Tree Talk Read online

  And so we went on, going back through my rings. I showed him the best and worst of days and lots in between and we named them all: greezy, sottoverdi, blanckwick, munglub; and so on.

  Charlie sucked it all in with his head on one side. I could feel his brain whirring and processing until he had reached an understanding that only plants seem to possess: what could be more important than weather; it nursed life itself.

  He sat quietly then, cross-legged on his high perch looking out across the canopy of the Jungle, out towards the grey line of the sea. It pleased me to see him so impressed by knowledge that we plants take for granted.

  ‘So it’s all connected,’ he said, ‘every breath I take, every breath you take Ash, it all adds up to…,’ and then he wrapped his arms tightly around himself and I swear he looked as though a storm was swirling around him, pulling at his face, slanting his eyes, tearing at his clothes. It was a windy day but not that windy. As the mini-tempest passed he stood unsteadily and shading his eyes looked slowly over the whole sky and then at the Jungle tree by tree.

  ‘It can’t be,’ he breathed. ‘That is… boggling. Phew,’ he shook his head.

  Charlie had put plant instinct together with human imagination and he had come up with something greater than both. At the time it was beyond my grasp. Now I know, I think only a child could have faced what he saw, and then said what he said so matter-of-factly.

  ‘There’s work to be done, Ash,’ and he slid down the rope, muttering, ‘but where do I start?’

  ‘Windy tonight,’ said Eva, looking up from her book.

  ‘It’s galooshty with a bite in it,’ Charlie replied with a new spark in his eyes.

  Eva smiled, thinking, no doubt, that the old Charlie was back. I wanted to tell her that my distraction had worked much better than I’d intended.

  Chapter 3 Wilfred

  As I said, I quickly became a fan of humans. I found them endlessly interesting, complex and clever; but not everyone feels that way.

  One evening, as I practised some human sayings, I was distracted by scrabbling and sniffing around my roots. I looked down to see a large rat stuffing his cheeks with my berries.

  In my first life as I think of it, in my dreamy greeny days, I’d sensed Wilfred as a busy, deep red energy. I was aware that he was different to the other animals –there was more going on in him, and when I first saw him properly he looked different too. He was bigger and paler than the other rats. His fur was a mixture of brown and white, making him look aged, but his eyes were sharp and canny. He spun round in surprise.

  ‘Well I’m blowed,’ he said, looking up into my branches, ‘this is a first; how did you come by it.’

  ‘By what?’ I asked, as much surprised as he was.

  ‘Gnosis,’ he said, ‘I’ve never known a tree with it.’

  And we fell to talking and that was the start of our friendship. Gnosis, he explained, was this extra way of seeing things that I’d got from Charlie. He’d never heard of it passing from humans in this way, and he lifted up on his legs and twitched and quivered in fascination. He himself had got it from eating a fungus, something his mother had told him never to go near or he’d never be happy again. But, being the nosiest rat born, he had had a nibble and found his skull split ear to ear with this knowing. I knew just how he felt of course. My berries, he told me, had similar effects.

  ‘I wonder, is it possible that your own dryad absorbed the essence of your berries, thus predisposing you to the boy’s vibrations.’

  ‘Dryad?’

  ‘Spirit. Tree spirit. A purely technical point, but interesting.’

  When he says things like that I realise just how much I have to learn. We talked long into that night comparing notes about our experiences. While Wilfred didn’t know of any plants with gnosis he knew of many animals. Most had got it in the same way as himself but he also knew of a family of magpies where it passed down through the generations. One ancient magpie was very skilled at precognosis – reading the future from natural signs. These few hundred animals formed a council, which met every three years to discuss, among other things, the human problem.

  Wilfred said that getting my gnosis directly from a human was a bad thing: it made me see them in a good light, and he set out to educate me properly.

