Beside the Dying Ash Tree by Michael Bloor

Andy put down the phone on his sister, though she was still sobbing intermittently. They’d already been talking for half an hour; he realised that there was no more comfort he could offer, til he saw her tomorrow at the undertakers. And he needed a break to process her news of their father’s death. So, booted and rain-proofed, he headed out the door for a familiar walk beside the river.

From the doorstep, he spotted his neighbour, old Archie MacLeod, coming along the street and heading Andy’s way. Giving Archie a wave, he headed up the street instead: he’d have to make for the river the long way round. He couldn’t face Archie just then: the old guy was as cheerful as the smoke from a crematorium chimney.

The rain relented after he’d passed under the railway bridge. By the time he got to the children’s playground, the sun was out. He watched a granny carefully balancing a toddler on a see-saw.A while back, Andy had been studying a couple of on-line sociology modules from The Open University. He remembered reading about Goffman’s concept of ‘role distance.’ Watching a toddler, sitting astride a wooden horse on a fairground ride, Goffman had noticed that the toddler was fully absorbed in riding the horse, fully absorbed in his role as a rider. At the same time, a slightly older child was guying the role, swaying slightly from side to side on his horse and pretending to fire a gun, like a cowboy hero chasing an outlaw. The older child had found some distance from the rider role and was able to improvise. Like, say, a singing bus driver, or a hedge-fund manager playing the hippie in his weekend cottage.

Along the riverside path, he stopped to watch the swirl and swell of the river from beneath a huge ash tree. The tree was suffering from Ash Dieback Disease. The young, outer branches were all shrivelled and bare. Just like the way his dad had shrunk over the past year and a half. He tried to choke back a sob, like his sister, knowing all the while that grief was a heavier thing than love.

Years ago, back when Andy was sixteen, his dad had tried  to warn him of the pitfalls that might lie ahead. Andy had taken no heed then, but he’d understood. Eventually.

The trouble was that there could be no exit or escape from some roles: their traits overshadowed all other possibilities. A pope riding a bike was always just that – a pope riding a bike. Never a cyclist.

There was a term for that in sociology too – ‘a master status.’ You could formally relinquish the role, or be stripped of it, but that was no help. In the eyes of the world, you still had a master status – ‘defrocked priest,’ ‘former Prime Minister,’ etc., etc. 

And, like a defrocked priest, Andy too was trapped in a lost role. He was a 51-year-old, orphan ex-footballer.

Back in the early 1990s, there had been a brief interlude of frenetic activity. Signed by United as a schoolboy, the envy of his friends, the idol of his young cousins and the neighbourhood kids. The move to the boarding house in the city: the dizzy circle of coaches, agents, and hangers-on. The wages: the car he bought before he could drive. The smiling crowd of fans, barmen and bouncers. The novelty of anonymous hotel rooms. Drinks and drugs, and the laughter in the background as he vomited in the sink.

A couple of years spun by. And then he was stranded like flotsam after the flood.  Just another kid who never made the grade. Yet he realised, standing beneath the dying tree, that it was now a relief to grieve for his dad, rather than grieving for himself.

In the river shallows, a few feet from Andy and the ash tree, a single, small, bright, yellow flower was growing among some pebbles, just above the water level. He didn’t know its name. It was beautiful, but it wouldn’t survive the next flood.

So what.

Michael Bloor

Image: An overgrown river bank from dd