And then he remembered he no longer had a van.
‘You want to borrow it?’ said Binny. His ex-girlfriend couldn’t seem to look at him. She was very busy concentrating on a spot to the left of his shoulder.
‘I’m really sorry, Bin,’ Oliver kept saying. And he meant it, now that she was standing in front of the house where he had spent the happiest three years of his life, now that he saw her again dressed in her green velvet top and loose trousers with a giant pair of blue-monster-feet slippers, he knew how truly sorry he was. For everything.
‘Bring it back tomorrow,’ she said, passing over the keys.
‘I can bring it back in a few hours if you like.’
‘I’m not going anywhere. Tomorrow’s fine.’ They paused, uncertain what to say next. There was a smell in the house he hadn’t noticed before, so full it was like another person.
‘Rose oil,’ said Binny, as if reading his thoughts. ‘An old friend of mine came over for coffee. I was worried there’d be nothing between us any more, but I was wrong. There was lots. We laughed and laughed.’
‘What’s that noise?’
‘Oh.’ She glanced over her shoulder towards the back door. ‘That’ll be Coco’s goat.’
‘She got a goat for Christmas?’
‘Don’t even ask.’ Binny ran her hand through her thick hair. A wedge shot out above her ear and stuck out like a flap, the way it always did. He knew every small thing about her, just as she did about him. He loved her more than anyone.
‘Could I see Coco?’ he said. ‘And Luke? Say hello?’
‘I think it’s better if you don’t.’ Briefly Binny caught his eye and gave a smile that seemed to hurt, and then she concentrated again on that interesting spot to the left of his shoulder. ‘How’s Sally?’
Oliver had no idea how to say, ‘Binny, I have made a terrible mistake. Binny, she says she doesn’t want to be a mother. Binny, I don’t know what to do.’ He had no idea how to say, ‘Those nights when it was just you and me and the kids and we stayed in playing Scrabble and I cheated and Coco hit the roof, I want them back, Binny. I got it all wrong. I miss you.’ So instead he said, ‘Fine.’ And after that he smiled and shrugged and there was nothing for it except to turn and walk away. He tried to ring Sal to check she was all right but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t, and well, to be honest, it was a relief.
By the time Oliver found the garden centre, it was past five. The owner was furious. He’d been waiting almost two hours. He showed Oliver some twigs in pots, twenty in all. Actually it looked as if he’d shoved a load of dead branches in plastic pots. There wasn’t one scrappy leaf between them. And when Oliver had said as much, the guy shouted, ‘What the hell? It’s winter. Of course they’ve got no leaves. I waited for you. I gave you the Rolls-Royce treatment and now you’re complaining?’ He was wearing a flat cap, like an artist, and one earring. And Oliver said, ‘I didn’t ask for Rolls-Royce treatment, I just asked for trees.’ He added that he didn’t even like Rolls Royces – or any cars, for that matter. ‘The van is my girlfriend’s,’ he said. And then he began to shake because it dawned on him, as if for the first time, that Binny was not his girlfriend. Sal was. An impy girl who blew up at him for worrying about his father and because he liked porridge at half past nine, who would be the mother of his child in six months. He thought of Binny, leaning against her doorframe, her shoulders soft inside her velvet top, her smile that was simultaneously generous and girlish so that it scrunched up her whole face. To his shame, his eyes began to blur.
And the tree guy had said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate. It’s been a bad time. What with Christmas and everything. People only want decorations. I run a garden centre and all I sell are nasty home furnishings. It gets to me. And we’ve had no rain for days. It makes my job harder, you see.’
And Oliver said, ‘No, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. It’s been tricky for me, too.’ He didn’t even like trees, he added. The remark was meant to show the man he was over the tears. It was meant to make the man laugh.
It didn’t.
