CHAPTER NINE: TREE HUGGING BY MOONLIGHT

Tree hugging and the juce of life ... whatever next?

The moon scudded between clouds that insisted in making the woodland flicker almost hypnotically as Griselda and Henrietta made their way towards the site of the meeting of the Holy Treehuggers. The evening was the sort of evening Griselda had always liked, balmy, warm enough for a pretty young thing to be out in the tiniest of skirts, and that's precisely what anyone catching a glimpse of her would have seen. Henrietta, on the other hand, looked the foul old hag that she was, wrapped in sack-cloth and old rags, and Griselda was in no mood to offer her a magical makeover.

So she stomped off to the Tree Hugging in a forest clearing and Henrietta had to follow her.

It wasn't that Griselda was particularly interested in hugging trees, and the whole idea of kissing one struck her as being too ridiculous for words, but she had just spent several hours in her small room in the company of Henrietta Blackboil, and besides body odours of the sort that suggested worse than poor hygiene and a complete and utter lack of any kind of familiarity with soap, the crusty old hag had farted a great deal. Consequently, after a couple of hours Griselda decided to take Spotty up on his invitation to hug trees in the woods even though she had never met a tree she'd wanted to hug, and she had lived a long life in the countryside where there are a great number of trees. From her perspective, trees, when they weren't being decorative, were useful sources of wood for her fire and handles for her fascinating range of broomsticks, one of which was still well hidden in the lands outside the University.

“It's worship,” she told Henrietta. “And as I have every intention of becoming a Priestess I thought I'd better put in a bit of worshipping. All right, it's trees and Spotty and his chums are all deluded, but it's good practice. It makes sense, don't you think? A lass ought to know something about her god even when he's as unbelievable as the bearded old bloke in the skies that seems to besot most people!”

Henrietta grunted. She was remarkably good at grunting, and Griselda recalled that she always had been, particularly after a period of abstinence from the dreaded drink. When she was drunk she couldn't think and on the rare occasion when she was sober, she grunted, Grunting was a substitute for thinking, something Henrietta found to be almost impossibly difficult most of the time.

To put it at the most basic, Henrietta Blackboil had long been an alcoholic, and not just any old common or garden alcoholic but a convinced one. She took her drinking seriously and never woke up without a hangover of one sort or other, and it had been partly for that reason that Griselda had conjured up sufficient devilish assistance to give her a second chance in life: to start again, to live life as it might have been lived had she been given a better start first time round and been nurtured by better parents. It had been one of her finest and most benevolent deeds and until the old woman had turned up earlier that day she had almost been proud of it.

The clearing described by Spotty was there, and so was he, together with a disappointingly small congregation. There were two lanky lads who were holding hands as if they were still in infant school and terrified of the teacher (Spotty, nee Lucifer) who they insisted in gazing at with awe written large on their faces. And there were three girls (late teens but looking like twelve year olds) who looked as if everything they wore had been tie-died in the sixties by hippies. Griselda shook her pretty young head sadly: not one of them had her fashion sense or could even begin to compete with her in the tiny skirt department.

Henrietta, of course, was putting in a typical appearance in which grubby blacks and browns dominated the colour scheme to the almost total exclusion of any other representative from the rainbow, bar, of course, the grey whiteness of her face, which was somewhat alleviated by the inclusion of more than a few wispy hairs sticking out of a handful of angry-looking moles, with others curling like grey pubes from her angular chin.

“So pleased to m-m-meet you and �" is it your granny?” enthused Spotty when he saw them emerge out of the shadows of night. He smiled warmly and rubbed his hands together obsequiously.

“Piss off!” growled Henrietta, and Griselda kicked her on both shins when Spotty wasn't looking. “There's no need for rudeness!” she hissed. “He's a perfectly sensible young man with a passion for trees.”

The vocally-challenged youth ignored Henrietta and clapped his hands together in a way that could only be called effeminate, with loose wrists that made it look as though both floppy hands might fall off at any moment.

“Right, everybody,” he cooed.

“Gay!” hissed Henrietta. “I can tell!”

