by Ana Salote
‘Go to the police then. You can’t just let him win.’
‘He hasn’t won though has he? We’re managing better now; we’ve still got the Jungle; let’s just be grateful for that.’
Though Eva couldn’t hear me, I offered her this bit of tree wisdom: ‘The wind always turns; wait a while.’
I told Wilfred how things had turned out.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘there’s more fun to be had in those quarters,’ and he sniggered rattily. Privately, I thought he had something left to prove. He couldn’t leave it at that – rescued by a human. Some weeks later he brought me this tale:
‘I used my network of informers to find out when Adolf was roaming some distance from home. I let myself in by the cat flap - so convenient - loitered in the kitchen, ate some delectable round things out of a box, and left my trademark circle of droppings in Adolf’s dish. I padded around upstairs on the thick carpets then settled myself in the bathroom ready for my favourite sport. The timing was perfect. I leapt out of the toilet bowl and sunk my teeth into Sperrin’s behind. Bog ambush! It beats all, I tell you. He screamed, he shimmied, he rolled on the floor; but I just swung with a grip like a trap. When I was ready, I let go and galloped down the stairs leaving him to stumble over his own trousers – they always do that. I looked up, showed him the length of my teeth and left him on his knees swearing and screaming for his wife.
I could do nothing but marvel at Wilfred’s audacity.
‘That’s called revenge isn’t it?’ I mused. ‘Paying back bad with bad. It’s one of those human things that I never really understood. I always thought that if you fall over a tree root say, and then in revenge you turn around and kick it, all you do is hurt your foot. But I’m beginning to see now.’
‘You have a simple way of looking at things,’ said Wilfred. ‘Revenge can be, will be, very sweet, I believe.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about but it gave me a hollow feeling in my trunk.
‘What about paying back good with good,’ he went on, ‘does that strike you as fair?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘everybody gains from that.’
‘Are you ready now to pay back your old friend Wilfred for his, how did you put it just now: wit, nerve, courage; for risking my own life in fact?’
‘Of course I am. That was the deal. I just can’t think of anything big enough that I can do for you.’
Wilfred, of course, had no such difficulties.
Chapter 15 Catch a Falling Star
‘All I ask for now is that you keep an open mind,’ Wilfred warned, ‘but a day may come when I ask more. It’s time to let you in on a few secrets. The greatest gathering of gnostics ever held will take place very soon. In a few weeks I head North for the first session. The Pica is going to read the signs gathered from every corner of the earth and she will then predict the future of the planet as closely as it can be told. After that we vote.’
‘What about?’ I said, beginning to feel uneasy.
‘The humans. Is the planet a better place with or without them?’
‘And what if the vote goes against them.’
‘We have options.’
‘Such as?’
He slid over my question. The council’s aim, he said, was to save the planet from the humans who were destroying it. I would be on the agenda for the next meeting – how to get the plants involved.
Now all this was a lot to take in. I said that I would have to think about it all very carefully and maybe talk to some of the other plants.
Wilfred’s whiskers shot upright, ‘What do you mean talk to the other plants, you don’t mean that there are more like you.’
It just slipped out. It was no good back-tracking. Wilfred was too sharp for that, so I played it down as much as I could.
‘Not exactly like me; but plants are more connected than animals, not so separate. I’ve been teaching some of them to think. Some can’t do it at all, but others are beginning to understand.’
Wilfred shut up then. I looked at his energy field and it was boiling.
‘So you can pass it on,’ he said. ‘It’s here then, the turning point is here. This puts a new twist on things. I must consult.’
He can be very dramatic. Sometimes I think he’s a secret soap-watcher on the quiet. Anyway he ran off.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he called back to me.
As if.
Brooke Farm’s theme tune was playing and I had missed the ending.
The next night Wilfred came back and told me that I could be the Teacher they were all waiting for but I had to get serious, I had to give up my loyalty to Charlie.
