It was a Saturday. Eddy knew that because of the way the street played out in the morning. On weekdays the street went into an hour’s worth of frenzy as people dragged themselves off to work and kids trudged to the school somewhere around the corner. In fact, the school was close enough so that, on a still day, Eddy could make out the chorus of children’s voices yelling and screaming as they tangled themselves around the playground during breaktime and lunch. It was a good sound; he knew that because it made him smile and it made him want to walk in circles around his room. But at the same time it was a sad sound.
Eddy saw pretty much everything that went on in his street. His upstairs bedroom had a grand view. It had two windows, one which poked out the front of the house and one at the side. The one at the front was quite big. It was actually three windows, side by side. One, two, three. The one in the middle wasn’t supposed to move but the two on either side of it were made to open up. Grandma had fixed the brackets, though, so they hardly opened at all. When they were as wide as they could get, he could fit his hand and part way up his arm out but there was no way he could squeeze his head through that narrow gap. Eddy could literally spend hours with his face pushed up against that precious hole into the real world. He would fill his lungs with the fresh breeze and listen to the sounds of people living their lives. If he lodged himself up against the right-hand window, at just the right angle, he could see all the way down to the corner where another mysterious street headed off in both directions towards a whole imaginationful of adventure. If he did the same thing up against the left-hand window, he could see where his street ended in a cul-de-sac, and on weekends and summer evenings he would watch the other kids use the place as a three-ring circus, packed full of bike and skateboard tricks.
The window on the side of the house was good too, but for a very different reason. The view was nowhere near as good. All it did was point across to the same sort of window, in the same sort of bedroom, in the same sort of house. What made this ordinary window so wonderful was what lay between the twin houses – a tree. A big tree. It must have been there for an awful long time, Eddy reckoned, because it had grown too big for the space the houses had left for it. The window-stopper on the window had given way years ago, so it opened wide enough for Eddy to fit through. Not that he’d ever dared. Muscled branches had first grown up against each house and then, refusing to give way, they had toiled up the side of the weatherboard planking like a climbing vine on steroids. Even better was the fact that one knuckled and barky elbow had lodged itself so steadfastly against the sill of his window that the window itself could no longer close all the way shut. It was one of those windows with a latch at the bottom and you lifted the whole frame up to open it. Now, with a knobby and determined tree in the way, when you closed it as low as the branch would allow, you were left with a good two or three inches of wide open window.
Grandma Daisy had threatened to have the tree seriously trimmed. It was ruining her house, she kept saying. She called it ‘that damned tree’. And she had meant it too. She was going to have the whole thing chopped down if she could. One, two, three with an axe.
What Grandma Daisy says, goes. Eddy knew that as a time-honoured tradition. If she said – and she did – that the world was the Devil’s playground and that God had given up on His creation years ago, then she was undoubtedly right. If she promised him a ‘whooping’ if he ever so much as stepped a foot outside his door without her permission, then a whooping was what he would get. Grandma Daisy wasn’t like the tree. If she ran up against a house, she’d just crash right through it.
So it surprised even Eddy himself when he’d put up a fuss about her having the tree, his tree, cut away. He’d sobbed and he’d pleaded. ‘Peese, peese, peese,’ he must’ve cried a thousand times, ignoring the very real potential of Grandma Daisy’s backhand. Even more to his amazement was her eventual surrender. To this day the tree had not so much as sniffed a blade and, if anything, had further entrenched its hold on the house.
Grandma Daisy wasn’t going to leave it without at least some points on the board though. No, that wasn’t her style. Instead, she nailed the window frame to the jamb so that six or seven inches was all that he was ever going to get. At least that’s what she thought anyway.
For the first few months Eddy refused to take this small mercy for granted and he didn’t dare fiddle with the nail. But as the weeks and months passed by something strange happened. Well, at least he had a suspicion that something strange had happened.
When he wasn’t sleeping or looking through one of the many secondhand books that Grandma had scooped from the library’s throw-out rack, Eddy was invariably glued to one of the windows. The fact that there was a big, wide world out there absolutely fascinated him. His favourite books had pictures, pictures that showed things not just beyond his window but beyond his street, his town, his country and even his planet. He was never going to see all these things through the narrow focus of his bedroom windows but, unlike the pictures, what he saw out on the street changed each and every day. Starting with the first neighbourly ruffles in the morning, every day carried with it the potential to deliver something entirely new. And that was the key. For Eddy, and he most certainly couldn’t encapsulate it in this way, this was his connection to the human race. If he could see it in action, he could believe he was a part of it.
While the front window was the one that delivered all the ‘action’, he would often find himself folded up against the side window, forehead nudged up against the glass so long that it left an impression on his head for over an hour afterwards. When Grandma Daisy saw the red mark on his brow, she’d call it his ‘nosy head’ and shake her own head to herself. It was the sort of shake that said more than it did. It said Eddy was indeed dumb and dumb people simply did dumb things.
But that tree, that special, stubborn tree, was a very real connection to life beyond this house. Unlike the tunnel vision afforded by the front window, he could actually touch it. Smell it. He’d just lean up against the cold glass, reach through the gap in the window and pat the rough bark like it was a loving and loyal dog. It was relaxing, almost hypnotic, and Eddy quite often found himself drifting away on a magic carpet of daydreams, or even talking quietly to himself about anything from dinner to dinosaurs.
Day in and day out, he followed this routine. It wasn’t as though there was much else to do. And so it was, as with many things that live around us every day, Eddy didn’t really notice the incremental growth of the branch as it continued its dogged search for the sun. As the weeks turned into months, the single nail holding the window frame in place was beginning to strain. As the tree exerted itself against the house it literally began reaching into the gap, one eternally slow millimetre at a time, and there was no way that a few taps from Grandma Daisy’s old hammer were ever going to restrain it. By the time Eddy noticed something strange was going on, the nail had all but surrendered.
When Eddy saw what was happening it astonished him. It was like the tree was coming to visit. But it was also a worry. What if Grandma Daisy saw this too? She couldn’t necessarily blame him, even though she’d do her very best to, but this would undoubtedly give her the excuse she needed to rip the whole thing out, roots and all. And that would be bad. Dreadfully bad.
So Eddy did the only thing he could. He left the nail to fight a losing battle and crossed his fingers fifty times a day in a hope against hope that Grandma Daisy would keep looking right on past it like nothing was happening.