Tree Magic

by Harriet Springbett

  Mum ignored her. Her narrowed eyes were fixed on Bob.

  “Come on, Jaz. Let’s sort things out. For Rainbow’s sake.”

  “There’s nothing to sort out. It’s over.”

  Rainbow glanced from Mum to Bob and back again. Over? She suspected Mum and Domi were having a love affair, but she didn’t think it meant that Mum and Bob were finished. No more Mum and Bob?

  She reached out and leant against the Mini. If there were no more Mum and Bob, where did she belong? Here with Mum and Dad, which wasn’t her home, or home with Bob, who wasn’t her father?

  Bob didn’t look at all shocked by Mum’s revelation. He nodded towards the line of cars.

  “Hippie outing? Or are you all off to raise some spirits?”

  He laughed at his own joke, though his voice sounded strangled.

  “Go home, Bob,” Mum sighed.

  “What? And leave you both here with this bunch of creeps?”

  Mum slapped his cheek.

  He caught her hand and wrenched it down to her side. She cried out in pain.

  Rainbow threw herself between them and tried to push them apart. They turned away and she fell into the dust. Domi’s bare feet appeared on the tarmac by the Mini. He put a restraining hand on Mum’s arm and helped Rainbow to stand up.

  “Can’t we sort this out like adults?” said Domi.

  “Get away from us,” shouted Mum at Bob. “We’re never coming home.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn selfish. Think about Rainbow for once,” replied Bob.

  “She’s happy here,” said Mum.

  “I think she’s old enough to know where she wants to be.” Bob turned towards Rainbow. “A girl needs her home, her school and her friends, doesn’t she, honey? Not some hippie dropouts. I bet they haven’t even taken you to school since you got here.”

  Mum and Bob looked down at her. There was silence.

  “It’s my birthday,” she said, lamely.

  “I know, honey,” said Bob. “I’ve got a big present for you. It’s at home.”

  Rainbow didn’t know what to say.

  “You don’t want us to go back, love, do you?” asked Mum.

  Domi put an arm around Rainbow. He turned to Bob and Mum and cleared his throat.

  “This isn’t the kind of thing you decide in the middle of a road. We’re on our way out. Come back tomorrow evening, Bob, and we’ll discuss things properly.”

  Bob seemed to see Domi for the first time.

  “I don’t know who you are, mate, but you’re not discussing anything. This is between me and Jasmine.”

  “And Rainbow,” said Domi, unperturbed. “I’m Dominique, the owner of Le Logis.”

  He held out his hand.

  Bob spat onto the road.

  “So you’re the con-man from her past. I can see why she left.”

  Domi’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing.

  Rainbow felt braver with Domi’s arm around her.

  “I’m sorry, Bob,” she said. “This is all my fault. I meant to phone you and tell you not to come.”

  Bob looked uncertain. “But I thought you hated it here. You wanted me to pick you up.”

  “I was homesick when I phoned you. And you took so long to come. I’m kind of used to it here now.”

  “I couldn’t come any quicker, honey. I had gigs and the garden to see to. And the ticket to book.”

  She had been stupid to think he would come immediately. He never did anything on an impulse. Not like Mum.

  “Who’s looking after Acrobat and his kittens?” she asked.

  “Ah,” said Bob. He scratched his chin.

  “What do you mean, Ah?”

  “Well, I couldn’t look after all those animals on my own.”

  Dread clutched Rainbow’s chest. Her vision slipped sideways.

  Mum gasped. “What have you done with them?”

  “The cat’s back with the Bellamys.”

  “And the kittens?”

  Bob ignored Mum.

  “Look, Rainbow, are you coming home with me or not? I can’t hang around here for ever.”

  Blood thumped in Rainbow’s head. She wrenched herself free from Domi, launched herself at Bob and grabbed his T-shirt.

  “What have you done with the kittens?”

  “Hey! Calm down.” He pulled himself away.

  “The kittens,” she shrieked.

  “Well, they had to go for a little swim.”

  “You drowned them,” she screamed. “How could you?”

