The Tree (5 page)

I'd only been back in my bed a minute when I heard a scratching on the wall behind me. I jumped with fright before realizing it was only the rats running inside the walls. Since Dad had died the rodents had moved in. They knocked on the wall by the end of the bed, rapping on the timbers. I was too frightened to move. I was scared if I made a noise I wouldn't hear them chewing through the walls above my head. Then I'd miss the crucial moment to escape before they attacked me.

The volume of their scratching increased suddenly. It sounded like three of them were fighting, chasing each other in a whirlpool of rat limbs. I heard my mother stirring in her bed on the other side of the wall. She punched the fibro hard with a book trying to shut them up.

Then my wall breathed in, I saw it and I felt it. Then out, it billowed. I gasped. I heard the shattering of glass and my mother scream. I jumped from my bed and ran to her room and found her squashed against the bedhead, her arms over her head. By her side, lying in her bed, was the snake-tongue branch. It stretched from the window across the room to the bed, where its frayed tips lay draped beside her. As she dared to drop her hands from her face I could see her expression change from fear to grief as she realized that the branch lay on my father's side of the bed.

That was when I first understood that whatever was between my mother and the drain man was serious, he wasn't just another mister. I could see her recognize it as well, and now my father was letting her know he wasn't going to give her up that easily. Even if nothing was happening with the drain man, he was aware that whatever my mother felt for him, my father, and no matter what intimate moments they had shared at the top of the tree, they were limited. Even though those moments seemed real, as real as any moment of dialogue any two living people could have, they could never share a bed again, their relationship would never involve the flesh. I understood then that there was something in the hardship of real life that was so vital it transcended the spiritual. The fact that he could never compete with the realness of human contact struck me like a blow. And there was this other thing called sex, and I didn't understand it or know what it was, but it had to do with beds and men and women, and I realized I hated my mother for whatever it was she had done to make my father mad. There was this bed and two men involved and I sensed that meant trouble. So Dad's attempt to assert his claim over my mother was so poignant, I wanted to cry.

Edward arrived and gaped at the damage before him. My mother still hadn't moved. The bed and floor were covered in glass. She motioned for Edward to stay where he was, though his instinct was to rush to her. She pointed to her shoes thrown down in the corner of the room. Edward, in bare feet, leant in and retrieved them. He threw them to her on the bed and she slipped her feet into them and carefully swung her legs down to the floor. The fragments of glass scrunched under foot and she took her time getting to us. At the doorway she turned back to look into the room. It didn't appear as if she found it strange or out of place that the branch we called snake tongue, that had for years rubbed against the side of the house on windy nights, forcing me to lie awake listening to it grinding its bare knuckles on the weatherboarding, had flung itself into her room. My mother waved the damage away; shrugged it off as if it were an inevitable household accident waiting to happen, like a top-heavy vase of flowers sitting in a gusty spot. She walked away from it down the hall pushing Edward and me towards the bank of moonlight at the kitchen window.

It was near one o'clock and somehow the excitement of having a reason to be awake in the middle of the night overtook us and as my mother was oddly chatty we wanted to stay with her. Her moods were so unpredictable any chance of being with her when she wasn't dark and erratic were moments to cherish. There was a joy in her movement and her voice. Edward, I could tell, was appreciating it as much as I. She fed us, cooked a meal even with what felt like genuine love. It seemed a weird response to the drama. I put it down to adrenalin and the fact that her moods had become so random due to the shock of Dad's death. We were all in shock at the time, but we didn't know it. Whatever the reason for her cooking the meal we were grateful and just after two o'clock I went back to my bed feeling happy, until I remembered the branch.

I don't know where my mother slept that night, but I have a feeling it was in her bed amongst the devastation. That made me sad because I thought she was going insane. I knew that meant we would have to keep looking after her, making sure no one knew about what was going on, and I cursed the day I climbed the tree and talked to my dad and believed that it would help my mother to tell her to climb the tree and talk to him.

The branch stayed where it was for the rest of the week, while my mother's moods continued to fluctuate. Mostly she seemed happy and in no hurry to have the branch removed from the side of the house and the damage repaired. It wasn't what most people associated with normal mother behaviour. Mothers on the whole seemed to be cleaners by nature. Things that were broken were thrown out or fixed, drains had to be cleared, toilets unblocked, light bulbs changed, saucepans scoured, that was natural mother behaviour. Leaving a gaping hole in the side of your house with a branch sticking out of it was irresponsible. It was unthinkable mother conduct.

It was only when she found us using it as a tightrope that she was forced to act. As the week had gone on we had begun to sneak into her room and dare each other to walk from the bed to the trunk of the tree. The rules didn't allow us to sit or use our hands in any way, other than stuck out from our sides, wavering, like a tightrope walker. It was much more dangerous than it looked. Standing on the bed it was an easy enough dare, but once outside the window the dense foliage shielded a view of the ground below, disguising the fact that it was a long way down.

