CHERRY TREE

Yesterday it was the ATM. Whispering to me outside the chemist’s as I typed in my PIN and waited for the cash. I had to lean close in to catch the words. The sounds of the machine muttering, those tricky shifts of pitch trickling inside. The screen flashing up messages. Choices to make about what I wanted. Then my card appearing and the bank notes rustling through the flap seemed to drown them out. It’s hard not to imagine someone behind there counting the notes and pushing them at the slit. But it’s just a machine. It can’t feel anything. After the voices it was like the sound of the sea or washing machines. Maybe a dozen washing machines in a launderette. I thought of that young woman with a baby in her arms staring at her washing going round and round. Watching the pink bedspread turn and turn, wondering where her life was taking her. When I came away from the ATM the man behind me was coughing as if I’d been making him wait too long. That baby was Alex, the one in the launderette.

This morning I woke early and put my hair into a plait. There was sunshine after days of rain. It fell against the bedroom blinds and spilled through like golden grain from a silo. The birds have been active for weeks now, as soon as the shortest day passed. They’re wonderful mathematicians, waking at first light to patrol the roof. First jackdaws, then chaffinches, thrushes and blackbirds. Soon the collared doves will be back, making those throaty cries that make you want to run from your life. To run and start again. Jake’s still away and I have the house to myself: the width of the bed all night and now the breadth of the day, like something you could put your arms round and squeeze. This morning I rinsed some dark bristles from the sink.

After breakfast and the smell of toast, I put the ladder up against the cherry tree and set to work with a bow saw and lops. Like Abe Lincoln, that old story from my school books, though I’m sure he used an axe. I wanted to prune it before the blackbird came back to sing in it, telling us all about love and conquest. I used the folding stepladders and had to climb into the tree with the saw. It’s funny how the flesh of the tree is pink as if it has sucked up cherry juice from the soil. It’s an intimate pink, like the secret flesh of a woman. There’s been a lot in the news about FGM recently. Girls from the Middle East and Africa. The thought of it’s hard to bear. A razor blade or a piece of broken glass. The women do it and the men look away. Then, if the girls are British and sent away for a holiday, the government looks away. That’s the way a secret grows deeper. The secret’s not the thing, the mutilation – those tender clitorises thrown to the crows – but the reason it’s wrong and we don’t say anything. One thing I never wanted was a daughter.

The neighbours were watching at the windows again. Look, that woman’s in the cherry tree. What is she thinking at her age? I could hear them saying it. I could feel the pressure of water vibrating through the tree, all those capillaries sucking at the earth and singing when you put your ear to the bole. I had to drag the cut branches out of the tree, all tangled with the uncut ones, the ones that would live. Very awkward, balanced on a branch twelve feet up. I used to go rock climbing with my first boy friend. But he was more interested in finding new routes than being with me, unless I was belaying him. Love never happened between us, but I still like that feeling of being high up above the ground, the feeling that things are about to spin. There’s a white and ginger cat watching me from the garden wall. Next door, their leylandii’s dying off, all brown and stiff on the western side where the wind comes into it. Good. The other trees in that godforsaken garden are a sycamore with the crown cut out of it – excised – then an ash tree that’s far too close to the house. Ash Dieback’s crossing the country like a plague, so it’s only a matter of time before it crashes through their roof. That would serve them right in the eyes of God. Well, in my eyes, too. They never said a word to us.

There’s a ladybird clinging to one of the branches of the tree as I saw. The branch creaks against the blade as the cut tightens, but I manage it, making damp sawdust sift down to the grass. A pink snowdrift. The way snow is on the hills when the sunset touches it. My arms are aching by then. I take off a few smaller branches with the lops, still balancing. The ladybird’s there an hour later when I’m trimming off the small branches to make a bonfire. I ease it onto my hand and put it on the trunk of the rowan. Fly away home, I whisper, but it doesn’t. Its wing-casings are dark red so maybe it’s very old. Maybe it’s too old to have children or to rescue them. Rucuse them. A very different thing and complicated to explain when I checked up on what it meant. There are lots of fragments like that. Words and bits of words that join together when it suits them. Promiscuous words that breed or propagate themselves. I don’t know whether they’re animal or vegetable, really. A life form that evolves in-between everything else. In-between music and poetry and the sound of wind and the other little secret sounds that the world makes to itself. But words are sounds that mean things. And things are what we do.

