Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

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LEAVES OF LIGHT

‘Ancestral life – the bacteria and the blue-green algae – came a billion years later. The blue-green algae were the first to know how to turn molecules of light into food. The oxygen released by this process changed the atmosphere of the Earth for ever, allowing the creation of life as we know it.

‘After the blue-green algae came the mosses, the fungi and the ferns. By the end of the Devonian Era the first trees – 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 –

CO2 + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O + H2A.

Miss Thompsett herself – dark green twin-set and box-pleated tartan skirt – is as tidy as her handwriting.

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 –

– but I don’t think that was what she wants). I haven’t even got the right textbook.

Apart from Audrey, everyone else is labouring over their leaves, and Miss Thompsett says, ‘Problem, Isobel?’ in a way that implies there’d better not be and I sigh and shake my head.

‘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?

Eunice’s cross-section of a leaf: 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.’

As the tide of summer wilderness has died down in the garden, several lost objects have been revealed – an old shoe (they’re everywhere), a tennis ball, Vinny’s second-best spectacles and poor Vinegar Tom, no longer a soft-sock kitten body, but a hard dried-out felt thing, flattened into the ground. It’s not possible to say how he died but Vinny refuses to believe that Mr Rice is entirely innocent of felinicide.

Vinny is very upset by the young cat’s death, normally she restricts herself to a narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating) so that it’s quite disturbing to see her scarecrow shoulders vibrating with sobs and Charles and I try and placate her with a garden funeral. ‘Cat that is born of cat has but a short time to live on this earth,’ Charles says manfully as Vinny moans open-mouthed by the graveside. Richard Primrose intrudes, suddenly popping out from behind a rhododendron and sniggering, ‘RIP – Rise If Possible, snarf-snarf,’ and I have the satisfaction of seeing Vinny whack him with the spade.

Mr Rice falls from grace even further when Debbie discovers him on the living-room chaise longue in a compromising position with a battleship-blonde called Shirley, the barmaid at the Tap and Spile on Lythe Road.

‘Doggy position too,’ Mr Rice confides smugly to Charles.

‘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.

‘Look,’ Charles says, pressing something into my hand as I hurry out to school. A handkerchief, slightly grubby, folded in a limp triangle. ‘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.

None the less, I take the handkerchief and push it deep into my coat pocket before running the length of Chestnut Avenue to the bus-stop on Sycamore Street.

The bus makes its stately progression up the High Street while I try hard not to listen to Eunice, sitting next to me on the top deck, wittering on about adenosine triphos-phate. Instead, I smoke a jewelled Sobranie pretending to be sophisticated and concentrate on imagining Malcolm Lovat without his clothes.

For a startled moment I think I must have conjured him into being, albeit fully clothed, for there he is – down on the pavement. The bus stops, ingesting passengers, giving me plenty of time to inspect his lovely dark curls, his smooth cheek and his slender surgeon’s hands. What is he doing in Glebelands when he should be practising life and death at Guy’s? But wait, who is this he is engrossed in conversation with? This person who is tossing her blond hair around like a horse advertising shampoo and simpering and smiling in a very girly way? ‘Hilary!’ I fume helplessly to Eunice. Eunice mimes being sick. ‘What’s he doing here?’ I say, baffled.

‘Oh, his mother’s been taken ill,’ Eunice says, without a trace of emotion. ‘Cancer, or something.’

‘And what’s he doing with her ?’

‘Apparently they’re going out together, have been for some time.’ Is there nothing that Eunice doesn’t know?

When she’s talking to boys, Hilary has a way of holding her head on one side and half-closing her unnaturally blue eyes, a position that for some reason has the effect of raising testosterone levels in a radius of ten feet. She’s undoubtedly pretty. ‘Pretty awful,’ Eunice says.

‘That’s it then, I’m going to have to kill her.’

‘Good idea,’ Eunice says reasonably.

Standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing-up in a half-hearted kind of way I glance out of the window and let out a scream of horror at the face looming fuzzily through the dark glass, a strange Quint-like figure trying to attract my attention. For a moment I think I’ve finally spotted my invisible ghost, but then understanding dawns – this is no ghost, it is Mr Rice standing in the garden, a halo of light from an electric torch illuminating a very unattractive sight. Mr Rice is giving a one-man show. His torchbeam is directed down at his other torchless hand, which is jerking up and down like a jackhammer around the toadstool of his penis. I recoil from the window in horror and when I next dare to look there’s no sign of him.