  She threw herself at him and pounded his chest.

  “I hate you! How could you? I hate you! I hate you. I never want to see you again.”

  Tears spilt over her fists. Mum and Domi eased her away, one on each side of her.

  Bob stomped back to his van. He revved up the engine and roared away. Rainbow didn’t bother to watch him leave.

  Part IV

  Twigs

  Mary, 1992–1993

  Chapter 18

  Mary’s first sensation as she wakes this spring morning is anguish. It drains her vitality and leaves her vulnerable, like a little girl whose mum has left her at school for the very first time.

  She struggles from sleep into empty consciousness. Eighteen months have passed since the accident. She tries not to think about before. It still hurts too much. What more is she obliged to do for freedom from her memories?

  Last night she lay in bed for hours, listening to cars swishing along the wet road under tired streetlights. Memories of Michael slid unwanted into her head. She tipped them straight out again. But when she crossed the quagmire between awake and asleep, he was lurking there. He trapped her in his arms and pulled her into sleep, and so she was forced to succumb to his presence in her dreams.

  She’s missing him badly this morning. She knows she’ll lash out and create a tornado today; anything to spin herself away from her internal wound. She has to regain control, even if it means inflicting pain.

  She rolls from her bed and stares out of the window into the busy street below. The view of concrete and metal reassures her. It hardens her and helps her make the transition from green dreams to grey reality.

  She’s been living with Mother in this semi-detached house in the local town since the divorce a year ago. They are known here as the Hubbards. When Mother divorced Bob and dropped his surname, Mary helped herself to her mother’s maiden name. She was glad to change the Linnet as well as the R–.

  Mary approves of towns. There is continual movement and no time for reflection. It’s all about getting to your destination. There’s no looking back and wondering, no stopping to think about things like she used to in the countryside. Here, roads, cars and houses are laid down on the face of nature. They squash it back to where she wants it to be: underground, out of sight.

  Occasionally, creeping fingers of green weeds appear between the concrete paving slabs in the front garden she walks across every day. She has weed killer for this problem. In springtime she kills every seven days; in the summer, every fourteen; in the winter, once a month.

  She turns away from the window and dresses in her usual ripped jeans and moth-holed jumper. In the cold dampness of the bathroom she coaxes the bolt on the door into its sleeve. Then she pours hot water into the basin and scrubs her face with her rough flannel. She cleanses the pain that is too close to the surface, forces it to seep out through the pores of her skin. Once her face is bright red, she counts her spots and backcombs the crown of her head so she looks a mess. She’s as ugly and unfashionable as she can be. She feels stronger now, in control again.

  She thumps down the stairs, looking out for signs of Mother. Without Bob to anchor her, Mother has become dependent on Mary. It’s a desperate need, unimaginable before, and it drives Mary out of the house. Her only breathing space is when Mother goes on her inspirational creativity retreats or to her meditation meetings. She has given up singing and song-writing, and works in a supermarket. In the evenings she writes fantasy stories in the
company of a bottle of wine. Mary wonders what’ll happen when she leaves home. Mother will probably crumple up and die in a nest of empty bottles and failure. Mary could feel guilty about this, but she refuses to let herself feel anything. Guilt was for R–.

  She opens the door into the kitchen. Mother is hunched over a mug of tea at the table. Mary changes her mind about having breakfast. She picks up her scruffy denim jacket and walks straight out of the front door.

  She begins the familiar walk to school. Mother bought a house in this area of the town so that Mary didn’t have to change schools. Mary would have preferred the anonymity of a new school. She always was the odd one out in her class, but when she returned to her Year 9 class after the accident she quickly earned a new respect as the school rebel. The kids loathe and admire her. She’s almost fifteen now, nearing the end of Year 10. The teenagers – even Lucy Carter and Rebecca – hang around with her in hope and fear of her ruthless moments. They cling and follow, copy and hang back, support and desert her. She never refers to them as her friends.

