The Kicking Tree

by Trevor Stubbs

  “Like a cup of tea?” asked a cheerful hospital auxiliary pushing a trolley who had put her head round the door.

  “The most sensible thing I have heard in hours,” Jalli had replied.

  “There you go, love. Sugar?”

  “Yes please. Lots!”

  “Biscuit?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Here, take one of these for later.” This lovely woman had been doing her bit of caring. Working at the hospital, she knew more about what happened to people than others might guess, and she ministered through her tea and biscuits, and just bringing an air of everyday normality to the traumatic situations she encountered. “I’m just out here if you need anything.” Jalli thanked her.

  Then a doctor had come and explained that Jack was undergoing tests. He had arrived at the hospital unconscious with several broken bones – his left cheek, his left upper arm – and a lot of bruising. They had been worried about his eyes too, but the main thing was that they didn’t yet know the extent of any internal injuries or what was happening inside his head. They were giving him a scan at this moment. It would be at least a few hours before she could see him.

  Then Grandma and Matilda had arrived! The policewoman had given them a moment while Jalli had briefly explained and had sobbed her apologies for not listening more attentively. Then the policewoman had asked them to leave so she could continue the interview. They had begun to protest, but Jalli had said that it would be best. She hadn’t wanted to tell Grandma what happened like this. They had kissed and hugged. It was so good to have such a grandma, Jalli had thought. “I’ll be alright,” she had said. “I can go after this, can’t I?” she had asked the policewoman.

  “I’ll have to check when we’ve done, but I don’t see why not from our point of view. You’ll have to ask the doctor.”

  The interview had been easier once she had seen her grandmother. Afterwards they had tried to find out more about Jack. He was unconscious, but as he was sedated he was not expected to come round for some time. The doctor had insisted that Jalli had to remain in hospital overnight so he could check that everything was going on OK. After he had been the next morning Momori took her home. Matilda stayed on at the hospital. Jack was still out.

  It was three days before Jack regained consciousness. He was making remarkable progress, the doctor said. He was a fighter. Jalli became anxious for him, then weepy, then angry with herself, and then sorry in turns. She begged Matilda’s forgiveness countless times because she held herself responsible for his being in the park in the first place. She felt so guilty. She told herself that her relationship with Jack must now be at an end. She felt unclean and unworthy. She was defiled, unfit for a young man so good that he had been willing to sacrifice himself for her. How could she be his now, when some monster had entered her body, her very life, forever, and taken that which should have been Jack’s and Jack’s alone. No! When Jack was better she would take him back to the garden and his own world, where he could begin again. Then she would devote herself to Grandma as long she needed her. She could never marry Jack now – never marry anyone.

  When Jack came to, she was the first person he asked for. He drifted in and out of consciousness. He kept reaching for her hand. He doesn’t realise what’s happened yet, thought Jalli. They all wondered how much Jack would remember of anything, indeed whether his brain would ever return to normal. One thing the doctors were pretty sure about was that he would never see again, but whilst the bandages remained they could not be completely certain.

  Several more days, though, saw Jack much improved.

  On the fourth day, they found him sitting up. As soon as Jalli, his mother and Momori came into the room, he asked, “What happened? Why can’t I see? Where am I?”

  His mother explained that he had had an accident in the park and that the bandages over his eyes would have to remain for some days. He was in hospital in Wanulka. “Of course, Wanulka.” He could smell it now. Then it all flooded back.

  “The park, parmandas! Jalli! Jalli!”

  “I’m here, Jack!”

  “Jalli. Are you hurt? What happened? That man!”

  “It’s alright.”

  “Did he…? Did he…?”

  “You just concentrate on getting better, Jack.”

  “No. Jalli. Did he hurt you. Did he… you know? I want to know.” Jalli burst into uncontrollable sobs. Jack put out his hand towards the sound and pulled her towards him, stroking her hair.

  “I’m sorry!” said Jack.

  “No! It is all my fault! It’s me that should be sorry! It’s all my fault. I let you down! I…” Then Jalli was overcome with a sense of her own flawed nature. She pulled away from him and fled from the room, sobbing. Grandma followed her.

  “Jalli! Jalli!” Jack was reaching out into the dark.

  “She’s gone. She’s upset. You just rest.” It was his mother. Jack had expended all his energy and the doctor came and administered a sedative.

  He would need to rest, they said. They planned to remove the bandages the following day and then they would know for certain about his eyes.

  *

  Jalli did not return to the hospital the next day, and neither did Momori because she knew she could not leave her. The bandages were removed, and as the doctors had suspected, there was no hope of him ever seeing again. There was too much damage. They had explained it to Jack as carefully as they could. They expected him to make a full recovery otherwise though, and in Wanulka there were all sorts of services he could access as a registered blind person. They would send someone to him to talk about the options.

  “Wanulka! I want to go home!” declared Jack. “Where’s Jalli?”

  “I don’t think she wants to see you at the moment,” explained his mother.

