THE TREE-GIRL

Once upon a time there was a girl who had a disease called fear that stopped her from doing anything. One day she realised that the person she used to be had vanished into thin air together with her lost love and decided to change her name to square root of S for two reasons:

1. because ‘s’ was the initial of her former name.
2. because her old self had shrank to minimum proportions.

One morning, tired of wandering aimlessly around town, √S decided to become a tree. Yes, a tree. Why a tree? Because Trees don’t move but grow effortlessly, stretching their branchy arms from the ground to the sky. Trees are solid, consistent and full of life and like an immense city give refuge to millions of ants, birds, beetles, moths, caterpillars, worms, aphids.

When √S felt ready to change her appearance she dyed her hair green and invited a couple of sparrows to build a nest there. With a sharp knife she carved her body with lines and grooves and let lovers write their names on her back while promising to each other eternal love. When the cold seasons arrived √S covered herself with a coat made of dry leaves she had picked up during her walks around town. With the light touch of her delicate hands she stitched every single leaf on an old beige rain coat. When the coat was finished up to the last leaf, she went out and sat outside cafés and bars where she became known to people as the Tree-girl. There she made a few friends and showed them the names of the lovers written on her back.

Now that she had become the living and talking symbol of a tree she felt she represented them all, and not a day went by without her talking to the trees in need. One day it was the poplar whose brunches had been chopped off by an electric discharge from a neon sign, the next day, it was the pine tree that had been threatened with arson by a bunch of teenagers on a Saturday night rampage. √S caressed the bark, whispered inside the tree holes and cleaned the roots from the picnic leftovers.

Her new friends wanted to know for how long she had been dressed up as a tree but no one ever asked her the reason why. From the very beginning she had made clear to everybody that she wasn’t an eccentric-at-all-cost or an aspiring actress looking for publicity. But one evening a journalist took a snapshot of her seated outside a café called the ‘Tunnel of Love’. The photo was later published by a local paper.

“The tree-girl” - as the journalist wrote in his article - “was most certainly an environmentalist who, with her way of dressing, wanted to raise awareness on environmental issues among local people and even the whole world.” While an agony aunt from a glossy magazine swiftly replied that that couldn’t have possibly been the case as no environmentalist would sit a the Tunnel of Love café.

“It was evident” - she said - ”both to her, and anyone who read her very popular column, that the Tree-girl was a symbol of love as it could be easily demonstrated by the names of lovers carved on her back.” The agony aunt proposed to put the girl’s picture on the front page of her magazine in the next week’s issue and invited all lovers to gather together at Wastepaper Square, where the magazine head office was located, to inscribe their names on a gigantic papier-mâché tree that was going to be erected in the square for the special occasion.

The environmental journalist replied with a fiery article in which he condemned the initiative as exploitation and misinterpretation of such an invaluable message. He also added that instead of destroying trees to build a papier-mâché one, we should: “save them, not waste them!”

But although he had been the first to give a name to the strange girl who moved from one place to the next without leaving any trace, except for a handful of leaves here and there, his voice was lost with the wind never to be heard again.

‘Find me the girl, find me the girl shouted the agony aunt’ puffing and spitting like a dragon.

Little Lucy, her secretary, shivered like a blade of grass under a strong wind. She opened her mouth, moved her lips but the words didn’t come out, instead little letters rolled down onto the keyboards and hit the keys one at a time, turning red and round like rubies and making a noise like hails falling on a windscreen.

‘Take the car,’ said the most famous agony aunt among all agony aunties, throwing a big bunch of keys that reached Lucy’s forehead in slow motion and stopped in front of her for a fraction of a second, giving her enough time to catch it with her left hand.

‘Go to the Tunnel of Love and find her, bring her here, you have one hour, now go, go!’ shouted the agony aunt.

Meanwhile at the Tunnel of Love café √S was drinking her daily dose of chlorophyll, it tasted bitter but it kept her hair greener or at least so she thought. A group of people who had never seen her before were looking at that strange creature in total disbelief pretending she wasn’t there. She didn’t seem to mind. She had grown accustomed to her unwanted popularity which had become second nature to her.

Drops of hail were falling all around √S and whenever the little round pearly drops hit her turned into emerald green stones. In a very short time her chlorophyll drink was topped up with a frothy head of shiny green bubbles. √S fished one up with her spoon and put it into her mouth, it tasted of mint and aniseed. She took a spoonful and swallowed it. Immediately a strange sense of warmth invaded her from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, the sky turned purple and the next thing she knew she was floating above her table looking down on herself calmly. From there she saw the whole town with its parks, football grounds, stations, airports and every single tree waving at her.

‘Excuse me’ said a girl with a soft voice, touching her arm delicately with her fingers.

‘Are you the Tree-girl?’ And there she was again, sucked back into her body in an instant.

‘Who?’ replied √S

‘The tree-girl. It must be you. I’ve seen your picture on the paper. You see, we are, she is...my boss, we are looking for you.'

‘I don’t know what you mean’ replied √S

‘You don’t know?' said Lucy ‘You are on the papers, and everybody is looking for you!’

‘Who is looking for me?’ said √S

‘Us’ answered Lucy ‘you know...me and my boss, the environmentalist, the readers, the lovers, and the bloggers who have joined in the debate.’

√S looked puzzled, she was aware of the interest and curiosity she aroused in people, and now and then she had seen a few lights flashing from a camera but that was all. No one had ever bothered her, if anything the majority of people seemed more inclined to avoid her altogether than confront her or ask any questions. It was true that the habitué at the café who had befriended her, had been very nice and very appreciative of her unusual looks, but that was partly because having √S in their café had somehow made the place and themselves more important, almost unique. Setting them apart from the rest of the cafés-goers who had nothing else better to do than chat while sipping their drinks. But the Tunnel of Love crowd was different, they were special because the tree-girl had chosen their refuge.

√S turned around and said to Lucy who was now sitting on one of the comfy chairs.

‘What do they want from me?’

‘Well, first of all there is the open debate: are you or are you not an environmentalist? Are you or are you not the symbol of love? Then there is the agony aunt’s celebration with a giant papier-mâché’ tree and name carving of all lovers, broken hearted included. Do you know that people are queuing up? And that the line is half a mile long already?

√S looked at Lucy, she liked this girl and although she wasn’t sure what she wanted from her, a familiar thought crossed her mind: Einstein’s theory of relativity and time travel. If it is theoretically possible to travel back in time and forward into the future, she thought, then there must be a future already laid out in front of us. All we have to do is follow it. And if Einstein believed in destiny then there was no reason why she shouldn’t believed in it herself!

√S stood up, picked her bag from the floor and followed Lucy into her car.

The night had fallen over the city covering the buildings with its gloomy light like a ghostly sheet.

Lucy and the Tree-girl closed the doors and fastened their belts. It was raining. Lucy switched on the windscreen and drove off turning at the roundabouts. The wipers moved quickly—right and left, right and left—while the green rain stained the city.