The Strangler Tree

Lurching down the dust road labyrinth of Guatemala, past the burnt meadows and frightening precipices, Padraig finally understood her idea that travel could cure all pain. He stepped over the basket of piglets at his feet, raw in their new wrinkled skin. He burrowed through the people-filled bus and climbed the ladder at the rear. He dropped his plan to give it a week before ending the trip. He was going to play this country by ear.

            On the roof, every sharp turn had him holding his breath, then catching it. He grinned back when the other men up there, all locals, laughed. If he was not holding the bar when they reeled around a corner or plunged through a deep pothole, that could be it. Dead man tumbling. He let go a couple of times, just for the jolt. Once it came close and this time, the men did not laugh. They said things in this language he did not understand. They gesticulated with their free hands.

            All day, the roadside was a hemline of litter to the sky and the mountains and the valleys. By the time he joined a young couple standing at the edge of a darkening village, there was dust in his eyelashes and on his teeth.

            ‘You think our lift will show?’ asked the male, blonde half.

            ‘Doesn’t look good,’ said Padraig. He imagined knocking on the low doors of the houses made from wood and corrugated iron. Sleeping on the ground beneath one of those animal shelters with no walls. Listening to the rustle of unseen insects.

            But the pickup came. On the snarling descent to the lake, the wind sang a mean song through his shirt but he did not follow suit when the couple dug into their backpacks, wrapped themselves in blankets.

            ‘Aldous Huxley called it the most beautiful lake in the world,’ shouted the male. Overhead the stars burned and glimpses of the lake appeared, its borders announced by the dying bonfires of villages.

In the empty dining room of the hostel, they dined on yam and fried fish and terrible beer. The couple told Padraig about their trip around the world. Their names were Henk and Darya, and they were from the Netherlands.

‘How about another beer?’ said Padraig, when they had finished eating.

            ‘You’re not tired?’ said Henk, whose lips stayed fat when he grinned. ‘I guess it’s true what they say about the Irish.’

‘Our boat’s at five, isn’t it?’ said Padraig. ‘'‘Hardly seems any point in going to bed.’

‘Sorry Padraig,’ said Henk.

‘I can’t keep my eyes open,’ said Darya.

            In his bedroom, a spider the size of a small mouse scurried from underneath the bed when Padraig turned on the lamp. It paused in the centre of the room and he threw a book at it, but the spider just flashed back across the floor, disappearing under the bed again. Padraig pulled the bed into the centre of the room. This time, he did not see the spider run anywhere.

In bed, he tucked in the sheet all around him, so that even his head was covered. The air was warm and never felt like enough. An urge kept rising in him to clap his hands together, to frighten the spider away. He imagined Henk coming in to investigate, finding him there like a corpse, applauding alone. A bark of laughter escaped him. It echoed in the high ceilinged room.

In the silence that followed, Emily came to him, for the first time in weeks. He could see the slight oiliness of her skin, the way she used to tilt her head when she looked at him, her wide gaze.

He closed his eyes. He tried not to think.

***

They had met at a birthday dinner for a mutual friend.

            ‘This is Emily,’ announced the friend on Padraig’s arrival, and he indicated the empty seat beside her for Padraig to sit in. ‘An artist from America, only came to Florence two months ago. A new ex-pat for you. I get tired of talking to Padraig,’ he continued, looking at Emily. ‘Three years in Italy and he refuses to learn Italian. All the time, I translate for him. You two can talk together, yes?’

            They were seated at the end of a long table. Padraig took in her fine brown hair pulled loosely from a small, beautiful face. He wanted to run his finger down that ruler sharp nose.

Her eyes jerked away.

            ‘This must be the most obvious set up I’ve ever found myself on,’ she said, looking at her menu.

            ‘You’ll get used to that carry on here.’

            ‘I was in Ireland once.’ She glanced at him. ‘I stayed on Achill island. I didn’t want to leave.’

‘You picked a good spot,’ he said, ‘though beauty doesn’t always run deep. Religion and greed aren’t exactly ideal features in a country’s makeup, if you’re asking me.’

            ‘It’s the most pagan place I’ve ever been.’

            ‘Really?’

            ‘I met the parish priest. An atheist if ever I saw one.’ She looked at him and laughed. He began to laugh himself.

            ‘You may be onto something there.’

            They were both in their late forties. Both childless, they also learned, with mutual, undisguised pleasure.

            ‘At least I had a stab at marriage,’ she said. ‘At least I had a go.’

A few weeks later, walking back to his apartment with a bag of dinner ingredients, he broke off a large plum tomato from its stem and bit into it, as though it was an apple. She laughed, as he knew she would. She laughed like a child. Then she wrapped an arm around his neck and kissed him.

‘Stop that,’ she said, as he turned it into a French kiss and attempted to pass a chunk of un-chewed tomato into her mouth. She pulled herself away.