It was no good my teaching the whole garden to think if all they wanted to do then was watch TV (if a tree could blush I would have flamed like a maple in September). Only the night before, half the garden was enthralled by Sally Durell’s wedding. I have a horror that Wilfred will catch us at it some time.
‘You could be one of the greats,’ Wilfred interrupted my guilty thoughts, ‘there is no doubt, you will be remembered and revered as first among flora.’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong tree. There’s nothing special about me.’
‘Self-evidently wrong. Stand tall; say hello to your destiny. I see it all. Maybe they can manage without animals for a while, though they won’t like it, but if the plants turn it’s goodbye humans.’
‘If they’re clever enough to make TVs, I think they can manage without us,’ I said.
‘You don’t get it do you?’ said Wilfred, amazed at my stupidity. ‘Without you lot we’d all die – you, the plants, are the most important things on this planet,’ and then he did a strange thing; almost involuntarily he bowed to me.
The solemn moment dissolved as he rolled on his back, mouth lolling. He stayed there for a silly length of time.
‘Wilfred!’
He didn’t move.
‘Wilfred, wouldn’t Adolf like to see that soft belly fur, and those pink padswaving in the air.’
That did it. He spun over.
‘Just making a point. That’s how we’d all be: every animal, humans included, would go belly up without you lot. You make the air breathable.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. At dawn you’re breathing out pure oxygen. The birds get high on it and they sing at a vibration which helps the plants to grow.’
‘The dawn chorus.’
‘That’s right, a big old lovefest between the birds and the plants.’
I liked that, the greenery and the birds together, literally breathing life into every new day.
He looked at me shrewdly.
‘So you see how well we work together, flora and fauna. It could all be so perfect if it weren’t for…’
I started folding my leaves into myself. There was truth in what he said but I didn’t want to see it. Wilfred saw me shutting down.
‘Alright, enough for one day; I know what you’re thinking – and as humans go,’ he took a deep breath, ‘he’s a decent kid,’ he said this quickly, as if the words stung his tongue and he needed to spit them out.
I was listening again.
‘But there’s a lot at stake here,’ he went on. ‘The Pica showed you the rain forests. You, yes you, could save them. Or will you choose the boy?’
And off he went. I felt torn. For the first time I regretted my gnosis. The head of the Pica floated into my mind with these words: ‘There’s no going back from knowing, but there’s peace at the end of the flight.’
What I needed was to go green for a while, maybe for a whole day. The sun was setting and the sky was tiered like a purple stadium; the darkening tiers melted into soft furrows, melted again into smoke pillars and drifted away. Peace.
And something else; another feeling, but as I tried to hold it, it lost its substance like the clouds.
I felt more settled then and rested deeply, only stirring when Charlie came stealthily up the ladder. Ever since Charlie’s night jaunt Eva had continued locking the chu
te at night – for her own peace of mind she said, so Charlie came the long way round and he came equipped for activity.
He was carrying star charts and a compass. I nudged into his thoughts. He was preparing for something; something nice and exciting – a meteor shower, one of the best in years. That was good. I could use a distraction. I let the rest of the garden know. Everything stirred and we opened ourselves to the western sky where Charlie was training his telescope. And what a show it was.
The sky at that time was properly dark. The street lights died at midnight. If there were lights to be seen they were the small soft lights of candles, so the stars could be seen for what they truly were and starlight had a meaning again. I had not seen true starlight until the first lights out curfews. I hadn’t rested for a week then. I just gazed up, so that the branches which grew towards the sun started to spread more evenly towards the stars. In a true starlit sky there are dizzying ranks beyond ranks beyond ranks of stars; intense whites, haloes of red and blue, and they twinkle like in the rhyme.
