IF TREES COULD TALK — an extract

Rue rushes into the café with her breath clouding and her nose bright red. The cold claws at her back until the door slams shut on its grip and slips away. She shuffles her head out of her scarf, tucking it under her chin so she's breathing in the coffee and freshly baked pastries. Scents that always remind Rue of winter nights at home, sitting by the electric heater playing cards with her brother while her parents sipped on their fifth rakweh of the day.

      She looks around the dimly lit space, peering across the array of mismatching wooden furniture and overgrown plants that have begun to spill over their pots and down the shelves. No one's behind the till, and the only customers are Emma and Albert Anderson, sitting at the corner table by the window. Rue nods at them and they nod back, huddled over a pair of hot chocolates.

      There's the faint sound of grinding coffee beans coming from the far side of the café, just past the doorway labelled Staff Only. Rue waits patiently by the fridges, staring down at the multi-coloured macaroons lined up in boxes like books stuffed into a chest. Rue taps a finger to the glass, wondering if she should buy some. She knows Aisha loves them, but she also knows Aisha has been on an indefinite diet for the last three years.

      'Rue,' a voice chirps and she looks up to find Piper coming through the door way with a large aluminium bag the size of her head against her hip. She throws the bag on the counter by the coffee machine and taps her hands on her apron as she makes her way to the till. 'It's been so long. How have you been?'

      'Just fine, busy with work.' Rue says, her finger still tapping away at the glass. 'What about you? Is Alistair not in?'

      'He's off today, and I'm all good. The usual, looking for work,' she says with a smile and gives a shrug that seems too big for her petite body. She's a pretty girl, the kind of delicate type with fine features, smooth skin slightly pricked with freckles. Rue's eyes drift across the slight curve of her exposed collar bones and down to her slim wrists. 'He's been asking about you, you know — Ali I mean. Doesn't miss the chance to ask Everton every time he comes in if he's seen you.'

      She says this with a slight smile on her lips, poorly disguising a secret Rue already knew.

      'Tell him I say hi,' Rue says thinly and then taps the display glass loudly. 'And could I get one box and an Americano?'

      'Sure.' She hops around to the coffee machine, her bronze hair swinging from its knot all fluffy and excited.

      Rue gives the tables another look, looking for a place to sit. She ends up taking the table just behind the Andersons', where she has a clear view of the cobbled street outside the window. The pebbled ground is wet from the melting ice that had clustered overnight.

      She struggled a little with the drive up into town today, realising she hadn't actually driven on ice before: a car is more of an expensive hindrance in London. It wasn't too bad though. The roads were empty and the slow pace she drove at meant she could enjoy the view of the trees, their leaves crisp and white.

       She's keenly aware of the O'Niell's workshop being just a couple of metres down the road.

      So that's why you chose to meet here, the little macaroons on the table giggle. The table is chipped underneath and Rue picks at the splinter. The macaroons looked better under the fluorescent light of the refrigerator, now they look like oversized skittles left out in the sun too long. Piper arrives with the Americano, making idle chat with the Anderson's behind her for a moment before heading back to the staff only area.

      The café's quiet, nothing but the slight hum of the coffee machine fills the store. The Anderson's seem occupied with a newspaper between the two of them. Rue watches the street lazily, her thoughts floating whimsically with the steam from her Americano.

      She's imagined Marseille walking down the road about fifteen different ways. She wonders what he would do if he notices her sitting by the window. She imagines him walking right past her, not even glancing in her direction as he makes his way down the street. Or maybe he'd wave and keep on walking. He might just invite himself to sit opposite her like he'd done last Sunday at her place. 

      She wonders what she'd say to him. How would they converse now? Like friends? Are they friends?

      She goes to rub her face with her palm and stops short, remembering the concealer she lavished on before leaving the house. A little has come away, a yellowish tinge on her fingertips. She only wishes her skin could come away so easily, to rub and rub away at herself, of her imperfections, until she is raw. Ready to grow back new again.

      She stares at herself in the black screen of her phone, looking dull and tired. She may just have to go deeper than the skin.

      The café door swings open and Aisha rushes inside. She's wrapped in a scarf so big it borderlines on a blanket and her shoulders are bulky from the multitude of layers she's put on. Her dark skin doesn't give away any disagreement it may have with the cold, but her narrowed eyes do. 

      'Over here,' Rue says in a small voice, but Aisha's already made her way over.

      'It was hard to notice you with all… these people,' Aisha says with a long look at the café. 'Although I'll admit I wasn't entirely sure I heard right when you asked to meet in a café. Tired of my unsolicited house visits already?'