  He gave me the first of his lectures then, one that I’ve since heard many

  times. To my mind his hatred of humans isn’t quite rational. They make him

  shudder. They’re vermin he says. What are vermin I says? Vermin, he says, are

  dirty, they spread disease, feed on waste and breed uncontrollably.’

  ‘On the other branch,’ I said, ‘they can be very kind. My gardener takes good care of me, and Charlie…’

  ‘Ash, you’re so domesticated,’ Wilfred interrupted – he’s not a good listener, ‘you’ve heard your mates out in the woods and meadows, and in the hedgerows.’

  Actually, for a long while, I hadn’t been listening.

  ‘There’s been so much death out there. Who gave the humans the right to decide who’s a weed and who’s not? They say they’re doing it for the crops but even the crops have started to complain. They don’t like being sprayed and regimented, there’s no variety any more, they’re forced to grow quick and exhausted, only the big ones get to breed. At first they thought: great, no caterpillars, no aphids munching on us; then they noticed the silence: no bustle, no visitors, everybody the same size and shape, and they sunk into this quiet depression. They used to feel part of a bigger picture where everybody gets a piece of the action; not any more, the vermin want all the benefits to themselves.’

  He was right about the ‘weeds’, and so my doubts began.

  ‘If only those plants could be taught to think like you,’ he went on, ‘then they could do something about it. Then what a power we would be, flora and fauna, together against the vermin.’ He bared his yellow teeth and his eyes flashed with fervour.

  It was then that I learned how to lie, or rather how to hide parts of my mind. I thought it best if I didn’t worry Charlie with Wilfred’s plotting. Already I was being torn between them. I started keeping score. Were humans mostly good, or were they vermin? I imagined notches on my trunk like this: Human IIIII Vermin I. It amused me but I never really doubted that Wilfred was wrong.

  One night Wilfred came early, puffed up and gleeful with his tidings. But I already knew. I had seen it on TV.

  We were watching the news before Brooke Farm, when Eva grabbed the remote, turned the sound up and sat forward. I wouldn’t have paid attention normally but she looked so worried that I tried to understand what was going on. There was stuff about men in suits and men in head-dresses who didn’t agree about this and that. Then men all dressed the same made things explode and dropped things out of aeroplanes and made things burn and trees burn and people burn. It was a relief when the weather came on, as this was easy to understand.

  Human weather forecasts are embarrassing. They’re so simple and often wrong. But even the weather forecast was different that day. They were saying things about icecaps melting; there were pictures of somewhere cold and far away, and there was ice falling into the sea, not little chunks but walls of it miles wide breaking off and melting into the blue-black water. The weather, they said, was going to change quickly and dramatically, and that also had something to do with oil.

  I didn’t understand it, but Wilfred was more than happy to explain:

  ‘The oil-agers,’ he said, ‘have come to the end of their age. The oil would have lasted them a while longer but they had to start fighting over it; now what’s left of it is burning; half the planet is on fire. It was bound to happen. Let’s hope they all kill each other quickly and let the planet heal. Maybe a few stragglers will survive, like the old stone-agers. Ah, the stone-agers; they were no bother; I got along with them just fine. Do you know why? They didn’t get above themselves. It started to go wrong when they gave themselves that name: Homo sapiens. It means wise man. How vai
n, how pompous, how deluded! Homo selfish idiot is more accurate.’

  ‘Or Verman,’ I said.

  ‘Clever,’ he said, ‘vermin, verman. Why didn’t I think of that one? Yes, noble Rattus sapiens battles plague of vermanity. That’s the real truth.’

  I hadn’t meant to go along with him like that, but his character is old and strong, while mine is new and suggestible. He sneaks into my mind and takes over. ‘So,’ I said, after thinking some more, ‘the end of the Oil Age, what does it mean?’

  ‘A lot of the bad things are going,’ said Wilfred, ‘cars first. Just watch; enjoy watching them cling to their dying age.’

