by Jaco Jacobs
With my head hanging, I started walking home.
17
When Everything Changes and Stays Exactly the Same
‘Hey, doofus, are you going to make me coffee or d’you want a wedgie?’
When someone says something like that to you, there are a couple of things you can do:
Option one: you can drop everything and immediately switch on the kettle.
Option two: you can point out to the person, in a very friendly manner, that you’re busy doing the dishes because you owe your little brother more or less a year’s pocket money, and tell him to make his own coffee.
Donovan’s eyes widened when he heard my answer. He obviously hadn’t expected me to choose option two.
‘What did you say?’ he hissed.
I chucked some knives and forks into the foaming dishwashing water. ‘I said, make your own bloody coffee – unless you’d rather do the dishes yourself.’
Donovan approached me, looking threatening, then grinned unexpectedly. ‘Playing hard-ass, eh?’ He punched my shoulder but then, wonder of wonders, reached out and switched on the kettle. ‘Don’t think that just because you’re going to high school next year and you spent a few days sitting in a tree with your girlfriend, you can suddenly do whatever you want. Do you get me?’
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’
My throat tightened when I thought of Leila. This time the previous morning, everything had been different.
This time the previous morning, we were still sitting in the tree.
The caretaker had brought us coffee.
The students and the choir had sung songs and waved posters around.
People had taken photos of us.
And I had behaved like an idiot.
‘Heard anything from her since?’ asked Donovan.
I put a plate on the drying rack and looked at him in surprise. I couldn’t remember my brother ever speaking to me as if I was a normal human being. Usually he only threatened me and made fun of me, always looking for a fight.
‘Nope,’ I said.
Donovan smiled. ‘Girls are weird. You’ll have to get used to it.’ He checked his reflection in the oven door and flexed his biceps. ‘Melissa goes on and on about global warming and the forests that are being chopped down and stuff like that. She thinks you and that Leila chick were terribly brave. She calls you ego-warriors, or something.’
‘Eco-warriors,’ I corrected him.
‘What?’
I shook my head. ‘Never mind.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Whatever. I still think it’s stupid to sit in a tree for so long.’ Donovan was quiet for a moment and started playing with the salt and pepper pots. It looked like he was making the two pots kiss each other. ‘I told Dad I won’t be playing rugby next year,’ he said without looking up.
I nearly dropped a plate. ‘You what?’
Donovan shrugged. ‘I told him I’m going to focus on swimming instead.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
Even before Donovan was born, my dad had bought him his first rugby ball. If the first team played during shop hours sometimes Dad simply closed the sports shop. He never, ever missed one of Donovan’s games.
‘He didn’t exactly do somersaults of joy,’ Donovan said drily and sat on a kitchen chair, making himself comfortable by resting his bare feet on the table. ‘But I think he was a little distracted by all the commotion you caused. Maybe it’ll only sink in properly later.’
Maybe Dad felt the same way I did – as if everything that had happened in the past few days still had not sunk in properly. I guessed anyone would feel that way if one morning they opened the front door and, before they knew it, they were sitting up in a tree with a girl, and the two of you met all kinds of strange people and suddenly made the front page of the newspaper.
Yesterday afternoon, when I got home, I had collapsed on my bed and fallen asleep almost immediately. It had felt as if my brain had had enough of everything and decided to switch off. I only woke up when my mum called me for dinner.
We ate dinner as if nothing had happened. Mum talked about her Very Important Court Case. Dad complained about his shop’s Christmas sales – which were looking dismal – and people preferring to slouch in front of the TV instead of exercising. Donovan was rather quiet – I suspected he was thinking of Melissa the whole time.
Adrian was the only one who kept asking questions about my three days in the tree. I answered as few of them as possible. Adrian was disappointed that I didn’t ask the fruit-juice man for more money.
Outside the pool pump was going chug-chug-chug.
The fridge hummed like a purring cat.
At the front gate Mr Bones was barking at the reverend’s wife, who walked past with her German shepherd, as she usually did that time of the morning.
It felt as if I had been in a time machine and had gone back three days…
Mrs Merriman, who wore pink and missed her son who wandered the streets.
Milly and her puppies.
The caretaker and the story about the bulldozers.
The bowls players practising being angels.
Killer, whose real name was Joy.
The front-page articles.
The island game.
Leila and The Tree At The Centre Of The Universe, with her dad and mum’s initials carved into the trunk.
It felt as if all those things had been merely a dream.
It felt as if something had changed during the past three days.
Yet everything suddenly felt exactly the same again.
I was so freaking lost in thought that I accidentally made Donovan coffee when the kettle boiled, even though I had convinced him for the very first time in my life to do it himself.
18
An Invisible Tree
Late that afternoon, I went to the park.
‘Where are you going?’ a suspicious Donovan wanted to know when he saw me sneaking out the front door. ‘Mum said I had to make sure you don’t get up to something crazy again.’
