The Talking Trees

There were Four of them in the same class at The Red Abbey, all under 15. They met every night in Mrs. Coffey's sweetshop at the top of the Victoria Road to play the fruit machine, smoke fags and talk about girls. Not that they really talked about them--they just winked, leered, nudged one another, laughed, grunted and groaned about them, or said things like "See her legs?" "Yaroosh!" "Wham!" "Ouch!" "Ooof!" or "If only, if only!" But if anybody had said, "Only what?" they would not have known precisely what. They knew nothing precisely about girls, they wanted to know everything precisely about girls, there was nobody to tell them precisely all the things they wanted to know about girls and that they thought they wanted to do with them. Aching and wanting, not knowing, half guessing, they dreamed of clouds upon clouds of fat, pink, soft, ardent girls billowing toward them across the horizon of their future. They might just as well have been dreaming of pink porpoises moaning at their feet for love.

In the sweetshop, the tall glass jars of colored sweets shone in the bright lights. The one-armed fruit machine went zing. Now and again, girls from Saint Monica's came in to buy sweets, giggle roguishly and over pointedly ignore them. Mrs. Coffey was young, buxom, fair-haired, blue-eyed and very good-looking. They admired her so much that one night when Georgie Watchman whispered to them that she had fine bubs, Dick Franks told him curtly not to be so coarse and Jimmy Sullivan said in his most toploftical voice, "Georgie Watchman, you should be jolly well ashamed of yourself, you are no gentleman," and Tommy Gong Gong said nothing but nodded his head as insistently as a ventriloquist's dummy.

Tommy's real name was Tommy Flynn, but he was so young that neither he nor they were ever quite sure if he really belonged to the gang at all. To show it, they called him all sorts of nicknames, like Inch because he was so small; Fatty because he was so puppy-fat; Pigeon because he had a chest like a woman; Gong Gong because after long bouts of silence, he had a way of suddenly spraying them with wild bursts of talk like a cross between a fire alarm and a garden sprinkler.

That night, all Georgie Watchman did was to make a rude blubber-lip noise at Dick Franks. But he never again said anything about Mrs. Coffey. They looked up to Dick. He was the oldest of them. He had long eyelashes like a girl, perfect manners, the sweetest smile and the softest voice. He had been to two English boarding schools, Ample-forth and Downside, and in Ireland to three, Glongowes, Castleknock and Rockwell, and been expelled from all five of them. After that, his mother had made his father retire from the Indian Civil, come back to the old family house in Cork and, as a last hope, send her darling Dicky to The Red Abbey day school. He smoked a corncob pipe and dressed in droopy plus fours with checkered stockings and red Hares, as if he was always just coming from or going to the golf course. He played cricket and tennis, games that no other boy at The Red Abbey could afford to play. They saw him as the typical school captain they read about in English boys' papers like The Gem and The Magnet, The Hoys' Own Paper, The Captain and Churns, which was where they got all those swanky words like Wham, Ouch, Yaroosh, Ooof and Jolly Well. He was their Tom Brown, their Bob Cherry, their Tom Merry, those heroes who were always leading Gray friars' School or Blackfriars' School to victory on the cricket field amid the cap-tossing huzzas of the juniors and the admiring smiles of visiting parents. It never occurred to them that The Magnet or The Gem would have seen all four of them as perfect models for some such story as The Cads of Gray-friars' or The Bounders of Blackfriars'. low types given to secret smoking in the spinneys or drinking in The Dead Woman's Inn. While the rest of the school was practicing at the nets, they were cheating at examinations or, worst crime of all, betting on horses with red-faced bookies' louts down front London. They were a quartet of rotters certain to be caned ceremoniously in the last chapter before the entire school and then whistled off at dead of night back to their heartbroken fathers and mothers.

