The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith

simply look, holding my hand up in front of my eyes and watching it moving as if it belonged to someone else, that I would never again in my whole life see or feel or taste anything as beautiful as the tree I’d finally seen.
    I got to my feet by leaning against the wall. I fumbled through thin air across to the stairs and reached out for the banister. I got to the top, crawled from the landing into our bedroom and made myself lie down on the bed and shut my eyes, but the white was still there, even behind the shut lids. It pulsed like a blood-beat; dimmer and lighter, lighter and dimmer. How many times had I passed that tree already in my life, just walked past it and not seen it? I must have walked down that street a thousand times, more than a thousand. How could I not have seen it? How many other things had I missed? How many other loves? It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered any more. The buds were like the pointed hooves of a herd of tiny deer. The blossom was like – no, it was like nothing but blossom. The leaves, when they came, would be like nothing but leaves. I had never seen a tree more like a tree. It was a relief. I thought of the roots and the trunk. I thrilled to the very idea that the roots and the trunk sent water up through the branches to the buds or blossom or leaves and then when it rained water came back through the leaves to be distributed round the tree again. It was so clever. I breathed because of it. I blessed the bark that protected the spine and the sap of the tree. I thought of its slender grooves. I imagined the fingering of them. I thought of inside, the rings going endlessly round, one for every year of its life and all its different seasons, and I burst into tears like a teenager. I lay on my back in the bed and cried, laughing, like I was seventeen again. It was me who was like something other than myself. I should have been at work, and instead I was lying in bed, hugging a pillow, with my heart, or my soul, or my mind or my lungs or whatever it was that was making me feel like this, high and light; whatever it was had snapped its string and blown away and now there it was above me, out of my reach, caught in the branches at the top of a tree.
    I fell asleep. I dreamed of trees. In my dream I had climbed to a room which was also an orchard; it was at the very top of a massive old house whose downstairs was dilapidated and peeling and whose upstairs was all trees. I had climbed the broken dangerous stairs past all the other floors and got to the door of the room; the trees in it were waiting for me, small and unmoving under the roof. When I woke up I could see a lot more clearly. I washed my face in the bathroom, straightened my clothes. I looked all right. I went down to the kitchen and rooted through the cupboard under the sink until I found your father’s old binoculars in their leather case. I couldn’t make it out from the bathroom window or from either of the back bedroom windows but from up in the loft through the small window, if I leaned out at an angle so the eaves weren’t in the way, I could easily see the white of the crown of it shimmering between the houses. If I leaned right out I could see almost the whole of it. But it was tricky to lean out at the same time as balancing myself between the separate roof struts so I fetched the old board we’d used under the mattress in the first bed from the back of the shed, sawed it into two pieces so I could get it through the loft hatch, then went back down to the shed, found the hammer and some nails and nailed the pieces of board back together up in the loft.
    Birds visited the tree. They would fly in, settle for a moment, sometimes for as long as a minute, and they would fly off again. They came in ones and twos, a flutter of dark in the white. Or they would disappear into the blossom. Insects, which are excellent food for birds, tend to live on the trunks and the branches of trees. Ants can use trees as the ideal