The Cherry Tree

(A story of marital infidelity, corporate boredom, and the power of nature over common sense)

High up on Burbage moor there is a Cherry Tree. Quite how there came to be a Cherry Tree on Burbage moor is knowledge that has long been lost to any living being, as to why there is a Cherry Tree on Burbage moor, well, that is entirely irrelevant; at least it is to this story. And what better way to begin a story than with a lie.
If you were to lodge in the boughs of that Cherry Tree and turn to the north-east, facing out across the valley, you would see before you, spread like a messy spillage of metropolitan spatter, the fair city of Sheffield and its’ green spangled suburbs. If you were to sit at the top of the tallest of the city’s buildings and look out towards the Cherry Tree, you would be able to share almost the exact same view that had been both keeping and sending Max White sane and insane respectively over the last year. Max was not in the highest building in the city, but it was pretty high just the same; he was at his place of work on the tenth floor. That put him roughly eighty five feet above street level, nearly four hundred feet below Cherry Tree level. Make of that what you will.
Max was not happy at work. He was good at his job but the days when that meant anything were as long gone and forgotten as the knowledge surrounding the planting of the Cherry Tree. Max was an engineer, a civil engineer. It was his job to plan and maintain the stuff that exists below the roads and footpaths, the flotsam and jetsam to which none of us give a second thought: pipes and wires and steel and concrete and plastic and copper and brass and general, everyday, hi-tech debris, and all these things found their way down there by someone digging big holes or mile-long trenches with noisy, smelly machinery. Important as his job was, the public’s perception of what Max did was to make them late for work while at the same time, defacing and scarring the streets of their sacred city. For all his civil engineering efforts, the public’s opinion of, and subsequent reaction to, his work, was generally much less than civil, nearer antagonistic and bordering on considered violence.
But the public’s lack of understanding regarding the importance of his work was not the source of his depression. Neither was the fact that he had been waiting for over a decade for promotion that was obviously never going to come. No, what was upsetting Max was the realisation that the fifteen years he’d been working for the company stood for fifteen years of wasted time. Fifteen years staring into manholes and muddy pits; fifteen years of scribbling on ancient plans and arguing with other engineers; fifteen years of gazing at the same clock, willing the hands to move ever more quickly from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon. Wishing away his life.
And that was a sin. His Nan had told him so.
Max was not old, not by most standards. He was only in his mid thirties, but that was old enough to appreciate that time was a precious commodity. Not as precious as his Nan must have thought, now ten years in her grave, but precious all the same. His youthful days of seeing death as something so remote, something so far into the future that he could not even begin to consider it, were now no more than embarrassing memories. Although Max could still count himself young, both physically and socially, he could also feel the beginnings of an uneasy dread of mortality.
And of course, that would be just fine and dandy if it wasn’t for the fact that he believed the years from twenty to thirty five had been entirely wasted; years that had passed almost without notice. It was only when he wandered into the toilets to relieve both his bladder and nerve numbing boredom, glancing into the mirror, wondering who the old bastard was that was looking back at him, that he would have the passage of time rudely forced upon his consciousness.
Who knows where the time goes?
And then there was the company. Ha! The way it was starting to treat everyone: its employees and its customers, seriously pissed him off; and the way all the bosses were now yes men who couldn’t look anyone in the face. What had once been an exciting, stimulating place to work, had now become thoroughly depressing. A world of memos and e-mails and new directions and strategies; a world of visions and corporate policies and customer care global statements, instead of a place where things got done. Max couldn’t remember the last time anything actually got done.
But of course, we’re forgetting the Cherry Tree. Max’s Cherry Tree. He spotted it one wet, Wednesday afternoon, while he sat at his desk and his boss berated him for either doing something he shouldn’t have or for not doing something that he should. As the words droned on, he happened to glance out of the window, allowing his eyes to skip across the roofs of the city and out into the countryside. He let them continue on their way, through the nearby fields and farmlands, on and upwards, out to the heather-covered moors in the distance. And while his eyes caressed the wavering horizon he suddenly stopped.
“What’s that?” he said.
His boss, thinking that this was some sneaky method of wriggling out of his responsibilities, redoubled his attack. “What do you mean, what’s that? Don’t think that ignorance is any excuse in my book.”
