بخش 06

How you doing You look tired

I’m fine

Mum’s on this new medicine

It’ll make her better

She goes into hospital once every two weeks

and they pump the medicine into her bloodstream

She is sick for the next few days,

but she is better again

Your sister’s doing better

Half-sister

Yeah

I’d still love you to meet her

I’ve been talking with your grandma

about bringing you out to LA

You want me to come to LA

Yeah, absolutely

You would you like that, wouldn’t you

Yeah

We were thinking over Christmas

You can be back here in time for school

So you mean just for a visit, then

Yeah, but it would be great

I don’t want to live with Grandma

It’s an old lady’s house,

with old lady’s things

You can’t touch anything or sit anywhere

You can’t leave a mess for two seconds

Conor

I want to have my own room

in my own house and my own things

You wouldn’t have that in America

There’s barely enough room for us

I don’t care

Conor, listen

She is so strict

Your family, your life, your friends

Her house is like a museum

All of it is here

It’d be unfair to take you out of it

Unfair to who

Conor

Doesn’t look like your grandma’s home yet

She sometimes goes back

to the hospital after I go to bed

The nurses let her sleep in a chair

Just because she doesn’t like me,

doesn’t make her a bad person

She says you’re all start and no finish

Well, she is entitled to her own opinion

How long are you here for

As long as I can be

What does that mean

We don’t have a lot of money

And Americans don’t get a lot of holidays

You’re not American

But I live there now

I’ll come back whenever I need to

And you are gonna come to LA for Christmas

In your cramped house,

where there’s no room for me

Conor

Why did you come

Conor, wait

Conor, I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah

There’s still loads of time

As destruction goes,

that was remarkably pitiful

Now, I have come to tell you the second tale

Is this as bad as the last one

It ends with proper destruction,

if that’s what you mean

It’s about a man who thought only of himself,

who wasn’t as generous as he should have been

A man who gets punished very badly indeed

Stories aren’t real, though

They don’t help anything

Stories are wild creatures, Conor O’Malley

When you let them loose, who knows

what havoc they might wreak

Oh, yes

Okay

Go on, then

Good

150 years ago, the future came

Factories grew in the landscape

like weeds

Trees fell, rivers blackened

and the sky choked on smoke and ash

But there was still green

if you knew where to look

On the edge of this town lived

a stubborn man who refused to change

He dealt in the old ways of medicine,

herbs and barks and concoctions

brewed from berries and leaves

Villagers only ever called him the apothecary

The what

The apothecary

An old fashion name for pharmacist

Why didn’t you just say

There was also a young parson in this village,

an enlightened man and a kind one

who just wanted the very best for his congregation

He preached against the apothecary’s

use of the old ways,

and the apothecary’s foul temper and greed

made certain some of these sermons

fell on eager ears

Much as he tried to keep on helping the community,

his business sank,

which only made him grow bitter

On the parsonage grounds

there also lived a yew tree

That’s the hill where you live

The yew tree is the most important

of all the healing trees

Why

Its berries, its bark,

they thrum and burn and twist with life

It can cure almost any ailment

Really Anything

Anything that can be cured,

if mixed by the right apothecary

The apothecary wanted the yew tree very badly

But in order to harvest these things