The tree surgeon turns up to look at our giant bay tree, which has grown to cast its oppressive shadow across three back gardens. He has a lot of questions, and a tendency to talk over my answers.
“What shape do you want?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “What shapes can you…”
“It can be anything,” he says, scribbling in his notebook. “You can have a lollipop, or a cone, or egg-shaped. It’s entirely up to you.”
“I think egg-shaped, but not too…”
“You can have an egg with a flat bottom, or we can taper it so.”
“Regular egg,” I say, “with the pointy end at the…”
“For example, I just did a big bay in south London, and she was very particular about the proportions. She wanted…”
“OK,” I say. “Egg-shaped.”
If I’m irritated by the tree surgeon, it’s because I should be the one pruning the bay tree. But it’s three storeys high, and my wife won’t let me. The implication is that because I am old, I will fall out of the tree and die.
“That tree surgeon is my age, or older,” I say.
“I’m not really worried about you dying,” my wife says. “I just know you’ll never get rid of the branches.”
On the morning of the scheduled work, my wife is getting ready to go out. “I think they’re coming at 11,” she says. “Did you email the neighbours?”
“Yes,” I say. “They’re psyched.”
The doorbell rings at 9.30, while I’m still in the bath. When I open the door, I look as if I’m perspiring through my clothes. It’s a different tree surgeon – the tree surgeon’s colleague – much younger, with a hipster beard like facial topiary. I tell him where to park, and leave him to get on with things.
Half an hour later, he calls me downstairs. I meet him under the tree. “Remind me what you wanted,” he says, showing me a tattered sheet of notebook paper. “Did you actually say ovoid with a flat bottom?”
The paper is covered in writing, some of it vertical, some horizontal. The word “ovoid” is scrawled inside a box limned in thick Biro.
“I might have said egg-shaped,” I say, “but I don’t want a flat bottom.”
“That’s why it’s usually best to ask,” he says. “The things he writes down don’t always make sense.” Something conspiratorial passes between us: the unspoken notion that tree surgery ain’t brain surgery.
“Just take it back as far as you can without killing it,” I say. “And if you accidentally kill it, that’s fine, too.”
“Right,” he says. “How high d’you want it?”
The tree surgeon and his assistant attack the tree with long-handled power tools. Clippings are carted down the alley and shredded. I sit at my computer, soothed by the noise of industry.
My wife comes home and finds me in my office. “How’s it going?” she asks, looking out of the window.
“It’s a different guy,” I say. “Very efficient.”
“Don’t we want it lower than that?” my wife says. “We agreed to halfway up next door’s scaffolding.”
“Yes,” I say, “but you’re looking down at it from up here. When I spoke to him, we were looking up at it from down there.” I realise I may have told him three-quarters.
“That’s not halfway,” she says.
“It’s a matter of perspective,” I say.
“You’re useless,” she says, stomping out.
I hear her in the garden, talking to someone in persuasive tones. Later, I look out of the window and see the tree surgeon’s head poking out of the crown of the tree, bay and beard all one, and I think: that should be me.
