Quinton planted the Lilitree in the back garden. It wasn’t much of a garden, muddy with patchy flowers and weeds growing haphazardly, scrawny tomato plants dwarfed by a monster crop of broad beans. Lilitrees are, of course, illegal and very rare. No one knows where they’re from, but in the old days you’d find them mostly in the sandy areas, in the notorious Cape Flats. And also near water; they always move towards water. But you don’t find them so much these days, not for a long time. Just now and then you hear of one. But Quinton had connections.
He bought the seed at twilight in a little alley off Main Road. He went right at the minibus taxi rank, past the Virgin Active gym where people were eerily framed in the lit windows, jogging up and down. He wove his way through the tattooed men out looking for trouble, until he came to the crossroads where Adultworld and the post office meet. The dealer sheltered in the doorway of an old abandoned Victorian building, smoking a pipe. Quinton could not see the face of his supplier, which was hidden in the folds of the long cape. Rough hands dropped the seed into a brown paper bag, knotted it with string and furtively took the wad of notes.
Quinton planted the Lilitree beneath the exposed roots of the cabbage tree before Marlene could stop him. When she found out that they were to grow a little girl in the muddy backyard, she was livid.
‘How are we supposed to feed her? We just don’t have the money, Quinton. Use your head for once in your life.’ She headed to the yard, her sinking heels leaving a fine track in the mud. Marlene, down on her knees, was about to unearth the seed when Quinton’s voice came from behind her: ‘You can’t do that, it’s – it’s abortion.’ Marlene, who was still grappling with the residual effects of her early years as a Catholic, wouldn’t speak to him for days.
But nothing happened. Every day Quinton checked the spot where he had planted the Lilitree, but the caked brown soil yielded nothing. Marlene wore an insufferably smug tight-lipped smile. She whistled primly while she washed and ironed the huge bags of other people’s clothes that made her hands so reddish raw. When they saw the dreaded Kikuyu grass springing up like uninvited guests, Quinton began to feel he had been taken for a ride. And the seed hadn’t come cheap – he had used a month of Friday night drink money to pay for it.
‘Just think how many more bags of dirty clothes we could wash, if she did it for us. And we’d never need get up to change the TV channel ever again,’ Quinton sighed as he poked Marlene up to change the TV channel. They didn’t have a remote control for their old box.
That weekend, Marlene was about to uproot the grass before it could spread and cover their nice muddy yard, when she noticed something different. A patch of grass had grown into thin green fingers, spread out on top of the soil and gently pressing down as if about to hoist out of the mud. She screamed.
The next day, a little head appeared, like a cabbage sprung up overnight. Every day their Lilitree grew and grew: first firm green stalk-like arms, then a barky brownish green trunk, then the long muddy tendrils that coiled and snaked down her back, until by the end of the month, there was a little girl growing in the garden.
‘When can we pick her?’ asked Marlene, who was tired of doing the dishes. Quinton never helped with the housework, never mind their laundry service. He liked to think of himself as the public relations department, answering the phone and greeting the customers, especially the nice ladies. Marlene ached with the strain on her back; she most hated bending over the bath to wash the delicates.
‘We can’t pick her – she has to walk out of the pod. The instructions say that she will come knocking at the door.’
Now it was Marlene who was the more eager to have their Lilitree ready for harvest. She covered her feet (a bit like exposed roots) with compost, including nice wriggling maggots that made the Lilitree shudder. Marlene, despite the rain, watered the tree every day until the little girl cried from the relentless cold spray.
‘Aw, shut it,’ yawned Marlene, ‘otherwise we will eat you.’
The Lilitree cried louder in her little cat-like voice. The August rain lashed down and she caught a cold and sniffed miserably. (Lilitrees can only be planted in early July, otherwise they just turn into cabbages.)
‘A bit of a wet blanket,’ Marlene nodded to Quinton, ‘I should give her something to cry about.’
Throughout September Marlene continued to nurture their little tree as it grew steadily. By November Quinton was bored with it all. But still the Lilitree did not step out of her pod. The mangy stray cats came and hissed at the tree and she hissed back.
Marlene waited impatiently. They thought up names for her; they tried to coax her into the house by waving nice sweeties and marshmallows at the window. In late spring, the Lilitree started to grow little green breasts. Marlene found it quite indecent and covered them with a kitchen cloth.
Finally, during a sweltering week in late December, there was a knock at the kitchen window, a small tentative tap-tap. Marlene and Quinton were watching TV and almost didn’t hear it. ‘Hello mommy,’ said Quinton kissing Marlene, ‘I think that’s our little girl!’
But the Lilitree was not a little girl. There, standing at the kitchen door was a fully grown woman. Green with barky skin, she had fashioned a shift made of rubble bags and swung the red checked dish towel around her waist. Quinton had never seen a more beautiful woman.
‘You idiot!’ Marlene shouted at Quinton. ‘You got the wrong seed.’
‘It’s your fault,’ Quinton shouted back, ‘if you hadn’t watered her so much and rubbed all that compost on her feet ...’.
But he remembered guiltily how the seed dealer had been standing too close to Adultworld. Maybe this was a different kind of Lilitree?
‘We can look it up on the Internet,’ he pacified Marlene.