I promised him I wasn’t planning to go and sit in the tree.
The park was deserted when I got there.
Everyone had left. Killer and the students. The choir. The cyclists. The pretty girl who had asked for my autograph.
And the tree.
The municipality had been there. Red-face and Rat-face had done their job.
In a way I had expected that but it was still a shock to see the stump sticking out of the ground.
Once, when I was seven or eight years old, I was in the play area at McDonald’s and I saw a woman who had no arm, only a stump. The woman must have seen me staring at it because she walked up to me and asked with a friendly smile, ‘Do you want to feel it?’ I got such a fright that I started to cry hysterically and ran away to my parents. For weeks afterwards I had nightmares about the woman’s pink stump.
That was what the tree stump looked like – like something you couldn’t stop staring at but that you were too scared to touch.
A few leaves were lying on the ground. That was all that remained of the tree.
I was no longer seven or eight years old.
I was thirteen.
Next year I would go to high school.
I no longer cried about everything.
But the burning pain in my chest was so bad it felt as if I was going to suffocate. I clenched my teeth and my fists.
It was stupid. I didn’t know why I wanted to cry. It was just a stupid bloody tree. Thousands and thousands of them were chopped down every day and no one ever shed a tear about that.
‘A tree should be for ever,’ said a voice behind me.
I quickly wiped my eyes.
The caretaker appeared beside me but I didn’t look at him.
‘But nothing on this earth is for ever,’ he continued in a soothing voice. ‘What’s most important is that you and Leila made sure the tree was really seen. In today’s world that’s more necessary than you think – to
be noticed. Too many trees and animals and people have become invisible, or have simply disappeared, without anyone remembering them.’ For a moment he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You and Leila are welcome to pop in for coffee any time.’
Then Uncle John turned around and walked back to the bowling green.
I let out a deep breath and stared at the sawn-off stump sticking out of the ground. I thought of Mr Fourie, who said I had a rich imagination, and I thought of what the caretaker had just said.
Maybe I could imagine that the tree had only become invisible…
I pictured a rough, thick trunk growing out of the sawn-off stump. The trunk grew taller and taller and taller. From the trunk sprouted thick, low branches, close to each other – the kind of branches that are perfect to teach a little girl how to climb a tree. The trunk reached higher into the sky, higher and higher and higher, until it made you dizzy to look at it. It split into smaller and smaller branches. The tree was exploding into leaves. Birds came to sit on the branches, chirping and twittering; the wind rustled the leaves; the rough bark was basking in the afternoon sun. And somewhere on the bark, in a secret place among the leaves, appeared a heart with two letters inside it.
I smiled.
Below the last composition in my exercise book Mr Fourie had written, Keep writing such good compositions! I’m going to miss your talent next year. I got ninety-five percent for that composition.
I hoped that the following year I would get a chance to write a composition about a tree that appeared out of the ground. It would be a good composition, I just knew it. The caretaker was right: it was great to be noticed – even if it was only because you wrote good compositions.
At that moment I thought I understood why Mrs Merriman dyed her hair pink, wore pink clothes and walked from house to house to collect money for the SPCA.
Why Joy shaved her head, had her nose pierced and became Killer.
Maybe I even understood why Mum spent so much time on her Very Important Court Case; why Dad wanted a bigger sign for his shop; why Adrian had been thinking up clever plans to make money since he was small.
It was to be noticed.
I smiled. It actually made sense.
OK, except maybe for Adrian. He was probably a born money-grabber.
It was no fun always being Marnus-in-the-middle. The one who wasn’t a good swimmer, didn’t have hordes of girlfriends and wasn’t allergic to schoolwork. The one who couldn’t read fluently at the age of five and wasn’t constantly busy with all kinds of moneymaking plans.
I thought I had finally worked out what made me sit in the tree with Leila in the first place.
Most importantly, I thought I understood why Leila had started a petition to save the tree.
Sometimes you need to be noticed – even if it’s by your own dad.
‘Marnus!’
I swung around in surprise when the caretaker called my name. He had stopped some distance away from me and had turned around.
‘Can I tell you a secret?’
I nodded.
‘That first evening, your mum came to look for me at the bowling green. She offered me money to keep an eye on you and Leila all the time. I refused to take the money, but I promised her to take good care of you both. I could see she was terribly worried about you.’
I couldn’t believe my ears. So that was why the caretaker would come every evening and sit under the tree with Leila and her mum and me. And that was why he brought us coffee and looked so angry when it seemed like things were getting out of control with the students.
I smiled.
My family was weird.
‘Merry Christmas to you, Marnus!’ said the caretaker. ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot to tell you – Mrs Merriman sends her regards. She invited me to have lunch with her on Christmas Day.’ He turned around and walked off.