  Trish Bellamy is her only friend. Although they no longer live in the same village, Mary spends most evenings at Trish’s house. She cycles there after school on her rusty, old-lady’s bicycle. Trish’s family, particularly Trish’s mum, is her only weakness nowadays. Trish is the most unpopular girl in school. She’s intelligent, shy and gullible. The others tease her because she wears glasses and has more spots than skin. They ask each other what Mary sees in Four-Eyes and why she hangs around with her.

  Trish is unfazed by Mary’s spectacular mood swings. She sticks by Mary, whether she’s beating up a Year 7 pupil or sharing stolen sweets with her hangers-on. Trish knows exactly where she’s going in life and precisely how she’ll get there. Mary envies this hidden strength. She has no idea where she’s going.

  It’s a half-mile walk to school. This morning it looks as if she’s going to be early, so she decides to stop for breakfast and kill time until she’s late. McDonald’s is just ahead. She hates it for its popularity, but today she’s too hungry to care. Besides, she’s alone and eating from necessity, which isn’t the same as choosing to eat there with friends.

  She sits in a corner where nobody can look at her without her noticing. She watches the losers chewing on stodgy egg and bacon muffins. There are dozens of them, mostly rushed men in suits. Several boys her age are sitting at the bar. She hears them discuss where they’re going to hang out while they skive school.

  She has never skived. She can’t be bothered to find an alternative to the daily punishment of school. She’s never had a boyfriend either. No one she knows is worth associating with. The boys at school are lemmings. Nothing separates one from another; they are as predictable and blank as cardboard cut-outs in their dull uniforms.

  She sucks up her watery orange juice and thinks about the other boyfriend possibilities. Trish’s boring older brothers bring home snooty fashion-sheep undergrads. Jimmy, Trish’s younger brother, is still a kid. The youth-club boys are the same as those at school. That leaves Mark Flint, her boarding-school-scholarship neighbour, who is stuffed with nervous tics. He has a phobia about things falling on his head, which could be quite interesting. But he’s never around.

  No, it seems that a boyfriend is out of the question. She will stay single forever and end her days as a spinster, eating rats in a freezing attic. Or she could become a nun and dedicate her life to blaspheming. Yes, that would be ideal. She could wrinkle up in a convent for the rest of her life. She would kneel for eighteen hours a day, her hands folded, and silently tell God what an arsehole he is. She would become a saint. No one would know what she was saying in her prayers. She could sail around in her robes, being nastily holy to brats and goody-goodies. She could develop a love for singing loudly and test the godliness of the other nuns by massacring hymns in her out-of-tune voice.

  There is a loud shout at the next table. Her daydream shatters. An angry, six-foot heavyweight punches a young man. The young man falls towards her. He cracks his head on her table, rolls over and drops into her lap like a gift from heaven.

  She leaps up and pushes him into the puddle of Coke on the floor.

  Mr Heavyweight makes a single-minded beeline for the young man’s prostrate body. She’s in his way. He slams into her.

  She swears at him and kicks him hard in the shin.

  He swears back at her, hopping on one leg.

  She snatches her bag and elbows through the rubberneckers to the exit. Outside, she dashes across the road without looking. No one is chasing her. She stops. She’s shaking. She leans against a shop front and counts thirteen passing cars.

  In the distance a siren blares. It approaches and a flashing police car hurtles up to McDonald’s door. Three policemen jump out. Within minutes the two trussed-up fighting cocks emerge from McDonald’s and are shoved into the police car, ready to be grilled. She walks away.

  The police car brakes at the pedestrian crossing in front of her. A pair of narrowed eyes glares at her from a Coke-washed face of stubble. Then the police car jerks the boy away. She rubs her goose-pimpled arms and continues onwards to school. The real world is harsh and unforgiving. It’s a step beyond the safe environment of teachers and kids where she has played the rebel for the last eighteen months. Is it time to take that step?

  The vulnerability from last night’s dreams niggles Mary all day. Two detentions and Joanne Clark’s broken nose only allow the pain to subside momentarily.

  At break she sits alone in the physics lab. Mr Higgins is supervising her detention. She tries to answer the science questions he’s given her in an effort to divert her mind from her simmering anguish. Words glare, numbers accuse, units of measure mock.

