‘He’ll be there,’ Arry says, reading my thoughts in the uncanny way he has. I think he must be psychic. ‘Will lives in the tops of trees. He’s a different man up there. Until you understand that about him, and until you’ve experienced it yourself, you don’t really know him. Of all the people I’ve ever met, he’s the only one who’s really special. The only one I’d do anything for.’
‘Sounds like the love of your life,’ I say, but not meaning it.
‘He is,’ Arry says, meaning it.
‘And,’ I say, meaning it, ‘of mine. I think.’
‘You think?’
‘Who knows the future?’
‘Well, do it for him.’
‘O, Arry! I don’t think I can.’
‘O, Cordelia, I know you can, if you’ve a mind to.’
‘Even though he doesn’t know I’m doing it?’
‘You’re talking mind. I’m talking spirit.’
‘You mean, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy”?’
‘Now there’s a happy thought between friends.’
‘D’you think Hamlet was the love of Horatio’s life? And d’you think Horatio was queer? I think I do.’
‘Now what’re we talking here?’
‘Shakespeare.’
‘Then you tell me. I’ve no head for his sort of heights.’
‘I thought we were talking about facing phobias?’
‘Right! Okay! You’ve got me there, you have indeed now. I’ll tell you what. Let me help you face yours and I’ll let you help me face mine.’
So I said yes, and had to lie down straight away to recover.
Next day Arry said, ‘The man on the ground. You remember Cal?’
‘Why him? Because you fancy him?’
‘Cheeky chitty! Because he knows what to do and has plenty of muscle. Because he won’t mind sitting around waiting while we’re at the top.’
‘Sounds like a faithful dog.’
‘He is a bit. He hasn’t got much up top, it’s true, but he has got big muscles. He’s also got a car, well, a banger of a van, which will be handy for getting us there and carting the gear.’
‘As well as because you fancy him.’
‘And because he fancies you. Makes him keen, you see.’
‘O?’
‘Yes, O.’
‘Well, I don’t fancy him. Except in a fantasy way. More muscle than brains isn’t my type.’
‘Best not to let on to him about that till after the climb, because we do need him.’
‘You’re a disgraceful manipulator.’
‘All I’m doing is giving two people what they want. You want an exciting challenge up there with the birds. Cal wants to be near the bird of his desires. What’s so wrong with that?’
‘Not to mention what you get out of it. A day with a bit of rough and me to scare the living poo out of.’
‘Fair trade.’
‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’
‘What the bright lads call enlightened self-interest, so I’m told. Which isn’t a bad motto for running your life, now is it, colleen?’
The climb has to be on Sunday. Arry has a stop-gap job, Monday to Friday in a garden centre, maintaining the plants, fetching and carrying. He needs Saturday, he says, ‘to set up the tree’, whatever he means by that.
Sunday morning at ten is cloudy and warm, a late September day, a hint of autumn in the air. We’ve had no rain for a couple of weeks. I’ve tried to keep my mind off the coming horror by working all Saturday with Julie on the next issue of the school mag and helping her to clean up her garden: weeding, mowing the lawn, giving the shed a coat of preservative. She’s got behind with her laundry, so I do that while she marks school essays. Anything to keep me active so that I don’t brood. We end the day after supper, watching a film on tv. I wake in the night at 3.30 and can’t get back to sleep. I imagine falling out of the tree, breaking my back and ending up quadriplegic for the rest of my life.
I eat very little breakfast, a small bowl of cereal, unfinished. Funny what odd details the mind fixes on when in panic. The cereal carton has one of those O-no! word puzzles on it. Q: How do you get rid of varnish? A: Take away the r. Usually I’d groan and pass on. Today I stare at it as if I don’t get it, while at the same time wishing I could vanish.
Arry tells me to wear my old tracksuit. Before we set off he produces a very unflattering helmet that he tries on me to make sure it’s a snug fit. I say nothing, except required yeses and noes, because if I say anything it will be to cancel the trip. By now I feel too weak to stand and expect to faint when I do. I am as one condemned in the seconds before facing the executioner. The thought crosses my mind, worthy of a cereal packet: I think I’d die if I were ever condemned to death. Appropriately, for as we go out to join Cal in his battered van Arry is carrying a coil of rope.
