The Whole Story and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  I thought about phoning you. Then I thought about the tree. It was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Its blossom was high summer blossom, not the cold early spring blossom of so many trees and bushes that comes in March and means more snow and cold. This was blue-sky white, heat-haze white, the white of the sheets that you bring in from the line in the garden dry after hardly any time because the air is so warm. It was the white of sun, the white that’s behind all the colours there are, it was open-mouthed white on open-mouthed white, swathes of sweet-smelling outheld white lifting and falling and nodding, saying the one word yes over and over, white spilling over itself. It was a white that longed for bees, that wanted you inside it, dusted, pollen-smudged; it was all the more beautiful for being so brief, so on the point of gone, about to be nudged off by the wind and the coming leaves. It was the white before green, and the green of this tree, I knew, would be even more beautiful than the white; I knew that if I were to see it in leaf I would smell and hear nothing but green. My whole head – never mind just my eyes – all my senses, my whole self from head to foot, would fill and change with the chlorophyll of it. I was changed already. Look at me. I knew, as I sat there blinking absurdly in the hall, trying to simply look, holding my hand up in front of my eyes and watching it moving as if it belonged to someone else, that I would never again in my whole life see or feel or taste anything as beautiful as the tree I’d finally seen.

  I got to my feet by leaning against the wall. I fumbled through thin air across to the stairs and reached out for the banister. I got to the top, crawled from the landing into our bedroom and made myself lie down on the bed and shut my eyes, but the white was still there, even behind the shut lids. It pulsed like a blood-beat; dimmer and lighter, lighter and dimmer. How many times had I passed that tree already in my life, just walked past it and not seen it? I must have walked down that street a thousand times, more than a thousand. How could I not have seen it? How many other things had I missed? How many other loves? It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered any more. The buds were like the pointed hooves of a herd of tiny deer. The blossom was like – no, it was like nothing but blossom. The leaves, when they came, would be like nothing but leaves. I had never seen a tree more like a tree. It was a relief. I thought of the roots and the trunk. I thrilled to the very idea that the roots and the trunk sent water up through the branches to the buds or blossom or leaves and then when it rained water came back through the leaves to be distributed round the tree again. It was so clever. I breathed because of it. I blessed the bark that protected the spine and the sap of the tree. I thought of its slender grooves. I imagined the fingering of them. I thought of inside, the rings going endlessly round, one for every year of its life and all its different seasons, and I burst into tears like a teenager. I lay on my back in the bed and cried, laughing, like I was seventeen again. It was me who was like something other than myself. I should have been at work, and instead I was lying in bed, hugging a pillow, with my heart, or my soul, or my mind or my lungs or whatever it was that was making me feel like this, high and light; whatever it was had snapped its string and blown away and now there it was above me, out of my reach, caught in the branches at the top of a tree.

  I fell asleep. I dreamed of trees. In my dream I had climbed to a room which was also an orchard; it was at the very top of a massive old house whose downstairs was dilapidated and peeling and whose upstairs was all trees. I had climbed the broken dangerous stairs past all the other floors and got to the door of the room; the trees in it were waiting for me, small and unmoving under the roof. When I woke up I could see a lot more clearly. I washed my face in the bathroom, straightened my clothes. I looked all right. I went down to the kitchen and rooted through the cupboard under the sink until I found your father’s old binoculars in their leather case. I couldn’t make it out from the bathroom window or from either of the back bedroom windows but from up in the loft through the small window, if I leaned out at an angle so the eaves weren’t in the way, I could easily see the white of the crown of it shimmering between the houses. If I leaned right out I could see almost the whole of it. But it was tricky to lean out at the same time as balancing myself between the separate roof struts so I fetched the old board we’d used under the mattress in the first bed from the back of the shed, sawed it into two pieces so I could get it through the loft hatch, then went back down to the shed, found the hammer and some nails and nailed the pieces of board back together up in the loft.

