The Orange Tree

The orange tree did not want to come out of its pot.

Asha had both hands round the trunk, which was no thicker than a broom handle, and Mrs Oddie had both hands round the pot, and between them they pulled. Nothing happened. Rain drummed on the shop window and ran down the glass in long grey ropes, so that Gull Street outside looked as if it were melting.

'Gently,' said Mrs Oddie. 'He's older than your mum.'

'He's stuck.'

'He's settled. There's a difference.'

Dividend sat on the counter beside Barnaby the till, watching with the expression of a cat who had seen many things pulled out of many pots and had not been impressed by any of them. The pencil Asha had brought, as instructed, lay forgotten next to his tail.

Mrs Oddie fetched a bread knife from the back room and slid it round the inside of the pot, slowly, the way Mum loosened a cake. Then she tipped the whole thing on its side on a spread of old newspaper. Asha gave one more tug.

Out it came, with a soft, sucking sound.

There was hardly any soil left. Where the soil should have been, there were roots. Pale brown, wiry, packed tight. They had grown down to the bottom of the pot and found nowhere to go, so they had turned and gone round. And round. And round again, until they made the exact shape of the pot, like a basket someone had woven in the dark.

Asha touched them. They were hard as string.

'How long has it been in there?'

Mrs Oddie put the lifeguard on her nose and peered. 'Since the miners' strike,' she said. 'The second one. Or possibly the first.' She turned to the till. 'Barnaby, you'll remember. Was it before the decimal pennies or after?'

Barnaby, being a till, said nothing.

Outside, a gull landed on the windowsill, looked in at the tangle of roots, and left.

Mrs Oddie wiped her hands on her cardigan and reached under the counter. She came up with a brown paper bag that said GULL STREET BAKERY on the front in curly red letters. It had held a cheese scone. It still had crumbs.

'Pencil,' she said.

Asha passed it over. Mrs Oddie shook the crumbs out for Dividend, who ignored them, then flattened the bag on the counter with the plain side up.

'A hundred pounds,' she said, writing it at the top. 'In an account that pays five per cent a year. What have you got after one year?'

'A hundred and five.' That was easy. Five pounds of rent.

'And after two?'

'A hundred and ten.'

Mrs Oddie said nothing. She only turned the bag round and slid the pencil across, and waited. Barnaby waited too. Rain ticked on the glass.

Asha chewed the end of her plait. The bank paid rent on the money you had in it. After one year she didn't have a hundred pounds in it any more. She had a hundred and five.

'Oh,' she said.

She wrote it out properly, the way she wrote in the paying-in book, one line at a time:

Start: £100.00
Year 1: £100.00 + £5.00 = £105.00
Year 2: £105.00 + £5.25 = £110.25

'Twenty-five pence,' said Asha. 'That's the extra. The five pounds earned its own rent.'

'Keep going.'

She did. Five per cent of £110.25 was £5.5125, which was a silly number, so she rounded it the way Kerry at the building society had shown her.

Year 3: £110.25 + £5.51 = £115.76
Year 4: £115.76 + £5.79 = £121.55
Year 5: £121.55 + £6.08 = £127.63

The column ran down the bag in her wobbly pencil, past the crease where the scone had been folded in. Each line was only a little bigger than the one before. Hardly anything. A few pence more each time.

But the few pence never went backwards.

Asha looked at the numbers. Then she looked at the roots on the newspaper, going round and round, each loop lying on top of the last.

Dividend put one paw on the bag, exactly on Year 5, and lay down.

Mrs Oddie slid the bag out from under him, which took some doing. He left a ginger hair on Year 3.

'There's a quicker trick,' she said, 'if all you want to know is when your hundred turns into two hundred. Mr Pengelly showed me in 1962, on the back of a tea ticket. Take seventy-two. Divide it by the rate.'

'Why seventy-two?'

'Because it works.' She thought about it. 'Near enough. It's an old rule. Don't ask it to be exact.'

Asha did it on the back of her hand, under last week's half-washed sum. Seventy-two divided by five. Fourteen, and a bit left over.

'Fourteen years,' she said. 'And a bit.'

'And a bit,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Eight per cent.'

'Nine.'

'Six.'

'Twelve.' Asha sat up. That one had come out of her mouth before her brain had finished. 'My turn. Three.'

'Twenty-four,' said Mrs Oddie, without even blinking behind the lifeguard. 'Twelve.'

'Six. Nine.'

'Eight. Seven.'

'Ten.' Asha frowned. Seven didn't go into seventy-two. 'Ten and a bit.'

'Ten and a bit. One point to the girl with the plait.' Mrs Oddie made a mark on the bag. 'Barnaby, are you keeping score? He isn't. He never does. Thirty-six.'

'Two years!'

'Nobody pays thirty-six per cent,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Not honestly. A man came into the branch once, in a camel coat, telling everyone in the queue he'd found a scheme that paid thirty-six per cent. Mrs Ellery from the chip shop nearly gave him her savings book right there by the leaflet stand. I had to...' She stopped. She looked at the bag. 'Where was I?'

'Thirty-six per cent. Not honestly.'

'Quite right. Your go.'

The rain had eased to a drizzle. A woman with a pushchair hurried past the window under a carrier bag. Asha opened her mouth to say nine again, then shut it, because there was a number she actually wanted to know.

'Four,' she said.

Mrs Oddie knew which number that was. She didn't answer straight away. She let Asha do it.

Seventy-two divided by four. Asha wrote it underneath Year 5, small, then a second line beside it, because a sum on its own didn't mean anything until you knew who it belonged to:

4% → about 18 years to double
Me now: 12. Me then: 30.

Mrs Oddie leaned over and read it upside down. Then she took the pencil back and, in her small bank-clerk handwriting, added two more lines at the very bottom of the bag, where the paper had gone soft with butter.

Year 10: £162.89
Year 20: £265.33

'I did those on the bus,' she said. 'Long ago. I've never forgotten them.'

Asha stared at the last number. Two hundred and sixty-five pounds and thirty-three pence. More than the telescope. Out of a hundred pounds that had just sat there.

'You'd have to wait twenty years,' she said.

'You would.' Mrs Oddie looked over at the orange tree, lying on its side on the Hollins Bay Gazette with its roots in a knot. 'I was twenty-eight when I put that pip in. Twenty-eight, with a perm I regret, and I thought I'd be picking oranges by the time I was thirty.'

Asha did the sum without meaning to. She didn't even need her hand.

Eighty-one take away twenty-eight. Fifty-three.

Fifty-three years in one pot.

Then she did the other one, the one she hadn't asked for. If Mrs Oddie put a hundred pounds in an account at four per cent today, it would double in eighteen years. Asha would be thirty. Mrs Oddie would be ninety-nine.

She looked at her line in pencil. Me then: 30. It seemed rude now, somehow. Greedy. As if she had taken the biggest slice without asking.

She opened her mouth. Nothing sensible was in it, so she closed it again.

Mrs Oddie didn't seem to notice. Or she noticed and let it go, the way she let Dividend sit on things. She was already rummaging behind the counter for a bigger pot, a cracked blue one that said CORNISH CREAM on the side.

'Roots first,' she said. 'We'll tease them out. Gently. They've been going round in circles long enough.'

Asha knelt on the newspaper and began to unwind them, one loop at a time.

Dividend came and lay on the bag, right on top of Year 20.