The Olive Tree (2 page)

My face is perfectly round. I’m sure you could draw it with a compass, and only very rarely, the edges of the circle and my face wouldn’t combine. I hate it.

I also have, inside the circle, a pair of apple cheeks. When I was younger, adults used to pull at them, take my flesh between their fingers and squeeze it. They forgot that my
cheeks were not like apples. Apples are inanimate. They are hard, they don’t feel pain. If they’re bruised, it’s only on the surface.

I do have nice eyes, mind you. They change colour. My mother says that when I’m alive inside, energised, they are a vivid green. When I’m feeling stressed, they become
the colour of the North Sea. Personally, I think they’re grey rather a lot, but they are quite large and shaped like peach-stones, and my eyebrows, darker than my hair – which is
girly-blonde and straight as straw – frame them well.

I’m currently staring into the mirror. Tears prick my eyes because when I’m not looking at my face, in my imagination, I can be anyone I choose. The light here in the
tiny on-board toilet is harsh, shining like a halo above my head. Mirrors on planes are the worst: they make you look like a two-thousand-year-old dead person who’s been freshly dug up.

Beneath my T-shirt I can see the flesh rising above my shorts. I take a handful and mould it into a passable impression of the Gobi Desert. I create dunes, with small pouches
between them, from which could sprout the odd palm tree around the oasis.

I then wash my hands thoroughly.

I actually like my hands, because they don’t seem to have joined the march towards Blob Land, which is where the rest of my body has currently decided to live. My mother says
it’s puppy fat, that the hormonal button labelled ‘shoot sideways’ worked at first press. Sadly, at the same time, the ‘shoot upwards’ button malfunctioned. And it
doesn’t seem to have been fixed since.

Besides, how many fat puppies have I ever seen? Most of them are sleek from the exhaustion of excitement.

Maybe I need some excitement.

The good news is this: flying gives you a feeling of weightlessness, even if you
are
fat. And there are lots of people on this plane far fatter than me, because I’ve
looked. If I’m the Gobi, my current seat neighbour is the Sahara, all on his own. His forearms hog the armrest, skin and muscle and fat spreading like a mutating virus into my personal space.
It really irritates me, that. I keep my flesh to myself, in my designated space, even if I end up with a bad muscle spasm in the process.

For some reason, whenever I’m on a plane I think about dying. To be fair, I think about dying wherever I am. Perhaps being dead is a bit like the weightlessness you feel here,
now, inside this metal tube. My little sister asked if she was dead the last time we flew, because someone had told her Grandpa was up on a cloud. She thought she was joining him when we passed
one.

Why do adults tell kids such ridiculous stories? It only leads to trouble. For myself, I never believed any of them.

My own mother gave up trying them on me years ago.

She loves me, my mother, even if I’ve morphed into Mr Blob in the past few months. And she promises that one day, I will have to crouch down to see my face in water-splashed
mirrors such as this. I come from a family of tall men, apparently. Not that this comforts me. I’ve read about genes skipping generations and knowing my luck, I shall be the first fat dwarf
in hundreds of years of Beaumont males.

Besides, she forgets she’s ignoring the opposing DNA which helped create me . . .

It’s a conversation I am determined to have during this holiday. I don’t care how many times she tries to wimp out of it and conveniently changes the subject. A
gooseberry bush for a father is no longer satisfactory.

I need to know.

Everyone says I’m like her. But then, they would, wouldn’t they? They can hardly liken me to an unidentified sperm cell.

Actually, the fact I don’t know who my father is might also add to any delusions of grandeur I already harbour. Which is very unhealthy, especially for a child like me, if I
am still a child. Or have ever been, which personally I doubt.

At this very moment, as my body hurtles across central Europe, my father could be anyone I choose to imagine; whoever suits me at the time. For example: we may be about to crash,
and the captain has only one spare parachute. I could introduce myself to him as his son and he would have to save
me
, surely?

On second thoughts, perhaps it’s better if I don’t know. My stem cells might originate from somewhere in the Orient and then I would have to learn Mandarin to
communicate with my father, which is a mega-hard language to master.