Against that curtain the meteor shower came down. The stars had started raining. Charlie threw his telescope aside and climbed as high into my branches as he could get. I did my best to lift him towards the stars and we watched together. Then just as we thought it was over one of the last falling lights carried on falling. It fell through space, it fell through sky, it fell through Cornwall. It was fire, a white ball with a tail of fire. My branch bent under Charlie’s weight straining upward. I thought: he’s doing that, he’s bringing the meteor down, he wants to catch a falling star. And he held out his arms.
I was holding him, he wasn’t holding on to me. The whole garden was lit with the fire. The shrews and moles and cats looked up with white blind-seeming eyes. Charlie, for heaven’s sake, I thought, and the blazing rock seemed to pass right between his hands before it burrowed a full foot down into the garden. Eerie space steam rose from the hole. We all gasped and waited for the little alien to come crawling out – I was sure that it would look like a cat, but there was nothing. The steam got less and we waited for it to cool. Charlie didn’t want to dowse it with water in case he washed off any magical space dust. Eventually he got impatient and fetched the fireplace tongs. Then he lay it on a piece of foil and brought it up into the tree to cool. The sky was lightening in the East, so Charlie slipped back indoors and I was left alone with the space rock.
I had a spooky feeling running just under my bark, as though I was being watched. I looked around the garden just greying in the dawn. Three sets of black eyes were trained on Charlie’s bedroom window. Two magpies were posted in the apple trees at each edge of the garden; one sat higher in a fir. My thoughts went out to them questioning, but their thoughts were running in a stream far above mine. I felt tired then but I did not rest easy.
Later, I was not the only one watching as Charlie turned the rock carefully in his hands. It was a small, dull-looking thing. He pushed my branches to one side so that the morning sun fell on it, and then the patterns showed: red veins branched across it; at the end of one branch were dark swirls, at the end of the other, a shine. The shine was not visible in the shade, only in the sunlight did this spot shine like a mirror.
‘Wow,’ said Charlie quietly to himself. The rock felt warm and heavy in his cupped hands, then I felt all his being lift; the very brain in his head was rising. Everything about him strained upwards, then gradually he settled back into himself.
‘This is it, Ash. Phase two is here. Adapt and survive. That’s what the garden has to do, and there’s no time to waste, no time at all.’ He swung one-armed down the rope.
Just then Eva came out cradling some bugs she’d rescued from a cabbage.
She was about to free them when she stumbled and almost fell into the mini crater.
‘What the…’ she said looking down, up and all around. ‘Have we been bombed?’
‘Meteor,’ said Charlie, ‘Seen my library card. Got to go,’ and he skidded through the house.
A few nights later the excitement was over apart from the hole in the garden, and a few moles still shocked by the sudden air in their tunnels. Eva wanted to take the rock to the museum but Charlie worried that he wouldn’t get it back, so he kept it in the treehouse and did tests on it. He found that it did funny things to magnets. Sometimes he just stared at it like his mind could follow it back out to where it came from.
Wilfred came to see me. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d been in the hills two counties away, he said, at a meeting. He inspected the hole and shook his head.
‘Strange days, one more omen.’
‘Of what?’ I asked.
Wilfred peered into the hole and shuddered. He raised himself onto his hind legs and sniffed the wind: ‘It’s coming soon, I see it.’
‘Can’t anybody give a straight answer round here?’
‘We must wait for the council. Mother Pica will dwell on the signs we have gathered; when she is ready she will speak.’
He asked me lots of questions about the rock.
‘Branches – choices most likely. The shine – the future I would guess if we make the right choice.’
‘Or maybe it’s just another rock,’ I said.
‘Or maybe it’s just another rock. Don’t balance on the fence too long my friend. You may get blown off.’
Chapter 16 Science
I watched with interest as what looked like a giant woolly caterpillar walked up the garden. What an odd creature, I thought. Only when it came into my shade and looked up did I know it for Wilfred. He had grown his coat, so that his eyes were set deep in fur, which haloed his body, doubling his size.
‘Wilfred,’ I greeted him, ‘expecting a cold snap?’