I pile the cherry branches on top of our cast-off Christmas tree on the heap at the bottom of the garden where we make bonfires. It overlooks open fields with Holsteins grazing. They’re huge cattle, bred for milk alone. Milk and procreation. Every summer they take the calves away one night in July and the cows moan for them, heavy with milk. You can understand why that Christmas carol says the cattle are lowing, as if their voices are rising out of the earth. In the early morning, when the light catches them on the field grazing under the thorn trees, they have this epic quality, like beasts from an ancient myth. The needles on the Christmas tree have turned brown. I reckon it’ll go up like a torch and take the cherry tree with it. Once you’ve got a core of heat, a fire will burn green wood. It’ll burn any young growth to ash. Then the wind takes the ash and scatters it. Last year I stood on the decking at the end of the garden with a candle and waved it so the cows could see. They came to me through the dark fields, dragging their bellies, pawing the ground with cloven hoofs, their eyes circling me, drooling, moaning in bovine sorrow for all their lost children.

Who knows what it is they know or feel? They feel the loss but have no words for it. They feel the dark music of abandonment in their mouths, dripping from their jaws. I was still there when Jake came to get me with a blanket. A blanket and a cup of tea, his cheeks stubbly and wet. He was trying to look upset for me. Barbara, sweetheart, you can’t go on like this, come on in. I took the blanket and draped it like a priestess. Let it lie, Barb, for God’s sake let it lie. He calls me Barb, like the old days. I would like to be that cursed dart. I can’t cry any more and I can’t love him now. It was him who wanted Alex to go for a soldier. I poured the cup of tea slowly into the field and it steamed like entrails, a libation, watching Jake walk back to the house, his shoulders stooped under the load of me, the burden of me.

It’s one o’clock before I even get near a sandwich. I’ve got half a dozen decent sized boles to saw into logs for the winter stove. I’ve got a pile of brushwood ready to feed the bonfire. I start that by trimming off branches with the lops and piling them to make a dense core. I’ve got petrol in the shed for the mower. That’ll start it. Dangerous, I know. But I’m always really careful. You’d just got to remember that vapour is invisible. Alex told me that when he was at school, the way they come home full of knowledge, full of things to say, the world amazing to them with its chemistry and biology and physics. Suddenly they want to know how things work. They want to know why.

After a quick lunch I tidy the tools away into the shed. I decide to wait before trying to start the fire. Some of the neighbours have washing out and I don’t want them complaining. I check the compost bins for rats, but they look OK. Just recently they’d been getting into the plastic containers. Leptospirosis can be serious, so I’m always fastidious with the kitchen waste. This is a rural area and I came across a few cases when I was a practice nurse and the farmers came in. Some of them used to take the drugs the vet prescribed for their stock. That’s not as daft as it sounds. They were stoic breed, taking illness as it came. Watching death with a steady eye. Yet the seasons turn in them when the peewits return and the curlews and oystercatchers and new lambs run under the hawthorns or play king of the castle on the river bluffs. They turn like something immense and slow and nothing is said or needs to be. That’s a kind of joy, a kind of heaven on earth.

There are a couple of suspicious-looking holes in the base of the garden wall, so I take a lump hammer and tap some stones in there to block them up. Jake’s hammer. Thor’s hammer. The vengeance of God just to keep a few rats in PJ’s garden. A nice feeling. Their house is a holiday cottage, so they’re only there a few weekends of the year. He emailed me to say they had unwelcome visitors and could I check? He couldn’t bring himself to use the word rats like the rest of us. That was a cheek. It’s nice to think of them breaking into his house, shitting on the kitchen floor, pissing on the working tops, gnawing at the skirting boards and wiring. Finding tubs of humus or guacamole or stray bacon rind or scraps of leftover bread. PJ and his wife never hang any washing out, which is weird. She looks like butter wouldn’t melt, all dimples and softly permed hair. But just try parking outside their house and she’ll cut you to pieces in a few words with that sabre of a tongue.

I told Jake I’d put some poison down for the rats rats rats rats rats, which I did, but not enough to slaughter the entire population. RATS! We used to say that to our first Jack Russell, Maisie and she’d go crazy pawing at the back door. Just enough poison to keep Jake happy and PJ on the hook. Blue pellets in a plastic tray. I pushed them under the garden shed like some mad emperor poisoning the guests at a feast. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Once Alex set up a rat sniper post at the bedroom window with an air rifle. He had no shirt on and it was summer. He was doing his basic training and he’d lost weight. His hair was very short, like spikes of ice or glass. He looked like a little god up there with the airgun Jake had got him when he was sixteen. He never actually shot anything apart from a target pinned to the mountain ash. He hadn’t the heart. When I put the ladybird down I tried not to look at the pellets that were still stuck in the bark.