The tree man had given him such a sad look, as if he’d seen right into Oliver’s chest, where his heart should be, and found a ragged wound, and he’d said quietly, ‘Well, that’s a shame, you know.’ He had touched Oliver’s hand very gently, like a friend who wanted to help. ‘You know, I think you may have made a terrible mistake,’ he said. Oliver had no idea whether he was referring to the trees or Binny or the baby or something altogether more spiritual.
So he hadn’t asked what kind of trees they were.
Or what kind of twigs, for that matter.
He had just fished in his pocket and paid for the things.
However, his father was surprisingly excited. He didn’t question their size, or the issue of no leaves. He left Oliver in the hallway and made his way through to the kitchen, holding on to the walls as he passed as if he were just checking they were still where they should be.
Did Oliver have any John Innes No. 2? he called.
Who’s he? Oliver asked.
His father laughed from the kitchen. ‘The special soil.’ You needed John Innes No. 2 to plant a tree, apparently. And what about supports for the trees?
No, Oliver said. He didn’t have any of those things.
The lino had begun to curl on the hall floor. You could see the bare wood beneath. And there were dark patches in the woodchip wallpaper that hung like shadows on an X-ray.
‘How was Christmas?’ called his father. ‘How is that nice woman?’
‘What nice woman?’
‘The one you live with. With those nice kids.’
‘Oh,’ said Oliver.
The house was beginning to deteriorate, like his father’s lopsided shirt and the chicken-soup smell and the strip of concrete outside, and like Oliver too. All the time they were getting older and a little more broken apart. When he was young he’d thought life would be a process of becoming more certain, but now that he was thirty-three he could only see it as a process of becoming less so. He thought of the careful way his father had moved along the hall, as if even an action as straightforward as walking was now something to think about. Oliver’s throat felt thick and painful. ‘Do you want these trees, or not?’ he said.
Oliver had assumed he would just carry the pots into the garden and leave; it was dark, after all. You couldn’t plant trees at this time of night. But his father reappeared from the kitchen with an old spade, dragging two shopping bags containing plastic demijohns filled with water. He was dressed in his waterproof jacket, gloves and a woollen bobble hat. Before her stroke, Oliver’s mother had taught herself to knit. She’d started with scarves and made her way through hats and pullovers, ending up with knitted dolls to hold toilet rolls; she’d given all of them away. There was a time when the local charity-shop windows were full of little wool dolls, all sitting on toilet rolls as if they were hatching. But that was by the by.
Oliver’s father had fastened a blue plastic bag over each of his shoes and secured them at the ankles with rubber bands.
‘Do you want some bags too?’ he said. ‘I have spares.’
‘What for?’
‘To protect your shoes.’
Oliver glanced at his sneakers, so battered his toe was beginning to work its way through the canvas, and said he could manage without the plastic bags.
‘Shall we head off?’ his father said.
‘Head off?’ repeated Oliver with a strange new sensation of scrambling to keep up with his father. ‘Why? Where are we going?’
‘To plant the trees, of course. I have my list here and my map.’ His father slipped several receipts out of his pocket along with two rumpled pieces of paper. He unfolded them and checked them carefully, then pocketed them again before Oliver could look.
‘What list, Dad? What map?’
‘My list of where the trees must go.’
‘Aren’t they going in your back garden?’
‘Goodness, no,’ said his
father, as if this was really so obvious it didn’t need to be said.
Oliver checked his watch. It was already seven and he felt worried about Sal. ‘Is this going to take long? I kind of need to get back …’
His father didn’t seem to hear. He passed Oliver the spade and one of the bags of water. He gave a plasticky rustle as he moved with his homemade shoes in that new, careful way towards the porch.
Outside, Oliver opened the passenger door of the van for his father and loaded the bags and the spade into the boot. Maybe his father wanted to deliver the trees to friends? Maybe they were presents? But why, if they were presents, would he need a shovel and plastic bags on his feet? His father had never mentioned friends or presents or indeed going anywhere. Meanwhile, his father had a question of his own. What was that smell? Oliver said it was probably the goat and his father said, ‘You drive a goat in a van?’ and Oliver said it was a long story. He liked using the same words Binny had used. It was like briefly holding her hand.