“I’ve never seen it before,” Max said, standing and walking across the office to the window on the south west side. It was clearly a tree, standing alone, on the vast expanse of moor-land that was visible from his eighty five feet vantage point. As he looked, the tree seemed to grow both in stature and importance. Something so far away and so simply itself. There was something about that tree that made Max feel better. He didn’t question the effect, he just took advantage of it. Somehow, it had transported him away from the irritating monotony of his bosses gripe to a place where the trivial no longer held sway. That tiny tree was bigger than anything that had happened within the confines of his office in the last fifteen years and Max could only marvel at its simplistic beauty.
“I said,” his boss ranted on, “do you expect…”
“Sorry,” Max interrupted from across the room. “I must have made a stupid error. Not concentrating. Totally my fault.” He walked briskly back to his desk. “You can be assured, I’ll take it on board, learn by the mistake, and then ensure that it never happens again. I’ll make a note in my diary and we can all discuss it at the next team tactic talk. We can flag it up, make an issue of it. Hopefully, we’ll all benefit in the long run. From bad comes good – and all that. Cheers!” Then he sat down and ignored his bosses stunned expression. After five minutes or so of miming work, he looked out again at the tree and quietly thanked it.
That was how it began. Almost a non-incident; harmless even. Who could have known what that tree would ultimately be responsible for: two broken marriages, a kidnapping, an attempted murder, two suicides, one new life, a tragedy and a song.

* * * * *
A massive, bulging, lime-green folder crashed down onto Max’s desk, almost knocking over a mug of cold, scummy tea.
“How’s things, Max? Going for one at lunchtime?”
Max pulled his head out of his hands and looked wearily across the desk at Carl Freeman. Carl had joined the company at the same time as Max and their careers had followed exactly the same path: promising to start with (to keep their interest) and then stagnating at a suspiciously similar pace.
“Jesus, Max, you look like shit.”
“I’m suffocating here, Carl. I need to get out. I need to do something. The only future I see is me getting older and turning into one of those.” He pointed down the office towards the table where the Bitter Triplets worked: three older guys, a year or two from retirement, whose main function in life seemed to be to criticise everything that anyone other than they themselves did, and to be-shit anything else that didn’t hold court in their tiny, shallow, narrow world. “Fotty years, man and boy,” Max said, in a thick, cartoon Yorkshire accent, mimicking the way the other men would speak. “I mean, Carl, all them years sitting at the same desk, doing the same stuff; what are they gonna do when they eventually go?”
“Die, with a bit of luck,” Carl said, idly flipping the pages of a fat computer magazine. He glanced up at his depressed friend when it was obvious he was being stared at. “What?” he said.
“You’re evil, Carl. You know that?”
“The truth hurts, Maxy boy. And the truth is what it is. They have no interest outside of what they do here. Even if they don’t die straight away, they might as well. Anyway, bugger them; what’re we going to do with you? Fancy fabricating an urgent survey and spending the whole afternoon in The Queens? We can discuss your melancholy at length and then drink it into oblivion. What do you say?”
“Oh, I don’t…”
“And don’t look at that bloody tree. It was funny at first but now it’s getting scary.”
The tree had, by then, become something of a problem for Max. Initially, it had a lifting effect: he found that it was possible to surf across any amount of office bollocks by keeping it in his line of sight. Another uncalled-for rebuff from his boss, one glance at the tree and the smile would be back on his face; a pointless, petty memo from above, the same, one glance and all was well. Only like any habit, his dependence on it increased. He could no longer even begin to work without gazing at it first thing in a morning. If he was asked to leave the building for any length of time, he would feel it necessary to wander over to that same, south west window and soak up the goodness that sprang from those distant boughs. And on mornings when the weather was so bad it was impossible to see across the hills – well, on the last occasion, he’d gone home sick. Only Carl had known the real reason. The magic Cherry Tree had gone from saviour, to crutch, to monkey on his back in less than three months.
“Maybe it’s not so good an idea,” Carl said. “If I go home pissed again, Margaret will skin me.”
Max smiled thinly. Played with his pencil. He knew that Carl mentioning his own wife was a prelude to the inevitable line of questioning.
“So,” asked Carl, predictably, “how’s things with you and Harriet?” He closed the magazine that he wasn’t reading and sat looking across the table at his friend with as near to a vacant expression as he could muster. In truth, he looked like a first time, expectant father.