Sometimes, I wish Mum looked more like other mothers. I mean, she’s not Kate Moss or anything, because she’s quite old. But it’s embarrassing when my classmates
and my teachers and any man that comes into our house looks at
her
in
that
way. Everyone loves her, because she is kind, and funny, and cooks and dances at the same time. And
sometimes, my bit of her doesn’t seem large enough and I wish I didn’t have to share her the way I do.

Because I love her best.

She was unmarried when she gave birth to me. A hundred years ago, I would have been born in a poorhouse and we’d probably both have expired of TB a few months later.
We’d have been buried in a pauper’s grave, our skeletons lying together for eternity.

I often wonder if she is embarrassed by the living reminder of her immorality, which is me. Is that why she’s sending me away to school?

I mouth
immorality
in the mirror. I like words. I collect them, like my classmates collect football cards or girls, depending on their maturity levels. I like bringing them
out, slotting them into a sentence to express the thought I’m having as accurately as I can. Perhaps one day, I might like to play with them professionally. Let’s face it, I’m
never going to play for Manchester United, given my current physique.

Someone is banging on the door. I’ve lost track of time, as usual. I check my watch and realise I’ve been in here for over twenty minutes. I will now have to face a
queue of angry passengers desperate to pee.

I glance in the mirror one more time – a last look at Mr Blob. Then I avert my eyes, take a deep breath and step outside as Brad Pitt.

‘We’re lost. I’ll have to pull over.’

‘Christ, Mum! It’s pitch-black and we’re hanging off the side of a mountain! There
is
nowhere to pull over.’

‘Just stop panicking, darling. I’ll find somewhere safe.’

‘Safe? Hah! I’d have brought my crampons and ice pick if I’d known.’

‘There’s a lay-by up there.’ Helena steered the unfamiliar rental car jerkily round the hairpin bend and brought it to a halt. She glanced at her son, his fingers covering his
eyes, and put a hand on his knee. ‘You can look now.’ Then she peered through the window, down into the steep valley far below, and saw the firefly lights of the coast twinkling beneath
them. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she breathed.

‘No, Mum, it is not “beautiful”. “Beautiful” is when we’re no longer lost in the hinterland of a foreign country, a few yards away from hurtling two thousand
feet down a valley to our certain deaths. Haven’t they heard of crash barriers here?’

Helena ignored him and fumbled above her head for the interior light switch. ‘Pass me that map, darling.’

Alex did so, and Helena studied it. ‘It’s upside down, Mum,’ he observed.

‘Okay, okay.’ She turned the map round. ‘Immy still asleep?’

Alex turned to look at his five-year-old sister, spread-eagled across the back seat with Lamby, her cuddly sheep, tucked safely under her arm. ‘Yup. Good thing too. This journey might scar
her for life. We’ll never get her on Oblivion at Alton Towers if she sees where we are now.’

‘Right, I know what I’ve done. We need to go back down the hill—’

‘Mountain,’ corrected Alex.

‘– turn left at the sign for Kathikas and follow that road up. Here.’ Helena handed the map to Alex and put the gear-stick into what she thought was reverse. They lurched
forward.

‘
MUM!
Christ!’

‘Sorry.’ Helena executed an inelegant three-point turn and steered the car back onto the main road.

‘Thought you knew where this place was,’ Alex muttered.

‘Darling, I was only a couple of years older than you the last time I came here. For your information, that’s almost twenty-four years ago. But I’m sure I’ll recognise it
when we reach the village.’

‘If we ever do.’

‘Oh, stop being such a misery! Have you got no sense of adventure?’ Helena was relieved when she saw a turning signposted to Kathikas. She took it. ‘It’ll be worth it
when we get there, you’ll see.’

‘It’s not even near a beach. And I hate olives.
And
the Chandlers. Rupert’s an arseho—’

‘Alex, enough! If you can’t say anything positive, then just shut up and let me drive.’

Alex lapsed into a grumpy silence as Helena encouraged the Citroën up the steep incline, thinking what a shame it was that the plane had been delayed, landing them in Paphos just after the
sun had set. By the time they’d cleared immigration and found their hire car, it had been dark. She’d been relishing the thought of making this journey up into the mountains, revisiting
her vivid childhood memory and seeing it anew through the eyes of her own offspring.

