Human Croquet (16 page)
She woke up with a jerk, her dream evaporating into the dawn – there was no sign of crystal goblet or silver plate, nor even of rotting mushroom and acorn cup – just the stillness of the forest. Charles was snoring, curled up tidily like a small hibernating animal. The fog had lifted, replaced by a watery dawnlight, nothing had changed, they were still alone in the heart of the wood.
genus cordates
– were already extinct.
‘In the Carboniferous Era there were forests of giant ferns, the first conifers appeared and the coal fields were laid down. 136 million years ago, the flowering and the broad-leaved trees made their first appearance. Most of the trees we know today were in existence by twelve million years ago,’ Miss Thompsett’s voice drones through the classroom. On my right-hand side, Eunice is as alert as a sheepdog as Miss Thompsett writes on the blackboard in her tidy writing –
light energy
– (CH 2) + H2O + H2A.
On my other side, Audrey is hunched up asleep, her arms pillowing her head on her desk. She has shadows as dark as bruises under her eyes and she is dreadfully pale. She’s not really here at all, as if someone had made a really poor facsimile of her and sent it out into the world without telling it how to behave, an incompetent
doppelgänger.
Miss Thompsett bores on …
outer layer of the epidermis and into the palisade cells
… she’s giving us ‘a brief history of photosynthesis’, and the effect is like a sleeping draught. Her words pour into my ear and then curl around my brain like green fog …
chlorophyll, grana, photons …
Eunice transcribes busily. Everything in Eunice’s exercise book is neatly drawn, highlighted, coloured, labelled and underlined. Her diagrams are more exact than a textbook. On the board, Miss Thompsett is drawing molecules, the molecules are the size of ping-pong balls. The world Miss Thompsett inhabits must be gigantic, her primitive organisms the small size of small towns, her elephants the size of Sirius B.
My head nods and my brain grows cloudy and soon I’ve joined Audrey in sleep. ‘Right,’ Miss Thompsett says suddenly, so that I wake up with a jerk. ‘Now draw me a cross-section of a leaf to explain photosynthesis.’ I haven’t the faintest idea what a leaf looks like in cross-section (well – green, thin, flat –
‘Audrey Baxter!’ Miss Thompsett says loudly and Audrey flinches awake looking like a startled cat. ‘So good of you to join us,’ Miss Thompsett says – but too soon, for Audrey is already out of her chair. ‘I have to go,’ she mumbles and disappears out of the door. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey, Isobel?’ Miss Thompsett asks, a puzzled (though very tidy) frown on her face.
‘She’s not herself,’ I say vaguely (but then who is?).
I bend over my biology textbook with my coloured Lakeland pencils and, to cheer myself up, draw a tree.
Not any old tree, but a wonderful, mystical tree that comes from somewhere deep inside my imagination. A tree with a gnarled and knotted trunk with bark, coloured in cinnamon and raw umber, and a huge head of leaves, parted down the middle. On the left-hand side, I draw the leaves in every shade possible from the green spectrum – the colours of soft moss and trailing willows, of tangled timothy grass, of apple trees and primeval forests.
And on the other half of the tree – a bonfire of leaves, leaves flaming up in a conflagration of red-gold, ginger and bronze. Leaf skeletons toasted to the colour of fox-fur, leaves jaundiced to quince and sulphur, dropping like sickly jewels from the charred branches, leaves like topazes and lemons shooting up tongues of fire the colour of rosehips and blood. A leaf like the breast of a robin detaches itself and floats upward on a plume of wood-ash. And all the time that the right-hand side of the tree burns, the left half remains as green and whole as spring.
Perhaps this is the tree of life or Eve’s knowledge tree? Zeus’ own Dodona oak or the great oak sacred to Thor? Or maybe Ysggadril, the ash, the world tree, that in Norse mythology forms the whole round of the globe – its branches propping up the sky roof above our heads, full of cloud-leaves and star-fruits and its roots beneath the earth springing from the source of all matter. Trees of Life. It goes without saying that Miss Thompsett isn’t impressed by my artwork.
‘Finish these diagrams for homework,’ Miss Thompsett orders pleasantly, ‘and if you can find time, read ahead to the next chapter in your textbook.’ Find time? Where might it be located? In space? (But not in the great void, surely?) At the bottom of the deep blue sea? At the centre of the earth? At the end of the rainbow? If we found time would it solve all our problems? ‘If only I had more time,’ Debbie says, ‘then I might get something done.’ But
then
what would she do?
Photons of light speed down sunbeam arrows for exactly 8.3 seconds and splash through the outer layer of the epidermis and into the heart of the palisade cells. The molecules of light race into the chloroplast, into the perfect little green discs of the grana. The light is drawn further and further in, helplessly attracted by the magnesium at the heart of the little chlorophyll molecules. Light and green embrace, dancing a wild jig of excitement for a tiny fraction of time while the little molecule of light gives up its energy. The chlorophyll molecule is so agitated by this encounter that it splits a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The plant releases the oxygen into the air for us to breathe. The hydrogen converts carbon dioxide into sugar which is used to build new plant tissue. ‘Unlike the plant,’ Eunice notes in bold fountain-pen, ‘we cannot synthesize our own molecules of food from light so we must eat plants or animals that feed on plants and thus without photosynthesis we would not be able to exist.’
snarf-snarf,’
and I have the satisfaction of seeing Vinny whack him with the spade.
chaise longue
in a compromising position with a battleship-blonde called Shirley, the barmaid at the Tap and Spile on Lythe Road.
‘Doggy?’ Charles repeats, one baffled eyebrow cocked ready to go off. But now Mr Rice is lying doggo in his room waiting for Debbie to calm down. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ Gordon mumbles helplessly, “fraid you’re in the dog house.’
‘Makes a change from you then,’ Mr Rice sneers.
‘Hers?’
I query, rather cynically. ‘Yes,’ Charles says, unfolding the triangle, ‘definitely.’ The handkerchief is monogrammed with an elaborate embroidered ‘E’ and as we cannot think of anyone else with that initial, I suppose it must be hers. A faint trace of memory, a barely decipherable twitch along the neurons (a faint
click)
reminds me of something. Charles presses it against his nose and inhales so hard that he snorts unattractively. ‘Yes,’ he says. I sniff the handkerchief less belligerently. I am expecting tobacco and French perfume (the scent of a grown-up woman) but all I can smell is mothballs. ‘Found it in a drawer,’ Charles says. I’m beginning to suspect that he’s turning the house upside down, looking for Eliza, perhaps he’s already pulling up floorboards and ripping down plaster. But looking for Eliza is a heartbreaking and thankless task. We have done it all our lives, we should know.
