The Truth Tree

Exactly one week after Jim gave up work on the offshore rigs Freda and he got married and moved to Ardoch. Careful planing and hard work had enabled them to buy a rambling property on the outskirts of town at a remarkably young age. Freda gave up her job as a hairdresser at The kindest Cut and started doing privates at home. They both knew what they wanted and got on with it. Freda fell pregnant almost straight away and produced a bouncy son. Twelve months later a healthy daughter arrived and so in no time at all they were energetically bringing up two bonny children. The family blossomed amongst the leafy garden but in what seemed a cruelly short space of time the children had left home to pursue their own lives.

Although Jim and Freda were sad to see them go they wished them good luck and God speed; then, with bags of enthusiasm, began piling time and energy into the revitalisation of all those shelved ideas and projects.

Jim worked in positive fashion towards early retirement at the steel works and took up an evening philosophy course at night school. Freda restricted her hairdressing to a few brave old faithfuls who didn't mind a bit of near sighted topiary, and together, Freda and Jim rediscovered, `that old black magic'. One evening when Jim was at Boyers Tai Chi class, Freda flicked through his philosophy assignment. She would have made a better philosophy student as it happened but she couldn't be bothered with all the eclectic jargonese. You live, you die. Enjoy it while you can was her motto.

Jim, through his philosophical studies and a niggling prostate, became obsessed first with the planet and Plato then with vegetables and Voltaire. And Freda, because of her excellent nature and her love for Jim just went right along with it. Their large plot of land lent itself to the indulgence of Jim's green and planetary fantasies and he indulged them pretty well as he pleased. One of the first things he did was to dig a long drop toilet in the middle of the back lawn; the theory being that the human waste would seep into the surrounding soil through a series of perforated subterranean pipes and invigorate the flora. Already lush foliage hid his efforts from prying neighbours and as he laboured he revelled in the bonus effect of firming arm and back muscles. At lunchtimes however he still indulged his stubbornly flaccid stomach with a bottle of Sweetheart stout.

It was during a prolonged lunch break a year before his retirement that he began to cook up a wondrous scheme. Ignoring all the basics of logic, he drifted into a perilous state of loose and woolly thinking. It followed a path oft travelled by enthusiastic amateurs. `What if I scrap all existing philosophical mumbo jumbo, start with a clean slate, get myself into an environment that will allow free, undistracted thought, then devote the rest of my life to discovering the ultimate TRUTH.' Even Jim with his rooster's vitality and boyish enthusiasm was a little dry mouthed at the enormity of his magnificent idea. It would involve going back to basics in a very big and honest way.

The first time Freda got wind of his incredible idea was one Saturday lunchtime when she stood calling him in for his customary bottle of Sweetheart stout and sandwich. Rather than springing vigorously from the foliage, his ruddy face appeared framed in the open top of the long drop toilet's stable door.

"What on earth are you doing in there silly?" She was embarrassed and a little shocked.

"Would you mind bringing it out here my love? You wouldn't believe how comfortable it is in here, it's the perfect place for relaxing and thinking."

Against her better judgement she took him the sandwich and the bottle of stout and although she avoided looking at any thing in particular she did notice a note pad and pencil perched on the toilet roll.

He sounded perfectly normal but all the same her heart sped up and skipped a beat or two. Was this the beginning of Alzheimers? Surely not, they'd been very careful about the use or non-use of aluminium pots and anyway, didn't these afflictions manifest themselves in a more insidious way; not just suddenly on the loo? He seemed cheerful enough though and during the next few months she got used to the idea of Jim having his lunch in the loo on the weekends and even placed an old garden chair by the door to keep him company.

At last Jim took a well earned early retirement and soon after confided the outline of his big idea to Freda. She was picking creamy blossoms from their magnolia tree and Jim was doodling with a hoe amongst the brussels.

"I'm thinking of launching a magnificent experiment," he told her. "An experiment that will furnish me with something rather terrifying." He lightly gripped her shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. "I'm going to discover the answer to existence itself. I'm going to discover the one and only irrefutable truth."

He explained that all he need do was to pare existence down to its very foundation, then with the minimum of distractions he'd contemplate the glorious enigma until, and on this he was utterly convinced, the truth would spontaneously avail itself.

Like most of us Jim had bravely concluded that almost all of what we do beyond eating/drinking, breathing and sleeping was a distraction or a burden and even the recently rediscovered old black magic eventually lost its lustre. Jim finally concluded that the place of greatest existential foundation, the place of least distraction, was the long drop loo in the middle of the garden. He was convinced that that was the place where he could best do justice to his experiment. He recognised the loo as an altar on which to become spiritually centred, a sort of private lay line. He saw the loo as a place where one could release ones mind as well as purge the body and he wished the greater population would recognise it as such `Just look at them,' he once said to Freda as they drove through town. `They look so bound up they must go to the loo to worry rather than to satisfy the gentle pressures of peristalsis.'