How had he got to a place where he had to imagine connections instead of having them?
Oliver drove with his father directing left here, right there, slow on this corner, you might want to get in the left-hand lane, as if Oliver were a complete stranger. Oliver still had no idea where they were heading and his father seemed in no hurry to enlighten him. The old man sat upright, with his seatbelt carefully clipped over his lap, and his list in one hand and his map in the other. The pavements were already jostling with New Year’s Eve party-goers, the cheap bars flashing their neon signs. Briefly Oliver scoured the crowd for Sal, asking himself if this was where she had come, wondering who she was meeting. Maybe his father was taking his trees to the crematorium, though Oliver assumed it would be closed. They could just leave them at the gates. No one would steal twenty little trees on New Year’s Eve. Oliver could still be home by nine.
And once again, thinking of home, Oliver’s head tripped and he had to reshuffle the pictures in his mind. Home was not Binny’s house, blockaded with her parents’ old furniture and smelling of so many things it was like a riot in his nose. It was not the small house that smelt of chicken soup where he’d grown up. Home was a flat on the fifteenth floor where he was living now with Sal. A flat that had no furniture and one single futon and his guitar under a blanket, because his songs, it turned out, if you heard them over and over again (‘Can you shut the fuck up, Oliver?’) were so crap they were enough to make a woman scream.
Oliver slowed the van as they reached the crematorium, but his father didn’t even turn his head. ‘I think there might be rain tonight,’ was all he said.
‘Do you actually know where we’re going?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’
His father tapped his nose and laughed. ‘Confidential information,’ he said. Caught in the flashing street lights, his father’s old face shone blue and green and yellow as if there were a party going on inside him.
They drove for another fifteen minutes. They were in the sprawling outskirts of the city. The streets widened into bypasses. Rows of semi-detached houses were wrapped like parcels in garlands of lights. Then the bypasses turned to dual carriageways and the houses were replaced with warehouses and retail outlets. Some sites were no more than wasteland, abandoned before building work had finished and surrounded by security fencing and signs that warned DANGER. KEEP OUT. Surely they weren’t heading for the motorway?
‘Here we go,’ said his father. ‘You can park anywhere.’
‘Here?’ Oliver said, braking too fast and indicating as an afterthought. ‘Are you sure?’ All that Oliver could see was a road intersection and a roundabout. He parked the van hurriedly.
‘Oh yes,’ said his father. ‘Absolutely certain.’
It was hard dodging traffic. It would have been bad enough if Oliver had been alone, but it was a lot more difficult with an old man, a potted twig, a demijohn of water and a spade. People kept honking horns and making faces as if the two of them were drunk. One driver even slowed to let down his window and asked what the hell they were playing at; Oliver shot out his hand and grabbed his father’s arm. And the step up to the grassy roundabout his father had set his sights on was clearly higher than he’d anticipated. His father kept trying to hoist himself up and rocking back again. In the end Oliver almost pitched him. Cars were whipping right past.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Oliver said. Actually he shouted. The traffic was loud and he was nervous.
‘This is exciting,’ shouted his father.
‘Illegal is what this is.’
‘Do you need a hand getting up?’
‘If you put a tree here, Dad, the council will just dig it up.’
‘They won’t even notice,’ said his father.
Planting the first tree was far harder than Oliver expected. His hands were sore after ten minutes where the shovel handle bit into his palms, and his shoulders ached. He should have thought to check the blade before they left, because it was so blunt it was like using a wedge of wood, and the ground didn’t help. After those ten days of mild weather and winter sunshine it clung together in stony clods. Oliver managed a hole that was six inches deep and about as wide.
‘There you go,’ he said.