      Rue clears her throat as she gives the street outside a quick look. 'Just needed some fresh air.'

      'Sounds like a lie.' Aisha sniffs as she unravels the scarf around her neck and chucks it onto the unoccupied chair between them. 'Your house that much of a mess or something? Thought I'd seen the worst of it.'

      'I really just needed some fresh air.' 

      Aisha makes a patronising sound in the base of her throat as she goes to fish out her notebook from her satchel. She chucks it onto the table, shuffles out of her coat, and then leans back into her chair with a slow breath.

      Her bad mood quickly mingles with the bitter scent of coffee in the air. Her quip retorts and stoic expressions never give away what she feels, usually: she's never been the type of person you could read. But Rue can see it now, in the way she's holding herself straight up, her hands inter-locked together, and her chin pointed downwards, perfectly aligned with her chest. There's a tension coiling around her, as if her veins have knotted and tightened up her arms and through her shoulders.

      Rue eases back into her chair, as if the extra distance will help. 'Is everything alright?' 

      Aisha's face barely moves, but she offers up a little surprised blink and furrows her eyebrows ever so slightly. 'Shouldn't I be asking you that? I can't tell if this new move is a bad omen or a good one.'

      Rue's eyes fall back to the cobble streets outside. 'I asked you first.'

      'I'm just fine.' The subject changes with the swift flick of a page as Aisha opens her diary to the coming weeks. 'You don't have much next month, if we pretend like your deadline isn't there. Just two readings in the first week, and then an event.'

      Rue nods absentmindedly. Aisha's eyes have wandered off, skimming the words she's scribbled onto her diary.

      They're friends before colleagues, or at least they were friends. They'd been friends in primary through to secondary school before losing touch when Aisha headed off to university. Back in school where being different had out-casted enough of them to form alliances. Back before the new century where they were the others: brown, unintelligible, alien. They were children whose native tongue belonged to another land, skin paling with the lack of sun, their minds eye lost between two worlds.

      It's a little funny, how the two of them have ended up. Their lives centred on a language that once seemed so distant.

      'You've made yourself angry,' Aisha says, and it's the softness to her tone that startles Rue.

      'Huh?'

      Aisha leans forward and places her cheek into her palm, the flesh pressing up into her face, and suddenly she looks sixteen again. 'You've got that face — that you've started imagining some scenario and it clearly hasn't played out well.'

      Rue presses a finger to the space in-between her eyebrows consciously. 'Well, not a scenario really. Just thinking about when we were younger.'

      'What were you thinking about?'

      'I used to think things were easier for us as children.'

      Aisha raises an eyebrow. 'But?'

      'It was hard back then, alternating between home, family, culture and school, the English, the difference. We were floating — still are, probably.'

      'Isn't that what Departure from the Nest is all about? I remember having this conversation before. How growing up as a first-generation immigrant meant not really feeling any connection to one country or culture more than the other?' Aisha says, waving down Piper. 

      Rue can feel her lips droop, the muscles in her face tightening. Departure from the Nest. She's never liked the title.

      'It feels like forever ago now. I remember how into it we were talking about all those subtle themes.' There's a slight smile on Aisha's face now as she orders a flat white and a plate of bread and butter. 'You were so obsessed with Nancy. Many people still are. There's much to say about likeable child characters when you're an adult.'

      Nancy. The name feels so odd to her now, like an echo that's been traveling for years and has become nothing but the sound of the wind. Her character. Her child. A Middle Eastern refugee adopted by a French couple. A young girl who turned her back on her war-torn past, and eventually grew up to reject the land that scorned her. A teenage girl, a nimble, fickle thing who ran away and didn't look back.

      "Magical." "Beautiful." "Heart-breaking and lifting." 

      'Don't you think it's a bit annoying?' 

      'What?'

      'I never said where she was from.'

      'Huh?' Aisha looks up from the coffee Piper has just put in front of her. 'Who?'

      'Nancy. I never said were she was from.'

      Aisha rips open a sachet of sugar and shakes it into her cup. 'What do you mean? Of course you did.'

      'No, I didn't.'

      'Rue, the whole god damn book was about how she was from—' She suddenly stops mixing the contents of her cup and looks up at Rue. '…the Middle East.' 

      'I should have been specific.'

      Aisha drops her spoon. 'What does it matter?' she asks, with a look on her face that says she knows better.

      'I should have been specific,' Rue repeats. 'The book was for children and I did exactly what I hated people did growing up. Clumping us all together and putting us into the other box. All those thousands of books that sold, all those books telling children that all of The Middle East is one country, of one people, of one culture, and all of it is under war.' 