“So what?” hissed Griselda back. “And anyway, he isn't, from the way he looks at my legs! Don't forget, you're far from normal yourself, whatever that may be! Now shut up �" or else!”

“I look at this t-t-tree,” pronounced Spotty, walking to the largest tree bordering the small clearing and with a seraphic smile on his spotty face. “I revere it! I call it f-f-friend. I walk up to its precious t-t-trunk, my fellow worshippers, its giant monopod c-c-clinging for an eternity to the green land, a trunk made by the Almighty in his own image...”

“Crikey, so the old geezer in Heaven was a pissin' tree, was he?” whispered Henrietta, and Griselda kicked her again, hard like you might kick a football on a Saturday afternoon whilst taking a penalty kick at Wembley, and Henrietta winced and scowled so blackly it began to look as though a storm might be brewing..

Spotty frowned at Henrietta, and continued. “I reach out towards the precious t-t-tree,” he proclaimed, “and I touch its woodland b-b-bark with f-f-fingers made for Praise! Oh d-d-darling angels of the Heavens, c-c-come down and see me worshipping this w-w-wonderful tree, its gnarled perfection, the s-s-sap that runs like nectar through its veins! I call upon the sp-sp-spirits of the woodland to breathe down on us all and bring us the g-g-greatest peace of all! I p-p-purse my lips, I kiss the gnarled old bark, I l-l-love the tree...

“For it is wr-wr-written in the book of life that all of the Lord's creatures are precious and mighty, and most precious amongst them, and mightiest, are the t-t-trees, so I c-c-call upon their spirits to shower us with the juice of life, and we will kiss each and every one of them with tongues of praise...”

“Tongues? Urgh!” hissed Henrietta.

“I've had enough of this!” breathed Griselda. “What a load of old tripe! It's worse than X-factor on the Telly! By the devil, let the juice of life rain down on this gathering and cover them with the greatest peace of all! At least it'll be something to look at!”

And, of course, things started happening like they always did when Griselda muttered her entreaties. She didn't know how or why, just that there was a force somewhere in the Universe that responded to her requests when she made them. The strange events that accompanied such seemingly satanic assistance were what had given her the reputation of being some kind of witch, in league with dark forces, when she was back home in Swanspottle, and she did little to disabuse her neighbours. It could be handy being looked on as dangerously special. And this time, like in so many others, things started happening.

To start with there was a random kind of tapping sound, like the noise Yorkshire pudding batter might make when it is thrown across a kitchen by a naughty child and heard by an irate parent plopping to the floor in globules of mess. Then there was a groaning from the trees around them and finally there was a dripping as something splattered down onto the small congregation. At first it was isolated spots and then it accelerated until it became like gloopy rain. A small pool formed at Griselda's feet and she bent down and dipped one finger in and raised it to her nose.

“What the pissin' 'ell...” gasped Henrietta. “It's pissin' mad, that's what it is!”

“I recognise this smell,” breathed Griselda, and the image of Constable Lockemup with his cotton boxer shorts round his ankles like a pale blue puddle formed in her mind. She had spent many an hour with that good officer of the law in the past, and had rather enjoyed every one of them.

“What, then?” demanded Henrietta.

“Our prayers h-h-have been answered!” pronounced Spotty. “The Lord of all trees has praised us and benevolently showered us with the precious juice of life! All praise! Our prayers have been answered!” He smiled deliriously and then looked round his tiny congregation like a magician at his audience. “We have been showered with the precious juice of life by the Almighty! He has seen us and rewarded us mightily!” he almost wept.

“Juice of life?” chortled Griselda to Henrietta. “I'd say it was! You know what this manna from the lovely heavens is, hag?”

“Of course I don't! So you can tell me if you know, you old crone!” gasped Henrietta, wiping a huge white globule from her hairy chin.

“It's what the Spotty bloke asked for!” cackled Griselda, sounding for a moment like her disreputable and rather ancient proper ego. “It's the juice of life, you reprehensible old hag, but I prefer to call it semen, so pull your crusty old knickers up if you want to stay childless!”