  “Of course not,” thought Jack, “who wants a blind person for a husband! I let her down and now I’m blind, useless, useless. If I couldn’t look after her while I could see, how can I look after her now I’m blind? She was always too good for me anyway. I knew that really. She must find someone here in her home town who can love her and look after her!” But all he said out loud to his mum was, “I want to go home!”

  The doctors found it odd that they could not refer Jack directly to the doctors in his home town. But at his mother’s insistence they gave up trying, and presented her with his records and scans for the doctors there.

  Jack and his mother took a taxi to the Municipal Gardens. Matilda had wondered whether she should go back to the Rarga home and explain. But she did not want to leave Jack. She used the phone she had been given to ring them. She explained that they were leaving for Persham. Jack wanted to go home. Momori had asked her to hold on and shouted for Jalli.

  “Of course, he wants to go home!” stated Jalli. “Why should he want to stay? It’s because of me that he can’t see.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, Jalli.”

  “I am!”

  “Don’t you want to see him before he leaves?” Momori was trying desperately.

  “Don’t you think it hurts enough?” sobbed Jalli angrily.

  Momori was sorry the whole business had fallen apart so badly, she lamented to Matilda. She would pray about it.

  “Your son made my granddaughter happier than she had ever been in her life!” And these were words that Matilda never forgot.

  *

  Back in Persham Jack took to his room. He quickly learned how to get about in the house he had known all his life. But outside it was different. Before, he had taken being able to see for granted. Now he couldn’t go out without someone on his arm. He couldn’t read, and worst of all he was useless to anyone. He was a liability. The social-workers had come and gone. They had offered him places on courses to learn Braille, presented him with job opportunities “for the blind”, and, worst of all, made sympathetic noises. All of which, in his anger, Jack rejected. A Mr. Evans from the church came round. Jack gave him short-shrift. Why should God give them so much just to take it all
away? The old man didn’t know the answer, but, he suggested, “Don’t give up telling God exactly how you feel about it! I shan’t!”

  *

  One rainy day when his mother was out, Jack felt so fed up he made for the front door, turned the handle and stepped outside onto the pavement. His foot struck something solid and he knew what it was. His kicking tree. He felt the wet leaves now up to his face. It was mocking him! His anger swelled and he lashed into the tree, kicking, pulling, twisting, ripping until he had expended all his pent-up energy, all his frustration, all his anger – and then he sank, sobbing, onto the pavement, soaked to the skin, with his arms about the base of the tortured tree, laying amongst the mess. He remained there for a quarter of an hour before the old man from the church leaned over him and asked, “You alright, lad?”

  (It turned out later that Mr. Evans had seen the whole thing, but was wise enough to give plenty of time for Jack’s anger to take its course and subside.)

  “No!” moaned Jack. “I want Jalli.”

  “You’ve certainly let God know how you feel! Not much left of that tree! Come on let’s get you inside.” But the door had shut behind Jack and locked itself. The old man and Jack sat on the doorstep to wait for Matilda to come home.

  “Tell me about, what’s the name you mentioned, Jalli?”

  “We were engaged to be married, once.”

  “What happened?”

  For some reason, having expended his energy on the tree and sitting here soaking in the rain, Jack felt like talking.

  “Might as well tell you,” he said, “it won’t make any difference!” The old churchman listened to the whole story.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “what was the last thing Jalli said to you before she left the room in the hospital?”

  “I don’t know. She had just told me the man had raped her after I was knocked out. I had let her down. As we were leaving my mum phoned, but she didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Think about this. Did she actually say you had let her down?”

  “No, I said that. It was obvious!”

  “It’s not so obvious to me. A girl’s fiancé tackles an armed monster, despite him being twice his size, and being beaten within an inch of his life! Now if you had run off you might be accused of letting her down, but you didn’t.”

  “I would never have done that! It never crossed my mind.”

  “Of course not! You loved her. She loved you.”

  “But we should never have gone to the park in the first place.”

  “Who’s idea was it to go to the park?”

  “Well, hers. She wanted me to see the parmandas.”

  “Which many people have done on thousands of occasions quite safely, I suppose. How could you refuse? How could you know that a monster would be in the park that day? Especially if, as you say, someone had been caught only a day before whom the police had said they were charging.

  “Now, I want you to think very hard. Exactly what did Jalli say to you before she left? Do you know how a woman feels after she has been raped? She feels dirty and debased. She might think you wouldn’t want her.”

  “Never! Of course I want her. I love her. It wasn’t her fault! Why should it make any difference if she had been assaulted?”

  “But she might think it does. We men, we can’t begin to imagine what a woman feels after something as brutal as this. And it’s about what she thinks you might think.”

  “I would never leave her because of that. That would be terrible!” But then Jack stopped and stared into the blackness with the rain running down his face. This was the first time he had looked at it from Jalli’s point of view like this. His expression told the old man the story…

  “In the hospital… she said it was her fault, didn’t she?”

  Jack nodded. “Mum said she didn’t want to see me.”

  “My guess is, your Jalli was too ashamed of herself to want to see you. Do you still love her?”

  “Of course I do! She is the best, most wonderful person I ever met. We had such great adventures together. She made me feel I belonged… but how can she still want me now I am blind!?”

