Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  ‘No. I’m just hiding. She’s probably gone by now.’

  Lawrence made as if to go but the priest’s silky prattle held him there.

  ‘Of course. Did she want you to play bridge?’

  Lawrence nodded.

  ‘You’re wise not to learn. It can be a tyranny.’ ‘You play, then?’

  ‘Used to. It took over my life. I began only to see people who played. I neglected my friends, my work, my appearance. It took me into a life without love. I don’t know why it has such a respectable image; it can be just as destructive as poker and even more expensive. Tell me, er– ’

  ‘Lawrence.’

  ‘Lawrence. Lawrence of the gridiron. Tell me, are you a believer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even in the broadest sense?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Professional curiosity. I just wondered why you chose to hide in a place of worship rather than a broom cupboard or a washroom.’

  ‘The door was open. It was near. I didn’t know it was a– Look. I can’t stand church actually and I think God’s all crap.’

  ‘So you do believe.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But you think he’s all crap? If he didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have an opinion of him.’

  ‘I mean the whole God business. I … I believe in nature. Seasons. Seeds. They make faith pay. Religion’s just there to control people, to make them afraid or guilty.’

  ‘It can comfort. It can offer hope.’

  ‘False hope. If it was all true, you’d never need to convert anyone. We’d all be religious. We’d believe because we’d know, like we feel the heat of the sun or know that rain is wet.’

  ‘Ah but with faith you can– ’

  ‘Faith? The whole thing’s a con. Who takes invisible things on trust? Men used to worship trees and that made sense. Trees shelter and hold land together and let you plant crops. Yew trees cure cancer. God doesn’t– ’

  ‘The power of prayer is– ’ ‘Gobshite! I– I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.’

  ‘You’re very angry. I could feel the anger about you the moment you came in. It was crackling like an electric storm.’

  ‘Well I’m angry because I got talked into coming on this fucking cruise and now I’m trapped on a boat with a bunch of brain-free morons and there are no trees anywhere and it makes me want to– ’

  A glance from the priest made him see that he was clutching the bench so hard that his knuckles were white. He loosened his grip, embarrassed. Father Xavier watched and waited a moment then said quietly, ‘They’re not all that bad.’

  ‘I don’t like people at the best of times.’

  ‘And this isn’t …?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Well piss off.’

  Apparently accepting defeat, the priest held up the palms of his hands. Lawrence began to leave but Xavier was following him.

  ‘Actually there are some trees in the theatre lobby, but they’re not well and the sight of them so neglected makes my heart bleed. Do you know anything about them?’

  Lawrence stopped, a hand on the door. He had to smile, however grimly, at the man’s cunning persistence.

  ‘It’s my job,’ he said.

  ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bad-tempered man, doesn’t like people, worships nature.’

  ‘I’m not bad-tempered.’

  ‘Short-tempered, then. It’s no bad thing. St Peter was quick to anger. It just needs a useful channel. You should try the gym. For your anger, that is; I’m sure your body needs no work at all. Here. I’ll show you those trees.’

  They took the lift up two floors and walked along an internal corridor. The entrance to the casino lay at one end, that to the theatre at the other. In the foyer, four miserable weeping figs were arranged, each one beneath a grimy skylight. Even as the priest led him over to them, Lawrence saw leaves drifting down to join the scattering of them on the carpet. The problem was easy to spot.

  ‘They’ve got enough light, just about,’ he said, ‘although those skylights could do with a scrub. But they hate being so close to the heating grilles. They need humidity either way. If the pots are set on gravel …’

  Ordinary gravel?’

  ‘Yes. Or the kind you put in fish tanks. You need about an inch. Then that needs to be kept wet at all times. The compost’s fine, it’s obviously getting enough water, but the air around the pots is dry from the heating and water in the gravel would evaporate slowly and help them. But you can’t just stand them in water or the roots’ll rot.’

  ‘Excellent. The works department should have some. Or maybe the florist. Thank you. It was so depressing watching them die.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You’ve saved four lives.’