We’ve got a little conservatory made of PVC that opens out onto a patio. In the afternoon I get into one of the cane armchairs and listen to the Archers, then the afternoon play. Shula’s kicking off about something. The play’s about some kids in London who steal a car and find a baby strapped into the back. It’s a comedy. But it isn’t funny for the baby or the baby’s mum. That’s the trouble with comedy, it’s funny sometimes because it’s being cruel or forgetting one side of the story, or pretending that people don’t feel everything that happens to them. That’s how we get by. I like the old-fashioned comedians who could twist words open like party crackers. That one about being on the Underground and missing the stop in the blackout: I say, is this Cockfosters? I can’t tell whose it is, it’s dark in here. Pure innuendo. That old joke with a straight face from the Blitz when my granddad was in London doing fire duty on St Pauls. Putting out incendiaries with a bucket of sand. All for the sake of the house of God. That’s about three Gods already. Maybe it should be gods. With the old comedians it was all in the way they said things, just a little more weight from the tongue here rather than there. That’s the beauty of radio, it makes them work harder to get things across. Pure sound, with all the pictures in your head. Where they can multiply if you’re not careful.

I fall asleep in the middle of the play and when I wake up I’m hungry. I cut a slice from the loaves I made yesterday. I’ve still got my mother’s old Moulinex with the dough hook, so making bread is easy, once you’ve got a method. I mix the yeast with the flour, add olive oil, dissolve the salt in hot water and then set the whole thing going. The trick is to add water slowly as the dough gathers around the hook. When it’s formed a beehive shape and cleans the bowl, it’s ready, whatever the flour. When I let it fall from the mixing bowl to the bread board it makes a sound like wax coming out of an ear. I did a lot of syringing when I was at the practice, though I think it’s frowned on now. I toasted the bread and coated it with peanut butter and marmite. Alex’s favourite. That’s what he asked for when he was in Helmand. Marmite. He told me the Americans couldn’t understand it. He sent me a picture from his mobile phone holding the jar and grinning with his mates in the background.

There’s a message on the answerphone, which is probably Jake. Blink, blink. You have one new message. He travels a lot for his work. He’s an advanced driving instructor and does those talks for drivers who get out of trouble by choosing a refresher course instead of a fine and points on their license. He always made me feel safe in a car, I’ll say that. He taught Alex to drive and he passed first time. I hate driving at night now. Ever since I started wearing glasses for long-sightedness. The worst time is at dusk when the light’s fading and everything seems to be in shades of grey. I’m terrified that I’ll miss a child crossing the road or knock someone off their bike. And the dusk seems to whisper the way mist whispers or owls when they’re really far away. I can hear them calling from telegraph poles across the valley when I’m out there in the dusk and Jake’s watching TV. It’s the sexiest sound, the sound of desire and distance.

Right now the brightest planet on the horizon is Jupiter. Alex got me one of those apps for my phone. You hold it up to the night sky and it tells you the names of the heavenly bodies. Jupiter’s like an opal glowing on a silver chain of stars, as if the sky was a black velvet dress, or dark skin, the way some African people are dark. We had a Sudanese doctor for a time. Mohammed something. I mean someone. Blue-black skin. Black velvet, like the inside of my mother’s jewel box in the bedside cabinet that smelt of cologne. I’ve got it somewhere in the attic, packed away with some of her wedding presents. The Sunday roast knives and a sharpener and the ivory serviette rings carved into curled elephant trunks.

At four o’clock I get the photographs out and search through them. I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. Alex on his tricycle. Alex with Jake sailing a model yacht. Alex with that first girlfriend who never had anything to say. Jenn. Then I’m in his room pulling shirts from the hangers and smelling them. Smelling him. I get into his bed and sleep for an hour. When I wake up I could swear he’d just spoken to me, but I haven’t quite caught the words. It’s going dark outside and I should probably make some proper food, though Jake won’t be home tonight. That’s the message. It’s why he ever leaves a message. I make the bed and tidy Alex’s things and sweep a dead bluebottle into the bin. I’m drifting in the house now. It’s really quiet like the sea, just those deep sounds of sea creatures bleeping far away below the foundations. Whales moving slowly through drifts of krill in fathoms of salt water. Shoals of jellyfish drifting by in their venomous veils. The house is old and that’s what you get in an old house: the voices of the dead passing down through its layers of air or rising like faint prophecies. Once when Alex was ill, I put the vaporizer on and set tea lights all round the bed on the floor and we pretended it was a ship at night.Sailing to Africa in the scent of eucalyptus as he sat up against the pillows with big feverish eyes.

The first inkling that something was wrong was just before Alex was due to finish his first tour. Until then he’d been in touch every few days. Texting. Skyping. He’d trained as a radio operator. So when they were on patrol he was the crucial link with the base, coordinating things. I watched that series on TV and it showed the soldiers – just children, under the helmets and body armour – filing out, looking for insurgents. It’s provocation, really. When they get fired at, they call down the air force to drop bombs or fire missiles. It looks like a video game on TV, like that X Box things Alex used to have. But there are real people behind the dust. Real bodies and bowels and blood. We shouldn’t have been there, but Alex never wanted to talk about that. It was a job. He kept saying that, he had a job to do and his mates relied upon him. That’s how they weave the web that holds them: duty, obligation, like funnel spiders making their traps.

