JULIAN: It was one of our beginnings. Somewhere. Somehow.
EVELYN: Look at us, beginning and ending all over the place.
[Pause]
EVELYN: I miss you, Julian.
JULIAN: I know. What about your beloved tree? How do you think that began?
EVELYN: I like to think it began accidentally. Just by chance. A stray seed on the wind that burrowed its way into the soil.
JULIAN: Or was planted by a king, long ago.
EVELYN: Or perhaps just an ordinary person.
JULIAN: Maybe a you in another world planted it, and sent it here.
EVELYN [laughing]: A tree travelling through time and space?
JULIAN: Yeah. Why not?
EVELYN: I can think of many logical reasons why not.
JULIAN: I thought we weren’t supposed to be using logic tonight.
EVELYN: That’s true.
[The clock ticks loudly. Birds begin to sing outside]
JULIAN: If they cut our tree down, it’ll still exist somewhere else, you know.
EVELYN [smiling]: I suppose that’s true.
[Pause]
JULIAN: Evelyn?
EVELYN: Yeah?
JULIAN: What about our ending?
EVELYN: I don’t like to think about it.
JULIAN: No. Me neither.
[Pause]
JULIAN: I didn’t want to leave, you know.
EVELYN: I know.
[Orange light trickles into the room. The sun is rising]
EVELYN: You’re here now, though, right?
JULIAN: Now?
EVELYN: Yeah, right now.
JULIAN: Sure. I’m here. Go to sleep.
Pebbles
The shortest war in history was between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar in 1896.
It lasted thirty-eight minutes.
We read a book about Northern Ireland at school. A novel about a boy from one side and a girl from the other. We had one of those teachers who spoke like Shakespeare. Everything she said was for dramatic effect. I remember giggling into my sleeve when she spat out rude words.
I thought I knew everything about the war. About religious fighting with bricks and fists and falling in love with girls on the other side. It was twenty years ago. I was young.
‘What the hell are they complaining about? It’s romantic,’ I said, as we walked home along the cliff tops. ‘War’s like this whole fucking romantic thing. Romeo and Juliet. Those petrol bombs, you know. Burning love.’
‘It’s like football.’ George swiped a tongue on a roll-up, nearly dropping it. ‘We’re all sport.’ And he pointed his finger to the side of his temple and mimicked pulling a trigger. ‘Bang, said the gun,’ he said.
‘But guns don’t talk,’ I said, squinting at the smoke.
‘Neither do the dead,’ he said. Then he grinned like he was mad.
We walked past some kids sitting in trees, making parachutes out of plastic bags. They tied them to 2B pencils and let them drop, slowly, to the ground.
During World War I, British tanks were categorised as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Male tanks had cannons. Female tanks had machine guns.
In the eighties, when I was young, the threat was petrol bombs. Northern Ireland was only a ferry ride away. And we heard about the IRA and raging politicians and other snippets of conversations on the news. And then there was talk of nuclear power, and how damaging was that, exactly? And what was the world coming to? And please could someone protect the children? We played a game called Fireball at school, where you’d throw a rubber ball, hard, across the playground and someone on the other team had to catch it. It hurt like hell. The person catching it had to pretend that it didn’t. They had to stand there and take it. As though it didn’t burn.
In the 1400s, during the Spanish Inquisition, a form of torture similar to water-boarding called toca was invented. Victims were forced to ingest water from a jar poured over their faces, until they felt as though they were drowning (because they were).
I liked to think I knew how it was over there, in Belfast. I lay awake one night, thinking about it. Somewhere, there was a girl, one I was deeply in love with, and she had bright-red hair. Her name was something wonderful, and she was the sister of the leader of a local gang. Throwing stones in the name of God. A shared God. A different God. A God from over the other side of town. She was marvellous. She used to kiss boys and girls for cigarettes. I knew that I could find her on the corner of a street, sharpening pebbles, putting them in her pocket. I knew that she would give me one of those pebbles, press it into the palm of my hand until the sharp edges cut me, as she kissed me behind the bike sheds and we forgot about the world, and she said it was all going to be OK – somehow – in the end. It’s because war’s romantic, I thought. And dangerous. It’s a red-haired girl, kissing another girl, me, under a streetlight, with no one caring because there’s a whole damn war on, and they care more about which side you’re on, instead of what gender you are and who the hell you’re kissing. That’s what I imagined, you see. That’s what I thought.
Did you know at least ninety-two nuclear weapons have been lost at sea?
You said: ‘Let’s go to Brighton Pride and see how it’s changed.’
I had nothing to compare it to; I’d never been. You had to work late the night before, so I looked it all up on the Internet – all the pictures, all the stories. When you got back, I spent the night in bed telling you about the first Brighton Pride, in 1992. I dreamed of all the tents, wondering how many people it took to put them up. Joke: how many lesbians does it take to build a tent? And then I woke myself up because I couldn’t think of an answer and suddenly I couldn’t breathe, stuck under the sheets. Like when they used to say you should bury your head in a plastic bag if a country declares nuclear war. Take deep breaths and let the world float away. ‘They’ll blow our atoms out our ears,’ my granddad used to tell me, cursing the modern world. ‘In the future,’ he said, ‘I bet the government’ll weed out plastic bags, too. And how the hell will we save ourselves then?’
We got a train from London Bridge and the platform was packed, the carriage stuffy, one from a smaller company, with chairs that smelled of tobacco and sweat. We just managed to fit on the corner of one seat, opposite a family. Suitcases scattered all around their feet. The mother of the children, one girl and one boy, looked around at the tight clothes, the placards and the feathers.
A group of twenty-somethings started singing ‘Summer Holiday’.
‘Mum, why are those men dressed like cowboys?’
‘It looks as though they’re going to a party,’ she replied, raising an eyebrow at those who looked on.
You collapsed with the giggles and sang along with the rest.
I closed my eyes but started picturing falling-down tents.
I could feel my pulse in my throat.
I took a deep breath.
I once saw an art installation called One Hundred and Eight. It’s by Nils Volker and consists of one hundred and eight plastic bags. These bags are lined along a wall and are inflated and deflated by a machine. They look like jellyfish lungs and sound like the wind.
It’s like the exhibition is alive. Like it’s whispering in your ear.