The trees were at the far end of the complex, corralled in pens, some with horticultural fleece round the pots. Stocks were low. Autumn or spring was the time to plant, not midwinter. He scanned the labels. Compared the pictures on them to the spindly plants on offer. There was only one rowan tree. Red berries and white flowers, ideal small tree, attractive to wildlife, he read. Grows to a height of 10 metres. It would grow, its roots in the soil drawing nourishment from Jason. Macabre. Of course, death was macabre, that was the point, and all the rituals, like scattering ashes in rose gardens or planting bulbs by graves, were variations on the theme: life in death, the circle of creation, the wheel of life. But it should have been his father or his mother he was here choosing a tree for, not his eighteen-year-old son.
Jason. They’d picked the name because they liked the sound of it, though people teased them at the time that it was after the Neighbours soap star, Jason Donovan.
Following the first miscarriage, they had learnt to be circumspect in hope. Not to tempt fate. Jason was the fourth pregnancy. Only when Val reached twenty-six weeks did she suggest they get some baby name books. Andrew favoured short, unfussy names: Jack, Tom, Joel; Anna or Rose for a girl. Val wanted something more unusual: Lewis or Jeremy, Suzanne, Bethany. Occasionally she got carried away.
‘You can’t call a child Ferdinand,’ he’d objected, laughing. ‘He’d never live it down.’ He drew the line at Lorelei, too. ‘It needs to be something people can pronounce – and spell. Jason had been the only name they’d agreed on for a boy.
‘Can I help?’ The assistant, a chubby-cheeked girl with blue hair, set down her wheelbarrow.
‘The rowan.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It’s the only one you’ve got?’
‘Yes. Doesn’t look up to much now, they never do, just sticks really, but it’ll surprise you.’
‘They’re good for birds?’
‘Yes. Or there’s the silver birch, they’re popular, we’ve a few of them, or the aspen, you know, the ones that shiver.’ She fluttered her hands. ‘The leylandii are good too.’ She gestured to a stand of them behind him. ‘A lot of birds nest in them, but they are quick-growing.’
He didn’t like the shivering idea. And he was pretty sure the leylandii weren’t on the list from the woodland cemetery. He knew they were the ones that grew like weeds and caused more neighbour disputes than anything else. It seemed fitting now that the rowan was one on its own, an only one, just like Jason had been the only one.
‘I’ll take the rowan.’
‘And keep the receipt; any problems and we offer a full refund.’
A preposterous image of digging up the tree from its woodland site and hauling it here for his money back snuck into his head.
He manoeuvred the tree into the car with the top sticking out of the open passenger window.
He still had to call at the funeral home. He should have gone there first. Jason’s clothes were in the back, in a carrier bag. Jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, underwear, his shoes. The shoes they had to bring home from the hospital. Big as coal barges. A fragment of the song came into his head: Herring boxes, without topses, sandals were for Clementine… Thou art lost and gone for ever, dreadful sorry, Clementine. Singing it with Jason in cod-Yankee accents. Jason picking out the tune in between on a harmonica.
This wasn’t happening. It didn’t make sense. It was as if he was playing a role, grieving father, but he wasn’t really committed to it. It was all pretence. Any moment the curtain would fall or the camera stop rolling and the chimera would disappear. Everything would go back to how it should be.
He had tried to talk to Val about it, the unreality, but she’d reduced it to a formula: denial – it’s a part of the process. Before he had a chance to take it any further, to ask her if she too felt this bizarre disconnect, she was moving on to something else. Her energy, close to mania, exhausted him.
He sat until the light began to fade, his buttocks growing numb in the seat. The sky changed, the ink of night stealing across from the east. East, the Orient, from