‘I love you,’ she said then. Her hand went to her mouth. ‘I didn’t know I was going to say that.’

‘I love you too,’ he said.

***

Padraig ended up spending two weeks in the hostel. In the evenings, he drank and smoked pot with whoever was around. During the day, he went on solitary hikes to neighbouring villages, as far as twelve miles on one occasion. When dogs came at him, their throaty snarls rippling through ketchup-red gums, he shook his stick at them. Sometimes he just kept walking. Once, a man clanged a machete on the side of the truck he had caught a ride home in, all the while shouting at the driver. Probably angry because he hadn’t got the fare. Long, thin, blunt weapons. All the men had one. He thought of buying one for himself.

By the time Henk read out the description from his guidebook of Semuc Champey, natural wonder of the jungle, there was nowhere left to walk. It was Padraig who figured out the nearest village and the bus route to it and how long the journey would take. Henk and Darya decided to go to, along with a couple of newly arrived Israeli guys, and a girl called Céline. Beautiful, French Céline whose boyfriend had dumped her, two weeks into a trip they’d been planning for over a year.

‘Is like this Padraig,’ she said, speaking of her own broken heart. She purred his name. Pawrg. He had no intention of correcting her. ‘With life, you have to keep moving. It doesn’t care what you do, but it’s better for you this way.’

They reached the village on the edge of the jungle just before the bottom of an angry red sun touched the horizon. Beds were provided in the first house they approached, and the following morning, they caught a lift with a Guatemalan tour group.

It was an old US school bus; halfway to their destination, on the steepest part of the road, it gave up. They were all to get off, they were told. Walk until the road grew flatter.

Before Padraig could catch up with the others, Henk positioned himself beside him. He began to talk about the landscape.

‘Look at that tree,’ he said, many words later.

The only thing remarkable about this tree, as far as Padraig could tell, was the pale grey colour of the trunk. But Henk had stopped walking.

‘Notice anything unusual?’

‘I don’t. A bit hard looking maybe. Funny colour.’

Ahead, Céline was walking beside a Guatemalan woman, who was pulling a leaf from a tree. She gave it to Celine who tasted it, laughed, said something.

‘It’s not the real tree.’ Henk spoke as though he had made it himself.

‘Not following.’

‘What you see is not the real tree. It’s a parasite. They call it a strangler tree.’

Padraig resumed walking. ‘Sounds a bit morbid.’

‘A monkey or squirrel brings up the seed onto the old tree,’ said Henk. ‘Then a root grows, reaches the ground and the new tree begins. When the old one dies, the inside is like a cave. They’re everywhere.’

It was true. Once he had seen that one, he started seeing them everywhere. He wondered he had not noticed them before. They were the reason he spotted the mansion, nestled, half hidden, against the sulking green.

‘What’s a house doing out here?’ he said, and he called the others. Together they walked down to it, its walls a now pale salmon, the shutters a pastel green. They peered through the letter box, and through cracks in the boarded up windows. They calculated at least ten rooms.

            ‘That would make a pretty cool hostel,’ said someone.

‘Maybe I’ll turn it into one.’ He threw it out in the guise of a joke but Céline turned and stared at him.

            ‘You fucking should Pawrg. That is exactly what you should do.’

For the rest of the walk and the three hours that followed on the recovered bus, it was all he thought about. They knew the destination was popular with Guatemalan tour groups. Why not make it popular with Western ones? He could organise private tours. He could open a bar out the back where people could watch the sunset while drinking Mojitos. Renovating the place would be a huge challenge, just what he needed. He had heard some scary stories about local farmers driving away such Western ventures, but these were probably exaggerations. Anyway, there were ways of working with people. One thing he’d learned was that everyone wanted something. Maybe Céline was right, he thought, as the exhausted bus pulled to a halt. Maybe he fucking should do it.

***

The day he had moved into Emily’s apartment, it rained. All week, the sun shone and only wimpy little white clouds crossed the sky. But on this day, a sky-wide grey hurled itself onto the city of Florence. He rang the doorbell with ornamental waterfalls running from his hair onto his face, from his chin onto the bunch of unopened daffodils lying on top of the box he carried.

            Her face looked stretched, as though someone was standing behind her and pulling her hair. Leaving the door open, she walked down the hall and up the spiral staircase that led to her studio.

            He placed the box on a sideboard in the hall. Followed her up there, towards the sounds of her flip flops slapping the wooden floor, things being lifted and put down again.

            ‘I cannot bear this weather.’

            ‘You don’t get rain in Vermont, I suppose?’

No answer. He stayed on the stairs. He had seen the size of the wooden beams she used to support her canvas. When silence finally came, he opened the door to the studio. Found her sitting on the ground with her back against the wall, her gaze directed at the skylight of raining sky.

