When we meet, we talk about the tree.

Then again, there isn’t much else to talk about for you and me. We don’t meet often. Chance encounters in the street: a wave and a nod, some muttered politeness, we don’t always hear each other very well, as if we’re talking and listening with our mouths and ears full of dust. Most times you’re in a rush. I’m not, but that’s ok. Our trajectories cross regardless of our very different speeds, you hurrying along and I still-still-stilted (‘glacial’, you once called it with a smirk, but these days glaciers move much faster than I do, much faster than even you). When our paths do cross it’s small-big-tree-talk. I noticed the dirt under your fingernails last time we talked. I couldn’t help but think you’d been scratching the bark, or maybe you’d been digging in the soil at the roots.

They’re going to have to redo the pavement some point soon, have you noticed how the roots are pushing up those ugly big concrete slabs? People in a hurry might trip and tumble, it’s a health-and-safety lawsuit in waiting. Did you see that photograph of the old oak that kisses/eats/suffocates a bench right next to it? I wish I had shown you, I love those action shots: if someone with no knowledge of trees or benches saw it, they’d perhaps think the photographer had captured the precise moment a predator caught a prey. A cascade of catching and consuming and digesting. I don’t ask you any of this. I came this close to asking you about your fingernails, but you had already rushed off again and I couldn’t keep up.

You and the tree are twined.

At least in my thoughts about you, which are always also about the tree.

It’s a lime tree. It was already there when I carried a lifetime of cardboard boxes into the new house, temporary and rented. Built on borrowed ground, I remember thinking as I stepped over a root. Its scent was all stately blossom and townhouse-chic, gracing the neighbourhood with a leafy suburb vibe that jarred with, well, the neighbourhood. Still: a better welcome than any neighbour gave me. That scent hasn’t drifted through our streets for several summers now. Something’s not right. We have both noticed this. (When I say we share this knowledge I mean I read this in our cursory glances and in the intonation of your ‘good morning’. We talk about the tree but we don’t talk about the sensory void it has begun to leave in our lives, which forces noses to cope with the smell of the ramshackle wheelie bins in the front lawns. With the smell comes a heightened awareness of loose tiles and stepped-over rubbish, gates loose in their hinges, plants turned brown in windows, windows covered in a thin layer of Sahara sands.)

The last time we met was on the corner of my street. You were taking your children to school, and it was late, and it was raining a dirty rain, so there wasn’t any tree-talk, only some hasty niceties and jumping in puddles and the meaningful sideways look that, indeed, yes, no, no smell of lime.

Isn’t summer rain supposed to bring out all the aromas that plants usually keep to themselves, close to leaf? Doesn’t downpour make generous?

Where is the lime tree hiding its scent?

Have you been digging for it?

I don’t ask you this.

On the radio there is talk of soiled soil: poison scandals; city-wide infrastructure projects that pump to the surface lead, political nepotism and corruption, and all kinds of chemicals. It pollutes our children, our chickens’ eggs, our vocabularies. We never talk about those things. But I have been meaning to warn you, to tell you to be careful where you claw at the earth.

I wanted to ask you if you have seen the painting of the mushrooms sprouting on bark. I don’t remember who painted it. It’s an eighteenth-century close-up of decay, a still-life that is neither still nor alive, not really. It is dead things moving, but we can’t see it happening in front of our eyes. Is the painting about the bark or about the mushrooms? I wonder what you’d say if you looked close at the milky colours, really up-close, you know, nose to the canvas. I think you would say nothing moves, even if you looked for a long time, whereas I had to turn my eyes away because the speed of the mushrooms moving over the bark exhausted me. I tried to smell them in the gallery, but they smelled of oil and dust, and anyway you’re not supposed to push your nose into an old painting searching for fungal smells.

Other things are happening in this street of ours. Other absences are becoming so noticeable that they have begun to span, then fill the distance between our houses. At least, it seems that way now that there are few places to go. I stand by the window and I look outside and I notice how a neighbour hangs out the washing, careful and precise, along a neat washing line strung between fences.

But the linen is dirty, always. Covered in sand, smudges, as if the soil is coming up and becoming air. It moves on the wind and on the wingbeat of the sparrows that always nested in the dying hedge outside the building that was once the public library, then a community centre, now a foodbank. I go there more now than when it was filled with books.

Have you seen the dirty laundry hanging completely still? I meant to ask, but it keeps slipping my mind. It’s the kind of thing I think you’d like to hear/talk/exchange a glance about.

Have you seen the sparrows lately?

I wanted to ask you if you know the painting of the songbirds, the one that is mostly very dark with flashes of blinding colour: gold crest gold and kingfisher orange and blue like the heart of a flame. Small gleaming black eyes, wide with panic. Wings touch, feathers are all out of order, it’s a painting of passions. It scared me when I saw it, the vividness of the thing. I hadn’t recovered yet when the gallery volunteer told me off for trying to smell the painted mushrooms.