It could not have occurred to them, because these crimes did not exist at The Red Abbey. Smoking? At The Red Abbey, any boy who wanted to was free to smoke himself into a galloping consumption, so long as he did it off the premises, in the jakes or up the chimney. Betting? Brother Julius was always passing fellows sixpence, or even a bob, to put on an uncle's or a cousin's horse at Leopard stown or the Curragh. In the memory of man, no boy at The Red Abbey had ever been caned ceremoniously for anything. Fellows were just leathered all day long for not doing their homework, or playing hooky from school, or giving lip, or fighting in class. And they were leathered hard. Two years ago, Jimmy Sullivan had been given six swingers on each hand with the sharp edge of a meter-long ruler for pouring the contents of an inkwell over Georgie Watchman's head in the middle of a history lesson about the Trojan Wars, in spite of his wailing explanations that he had only done it because he thought Georgie Watchman was a scut and all Trojans were blacks. The only reason they did not drink was that they were too poor. While, as for what The Magnet and The Gem really meant by "betting"--which, they dimly understood, was some sort of depravity that no English boy would like to see mentioned in print--hardly a week passed that some brother did not say that a hard problem in algebra, or a leaky pen, or a window that would not open or shut was "a blooming bugger."

There was the day when little Brother Angelo gathered half a dozen boys about him at playtime to help him with a crossword puzzle.

"Do any of ye," he asked, "know what 'notorious conduct' could be in seven letters?"

"Buggery?" Georgie suggested innocently.

"Please be serious!" Angelo said. "This is about conduct."

When the solution turned out lo be Jezebel, little Angelo threw up his hands, said it must be some queer kind of foreign woman and declared that the whole tiling was a bugger. Or there was that other day when old Brother Expeditus started to tell them about the strict lives and simple food of Dominican priests and Trappist monks. When Georgie said. "No tarts, Brother?" Expeditus had laughed loud and long.

"No, Georgie!" he chuckled. "No pastries of any kind."

They might as well have been in school in Arcadia. And every other school about them seemed to be just as hopeless. In fact, they might have gone on dreaming of pink porpoises for years, if it were not for a small thing that Gong Gong told them one October night in the sweetshop. He sprayed them with the news that his sister Jenny had been thrown out of class that morning in Saint Monica's for turning up with a red ribbon in her hair, a mother-of-pearl brooch at her neck and smelling of scent.

"Ould Sister Eustasia," he fizzled, "made her go out in the yard and wash herself under the tap; she said they didn't want any girls in their school who had notions."

The three gazed at one another and began at once to discuss all the possible sexy meanings of notions. Georgie had a pocket dictionary. An ingenious contrivance? An imperfect conception? (U. S.) Small wares? Finally, they turned to Mrs. Coffey. She laughed, nodded toward two giggling girls in the shop who were eating that gummy kind of block toffee that can gag you for half an hour, and said, "Why don't you ask them?"

Georgie did so, most politely, saying, "Pardon me, ladies, but do you by any chance happen to have not ons?" The two girls stared at each other with cow's eyes, blushed scarlet and fled from the shop, shrieking with laughter. Clearly, a "notion" was very sexy.

"Georgie!" Dick pleaded. "You're the only one who knows anything. What in heaven's name is it?"

When Georgie had to confess himself stumped, they knew at last that their situation was desperate.

Up to now, Georgie had always been able to produce some sort of answer, right or wrong, to all their questions. He was the one who, to their disgust, told them what conraception (as he called it) meant. He was the one who had explained to them that all babies are delivered from the navel of the mother. He was the one who had warned them that if a fellow kissed a bad woman, he would get leprosy from head to foot. The son of a head constable, living in the police barracks, he had collected his facts simply by listening as quietly as a mouse to the four other policemen lolling in the dayroom of the barracks with their collars open, reading the sporting pages of The Freeman's Journal, slowly creasing their polls, and talking about colts and fillies, cows and calves, bulls and bullocks and "the mysteerious nachure of all faymale wimmen." He had gathered a lot of other useful stuff by dutiful attendance since the age of 11 at the meetings and marchings of The Protestant Boys' Brigade, and devoted study of the Bible. And now he was stumped by a nun!

Dick lifted his eyelashes at the three of them, jerked his head and led them out on the pavement.

"I have a plan," he said quietly. "I've been thinking of it for some time. Chaps! Why don't we see everything (continued on page 104)the talking trees(continued from page 96) with our own eyes?" And he threw them into excited discussion by mentioning a name. "Daisy Bolster?"