      She raises her eyebrows. 'Well—'

      'You know what I mean Aisha, come on. You can still fly into Lebanon and enjoy a holiday for the summer without losing a limb.' She's getting more irritated the more she thinks about it. It was careless, ridiculous even, considering the amount of people the book had gone through before it was printed. How could she have missed it?

      'Rue. Rue.' Aisha snaps, and puts a hard palm to the table. 'You cannot start spiralling down this train of thought. You've always been like this, so insecure and doubtful it's almost unbearable. It's not your job to give people history and geography lessons.'

      'I shouldn't be misguiding them either.'

      'Misguiding them? We've always talked about how books made us feel less alone, took us on journeys, to worlds so far away because we didn't like the ones we were stuck in. What do you think Nancy is? Nancy's us. She's thousands of children and adults that feel and have felt the same way. You write books Rue, and while you have no responsibility to this world in your work, you've still managed to make a lot of people feel a lot less alone.'

      That isn't true. She just taught people to run away. 

      She wants to dig deeper into the hole under the table and crawl into the wood. She thinks about all those copies on her shelf, on the shelves in bookstores, and homes of families. She thinks of all the wood and ink. The words printed again and again and again. She'd told people that if they didn't fit in the world they lived in, they didn't need it. She told Nancy to pick up her stuff and leave, to spirit herself away into the wild and create a new world just for herself.

       'I wish I could take it back,' Rue says thinly.

      'Take what back?'

      'All of it. I was wrong.' 

      'Rue…why are you doubting yourself now after all this time? Is this anything to do with why you've been struggling to write?'

      She had never told Aisha that. She'd thought she'd strung her along enough to make her think she was writing, but very slowly and inconsistently. Perfectly typical. Then again, it's wishful thinking to imagine she could hide anything from Aisha. Too pointed and straightforward, brown eyes like seers peering through the skin, the flesh, and the bones. 

      'No,' she says, despite herself. 'I've just been rethinking things.'

      'I know we decided to meet because of your schedule, but since I'm here anyway can we discuss the new novel?'

      Rue almost snorted. New novel. There is no new novel. What there is, is a half-assed drafted plot she'd dug out of archives upon archives of ramblings, thoughts, and word-vomits. She still remembers how uncertain Aisha was with it when presenting it to Harrison. Rue hadn't been there but she'd imagined Aisha, despite her own doubts, shoulders high, holding up a quarter of a skeleton in front of several professionals and declaring it to be whole. This may seem incomplete, but soon it will be filled with wax, moulded to perfection, and then painted in such fine detail you'd think the eyes within its skull will roll forward any second and blink at you with life.

      In the end, all the meticulous editing, plotting, and details Rue had needed so desperately for her debut novel no longer applied. Now, it's just a matter of how long till it's done? 

      'No, no, it's fine. I'm still working out the characters right now that's why I'm struggling. I just need time.' 

      Aisha tenses up again, and closes her eyes. Rue almost wants to laugh.

      The silence stretches out and envelopes them in a bubble. Rue can no longer hear the grinding of the coffee machine, the paper rustling between the Anderson's, or the slow drip of water from a pipe somewhere outside. She can't hear Aisha turn the pages of her diary, but she sees the far away months, blank but for a few scribbles and question marks. 

      How uncertain everything is, Rue thinks and slowly curls a finger through the handle of her coffee cup.

      She'd thought being published was the end goal, the key to the rest of her life. How awfully wrong she was. First it was an agent, then it was finding a publisher and getting a deal, then it was hoping she'd sell enough to start making royalties, and then getting another deal. Never once in the incessant waves of worry, that seem to keep crashing into her every time she'd resurface from one, did she think she'd be overwhelmed with the worry of not being able to write.

      Yet here she is, dragging the one person who has ever believed in her down under. Into the dark pools of her anxiety and shortcomings, straight into the crashing waves, where the tide will take them out to sea, drifting them further and further into the endless blue.

The two of them leave behind their empty coffee cups, and a lone piece of buttered toast now dry and stiff. There's a perplexed look on Aisha's face as they say their half-hearted goodbyes. Rue allows her the time to wager with herself, but in the end she just nods another goodbye and turns down the cobble road.

      The ice has dulled the colour of the brick houses, and the air is a faint mix of mist and chimney smoke. Aisha's long dark coat and black hijab bleed together to form a shadow in the distance, and she stands stark in the grey back-drop. Her figure shrinks with every little bob she takes, until the grey clouds that have swallowed the sky, swallows her too.