  Mr Higgins alternates between sharpness and sneers. He reeks of dislike for her. She can smell the invisible, silent aura of disgust flowing like sour milk from his mind. It seeps through the skin of his face and down his arms, and then spills across the bench and envelops her. He probably thinks she pretends not to understand physics because she wants to rebel. In fact, the science labs and maths classrooms are the only places she doesn’t need to act in order to appear stupid.

  He grows tired of lecturing her on her behaviour and shuffles papers at his desk. There are two test tubes of transparent liquids at the far end of her bench. She tries to calculate velocities. Her tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth as she mantras the mesmerising words ‘ticker tape’. The test tubes intrigue her. The mantra changes: one tube, two tubes; one tube, two tubes.

  Her heartbeat accelerates. Like a reaction to extreme thirst in the night, she sees herself stand up, take hold of the test tubes and … and then what? Will they explode if she mixes them? Is one of them acid? Would it burn through his papers if she threw it over his desk? Over him? She wonders what he would do if she drank them. The two phials of glass represent entry to a whole new category of reactions.

  Mr Higgins glares at her.

  “Five minutes, Hubbard.”

  Mary picks up her pen. The knowledge that she could create havoc with the test tubes helps relieve her frustration. She concentrates on the worksheet. There are fourteen questions. In a burst of imagination, she scribbles down the six formulae her brain has scraped up over the last year. She fills in numbers randomly and slams her pen onto the bench.

  Mr Higgins’ lips curl in disdain as he walks over. He takes one look. Mary stands and folds her arms. The test tubes are between her and the door.

  “Pathetic,” he says. “I’m looking forward to telling your parents how lazy you are when I see them this evening.”

  Mary sneers internally. Even if the sneer were visible, Mr Higgins wouldn’t see it because of the long fringe of hair she hides behind. She doesn’t care what the teachers say at parents’ evening.

  He leans close to her.

  “But we’ll tell the headmaster your behaviour is satisfactory, all right? So I don’t have to put up with you again. You’re dismissed.”

  She walks
towards the door. When she reaches the test tubes, she swings her bag out and knocks them to the ground.

  The simultaneous explosions of shattering glass and Mr Higgins’ temper are icy spring water to Mary’s thirst. She smirks. Under the bubbling puddle, three of the floor tiles are revealing their original colours. She wishes she’d had the nerve to drink the contents.

  Chapter 19

  “Your teachers tell me you’re good at languages,” says Mary’s mother.

  She’d almost forgotten to attend the parents’ evening, which would have suited Mary fine, but had remembered at the last minute and turned up late. Without Mary.

  “They say you could be a translator,” she adds.

  Mary doesn’t want to think about careers. She’s annoyed at being assessed and categorised. Hunched in the plastic kitchen chair, her body all angles, she pretends not to listen to her mother.

  At school she’s wallowing in academic failure. She refuses to drop sciences and spectacularly fails everything set. She measures and mixes in chemistry lessons, chanting the proportions: three to one; five to two; seven to ten. No matter how carefully she measures, the results hiss and spit in rebuke. Sometimes they turn strange colours that provoke detentions.

  In French lessons it’s different. She has to work to hide her delight as she learns the foreign code. In her head the sentences form themselves, while on paper she mixes them up. She’d like a penfriend, but can’t weaken her position as a dud by risking discovery. She’d been tempted to sign up for the French exchange trip in Year 9, when Mother and Bob were going through the divorce, but Mother had approved of the idea, so Mary had refused to go. When, in French lessons, she lets slip a correct answer, she sees Mrs Beacon’s eyes light up. This is a warning to shut up and she counts the number of each type of accent on the page in front of her instead. So far, she has managed to avoid living up to the hope in Mrs Beacon’s face. She does like languages though, despite her studied indifference. Sometimes, when she locks herself into her bedroom at night, she pulls out her French textbooks. She speaks the words aloud and invents conversations with Pierre and Marie-France. Tomorrow she’ll discuss careers with Trish. Perhaps she’ll be a nun in France.