  So I watched and he was right. The traffic hum that I was born into, faded right away. The lights that hid the stars every night went out at midnight. A few months later they were out by ten o’clock. These were the nice things.

  Not so good were the days when the power was cut off in the middle of a soap; but for the humans, Wilfred said, there were harder times to come, and he scurried off chanting to himself: Rattus sapiens, Rattus sapiens shall inherit the earth.’

  As usual, there was nothing I could do but watch.

  Chapter 4 The Task Begins

  Humans, as far as I can tell, don’t usually begin their life’s work at the age of ten. Charlie did.

  For his birthday he asked for a particular gift. It was a goldumbra afternoon and the party had spilled out into the garden. Since morning Charlie had been in a strange mood. He had woken excited, thumped downstairs for the post, then turned quiet. At the party there was something brittle about him. He opened presents and thanked his friends politely. I couldn’t read his thoughts and every now and again I saw him staring vacantly into the distance.

  Eva appeared with a heavy rainbow-wrapped cube on top of which was a big silver ten on a spring. His friends oohed and aahed. ‘Bet it’s a robot,’ someone whispered. Charlie laid the ten to one side and carefully unpicked the tape.

  ‘Rip it!’ George urged him.

  Charlie opened out the paper and brushed his hand over the cover of Birtwhistle’s Complete Botany of British Plants in three volumes. I watched his face carefully and I saw that his eyes glowed.

  ‘Flower books,’ said Dan.

  ‘They’re nice,’ said Izzy, but her nose was wrinkled.

  George snatched at a plastic toy. ‘Let’s have a go with this then. ‘Ugh, there’s an earwig on it. I hate earwigs,’ he said and stabbed the creature through the head with a biro. The earwig, with its head pinned to the picnic table, waved its body helplessly. Charlie froze. He bent forward as though winded, then reached over and took the pen out of George’s hand.

  ‘You don’t just break an animal like a toy,’ Charlie said quietly.

  George shrugged. ‘Sor-ree, it’s an earwig not an elephant.’

  ‘The earwig doesn’t know that,’ said Conal, rather wisely I thought.

  The party was dampened until Eva came out again, this time carrying a green cake streaming ten spots of light. In the middle of the cake sprouted a tree with red berries: me I guessed, with a tickle of satisfaction.

  ‘Why has it got skunks on it?’ George whispered.

  ‘They’re badgers, stupid,’ said Conal.

  Happy Birthday was sung in three different keys with a staggered ending.

  ‘Make a wish,’ said Eva.

  ‘Mmm, I’ve got more than one,’ said Charlie twisting his hands.

  ‘Well make two then; I think it’s allowed.’

  ‘Three actually.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Eva asked the party, ‘do we let him have three?’

  ‘I made three once; none of them came true though,’ said Jade.

  Charlie screwed up his eyes and his lips moved silently through three wishes.

  I heard his wishes but since birthday wishes are secret I can’t tell you what they were. The first wish was no surprise, the second wish was made with such power that his aura crackled, the third wish staggered me; it was on a scale I couldn’t have guessed at.

  He had, when he opened his eyes, the look of a storm-blasted sapling. I followed his eyes to the earwig which got up, clicked its head back into place and slipped out of sight. A few minutes later, Graham, from next door, appeared with an envelope. It was for Charlie and had gone to the wrong address. Charlie ripped it open and beamed.

  ‘Dad’s coming over in two weeks,’ he said and skipped around the garden.

  Two out of three, I thought.

  I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say that the third wish had something to do with our garden. Our humble little garden; how could it be so important, so very important? Surely it was just a child’s fantasy? But what a fantasy.

  The very next day Charlie began working on his third wish. Armed with Birtwhistle’s Botany he told me only that he was going to identify every plant in the garden from the smallest grass to the biggest tree.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘I need to be ready,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’ I called, but he was already off down the garden with his books and pens and magnifying glass.

  Hours later he came back and showed me his drawings.

