Tree Magic

by Harriet Springbett

  ‘Very well-written and well-constructed . . . here is an author who has the skill of an accomplished novelist’.

  Curtis Bausse, author of One Green Bottle

  ‘Rainbow’s journey was a wonder to read; Tree Magic is utterly stunning from start to finish.’

  Rachel Bell, #SundayYA host

  ‘This book is full of emotions . . . a book that will be enjoyed by both young and older adult readers.’

  Jacqui Brown, blogger at The French Village Diaries

  ‘This is an original and complex story that kept me engaged. Highly recommended.’

  Susan Elizabeth Hale, author of Emma Oliver and the Song of Creation

  ‘The writing is poised and elegant with many moments of lyricism.’

  Atthys J. Gage, author of Spark

  Tree Magic

  Harriet Springbett

  To Lumineuse,

  who lit the way

  And Cycy,

  who paved it

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Meristem

  The seed

  I. The trunk 1990

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II. Cambium 1990

  Chapter 8

  III. Branches Rainbow, 1991

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  IV. Twigs Mary, 1992–1993

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  V. Budding Rainbow and Mary, 1993–1995

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  VI. Blooms Rainbow and Mary, Summer 1995

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  VII. Leaves Rainbow and Mary, Autumn 1995

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Meristem

  “What’s meristem?” asked Rainbow.

  “It’s one of the plant tissues that trees are made from,” he said. “Meristem cells divide and form new cells. Primary meristem is what makes trees get taller and their roots go deeper.”

  “Oh. So what’s cambium?”

  “Cambium is a secondary type of meristem. It divides to produce cells, called secondary xylem and secondary phloem. They make the tree grow wider.”

  The seed

  Rainbow thought she’d died in the accident. She had to be dead because she could see Amrita Devi, and Amrita came from a Bishnoi legend.

  Amrita was hugging a silver maple tree on the edge of a wood. A heaven full of trees seemed fitting to Rainbow, though lightning had split this particular maple and one of its two branches was almost dead. It needed some good hugging.

  The Bishnoi girl was exactly as Rainbow had imagined: small and sprite-like with long black hair, and wearing a colourful sari in pinks and reds. Rainbow’s mum had told her the legend nine years ago, when Rainbow was four. According to the fable, Amrita had tried to save an ancient tree from woodcutters.

  Amrita lifted her head from the trunk and beckoned to her. Rainbow crept through the silence to the silver maple and mirrored Amrita, lacing her arms around its trunk and hugging it. Then she closed her eyes and let herself be drawn into the tree’s reassuring comfort. It was as if she, Amrita and the maple were one, holding and healing each other. This was definitely heaven.

  She opened her eyes to tell Amrita how great it all felt. But Amrita raised a finger to her lips and pointed towards a figure that had just arrived. It was another Rainbow.

  This Rainbow looked angry. She kicked through decaying leaves, her hands shoved deep into her jean pockets. When she heard Amrita’s low call, she stopped and stared at them both. Her face was shock-white and her lips frozen blue.

  Amrita stretched a hand towards her, inviting her to join them at the silver maple. But this strange Rainbow refused to come closer. Amrita pleaded, her voice an ethereal shimmer.

  “Xylem and phloem, xylem and phloem,” she said. “You’re not cambium. You shouldn’t have divided. Come! Be healed!”

  The strange Rainbow ignored Amrita’s peculiar entreaty. She turned her back and stamped away.

  Rainbow realised she’d been holding her breath. She let it out in a sigh of relief. She didn’t want to share Amrita and heaven with this imposter. She tried to catch Amrita’s eye and smile at her, but Amrita was no longer as solid as before. The whole of heaven rippled, like a bubble in a breeze. The colours weakened. Each separate entity blurred into a redgold fuzz of whirling leaves. Then the bubble burst.

  Other pictures began to form in Rainbow’s mind, pictures from real life: her rough hands, a breaking branch, a red car. She wasn’t in heaven, after all. There was a smell of disinfectant and she felt emptied, as if she had vomited all her insides and only the shell of her body was left. Had Amrita taken her gift away? Under her cheek, the coarse cotton of the pillowcase was cold. Her eyelids flickered open. She was in a hospital bed.

  She couldn’t remember what had happened or why she was here. She closed her eyes and felt herself fall, spinning through a fringe of cascading autumn leaves. Cracks of splitting wood echoed around her head. She fell for a long time.

  When, at last, she struggled through the leaves and reached the surface again, the memory of a red car roof rushed towards her. She blinked it away and clung to consciousness. Reality filtered through the leafy eddies. She remembered the heavy branch under her hands, her hands on the branch, the branch in the air, the branch on the car … and the man in the car.

  It was too much to bear. She closed her eyes and tried to slip back among the leaves to her woody heaven. The leaves had gone. She squeezed her eyes tighter shut. There was no longer any heaven. All that remained was an unsteady memory of a girl in an Indian sari, quivering like a watery reflection. Rainbow blocked out the disturbing images of squashed red metal and concentrated on the girl. She was sure it was Amrita Devi. She remembered the day she’d learnt about her.