  He accompanied Lawrence back to the lift, apparently reluctant to let him go.

  ‘You must come back here tonight. Lala’s doing her first show.’

  ‘Lala?’

  ‘The singer. Surely you’ve heard of her?’ His tone implied an accusatory ‘even you’. Lawrence shook his head. ‘Actually her records always sold better in Catholic countries. She’s big in Ireland. But you must hear her.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘You’ll be glad you did. She’s a phenomenon.’

  The lift arrived. Cruelly, Lawrence allowed the priest to step in first then ducked out to escape him.

  ‘I’m going this way,’ he said.

  Unabashed, used perhaps to being avoided or abandoned by his reluctant, floating flock, Xavier slapped a broad finger on the Open Doors button.

  ‘You should try the gym. Really you should,’ he said.

  ‘Why the fuck?’

  ‘Instead of the chapel,’ he went on calmly. ‘Nobody goes there either and the instructor’s, well, he’s your kind of guy.’ He took his hand off the button and the doors began to close. ‘Peace of the Lord,’ he said, winking as he raised it in blessing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Of the five hundred passengers on board, forty or so had discovered the indoor pool. They swam stately, mind-my-hair breast stroke, hauled anxious children across in the shallows or merely floated, clutching the edge bar for security, and staring, slack featured, at the watery scene, as though surprised or even indignant at finding themselves so publicly naked and so wet. By contrast, only one older couple had braved the gym. In matching yellow tracksuits and redundant flannel headbands, they were off to one side, riding exercise bicycles so gently as to produce little more than a faint, constipated flush on their cheeks. Reading stands were clipped to the handlebars and each rider was flicking through a magazine. Judging from the photographs, the woman appeared to be reading recipes for comforting winter puddings.

  A man with the build of an oak, in tee shirt, socks, shorts and plimsolls of uniform whiteness, was polishing the chrome on one of a daunting array of weightlifting machines. He looked up eagerly as Lawrence came in and revealed the lined and humourless face of a sergeant major. Lawrence could not imagine that he and the chaplain had much in common.

  ‘What can I do you for?’ he asked and his endearing lack of charm lent Lawrence confidence to be candid.

  ‘I’m on this boat for three weeks,’ he said. ‘I don’t play bridge, I’ve no money to gamble and I’m not big on fruit carving. Someone suggested you could help me make good use of my time.’

  ‘Right.’ He all but rubbed his hands. ‘My name’s Spencer. Your name is?’

  ‘Lawrence.’

  ‘Lawrence. Right.’ He seized Lawrence’s hand in a powerful shake. ‘Got any sports gear, Lawrence?’

  ‘Er. No.’

  ‘That’s fine. Pick out what you want from the display in the corner there and we’ll bill your cabin number. Changing room’s through there. I’m ready when you are and we’ll see what you can do.’

  Lawrence picked the plainest clothes in his size – not an
easy feat since most were adorned with dayglo flashes and other meaningless decoration – and put himself at Spencer’s mercy.

  ‘Right,’ said Spencer. ‘What we’ll do is begin with a thorough assessment – muscle tone, elasticity, weight, heart rate, aerobic levels and so on – then we’ll draw you up a routine. You can come in every day, stick to the routine, do more if you feel like it but never less or I’ll be disappointed in you. Three weeks and you’ll feel like a whole new you. On those scales, then, then I’ll take your stationary pulse and stick you on the treadmill till you lose your puff, alright?’

  Lawrence had thought himself quite fit. Climbing trees, even with a safety harness, sawing off branches, and heaving away the debris kept his arm and leg muscles taut. He was not a smoker, but he drove more often than he walked and he rarely ran if walking would do. After ten minutes on the rotating rubber belt of an electric treadmill, he was gasping like an old man. After five on the Stairmaster, he was gasping like an old man with a cheroot habit. He fared better when Spencer tested his strength, asking him to raise clusters of shiny metal weights with forearms, legs and chest, but the humiliation continued when Spencer led him into his office and, getting him to roll up his tee shirt, used some callipers to measure the fat deposits at his waist and under his arms.