      Rue gives the path over her shoulder a quick look, thinking briefly of Marseille until the trees in the distance take her attention.

      Rue would be lying if she said the forests didn't scare her. More often than not her mind had the tendency to seep into the darkness and mould images into the shadows. Fractures of light turning into claws or eyes, blinking once, twice, and then a smile would appear like a tear in the walls and fall as if to swallow her. On bad nights she'd just sit on her floor before those large glass doors staring beyond her porch, beyond the patchy land and out towards the forest. She stares and stares, counting the trees one by one. Most days she counts no more than twenty-five, sometimes she can see as little as twelve, and when the moon is particularly plump and bright, she loses count at forty.

      She can't tell if it's the darkness that scares her or what seems like a never ending landscape of trunks, standing amongst each other in what could be hundreds or thousands, going on for miles and miles, hiding all kind of secrets underneath their canopies and in-between their roots dug so deep into the ground.

      You're afraid of the unknown, her therapist would reiterate every session.

      And how exactly do you cure that? 

      Her name was Danielle, multiple piercings, slim face, freckles, and long, red hair. With all her multiple qualifications hanging up on the wall behind her, circling her like a halo. 

      You can't cure fear Rue, you need to unlearn it. You need to break it down logically and learn how baseless your fears are. 

      Logic. The logic of it all were that her fears were cemented into things that may happen, not things that are happening.

      Then how do you fix someone with a fear of heights, or spiders, or rollercoasters?

      Similarly through therapy, and sometimes through exposure. For you, it's about taking what you believe are risks and seeing more often than not that good outcomes can come out of the unknown. 

      And what if the outcomes are bad?

      You may realise they are not as bad as you believe them to be.

      Rue doesn't consider herself a violent person, but in that moment, she wanted nothing more than to chuck a book at the woman's face. Those big psychology books she'd use as a foot-stool when trying to reach the top shelves in the library. She wanted to ridicule her because she knew. She knew all of this. She knew her fears were baseless, a trick of the mind and toxic combination of anxiety and paranoia pumping through her brain like poison. Being so lost in her mind didn't mean she didn't see the real world. 

      Perhaps that was it. That she'd seen too much and didn't want to see anymore. Covering her eyes with a thin veil so she could only see the world before her through the stitches and embroidery. In the end, however, this veil had only come back round to choke her.

      Things weren't particularly good growing up, not so awfully bad either. She doesn't remember much of her childhood, but she remembers being separated from her parents at the age of six when they tried to take refuge in England. She was granted immediate access but her parents had been put under investigation, for a 'period of time'. Her brother, too young at the time to make the trip, had also stayed behind. This lasted two years.

      Rue went to live with her grandmother, and no memories of her childhood are as stark as those two years living with an old woman she didn't know and suddenly had to call teta affectionately. Memories lined in shadows made up of devils and prayers slicked with the rattle of beads. Her teta was a woman so wrapped in her faith. She wore a silver cross around her neck, a gift she received when she was young and eventually grew too tight for. Her wrinkles folded over the chain as if it were embedded into her skin, and at the end Christ laid home on the centre of her chest.

      She wasn't a particularly kind or cruel woman, but she was so full of fear. Whether it was a fear of God, or a fear of people, of which she had a warning for them all. That God will judge her, and God will judge Rue, and all those sins people have been collecting like china plates laid out in glass cabinets to be forgotten will come to question.

      It's on those nights where she stares out into the woods and contemplates that she knows her fear isn't of the unknown. She doesn't think of the creatures and possibilities in the pits of the oceans, or of the planets and galaxies in their millions far away in the dark vastness of the universe. While she has her moments where she looks up at the sky and feels small, it comforts her to know that she is just as insignificant as dust.

      Surely then, she believes, that we are so small, so close to nothing, that to be anything than what we are could not be a sin. To fear God and his judgement in this life, to fear being anything close to human despite being just that. Surely, it is all nonsense.

      This is what she tells herself on those nights watching the trees being simply what they are. A sense of jealousy overcomes her, and then exhaustion as she wonders just how wonderful it would be to just exist. To not overthink, to not complicate, or to not drown in a confusion of self-damnation. To spend life finding a reason to live, what a tiring existence.

      A life lived for the afterlife.

      A life lived contemplating its pointlessness.

      A life lived searching for purpose.

      A life lived because we are here, and we will go.

      What kind of life are you living my lovely, lovely Rue? the trees whisper to her at night.

      Rue never has an answer for them.