Evidence

It is so suddenly high up there, where the trunk disappears into a broad umbrella-weave of branches, that without meaning to I find myself sitting down on the pine-needle forest floor. I am still there, my head resting along the prickled trunk, looking up and up and up into a dizzying fall, when he comes back to find me. I hear him stop beside me, quizzical.

Look, I say, not moving.

He does, and after a moment slowly sinks to the floor too. We stay like that for the longest time, not saying anything.

It starts to rain, outside the shelter of our pine tree. Heavy summer rain, thick and fast. He points to a single raindrop falling down towards us. We find another and another, hypnotised by their fall.

Later the rain stops and we watch the light play on the branches high above. When a cloud passes the colours change, dulling to a flat tangle, until the sun begins to pick out the light and shade again, filling in the spaces and spinning out the tree-branches to impossible heights.

Somehow we're lying down now, as if holding each other was the most natural thing in the world.

Green and brown, he says, gazing up at the moving colours. Green and brown. Your arm across my chest. Your head on my shoulder. Green and brown.

I try out a hundred things to say in my head, but none of them sound right. I put my face against his woollen jumper and that way I don't have to say anything, anything at all.

One one thousand. Two one thousand.

Then I get up. In silence, we brush each other down, loosening the fine coating of pine-dust and needles clinging to our clothes, returning ourselves to order. I keep brushing my skirt even when it's completely clean.

All gone? I ask finally. He nods.

All gone.

I find one later, tangled into my hair. I hold it in my hand for a few moments, a tiny furred pine-needle, no longer than my fingernail. I look to see if anyone else has noticed. Then I crush it and let it fall, my betrayer.