But I forgot to ask you about that, too.

                                                You really should go to the gallery, I would say to you if I could.

The gallery opens every two weeks for an afternoon (one to five), perhaps rather to air the rooms and the paintings than to let people in. They rarely turn on all the lights. Dust long-settled on the frames. I was all alone, swaying between the mushrooms and the birds. (Perhaps that’s why the volunteers watched me so closely: I was suspect because I was there, loitering, preying on paintings so slowly that it was almost undetectable with the naked eye. But wasn’t that a streak of soil in the corner of the canvas – actual soil, not paint – right there on the bark? Shouldn’t at least someone look and or smell closely?)

Last week I stood under the lime tree canopy and sniffed a little.

Because the painting of the mushrooms sorely needs restoring, and because despite appearances I know very little about art and conservation, I couldn’t tell if the painter had intended for the bark to look so weathered and mouldy, or if that was simply what a lack of care and resources looked like. Layers of decay. Anyway, it was too dark to really tell.

I stood close to the lime tree bark and sniffed a little. I wore a green jacket, it’s more of a blazer really, casual formal, the kind of thing you wear to stand out in a soirée crowd, the kind of thing you’re extra careful about not to get stains on. The jacket clashed with the lime tree. It’s all smooth and velvet and shiny buttons, and as you know (do you know?) the bark is heavily scarred, stripped in some places. Palimpsestic carvings, in some places more than five layers of faded love hearts thick, gradually fade as your eyes travel up the tree’s lines. Initials become mossier. Is that a ‘K’ or an ‘R’ declaring their undying love to ‘J’ (or ‘I’?) in the living wood? Looking closer – really close, with my nose right up against the bark, it was dry and cold – didn’t help. But I think I smelled something there, flourishing, flowering, faltering just under the surface.

It didn’t smell like a lime tree at all. In fact, it smelled like something I had never smelled before: a musty-dust smell, a fairy waft, an olfactory opposite, an anti-smell. It got in my nose and it made me sniff a little. It made me feel like the space under the branches was getting smaller, like an unkind embrace, the kind that goes on for an awkwardly long time, the kind with uncertain limbs and unbrushed teeth. I held my breath so long it left me breathless.

Where did you say you saw the sparrows last? I have forgotten.

Last week I breathed into our street and onto the lime tree leaves, maybe to encourage the tree into action, but nothing came from it. Something really isn’t right. Last week my nose touched the bark.

                                                You shouldn’t go stand too close, I would say to you.

You shouldn’t go stand under the canopy and near the grey bark, which is only seemingly a surface,                   an idea of surface,

     the illusion of a

surface.

                                                I should really tell you this. But I haven’t seen you in a while.

Couple of streets down, the council is planting ash saplings where pavement tiles have been removed. The summer rains aren’t doing what they’re supposed to, in actual fact there haven’t been many this year, have you noticed, so a council vehicle comes by a few times a week. There’s some comedy value in watching the little car pulling a big water tank through suburbia. The tank says in huge lime-green letters: ‘HELPING OUT OUR TREES – EVERY DROP COUNTS’. A long rubber pipe pumps water into the dusty soil. The rubber smells. The pumping is surprisingly loud, but the noise is drowned out by nearby leaf blowers, also employed by the council. There are no leaves, but that doesn’t matter. They blow the dust into corners.

The water vehicle only stops at the saplings. Over the rooftops, the driver can see the large lime tree in its yellow foliage, peering, I imagine, thirstily, stretching its considerable roots far under our houses, yours and mine. Trying to reach that water, that tax-paid water, stored in fancy reservoirs and driven out, delivered, poured into the mouths of the meek and needy. I imagine the lime tree moaning in its leaves about this. About scroungers who are taking up valuable public space and limited resources, who aren’t providing any shade and accommodation for others but only take take take ta—

Every drop counts, the tree reads, squinting angrily over your roof.

Every drop counts, the tree repeats, straining branches and roots.

Every drop counts, and the tree holds its breath in a tantrum.

Or at least: I imagine it does, standing under the canopy and sniffing a little and smelling only the absence of air.

Isn’t it strange how when we meet we talk about the tree, but we never talk in its shade? Have we ever met here on the lime tree line? I can’t be sure; my memories are fading. Have you stood under this canopy and noticed anything wrong, noticed an absence that’s filled with something out of place?