            She didn’t turn to him when he sat down beside her.

‘Sorry,’ she said, after a good half hour had passed. Her voice could barely scrape the word out.

‘If you don’t want to do this,’ his voice began. He thought of the unopened daffodils downstairs.

When she turned to him, she was wearing that wry smile of hers. It clashed with her smashed looking eyes.

‘Aren’t you frightened?’ she said.

‘No.’

It was an honest answer. Apparently, only five months had passed since they met. That was according to other people, to the calendar in his diary. But he was having trouble remembering a time when he did not know her.

The side of her head met his shoulder. She took his hand. He felt her lips on his palm.

Less than three years later, she was the one to move, to a hospice you could walk to from the apartment.

            ‘You will get beyond this,’ she said, in one of her final moments of lucidity.

            ‘It’s not about me getting beyond this.’

            ‘Don’t do that.’

            More than the words, her tone of voice silenced him.

***

A chain of turquoise pools shimmered across the tangled green of bush and trees. At the top of the waterfall that began the whole thing, Padraig watched the others splashing in the first pool, oblivious to his new status of watcher. A howler monkey roaring from somewhere behind him, he waved and waved until Céline looked up and waved back.

The rocky ledge was warm from the sun; carefully he eased himself into a sitting position, his legs swinging like a child on an adult’s chair. The noise of the water leant an air of urgency to the moment and wouldn’t let his gaze rest anywhere else. It threw itself white and spraying onto the rocks below.

It wasn’t a sharp drop. At least, not as sharp as he first concluded. Another ledge lay below him, and after it, two other rocks jutted out. If a person was very careful, they could climb down all the way to the bottom. It was practically as straightforward as the way he climbed up, on the other side.

If he pulled this off, it would be a sign. He would go ahead with the hostel. Stomach-down on the grass, he swivelled himself around, until his feet hung in the air. Then, hands clutching at the weedy grass, he began to lower himself. His left hand was beginning to slip by the time his feet met rock. He heard his voice cry out.

‘Thank fuck,’ it said, barely audible against the crashing water.

Rapid heartbeats drummed inside him. A couple of minutes passed before he could look down. Now he was there, he realised the ledge was thinner than he initially believed. But once he was lying on it, stomach-down again, he should be able to slide onto the first rock below. Even if he fell from there, chances were he would not do much damage.

The fall happened without his realising it was going to. He hadn’t even begun to swing himself around when he was sliding, and then, for the briefest moment, airborne. When he opened his eyes, Henk was standing over him. Pain struck from his left elbow and he could taste blood.

‘Sorry,’ he said, in a hoarse voice. As he spoke, he felt something hard and pointed underneath his tongue. He fished out a fragment of tooth. Running his tongue over his teeth he discovered a jagged edge on one of the front ones.

‘What were you thinking?’ said Henk, taking Padraig’s left hand in his own and stretching out his arm until a yelp escaped him.

‘Broken,’ said Henk.

‘You are an extremely lucky man,’ said Darya, who looked bored by the whole thing.

‘Were you trying to fucking kill yourself?’ said Céline.

Henk made a sling and Céline gave him painkillers. He would get a lift back to the village from the first tour group that came. It was holiday season in Guatemala; there would probably be one the following day. No one asked what he would do after that. He went to his tent before dinner. Later, Céline brought him a glass of wine.

‘Here you are, show-off,’ was all she said before ducking out again.

The next morning, pain woke him, his elbow aching and lower lip throbbing fatly. He sat up. He went outside. Walked past the dead fire, the three other tents on the other side, all zipped shut. He walked into the cluster of trees at the water’s edge.

Ahead, a large freckle of sunlight stained the ground. He would walk to it and back, he decided. On his way, he could gather firewood to make coffee.

Before he reached the sunlight, he came across the strangler tree. It was bigger than the other trees there and a wider space surrounded it than any of them. Padraig walked right up to it. Stroked the pale, grey bark that seemed hard as metal. Peering inside a small gap he found at the back, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, but a sour smell rose up to greet him and his head pulled back. It was impossible to tell how much of what was in there was the dead, original tree and how much was cavity. He put his eye to the gap again but the sound of eager scuffling had him jerking back a second time. A rat perhaps, or a large insect. Maybe even a snake. It stopped as quickly as it started.

At the very end, she didn’t know who he was. She did not know who anyone was. The cancer had reached her brain and that, along with the morphine, made her look out at them all with those furious, uncomprehending eyes. Life goes on, people said to him. You have to get on with it. It’s what she would have wanted. You can’t give up.

The scuffling started again. This time it sounded closer to the gap, as though something inside was crawling its way towards it. He took a step backwards and turned around. Started to make his way back to where the others were.

***

 Published in Issue 110, Confrontation Magazine