The Island of Missing Trees(3)
All day long the students had been carrying on about the storm, worried for their holiday plans and travel arrangements. Not Ada, though. She had neither family gatherings nor exotic destinations lined up. Her father did not intend to go anywhere. He had work to do. He always had work to do. Her father was an incurable workaholic – anyone who knew him would testify to that – but ever since her mother had died, he had retreated into his research like a burrowing animal hiding in its tunnel for safety and warmth.
Somewhere in the course of her young life, Ada had understood that he was very different from other fathers, but she still found it hard to take kindly to his obsession with plants. Everyone else’s fathers worked in offices, shops or government departments, wore matching suits, white shirts and polished black shoes, whereas hers was usually clad in a waterproof jacket, a pair of olive or brown moleskin trousers, rugged boots. Instead of a briefcase he had a shoulder bag that carried miscellaneous items like his hand lens, dissecting kit, plant press, compass and notebooks. Other fathers endlessly prattled on about business and retirement plans but hers was more interested in the toxic effects of pesticides on seed germination or ecological damage from logging. He spoke about the impact of deforestation with a passion his counterparts reserved for fluctuations in their personal stock portfolios; not only spoke but wrote about it too. An evolutionary ecologist and botanist, he had published twelve books. One of them was called The Mysterious Kingdom: How Fungi Shaped Our Past, Changes Our Future. Another one of his monographs was about hornworts, liverworts and mosses. The cover depicted a stone bridge over a creek bubbling around rocks coated in velvety green. Right above the dreamlike image was the gilded title: A Field Guide to Common Bryophytes of Europe. Underneath, his name was printed in capital letters: KOSTAS KAZANTZAKIS.
Ada had no idea what kind of people would read the sort of books her father wrote, but she hadn’t dared mention them to anyone at school. She had no intention of giving her classmates yet another reason to conclude that she – and her family – were weird.
No matter the time of day, her father seemed to prefer the company of trees to the company of humans. He had always been this way, but when her mother was alive, she could temper his eccentricities, possibly because she, too, had her own peculiar ways. Since her death, Ada had felt her father drifting away from her, or perhaps it was she who had been drifting away from him – it was hard to tell who was evading whom in a house engulfed in a miasma of grief. So they would be at home, the two of them, not only for the duration of the storm but the entire Christmas season. Ada hoped her father had remembered to go shopping.
Her eyes slid down to her notebook. On the open page, at the bottom, she had sketched a butterfly. Slowly, she traced the wings, so brittle, easily breakable.
‘Hey, you got any gum?’
Snapping out of her reverie, Ada turned aside. She liked sitting at the back of the classroom but that meant being paired off with Emma-Rose, who had the annoying habit of cracking her knuckles, chewing one piece of gum after another although it was not allowed at school, and a tendency to go on about matters that were of no interest to anyone else.
‘No, sorry.’ Ada shook her head and glanced nervously at the teacher.
‘History is a most fascinating subject,’ Mrs Walcott was now saying, her brogues planted firmly behind her desk, as though she needed a barricade from behind which to teach her students, all twenty-nine of them. ‘Without understanding our past, how can we hope to shape our future?’
‘Oh, I can’t stand her,’ Emma-Rose muttered under her breath.
Ada did not comment. She wasn’t sure whether Emma-Rose had meant her or the teacher. If the former, she had nothing to say in her own defence. If the latter, she wasn’t going to join in the vilification. She liked Mrs Walcott, who, though well meaning, clearly had difficulty keeping discipline in the classroom. Ada had heard that the woman had lost her husband a few years back. She had pictured in her mind, more than a few times, what her teacher’s daily life must be like: how she dragged her round body out of bed in the mornings, rushed to take a shower before the hot water ran out, rummaged in the wardrobe for a suitable dress hardly different from yesterday’s suitable dress, whipped up breakfast for her twins before dropping them off at the nursery, her face flushed, her tone apologetic. She had also imagined her teacher touching herself at night, her hands drawing circles under her cotton nightie, and at times inviting in men who would leave wet footprints on the carpet and a sourness in her soul.
Ada had no idea whether her thoughts corresponded with reality, but she suspected so. It was her talent, perhaps her only one. She could detect other people’s sadnesses the way one animal could smell another of its kind a mile away.
‘All right, class, one final note before you go!’ Mrs Walcott said with a clap of her hands. ‘We’ll be studying migration and generational change next term. It’s a nice fun project before we knuckle down and get on with GCSE revision. In preparation, I want you to interview an elderly relative during the holidays. Ideally, your grandparents, but it could just as well be another family member. Ask them questions about what it was like when they were young and come up with a four-to-five-page essay.’
A chorus of unhappy sighs rippled across the room.
‘Make sure your writing is supported by historical facts,’ Mrs Walcott said, ignoring the reaction. ‘I want to see solid research backed up by evidence, not speculation.’