Max knew that his friend meant well, but that didn’t stop the familiar lurching in his stomach at the mention of his personal problems. “I don’t know, to be honest,” he said. “I’m still hanging in there. Doing the decent thing for the kids.” He looked around, checking that they weren’t within ear shot of any office fools. He sighed. Started bending the pencil. “She says that she isn’t seeing him anymore. That it’s all over. And I’ve sort of come to terms with that. But… I don’t know, maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Being over-sensitive. I mean, it’s not as though it’s unusual particularly, is it?”
Carl continued to stare, keeping his face as neutral and still as he could.
“I know,” Max went on, “there’s couples like you and Margaret who would never be unfaithful to each other, but I think you’re in the minority, don’t you?” Max looked pleadingly at his friend, knowing the lie was puny.
It was more than Carl could continue to ignore. “Would you do it, Max?”
“Well, you don’t know, do you. Unless you find yourself in that position. I mean, opportunity and a particular situation. Who knows what could happen?”
“Max,” said Carl, holding his friend in a steady gaze. “We’re not talking about getting pissed at the office party and finding your trousers round your ankles. We’re not talking about an unfortunate slip or error of judgement where one minute you’re a faithful spouse and then, half an hour later, you’re an adulterer, wondering how the hell it happened and regretting it deeply. We’re talking about scheming and conniving and lying and having several different men of dubious social standing visit the house for rampant sex romps on a regular basis over Christ knows how many years while you are sending yourself crazy trying to eke out a living, working every hour God sends, in this shit hole.”
“Well,” Max said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” He then cracked a smile and laughed. “I know, Carl, you don’t understand. I don’t expect you to. And I know that you’d have been gone months back…”
“Years, Max. Years. I’d have been gone after the first time. When was that? Three months before you were married? Come on, man, get real.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. But it isn’t that simple. My life seems more complicated than anyone else’s somehow. George and Sarah are only six and seven, and then there’s Stewart with Asperger’s. I can’t just abandon them all.”
“No-one’s asking you to do that, Max. For God’s sake. You wouldn’t be leaving your kids, just that bi…” Carl stopped himself. “I’m sorry, Max, out of line.”
“It’s okay. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. She is a bitch. But look, I’ve come to accept that my marriage is now on a temporary basis. The kids won’t be little forever. In ten years time they’ll be old enough to…”
“Ten years! Jesus, Max, you’ll be six foot under by then. You can’t go on like this for ten years. Look at you now. And anyway, Harriet may be a bitch but she’s a good looking one: natural blond, great figure. I mean, what are the chances of no-one else trying it on with her. I mean, there was that time we were all pissed and, well, I’ve already apologised enough for that. Shouldn’t bring it up again, I know. But it’s there, and, if someone does have a go, what are her chances of resisting? You’re setting yourself up for a life of misery. Be realistic.”
Max seemed to be thinking over his friend’s words. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then, without warning, stood quickly. “It’s five to twelve, Carl. Just time for a piss and a pint. Come on.”
Carl stood up, pushed the computer magazine back into the drawer. “I’m having pie and chips with two pints. No, three. You’ve thoroughly depressed me, Max, and now my diet’s down the pan.”
“What diet?” said Max, stacking his papers and pushing his chair under the desk.
“My New Year’s resolution: to get fit.”
“Carl, it’s May.”
Max followed him towards the doors at the end of the office. As Carl pushed through them and turned right towards the lifts, Max shouted that he’d catch him up, that he was just nipping to the toilet. Instead he slowed and turned to look out across the moors. There it was, silhouetted against a perfect, deep blue sky. He would have to drive up there some time. Drive up there, find the tree, and sit under it. Maybe even crack a bottle. He thought perhaps that would take some of the intensity out of the problem. After all, it was only an old tree. Before he turned back towards the doors he looked down the full length of the office to see if the Bitter Triplets were still there. But instead, he caught sight of Elizabeth, the new girl from Wales, with jet black hair and eyes that frightened even the toughest of the engineers. She hadn’t been working in the office long but, whenever Max had had call to deal with her, she’d been like a breath of fresh air. Her beauty was not up for question, but there was something else about her too: a calmness, an authority, an elegance that he had no way of describing. And yet, for all her natural beauty, she did not attract unwelcome attention in the way that other good looking girls did. It was almost as though she had some protective field around her that repelled slime-balls and pillocks. And when she’d spoken to Max, he believed, just for a moment, that her words held the power of healing.