When I can finally bring myself to go out and investigate, the garden appears to be devoid of human life, only the faint sound of someone whistling ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ that quickly fades into nothing. The giant hogweed have probably got their hands on him.

Somewhere over on Sycamore Street an owl hoots softly, a ghostly hoohoohoooo that floats like a feather on the silent air, but Mr Rice has disappeared.

Mr Rice wakes up slowly from a bad dream in which he closed his eyes and embraced the barmaid Shirley only to open them and find he’s holding the body of a decomposing Vinny, eyeballs hanging out and flesh liquefying. It leaves him feeling quite stupid.

None the less he chortles to himself at his ruse, he has put his suitcases of samples and a bag with his best clothes in the Left Luggage at Glebelands station, and is planning to walk out of Arden first thing after breakfast as if he was on his way to work and never come back! He owes nearly three months’ rent and has no intention of paying it. Getting out of this dump will be a blessing, he thinks, if he can wake up, that is.

Mr Rice opens his eyes uneasily and sees double. His head feels thick and heavy, the result no doubt of too much brandy and Babycham in the Tap and Spile last night. He opens his eyes again. He isn’t seeing double, his vision seems to have multiplied into a hundred honeycombed images. Mr Rice moves a leg and sees something thin and black and hairy waving in front of him. His legs were never very manly – but not that bad, surely? He tries the other leg, to the same effect. And then his four other legs.

Mr Rice screams, but it is a silent scream – all he can hear is an almighty buzzing in his head. He catches a hundred glimpses of himself in the mirror, oh no … it can’t be … this is another nightmare from which he will wake very soon. Surely?

He tries to move. His centre of gravity has shifted to somewhere else. It’s impossible to co-ordinate so many arms and legs, or maybe they’re just … legs. He decides to try and jump off the bed. He concentrates on all of his legs, one-two-three jump! and finds himself on the window-sill. The window is open, it is just possible, Mr Rice thinks, that he could squeeze through that space. The smell of Mrs Baxter’s apple sauce cooking and a pile of dog excrement down in the garden are like a siren song to Mr Rice as buzzzbuzzzz-buzzzzzzzzzzz he pushes his big body through the gap and unfolds his iridescent wings …

Next morning I get out of bed and draw the curtains, half-expecting to see Mr Rice still performing in the daylight. But he’s not there, instead, in the morning mist, Mrs Baxter is in the field filling a basket with trompettes de mort. Bundled up in cardigans and wearing an old woollen hat like a tea-cosy she looks ancient, an old hen-wife gathering her potions. I suppose she’ll cook the mushrooms for breakfast. How satisfying it would be if Mr Baxter’s grilled mushrooms really did trumpet his death. Mrs Baxter and Audrey would be so much better off without him. Maybe then Audrey would cheer up and be herself again. Whoever that is.

I puzzle at what to say to Mr Rice over the breakfast bacon, but find I am saved from this nicety of etiquette as he doesn’t appear at the breakfast table, never appears again in fact.

‘Done a runner,’ Vinny concludes, surveying the debris he’s left behind. She brushes a bluebottle away. ‘This stuff’s breeding,’ she says, finding pile after pile of magazines under the bed.

Vinny burns Mr Rice’s magazine collection on a bonfire, holding each item with the wooden tongs that the Widow used to retrieve washing from the copper with. Mr Rice’s magazines are an altogether more dirty kind of laundry than that which Vinny or Debbie are used to dealing with. We are baffled by Mr Rice’s literary tastes. ‘Why would anyone want to look at pictures of people in macs and gas-masks?’ Debbie asks. I can’t imagine. ‘Poor old Auntie V,’ Debbie laughs, not very nicely.

‘Disappeared?’ Charles asks eagerly, but Gordon assures him that Mr Rice has not vanished into the crowded air because he’s had the foresight to take his suit and his suitcases of samples with him. Perhaps what I saw last night was some kind of valedictory salute.

‘The bloody bastard bugger,’ Vinny says, throwing his clothes on the bonfire. ‘A real insect,’ Debbie summarizes.