  Birds visited the tree. They would fly in, settle for a moment, sometimes for as long as a minute, and they would fly off again. They came in ones and twos, a flutter of dark in the white. Or they would disappear into the blossom. Insects, which are excellent food for birds, tend to live on the trunks and the branches of trees. Ants can use trees as the ideal landscape for ant-farms, where they breed and corral and fatten up insects like aphids and use them for milk. (I found these things out later that evening on the internet.) Traffic drove unnoticing past the tree. People passed back and fore behind it. Mothers went past it to fetch children from school, brought them home from school past it the other way. People came home from work all round it. The sun moved round it in the sky. Its branches lifted and fell in the light wind. Petals spun off it and settled on a car or a lawn or fell maddeningly out of range where I couldn’t see them land. Time flew. It really did. I must have watched for hours, all afternoon, until you were suddenly home from work yourself and shouting at me for being up in the loft. I came down, went online and typed in the word tree. There was a lot of stuff. I came off when you called me for supper, then went back on again after supper and came off again when you told me that if I didn’t come to bed immediately so you could get some sleep then you would seriously consider leaving me.

  I woke up in the middle of the night furious at that woman who thought she owned the tree. I sat straight up in the bed. I couldn’t believe how angry I was. How could someone think they had ownership of something as unownable as a tree? Just because it was in her garden didn’t mean it was hers. How could it be her tree? It was so clearly my tree.

  I decided I would do something; I would go round now in the dark and anonymously throw stones at her house, break a window or two then run away. That would show her what she didn’t own. That would serve her right. It was quarter to two on the alarm. You were asleep; you turned and mumbled something in your sleep. I got out carefully so as not to disturb you and took my clothes to the bathroom so my putting them on wouldn’t wake you.

  It was raining quite heavily when I went out. I scouted about in our back garden under our trees for some good-sized stones to throw. (It wasn’t that our own trees were any less important than the tree I’d seen; they were nice and fine and everything; it was simply that they weren’t it.) I found some smooth beach stones we’d brought back from somewhere and put them in my jacket pocket and I went out the back way so you wouldn’t hear anything at the front. On my way round to the woman’s house there was a skip at the side of the road; someone was putting in a driveway, digging up a front porch. There were lots of pieces of brick and half-brick in the skip and a lot of smashed-up thrown-away paving slab. Nobody saw me. There was nobody at all on the street, on any of the streets, and only the very occasional light in a window.

  When I got to the woman’s house it was completely in darkness. I was soaked from the rain and there were the petals plastered wet all over the pavement outside her garden gate. I tucked my piece of slab under my arm, soundlessly opened the gate. I could have been a perfect burglar. I crossed her lawn soundlessly and I stood under the tree.

  The rain was knocking the petals off; they dropped, water-weighted and skimpy, into a circle of white on the dark of the grass round the edge of the dripping tree. The loaded branches magnified the noise; the rain was a steady hum above me through which I could hear the individual raindrops colliding with the individual flowers. I had my breath back now. I sat down on the wet gr
ass by the roots; petals were all over my boots and when I ran my hand through my hair petals stuck to my fingers. I arranged my stones and half-bricks and my slab in a neat line, ready in case I needed them. Petals stuck to them too. I peeled a couple off. They were like something after a wedding. I was shivering now, though it wasn’t cold. It was humid. It was lovely. I leaned back against its trunk, felt the ridges of it press through my jacket into my back and watched the blossom shredding as the rain brought it down.

  You sit opposite me at the table in the kitchen and tell me you’ve fallen in love. When I ask you to tell me about whoever it is, you look at me, reproachful.

  Not with someone, you say.

  Then you tell me you’re in love with a tree.

  You don’t look at all well. You are pale. I think maybe you have a fever or are incubating a cold. You toy with the matting under the toaster. I pretend calm. I don’t look angry or upset at all. I scan the line of old crumbs beneath the matting, still there from god knows how many of our breakfasts. I think to myself that you must be lying for a good reason because you never usually lie, it’s very unlike you to. But then recently, it’s true, you have been very unlike yourself. You have been defiant-looking, worried-looking and clear-faced as a child by turns; you have been sneaking out of bed and leaving the house as soon as you think I’m asleep, and you keep telling me odd facts about seed dispersal and reforestation. Last night you told me how it takes the energy of fifty leaves for a tree to make one apple, how one tree can produce millions of leaves, how there are two kinds of wood in the trunk of a tree, heartwood and sapwood, and that heartwood is where the tree packs away its waste products, and how trees in woods or groves that get less sunlight because they grow beneath other trees are called understory trees.

  I fell in love with a tree. I couldn’t not. I am perfectly within my right to be angry. Instead, I keep things smooth. There’s a way to do this. I try to think of the right thing to say.

  Like in the myth? I say.

  It’s not a myth, you say. What myth? It’s really real.

  Okay, I say. I say it soothingly. I nod.