He’d always been a hopeless romantic, but he didn’t care. It held its own benefits. Just that one glance from the far end of the office had lifted him sufficiently to feel able to cope with the inevitable grilling he was about to get from Carl in the pub; but, on those occasions when she looked directly at him, or touched his arm the way she did when she spoke to someone, he would feel on top of the world.
But he had no designs on Elizabeth. She was, to Max, simply an example of how good the world could be. It was enough to know that. He risked looking back at her, not wanting to appear like some of the other, less subtle members of the male staff. When he did, he was rewarded with a smile and a wave. He felt that strange lurching inside his stomach again.
What a life: wayward wife, addicted to a Cherry Tree, and now there was Elizabeth and whatever that was all about. He wouldn’t even dare mention her to Carl.

* * * * *
The Queens was, predictably, busy. In a city where Max’s boredom was replicated a hundred times in every building, the demand for lunch-time alcohol was high.
“Where’ve you been, you git? I didn’t wait. I got the beer in and got us a seat quick. If you’re not sitting down by five past then you’re standing all dinner time. Can’t eat bloody pie and chips standing up – not with a pint in my hand too.”
Max tried a weak smile. “I, er… I was longer in the toilet than I expected.”
“Don’t!” Carl yelled, glugging beer. “I’m gonna eat in a minute. Do you want anything?”
“No, maybe a salad sandwich from the shop on the way back.”
“Pansy,” said Carl. “Oh, shit! Keep your head down.”
Max instinctively turned towards the bar to see what had made Carl react. Then he wished he hadn’t.
“You’ve let him see you, haven’t you? You dick,” said Carl with his chin on his chest.
“Max! Carl! Hi! Didn’t you see me come in? Room for a little one to squeeze in? A little one – squeeze in?” An overweight, dumpy man in his late forties with balding head, stupid grin and a glass of white wine was waddling towards them. He wore a light grey suit, a blue shirt and a Simpson’s tie. On his feet he wore, as ever, winkle pickers. No-one had ever asked him why. “Beer,” he said, grinning, “Whoah!” waving his tie at them. “Whoah!”
“Hello, Harvey,” said Carl, “do sit down.”
“Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind if I do.” He plopped down on the bench seat beside Carl. “So,” he started. “What do we know then…? Hang on! What have we here?” He was up on his feet again and pushing through the thickening crowd towards the bar. In seconds he was back. “Look what we’ve found here,” he said. “There’s girls. There’s girls.” He pulled out two stools from under a nearby table and placed them carefully in front of where the three of them were sitting.
To Max’s dismay, he saw that Harvey had dragged Elizabeth and her friend, Jilly, over. Elizabeth was wearing faded denim jeans, a white, linen shirt and what looked to Max like cowboy boots. Jilly wore a thin cotton dress with a predictably too low front for her remarkable chest.
“Sit down, girls,” said Harvey. “Sit down. There, now that’s cosy. That is cosy.”
Max couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted to. Elizabeth had sat immediately opposite him and Jilly, by leaning sideways with her head down low, pretending to adjust the strap on her shoe, was treating him to a down the blouse white knuckle ride worthy of Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
“Well, girls,” Harvey said, obviously unable to stay silent for more than a few seconds. “I’ll do the introductions. Jilly, this is Max and Carl, and I’m… well, you know who I am. And Elizabeth, this is Max and Carl, still, and yours truly. I say, how do you say Elizabeth in Welsh? Hhmm? Elizabeth, in Welsh?”
Elizabeth sipped her coke and then fixed Harvey with two cold, black eyes. “You pronounce it Elizabeth. It’s a name. A proper noun. They don’t change.”
“Ha ha. Ha ha. Fantastic,” he said. “Fan – tas – tic!”
Max could stand no more. “Er…” he said, and then faltered as those black eyes fell upon his own. Only now they smiled instead of radiating contempt. “Er… whereabouts in Wales are you from?” he said, and then drank deeply from his beer, covering his face and nervousness.
“North Wales,” she said, “Rhyl.”
“Rhyl?” Max said, trying to sound relaxed, “I’ve been there.”
Elizabeth laughed. “So have a lot of people. It’s the seaside.”
“Drug capital of Wales,” Harvey chipped in. “Drug capital – of Wales.” He then looked around to see who might have acknowledged this less than impressive display of street wisdom.
“It was just last summer,” Max continued. “I thought it was really nice.”
“It’s a hell of a lot better than it was,” Elizabeth said. “They’re finally spending some money on the place. Where did you stay?”