  She remembered how she’d watched Mum climb out of the workroom window and had decided that this time she’d follow her. She remembered wriggling out from behind the piano, scrambling up onto a footstool and looking out of the window to see where Mum had gone.

  Mum was striding across the garden towards the woods. Her long, orange-spangled skirt caught on wet tufts of grass and spread into a triangle behind her. Rainbow struggled through the window and jumped down onto the lawn.

  Mum was about to be swallowed by the dark greens and browns of the Dorset trees. Rainbow raced after her: round the pumpkin patch and the rhododendrons, under the snarled chicken wire, across the hayfield and into the bracken at the edge of the wood.

  Mum stopped at the foot of the big oak tree and stared up into its canopy. She threw out her arms in their wide, purple sleeves. Rainbow followed her gaze. There must be something special up there. Mum seemed more distracted than usual and Rainbow expected to see a dragon or a Buddha. But there was nothing o
f any particular interest – simply branches, twigs and leaves.

  She ran forward to tug on Mum’s skirt. Before she could reach her, Mum stepped up to the trunk of the tree, wrapped her arms around it and laid her face against the bark.

  Mum’s closed, kohl-dark eyes shut Rainbow out, so she sidled up beside her and leant her tummy against the tree. Her arms were too short to go far around. It didn’t matter. She felt grown-up. Now she knew where Mum disappeared to when she’d been crying. Rainbow had Big Ted for the times Bob made her cry. Mum didn’t have a teddy, so she obviously had to make do with trees.

  She was wondering why Mum had chosen trees rather than something that would fit in bed with her and Bob, when Mum sighed. Her arms slipped down. One bumped onto Rainbow’s head.

  “Ow!”

  “Rainbow! What are you doing here? I thought Bob was looking after you.”

  “I hid from him. Why are you hugging the tree?”

  Mum smiled down at her, took her hand and led her to a tree stump. She sat cross-legged with her back to it and pulled Rainbow onto her lap. Rainbow snuggled up to make the most of Mum’s attention.

  “Tree-hugging makes me feel better, love.”

  “How come? You could hug me instead.”

  “I am hugging you. Look.” Mum gave her a squeeze. Rainbow closed her eyes and burrowed into the earthy smell of Mum’s skin.

  “Trees affect our chakras. They absorb our negative energies in the same way they absorb the carbon dioxide we breathe out,” said Mum.

  “What’s carbon dioxide?”

  Mum laughed the tidy laugh she used with people who didn’t interest her. “It’s too difficult to explain to a four year old. Shall I tell you a story instead?”

  Rainbow rubbed her head against Mum’s shoulder in a vigorous nod.

  “It’s a legend told by the Bishnoi people about a girl called Amrita Devi. She lived in India a long, long time ago. She understood how important trees are. One day, the Maharajah’s tree cutters came to cut down a tree in her village to build a new fortress for the Maharajah. Amrita threw herself in front of the men’s axes, hugged the tree and declared that if they wanted to cut down the tree they’d have to kill her first. Wasn’t that brave?”

  “What happened next?”

  “There are two versions. One says she saved the tree and the other says she died.”

  “Maybe she did both,” said Rainbow. She twisted her finger around a coil of her brown hair and entwined it with a long strand of Mum’s silky, black hair.

  Mum’s arms slackened. Rainbow glanced up at her face.

  She was gazing up into her tree. “Yes,” she murmured. “Maybe her soul split into two and created an Amrita who died and an Amrita who lived. Perhaps they coexisted in parallel worlds.”

  Mum was getting her faraway look. Rainbow frowned.

  “I meant that the Marjah’s men could have killed her but then decided not to chop down the tree after all.”

  Mum wasn’t listening. She’d begun to float away. Rainbow tugged on a black line of her hair.

  “Can I come with you next time you hug a tree?”

  Mum kissed the top of her head. She eased Rainbow out of her lap and disentangled their braid.

  “If you like, but don’t tell Bob.”

  Rainbow grinned and hopped from one foot to another as her mum swept dead grass from her skirt.

  “It’s another secret? Like the weejee board?”

  Mum nodded and held out the other hand for Rainbow to take.

  Rainbow remembered grasping it and following Mum back to the house. She remembered thinking that next time she caught her mum with the Ouija board, she’d ask her to talk to Amrita as well as Dad.

  And, as she lay in the hospital bed, Rainbow realised that Amrita was the seed from which everything had grown.

  Part I

  The trunk

  1990

  Chapter 1

  Rainbow wriggled the last few metres home through the August-long grass on her belly, aiming for the hole in the chicken-wire fence. It made her feel like a kid again, playing Red Indians with an invisible friend, though at thirteen she was too old for games. Her knees and elbows were an angry red and she was itching all over, but she daren’t stand up. She had to know whether Fraser was there.

