been permitted to see this famous tree yet; you are keeping it a secret, close to your heart. I know it’s situated somewhere over the back since that’s the way the loft window faces and you are spending all the daylight hours that you’re home in the loft. I know it’s just come into leaf and that before, when you first saw it, it was blossoming, all that stuff about it being white, I’ve heard it several times now, how you were going to phone me but you couldn’t see anything but it, etc. Every night in bed before I pretend to go to sleep it’s been you telling me more and more things about trees as if desperate to convince me; on the first night I asked you what kind it was and you went into a huff (probably, I thought myself, because in your subterfuge, your attempt to screen your affair or whatever it is from me, you’d simply forgotten to pick a kind and I’d caught you out); because what kind it is, you said, waving your arms about in a pure show of panic, is just a random label given by people who need to categorize things, people are far too hung up on categorization, the point about this is that it can’t be categorized, it’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen, that’s all I know and all I need to know, I don’t need to give it a name, that’s the whole point, you said, don’t you see?
No, I say, sitting calm and reasonable in front of the wreckage of our room. Listen, what I mean is. Some trees can be kept inside and others can’t. It’d stunt them. They would die. And it sounds to me from your description and everything, though I haven’t seen it myself as you know, but it does sound to me as if your tree is too big for the inside of a house already.
I know, you say. You drop the screwdriver on the undamaged bit of floor at our feet and you lean into me, miserable. I can sense triumph. You are warm under my arm. I shake my head. I keep my sad face on as if I understand.
And probably its roots are too settled now to move it without doing damage, I say.
I know, you say, defeated. I was wondering about that.
And anyway, I go on, but gently, because I know the effect it will have. The thing about your tree is, it belongs to someone else. It’s not your tree to take. Is it?
Probably I shouldn’t have said that, though it was worth it to find myself holding you so close later that night, a night you didn’t leave me, weren’t cold and wooden to me. Certainly it is one of the reasons I have to go and fetch you out of the police station the next day where you are being questioned about wilful damage to someone else’s property. I’ve done nothing wrong, you keep telling me all the way home. You say it over and over, and you tell me it’s what you repeatedly told the man recording you saying it in the interview room. I notice that you want to go the long way home, that you’re keen not to take the shortcut. Once I’ve settled you in the house, up in the dangerous loft again with a cup of tea I’ve made you, I sneak out. I head for the streets you didn’t want us to walk down. At first nothing is out of place. Then outside a house on a well-to-do street I know I’ve found it when I look down and see that someone has written, quite large, on the pavement in bright green paint, the words: PROPERTY IS THEFT.
There is a tree in the garden. I look hard at it. But it is just a tree; it’s nothing more than a tree, it looks like any old tree, with its early-evening mayflies hovering near it in the shafts of low sun, its leaves pinched and new and the grass beneath it patchy and shadowed. I can feel myself getting angry. I try to think of other things. I tell myself that the correct term for mayflies is ephemeroptera; I remember from university, though I can’t think why or how I ever learned such a fact, especially I can’t think why I would have retained it until now. There they are regardless, whatever they’re called, annoyingly in the air. For an instant I hate them. I fantasize
No, I say, sitting calm and reasonable in front of the wreckage of our room. Listen, what I mean is. Some trees can be kept inside and others can’t. It’d stunt them. They would die. And it sounds to me from your description and everything, though I haven’t seen it myself as you know, but it does sound to me as if your tree is too big for the inside of a house already.
I know, you say. You drop the screwdriver on the undamaged bit of floor at our feet and you lean into me, miserable. I can sense triumph. You are warm under my arm. I shake my head. I keep my sad face on as if I understand.
And probably its roots are too settled now to move it without doing damage, I say.
I know, you say, defeated. I was wondering about that.
And anyway, I go on, but gently, because I know the effect it will have. The thing about your tree is, it belongs to someone else. It’s not your tree to take. Is it?
Probably I shouldn’t have said that, though it was worth it to find myself holding you so close later that night, a night you didn’t leave me, weren’t cold and wooden to me. Certainly it is one of the reasons I have to go and fetch you out of the police station the next day where you are being questioned about wilful damage to someone else’s property. I’ve done nothing wrong, you keep telling me all the way home. You say it over and over, and you tell me it’s what you repeatedly told the man recording you saying it in the interview room. I notice that you want to go the long way home, that you’re keen not to take the shortcut. Once I’ve settled you in the house, up in the dangerous loft again with a cup of tea I’ve made you, I sneak out. I head for the streets you didn’t want us to walk down. At first nothing is out of place. Then outside a house on a well-to-do street I know I’ve found it when I look down and see that someone has written, quite large, on the pavement in bright green paint, the words: PROPERTY IS THEFT.
There is a tree in the garden. I look hard at it. But it is just a tree; it’s nothing more than a tree, it looks like any old tree, with its early-evening mayflies hovering near it in the shafts of low sun, its leaves pinched and new and the grass beneath it patchy and shadowed. I can feel myself getting angry. I try to think of other things. I tell myself that the correct term for mayflies is ephemeroptera; I remember from university, though I can’t think why or how I ever learned such a fact, especially I can’t think why I would have retained it until now. There they are regardless, whatever they’re called, annoyingly in the air. For an instant I hate them. I fantasize
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