‘Please can I have some water?’ rasped the Lilitree, leaning against the doorframe.
‘Look at the poor girl,’ Quinton fussed. ‘Marlene, get her some tea!’
Quinton was enchanted by the fragile creature that took on their household tasks with an impassive vigour. Not only did she do all the housework, but she also washed an inordinate number of dirty clothes. Marlene was pleased. Soon they could afford a new TV, with remote control.
But the Lilitree couldn’t settle. She preferred bedding down in the mud beneath the cabbage tree. She shunned the tasty sausages that Marlene made and rummaged through the compost heap for her supper. She drank greedily the water that gushed straight from the outside tap into her mouth. She loved the hosepipe. She tracked mud into the house, her dirty toes against the scrubbed tiles. And best, she worked like a demon. But even as hundreds of great big white laundry bags were effortlessly dispatched, the Lilitree was weighted down as if by an invisible burden. There was a forlornness about her that stirred Quinton’s curiosity. When Marlene tried to lock her inside during the heavy rains, the Lilitree stared out at the garden and yearned for the smells, the soft and varied textures of the scraggly plants that grew there, the feel of the rain against her skin. She didn’t seem interested in much else. One night, as she brought them hot chocolate during their favourite shows, they discovered that she liked reality TV. She watched with them and once she even laughed out loud, like the sound of wind rustling leaves. But after a few nights of intent viewing, she lost interest. Halfway through The Peepshow, she wandered out and Quinton found she had climbed high up the cabbage tree, with its branches wrapped around her.
Quinton tried to console her with magazines and chocolates. First she grabbed them greedily, ripping through the celebrity pictures while sucking the soft caramel out of the chocolates. Not long after, magazines lay unopened; chocolates were trodden into the mud. He bought her a pretty yellow dress, which brought out the colour of her skin and she danced around in it, delighted. Marlene found it two days later, in the vegetable patch, like a dirty pumpkin. Quinton gave her flowers, but the Lilitree shrieked when she saw her cut sisters and laid them tenderly in her muddy bed. Quinton crept beneath the cabbage tree where she lay, and listened to her unhappy woody breathing.
Marlene observed silently. She watched those long elegant fingers wringing sheets, ironing and folding the endless stacks of shirts and trousers. She watched the Lilitree bending over the tub to wash the delicates, her body gently swaying.
Marlene thought of taking a nice Sunday afternoon walk in the forest with the Lilitree. Because they were one happy family. They veiled her greenish skin with a coat and shawls and tied back her thick tendrils with scarves. They entered the forest with the tightly wrapped woman and immediately, when she smelt the damp wood and leaves, she bolted, pulling at the jacket and scarves that bound her. She ran off the path and was easily camouflaged by the trees. Quinton sprinted after her and they raced between the pines. He puffed behind her but she remained out of reach. She heard the low guttural tones first, but even so she was unprepared: turning a bend, she saw a great gush of water from beyond what was visible – right up to the clouds – and was entranced at the sight. Never had she seen such an enormous tap. Unable to resist, she paused for a second and drank from the spray of the waterfall. Hearing footsteps, she turned and ran, but Quinton had gained on her, and with a flying leap, rugby tackled her to the ground. They rolled in the moss and stones. He loved her then; no one had ever been lovelier. He couldn’t let her go, he told her beneath the insistent chatter of the waterfall. She begged and pleaded to stay in the forest with the other trees and the giant tap. But Quinton couldn’t. So, in his arms, he carried her back to the car and Marlene drove them home. Heading back to the disquieted suburbs, they all felt let down.
The Lilitree could not forget the forest. The little muddy yard was suddenly too small because she could hear a distant whisper of trees from beyond those high cracked walls; she heard the call of the sea she had never seen. She thought only of the water gushing from the mountain spring and lost her taste for the outside tap.
Marlene also dreamed of the forest. She dreamed of the Lilitree being eaten by porcupines, of the manky smell of rotting wood, of lightning severing limbs with branched out fingers and a slow death by ants. In her dreams she tried to help, she was always coming with a basket of sweets and a bottle of milk and a bottle of gin. But she never got there.
Without water, the Lilitree’s skin took on a greyish tinge and her fingers faded to yellow. Her limber gait slowed down and her movements worked to an arthritic grind. Quinton hovered, eager to do anything she wanted, but for the one thing that the Lilitree asked of him.
‘You wouldn’t be safe there,’ he pleaded with her. Then, more assertively, ‘I am responsible for you.’
She stopped eating decaying vegetables from the compost heap. She cowered when Quinton sprayed her with the hosepipe.
‘Let me go back,’ she asked again. But Quinton could not.
The Lilitree wilted. Her face lined with faint concentric rings that deepened as if scored into her skin. On the day that she could no longer lift the heavy laundry bags, she raised herself from the delicates and found that she hurt in a way that she had never hurt before. She went to lay herself beneath the cabbage tree, her trunk held within its roots. There she stayed, and her skin turned a silvery brown, and the leaves swished above her.
They never talked about her after that. Later, they forgot that, for almost a year, they had known and even loved a tree woman. When their children played in the garden, beneath the two cabbage trees, they knew only a vague story about how Quinton had carried the silver bough from the forest, and how, soon after, the second tree had sprouted from its trunk.