I didn't think then and I still don't that my father was the tree, or the tree my father. The spirit of him or some memory or part of him was undeniably there, so it became the focus of our memory of him, past, present, future. It was how we kept him alive, forcing him to stay near us. How much of what happened with the tree was caused by his presence there is difficult to say and sceptics find the suggestion ludicrous. What happened may have been coincidental, but it appeared as if the tree was acting like a jealous husband. It had lunged through my mother's window grabbing for her, as if he were trying to take her with him so she could join him in death.

It may have been that it was the gesture of a sad and lonely spirit wanting to do the most banal of human activities, go to sleep in his own bed with his wife, a pleasure he had been robbed of. No matter which way I thought about it, seeing the branch on my mother's bed made me sad, but also terrified of the power of the dead.

The drain man turned up a few days later saying he wanted to check our drains, he was still concerned about them. We knew it was really to see our mother. Seeing a living man and noting, though I was too young to put words to it, the way he looked at her, made me see the power of the living. It was immediate and grounded, not wafty and indefinite like our relationship with our father.

My mother and the drain man stood at either corner of her bed. The branch pinned across the covers wasn't a sight that was easy to comment on.

She had stalled him downstairs by the laundry for half an hour trying to hide the damage in her bedroom above. It was difficult to see it from the ground as the tree grew so close to the house. You could stand immediately below the catastrophe and be unaware of it. Eventually I noticed her manoeuvre him into a position where he could see the unbelievable sight of the branch skewering the house.

‘Holy shit,' he said. Then, ‘Sorry,' when he saw we were all watching him.

Mother appeared to be reassured by his reaction somehow. He looked things over for a long time before he made any comment.

‘Jeez, Dawn. It's a bit freaky.'

‘Isn't it?' She finished his sentence using the same rhythm, in the weird way they'd had from the start.

The fact that she knew, that he knew she'd made no attempt to have the branch removed magnified its strangeness.

‘I guess I should do something about it,' said Mum. ‘I just wasn't sure what to do. Where to start.'

The drain man skirted the room searching for a reason as to why my mother might be so odd as to want to keep the branch of a tree in her room.

He looked at her. ‘Are you serious?'

Mum just looked at him.

‘I've heard about people building houses round trees. I wouldn't recommend it though, the plumbing's a nightmare.'

She smiled and I saw her wonder for a second, if she could let him in on her secret. Then I grasped the reason why she couldn't. They were standing by the bed, the air felt gluey with the tension between them. The weight of the heat seemed to allow them to look at each other for longer than I had seen grown-ups look at each other before – if that was what they were doing. His dark, earthen eyes met her imperfect blue irises and I knew that he was going to lie in my father's place, on my father's bed. I will never see my father again, I thought. He will leave us for good if this man comes in here. This man who may have a wife, children. The children would have to come on weekends. I'd heard about this. I'd have to share my room with more boys. Chances were he'd have three boys with names like Jack, Stephan and Timothy, and then there would be six boys and me, and I held my breath until I fainted and toppled down on to the un-vacuumed hall carpet. I came round a minute later and was sick over the gritty rug at the door of my mother's room.

I didn't have to worry about more children. My brothers and I discovered later that night when we listened to my mother and the drain man talking in a dark corner of the verandah that he did have children, two daughters, adopted from Malaysia, but they were older. He and his wife had fostered many other children, but had no children of their own. This placed a stress on their relationship that eventually caused them to separate. We heard all this listening through the open window of mother's bedroom. They were only feet away from us but it was difficult to hear sometimes above the sound of the beating cicadas.

When we heard their chairs grating along the wood of the deck we scattered, but they were only topping up their glasses with beer. Finally the drain man left; we watched from the front window. Mum waved him off from the dewy grass of the footpath in her bare feet. I saw her sneak a quick look about her, checking to see if the neighbours were watching.

That night I heard my father calling to me again. I put a pillow over my head to stop the noise. I didn't want to talk to him. I went to my mother, but she wasn't in her room. Now that the branch had been removed it seemed so empty in there. We'd become accustomed to it lying across the bed. The drain man had cleared it all away that afternoon, lowering it with ropes like a coffin into a grave. The leaves had fluttered down in eerie circles.

‘Simone,' I heard my father calling me.

‘No,' I said, and I searched the house more desperately for my mother. I found her huddled on the sofa with the television on, watching a late movie. I saw her confusion as the black and white film flickered on her face. She didn't bother to take me back to bed.