• • •

Always, near every school, there is a Daisy Bolster, whom everybody has heard about and nobody knows. They had all seen her at a distance. Tall, a bit skinny, long legs, dark eyes, lids heavy as the dimmers of a car lamp, prominent white teeth, and her lower lip always looked wet. She could be as old as 17. Maybe even 18! She wore her hair up. Dick told them that he had met her once at the tennis club with four or five other fellows around her and that she had laughed and winked very boldly all the time. Georgie said that he once heard a fellow in school say she went with boys. Gong Gong bubbled that that was true, because his sister Jenny told him that a girl named Daisy Bolster had been thrown out of school three years ago for talking to a boy outside the convent gate. At this, Georgie flew into a terrible rage.

"You stupid slob!" he roared. "Don't you know yet that when anybody says a boy and girl are talking to each other, it means they're doing you know what?"

"I don't know you know what," Gong Gong wailed. "What what?"

"I heard a fellow say," Jimmy Sullivan revealed solemnly, "that she has no father and that her mother is no better than she should be."

Dick said in disapproving tones that he had once met another fellow who had heard her telling some very daring stories.

"Do you think she would show us for a quid?"

Before they parted on the pavement that night, they were no longer talking about a real girl; for once a girl like that gets her name up, she always ends up as a myth; and for a generation afterward, maybe more, it is the myth that persists.

"Do you remember," some old chap will wheeze, "that girl Daisy Bolster? She used to live up the Mardyke. We used to say she was fast."

The other old boy will nod knowingly, the two of them will look at each other inquisitively, and neither will admit anything, remembering only the long, dark avenue, dim gas lamps, stars hooked in the trees.

Within a month, Dick had fixed it. Their only trouble after that was to collect the money and to decide whether Gong Gong should be allowed to come with them. Dick fixed that, too, at a final special meeting in the sweetshop.

Taking his pipe from between his lips, he looked speculatively at Gong Gong, who looked up at him with eyes big as plums, trembling between the terror of being told he could come with them and the equal terror of being told that he could not.

"Tell me, Gong Gong," Dick said politely, "what, exactly, does your father do?"

"He's a tailor," Tommy said, blushing a bit at having to confess it, knowing that Jimmy's da was a bank clerk, that Georgie's was a head constable and that Dick's had been a district commissioner in the Punjab.

"Very fine profession," Dick said kindly. "Gentleman's tailor and outfitter. I see. Flynn and Company? Or is it Flynn and Sons? Have I seen his emporium?"

"Ah, no," Tommy said, by now as red as a radish, "he's not that sort of a tailor at all, he doesn't build suits, ye know, that's a different trade altogether, he works with me mother at home in Tuckey Street, he lets things in and he lets things out, he's what they call a mender and turner, me brother Turlough had this suit I have on me now before I got it, you can see he's very good at his job, he's a real dab...."

Dick let him run on, nodding sympathetically--meaning to convey to the others that they really could not expect a fellow to know much about girls if his father spent his life mending and turning old clothes in some side alley called Tuckey Street.

"Do you fully realize, Gong Gong, that we are proposing to behold the ultimate in female beauty?"

"You mean," Gong Gong whispered, "she'll only be wearing her nightie?"

Georgie Watchman turned from him in disgust to the fruit machine. Dick smiled on.

"The thought had not occurred to me," he said. "I wonder, Gong Gong, where do you get all those absolutely filthy ideas. Do you think, if we three subscribe seventeen and sixpence, that you can contribute half a crown?"

"I could feck it, I suppose."

Dick raised his eyelashes.

"Feck?"

Gong Gong looked shamefully at the tiles.

"I mean steal," he confessed.

"Don't they give you any pocket money?"

"They give me three pence a week."

"Well, we have only a week to go. If you can, what was your word, feck half a crown, you may come."

The night chosen was a Saturday--her mother always went to town on Saturdays; the time of meeting, five o'clock exactly; the place, the entrance to the Mardyke Walk. On any other occasion, it would have been a gloomy spot for a rendezvous; for this adventure, perfect: a long, tree-lined avenue with a few houses and enclosing walls along one side and, on the other side, the sunken little canal whose deep dike gave the place its name. Secluded, no traffic allowed inside the gates, complete silence, a place where men came every night to stand with their girls behind the elm trees, kissing and whispering for hours. Dick and Georgie were there on the dot of five. Then Jimmy Sullivan came swiftly loping. From where they stood under a tree just beyond the porter's lodge, shivering with excitement, they could see clearly for only about 100 yards up the long tunnel of elms lit by the first stars above the boughs, one tawny window streaming across a dark garden and, beyond that, a feeble procession of pendent lamps fading dimly away into the blue November dusk. Within another half hour, the avenue would be pitch black between those meager pools of light.