  Do you believe me? you say.

  I do, I say. I sound as if I mean it.

  It takes a little while before I do actually believe that it’s all about a tree and of course, when I do allow myself to, I’m relieved. More, I’m delighted. All these years we’ve been together and my only real rival in all this time doesn’t even have genitals. I go around for quite a while smiling at my good luck. A tree, for goodness sake, I laugh to myself as I pay for a bag of apples in the supermarket or pull the stick out of a cherry, flick the stick away, toss the cherry in the air and catch it in my mouth, pleased with myself, hoping someone saw.

  I am such an innocent. I have no idea.

  This is what it takes to make me believe it. I come home from work a couple of days later and find you gouging up the laminate in the middle of the front room with a hammer and a screwdriver. The laminate cost us a fortune to put down. We both know it did. I sit on the couch. I put my head in my hands. You look up brightly. Then you see my face.

  I just want to see what’s underneath, you say.

  Concrete, I say. Remember when we moved in and before there was a floor there was the concrete, and it was horrible, and that’s why we put the flooring down?

  Yes, but I wanted to know what was under the concrete, you say. I needed to check.

  And how are you going to get through the concrete? I say. You’ll never do it with a screwdriver.

  I’m going to get a drill from Homebase, you say. We need a drill anyway.

  You sit beside me on the couch and you tell me you are planning to move the tree into our house.

  You can’t keep a tree in a house, I say.

  Yes, you can, you say. I’ve looked into it. All you have to do is make sure that you give it enough water and that bees can pollinate it. We would need to keep some bees as well. Would that be okay?

  What about light? I say. Trees need light. And what about its roots? That’s why people cut trees down, because the roots of them get under the foundations of houses and are dangerous and pull them up. It’s crazy to actually go out of your way to pull up the foundations of the house you’re living in. No?

  You scowl beside me.

  And what kind of a tree is it? I ask.

  Don’t what kind of tree me, you say. I’ve told you, it’s irrelevant.

  I haven’t actually 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 h
ave retained it until now. There they are regardless, whatever they’re called, annoyingly in the air. For an instant I hate them. I fantasize about spraying them all with something that would get rid of them. I think about taking an axe to the tree. I think about the teeth of saws and of the sawdust the different kinds of wood behind its bark would make.

  I wonder if an anonymous letter to the person who owns this house about its dangers to the foundations (though it is nowhere near the foundations) might make him or her consider removing it. Dear Sir, I imagine myself typing, before I shake my head at myself and turn to go and as I do I see the words again on the pavement. The way they’re scrawled, how fast and sloping and green their letters are, reminds me of you when we first knew each other, when we were still not far past adolescence ourselves, still knew we’d alter the world.

  A woman comes out of the front door of the house. She clearly wants me to stop laughing outside her house. She shouts at me to go away. She says if I don’t she’ll call the police.

  I go home. You’re up in the loft. I worry about you up there. It has no floor and you’re balancing, passionate, on nothing but thin wood. I imagine you seeing the tree through the thick circles of magnifying glass in the binoculars I used to play with when I was a child; inside your head the tree is close-up, silent, there but untouchable, moving, like super-8 film. I know you; you never compromise; there’s no point in calling you down. But you’ve left me some Greek salad on a plate covered by another plate in the kitchen, a fork neatly beside it. I sit on the couch in front of the dug-up laminate and while I’m eating I remember the story about the old couple who are turned into two trees; they let the strangers who knock at the door into their house then find that the gods have visited, and their favour is granted them. I search around in the books until I find the book, but I can’t find the story about the old couple in it. I find the one about the grieving youth who becomes a tree, and the jealous girl who inadvertently causes the death of her rival and is turned into a shrub, and the boy who plays such beautiful music in the open air that the trees and bushes pick their roots up and move closer, making a shady place for him to play, and the god who falls in love with the girl who doesn’t want him, who’s happy without him, and who, when he chases her, is an exceptionally fast runner, being such a good huntress, that she almost outruns him. But since he’s a god and she’s a mortal she can’t, and as soon as she knows her strength is waning and he’s going to catch her up and have her, she prays to her father, the river, to help her. He helps her by turning her into a tree. All of a sudden her feet take root. Her stomach hardens into bark. Her mouth seals up and her face mosses over; her eyes seal shut behind lichen. Her arms above her head grow shoots and hundreds of leaves spring out of each finger.