The Tree (4 page)

Mother's trips to the tree stopped that night – squashed like a jack-in-a-box waiting to have its lid lifted, she waited inside the house. I could hear her pacing in her room and I knew she felt trapped there by the eyes of the old women of the suburb. I had continued to eavesdrop on the old women's conversation from the cold tile floor as they left the house that evening, clopping down the front steps with their bunioned hoofs stuffed into mis-shapen sandals.

‘We all have dead husbands,' I heard Gladys hiss into the ear of another of the old girls.

‘She may have been a bit younger when she lost him, but so what,' another one said.

My mother heard them too and she was furious. Then I saw her decide not to brew on it and she broadened her thoughts. The next afternoon I discovered why. She must have decided that the only way to beat the enemy was to employ them. So during the cicadas five o'clock chorus I was marched across the road with my first communion dress that had sat for weeks in a paper bag crushed behind the door of my mother's bedroom. My mother called to warn Gladys that I was on my way over with the dress and a bag of beads that had been passed on from a cousin in far north Queensland. She asked Gladys if, as a favour, she could alter the dress to fit me and do something with the beads that had originally been intended to decorate the bodice, and as Gladys was such a wonderful embroiderer . . . I wondered as she continued to flatter her, if Gladys was aware of the ploy. Which, I assumed, was that Gladys, by doing this favour for my mother, would be seen not only by God, but also by most of the congregation to be helping a needy young widow. And if they didn't see it, they would hear about it, as her needlework was legendary throughout the suburb. In the process of completing the task she would gain some empathy for the family and soften her attitude towards my mother and the tree. That was the plan, I think.

As I crossed the road the sun blazed down from above a row of unchanging suburban pines growing along Gladys's side fence. Her house was in the middle of the block of land, surrounded on all sides by grass burnt brown in the mid-summer scorch. It was a perfect square, Gladys's house, and every window was closed, locked, barred and bolted. The Neighbourhood Watch sign on her front gate rattled as I closed the gate behind me.

Gladys opened her security door and I felt the cold air from inside rush about my ankles. Unfortunately only the front room was air-conditioned, and standing in Gladys's sewing room at the back of the house was like being torched with a hairdryer. The stiff white fabric of the dress prickled and the chunky homegrown seam where the bodice joined the skirt itched like mad. A line of pins holding up the hem around the sleeve dug into me and the caramel carpet at my feet was like dirty sand clotted with occasional brown boulders of old lady furniture. It made me feel faint. I longed to escape. I looked around, desperate to find a way out of the over-tidied house full of glass cases crammed with crystal and china.

‘When's the big day?' Gladys asked me.

‘Not until next year,' I admitted, wondering if Gladys would suddenly see through my mother's strategy.

I could see her wondering why my mother was so anxious to have the dress done when my first communion wasn't for another six months and Gladys knew my mother wasn't the type to be over-organized.

‘I can't promise anything,' she finally said, picking up the bag of beads. ‘I'm better with thread.'

She tutted then left the room.

‘That's old, that dress,' she called from the hall. I could hear her digging around in a cupboard in the hallway.

‘All my cousins made their communion in it,' I answered.

She returned with a square of folded white silk and I knew immediately the material had been meant for her own wedding. Gladys's fiancé, we'd all heard about him, had been left to rot in the corner of a prisoner-of-war camp in Changi, Singapore.

She never married and she never got over it, that was how the story went, and once a year she met a thin man who had shared the cell with her fiancé. To pass the time in the camp they had bet on a dice they made out of paper. He was so old now, the thin man, that he had stopped coming and Gladys had to go and visit him in an old people's home.

The sheet of white silk landed on the Formica and she started cutting, the scissors grating across the table top. She was going to make me a new communion dress from the fabric that should have been used for her own wedding dress. It gave me the creeps.

There was no way I was going to wear a dress made out of old lady material. I ran across the road to tell my mother. When I got there I was appalled to find her circling the base of the tree. Edward was in the kitchen trying to ignore her, the tell-tale film of flour covering the kitchen as he attempted to thicken the stew he was making with a cup of flour and water. James, Gerard and I sat on the top step watching her desperately tramping around the base of the tree like Pooh searching for the Heffalump. Eventually I couldn't stand it any longer and I started down the stairs, imagining I would think up an excuse on the way to stop her and bring her inside.

‘Dawn!' I heard someone say. The voice was deep and penetrated the wall of surging cicadas.

My mother froze. I stopped too, halfway down the garden, wondering where the voice had come from. For a moment I thought it was Dad, fed up with waiting for Mum to climb the tree to come and see him. Then I saw Vonnie at the bottom corner of the garden, leaning on a single grey fence post where the Kings', the Johnsons' and our back yards met.

‘Leave him for a while, Dawn.' Mum was with Vonnie now by the back fence and I was on the grass between her legs my hands reaching up and grabbing at her calf muscles.

‘You've got to let the dead get on with it,' said Vonnie.

My mother was instantly accepting that Vonnie knew what was going on.

‘I can't leave him alone,' she said.