A little further, a large white fairy ring lies broken. It looks like someone has taken a baseball bat or a heavy foot to it: clumps and crumbs of ghostly white fungus flesh lie in the grass. Dandruff between dandelions. The sight upset me (I came across it at dusk, if you must know, and the red-and-pink sky cast the scene in uncomfortably soothing colours) and it drew me closer, like a bad relationship or a black hole or something else that messes with your sense of gravity. I don’t think I’d noticed the ring of mushrooms before, when it was intact. The broken circle appeared to me a smashed lock: an open door: for the unwanted and the unspoken, for that which could not be asked. I looked over my shoulder but there was no one running from the crime scene. I was alone. I imagined the leaf blowers causing further havoc the next morning. I wanted to drop to my knees and smell the mushrooms. Where have you been these past few days?

When you get too close to the lime tree that is holding its breath other, past lives become visible to which the tree had been host, which the tree held hostage, holds hostage still, absorbing the angers and hopes of others, making those feelings its own. Knife marks, crude words. Coins pushed into the bark, bent and dented, the tree working its way through its own timeline: the bark welcomes every intrusion and envelops the greening bronze and copper. Or have I got this all wrong and is the tree eating these coins like a magic trick in reverse, a ‘wow!’ in extreme slow motion that is somehow, still, impossible to figure out? I’m unable to pull my eyes away. I watch the living wood. Old fungus, old moss, clinging on. Ribbons in the lower branches, hanging limp, colours faded. Higher up abandoned birds’ nests made of twigs and plastic and other birds’ feathers. Leftovers, left-behinds, debris claimed by the tree and sculpted into a whole, into a still-life of a community.

Oh, and between the roots stands a small DIY wooden cross that hasn’t been cleaned in a long time. There’s a date and a name, but to be able to read them you have to crouch and get really close. But you know this, better than anyone.

Now, if you were here you’d just shake your head at me and I would maybe even shake mine too in agreement that yes, perhaps I shouldn’t always talk about this stupid no-good no-scent tree and maybe try and have a normal conversation. You know: ask what your name is, introduce myself, that sort of thing. We never get round to that, we’re stuck in the branches and trip over the roots.

If you were here you’d correct me in a matter-of-actual-fact kind of way that the tree’s microcosm isn’t all fossilised and dead and dying; you’d point out that the sticky sap still oozes even though you can’t see it move, not really, but you know that it should so it probably is, because that’s what sap does. You’d say that even this absence of scent indicates life, it’s the tree willing something out of our existence.

If you were here – but, need I remind you, you are not – you’d tell me how a tree is made of living lines, made of life lines: concentric circles on the inside, vertical lines twining and running parallel on the outside. I would interrupt you to compare the tree lines with the lines in the palm of my hand, and I would talk aimlessly about the similar aesthetics of nerve and root systems and isn’t the cosmos full of wonder, doesn’t it ever make you feel out breath and nervous and scared, and I would say a lot more but you would stop me because you really need to get going. Even in this hypothetical conversation, I can’t keep up with you.

I’m standing under the canopy and sniffing a little. A lot, actually, I’m sniffing a lot. It’s humid here under the branches. At the edges of the lime tree line, where the sun pushes in vain against the dense canopy, crooked fingers of wood reach up. They are lime saplings that never stood any chance in the shade of their parent. There are so many that they almost form a complete circle, like an exterior age ring for the scentless senseless tree. I tried to be careful, but I think one snapped under my foot as I crossed the tree line to get close enough to the bark for a whiff. I don’t quite remember when that was.

I’m thirsty I am thirsty my skin is dry and rough and is it

just me

or is the sun moving faster in the sky, so fast my eyes can’t follow its path through the sky? Anyway, my eyes are full of dust.

When we meet, we talk about the tree. But we haven’t met for some time and I’m still talking about the tree

just, to myself

I think.

Have you noticed how it’s been wind-still for so long now? I felt the breeze stop as soon as I crossed the threshold of the tree line. No leaf has moved since. The tree clutches them all, flexing its branches. It’s not giving anything to anyone anymore, it is no longer public space, it has chosen a different life for itself.

Not a breath of air, but dust whirs through the neighbourhood and onto our clothes and into our eyes, mouths, noses. One evening I see a wispy cloud of sparrows descend on the lime tree and reverse at the very last moment. They fly away in a cacophony, as if the canopy was about to swallow them whole.

This is the tail-end of a story told in lines that run up wooden torsos and limbs, skyward, to the light that catches the dust. They’ve run their course in long straight grooves, moving unnoticeably. Into a place where bark chewing old coins is the inaudible sound of a tree that grinds its wooden teeth in displeasure at the state of everything beyond its individual tree line, grinding and plotting, flexing branches and stretching roots and holding its limey breath.

Where have you been?

Did you pick up my children from school?

Who put the mushrooms back together in a neat circle? Was it the council? – I want to ask, but I don’t remember where my mouth is. I’m all ears but you’re silent and every word counts. I’m all itches that I can’t scratch, because I can no longer find my fingers.

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Kristof Smeyers is a historian of religion and the supernatural. He writes about fauna, flora and folklore. Twitter: @kristof_smeyers