  “You haven’t given her a chance to answer that. You have decided your blindness has meant she wouldn’t want you. And I’m guessing she has decided you don’t want her for another reason altogether. Has she given you a chance to tell her you still want her, despite what happened to her?”

  “We haven’t seen each other since the first day I came round and she rushed away…”

  “If you ask me, I think you had better get yourself off to Wanulka as quickly as you can and find out the truth! She needs to hear that you still love her whatever has happened.”

  *

  Later the old man was to reflect that he had never quite felt so much joy before whilst sitting sodden on somebody else’s doorstep. Mrs. Smith had been most distressed when she had seen them sitting there so wet, especially as she had been out longer than she had expected. She didn’t have to ask what had happened to the tree. She invited the old gentleman in, but he declined in favour of a speedy return home and a hot shower!

  After Jack emerged from the bathroom clean and dry, he announced that he thought he wanted to try and visit Wanulka. Perhaps he had been wrong.

  “I know you have been wrong!” asserted Matilda. “Momori said you had made that girl happier than she’d ever been and I know that is true. You’ll both be miserable until you find each other again.”

  “But what if the white gate isn’t there?”

  “We’ll have to find that out, won’t we?”

  That night Jack called upon God, or Whoever, from the bottom of his heart. He prayed and prayed for Jalli. Could it be that it wasn’t all finished after all?

  23

  A week after Jack left, Jalli had thrown herself into her biology text books. But after she had read them she found she had retained very little. She was still in such a state of shock. Her grandmother said that she was sure that that was normal under the circumstances. But Jalli was suffering from a depression that not even the most solicitous care from her grandmother could do anything about. Momori and her friends from the worship centre spent a lot of time praying for Jalli. If it had not been for them, even Grandma would have had difficulty coping. Instead of being a light that lit up the whole room that dispelled people’s unhappiness, Jalli had become an ever-deepening black hole that caused those who loved her to be filled with real sadness.

  The police didn’t leave her alone, and everyone in Wanulka and his dog seemed to know about what had happened. And even if they didn’t, Jalli imagined they did. If they ever caught this man, then for sure everyone in the whole land would certainly know about it because of the court case that would follow.

  The police came round frequently to report and to make sure Jalli would be sure to press charges when they caught him, especially as Jack, who was central to the case, had gone home before they could question him, and Jalli could not help them find him. They felt she was being obstructive with her descriptions of other galaxies and worlds and they were less sympathetic than they otherwise might have been.

  It was clear they were making little progress, and it was obvious they were very fearful he would strike again. The man they had detained had indeed been the man they had been looking for for the previous three years. But this monster was a new predator, and one to be feared. The way he operated was far more violent, and Jalli’s descriptions indicated quite a different person from the notorious Parmanda Park predator. There was no saying where or when he would strike again – but the only thing the experts agreed upon was that he would.

  The police and the park authorities were losing the public relations battle. The headlines read “Park monster still at large – No clues”, and “Exclusive: Predator victim ‘flees planet’!”

  Then, one day, three of the ladies from Momori’s church ladies’ group came bounding up the path. “Have you heard on the radio?” they chorused. “A man has been atta
cked by parmandas. He was not even in the park but on foot near the boundary when a whole hive flew at him and engulfed him.

  “They’ve taken him to hospital but he’s in a bad way. Some people are saying it might be the man who attacked you, Jalli.” They were still recounting what the radio was saying when the police arrived and asked to speak with Jalli. They suspected the man in the hospital was indeed the assailant. They were doing tests to see if he was a match with the forensic samples they had taken. They needed Jalli to identify him. They produced a picture of a man in rather a bad way. His face was swollen and Jalli could hardly see his eyes behind swollen lids.

  “I can’t be sure from this, but it could be him. He is definitely the right build.” The policeman reluctantly conceded that in the state the man’s face was in, it was a “big ask”.

  And, in truth, although Jalli wanted the man caught, she did not want all that would follow. She had heard tales about what defence lawyers put the victims through in the witness box. And she didn’t want to have to stand up in front of the whole world and explain how she had done exactly what the man asked, because she knew there was no way she could have fought him off, and all she wanted to do was be in as fit a state as possible to get to Jack. At first she was convinced she had done the right thing. Her grandma, Matilda and the police had all told her so too. But now, she knew, people were going to doubt her story. The defence was probably going to say she was a consenting partner.

  And Jack had gone, apparently forever, to some far away planet. That would not help her story either. In many ways, it seemed it was her word against this monster’s. Could he be convicted beyond reasonable doubt? She was even beginning to doubt herself. All her life Jalli had dared to be different. Now she just wished the world would leave her alone. She really wanted to blend into the background and be totally unnoticed. She had given up wearing her bright colours and sought out the drabbest, most shapeless clothes she could find. As the police spoke to her she was wearing a man’s shirt two sizes too big for her that she had picked up in a second-hand shop. It was grey and just looked wrong against her, now roughly combed, chestnut hair. In the witness box she would make a poor impression unless she smartened up a lot. By then the defence were going to have the perpetrator in suit and tie, and train him to speak politely to the judge and appeal to the jury.