  ‘No worries,’ said Spencer, filling the shaming details in on a form. ‘You’re in good shape for a bloke of fifty-two. Only kidding. Now. Did you plan to go to the tango class or do you want to go for your first work-out right away?’

  Lawrence pedalled a bicycle for ten minutes while a computer screen illustrated the imaginary hills his legs told him he was climbing, then he had another five minutes climbing imaginary stairs before Spencer moved him onto weight machines and worked his back, biceps, triceps, lats, gluts, pecs and whatever until he was inwardly whimpering for rest. Spencer was as merciless as his fat-busting gadgets. He stood over each machine, clearly thrilled to have a willing victim at last, and gauged Lawrence’s every gesture. When he ordered a set of twelve reps, he expected twelve, since, he explained, the last two, the two where Lawrence could barely clunk the weights off their resting place, were the crucial muscle-building movements that the other ten were only leading up to. After each set, it seemed, he declared,

  ‘Nice set. Now. Deep breaths then give me twelve more. Water?’

  After an agonizing series of sit-ups, by which time it felt as if every muscle in Lawrence’s frame but his tongue had been stretched to powerlessness, Spencer marched to the sound system and switched from the thudding, road-middling rock to the kind of breathy slow number Bonnie dismissed as ‘Celtic Whale music’, and led Lawrence through a series of deliciously relaxing stretches. Many of these involved his grasping Lawrence’s aching limbs –

  ‘Relax,’ he commanded. ‘I said relax!'

  – and easing them with surprising gentleness a few centimetres beyond the point where Lawrence’s exhausted muscles would carry them. Finally he made him lie on a mat with his eyes closed and concentrate on breathing while he crouched beside him as though keeping guard.

  Lawrence experienced the euphoria of pure exercise, when concentration on muscle, on movement, on pain and the longing for it to stop, drove out all other thoughts and allowed him to exist as simple body. Showered and changed, his sweaty clothes furled in a towel, he felt light-headed and almost in shock on re-entering the world of the Paulina. Although the Atlantic breeze was still bracing, the sun had come out, luring passengers onto the decks and making the ship feel twice the size. He was ravenous. Noisy queues were already forming for lunch and he planned to join them after he had left his gym kit to dry on his balcony. He could not resist the sight of his bed, however, sat for a few seconds then lay back and fell into a deep doze within seconds of reaching the horizontal.

  ‘Lawrence? Lawrence, it’s me.’ He stirred at the sound of knocking. ‘Lawrence?’ The voice was Bee’s. He froze then saw that, with the curtains drawn, she could see in through the porthole beside the door. He was too shattered to hide in the bathroom, incapable even of leaving the bed to lock the door. ‘Lawrence?’

  ‘Come in,’ he called out.

  She still looked fresh, her hair slightly tousled by the wind on deck. She shut the door behind her and leaned on it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t move.’

  ‘Are you sick? We missed you at the bridge class.’

  ‘No I– I chickened out. I went to the gym. Christ.’ He laboured into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m wiped out.’

  ‘The others are all eating lunch. I wondered if you wanted to join us.’

  ‘Er. Well. I’m not so hungry.’

  ‘You must be starving if you’ve been to the gym.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, raising his voice to cover the rumbling of his stomach. ‘Maybe I’ll get something later.’

  ‘You don’t have to hide from me, Lawrence.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’ She grinned. ‘It’s okay. I haven’t told a soul about last night and, judging from the way you’ve been avoiding my gaze and running away from me all morning, you’re relieved I didn’t encourage you as far as the ooh-ah-I-think-I-really-love-you bit.’

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered, still unable to meet her eye. ‘I feel so stupid.’

  She came to sit on the edge of the bed and rubbed his feet through his socks. Somehow she managed to do this without tickling.

  ‘Why? We had a nice talk and I lent a sympathetic ear and you kissed me because you were grateful and that’s the way you relate to women you like and maybe you’ll grow out of it and maybe you won’t.’