Her instructions had been precise. In separate pairs, at exactly half past five, away up there beyond the last lamp where they would be as invisible as cockroaches, they must gather outside her house.

"You won't be able even to see one another," she had said gleefully to Dick, who had stared coldly at her, wondering how often had she stood behind a tree with some fellow who would not have been able to see her face.

Every light in the house would be out except for the fanlight over the door.

"Ooh!" she had giggled. "It will be terribly oohey. You won't hear a sound but the branches squeaking. You must come alone to my door. You must leave the other fellows to watch from behind the trees. You must give two short rings. Once, twice. And then give a long ring and wait." She had started to whisper the rest, her hands by her sides, clawing her dress in her excitement. "The fanlight will go out if my mother isn't at home. The door will open slowly. You will step into the dark hall. A hand will take your hand. You won't know whose hand it is. It will be like something out of Sherlock Holmes. You will be simply terrified. You won't know what I'm wearing. For all you'll know, I might be wearing nothing at all!"

He must leave the door ajar. The others must follow him one by one. After that....

It was now 11 minutes past five and Gong Gong had not yet come. Already, three women had passed up the Mardyke carrying parcels, hurrying home to their warm fires, forerunners of the home-for-tea crowd. When they had passed out of sight, Georgie growled, "When that slob comes, I'm going to put my boot up his backside."

Dick, calmly puffing his corncob, gazing wearily up at the stars, laughed tolerantly and said, "Now, Georgie, don't (continued on page 136)the talking trees(continued from page 104) be impatient. We shall see all! We shall know all!"

Georgie sighed and decided to be weary, too.

"I hope," he drawled, "this poor frail isn't going to let us down!"

For three more minutes, they waited in silence, and then Jimmy Sullivan let out a cry of relief. There was the small, round figure hastening toward them along the Dyke Parade from one lamp post to another.

"Puffing and panting as usual, I suppose," Dick chuckled. "And exactly fourteen minutes late."

"I hope to God," Jimmy said, "he has that pound note. I don't know in hell why you made that slob our treasurer."

"Because he is poor," Dick said quietly. "We would have spent it."

He came panting up to them, planted a black violin case against the tree and began rummaging in his pockets for the money.

"I'm supposed to be at a music lesson, that's me alibi, me father always wanted to be a musician but he got married instead, he plays the cello, my brother Turlough plays the clarinet, me sister Jenny plays the viola, we have quartets, I sold a Haydn quartet for one and six, 1 had to borrow sixpence from Jenny, and I fecked the last sixpence from me mother's purse, that's what kept me so late...."

They were not listening, staring into the puckered handkerchief he was unraveling to point out one by one a crumpled half-note, two half crowns, two shillings and a sixpenny bit.

"That's all yeers! And here's mine. Six three penny bits for the quartet. That's one and six. Jenny's five pennies and two ha'pence. That makes two bob. And here's the tanner I just fecked from me mother's purse. That makes my two and sixpence."

Eagerly, he poured the mess into Dick's hands. At the sight of the jumble, Dick roared at him.

"I told you, you bloody little fool, to bring a pound note!"

"You told me to bring a pound."

"I said a pound note. I can't give this dog's breakfast to a girl like Daisy Bolster."

"You said a pound."

They all began to squabble. Jimmy Sullivan shoved Gong Gong. Georgie punched him. Dick shoved Georgie. Jimmy defended Georgie with, "We should never have let that slob come with us."

Gong Gong shouted, "Who's a slob?" and swiped at him.

Jimmy shoved him again, so that he fell over his violin case, and a man passing home to his tea shouted at them, "Stop beating that little boy at once!"

Tactfully, they cowered. Dick helped Gong Gong to his feet. Georgie dusted him lovingly. Jimmy retrieved his cap, put it back crookedly on his head and patted him kindly. Dick explained in his best Ample forth accent that they had merely been having a trifling discussion and "our young friend here tripped over his suitcase." The man surveyed them dubiously, growled something and went on his way. When he was gone, Georgie pulled out his pocketbook, handed a brand-new pound note to Dick and grabbed the dirty jumble of cash.

