The Tree (6 page)

‘Is that your mother up the tree of a night?' Gladys asked me, as I stepped up on to the table from the pattern of caramel twirls on her lounge-room carpet. She had already slipped the dress over my head. The weight of the beading caused it to sink with great speed over my body like a stage curtain being dropped halfway through a performance. It had ballast that dress and a bizarre odour. Partly it smelt new, the seams, the thread, the edge left by the fresh cut of the scissors, but the overall fragrance was that of old ladies' clothes in the Saint Vincent De Paul shop. I was desperate to get out of it but her question had come, like all those adult questions did, when you least expected them.

‘I've seen you all in the tree,' she mumbled, pushing me up on to the table, a curve of pins poking out from her mouth. She looked at me with the lizard yellow of her eyes. I was too petrified to answer.

I heard the Neighbourhood Watch sign on Gladys's gate shaking, then footsteps coming up her front stairs.

‘Hello.' There was a voice at the screen door. I'd never been more grateful for an interruption. Gladys's face folded into a question mark. She halted on the brink of one of the caramel twirls where she was stopped dead like a grandfather's clock. All she had to do to see who was calling was take a step forward, but she hesitated for so long that the caller had to speak out again. Now that she was sure there was someone there, she limped with her square body to the screen door while I stayed on the table waiting.

‘Father Gillroy,' she breathed out, relieved, excited and terrified all at once.

‘On my rounds, Gladys, are you available?'

Gladys spluttered and muttered, spat out her mouthful of pins and showed willing by initiating some hurried fumblings with the lock on the door.

‘Look at the work in that, Gladys.' Father Gilroy offered the compliment to Gladys on seeing me standing on the lounge-room table. He turned back to me. ‘You look lovely, Simone.'

‘Well, her mother asked,' Gladys whispered to him. ‘She isn't up to it.'

Father Gillroy nodded. If he was confused as to why Gladys was making my communion dress months before I was due to wear it, he didn't show it.

That night the priest joined the long line of misters who had came to call on us since Dad's death, seven months earlier. The other misters had tips on accounts, wills, drains and cookery, but the priest, in his Bermuda shorts and his bold-patterned shirt with a gold cross pinned to the collar, had arrived with a new sub-category of advice; spiritual guidance. He came back with me across the hot bitumen road and we found my mother in the space we mostly found her in those days, that was halfway through a number of domestic tasks – cooking, washing, cleaning, phoning. She would leave one for another, resume the previous, begin another, and do all of them badly. I knew she would be grabbing for her shoes when she heard the priest's sandalled feet slapping down the front path. She would be running in half-crescent swirls, worrying all at once about what to feed him, where to sit him, the inconvenience of it, the mess of the house. She let us in, at the same time pushing Edward to the kitchen to cook something while she entertained the priest. She behaved as if she were being interviewed by an adoption agency, trying to present her best side, at the same time being resentful that her suitability was being questioned. She was nervous, and scathing. It was childish, but at least she hadn't been hoisted into silence like the rest of us. The priest seemed aware that he inspired this response, but he projected over the awkwardness he was causing.

At least he wasn't dressed like a black crow, like the old priest who had retired to the beach somewhere north and hot. His visits had been terrifying, a mystery they were, like a weird performance where everyone had been rehearsed separately and brought together at the last minute, leaving all involved assuming the other party understood what was going on.

The young priest's style was more difficult to pigeonhole because he wore normal clothes and talked about sport and gardening. He appeared to be like everyone else, but he wasn't, because he was a priest. He accepted our hospitality on a take it or leave it basis, assuming he may be asked to leave or decide to go himself at any moment. Happy to eat or not eat, talk or sit in silence. But to give him his due after a difficult meal of stew and rice – difficult because the stew was full of cornflour lumps and the rice solid, and difficult because it was full of strangling silence – it was he not my mother that released us.

‘Let them go off, Dawn, and get on with their homework.'

We breathed as one, as silent a sigh of relief as we could, tiny, like a mouse's breath and my mother and the priest retired to the verandah where they sat opposite each other, Gerard wrapped around my mother's feet, like a sleeping cat. They were drinking beer and talking easily it appeared from where I was half hiding in the living room by the television.

