Tree Talk Read online

  81

  Tree Talk

  Ana Salote

  Speaking Tree

  Copyright © Ana Salote 2007 The right of Ana Salote to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious – except for the tree, which is real.

  ISBN 978-0-9553769-0-0

  Contents

  1 The Treehouse

  2 Growing

  3 Wilfred

  4 The Task Begins

  5 Garden for Sale

  6 No Money No Cry

  7 Swap Shop

  8 The Street Meet

  9 Signs of Rot

  10 I spy

  11 Here comes the Chopper

  12 Three Spies and Two Guys

  13 My History

  14 Strange Allies

  15 Catch a Falling Star

  16 Science

  17 The Vote

  18 Fire and Drought

  19 Of Floods and Heroes

  20 Future Vision

  Chapter 1 The Treehouse

  In a garden you have to get on with your neighbours; you can't pack up and move away. Growing up, there were times when I wanted to fight for light and air and water, when it was my instinct to lean over and choke the other guy or wrap my roots around his. But I've learned a few things since then. First, if you go too far the gardener might come along and chop you back; second, you've got to live with yourself; and third, you wouldn't really want to overrun the whole garden would you; where's the interest in that?

  Our garden is mostly a place of harmony. Eva, our gardener, knows when to interfere and when to let us be.

  In many ways our garden is unusual. The house is part of a grand Victorian terrace called Overvale Mansions. There are five houses standing together like great stone ships facing out to sea. The gardens slope gently at first and then drop steeply down the hillside. Eva lets the steep part of her garden run wild. It starts as an orchard but soon becomes a wilderness. Eva’s boy, Charlie, calls it the Jungle.

  We’ve only to look over the fences to realise how lucky we are. Graham, next door, is hopeless. His garden is a space for fixing bikes. He has a cracked patio, scrubby, tyre-marked grass, and a few valiant daffs in his borders. Even worse, to my mind, is the garden which borders the far end of the Jungle. The lawn's like a carpet; the flowers look plastic; the shrubs are cut into rigid shapes. It's a dead garden: no birds, no insects, no moss, no moulds, not even the memory of a weed. It belongs to the Sperrins.

  In my early days I knew little of humans, though I was aware of our gardener. A lot of plants, when they’re being fed and watered, think of it as a kind of surprise weather. Only the sensitive ones, like myself, sense the gardener at the end of the hose. Over the years I got more interested in the gardener. I noticed she had a little helper: one who ate soil, made potions and stirred things with sticks, and I began to look forward to him coming out to play. Even then I felt drawn to Charlie.

  The day of my awakening came when I was sixty-two rings wide. A pleasant spring breeze ruffled my leaves. A circle of humans surrounded my trunk.

  Now you must understand that until that day I was just like all the other plants. I lived in a sort of green vapour, not quite sure where I ended and the rest of the world began. I took a passing interest in birds and bugs, but my main concern was the weather; and if you were to put yourself in my place for just a minute you’d know why. Imagine living your whole life standing outside, without clothes, in the same spot; you only get a drink when it rains, and the sun feeds you. Wouldn’t you be obsessed with the weather? Anyway that was my world: I enjoyed light, but I didn’t see as you see; I felt vibrations, but I didn’t hear as you hear.

  It’s hard for me now to remember what it was like. I felt humans as different types of energy. On that day I saw the human energy around my trunk as a patchy spray of orange; a short strong column of violet, which I recognized as Eva; and a little ball of pure white energy, which I also knew well. The white ball rolled over to me. I felt a small warm spot against my bark. This, it turned out, was Charlie’s hand.

  There I stood, no more than mildly curious about the bobbing glowballs around me, when I was rocked from roots to shoots. A wave of light washed through me; I felt Charlie with his hand joined to me like an extra branch and I knew the world as Charlie knew it. I could see! The energy blobs had forms and faces beyond imagination. I watched Charlie’s dad, Pete, stacking planks of wood around my trunk; I saw Eva shielding her eyes – eyes, what astonishing things - and peering up into my branches, and Charlie’s sketches spread on the ground around me. Charlie was standing back from me, open-mouthed with his arms hanging loose and my own green light dappling his skin. He backed away from me without taking his eyes off my branches and tugged at Eva’s sleeve.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘The tree. I know how it feels.’

  ‘What, funny boy?’ she said laughing.

  ‘I really, really know how it feels.’

  ‘Well ask it if it minds me knocking some nails in it,’ drawled Pete.

  ‘Alright,’ and Charlie put his hand on my trunk and asked: did I mind if they built a treehouse in my branches? It would be like a bird’s nest but for humans. His dad was clever; he would try not to use too many nails. I told Charlie – by that I mean my feelings somehow spilled into Charlie’s head – that I didn’t mind, but it was just shock talking: a human was conversing with me and I was answering.

  ‘The tree said it doesn’t mind,’ said Charlie.

  Eva laughed again. Charlie knew it was pointless trying to explain, and quietly stood aside, though his eyes were sparking with discovery. We made a pact of secrecy right there.

