Tree Magic

by Harriet Springbett

  “No. You must move on.”

  Rainbow swallows. Self-contempt floods her insides. If only she could say the words, challenge the confession she thinks her mother made while she was unconscious. But she can’t; it’s overwhelming. She’s drowning. In a few seconds she’ll no longer be able to breathe. One, two, three.…

  A determination she didn’t know she possessed kicks in and she fights for survival. She’s got to block out the past, separate herself from it, begin again … pretend it never happened.

  The further she can distance herself from the person she was before, the easier it will be to forget about the accident. The easier it will be to turn her back on the terrible gift Michael encouraged. She mustn’t torture herself. She mustn’t think about how things could have been if her mother had told her the truth when it mattered. She’s got to become someone who is as different from the person she was before as possible.

  “Forget the accident and concentrate on getting better,” soothes her mother.

  Rainbow concentrates.

  Phloem

  Rainbow remained under observation for a week. At first she slept for much of the day. When she awoke she’d find Mum looking down anxiously at her. For the first millisecond she felt a wash of happiness at having Mum’s full attention. Then her memory cut in and the weight of Michael pulled her back down.

  On the third day she found a trick to stop herself thinking about Michael: Amrita. The two of them were linked in her mind. She would make her thoughts glide over Michael’s name to land on Amrita’s: Amrita, the tree-hugging survivor.

  Each day she was able to linger a little longer on Michael before passing onto Amrita. When Mum and Bob came to take her home, she could visualise him sitting in his chair with his bad leg stretched out in front of him before she had to move onto Amrita.

  On the last day she limped down the corridor and into the lift. She felt like a VIP, with Mum on one side and Bob on the other. She smiled her goodbyes to the nurses and experimented with her new crutches. But when she squeezed into the Mini, her throat constricted. Driving past the Drunken House was going to be the big test.

  “We thought you might like to sleep downstairs until your leg’s out of plaster,” said Mum as she turned the Mini into their lane.

  “Whatever.”

  “What would you prefer, love?” Mum’s eyes sought Rainbow’s in the rear-view mirror.

  “Upstairs will be fine.”

  They approached the Drunken House bend. Rainbow closed her eyes.

  “Watch the road!” cried Bob.

  The Mini bumped into a pothole; the one just in front of the Drunken House. Rainbow’s eyes opened of their own accord. She could see Michael in the front room. She could see the flash of his welding arc. Mum accelerated past. Rainbow blinked and craned her neck to see his face.

  It was trick of her brain, a trick of the light. The house was empty. The hollow windows of its eyes stared hopelessly back at her.

  “You’ll see Acrobat in a minute,” said Mum, her voice bright. “Everything will soon be back to normal.”

  Xylem

  Rainbow concentrates on how to get better, how to get better than she was before. She’s alone. Mum – no, Mother – has refused to acknowledge what she said while she was unconscious. Mother has refused to help her. So she speaks to no one.

  The first thing she has to change is her name. She’s stopped thinking of herself as R–, and there’s a hole where her name should be. This feels right. It matches the vacuum she can feel all around and inside her. But she needs a name to plaster over the R– that she was before. She mulls over the Myras, Lorenzas and Chloes she has been during her childhood games. They won’t do. She needs something ordinary. Something as plain and ugly as the lie she now knows she is.

  The answer comes on the afternoon Mother drives her home from hospital in the yellow Mini. Bob is there too. He makes an effort to walk slowly as she hobbles along the hospital corridor on her crutches. Her doctor is with them and she overhears Bob ask him if her silence is due to brain damage. She doesn’t hear the doctor’s answer. Perhaps her brain has been dislodged by the fall. Maybe the perpetual sickness in her throat and the memory of Mother’s words are the result of an illness in her head. But she refuses this false, easy solution. There is no illness: only Mother and her lie. Everything is Mother’s fault: even – especially – the accident.