A plume of matching smoke curls up above the hedge next door, where I find Audrey tending a bonfire of leaves for Mrs Baxter. Her hair is loose and keeps lifting in the breeze and strands of the red-gold cover her face like a veil. ‘We know nothing,’ she says mysteriously, when she catches sight of me. Perhaps she’s referring to the biology exam we’ve just failed.

The sadness of autumn is in the air, the smell of woodsmoke and earth and things long-forgotten. Over our heads the first skein of geese (the souls of the dead) scissor through the air, heading for their winter home, north of Boscrambe Woods, the creaking noise they make engenders a fit of melancholy in both of us. The Dog lifts its head, watching them make their black wingprints across the sky and gives a sad little whine. ‘Here comes winter,’ Audrey says. It was this time of year when my mother left and sometimes it seems to me that, in autumn, the whole world becomes an elegy for Eliza. Sometimes – like now – the loss of her swamps me, my heart turns hard like a stone and something drags my insides like the tug of a retreating tide. It’s like being a child again, feeling her absence paralysing me until all emotion is reduced to one mantra, I want my mother, I want my mother, I want my mother.

Audrey sighs deeply as if in empathy. Despite being wrapped in a shapeless old coat of Mrs Baxter’s, she seems to be losing her skinny child’s frame and beginning to bloom, like a very late flower. This new womanhood doesn’t seem to be a result of her eating any more though, in fact, if it’s possible she eats even less, little-bird portions that she pecks dutifully at when someone’s watching her.

In her kitchen, Mrs Baxter has a pot of mushroom soup on the stove (‘Daddy’s favourite’) and is busy making a blackberry and apple pie with apples from her own tree and the very last of the year’s blackberries from the church graveyard, unconcerned about what her blackberries might have been feeding on (flesh and blood). She presses a brown paper bag of apples on me to take home, ‘For an Eve’s pudding, or something.’ But there is no Eve in our house to cook it.

Mrs Baxter rubs fat into flour, lifting it high in the air and then letting it fall again like fine, soft snow and says, ‘Audrey’s filling out at last, isn’t she?’ She cuts up the apples, slicing the full moons of cored apples into a dozen new moons.

Mrs Baxter’s face has blossomed with an enormous bruise, like a gorgeous truncated rainbow – violet, indigo and blackberry-blue. ‘Silly me,’ Mrs Baxter says when she catches sight of me looking at it, ‘I tripped over the cat and hit myself on the sideboard.’ The Baxters’ neat tortoiseshell tabby sits indifferently on the window-sill, gazing at the birds feeding at the bird-table in the garden. The kitchen door stands open to let in the bright blue October day outside. Sithean would be such a lovely place if it wasn’t for Mr Baxter.

Mr Baxter is taking early retirement at the end of the Christmas term, although not through choice. There has been some heavily suppressed scandal at Rowan Street Primary to do with a small boy who had to be hospitalized after one of Mr Baxter’s routine punishment sessions. Mr Baxter is like an overheated boiler that Mrs Baxter spends a lot of time trying to damp down.

On cue, he storms into the kitchen, destroying the peace, asking Mrs Baxter what the bloody hell she’s done with his pipe and knocking the colander of blackberries all over the kitchen floor and I make a hasty exit in case he’s about to blow up.

‘There you are,’ Debbie says when I come in, carrying the apples. ‘Or are you?’

‘Pardon?’ We must be playing Lost Identity again.

Vinny sits at the kitchen table eating a biscuit at the same time as she smokes a cigarette, contemplating a huge, bloody ox heart sitting on a white enamel plate in the middle of the kitchen table like the results of an Aztec sacrifice (I could swear I can see it still pumping). I presume this is our tea for tonight and not the remains of Mr Rice. It doesn’t seem to be Vinny’s heart – it’s too big and anyway her scrawny chest looks intact.

One of Vinny’s subjects – Pyewacket, a gentlemanly black tom with white bib and tucker and spats – is delicately licking the heart in a way that looks oddly affectionate.

The cat does not attempt to drink from the saucer of milk which is also on the table, which is just as well as the milk is full of chopped-up fly agaric. ‘Kills the bluebottles,’ Vinny says by way of explanation and drags hard on a roll-up and lets smoke stream out through her nose, so that she looks like a dragon letting off a head of steam.

The Dog lays its head on Vinny’s knee and starts to drool gently onto her skirt, its expression suggesting it’s giving up its soul to Vinny (whereas in fact it’s wondering if she’ll drop any biscuit crumbs).