Cal’s van could accurately be described as a mobile rubbish tip. I sit scrunched up in the front, my feet in a bed of litter: old food wrappers, empty water bottles, crushed beer cans, plastic bags, pages of newspapers which I can tell from a glance are of the page three, give-you-a-helping-hand kind. Arry’s in the back, where he’s told me Cal often sleeps because he doesn’t survive long as a tenant or house guest. His record is five months. He prefers the alternative lifestyle. I suppose he could be called an itinerant lodger. Apparently, he’s a graduate of quite a few environmental protests, picketing up trees and down holes against the destruction of woods that lie in the way of roads and building developments. I admire him for that, but would like to give him – or, I mean, would like him to give himself – a good bath. He and his van smell like a fox’s den. (To be honest, I’ve never smelt a fox’s den but Will once told me they pong pretty badly – if that isn’t an oxymoron, which it is.) Also, to judge by our first meeting after his night in our house (when he was attractively clean, I remember, so he must have a bath sometimes) and by our drive to the site of my execution, I mean my elevation, this morning, he’s a man of few words, and most of those monosyllabic and not always decipherable. (‘Not when he’s with me and the lads,’ Arry tells me later. ‘He doesn’t stop clacking then. It’s the effect you have on him, colleen. He comes over shy with you.’)
The drive takes about thirty minutes, which is sixty minutes too long for me. The sun has burnt through the clouds by the time we get there.
‘There’ is a tree near a stream at the bottom of a dell. It stands on the edge of a parcel of trees not big enough to call a wood. We walk to it down a path through a field from a private lane, where Cal parks his van. An ideal place for a picnic, where the condemned woman can eat her last meal.
‘Why here?’ I ask Arry. ‘Why this tree?’
‘Now there’s a good question,’ Arry says. ‘I’ll tell you while Cal gets the ropes ready and I tog you up.’
Cal takes the rope Arry’s carrying and Arry pulls gear out of his backpack. I’ve seen all this stuff before when I visited Will at college. (O, Will, O, Will, why aren’t you here now? Because I was a fool, that’s why.) The rope has a bag of weights on one end. Cal lobs the weighted end expertly up into the tree and over the third main branch, where ropes are tied that go up to the top branches. He climbs to the branch and releases the ends, which fall to the ground. Then he comes floating down again on one of the ropes like a big hunky spider.
While Cal is doing this, Arry fixes a harness onto me, with a strap round my bum that’s like the seat of a swing, and straps that go round my upper thighs and my waist so that I can’t slip out even if, says Arry meaning to reassure me, I turn upside down.
As he does this he tells me, ‘It’s an old ash tree. Usually, to get to the top of a tall tree you have to climb in stages because there are branches in the way that would stop us pulling you up in one go. But this one has lost a main branch about halfway up, and if you look, you’ll see that gives us a clear way to a forked branch quite high up.’
I look and it does and
my feet want to curl into a ball. I decide not to ask how high that is.
‘We fixed the ropes yesterday,’ Arry goes on, ‘so you wouldn’t have to wait around, chewing yourself to pieces with nerves while we did it now. We tied their ends well off the ground in case anybody found them hanging and tried to climb them and had an accident, which would be nasty news for us as well as for them.’
The Ash Tree: native to Britain, Europe, America, anywhere there is limestone, chalk, or deep moist rich soil. Strong, tough, elastic, can grow to 46 metres, with straight bole and handsome domed crown. Bark ash-grey in colour, smooth to the touch when young, becoming irregular, ridged and cracked as it ages. Strong leaves, composed of four to eleven pairs of leaflets with toothed edges, equally spaced opposite each other along a central stalk with a single leaf at the end. Seeds are flat light-green ‘wings’ hanging from long stalks, sometimes called ‘spinners’ because they spin in the air when they fall from the tree. Likes water.