  The lift glides down to the ground floor. Mother tries to hug her, but her touch makes R– retch. In the car, R– slides her hand away from Mother’s insistent grasp. She has become a stone. Are there such things as hollow stones? Bob and Mother talk to her but the words refuse to line up properly. She feigns sleep.

  The car lurches into the Drunken House pothole. She resists the urge to open her eyes. I can do it, she thinks.

  She succeeds.

  Home appears disturbingly unchanged. She doesn’t look at the weeping willow. The path to the front door is difficult to manoeuvre, but she refuses Bob’s help.

  “We thought you’d be better off sleeping downst–” he begins.

  “I’m going up to my room.”

  She pushes away the Coke Mother offers her and struggles towards the stairs.

  All afternoon Bob and Mother traipse up and down the stairs to check she’s all right. They whisper to each other outside her door. The old R– would have loved the attention, but all she can feel through her numbness is a vague frustration that they won’t leave her alone.

  Her sketch pad is on her bedside table. She picks it up, wrenches out each page and throws both used and unused paper into the bin. This is good. Encouraged by the ease of changing things, she lurches into her mother’s bedroom. The cardboard box of souvenirs is on top of the wardrobe. Inside, there are photos of herself as a baby, crumpled newspaper cuttings, paperwork and the Ouija board. Last time she opened the box she only looked at the photos. This time, she deals with everything.

  Mother calls up to tell her that dinner is ready. She has prepared R–’s favourite dinner of pasta and courgettes and Bob has cleared the table. It’s birthday treatment. So why doesn’t she feel like the lucky birthday girl? Instead, she is struck by a sense of emptiness. How false everything seems. Mother smiles with her mouth, not her eyes. Bob doesn’t grumble once. R– leaves most of her food and waits until they finish eating to make her announcement.

  “You will call me Mary from now onwards.”

  Bob looks surprised. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Isn’t Rainbow nicer?”

  He obviously doesn’t know the truth.

  The effect on Mother, however, is satisfying. She grips the edge of the table with one hand and her glass with the other. The new voice in Mary’s head whispers that it serves her mother right.

  “What’s the matter, Mother? Don’t you like my choice?”

  She should be feeling frightened and sorry now. Somewhere inside, that’s exactly how she feels. But she won’t let this weakness surface. This is Mother’s last chance to admit the truth and close the widening gap between them. It still hurts too much to challenge her directly.

  The contours of Mother’s face blur, as if she’s about to collapse. Mary holds her breath and counts the seconds. She’s ready to accept the truth.

  “No, I’m … just surprised,” says Mother.

  Disappointment bubbles inside Mary. But the good thing about being a stone is that stones don’t have feelings.

  “I’m finished with Rainbow,” she says. She pushes back her chair and reaches for her crutches.

  Upstairs, Mary locks the bathroom door and opens the medicine cabinet. The scissors are inside. She slices them through her hair and throws sixteen handfuls of lifeless brown strands into the bin. Then she runs Bob’s electric razor over the back of her head. What’s left of Mary’s hair must be dyed black.

  Phloem

  Bob helped Rainbow up the path to the front door. In the kitchen, he pulled up a chair and took her crutches away for her. Rainbow leaned on Mum and then
sat down. Mum offered her a Coke. She accepted before Mum could change her mind.

  Through the kitchen window she could see her tree house in the weeping willow. It was exposed now the whipping branches were leafless. She sighed. That was where it had all started. She dragged her eyes away and looked to the right: the woods. To the left: more trees. She turned her back to the window and focused on Acrobat. He was lapping up the dregs of the milk she’d poured into his saucer. Even Acrobat reminded her of Michael.

  “What would you like to do this afternoon, love?”

  She had no idea. Nothing inspired her.

  “Shall we invite Becky around?” asked Bob.

  “No!”

  Mum and Bob exchanged glances.

  “I think I’ll go up to my bedroom.”

  She clambered up the stairs with Mum on one side and Bob just behind her. Then she hopped up to her bed, dropped the crutches and stretched out. Acrobat jumped up with a purr and nestled down by her left foot.