  ‘But. Well, I– ’

  ‘Yes yes. You really like me and I really like you and you’re a good kisser and so am I but we’re neither of us so desperate or so bored that we have to lunge into some ghastly, misjudged affair. So if you think you can manage to be friends without plunging your extraordinarily big tongue down my throat whenever a conversation’s getting interesting, and yes, if I promise not to refer to this again, I suggest we go and find some lunch before the gannets scoff the lot.’ She laughed. ‘Don’t look so shocked. Honestly, I’ve been walking about all morning and there are so few halfway bearable people on this boat it would have been madness to risk sleeping together in case it was a disaster and we had to spend the next three weeks hiding from each other. And the others have no idea. About the lunge, that is. Just in case you were wondering.’

  ‘They certainly haven’t. Reuben thinks of you as a sort of sad virgin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s such a gossip. If he knew half of what I do, I’d have lost my job and had to leave Barrowcester by now. Lunch?’

  ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Good. And then I’m going to teach you some more bridge.’

  ‘But– ’

  ‘You can’t escape. There’s no point trying.’ She smiled and leaned over to push the hair off his face so that he felt like a small boy suddenly. It was not entirely unpleasant and he wondered if perhaps a second kiss might not be out of the question eventually. ‘So let’s say you’ve got nine points and no five card suit and I open a no trump and nobody bids in between. How do you respond?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Throughout dinner, Darius kept his end of the table enthralled and scandalized with Lala anecdotes. Lawrence was trapped between a retired riveter from Tyneside who shouted because he was deaf and the riveter’s wife who, hardened by years of trying to make herself understood, shouted at everybody.

  ‘We took to cards,’ she bellowed at Lawrence, ‘because he could play without talking! We started with cribbage and gin! But we switched to bridge because you meet a more varied class of person and I do like breadth in my society! Especially since Malcolm’s disability payments came through!’

  ‘How do you bid, though?’ Lawrence asked her, beginning to bellow in sympathy. ‘Surely he has to hear you for that?’

  ‘She writes her bid
s down!’ Malcolm roared back. ‘The whole auction goes down on a piece of card that we pass around!’

  ‘It comes in handy as an aide-mémoir!’ she added, then swung round indignantly on the waitress who had just served her. ‘Is this the chicken? It looks like chicken! I asked for the pork!’

  He saw Bee laugh and watched as Reuben and the passengers nearest Darius leaned forward to catch some other highly spiced morsel he was throwing them. He wondered at his uncle’s unshakeable poise, at his ability to hold forth and chatter with complete strangers. His mother had the gift too. She could chat in queues at the post office or butcher. Stranded in a waiting room, where Lawrence would shield himself with magazines, she entered the lives of the other patients, daring to ask what seemed to him outrageously searching questions. How long have you been trying for a baby? What form did your wife’s cancer take? She happily bartered confidence for confidence and left each encounter seemingly unscathed by the self-exposure.

  ‘They’re only people,’ she would protest. ‘We were only talking. It’s fun to pass the time of day with people you’ll never see again.’

  ‘It’s all in the questions,’ Bee had explained to him that afternoon as they sat in deck chairs, she failing to read, he failing to write Bonnie a letter. ‘However grim they are, however dull, ask the right question and they’ll do all the talking. Before you know it they’ll be telling you really quite interesting things about themselves, you’ll be able to get on with eating and, hey presto, you’ll be passing for human.’

  He watched for a few minutes as the retired riveter’s wife sawed a strip of fat from her pork chop and he strove to remember the sort of questions Bee had suggested.

  ‘So,’ he asked her. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  It worked like a charm. For a moment she downed her knife and fork and stared and he feared he might have offended her, then she began to talk. Dropping her voice to a level nearer ordinary, thus leaving her husband adrift in a pool of silence, she told him of her childhood in North Shields, of her memories of the war and handsome Italian POWs near her aunt’s farm, of her young marriage, her large family, her vexation with her wayward daughters, the consolation of her sons and her recent hip operation. She asked no questions so, while she talked, Lawrence could listen, half interested, and eat his mediocre meal in peace.