Freda was intrigued, and went along fully with the idea, partly to see what would happen and partly because she was more than a little relieved to find that he was well and happy and not suffering from any definable form of ageing illness.

At first he just spent the weekends on the loo. He kept a pad and pencil at the ready and quickly discovered that by leaning back against a pillow and sitting on a postnatal cushion he could prevent pins and needles to the nethers. Freda happily toddled out with his meals and would sit in the garden chair on fine summer evenings reading or knitting as Jim patiently waited for the answer.

As the months ticked by Jim spent more and more time out in the long drop loo until, and who knows actually when, he became a permanent resident and never again felt the need to return to the house. Winter and summer Freda brought out his meals as Jim floated about in a labyrinth of contemplation. Without Jim for company Freda lost some of her sparkle and became less and less sure of herself. She lost the last of her thinning Thursday customers and slowly drifted into a world of her own. Old acquaintances popped off with regular monotony and occasionally Freda attended the funerals; with thin body and white face moving rhythmically inside a big blue coat and bonnet she'd shake people by the hand and say, "Jim sends his best wishes."

One day a chaffinch came and perched on Jim's knee. Its blank purple eyes stared cold and straight into Jims sparkly blue eyes. Jim stared right back and wondered if he could get inside that tiny head and flit about the town. He tried to imagine what kind of thoughts might occupy a chaffinch in spring.

The whole garden was now wild and overgrown. Jim's face had taken on the quality of weathered oak. Tenacious tendrils of flora gently but firmly entwined his ankles and knees and hugged his ribs. His wild beard provided a home for a family of voles and the soles of his feet had long since lost all feeling and begun turning black. At about this time, the time of the chaffinch, Freda had a mild stroke and lost part of her memory and so with a packet of aspirin for the headaches she began to jerk and dance through a serene but haphazard twilight.

A few days later, completely out of the blue the great answer came to Jim. THE truth, unannounced and unexpected, swift and complete. It was enormous and beautiful beyond all human imagination, and yet it was so simple. At first he didn't believe it could be that simple, but then as it burned before him he began to chuckle quietly and with laborious effort he carefully wrote down that magnificent, all encompassing, ultimate, existential truth.

That very same evening Freda thought she heard a long ragged cry but as it was soon swallowed up by the merry chirping of a chaffinch she thought no more of it and carried on ironing her newspapers.

Freda lived on for many years after Jim passed away and in some confusion she watched from her good eye the sturdy larch tree that grew strong and straight through the roof of the outside loo. It eventually pushed out the walls and Freda laboriously tidied all the bits away and left them stacked against the fence at the side.

During those many years, their two children, who'd gone to live in Australia, both died prematurely of alcohol and sunburn, and so, on a hot summer's day, a day in which a light breeze gently ruffled the larch leaves, Freda died. She died peacefully enough under the natural canopy of that huge tree at the ripe old age of 98. She'd been carrying a tray with a bottle of Sweetheart stout on it and must have tripped, for a sliver of glass pierced her heart.

With no beneficiaries to the will the house was put up for sale under the rules of probate. After several false starts a thin ambitious man and his nauseous platinum wife came to view, and the real estate agent, a woman with a fat red mouth and ankle bracelet, described it amongst other things as eminently subdividable and eventually landed herself a sale.

For the first year the new owners bitched and argued through a series of major renovations, and then, when they were complete, the mans narrow, anxious face began to appear each evening, lips puckering at the kitchen window, shoulders hoisted, tea cup and saucer to hand. This acidic, thin man saw the magnificent larch tree as personal threat. Just looking at it from the safety of the kitchen made the permanent knot in his gut tighten viciously until it drove him shuffling and wheezing to the newly installed, midnight oyster, vitreous china bowl in the cloak room.

Six months later, early one Monday morning, a tree removal company arrived and because of the close proximity to new houses and the size of the tree they began to saw it down in sections from the top. It was just after three o'clock when the foreman made the final cut. As the chainsaw ripped through the trunk a strange white powder burst out amid the flying sawdust. The tree feller was intrigued and on brushing the sawdust off the stump, he found, right in the centre of the tree, a white ring matched by a similar ring in the offcut. He immediately covered the exposed ends with plastic sheeting and called in a tree diseases expert from the Ministry of Ag just in case it was some sort of contagious fungal spore. The expert was baffled and so was a tropical tree PhD from the same office. It wasn't until the next door neighbour, a pathologist, wandered in just being nosy that they found the answer. The chain saw had sliced neatly through Jims skull. Jim had been consumed by the living Larch. He had become branches and leaves. However, death certificates need signing off with a certain scientific exactitude and so there followed a careful examination of the inside of that bony orb. The results of the examination were utterly confusing, for, rather than finding, as might be expected, the dried up kernel of a brilliant mind, all they found were three broken chaffinch eggs and the dusty remains of a birds nest made from shredded paper.