But life often failed to live up to expectations, she thought, especially when it came to seminal memories. And she was aware that the summer she’d spent here at her godfather’s
house when she was fifteen was sprinkled with historical fairy dust.

And however ridiculous, she needed Pandora to be as perfect as she remembered. Logically, she knew it couldn’t possibly be, that seeing it again might be akin to meeting a first love after
twenty-four years: captured in the mind’s eye, glowing with the strength and beauty of youth, but in reality, greying and slowly disintegrating.

And she knew
that
was another possibility too . . .

Would he still be here?

Helena’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and she pushed the thought firmly away.

The house, named Pandora, which had felt like a mansion back then, was bound to be smaller than she remembered. The antique furniture, shipped from England by Angus, her godfather, whilst he
reigned supreme over the remnants of the British Army still stationed in Cyprus, had seemed exquisite, elegant, untouchable. The powder-blue damask sofas in the darkened drawing room – its
shutters habitually closed to keep out the fading glare of the sun – the Georgian desk in the study where Angus sat every morning, slitting his letters open with a slim miniature sword, and
the vast mahogany dining table whose smooth surface resembled a skating rink . . . all stood sentinel-like in her memory.

Pandora had been empty now for three years, since Angus had been forced back to England due to ill health. Complaining bitterly that the medical care in Cyprus was every bit as good, if not
better than the National Health Service at home, even he had grudgingly admitted that the lack of a pair of reliable legs, and constant trips to a hospital forty-five minutes away did not make
living up in a mountainside village particularly convenient.

He’d finally given up his fight to stay in his beloved Pandora, and had died six months ago of pneumonia and misery. An already fragile body which had spent the vast majority of its
seventy-eight years in sub-tropical climes had always been unlikely to adjust to the unremitting damp greyness of a Scottish suburb.

He’d left everything to Helena, his goddaughter – including Pandora.

She had wept when she’d heard the news; tears tinged with guilt that she hadn’t acted on all those recent plans she’d made to visit him more often in his care home.

The clanging of her mobile phone from the depths of her handbag broke into her thoughts.

‘Get that, will you, darling?’ she said to Alex. ‘It’s probably Dad to see if we’ve arrived.’

Alex made the usual unsuccessful forage into his mother’s bag, fishing the mobile out a few moments after it had stopped ringing. He checked the call register. ‘It
was
Dad.
Want me to call him back?’

‘No. We’ll do it when we get there.’

‘
If
we get there.’

‘Of course we will. I’m beginning to recognise this. We’re no more than ten minutes away now.’

‘Was Hari’s Tavern here when you were?’ enquired Alex as they passed a glowing neon palm tree in front of a garish restaurant, filled with slot machines and white plastic
chairs.

‘No, but this is a new link road with lots of potential passing trade. There was little more than a rough track up to the village in my day.’

‘That place had Sky TV. Can we go one night?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Perhaps.’ Helena’s vision of balmy evenings spent on Pandora’s wonderful terrace overlooking the olive groves, drinking the locally produced wine and feasting on figs
picked straight from the branch, had not included television or neon palm trees.

‘Mum, just how basic is this house we’re heading for? I mean, does it have electricity?’

‘Of course it does, silly.’ Helena prayed it had been switched on by the local woman who held the keys. ‘Look, we’re turning into the village now. Only a few more minutes
and we’ll be there.’

‘’S’pose I could cycle back down to that bar,’ muttered Alex, ‘if I could get a bike.’

‘I cycled up to the village from the house almost every day.’

‘Was it a penny-farthing?’

‘Oh, very funny! It was a proper, old-fashioned upright bicycle with three gears and a basket on the front.’ Helena smiled as she remembered it. ‘I used to collect the bread
from the bakery.’

‘Like the bike the witch rides in
The Wizard of Oz
as she cycles past Dorothy’s window?’

‘Exactly. Now, shush, I need to concentrate. We’ve come in from the other end of the street because of the new road, and I need to get my bearings.’