The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith Page A

landscape for ant-farms, where they breed and corral and fatten up insects like aphids and use them for milk. (I found these things out later that evening on the internet.) Traffic drove unnoticing past the tree. People passed back and fore behind it. Mothers went past it to fetch children from school, brought them home from school past it the other way. People came home from work all round it. The sun moved round it in the sky. Its branches lifted and fell in the light wind. Petals spun off it and settled on a car or a lawn or fell maddeningly out of range where I couldn’t see them land. Time flew. It really did. I must have watched for hours, all afternoon, until you were suddenly home from work yourself and shouting at me for being up in the loft. I came down, went online and typed in the word
tree
. There was a lot of stuff. I came off when you called me for supper, then went back on again after supper and came off again when you told me that if I didn’t come to bed immediately so you could get some sleep then you would seriously consider leaving me.
    I woke up in the middle of the night furious at that woman who thought she owned the tree. I sat straight up in the bed. I couldn’t believe how angry I was. How could someone think they had ownership of something as unownable as a tree? Just because it was in her garden didn’t mean it was hers. How could it be her tree? It was so clearly my tree.
    I decided I would do something; I would go round now in the dark and anonymously throw stones at her house, break a window or two then run away. That would show her what she didn’t own. That would serve her right. It was quarter to two on the alarm. You were asleep; you turned and mumbled something in your sleep. I got out carefully so as not to disturb you and took my clothes to the bathroom so my putting them on wouldn’t wake you.
    It was raining quite heavily when I went out. I scouted about in our back garden under our trees for some good-sized stones to throw. (It wasn’t that our own trees were any less important than the tree I’d seen; they were nice and fine and everything; it was simply that they weren’t it.) I found some smooth beach stones we’d brought back from somewhere and put them in my jacket pocket and I went out the back way so you wouldn’t hear anything at the front. On my way round to the woman’s house there was a skip at the side of the road; someone was putting in a driveway, digging up a front porch. There were lots of pieces of brick and half-brick in the skip and a lot of smashed-up thrown-away paving slab. Nobody saw me. There was nobody at all on the street, on any of the streets, and only the very occasional light in a window.
    When I got to the woman’s house it was completely in darkness. I was soaked from the rain and there were the petals plastered wet all over the pavement outside her garden gate. I tucked my piece of slab under my arm, soundlessly opened the gate. I could have been a perfect burglar. I crossed her lawn soundlessly and I stood under the tree.
    The rain was knocking the petals off; they dropped, water-weighted and skimpy, into a circle of white on the dark of the grass round the edge of the dripping tree. The loaded branches magnified the noise; the rain was a steady hum above me through which I could hear the individual raindrops colliding with the individual flowers. I had my breath back now. I sat down on the wet grass by the roots; petals were all over my boots and when I ran my hand through my hair petals stuck to my fingers. I arranged my stones and half-bricks and my slab in a neat line, ready in case I needed them. Petals stuck to them too. I peeled a couple off. They were like something after a wedding. I was shivering now, though it wasn’t cold. It was humid. It was lovely. I leaned back against its trunk, felt the ridges of it press through my jacket into my back and watched the blossom shredding as the rain brought it down.
    You sit opposite me at