  Pete put a ladder up against me and climbed in among my branches. I was taken aback, never having had anything larger than a cat climb into me. He went back down, pulled out some nasty looking tools and went to work on the planks of wood. I started to get worried then. The sound of that saw so close was freezing my sap, but Charlie stood by, patting my trunk; the edges of our minds were still touching and I calmed down.

  It took a few days to finish the treehouse. Most of it was done with rope and pegs and Charlie helped Eva to weave the walls so that it looked like a giant bird’s nest. This was all made easier, Eva said, because I was very tall and sturdy for a mountain ash. She thought I must be some unknown hybrid.

  There was a chain ladder, which Charlie could pull up if he didn’t want to be disturbed and a thick piece of rope which hung down as an emergency exit.

  The treehouse was almost finished when Charlie stopped his excited jigging and stared up at his bedroom window. A smile of inspiration spread over his face. He ran to Pete, who was lounging on the grass with a cup of tea, and, moving Pete’s long hair to one side, whispered in his ear.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Pete laughed.

  ‘Oh can you try, please? It will be so great. Please.’

  ‘Your ma won’t like it.’

  Next morning Charlie went off to school and Eva left for work. Pete paced up and down, idly tuning his guitar. Then he laughed out loud, played a few wild chords, and disappeared. I relaxed into a green trance, turning minutely so that each leaf followed the sun’s drift and caught its light squarely. The sun, the sun; I joined the rest of the garden in its chant. Suddenly a crashing hole appeared under Charlie’s bedroom window. Stones bounced off my trunk and settled around my roots. A man’s face looked through the hole with Pete at his shoulder.I stared back at them.

  By the end of the day I was joined to the house. The two men had built a hatch, like a giant cat flap, under Charlie’s window. Fro
m this a chute led directly into the treehouse. Eva and Charlie arrived home together. Eva stood on the lawn with her hand over her mouth while Charlie hung round Pete’s waist saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ before flying upstairs. Soon he came bursting out of the chute into the treehouse. For the next hour a hot, excited boy went whirling through the house and down the chute, appearing head first, then feet first, on his back and on his belly. He tried to climb back up the chute but couldn’t do it until Pete fixed some handles to the sides.

  Charlie was too busy to hear Eva and Pete arguing in the kitchen. It was something about money, and why didn’t Pete get a job instead of demolishing the house, nothing of interest really. I went back to watching Charlie. You might imagine that I would object to all this interference, but the opposite is true. My trunk had split into a natural cup as though waiting for this very structure, and five strong branches curved out from it like a protective hand. When the treehouse was finished it felt as though a gap had been filled. I was complete.

  Chapter 2 Growing

  Then began the golden days, the last days.

  In the beginning I found it tiring to stay tuned to the human way of seeing things. There was far too much to take in. I often sank back into my own green world, but that wasn’t enough for me any more. I had developed a burning curiosity about all things human. Soon I couldn’t wait for Charlie to come out each day, and he was just as curious about me. We communicated directly mind to mind, and day after day we questioned each other, what it was to be human, what it was to be tree.

  I asked Charlie, ‘Where in your body do you feel you are?’

  He closed his eyes and seemed to be checking out bits of his body.

  ‘I’m not there, not there. I’m not there. I’m there. I’m in my forehead.’

  ‘So what does it feel like to be a tree?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Go sit on the grass down there and I’ll show you.’

  I dropped back into what I call my green state and let Charlie in. He stood up and opened his arms wide and raised his face to the sun.

  ‘I feel like a giant,’ he laughed, ‘and the light, the sunlight’s pouring energy into me; it’s so satisfying. I want to stretch up and meet the sun. And my feet, all my toes are growing, ooh h-hoo, burrowing through the ground. I’m all cold at the bottom and warm on top, and I feel joined up with everything.’

  It was my turn again. ‘What are eyes for?’

  ‘I sense light and colour with them. Do you know that you were probably the first thing I ever saw?’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘I was born just there under the window.’

  ‘And you were the first thing I ever saw,’ I said, ‘properly I mean.’ We marvelled quietly for a minute.

  ‘There’s something more about eyes,’ I said, looking into Charlie’s, which were full of fun and wonder, whitish green with dancing bird’s egg speckles.

  ‘Your eyes are just below the place where you are, and you shed your light through them, so your eyes show who you really are.’

  ‘If you say so, Ash.’

  ‘I knew there was something special about eyes.’

  Besides Charlie, I had another teacher. I had grown some branches across the lounge windows so that I could watch Eva and Charlie before the curtains were drawn. Charlie would be sprawled on the rug. Eva would be sorting through paperwork or reading. Sometimes they’d look up at a square of light in the corner and sometimes they’d sit together on the sofa and just stare at this coloured light with moving patterns in it. So I tried staring at it too. Gradually I learned to see that the moving patterns were pictures, like the real world but smaller and flatter, and I learned that by watching this square I could find out much more about humans than I could ever know by standing in a garden.

  I watched and watched and learned about things that happened long ago, and far away; about other plants and animals and the sea and planets; things I’d felt in my green days but never seen and things that amazed me. My favourite programmes were the soaps, because they put together two things which fascinated me: stories and human behaviour, Brooke Farm is the best of the soaps because it has the most weather in it.