  Mum smoothed back Rainbow’s hair. “Can I get you anything else, love?”

  “I expect she’d like some peace,” said Bob. “Fraser gave me this pile of work for you. It’s stuff you missed at school.” He plumped a bag onto the floor by Rainbow’s bed.

  “I’ll pop back in half an hour,” said Mum.

  Rainbow nodded. She picked up the bag and slipped out Rebecca’s French book. She’d only been absent for ten days, but vocabulary and grammar lessons filled several pages. On the last one there was a gap and then a pencilled message in Lucy Carter’s writing:

  Rainbow = un arc-en-ciel

  Evil Eye = le mauvais oeil

  Rainbow bit her lip and tasted blood. She shut the exercise book, shoved the bag to the floor and picked up her sketch pad instead. She flicked through the pages. Trees. Amrita. Amrita. Trees. She found the clean pages and skipped one. Acrobat was washing himself at the foot of her bed. She picked up her pencil and started to sketch him.

  Xylem

  Mary decides to take a week off before she goes back to school. During the week she hears Bob and Mother argue more frequently and knows she’s at the core of their disputes. She hears the word ‘teenager’ and snorts at their stupidity. It hasn’t even occurred to Mother that she could be at the root of the problem. R– would have felt sorry for Mother and relented, but Mary must be as hard as R– was soft. She lets them argue and takes Bob’s side as often as possible.

  This morning she pulls open the curtains and prepares herself for the sickness that wrings her guts into knots when she sees the trees around the house. She concentrates on the dull grey concrete of the patio until the nausea passes, then swings her crutches into position to attack the day.

  On her first day home she told Mother she didn’t want to see anyone, so no one has visited – apart from Fraser, who she refuses to see. Today, she feels ready to go out. It’s time for the world to meet Mary.

  “I want to see Patti,” she says at breakfast.

  “Good idea,” says Bob.

  Mother clears her throat. “You promised–”

  “She needs to get out of the house,” says Bob. “I’ll drop you off after breakfast.”

  “I don’t want her going there,” says Mother.

  Mary sits back and listens to them spit words at each other. She refuses to feel protective towards Mother and lets Bob flatten her with his scorn. Within seconds she sees tears in Mother’s eyes. She joins in the fight at Bob’s side.

  “If you won’t explain your problem with the Bellamys to me, I don’t see why I should avoid them. Anyway, I’m taking the cat back,” she says.

  “Acrobat? I don’t understand. You adore him. What’s come over you, Rainbow?”

  “It’s Mary!” she shouts.

  Mother turns away, her head bowed.

  Mary pinches her leg. She must defy the old R–’s instinct to break down. One, two, three, four … The pain passes and Mary cools back to stone.

  “Let’s go, Bob,” she says.

  “Are you sure about the cat?” he asks.

  Mary pulls an empty cardboard box out from under the table and thrusts it into his hands.

  “Yes. You’ll have to get it out of the tree house. I can’t go up there with crutches.”

  Mrs Bellamy glances over Mary’s head at Bob and then lets the cat out of the box. It uncurls with a miaow and pads away from the front door to the shed. Mary averts her eyes from the cat to the stripes on Mrs Bellamy’s apron. There are twenty-three of them.

  “Come in for a coffee, Bob,” says Mrs Bellamy.

  “He can’t. He’s in a hurry to get to Fraser’s,” says Mary.

  Mrs Bellamy folds her arms. Her tea towel drapes over her apron. She looks at Mary, then Bob.

  “I see there have been some big changes in the Linnet household.”

  “Yeah. Difficult times,” says Bob.

  He raises a hand in farewell and says he’ll be back that afternoon. Mrs Bellamy watches him leave. When she turns to Mary, her expression is pensive.

  “Come and have a chat before you disappear upstairs to see Patti,” she says. She steers Mary into the kitchen, nods towards a chair and goes back to stuffing her chicken.

  “So, tell me what’s happening at home,” she continues. “I see you’ve changed your hairstyle. That means something’s going on inside that head of yours.”