‘Don't let him rule your life.'

From the ground where I was lying the tree appeared to have grown larger than our house.

‘Go mad if I do,' said Mum. ‘And mad if I don't.'

Vonnie shook her head, I wasn't sure if she was agreeing or disagreeing. ‘You can't live with the dead,' she finished.

‘Can't live without them either.' My mother's addendum.

Vonnie hauled a box of paw-paws on to the grey stump. ‘From the Lus.' She flicked her head in the direction of the Vietnamese family who lived next to her.

‘The fruit bats had a party last night.' She pointed to a clump of paw-paw trees in the Lus' garden. In the failing light they resembled a row of women wearing great circular hats and carrying buckets on poles balanced across their shoulders. Mr Lu's shovel rose and fell and a pad of dirt hit the pile he had already scooped into his wheelbarrow. If I crawled through the hole in the Johnsons' fence I could see the Buddha that sat under the macadamia nut tree on a plinth raised up on four bricks.

The tree blew up behind us revealing the veined underside of its branches. I felt as if it could grab me and lift me to the sky.

‘I talk to Tom most days,' Vonnie said, passing the paw-paws over the fence. ‘When I've got a minute, but not the other way round. I don't let him interrupt me. Unless its important.'

My mother nodded keeping her back to the tree. A new resolve seemed to be spreading through her body, the arches of her feet rose to greet some new possibility.

‘I've only lived for him these past few weeks,' she admitted. ‘I've not cooked. I've not talked to them.' I knew she was referring to us. ‘I'm sorry, love.' I lay my head against her thigh and allowed her to smooth my hair, pulling at bits and straightening them between her melancholy fingers.

‘They understand that,' said Vonnie. ‘But now give them some time. And be careful. Talking to the dead isn't something everyone understands.'

‘Vonnie, I'm that grateful to you,' my mother was crying. ‘I needed to be told. I'm sorry, I've lost it a bit these past few weeks.'

With fresh determination we traipsed up the back yard and closed the door on the spreading arms of the poincianna tree and Vonnie's clothes trolley rumbled back down her path.

Inside the kitchen Mum whipped the serving spoon from Edward's confused hand and hugged him. ‘I'm so sorry,' she said, pushing him into a chair and serving the gluggy rice and burnt stew he had made. ‘It's going to be okay now. I'm back, I'm here again.'

We watched her as she stood at the kitchen counter serving the food, the back that was so familiar to us, that never lied. We wanted to believe her because she was our mother and we needed to believe her, but something about her tone and the forced straightness in her spine made us fear the worst. She wanted to be with us, but she wasn't, not really.

‘My dad's up in the tree.' I said it to Megan just like that. Even though I'd sworn to Mum I wouldn't tell a soul, she had. And, anyway, he was my discovery so it seemed that I had the right to tell who I chose and Megan was my best friend, and it just came out in a spear of words I couldn't hold back.

‘I can see him,' Megan said. Her head was resting on the bar at the back of the swing. Her feet were stretched across to my seat and mine to hers. She pointed to the sky. A fleece of clouds slipped past, riddled with holes. I searched through it for ages trying to find him.

‘See his face?' she asked.

I couldn't. The cloud began to stretch. ‘He's gone now,' she said.

‘I didn't mean he's in heaven. He's in the tree, I told you.'

‘Is he?' she asked.

I nodded.

I could see Megan didn't believe me. ‘Didn't he go in a box?' Megan's sandy hair fell across her freckled face.

‘Yeah, he was, but now he's in the tree.'

‘We don't go in boxes,' said Megan. ‘We get burnt.'

The swing rocked slowly and Megan's leg dipped down to the grass.

I couldn't work out which was worse, the silence of the box or the horror of the flames.

‘I just want to be left,' I said, ‘and I'll find my own way.'

‘They've got to put you in something.'

‘On the beach,' I said. ‘If they have to. Wrapped in my favourite quilt.'

Megan was looking again to the racing clouds above us. ‘Witch jumping over a hurdle,' she said.

I watched as the witch's long white front leg grew longer and her face narrowed to a point.

‘Now it's a dragon.'

‘I see it,' said Megan.

‘Becoming an angel.'

‘With a bugle.'

‘Baby riding a pterodactyl holding a club!' I yelled.

‘Over there.' Megan pointed to a new bank of clouds. ‘Elephant with long toes.'

The wind pulled at the cloud elephant, elongating its toes, bending them into talons.

‘Claws,' I said.

‘Ribbons,' Megan contradicted me.

‘Claws!' I said louder, sitting upright and rocking our giant carriage-like swing. Megan dropped her head back to take another look but our cloud elephant had already joined a froth of clouds on the edge of the sky.

‘I want to see him then,' said Megan, slipping down to the ground.

‘You can't see him. You can only talk to him. Except we're all banned and Mum said they'd take her away if they found her up in the tree again.'

‘Take her away to where?' asked Megan.

‘I dunno.'

‘You'd be like an orphan.' Megan was excited.

‘I might have to come to your school,' I thought aloud.