Jake said no way, it was all bullshit when we finally heard what was going on. About the charges. There’d been an IED and one of Alex’s company had been hurt. He’d lost a leg and he had a wife and baby. They’d caught the Afghan men who did it or thought they had. They were wounded in an air strike and couldn’t get away. What happened then would have been the end of it except one of the soldiers had used his mobile phone to record everything. It was all a jumble of radio static, helmets, desert fatigues, and faces behind orange goggles. There’s one glimpse of Alex under the radio pack. Their voices all hyped up with adrenaline. Still alive, sergeant. Rustling. The scuffle of boots, clink of equipment. And this one. Fuck, this! Then a Scottish accent. Oh, shall we or shan’t we? It’s like they’re playing a game. Then you can hear a voice crackling through Alex’s radio, but you can’t tell what it’s saying. Then Alex acknowledging: Roger that. Then … ucking rag head bastards where the f has floated away from the obscenity. That’s close up. Then a heavy breathing sound that makes you feel the heat. Someone’s humming in the background with almost-words. Pat a cake pat a cake. The video’s all jumbled up then. Sand and green foliage and a strip of canal and sky whirling. It’s a waste, lads. Those are the words, if you really listen.

There’s a pause then and the video goes black because the soldier’s put the phone away, though it’s still recording. Bake me a cake as fast as you can. Then there are two shots. Not very loud. Alex said they played the digitally enhanced loop over and over again at the court martial. I saw it on the news. It was all over the TV and then YouTube when they were acquitted because there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing. It was all about waste. Whether that was a noun or a verb, whether it was a kind of code; an order or an observation. We used to sing that song whenever we made pastry together and there was a little bit left over. Whenever we made a pastry man Alex would bite the head off first. That’s how I knew. Even though none of it was proven, even though he’s still out there and a corporal now. I couldn’t look at him when he walked free. Jake punched the air when he heard, like a footballer who’d hit the back of the net. Oh yes, he said, oh yes!

They didn’t find any weapons and the men’s families said they were just farmers working in the fields. Tending to the goats and a crop of melons. They had wives, children. They had mothers. That wrung my heart out so that I wished it was made of stone. A heart of pumice instead of a heart of flesh and hot blood. Stone that’s spurted from a volcano and gone cool and hard. Instead, it wakes me at night like something running wild. A creature hurling itself at a fence again and again as light thrums against the windows. I think of the sun rising in the east then, warming the dust on their cold graves.

I’ve got the matches from the kitchen drawer and I put on one of Jake’s old donkey jackets and a scarf. It’s almost dark, so I need a head torch in the shed to find the petrol can. That smell of soil and damp. Woodlice running for cover. There’s still half a sack of last year’s potatoes. Jake’s tools all haphazard. The lops where I left them, smelling of sap. There’s a stiff wind now, blowing steadily towards the fields, which is good. It’ll carry the smoke away. I splash a cupful of petrol onto the base of the heap I’ve made. Then I fasten up the can and take it back to the shed so the flames can’t leap back and make it explode. The petrol smells sharp, like the garage where my dad worked. In those days the pumps had a little twisty thing at the top and you could watch the petrol flowing to the hose. A bit like a barber’s pole turning.

Next comes the tricky bit: tossing a match onto the fire without getting too close. The first two go out straight away. I manage it third time and the whole thing goes up with a whumpf, a blast of heat against my face, a column of orange flame where the vapour is trying to escape. The Christmas tree catches at once and then the wind sends a stream of sparks out towards the fields where the cattle are standing, afraid in the dark. I think of their cloven hooves pressing into mud, treading their own dung. There’s no moon and Jupiter is there in the east, a luminous orb above the invisible line of hills. It’s the same planet the Romans sacrificed white oxen to when they made a conquest here in the North. Setting up their shrines, making their way across the Pennines, afraid of what was out there, the wild tribes watching them from marshes and hilltops. They were the invaders with their new language and weapons and shining armour and all-powerful gods. It’s strange to think they ruled for five hundred years and then went home to have everything they built here torn down to make barns and shippens.

Flames swirl and flare up as the wind catches them, like a beacon, lighting up my face for the neighbours to see. There’s a fierce core fanned by the wind. A red core, like war. Everything will burn now. I’ll stay as long as it takes to feed the cherry tree to the flames. When I go to bed my hair will smell of smoke. I’ll lie there alone and listen to the empty house trying to tell me what I know. Maybe Jake will come home late. I never did check his message. He’ll ask me what I’ve been up to all day, slipping in beside me with cold hands and feet, hoping I’ll warm him. Maybe Alex will text me to send his love, a picture of himself in uniform with some of the local kids.