We’re ready. Cal attaches the rope to my harness, Arry gives me some special climbers’ gloves to help me keep hold, and before I know it, Cal has hauled on his end and I’m dangling in the air. I close my eyes and let out a screech and hang on for dear life. It’s like the beginning of a nightmare, when you try to wake up and can’t.
‘I’m with you, colleen,’ Arry’s voice says quietly.
I look, and there he is, hanging beside me and grinning.
‘Keep your eyes on me,’ he says, ‘till you’re used to it. Don’t look down. Breathe normally. Try to relax. Hold onto your rope. Leave everything to Cal and me. You’ve nothing to do. You’re completely safe. You can’t fall, even if Cal lets go. Your rope’s in a winch that only lets it go one way. All right?’
I nod. And begin to rise smoothly, my eyes on Arry, who is hauling himself up with climbing gear.
We reach the first main branch and pause.
‘Put your feet on it,’ Arry says. He’s beside me, one hand on my shoulder, steadying me. How comforting a hand can be. ‘Feel the tree. Get to know it. Make friends with it. Take a look around.’
I do. But only at the tree trunk. The bark reminds me of an elephant’s skin. And beyond to the thick main branches and at other branching lesser branches thick with leaves. And up at the lattice-work of the canopy, glimpsing the blue sky through the foliage. It’s like being inside a huge green perforated parasol. Cool and smelling of a woody, slightly sour-sweet scent. Tree sweat? It reminds me of Will after his day’s work.
The Ash and Legend. In Nordic mythology the ash is called Akr yggdrasil, the World Tree. In its shade, the great god Odin and his brothers created the universe and made the first human beings, the man Ask from the ash and the woman Embla from the elm. The Vikings were called Men of Ash because of their belief in the tree’s magic. Their dragon-prowed boats were made of oak but ash was used for important parts, which was supposed to give them great speed over water and mighty strength in battle. The Teutons dedicated the tree to the god Thor, who ruled the weather and the sky and therefore the crops. For the Greeks the ash was sacred to Poseidon, the god of the sea, their great warrior Achilles carried spears made of ash. In many countries ash sticks were carried by herdsmen to protect their cattle from evil spells.
‘Okay?’ Arry asks.
‘Yes,’ I find I can say. I still haven’t looked down.
‘Onwards and upwards?’
I nod and hang on. Arry signals to Cal and I’m rising again. I no longer need to keep my eyes on Arry. The branches become more numerous around me, slimmer. Their leaves fribble in the slight breeze.
As if I’ve been given a calming drug, my body relaxes. I begin to enjoy myself. I’m smiling. Light-headed. Almost, even, a little high. I glance at Arry, pulling himself up beside me, and can tell from his satisfied smile that he’s noticed.
We reach the forked branch high up in the canopy, near the top, which Arry pointed out to me from the ground. Arry swings onto the branch and settles himself, holds out his hand, which I take, pulls me towards him, and turns me so that I can seat myself in the elbow of the fork. Cal keeps the rope taut enough for me to feel secure. I breathe out a deep sigh of relief.
‘Now you can look down,’ Arry says, still holding my hand, and I do, and the soles of my feet tingle, and my knees wobble, and my head swims a little, and I might panic, but make myself breathe steadily, and Arry chuckles.
It isn’t at all the same as looking down from an aeroplane or from a high bridge or the window of a tall building. I’m not looking at it, I’m in it. I’m part of the height, of the tree, of the view itself. The ground is falling towards me. Falling upwards. Through the leaves I see the little valley and across to the spire of a church in one direction, and over the hill to the roofs of a village in the other direction. I see Cal’s dinky-toy van parked in the lane, and in the bottom of the dell the little stream like a thread of silk and Cal looking up at us from the foot of the tree, a foreshortened, stunted figure, his upturned face a cartoon of eyes and nose and mouth.