Dick at once said, "Quick, march! Two by two!" and strode off ahead of the others, side by side with Tommy and his crooked cap and his dusty violin case, into the deepening dusk.

They passed nobody. They heard nothing. They saw only the few lights in the sparse houses along the left of the Mardyke. On the other side was the railed-in dike stream, but that made no more noise than a canal. When they came in silence to the sudden, wide expanse of the cricket field, the sky dropped a blazing veil of stars behind the outfield nets. When they passed the gates of the railed-in public park, locked for the night, utter darkness returned between old high walls to their left and overgrown laurels glistening behind the tall railings on their right. Here Tommy stopped dead, looked fearfully toward the laurels.

"What's up with you?" Dick snapped at him.

"I hear a noise, my father told me once how a man murdered a woman in there for her gold watch, he said men do terrible things like that because of bad women, he said that that man was hanged by the neck in Cork Jail, he said that was the last time the black flag flew on top of the jail, I don't want to go on!"

Dick peered at the phosphorescent dial of his watch and strode ahead, staring at the next feeble lamp hanging from its black iron arch. Tommy had to trot to catch up with him.

"We know," Dick said, "that she has long legs. Her breasts will be white and small."

"I won't look!" Tommy moaned.

"Then don't look!"

Panting, they hurried on past the corrugated iron building that had once been a roller-skating rink and was now empty and abandoned. After the last lamp, the night was impenetrable, but presently a house rose slowly to their left against the starlight. It was square, tall, solid, brick-fronted, three-storied and jet-black against the stars, except for its half-moon fanlight. They walked a few yards past it and halted, panting, behind a tree. The only sound was the squeaking of a branch over their heads. Looking backward, they saw Georgie and Jimmy approaching under the last lamp. Looking forward, they saw a brightly lit tram, on its way outward from the city, pass the far end of the tunnel, briefly light its maw and black it out again. Beyond that lay wide country fields and the silent river. Dick said. "Tell them to follow me if the fanlight goes out," and disappeared.

Alone under the tree, backed by the park, Tommy looked across to where the far heights of Sunday's Well gleamed with the eyes of a thousand suburban houses. He clasped his fiddle case before him like a shield. He had to force himself not to run away toward where another bright tram would rattle him back to the city. Suddenly, he saw the fanlight go out. Strings in the air throbbed and faded. Was somebody playing a cello? His father bowed over his cello, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up, entered the Haydn; beside him, Jenny waited, chin sideward over her viola, bosom lifted, bow poised, the tendons of her frail wrist hollowed by the lamplight; Turlough, facing them, lipped a thinner reed; his mother sat shawled by the fire, tapping the beat with her toe.

Georgie and Jimmy joined him.

"Where's Dick?" Georgie whispered urgently.

"Did I hear music?" he gasped.

Georgie vanished, and again the strings came and faded. Jimmy whispered, "Has she a gramophone?" Then they could hear nothing but the faint rattle of the vanished tram. When Jimmy slid away from him, lie began to race madly up into the darkness, and then stopped dead halfway to the tunnel's end. He did not have the penny to pay for the tram. He turned and raced as madly back the way he had come, down past her house, down to where the gleam of the laurels hid the murdered woman, and stopped again. He heard a rustling noise. He looked back, thought of her long legs and her small white breasts and found himself walking heavily back to her garden gate. He entered the path, fumbled for the dark door, pressed against it, felt it slue open under his hand, stepped cautiously into the dark hallway, closed the door, saw nothing, heard nothing, stepped onward and fell clattering on the tiles over his violin case.

A door opened. He saw firelight flicker on shining shinbones and bare knees. Fearfully, his eyes moved upward. She was wearing gym knickers. Then he saw them--two small birds, white, beaked, soft, rosy-tipped. Transfixed by joy, he stared and stared at them. Her black hair hung over her narrow shoulders. She laughed down at him with white teeth and wordlessly gestured him to (concluded on page 240)the talking trees(continued from page 136) get up and come in. He faltered after her white back and stood inside the door. The only light was from the fire.

