Margot (Part 2 of 2)

That oak.

If there’s an image that could be the emblem of our shared childhood, that tree would be the thing.

I remember when we moved to that house, when I was six and Alex was seven.  The tree was what caught our attention, just from its sheer size.  The biggest tree I think I’d ever seen in somebody’s back garden.  It was a tower of a thing, straight to beyond the tops of our heads, and then flowering outwards and upwards, with branches reaching in all directions.  And with the sun bright that day and burning in the leaves, twinkling through the canopy like oversized stars.

“I wanna live here,” I confided to Alex before us kids had so much as set foot inside the house.

“Me too,” he replied.

That oak tree came over time be to inhabited by a treehouse – built at first by the older kids and with Alex needing them to lift him up in an old tyre-swing – by two separate swing-ropes, by every last one of our initials.  And in autumn the tree would shed.  It cried acorn tears that drenched the ground.  Nothing me and Alex – sometimes with a tag-along Enid, or a supervisory Bobby – liked better than collecting those up.  Or lying in the grass beneath the tree, amidst the prickles, tossing those acorns against the trunk, rejoicing in that satisfying thunk you could just bet they were going to make.

It was Alex’s idea that we propagate the tree.

“Look,” he said, “acorns, they’re really nothing but seeds, right?  So if we plant them all over town they’re going to grow one day.  If we plant enough of them.”

“You think?”

“Of course they will.  It’s like giving our tree a few hundred sons and daughters.”

“Few… hundred…?”

“About.” 

“We might get in trouble.”

He tossed his head.  The way he could afford to do.  “Oh, I never get in trouble.”

And that was perfectly true.  Maybe it was the leg, or just all the shit he’d been through.  Or his mild, unprovocative face, the way he glanced a little sideways when he talked to somebody scary or in authority.  So, the real question was whether or not I was going to get into trouble.

“Will it work though?”

“It’ll work.”

Did he believe that?  We were young after all.  “Okay then.”

Well, I still don’t know.  We walked, and then I dragged Alex along in his cart.  We went all over town, planting them carefully, throwing them into rivers.  An ice-cream container each filled with acorns, clattering; losing a few as we roamed the streets and crept under fences, along woodland paths, through a couple of nearby parks.  Tossing a few over neighbour’s fences.

So maybe that oak tree will conquer the world.  I’ve never seen one sprout of evidence that any of our acorns took root, but they’re a slow-growing tree, a thing of many lifetimes for us.  And so.

Now, Gordy, he’s one who will take over the world.  I know this for a fact.  Lyddy’s rival and part-time best friend.  The two of them have always spurred each other.  But Gordy’s different, he wants more than just Lyddy’s sense of achievement.  Two hundred years ago you might have said he wanted to better himself, to improve his station.  I’m not sure what you’d call it now.  All I know about Gordy is that he’s into politics, and that he takes it seriously, and yet he doesn’t have a cemented ideology.  If I wanted to simplify it I’d say he was just in it for the power.

That’s why he always coveted titles like hall monitor, bus monitor, student council president.  And he worked for these things, actually pushing for votes, rallying his friends and sort-of-friends to show up on the day and make sure to cast a vote.  And why he was so active in university politics.  Always in the thick of a protest, with a megaphone in hand.  His name could often be found at the bottom of a student newspaper editorial, and certainly all over the comments sections.

That time he was arrested, it had Mum and Dad at each other’s throats.  Mum as mad as hell at him, for sure, but at the same time needing to defend him to Dad, to demand that he got fair treatment, same as Lydia, or DunJay, or Bobby might.  And Dad launching back at her with: “none of them have been arrested have they?  None of them have needed that fair treatment of yours.”

“He has principles, that’s all.”

“Oh, is that what we’re going to call it then?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?  You know Lydia…”

“Lydia would never go getting herself bloody arrested…!”

But it was Gordy who introduced us to Kate.  And since Kate lit Alex up from the inside I feel like Gordy’s redeemed himself ten times over for anything he possibly could have done wrong.