  ‘They are very good,’ I said, ‘but it’s not like that really.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A plant doesn’t live on it’s own like that. You need to learn how to watch. It’s a tree thing; it comes from being stuck in one place. Come and watch my branch for five minutes and you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘Wow, Ash,’ he said, ‘you’re Insect City,’ and we looked at my lodgers together: at small wings paned like glass and shot with rainbows, at tiny hairs and scales and sculpted heads.

  Charlie practised watching every day after that. He got better and better at it, so that sometimes the plants forgot that he wasn’t just one of them. He added notes to his drawings about which insects preferred which plants, which plants grew together and how the weather acted like a conductor, telling them when to bud, flower and fruit.

  ‘That’s better,’ I said, ‘now you’re getting the whole picture. That’s the most important thing. Don’t forget that.’

  Charlie looked at me with his head on one side, and we had a sort of joint premonition. ‘No, I won’t forget that,’ he said.

  He also drew a scale plan of the garden marked into squares. The squares were named after features; like moss chair, fungus face, big beetle log. Each plant was given a number and its locations marked on the plan. The days were growing shorter but he still came out in all weather and drew until dusk, then he would come up to the treehouse, look up the plants in the fat volumes and learn all the Latin names.

  ‘Sorbus aucuparia, that’s your posh name,’ he told me, reading from Birtwhistle, ‘only thing is you’re four times as big as you should be. I’ve got a theory about that.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well your memory is in your rings, and you have more memory than other trees, so you’re bigger. You’re upgraded like a computer. Or maybe your seeds dropped in from space. Anyway, it says here you’re also known as Rowan, Witch-wood, Witchen and Quickbeam. Quick comes from Anglo-Saxon cwic – oh wow, guess what cwic means.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Alive!’ and he lay on his back giggling.

  I like it when he does that. At other times, as he drew, he looked serious, even sad.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s starting,’ he said, ‘Beech is suffering most, but there are others. I should start the seed collection.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t bother yet, it could be just a blip,’ and he pulled himself up the chute to his room where I watched him gluing matchboxes together and slotting them into shoeboxes. Every day he put seeds in the boxes and labelled them neatly.

  I was pleased to be included. He rescued the last of my berries, which were already shrivelled and brown, squashed them and picked out the seeds. A single seed, no more than a brown fleck,
lay on the palm of his hand.

  ‘That’s the most amazing thing. You grew out of one of these.’

  I didn’t think it was amazing. It’s what trees have always done. Charlie picked up my thoughts.

  ‘All the instructions for making you are in this speck.’

  I was still unimpressed, but I did like how Charlie put my seeds in their own special box with the ends coloured red. He put it next to a picture of his dad. I heard him tell Conal that those were the things he would take if the house burned down.

  A few days later Charlie lay on his bed with a letter. Pete wasn’t coming.

  Someone had broken into his flat and nicked his guitar, phone and wallet. He had asked Eva to lend him money till his next gig.

  ‘Want to talk?’ I asked Charlie.

  He shook his head and started digging through the layers of rubbish, as Eva calls it, on his bedroom floor. Charlie says it’s not rubbish, it’s all useful and he knows where everything is. He flung things aside like a rabbit digs up earth. A year-old banana skin flew past me. Finally he rummaged in a box of pictures and cuttings under his bed. He came up from the fluff and dust with something in his hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a postcard for Dad, look, with a picture of a Strat – that’s a guitar he likes.’

  Charlie wrote:

  Dad,

  I am sorry you got robbed. I know you will come as soon as you can. I am doing a project about the garden. It is really interesting. So far I have found 72 different plants. Mum likes the drawings I have done. She has helped with colouring. When you come I will tell you what the project is really about.

  love Charlie

  The next time I saw that guitar picture it was sticking out from a pile of bills on the table. Charlie was smearing Birtwhistle with toast butter as he read. Eva tutted and Charlie looked up.