  She parted the grasses in front of the fence and peered into the garden. There was no sign of Fraser’s red Porsche but this wasn’t reliable evidence, as he sometimes walked up from the village to work with Mum and Bob. She sidled round the back of the rhododendron bushes to the weeping willow and then climbed up the rope ladder to her tree house.

  Everything was quiet. She sat down on the floor, let her legs swing over the edge of the platform and surveyed her hilltop kingdom. A crown of woods around the house separated it from the village at the bottom of the hill. It could almost be a castle, except that castles were grand and her house was just big and untidy, and overgrown. She had a good view of its crumbling walls from her tree beside the front gate.

  The kitchen door slammed. She stilled her legs. Bob appeared, followed by Fraser. They strolled to Bob’s white van, which was parked in front of the house. Rainbow’s tree was a good twenty metres away; there was no reason for them to look up and see her.

  “Jasmine’s so clumsy, man. I mean … the mixing desk! I’m always telling her not to take her coffee in there,” said Bob.

  Most of his thin, grey hair was scraped back into the ponytail he’d made of it last week. The rest straggled around his frown-lined face, and he was slouching from a bad mood.

  “She didn’t do it on purpose,” said Fraser. “Anyway, the insurance should cover it.”

  They leant on the open doors of the van, waiting for the heat to escape. Fraser smoothed down his hair and looked around the front garden.

  “What’s Rainbow up to? My Becky said she couldn’t go to the fair with her today because she’s too busy.”

  Bob looked up to where she was sitting. Rainbow drew her legs back inside the tree house and closed her eyes.

  “In there, as usual,” he said to Fraser. Rainbow heard him suck a last drag out of his cigarette and stamp it into the stony drive. “Up to no good; as bad as her mother.”

  Footsteps came down the drive towards her tree.

  “Hi, Rainy,” Fraser called.

  She opened her eyes and saw him standing below, his fatherly smile beckoning her to share confidences.

  “Why aren’t you at the fair with Becky? You told me you loved all those dizzy sensations. School starts on Monday and it’ll be too late then,” said Fraser.

  “I hate the fair,” she replied.

  It was easy to resist his warmth, now that she knew she couldn’t trust him.

  “Worried you’re not tall enough for the best rides?” He chuckled.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and glared down at him.

  “Actually, Rebecca and I don’t hang out any more.”

  She slithered backwards into the far corner of her tree house, where she was invisible to him, and wound her arms around the trunk of her tree.

  Fraser’s voice invaded her den: “Make up with her quickly, then. I’ve missed not seeing you around.”

  His feet crunched back up the drive to the van. She hugged her weeping willow hard. She had to grow. Mum wasn’t short, but for all she knew about her dad, he could have been a midget. Maybe that was why she was small for her age. If she could catch up with her classmates, she’d no longer be the odd one out. Mum said it didn’t matter if she was different from everyone else. But Mum didn’t understand. She didn’t notice the way normal people looked at her.

  An ant scuttled up the trunk to her arm. A trickle of others followed the same path. She moved her arm to a nearby branch and watched the ants continue along their highway. Could the tree feel their scurrying feet? They must make it itch … all those ants, flies and birds: even her. She tickled the branch in front of the ant, imagining the tree swaying a branch-rippling response and
giggling. Nothing happened. She let her hands rest on the branch and listened to Bob continue to moan about Mum.

  At last, the men got into the van. The doors slammed and the engine grunted into life. It whined as Bob backed along the drive and into the lane. Rainbow looked at her hands against the rough crevices of the bark. A strange warmth emanated from the branch. She pressed harder. The heat increased. She plucked off her hands in surprise and turned them over. Her palms carried a slight imprint of the bark. She ran a finger over the subtle ridges and watched them fade away. The sensation made her shiver. Her neck was goose-pimply, reminding her of Mum’s expression about someone walking over her grave.

  She shook off both the sensation and Mum’s saying, picked up her sketch pad and leafed through the pages. The drawings of Patti’s kittens, which had seemed so perfect when she’d sketched them that morning, now looked flat and amateur. The real kittens were rounded, lively and perfect. How could she persuade Mum and Bob to let her have one of them?

  “Rainbow, lunch!”

  Rainbow slid down the ladder and jogged to the house. She pushed the door to the point where it stuck on the curling lino and then squeezed through sideways into the dim kitchen. Mum was leaning against the cooker. She was smoking, as usual, and stirring something in a saucepan.

  Rainbow wrinkled her nose. She could smell tomatoes through the smoke.

  “You haven’t made soup, have you?” she asked.

  Mum glanced into her saucepan as if she’d forgotten what she was cooking.

  “Don’t you like soup?”

  Rainbow raised her eyes to the cobwebs on the ceiling and sighed. Most mums knew what their children liked and disliked. Sometimes she wished Mum was normal, like Rebecca’s mum.