The caretaker might be old but was it my imagination or had his eyes just sparkled the way Donovan’s did when he spoke of Melissa?
‘Merry Christmas, Uncle John!’ I called.
19
Green Leaves
Number 9 Begonia Street wasn’t far from the park. Fortunately Junior du Toit had asked Leila her surname for his newspaper article, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to look up their address in the phone directory the previous night.
The house looked almost as I’d imagined it would. It had a sunny porch covered in purple flowers. I was sure Leila would know the name of the plant with the purple flowers. The lawn was in need of mowing. In a sunny spot on the porch sat a ginger cat who looked at me through lazy, half-open eyes as I pressed the buzzer at the gate.
I waited for quite a while but no one opened the door.
Disappointed, I turned around, but then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a curtain move.
‘Leila!’ I called.
At first I thought she was going to ignore me but then the front door opened.
Leila walked to the gate. She was wearing shorts and a light-green T-shirt, and she was barefoot. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail.
‘Hello, Marnus,’ she said.
I expected her to be angry but she sounded quite friendly. By then I had learned one thing, even though I hadn’t known her for that long: with Leila you never knew exactly what to expect.
‘How did you know where I live?’
I shrugged. ‘I knew it was within walking distance of the park and I’ve read the odd spy story so I’ve picked up some tips.’
She smiled.
I cleared my throat. ‘Erm…I guess you saw…I mean, the tree.’
She just nodded. That morning her eyes looked even bluer.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Leila shook her head. ‘It isn’t your fault. Things got a bit…out of hand. You want to come inside? I’m busy packing but you can quickly come for a cool drink if you want. We don’t have organic fruit juice but there’s Coke in the fridge.’ There was a slight reproach in her voice but I could hear that she was actually joking.
‘That freaking Nature’s Gift cold drink tasted like dishwashing water,’ I muttered. ‘So…erm… are you going on holiday?’
She nodded. ‘My mum and I are going to spend Christmas with my seaside granny. And after that I’m going away with my dad for a few days,’ she said as if it was the most normal thing on Earth. ‘It’s probably high time I got to know my stepmother and little stepbrother.’
I bent down and picked up the black plastic bag at my feet. ‘Then I’m just in time,’ I said. ‘This is for you. Merry Christmas – even though it’s still four days away.’
On the way there people had stared at me strangely. I guess they didn’t often see someone walking three blocks carrying a tree with a red ribbon tied around its trunk. But what the heck – it wasn’t exactly the strangest thing I had done in the past few days.
Leila unlocked the gate and took the small tree from me.
‘A white karee,’ she said.
‘Scientific name: Rhus pendulina.’ I pretended to be clever. ‘I hope you have space in the garden. The man at the nursery said they grow very fast but you’ll still have to wait a few years before it’s big enough to climb into.’
‘You’re never too old to climb a tree,’ said Leila with a smile. She caressed the leaves of the tree and looked at me, cocking her head. ‘Marnus, do you remember what you asked me that first day when you opened the door with the dishcloth in your hand?’
Embarrassed, I cleared my throat. ‘Erm…I asked whether you were there for kissing lessons.’
Unexpectedly, she leaned forward and kissed me.
It was just a quick kiss that merely brushed my lips but my heart started doing strange things in my chest.
The sun suddenly felt much warmer on my face and shoulders.
The wind gently ruffled my hair.
And a tingling sensation went through my arms and legs.
As if, at any moment, leaves and blossoms would sprout from my body.
Acknowledgements
A lot of people helped to make this book possible, and I owe them so many thanks.
First of all, a huge thank you (and many kisses) to Elize, Mia and Emma for your love, patience and encouragement all those times when I’m off climbing trees in my head.
My publisher, Miemie du Plessis at LAPA Publishers, has had my back since pretty much for ever. Thanks (and a super-duper-sized milkshake) for believing in my first story when I was only twenty-one, and sticking it out with me since.
Kobus Geldenhuys did the English translation, and Madeleine Stevens did the copy-editing – and I think they both did an amazing job. I really appreciate your hard work and gentle approach to the story.
I am extremely grateful to BookTrust and everyone involved in the In Other Words project. This groundbreaking initiative is making books spread their wings all over the world.
And finally, thank you to my editor, Shadi Doostdar, as well as Paul Nash, Kate Bland and the rest of the team at Oneworld and Rock the Boat, who put their faith in this book and made me feel right at home from the very start.
A Rock the Boat Book
First published by Rock the Boat, an imprint of Oneworld Publications, 2018
Originally published in Afrikaans in 2015 as ’n Goeie dag vir boomklim
This ebook published 2018
Copyright © Jaco Jacobs, 2015, 2018
English translation copyright © Kobus Geldenhuys, 2018
The moral right of Jaco Jacobs to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78607-317-4
eISBN 978-1-78607-318-1