‘I start North tomorrow. My area runs from Greenland to the Barents then South to Germany. I’m collecting proxy votes from those who can’t travel, then I head into the Black Forest for the great gathering. I need your decision before I go. Are you with us? Can I tell the gathering that there may be a way to get the plants on board?’
‘Exactly what do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to teach the plants to think so we can all join forces against the humans.’
‘Against - what do you mean against?’
‘That’s the point of the vote.
First ballot: Is the planet better off without humans?
Ballot 2: If it is, what action should we take: a) non-cooperation – cows don’t give milk, hens don’t lay and so on, like the practice run we had a few months back, or
b) aggression, like the hamster rebellion.
‘I need more time to think.’
‘There is no time; I start tonight.’
There was a soft sliding sound followed by thuds as a pile of books slid down the chute. Then came a pillow; then came Charlie.
This was a relief. Wilfred wouldn’t hang around with Charlie there.
‘I’ll be back later for your answer, and don’t forget, you owe me one,’ Wilfred hissed.
‘Hi Ash.’ Charlie came elbowing out of the chute, sat down and started to read.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Phase two,’ he said without looking up.
Now usually I like to look over Charlie’s shoulder as he reads his science books. They are fun, colourful things with optical illusions and pop-up models of volcanoes and spacecraft. Not these new books: these books had page after page of tiny writing, and chemical equations and weird diagrams. Charlie read following his finger at great speed, line after line; the pages turned almost as fast as a breeze could blow them. When I tried speaking to him he answered, ‘just a minute,’ but as he got deeper into the books he didn’t answer at all. He wasn’t being rude, he just couldn’t hear. I looked into his mind and it was full of words and symbols running by in endless strings. Every now and then he’d pause for a few seconds and the strings would rearrange themselves and link up with other strings in different patterns, then he’d whisper, ‘OK, got it,’ and go racing on aga
in. He finished a whole fat book without looking up once. Between books he rolled the space rock around in his hands.
Since catching the falling star Charlie was a boy possessed. Phase two was much more than a schoolboy project. As far as I could tell his aim was to read every science book in the world. First he hauled as much as he could carry from the library, then he asked Conal’s dad, who’s a nurse, to get some books from the hospital library.
Normally I hung around listlessly while he read, wishing that we could have fun together like we used to, but that night I had some deep thinking of my own to do. I knew that Wilfred would be back soon demanding my decision. Knowing all about Wilfred and his powers of persuasion, I guessed that the first vote would go against the humans.
I looked down fondly at the top of Charlie’s head, where his hair grew in a funny swirl. He was in a growth spurt, lengthening out and losing roundness.
‘Now then, did someone put manure in your wellies?’ I muttered - that’s what Les Durrell said to his growing nephew. It was my favourite ever line from Brooke Farm and I’d been waiting for a chance to say it. But it was wasted: Charlie was still too engrossed to notice me.
Was I wrong to speak up for humans just because of Charlie? Wouldn’t he end up like the rest of them in a few years time? He broke from his reading as though he sensed my thoughts and gave me a reassuring look. I looked at the dancing speckles in his eyes, eyes that had never lost the astonishment of being born, and knew that I would stick by him all his life or mine.
So who would put the case for the humans at the great gathering? No one I guessed.
Eva wandered out into the garden. It looked like she had her painting itch.
‘Are you alright sweetheart?’ she called to Charlie as she carted out her easel, paints and stool and set up at the top of the orchard.
‘Yes,’ Charlie called back without looking up.
Eva painted. I looked at the garden, much of it still drab in its winter starkness, then I looked at her painting. She had the trees in a layered net against the white sky; soft greens and duns and yellows underneath; finally she dabbed on white flames of magnolia and balls of apple blossom, whiter than the sky. She was so intent, so lifted, and her aura showed a special strength of light pouring out of her forehead. And then I got it. I knew why she painted.