There is a grass embankment lined with six trees. They separate the houses from the highway that runs from town to the Atlantic ocean. A young boy chooses one specific tree for its handsome branches. They curve up and out in many directions, high up off the ground. From any one of them you can see out to Newlands, over Tokai across the Cape Flats, all the way to the mountains flanking Muizenberg. Sometimes, depending on which way the wind blows, you can smell the sea.
He comes to the tree to nail planks into its side to make steps. Walking towards it he can hear the highway down the other side of the embankment. He is adjusting the nails, hammer, rope and planks in his arms when he sees something at the foot of the trunk. It looks like a tuft of grass, or a clump of orange leaves, but as he gets closer, he sees the deflated, foetal form of a dead fox.
Its mouth is gaping and silent. For a moment he thinks it moves. The ants crawl over its glassy eyes and swarm around its treacle insides. The berg wind is hot like breath on him.
He goes around to the other side of the tree where he cannot see the decomposing thing and begins hammering the planks into the trunk. He climbs as he finishes each step, and when he runs out of wood he is high up in the branches and can see the bulge of the sky and the ocean beneath it in the distance. The landscape is brutally beautiful, making it seem as though the houses and buildings could just crack and fall away. Like a thin surface layer.
The heat shimmers. He turns back to look into the gardens of the houses across the street. There is movement within shady rooms, and the sprinkler systems are throwing out tiny beads of liquid light. Exhausted lawns spread themselves out like heatstroke victims. Quiet as a migraine. Until the school children come home.
He straddles a thick branch, his blood stinging in his fingers and feet. He runs a finger along the organic inside of the deep grooves in the bark. Dirt gets under his nails. He looks down. Stretching far beneath him, maybe hundreds of feet beneath the earth, the tree clutches soil in its roots. In the bright sun he leans forward into the urge of gravity. He stops himself and digs his fingers into the bark and looks up instead. Above him the tree makes a mirror of itself in the air, the high branches reaching up like sky roots.
He looks at the empty nests, built and then disintegrating with every season, bits of shell and feather blowing away. But these huge trees... alive since before him, before the highway, outlasting him and the neighbourhood and its lawn toys.
He is about to hammer the last plank of wood when he loses his grip and the wood falls down through the air towards the ground. It hits the dead fox, which bounces once and falls onto its other side. The fur of its underside is sparse, and the grey of its skin shows through. Part of its face has decayed so that the bone of the jaw and the sharp teeth grin up at him. The gaze of the fox is vast and endless, it spreads out from its empty eye socket into the grass, black like the ants. The balmy wind sends a cool shiver over the boy’s face. The sweat of the day has collected in the significant grooves and lines and in the hair of his eyebrows. He feels a pull, downwards. There is a snap, and a fibrous taughtness, although those who hear it cannot be sure which comes first, and the boy’s feet swing, touching the trunk of the tree there. And again. Again there. His shadow falls dark green over the grass and the grinning fox below.