I close my eyes, not from fear, which is fading now, but so that I can concentrate on what is happening inside me. I feel the tree moving. It isn’t a stiff-legged rigid structure, it doesn’t sway like the mast of a boat, but is supple, flexible, yielding. It makes me think of muscles flexing and relaxing. And it’s talking in creaks and sighs and knocks. I’m suddenly aware of it as a living thing. A being. I remember sitting on the bench with Will during our first visit to the arboretum and sensing the same thing then. But now I feel it intimately, because I’m in the tree and part of it, whereas then I was an outsider, observing. I remember Will’s description of the night he spent in the ancient chestnut and know for myself what he meant. Such a strange sensation, enclosed in the arms of the tree, held by them, inside and safe, and yet at the same time outside and exposed and vulnerable. A dual existence on the fringe of two worlds, being at the same time of the earth and of the air, flying and planted, bodied and disembodied. I understand for the first time what he was talking about.
The Ash and Inspiration. The ash is the tree of balance and the marriage bed. It links the opposites of our inner and outer worlds. Its ruling planet is the sun, the element of fire, but it contains the feminine element of water. Ash belongs to the Aquarian age of clear intellect and purpose helped by sharp intuition. That’s why so many cultures used its wood for weapons like spears and arrows, and for wands, protection against spells. It is also called the Venus of the Forest because of its associations with love. A girl who wanted to know who she would marry would carry an ash leaf with an even number of leaflets on each side in her left shoe and keep it hidden till she found her man, after saying:
Even, even ash
I pluck thee off the tree
The first young man that I do meet
My lover he shall be.
Charms against many illnesses were made from the ash, including hernia, warts, toothache, snake bites, gout and impotence as well as to cure diarrhoea and dysentery, and to quell bleeding. Sailors carried crosses of ash to keep them safe at sea.
Arry signals to Cal that all is well. Cal leaves my rope, takes the end of another, attaches Arry’s backpack to it, and hauls it up to us. Arry opens the backpack and produces a picnic box for each of us. Egg, tomato and cucumber sandwiches, and Diet Coke.
I’m touched that he’s thought of this; and am hungry from relief and pleasure and the appetising air. We munch at our sandwiches and swig our Cokes as if we sit up here and do this every day. As we eat, the bells in the church over the hill begin to peal. Nothing is said.
Arry finishes before me. Puts his picnic box away and takes out a little digital camera. He snaps me a couple of times, and returns the camera to his backpack.
‘Another reason for this tree,’ he says. ‘The real reason I chose it.’
‘Is?’
‘It was the one Will climbed the first time alone. To prove to himself he’d got over his fear. He didn’t tell me till afterwards. He climbed it
with me the way we did today, the professional way, and then he climbed it on his own the dangerous way, like kids do, from branch to branch without a rope. Look up at the branch on your right, just above your head.’
A little metal tag nailed to the branch. Incised on it the initials WB and a date.
‘Here,’ Arry says.
He’s holding out a similar little metal label with a nail already inserted. I take it. CK and the date are inscribed on it.
‘Cal made it for you. Take this hammer.’
I can just reach up without unseating myself, to nail my label under Will’s.
I hand the hammer back. Arry passes me the camera. I snap the labels. Hand the camera back. And need to let out a deep breath.
We sit in silence again for a few minutes.
The church bells stop ringing and the clock strikes twelve.
Arry says, ‘What d’you know about the ash tree?’
‘Nothing.’ And then remember: ‘Except a rhyme about the weather that my granddad taught me.
‘Oak before ash,
We’re in for a splash.’
‘Ash before oak,’ Arry adds, ‘We’re in for a soak.’
‘Which was first this year?’
‘Oak.’
‘And we’ve had a dry summer.’
‘They weren’t stupid, whoever made up those sayings. But one thing’s for sure. They don’t have headaches any more.’
He rummages in his backpack again. This time he brings out a little square-shaped paperback book.
‘Present,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Reward. And celebration. For beating your phobia and making your first ascent. Saw it in the shop at the arboretum when I went to collect my redundancy money, and thought you’d like it.’
‘Arry! I could kiss you!’
British Trees and Their Stories.
‘You’ve read it?’ I ask.
‘I took a glance at the stuff about the ash.’
Page 34, The Ash. Irish name: Nuin. Ogham:
This Is All Page 57
