Hovering in the corner was a flat square . The square was contoured and coloured in hues of brown.
Below the rainbow brown surface were four pillars. Each pillar reached up from the ground and touched a corner of the square. The cylindrical pillars were a single shade of silver. A sad silver shade only good at reflecting their surroundings and keeping the square off the ground. The square and pillars were the simple construct of a table. It never thought of itself as simple, let alone a table.
His mind was a cocohony of square thoughts. Each thought a simple truth, isolated from all other thought but identical if only in their complexity. His mind was a reflection of the hive of activity that occasionally occupied his back. His back was only his back when he decided to it to be. It became his back when hard circular objects were placed upon him. At times he decided it was his face. It never occured to him this was a unique thing to do. Face swapping was his way of escaping the mottled thing that never did anything except stare and stare and stare. The truth, and do not tell Tafula is that mottled thing was a carpet, a badly dyed collection of polyester yarn that was showing its age. The carpet was hardly ever cleaned and the mottled effect was highlighted with ingrained bits of food and shoe passengers.
Tafula was alone. He was the only living piece of furniture. A square freak. Even the chairs that surrounded him in a faux warm embrace were lifeless. His own legs were not alive. Tables unlike us are not hewn from a single piece of wood, especially in this modern era with mechanical carpentry. Tafula’s legs were milled out of nickel and aluminum alloys mined in Africa, smelted in China and finished in Bristol. Ok, milled is a stretch. The alloys were poured into a mould, left to cool and finally dipped into a bath to create table legs with a matt silver finish. That is the story of Tafula’s lifeless legs, they will carry him for the rest of his life.
In this world devoid of craft and life how was Tafula living and conscious? It all started several hundreds of years ago with a brown dusty seed falling off a giant teak tree. A tiny hard husk hid the promise of life. The seed had fallen to the ground in North Western Zimbabwe. In that time seedlings were all the rage, a carpet amongst a forest of tree trunks. The days were spent waiting for the rains, soaking up the water and slowly unfurling themselves into samplings. They chatted and played racing for the patches of sunlight under their moms beautiful purple and green frocks.
When he was a boy the world was abuzz with animal life, some small and some absolutely huge. The older trees whispered their tales in the winds that swayed them. The stories seems endless, talking about times so far gone that they could only be measured in when the rains came and went and not in the daily pulse of the sun. That pulse, the ebb and flow of when the trees woke up to eat the light and watch the life of the savanna playing out its never ending rhythm. Tafula and his fellow samplings lost a fear with each passing rainy season. They raced towards the sun, trying to outrun the animals that would seek out the juicy green leaves that kept them alive. After a few decades of rainy seasons they had outgrown all the animals except the hulking grey elephants. The elephants would wrap their trunk around a young tree and pull them out of the ground screaming. Even when you were a few decades old the young bull elephants in a show of strength would push trees over and sometimes even managed to kill them. If as a tree you were lucky you survived and grew up as a mangled heap of foliage, alive but never tall and true.With no elephants Tafula’s existence would cover hundreds of rainy seasons. He made it. He grew into a large impressive tree on the edge of a kopje where a greek emerged from the random rock pile to make its way across the plain.
From his throne he watched various battles play out in the plains, from prancing impalas to majestic lions. He saw good lions rule, bad lions rule and even the occasional mediocre mangy male hold court in the rocky outcrop under the shade of his branches. Lions were always present, sometimes they thrived but more often than not they barely made it from one season of plenty to another. He occasionally grew attached to a pride male, but could never do anything but watch as that male ascended to his own kingship and finally get ejected by a younger, stronger male. He had always thought the whole thing was a phenomenal waste of energy and the main reason lions never lived long. In those days his thoughts were vivid, filled with colour and awash with sensory stimuli. He could almost reach out and grab the strands of grass that tickled his huge trunk. He did sometimes let the tricks of the wind allow him to caress a lioness perched on his limbs. The limited sense of touch he possessed was a liability when random troops of baboons moved through his branches between scavenging episodes. He hated it when there was no pride in his kopje and the baboons made it their home, in those years his limbs took a pounding, broken branches were the order of the day.
