Free Frozen by Richard Burke Page A

weren't the types to build treehouses—or to seek them out. A groundsman patrolled the area occasionally, but he was looking for poachers, not concealed wooden platforms. I had only found it myself because I climbed the tree for the hell of it—again, something neither distinguished academics nor game wardens were famous for.
    Who made it? I have no idea. The boards were already powdered green when I found it, although the wood had not yet rotted. I never did discover whose dream we had taken over, but even today I am grateful to them. It was a simple platform jutting perhaps two or three feet out from the trunk, and forming a semicircle. It ran a little more than halfway round the trunk. From where we had climbed up, it curved away to the right.
    Verity climbed up first. “Wow,” she breathed, and I could imagine her large eyes, wide and sparkling, her mouth open just a little, her delicate teeth. She was standing on the branch without holding on, knees grazed and greened and her blue dress stained by the climb. She had taken off her shoes and socks, and she held them idly in one hand. I could imagine the rough feel of the bark beneath her bony feet. “Oh... this is brilliant, Harry.” It took me a moment or two to respond. I was below her, and transfixed by the fact that I could see up her skirt.
    “Told you you'd like it.” I wriggled round the branch to stand behind her.
    “Yeah,” she said, in a long sigh. “Wow...”
    I took off my own shoes, carefully gripping the branch with my spare hand. She almost skipped along it. “Oh, wow.” She clambered up on to the platform. I followed, and set my shoes down next to hers. We walked round the semicircle to where the boards appeared to sink into the flank of a vast branch. When she turned to me there was wonder in her eyes. We sat side by side with our backs against the gnarled bark, feet stretched out towards the edge, and looked out into a dizzying cage of leaf-light. Tremendous spars of wood leaped out to buttress the green wall that sealed our universe from the world outside. I remember the comfort of being there, knowing that we need say nothing. For a small while we held hands, and then we released them—let it mean whatever it meant. The air was full of the scent of dry wood, and the chatter of the leaves. This was the place that would make the summer magical.
    *
    It wasn't long before Verity took over. Not content with the treehouse as it was, she wanted to improve it. Within a week she had made the place thoroughly hers.
    First, there was her insistence that no treehouse was complete without a swing. She scavenged a good length of hemp rope from old John Taylor, who repaired cars in a mire of greasy filth he called a yard—and who also owned the best orchard for miles around, which Verity and I regularly plundered. Goodness knows how she got the rope out of him; she wouldn't tell. He was a mean old sod. I can't imagine him ever doing anything out of the kindness of his dark and oily heart. But Verity had a way with her—her determination and innocence were hard to resist.
    Then it turned out she had a flair for three-dimensional thinking because she found an anchor spot that let us use the swing in countless ways. She spotted a cleft in a branch about ten feet up and out from the platform's far end. To my eyes, it didn't look promising, but she insisted. To attach the rope she had to stand on my shoulders and pull herself up on to a branch way above head height, then crawl out along it until she was hanging perilously perhaps twenty-five feet above the ground with nothing to break her fall, wrestling with a thick and uncooperative mass of hemp.
    “You should let me do it,” I called anxiously. She had just lost her grip for the fifth or sixth time, and was swinging beneath the branch by her knees. She stopped trying to get back up and hung upside-down, staring at me intently. Her dress had fallen away. Its hem brushed her chin, and she swung gently,