Alex, he’s had a hard road to walk on.  Literally, I guess, because even walking was hard.  Disabled from birth he always faced challenges, right from crawling.  And it was hard for him finding a place in the world.  Other kids weren’t always kind, although he usually won them over quick enough.  As silly as it sounds, I think there really is a goodness in him that just shines through, that just wins people over.

It won Kate.

She was impressive.  Sharp and blond, well-dressed, perfectly made-up.  She had an aura about her of self-assurance, of knowing and loving her place in the world.  Of being built for the best things.  But she wasn’t a bitch.  You’d expect her to be at first sight, or a snob, or just a girl with all edges and an armour of razor blades.

Well, wrong.

Because she was nice.  She was fun.  Gordy invited her home for dinner one night with the family, and she just fitted in.  She was laughing at everybody’s jokes, telling a few of her own, sharing in all the play, diving into everything.  “I don’t have a big family, like this.  It’s just me.  Me and Dad.  This is awesome.  I love this.”

And Alex.  Right from the word go she saw something in my brother.  She saw the same thing that everyone did, of course, what I think of as the light inside him.  But she saw him the way less people do: as a man.  She was inspired by him, and turned on – like you should be when you fall in love. 

Which they did.  All the way.  No brakes.  She’d been round to visit him the next day, and they were out driving the day after.  There was a knowing look in Gordy’s eyes like he’d planned the whole thing, but I don’t really think he did.  He just wanted the credit.  Because Kate took that light inside Alex and she buffed it until you could literally all but see it.  She gave him a happiness I don’t even think we – or he – knew was properly missing.

No surprise that they were married less than two years later.

Those were rough days for Alex.  Not the first time he’d stared down cancer, but the first time he’d had to do it as an adult, old enough to really get what was happening.  The tumours that’d been cooked out of his leg had taken root now in the base of his spine.  And the doctors think now that they’ve got them all, but there’s no telling for sure if they’ll make a reappearance.  We all borrow time, I know that.  Alex likes to remind me of it if I start getting all cloying and pitying on him.  But the lease could be shorter for Alex – not just the nebulous maybe that we all have to contend with, but something having a concrete form, a hardness, a named and known reality.  And that has to be different.  Even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen his courage slip.

So he grabs life by the balls.  He dives in.  Barely in remission and he was stumbling up the aisle to meet Kate at the other end of his walk.  And she was a beauty.  Her dress might have looked like nothing fancy hanging on a hook – ivory velvet, lightly sculpted neckline, no overt ornamentation – but on Kate it was a snowdrift, fitting itself to her tremendous figure and flowing around her like a slow, ice-thickened river.  Her hair was combed up into curls with tiny birds nesting there, and a gossamer silver net set over the whole thing.

I heard Mum gasp at my side.

And for that evening, I had no interest whatsoever in being invisible.  I wanted to be up and dancing, and drinking, and carrying on.  Just like everybody else.  My heart wasn’t weighted down by anything.  I was just so happy for them.  Both of them. I hugged Kate and called her my sister and made her swear that she would never leave us – if Alex did anything wrong I would come down there and sort him out, just say the word, but she had to stick with him.  Stick with us.

“Of course, of course.  I know Alex.”

“And me, and Dad, and Bobby…” It’s a big list.  I wasn’t going to list them all.  Tina had only been on it for just over a year.

And I sat with Alex for a while as Kate whispered with her bridesmaids – Lydia amongst them – and said things to her father than made them both cry.  He sat with his arms rested on his thighs, one leg dwarfing the other.  “Did good, didn’t I?”

“Big time.”

“Who’d have thought?”

“I would have.”

“Me and her.  This… and… her.”

“Yes!  You, there’s nobody better.”

“You drunk?”

“Not very. You’ve just always been my favourite.”

“Well, all right, maybe vice versa.”  There was the kind of silence between us for a while that comes from proper companionship, from just knowing each other inside and out, and accepting all those bits of knowledge – of person – just the way you find them.  He looked across his shoulder at me after a minute or so.  “You know what?  You should dye your hair again.  Even brighter red.”

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work