During one reason the tree that would become Tafula noticed a new bipedal animal roaming the plains. It was a medium sized creature that nearly always carried an object of some size or shape or colour in the limbs that never touched the ground. It would come and go particularly when it was raining. They chattered incessantly, quieter than the baboons but just like them they never fell into complete silence for long. Ok maybe the tree was unfair. But only because they did not insist on swinging from his branches. They were innoculous. Tafula had no idea they would be far worse than the time when the rains vanished and the grass gave way to sand or when the blazing fires licked his leaves. Their love of fire was the first that would have raised his woody eyebrows if he had any. They were the only animal that he ever saw make fire by rubbing his dead branches together and they were the only animal that needed the fire when the sun went to sleep. He thought of them as the fire animal, they needed it to sleep, to eat, to chatter louder, to stay warm and to kill. Fire, and more fire. Fire would bring their offspring the tools to fell the tree giants of the savanna. One of those giants Tafula watched them quizzically as they grew old in his shadow.
The day came. When the fire animal would swing an axe into the heart of the tree’s belly. Cutting at his thin bark into his hard flesh. It started off as a mild stimulation. He was not worried because unlike the other trees he could not be pushed over by elephants, his flesh was harder than them all. But the fire men took turns, moving the axe amongst themselves. Tafula, was now in agony. He leaves fell to the ground, silent green tears. The wind howled through the gaping red hole in his belly as the sun baked his flesh. He now struggled with his balance, his once proud crown was now threatening to snap his back in half, collapsing him to the ground. He watched helplessly as they worked their way around him. He looked down at his eviscerated centre both galled at the horror of why they would do this but also captivated as he stared into himself. The tree looked at the sharp shards of his flesh that formed a carpet under the working men’s feet and wondered if they were looking back up at him. All his might, the hundreds of rainy seasons could not help him for he had never learnt to speak, to cry for help. With the mortal wounds cast. The men stopped.
The rains came and went. Tafula could feel the coolness of the drops on the few remaining leaves he could muster up. He could not convert the food in the ground and the light on his leaves into him. He was ring barked. Another rainy season came and went. Soon there were no leaves. An upright shadow of a tree stood on the edge of the kopje, marking the spot where a giant teak tree once lived. His mind still worked. A consciousness caught between age rings. The men then returned to fell him.
His skeletal remains were chopped up into manageable pieces. The heavy, heavy wood was loaded into wagons and taken away to be worked. The men had not come for timber furniture. They had come to build a railway across Africa. They carved him into 2m long sleepers to hold the railway up for the trains to run along. Sleepers, was what the men called the heavy pieces of wood. Sleepers, was what had become of the teak trees. For the next 60 years the sleepers held the commercial success of man on their backs. For man his success was unheralded for his species but the plains around the the railway lines died. Hunted, burnt and exploited, life disappeared.
None of that history was stored in his memory. His consciousness was a splintered collection of rough shards. Fast forward 60 years and rail as the economic backbone is waning in Africa. Poor maintenance and corruption has diverted the transportation business to heavy haulage trucks, where money is to be made by private individuals. The tracks that had supported commerce slowly rusted and warped. The sun and the rain having their way with the long pieces of iron. The tracks that had burdened him would soon be peeled off and repurposed. In the dying years of the railway compounds had sprouted alongside the tracks where communities could catch cheap, slow transport to their work in the city. Young boys and girls spent many an afternoon playing alongside the tracks, playing hopscotch between the sleepers. The idea was not to step in the gravel that supported the sleepers but to only run and skip on top of the pieces of wood. One of the boys, Thabani was an exceptional player. His feet effortless skipped atop the sleepers never touching the gravel. He was undefeated and would reign supreme his entire childhood. His feet seemed to glide along the slabs of teak that had been weathered to a coarse grey over their decades in the sun. Thabani’s feet seemed to know that his calling was to be a great carpenter, and never missed the opportunity to feel the coarseness of weathered wood along his soles.
As a man, Thabani had a home in the same compound he grew up in, just a few meters from being trackside. He had taken up carpentry in high school and excelled going on to get an A in his O’levels and winning prizes for his creations at the Polytechnic college. Mr T, was his nickname, whether is was due to the influence of the A team in the 80s or the fact that through his teenage years he always had a t-square in top pocket of his school uniform or maybe it was easier to yell than Thabani?
Mr T was known throughout the compound and across the city as the go-to carpenter for bespoke work. His creations forced the viewer to caress the curves and prod the edges of the wood. From tables to chair to kitchen countertops to beds, Mr T made it all. He never made any curios however as he had a practical streak in him that refused to waste wood by creating fluff. He insisted wood was to be worked and it was to be used, not left in a corner for the occasional glance. His fame meant that the railway company reached out to him when the decision was made to repurpose the railway lines, they wanted worthy carpenters to convert the sleepers into the highest quality furnishings. He could hardly believe it. He had often wondered as he walked to the local pub what he would do with the wood from the sleepers if given the chance. He knew that they were all older than the city that had sprung up around them, they were from a time before man came here. What could be a fitting piece?