  Mary ignores the chair and leans on her crutches instead.

  “I’ve changed my name too. Rainbow is too childish. I’m called Mary now.”

  Mrs Bellamy is bent over the chicken and Mary can’t see her reaction.

  “Mary Linnet. So the accident has made you feel older?” Her round face pops up again.

  “Yes.” It’s true: she does feel older.

  “And with those crutches you must be confined to the house instead of running around the countryside like you usually do. How’re you bearing up?”

  “Same as ever. Bob and Mother fight all the time.”

  “Mother? Is ‘Mum’ too childish as well?”

  Mary shrugs.

  “By the way, there’s something I want to ask you: why doesn’t she like me coming here?”

  Mrs Bellamy finishes the chicken and puts on the kettle.

  “I told you: we had an argument a long time ago.”

  “About what?”

  Mrs Bellamy cocks her head to one side. Her eyes narrow, as if she’s thinking something over. “It seems to me that this Mary is looking for answers.”

  “So give me some. You know what Mother’s like.” She’s a liar, the voice inside Mary’s head adds.

  “I can’t tell you, you know that. It’s up to your mum to explain. She’ll tell you as soon as she’s ready. So, when are you going back to school?”

  Mary sighs and answers Mrs Bellamy’s questions about her convalescence. At last, Mrs Bellamy releases her and she goes upstairs to see Patti.

  Patti’s Just Seventeen magazine slips from her hand onto the floor.

  “You can’t just change your name!”

  Mary tosses the jagged edge of her black fringe out of her eyes.

  “Why not? Rainbow is a kid’s name. Your mum didn’t blink an eye. She understands.”

  Patti pushes her glasses up her nose and tucks her ginger hair behind her ears.

  “Well, maybe you can, then.”

  Mary nods towards Patti’s pile of magazines. “Look at those models and singers. They’ve all changed their names.”

  She spots a packet of chewing gum under the heap of clothes on the floor, and helps herself to one.

  Patti frowns at her Just Seventeen. “I guess it’s kind of glamorous. Maybe I should change to Patricia. Patti is a bit babyish too.”

  Mary stops chewing. This is something new. She’s seen Patti copy Lucy Carter, but never her. “It won’t help you get into Lucy and Rebecca’s gang,” she says.

  Patti isn’t listening. “No, not Patricia. Trish. That’ll be my new name.”

  She picks up a pen, rum
mages around for a piece of paper, and practises signing ‘Trish’ with a flourish. Mary sits down on the bed and leafs through the magazine on the pillow. After a few minutes Trish suggests they go outside and play with the kittens.

  “I can’t. I’m allergic to cats now. I’ve brought back that stupid ginger.”

  “Acrobat? But I thought–”

  “Let’s listen to some music instead.”

  She fingers through Trish’s cassettes, ignoring her stare.

  “Haven’t you got anything less wishy-washy than the Beautiful South?”

  Trish sits down. “But you love them.”

  “Not any more. What about Public Enemy?”

  Mary outstares Trish, who lowers her eyes.

  “You’ve gone all hard and defiant since your accident.”

  “So what?”

  Mary feigns carelessness, though she feels a kernel of triumph inside. Killing off R– is more satisfying than she ever imagined it could be.

  Trish tilts her head to one side, reminding Mary of Mrs Bellamy. She smiles slowly. “What are Lucy and Becky going to make of you?”

  Part III

  Branches

  Rainbow, 1991

  Chapter 9

  By the time Rainbow was able to walk properly, the Drunken House had fallen back into negligence. Its dead windows were boarded against intruders as if no one had spent late summer and early autumn breathing life back into it.

  One April day, six months after the accident, she freewheeled down the hill on her bicycle, her teeth gritted against the freshness of the spring air. She stopped in front of the Drunken House.

  She was hoping something had been left behind, an object she could take to keep Michael’s presence closer to her. His face was already fading from her memory. She could picture him running his hand over his egg of a head and hear his booming laugh, but she couldn’t remember what colour his eyes were.