Hospital Field by Sian Melangell Dafydd

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Read by Adam Diggle

"Hospital Field" is taken from the charity anthology BEACONS, published by OneWorld. Buy it here.

Owning something ancient adds weight to life. Your tree: nut-skinned, sturdy, harmony in a pot, which has grown up to be tiny, perfectly asymmetrical and squat, with teardrop, razoredged leaves, which has grown up beautiful, is finally delivered home. You stuff all your other belongings into a rucksack: underwear, toothbrush, books, and you negotiate customs, ticket turnstiles and packaged sandwiches while your two hands are firmly wrapped around its roots in a blue glazed terracotta pot. You think it looks like it ought to have been a teapot, not a plant pot; blue as sea in summer, shining about its soil. Your fingers sweat all the way home but you hold it and hold it, adjusting your fingers when their bones ache.

 

Your girlfriend asks you how old it is.

‘It’s very old,’ she says, ‘it must be.’ You tell her you have no idea and probably won’t, unless it dies and you get to cut its trunk to count the tiny age circles, ‘but really, really, do you think I’m ever going to get to do that?’ you ask her. You both agree on ‘old.’

On the mantelpiece it goes, then, next to a painting by a school-friend artist and a black and white photo of your grandmother looking young on a boat. Against a white wall, you are pleased with its shape and how the light from the window throws its shadow diagonally and larger than life. The tip of its right out-reaching branch throws the longest shadow, hitting the rim of a photograph by a semi-famous Cambodian. The chair you sit on to play your guitar lives spot-on in the right place so that when you look up again from folk songs and breathe deep, there it is, perfectly crooked and alive in your home.

*

Your bonsai dies or it seems to be dying: you’re not sure which. It takes seven days to get to

such a state. On the morning of the eighth, the little feet of its blue pot are covered in leaves, their palms closed. On the ninth morning, even more. You break your waking ritual. Instead of going head-first to loo-kettle-radio-shower, you pop your head into the living room first to check the damage. You’ve learned to expect disappointment before your eyes are fully open. On the floor, leaves crunch like rice into your parquet gaps.

The tree rejects you. After one week of checking in with it before really starting the day, only three leaves remain. One: right at the top. Two: tight by the knot of its belly. Three: barely visible, it’s becoming brown, tucked behind a branch-pit. You leave the dustpan and brush in the newspaper rack now, and for the life of you, you can’t shake the fear that it’s all your fault.

Your girlfriend says you should be talking to your tree, and laughs.

‘Which language?’ you ask. She suggests English is a poor second to Japanese but you could give it a go since singing hasn’t charmed it into feeling at home.

You tell it about your day, about the man across the way on the seventh floor who had a heart-attack and had to be taken out of his flat in a crane through the window, his chest naked to the freezing air and pumped by machine. You even ask it if it’s listening and then prod the soil which is just as it should be, according to the instructions.

*

Day fourteen and leaf three singes and drops in front of your very eyes. It scrunches to powder between your thumb and forefinger and flakes back to where it fell in the first place.

You leave the dust there.

Something must be done. You journey to the other side of the city after work, to a place you hardly ever go – journey to the very end, just because you’re after a specialist and that’s where he’s to be had. It’s where the canals merge, large maples and damp benches every other street, and street sweepers hosing the roads down between passengers and cyclists.

The shop is the size of a locksmith’s, has mini grass-plants you don’t recognise hanging from upside down pots on a washing line. A miracle man works here, clearly.

‘I have come to ask about my bonsai,’ you tell him.

He asks if you bought it here.

‘No.’

‘Did you bring it with you?’

‘No.’

‘Where is it?’

‘At home, losing its leaves.’

‘That’ll be the problem: your home,’ he says. ‘Take it outside and it might survive. At the very least don’t keep it cooped up,’ this man says, pressing his black fingernails into his palms, ‘not for more than, say, seven days on the trot.’

You repeat ‘cooped up’ in exactly his tone: high-pitched disgust. You wonder whether

he imagines you in an apartment with trees in chains, just like the silver birches in the Bibliothèque Francois Mitterrand.

‘I need to lock up,’ the man says, as if he’s seen into your soul and seen padlocks, and you watch his hands as he fiddles with the keys. You trust those hands.

*

You report back over dinner.

‘It is hot here,’ your girlfriend says, ‘very hot.’

‘You’ve never said that before,’ you tell her.

But it is though,’ she says and blows out with puffed cheeks.

‘This isn’t hot,’ you say. You point at the thermometer which shows something between seventeen and eighteen degrees and you knew it would. ‘My dad has it fixed on twenty three.’

‘We’re not talking about your comfort, or your dad’s.’

‘Is it too hot, then?’ you ask her.

She tells you that in your place she would have worn a jumper instead of cranking up the heat. That, for sure, this shows that you’re more urban than she is. But, no it’s not too hot, no. You’re not sure if she’s lying and start watching her differently. She sleeps untidily at night: kicks down the duvet. You pull it back up. How could she, you tell yourself, how could she?

In the morning she makes coffee while you crouch in front of the bonsai.

‘It’s not personal,’ she says. ‘It’s science.’

‘You mean nature.’ you suggest.

‘Same thing,’ she says. ‘It’s just the way things are.’

You tell her elms die outside. There’s a foreign disease out there that gets them.

‘But not the miniature elms maybe,’ she says, ‘they’re made of stronger stuff.’

You don’t give in; you consider the balcony but you don’t do it. It’s a decorative plant, so what’s the point of it if it can’t be seen? So, contained in this beautiful, perfect flat, with artwork by foreign photographers of children with stories in their eyes and no shoes, your bonsai loses its last but one leaf.

*

You bend low and analyse the tiny point of contact between leaf and bark; try to find what is it that gives up right there. You fail, but find yourself staring until your lower back aches.

You’re tempted to pluck out the remaining leaf, to get the whole thing over and done with.

But this posture isn’t natural for you, and actually really hurts, so you stand up straight, resist the urge to touch the tree, and grab your coat to head to work. On the bus, you tell yourself that you really are killing it and should have stuck it on the balcony.

*

The last leaf is on the mantelpiece on your return. The tree is gone, the marble plush where the pot stood. It’s been manhandled again, this time carried sweaty-handed to share a garden with grasses, with bruised heads of great burnets, liquorice milk-vetch covered in sun-spots, devil’s-bit, blood-veined eyebright, clots of comfrey and meadowsweet frothing above it all. It’s abandoned there until it feels better.

*

Once in a while, she brings it in; places it in the middle of the kitchen table and tucks into a plate of poached egg on toast, dandelion and sorrel salad, picks at her nails and the muddy feet of the bonsai pot; drinks tea. She grows nut-skinned; sometimes wonders – did you ever know that you were the one who changed everything – and takes another sip of tea.

Sometime around the bonsai’s hundred-and-fiftieth year, you die, mid-crane-lift outside your apartment window.

(c) Sian Melangell Dafydd, 2013

Siân Melangell Dafydd is the author of Y Trydydd Peth (The Third Thing), which won the coveted 2009 National Eisteddfod Literature Medal. She is the co-editor of literary magazine Taliesin and writes in both Welsh and English.

Adam Diggle graduated from the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in 2009. Since then he has mainly worked in theatre and voice-over. Adams recent credits include Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men and Happy Loman in Death of a Salesman.