“Oh, er, just a guesthouse. Little place up the top end, by the big swimming pool.”
I’m having a conversation with her, Max thought, and instantly felt deeply guilty. Ridiculous, he told himself. What have I to feel guilty about. Perfectly normal, having a conversation with someone from work at lunchtime. Then he looked into those eyes again. God, what was happening?
“So, what brought you to Sheffield,” Carl asked, saving Max from further embarrassment. Max wondered if he’d done it on purpose, wondered if Carl had seen or sensed his own discomfort.
“Oh, er…” she faltered, seeming not able to make up her mind. Then, suddenly: “I came with my family. My dad, he works for Barclays Bank, and he was transferred.”
“Still live with your folks then?”
Max noticed that Elizabeth was getting uneasy. It wasn’t apparent to him why, and evidently wasn’t apparent at all to Carl. Harvey was desperately trying to see up Jilly’s dress and she appeared to be desperately trying to let him. There wasn’t enough leg room though.
“Yes… er, well, no. Not exactly. I was doing, for a while. But now I’m, sort of, in between things.”
“A nice place to be,” Max said, not having a clue what he was talking about but wanting to somehow ease the pressure on her.
“Hmm,” was all Elizabeth said in reply.
“So you’ve got yourself a little flat then?”
Max wished Carl would shut up.
“Yeah, just a single flat.”
Carl emptied his pint pot. Stood and wiped his mouth across his sleeve. “Seems to me, it’d be a damn sight easier, and comfier, stopping with your folks. I mean. How come you didn’t do that?”
“I don’t think it’s any of our damn business, Carl,” Max snapped.
Carl looked down at his friend, frowned and then shrugged. “I’ll get you another. Anyone else?”
Jilly and Harvey both waved empty wine glasses in the air. Max put his palm across the top of his only half empty pint, a gesture that Carl completely ignored, and Elizabeth looked away to the side. Carl shrugged once more and set off through the crowd.
Max was doing his best to control the unforeseen anger that had erupted. He could feel his neck and cheeks burning with blood. A hand reached across and touched his arm through his shirt sleeve.
“Thanks for that,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
Max knew that she couldn’t have failed to feel the tremor that ran through his body. “You didn’t embarrass me. It’s me that should be sorry, or at least Carl. He can be a bit insensitive. He doesn’t mean to pry but…”
“He wasn’t prying. He was just reacting to me being vague. There are a few things going on in my life at the moment and I don’t feel comfortable discussing them. It’s just that being evasive makes people dig even harder. I don’t blame him.”
“Still,” Max said, “he should have seen you didn’t want to talk about it.”
Elizabeth laughed. “You’ve already said he’s a bit insensitive. That lets him off the hook. But obviously, you did notice, which suggests, by implication, that you are sensitive.”
“I’m… I’m… well…”
“Now it’s my turn to be sorry. I’m just teasing.
“What do you two think?” Harvey shouted.
Max gave him an irritated look. Elizabeth smiled. “Pardon?” she said.
“Tom Cruise, Ben Afleck, and Brad Pitt. Who’d be the best in bed?” said Jilly.
“What!” shouted Max.
“Johnny Depp’s my favourite,” Elizabeth said.
“And mine!” Max said, forgetting his anger.
“Pansy, again,” said Harvey.
“No, I mean…”
Carl arrived with a tray of the wrong drinks: Guinness for Max, Bacardi breezers for Harvey and Jilly, and a brandy for Elizabeth. “What are we on about here?” he said.
“We’re talking about who would be the best male actor in bed,” said Harvey. “Max fancies Johnny Depp.”
“No, I…”
“He’s always been a bit that way,” said Carl. “He likes poetry too. It’s a good job he has friends who keep an eye on him.”
“That’s what I could do with,” Elizabeth muttered under her breath. Max was the only one who heard. She looked up from her lap where she was wringing her hands. “A friend,” she said, and smiled at him. There were tears in her eyes.
“I…” he began, but hadn’t thought it through.
Elizabeth picked up the unwanted brandy and downed it in one. “Come on, Jilly,” she said, standing up. “Time we were back.”
Max, aware of nothing except his own, laboured breathing, watched both girls leave the pub and then walk past the floor to ceiling windows of the bar, Jilly swinging the Bacardi Breezer by her side, Elizabeth wearing a smile that fooled everyone except Max.

 

Bob Lockett