think to myself that you must be lying for a good reason because you never usually lie, it’s very unlike you to. But then recently, it’s true, you have been very unlike yourself. You have been defiant-looking, worried-looking and clear-faced as a child by turns; you have been sneaking out of bed and leaving the house as soon as you think I’m asleep, and you keep telling me odd facts about seed dispersal and reforestation. Last night you told me how it takes the energy of fifty leaves for a tree to make one apple, how one tree can produce millions of leaves, how there are two kinds of wood in the trunk of a tree, heartwood and sapwood, and that heartwood is where the tree packs away its waste products, and how trees in woods or groves that get less sunlight because they grow beneath other trees are called understory trees.

I fell in love with a tree. I couldn’t not
. I am perfectly within my right to be angry. Instead, I keep things smooth. There’s a way to do this. I try to think of the right thing to say.