Nobody heeded him. Dick stood by the corner of the mantelpiece, one palm flat on it, his other hand holding his trembling corncob. He was peering coldly at her. His eyelashes almost met. Georgie lay sprawled in a chintzy armchair on the other side of the fire, wearily flicking the ash from a black cigarette into the fender. Opposite him, Jimmy Sullivan sat on the edge of a chair, his elbows on his knees, his eyeballs sticking out as if he had just swallowed something hard and raw. Nobody said a word. She stood in the center of the carpet, looking guardedly from one to the other of them out of her hooded eyes, her thumbs inside the elastic of her gym knickers, ready to press them down over her hips. When Georgie suddenly whispered, "The seventh veil!" he at once wanted to batter them all over their heads with his fiddle case, to shout at her to stop, to shout at them that they had seen everything, to shout that they must look no more. Instead, he lowered his head so that he saw nothing but her bare feet. Her last ugly garment slid to the carpet. He heard three long gasps, became aware that Dick's pipe had fallen to the floor, that Georgie had started straight up, one fist lifted as if he was going to strike her. Jimmy had covered his face with his hands.

A coal tinkled from the fire to the fender. With averted eyes, he went to it, knelt before it, wet his fingers with his spittle, as he had often seen his mother do, deftly dropped the coal back on the fire and remained so for a moment, watching it light again. Then he sidled back to his violin case, walked out into the hall, flung open the door on a sky of stars and straightway started to race the whole length of the Mardyke, from pool to pool of light, in three gasping spurts.

After the first spurt, he stood panting until his heart stopped hammering. He heard a girl laughing softly behind a tree. Just before his second halt, he saw ahead of him a man and a woman approaching him arm in arm; but when he came up to where they should have been, they, too, had become invisible. Halted, breathing, listening, he heard them murmuring somewhere in the dark. At his third, panting rest, he heard an invisible girl say, "Oh no, oh no!" and a man's urgent voice say, "But yes, but yes!" He felt that behind every tree there were kissing lovers, and ran without stopping until he had emerged from the Mardyke among the bright lights of the city. Then, he was in his own street, the sweat cooling on his forehead, standing outside the shuttered plumber's shop above which they lived. Slowly he climbed the bare stairs to their floor and their door. He paused for a moment to look up through the bare window at the stars, opened the door and went in.

Four heads around the supper table turned to look inquiringly at him. At one end of the table, his mother sat wearing her blue apron. At the other end, his father sat in his rolled-up shirt sleeves, as if he had only just laid down the pressing iron. Turlough gulped his food. Jenny was smiling mockingly at him. She had the red ribbon in her hair and the mother-of-pearl brooch at her neck.

"You're bloody late!" his father said crossly. "What the hell kept you? I hope you came straight home from your lesson. What way did you come? Did you meet anybody or talk to anybody? You know I don't want any loitering at night. I hope you weren't cadeying with any blackguards? Sit down, sir, and eat your supper. Or did your lordship expect us to wait for you? What did you play tonight? What did Professor Hartmann give you to practice for your next lesson?"

He sat in his place. His mother filled his plate and they all ate in silence.

Always the questions! Always talking and talking at him! They never let him alone for a minute. His hands sank. He stared at his greasy plate. She was so lovely. So white. So lovely. His mother said gently, "You're not eating, Tommy. Are you all right?"

He said, "Yes, yes, I'm fine, Mother."

Like birds. Like stars. Like music.

His mother said, "You are very silent tonight, Tommy. You usually have a lot of talk after you've been to Professor Hartmann. What are you thinking of?"

"They were so beautiful!" he blurted.

"What was so bloody beautiful?" his father rasped. "What are you blathering about?"

"The stars," he said hastily.

Jenny laughed. His father frowned. Silence returned.

He knew that he would never again go back to the sweetshop. They would only want to talk and talk about her. They would want to bring everything out into the light, boasting and smirking about her, taunting him for having run away. He would be happy forever if only he could walk every night of his life up the dark Mardyke, hearing nothing but a girl's laugh from behind a tree, a branch squeaking and the far-off rattle of a lost tram; walk on and on, deeper into the darkness, until he could see nothing but one tall house whose fanlight she would never put out again. The doorbell might ring, but she would not hear it. It might be answered, but not by her. She would be gone. He had known that ever since he heard her laughing softly by his side as he ran away with her forever between those talking trees.