  But the real secret of humans I discovered by accident. It’s obvious that human bodies aren’t stuck in one place like trees, but neither are their minds. They go back. They go forward. And they go some place else. Up? Or down? Whatever, it was a direction my mind didn’t have. Now I can do some of these tricks. Back is my weather memory; forward is my weather instinct. I got my first clue to the other direction as I listened to Charlie one day.

  He was lying in the grass with his magnifying glass watching the beetles scurrying among the roots when he began talking to himself:

  ‘Now the challenger beetle in his great armoured coat stalks the deserted streets of the city, hunting down the copperhead. The way is strewn with obstacles but he knows them not. Under, over, boulders, thatch; the copperhead wanders unaware, rubs his feet together in the sun, lazily twirls his antennae. The challenger storms through the grass; big as a house; great swivelling eyes precede him. A cloud passes over the sun; the copperhead bows; his hour has come. But what is this. He is taken up and away, saved by a hair’s breadth,’ and Charlie whisked the little beetle away on a lollipop stick.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked.

  Charlie explained about stories. It seems that while plants think moment by moment; humans think in chains, and chains are stories. And get this, the stories don’t have to be real.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you can have things in your mind that never happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case, you can have whatever you like in your mind!’

  ‘Yes – it’s called imagination.’

  I felt brambles clearing, paths opening into space. The freedom.

  ‘Careful though Ash; it also means you can have things you don’t want in your mind.’

  ‘And what’s that called.’

  ‘Worry.’

  Something I would come to know well, but not then. Those first weeks of our friendship were the best and the most exciting days of my life. Then something happened which made Charlie close his mind to me.

  I had noticed something odd about Eva and Pete. When they were together their auras shrank and grew duller; only when Charlie came into the room did they start to glow again. One morning, when Charlie was at school, I heard muffled shouting from the front rooms, the ones I can’t see into. This went on for some time; then I heard thumping on the stairs, more shouting, a stunning door slam, then a deeper quiet filled with a feeling of sadness and something broken.

  Out in the garden, life went on; birds sang and insects trekked about as usual. At school, I knew that Charlie would be playing or working cheerfully, and for once I didn’t wish him home.

  Charlie told me how the idea of the treehouse had always been with him. At nursery he had looked around the table at other children’s drawings of houses with smoky chimneys and spiky suns, sometimes with a tree to one side. Then he had scrabbled in the box of fat crayons and started to draw his own idea of home. Charlie drew his house in the tree. The teacher couldn’t work out what it was to begin with. As he got older the drawings got better and more detailed, and he regularly presented them to his dad asking when, when will you build me a treehouse? The treehouse, it turned out, was a goodbye gift.

  After his dad left, Charlie would come up and lie on his back on the platform staring up into my leaves which went up and up in green steps, up into the blue; and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, only that he wasn’t happy.

  I heard Eva talking to her friend Brigid in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m OK, it’s Charlie I’m worried about. He’s barely spoken for two weeks, just sits up in that treehouse, moping.’

  ‘Distract him - treat him to something nice,’ was Brigid’s advice.

  So Eva bought him toys. He piled them in his room, still boxed, and eventually told her,
‘Mum, you don’t have to, I’m alright.’

  Looking into him I knew that things were growing and rearranging inside him and that took time. Still I thought Brigid’s advice was good so I tried a distraction of my own.

  One of the things that humans do is give names to things. I still don’t know why they do this. Things which seem unimportant, like bits of plastic with wires sticking out, have complicated names like digital transponder unit, whereas very important and complicated things like the weather have a few simple names: rain, sun, wind. I thought I would put this right. I let Charlie understand the millions of different weathers that plants know of and I started to name them all for him. At first he looked listless and uninterested.

  ‘Take the weather today. It’s galooshty. Humans call it windy. He-llo, last weekend they also called windy, and the Tuesday before that – all different if you think back. Now today the trees look lively and the grass is flattened. There are long low gusts with a billowing somewhere beyond, like someone’s shaking out a wet sheet in the sky.’

  Charlie had cocked his head towards me; at last he was listening.

  ‘April 3rd ’93 was very similar,’ I said, matching tree-time to the human calendar, as I had learned to do.

  ‘How’d you know that?’ he said.

  ‘I keep the story of the weather in the rings inside my trunk,’ I said, ‘I often run back through them, especially in winter, and dwell on fine spells.’

  ‘Wow,’ – the little scientist in him was now fully awake and curious, ‘so, can you tell me what the weather was like on the day I was born?’

  ‘Let me see. Yes, aaah, of all weathers, the most perfect. Early autumn, placid, unstirring, golden. You may have noticed that there are only three or four days a year when no human finds fault with the weather. Your birthday was such a day.’

  ‘Good, I’ll name that weather goldumbra.’

  ‘Yes, goldumbra,’ and as I said it, another memory came to me, one I had put aside on the edges of the weather. I remembered white light coming into being right there under the window, and out of that light, eyes of astonishment looking straight at me.