‘That'd be good.'

I wasn't sure. ‘Do they do God at state school?'

‘Course,' she said.

‘Can't be the same one as ours?'

We had to think about that. If we had the same God, then why did we go to different schools?

‘It has to be different,' I said.

We were baffled. ‘If I'm a special Catholic,' I said, ‘at Catholic school – do they tell you that?'

Megan drew a blank expression. Obviously they didn't.

Was it all right we were different? Did it matter my school said it was better to be a Catholic and I was a better person because of it. They must be wrong, because I loved Megan and I wanted to spend every day with her for ever, but I was still worried about her school. Who were all the children there? Would they hate me if I had to go there because if they took Mother away, whoever they were, to this place, wherever it was, we might have to move and go to another school and be contaminated by children who weren't special Catholics. It was exciting and dreadful all at once.

‘I'll meet you tonight,' I said. ‘In the tree at the first branch. No sounds though. If we get sprung, Mrs Johnson'll call the fire brigade again.'

The night was a throng of wildlife: possums kicking mangoes to each other and skidding across the roof; squadrons of bats patrolling the sky; tree frogs belching out their nightly chorus, and all underscored by the drone of the cicadas.

When things had calmed and the night was breathing again, I rolled to the door of my bedroom and stepped as quietly as I could down the hall. My mother was fidgeting in her room, but she rarely checked us again after she had done her nightly rounds.

Jesus and his throbbing heart watched me drop out of the house, scraping my stomach on the windowsill on the way down. As I fell, I cut my foot on a sharp branch of the rhododendron tree under the corner window. On the ground the grass stabbed at my feet, it was that dry in the western corner of the house. I wondered why I hadn't used the back door as I bent my leg up to try and see how bad the cut was. Surely the lock on the back door couldn't be as loud as my pained landing.

James and Edward were still awake, goading each other to sneak into the kitchen and steal food. What they ate amazed me, gargantuan meals followed by slice after slice of bread. James was putting on weight, his grief was silent and fed on bread and strawberry jam, the colour of Our Lord's burning heart. Edward's grief was confused. He was torn between roles – husband, father, son? None seemed to fit. He tried to help Mum by talking to her after dinner about grown-up things and Mum let him, but it was the string of Misters to whom she really relieved the burden of how she felt. Her grief was a monologue she could unload on to anyone. Somehow her broken dam of grief had blocked the rest of us. Ours was notched up in explosive arguments. Fighting over the remnants of a meringue pie a neighbour had baked or scuffles over seating arrangements.

Megan was waiting on the lowest branch. We'd climbed the tree many times before so we scrambled up the first few branches easily. Taking turns, then, on top of the fifth branch to hug the tree, stretching a leg around the trunk until we could feel the dead branch on the other side. From the dead branch it was a step up to the snake-tongue branch, so named because it divided in two as it travelled towards the house, its feathered end tickling the weatherboarding. This was the branch that rubbed against the house and threw a shadow across the wall above Gerard's bed.

Once on that branch, you had to shimmy up to the cave, a kind of hollow in the trunk with a fan of branches above. That was the place where I had first talked to him. If you waited for the bats and the possums to silence themselves, breathed three times deeply, then you could hear him speak. But as I waited on the snake branch Megan, who was straddling the tree to step on the dead branch, heard a whisper coming from the verandah. She tapped my leg, alerting me to the low voices. I shrank to a ball on the branch and pulled Megan up.

Through the curtain of foliage we could see my mother's bare legs and the outline of the drain man leaning on the railing of the verandah. My mother was beckoning him to move along the verandah to the front of the house. As she disappeared into the shadow of the house, I saw her throw a glance to the top of the tree. It was only a flash, a twitch on her forehead, but its minuteness spelt guilt.

We edged along snake-tongue branch until we could see them, the idea of communing with the dead quickly forgotten when there was real-life intrigue before us. We lay on either side of the snake's forked tongue and watched. We could just make out in the shadows that they were drinking a bottle of beer.

‘That stuff's foul,' said Megan.

‘I know,' I said. I could imagine smearing away the goose flesh on the outside of the bottle with a fidgeting finger.

‘Do they have sex?' Megan whispered across to my branch.

‘No,' I said. ‘He clears the pipes when the roots get in.'

‘Do we like him?'

‘No,' I said. ‘He likes my mother.'

There was movement, their voices scooted around the edge of the house. My mother's mood had changed. She stepped back into the light. In and out of the shadows her face moved. The drain man was beside her. There was some demand from my mother, then a clipped reply from him. Then he was gone.

The tree began to vibrate. I could feel a rumbling. Megan looked spooked. ‘Let's get out of here,' she said. We reversed down the tree quickly, the bark scratching at our bare legs.

We didn't speak until we reached the ground.

‘I'll see you tomorrow,' Megan said, anything but disappointed that she hadn't managed to speak with the dead. It was far more interesting for her to see my mother drinking beer in the dark with a plumber than it was to talk with my dead father.

‘Yeah,' I said, ‘I'll see you tomorrow.'