For the next week she seemed to sleep anywhere but in her bed and the tree began calling me again. It drove me mad, but she was cross with him, she said, for complicating her life, for leaving her and for a while she turned her back on him. It seemed easier to think of him as dead than partly living with us. His memory was an inconvenience and though my mother didn't know it at the time or maybe she did, it was stopping her getting on, stopping us all. It had been useful for her to be able to talk to him, but not so useful for living with the living. And the drain man was very much alive. He seemed to be life itself: the way he walked, he was cemented to the earth. It made my father seem even more dead. They were earth and air and my mother was the fire between them. There was no water to be seen anywhere. Water may have lubricated it all, oiled the awkwardness that I felt between the three of them. The water that was there kept getting blocked in the drains.

Later that week I heard her scream. She was under the house. She was hanging the clothes there to dry because it looked like rain. I wasn't desperate to see what fresh horror she'd found, so I didn't hurry. I dawdled down the stairs and found her staring at a tree root that had churned a path across the cement in its search for water. The knuckles of the roots protruded like an arthritic hand that was attempting to straighten. We could see that one of the wooden stumps that supported the house was being pushed up by the roots and would eventually force itself through the floor. My mother became immobilized again. She didn't want anyone to know because it meant being told what she knew already, that the tree was pushing the house over. Her only hope was if it rained, then there was a chance that the tree would get enough water and it would stop the ground contracting and the house from shifting. She knew eventually she would have to decide between them, the house or the tree. The house our safety, the past, and the only way she knew to have a future. And the tree, her husband, the past, and the only way she knew to have a future. Her way of dealing with it was to ignore it and hope it would go away.

‘Bless me Father,' I faltered. I had been forced to repeat the mantra so many times it had finally slipped.

‘For I have sinned,' the priest reminded me.

‘For I have sinned,' I repeated. ‘This is my first confession and these are all my sins.'

There was a silence.

‘This is all secret, isn't it?' I leant in closer to the grille that separated us. It was Father Gillroy on the other side, the new priest. He was very enthusiastic and made time in his life to smile.

‘It is,' he said.

I waited a bit longer, not sure what to say next. We'd been given a list of sins – arguing with your brothers and sisters, answering back, taking the name of the Lord in vain. I wanted to say, ‘All the things on the list, Father.' But none of them were quite right. I didn't have sisters. I never answered back because I preferred to sulk. I didn't say God or Jesus, I said bloody hell. So I said: ‘I stayed up late.'

‘That's not a sin, my child.'

‘It might be,' I said. ‘Because I was listening to my mother and she was talking to a man.'

The outline of the priest on the other side of the grille flickered as he moved forward in his chair.

‘I'm sure that you did nothing wrong,' he reassured me. ‘Just listening to your mother and a neighbour talking, I expect.'

I could tell I had his attention now.

‘A plumber,' I said.

‘Oh.' He seemed relieved.

‘But he'd finished the plumbing hours ago.' I paused, remembering what had happened next. ‘Then she went to talk to Dad.'

I connected with the priest's fishy eye and I saw that he recognized me, so I said again: ‘This is all secret, isn't it?'

‘Yes, of course. Only God is listening.'

‘Dad's in the tree, we go and talk to him there.' I waited for my accolades. I assumed because of the angels in heaven and the Holy Spirit, I would be rewarded for having my own personal ghost. I felt so much better for telling him. Now I understood what this confession business was all about. I was working out things I'd not understood before.

‘In the tree?' the priest enquired. ‘How do you mean?'

‘That's where we talk to him, since he died,' I said.

I waited for the priest to ask for details, to give me my due praise. He didn't. The relief I'd felt moments earlier vanished and was replaced by red-faced embarrassment.

‘Very good,' he said. ‘Anything else to report?' I could tell he was trying to change the subject subtly and bring it back to my confession.

‘I've done everything on the list,' I blurted out.

He seemed happy enough with such a broad spectrum admission.

‘Say one perfect Hail Mary and one perfect Our Father and listen to the words as you say them.'

And that was that. We'd been taught confession was just a little chat with you and the priest and God, and so it was. But it left me feeling peculiar. No one had said anything about that.

I knelt in the church trying to ignore the fact that because I had taken so long in the confessional there was now along the hallowed pews a row of girls, their heads dipped supposedly in prayer, whispering, ‘How many sins did you tell him?'

The crinkled-up nose of Katherine Padley poked under the wall of my hair.

‘You're just supposed to do three or four off the list,' she said.

‘I know,' I said. I felt indignant. ‘But I did the whole list.'

She looked bewildered and wrinkled her nose up again, then she seemed to understand something that I didn't. She patted my arm in that special way the women at the funeral had done when they had supported the grieving family members under the elbow and led them to and from their seats in the church.