Debbie is too preoccupied to notice any of these assaults on kitchen hygiene. She’s standing at the sink washing her hands over and over again as if she personally had just removed the heart. She is obviously mad. Yesterday I found her trapped in the living-room, watching the mantelpiece to see if anything had moved, quite unable to move herself. ‘If I turn my back for one second they’ll be off,’ she said.

‘They?’

‘Those candlesticks.’

‘Do you see that dog?’ she says to me now and I follow her gaze to Gigi who is ripping an old slipper to shreds in a particularly psychopathic way.

‘Yes, I see it.’

‘It looks like Gigi, doesn’t it?’

‘Very like,’ I agree. ‘Identical, in fact.’

Debbie drops her voice to a whisper and looks around the room in a paranoid way. ‘Well, it isn’t.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ she says, and gives my sleeve an urgent tug to move me out of Gigi’s earshot. She moves her little piggy snout nearer my ear. ‘It’s a robot!’

Vinny snorts contemptuously and Gigi responds by snarling, retracting her upper lip to reveal a row of tiny discoloured shark teeth. Pyewacket looks up from his adoration of the ox heart and regards this stand-off with some interest. Chaos, I suspect, is about to break out in the kitchen again.

‘A robot? Gigi’s been replaced by a robot?’

‘Yes.’ What a bampot, as Mrs Baxter would say, but what can you expect from a woman sharing her one brain cell with a poodle on a turnabout basis. Whose turn it is today is anybody’s guess. I take hold of the Dog’s collar and present it to her like a dog show judge. ‘And what about this Dog, is this the same Dog – or has it also been replaced by a robot?’ To help her guess, the Dog runs through its limited range of facial expressions (sad, sadder, tragic) but she refuses to respond.

‘Have you talked to Gordon about all this?’

‘Gordon?’ she repeats, giving me one of her mad looks. (Oh no, not him as well.) ‘Yes, Gordon.’ Debbie’s eyes narrow (if that’s possible) and she looks away, chewing her lip and finally says, ‘The person pretending to be Gordon, you mean.’

‘Look,’ I say to Gordon when he trudges home from work, a suburban Atlas with the cares of Arden on his shoulders. ‘Look, there really is something wrong with Debbie.’

‘I know,’ he says wearily, ‘but I’ve taken her to the GP.’

‘And?’

Gordon shrugs helplessly. ‘He prescribed her some pills, said her nerves were frayed (frayed nerves, what an idea). Poor Debs,’ he adds sadly, ‘it would all be different if she had a baby.’

To make up for not having a baby, Gordon (the person pretending to be Gordon – who knows, she might be right, after all, Charles and I have had our doubts) does the best he can and takes her out for a meal to the Tap and Spile.

Charles has taken the Dog for a walk and Vinny and I are watching Coronation Street (Vinny’s a member of the Ena Sharples fan club). She’s preoccupied during the advertising break by the disintegration of her roll-up and keeps picking out shreds of tobacco from her mouth so that she looks like a tortoise trying to eat brown shredded lettuce. She’s got a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip as well. She really ought to go back to smoking Woodbines.

‘There’s someone at the door,’ Vinny says without taking her eyes off the television screen.

Vinny is covered in Cats, like someone in a surreal film – three on her lap, one draped around her shoulders, one at her feet. I half-expect to see one on her head in a minute. She could make a tippet out of the next two to die, that would be unusual. (Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they’ve been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics – such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal, they are, in fact, working very, very hard.)

Catskins Vinny picks up a toasting-fork and looks as if she’s about to spear Gigi with it. ‘There’s someone at the door,’ she repeats impatiently.

‘I didn’t hear anyone.’

‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there,’ she says. (Isn’t this the way the Dog was introduced into the story? I must be having déjà vu, one more alarming little snag in the fabric of time, I suppose.)

‘All right, I’m going, I’m going,’ I say when she starts waving the toasting-fork at me.

I open the back door cautiously, you never know what might be walking abroad – it’s nearly Hallowe’en and there is still the vivid memory of Mr Rice to contend with. I’m half-expecting there to be another dog on the doorstep, Arden is all exits and entrances, its thresholds the places where the interesting things happen. It isn’t a dog, however, it’s a cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box is a baby.

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