‘Is that it?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
His father took hold of the spade. He rested his plastic-bag shoe on the lug, the shaft against his leg, and stooped his shoulders. Oliver watched his father’s great sweeping movements, letting the spade take its own weight as it cut through the soil. After a little while his father began humming something. He looked right with a shovel, alone in the dark, as though he’d grown solid.
‘The thing is,’ his father said, ‘to lift the tree gently out of the pot. We don’t want to disturb the roots, you see.’
Oliver passed him the tree and his father eased it out of the pot like a magician lifting a rabbit out of a hat. He even said, ‘Hey presto,’ and, despite himself, Oliver laughed. There was something slightly magical about the evening. The Christmas lights in the distance, all that traffic speeding past, no one knowing that Oliver and his father were planting a tree right in the centre of things.
‘Lower it into the ground,’ said his father.
‘Supposing I break it?’
‘It’s a tree. You can’t break it.’
‘And how would you know?’
‘Look how many of them there are in the world.’
So Oliver rested the tree in the hole while his father slowly lowered himself to his knees and began scooping back the dug-out earth with his bare hands. He filled the cracks and patted the soil firm. Oliver thought of all those summers he’d played alone on the beach, building sandcastles while his father sat beside his mother. He thought of Sal staring with horror at her pregnant belly. And it occurred to him that his father had been frightened of getting it wrong, even with sandcastles. That was why his father rarely went anywhere. That was why he never did anything. Because he had always been so certain that, faced with the challenge of being a father, he could only fail.
Oliver knelt beside his father. He picked up the hard earth and broke it into smaller pieces and pushed it around the tree. The trunk was no wider than his finger.
‘I’m going to be a dad,’ he said.
His father continued to arrange the earth around the fragile trunk of his tree. Oliver wondered if he’d even heard.
‘You’re going to be a granddad.’
There was still nothing from his father, only the scratchy scraping of soil. Then, ‘Ish, ish, ish.’
Oliver turned. The old man’s face was damp. His mouth was hoisted into a shape that showed his teeth. Ish, ish, ish. He was laughing. His father was laughing with happiness, and seeing his father laugh like that, Oliver almost laughed too. It was the first time he had told anyone about the baby since breaking the news to Binny. Sal didn’t want to hear a word about it. Oliver continued to pat the soil alongside his father
, their hands meeting and moving away again. It suddenly seemed terribly important that they did their best to help the little tree.
‘Well, well,’ his father said. ‘Well, well. Is that with the nice woman?’
‘What nice woman?’
‘The nice woman with those kids?’
And the happy feeling was gone, as suddenly as it had arrived. Oliver felt a weight plummet through him, like being filled with lead. His shoulders sagged. His head dropped. ‘No, Dad. It’s not. It’s … someone else.’ He couldn’t even speak Sal’s name.
Sometimes everything in life seemed right. You had all the things you wanted, all you’d hoped for, only when you looked properly you realized they were all in the wrong context, as if without noticing you’d drifted into the wrong story. Oliver had no idea how he would ever set things straight.
His father opened a water bottle and trickled a steady circle of water around his tree. ‘Cheers,’ he said, more to the tree than to Oliver. He pulled his list from his pocket and drew a pencil line through the first item.
Oliver and his father went on to plant all twenty trees that night. It took several hours. They drove from the roundabout to the empty car park of a nearby shopping centre, where they dug three holes in a grubby square of grass. Apparently a nice young woman worked on the tills and she’d been telling Oliver’s father that she had no garden. They planted one tree in a concrete planter that was sprouting litter and dead dandelions, and two more trees in a neglected flowerbed alongside a bus stop. With his map on his knees, Oliver’s father directed them to bare plots of mud and scrappy, uncared-for banks. Clearly he had worked it all out. They planted trees alongside benches and waste bins and in two overgrown gardens where the curtains were towels and the front doors were held together with planks of wood.
‘A nice Muslim family lives here,’ said Oliver’s father, whispering as he watered their new tree.
‘How do you know them?’