‘It's not like there's any question in her mind that he's there,' I heard my mother say.

‘I'm sure there isn't. The image is fascinating and not without symbolic significance. It's a form of thought transference.'

‘Huh?' My mother grunted.

The priest was over-educated, but dim with lack of life experience and my mother was clever but barely schooled.

‘It's one way of explaining these types of experiences,' he added.

‘I wouldn't tell her that,' my mother snapped. She was put out by the priest's explanation of who or what we talked to when we communicated with Dad. Not that she'd fessed up to the priest that she also partook of nightly rants in the tree with her dead husband.

‘You transfer your thoughts, give them a voice, a persona,' said the priest.

‘She does. I don't,' my mother cut in, speaking rather too defensively and giving herself away, I thought.

‘Yes, ‘‘she,'' of course.' The priest must have had an inkling of what was going on, but who'd told him? Gladys? She couldn't know. Vonnie? She would never say. Me in the confessional? That was supposed to be secret. Megan? I doubted it.

As they passed me on their way to the front door they looked down on me, literally, lying as I was on the floor in front of the television. My mother shut the heavy glass door and collapsed on to the sofa behind me.

‘I told him in confession,' I finally admitted, wanting the weirdness in the air between us to disappear. I hoped I was saying the right thing.

‘I gathered that,' my mother said.

‘They told us it was all a secret.'

‘He got to it in a roundabout way.' She didn't look at me, she gazed up at the ceiling fan chopping its way through a crowd of flies that followed the slow blades. ‘He wondered if you still thought you could talk to your father.'

I felt exposed and stupid. Why hadn't my mother stood up for me? Now she was acting as if it was all my problem, like she had never been involved. Like the whole thing was my own fantasy that she'd played no part in.

‘It's like wish fulfilment,' she said, as if explaining away what she and I both knew was real. But if she didn't believe any more why was she hiding the tree's path of destruction? Why didn't she call someone to look at the damage? I felt alone and ridiculous and without support.

‘Go to bed,' she said, dismissing everything we had been through together in the past few weeks. She stood up and the anthem of the seven o'clock news played her out of the room.

That night I wanted to hurt my little brother Gerard because I wanted to get to my mother. How could she abandon what she had believed in so strongly? It couldn't have just been pressure from a priest. Her relationship with religion had always been fickle. It had never involved going to church or believing in God. She had however believed that everything happened for a reason, until Dad had died, then she'd said that even that, the last wobbly cornerstone of her belief, had been knocked out. Anyway it wasn't like her to be influenced or worried by what a priest thought. So I pinched Gerard so hard three times in a row until he woke up crying. I'd stood over him for ages getting up the guts to hurt him. He was asleep I knew because he was purring with such pleasure it was putting me off my attempts to sleep. But I wanted him to pay for my mother's betrayal so I found a squidgy lump of skin on his arm, picked it up and twisted. I felt so bad, but nothing happened. I tried again. This time he rolled over and murmured. By the third time I was feeling more desperate so I squeezed harder and he sat up sharply, already crying.

‘Daddy,' he called, ‘Daddy,' and I felt very badly.

I dived for my bed and landed on the pillow just as my mother arrived.

‘Daddy,' Gerard sobbed.

My mother took him in her arms and cuddled him close.

‘What is it?' she kept asking.

‘She pinched me.' He pointed towards my bed and sobbed on.

‘I didn't,' I said. ‘He had a dream and I can't get to sleep because he snores,' I shouted. And the whole plan backfired because my mother took my little brother away to sleep with her. It suited both of them because it meant my mother had company in the bed she had been terrified to sleep in for the past weeks and my little brother got what we all wanted – to sleep in bed with our mother.

‘Why do I have to sleep by myself,' I'd often queried. ‘You're older than me and you get to sleep with Dad and we have to sleep by ourselves. It's not fair.'

She just said, ‘Go to bed.' That was her answer because I knew she didn't have an answer.

Then the back steps started to separate from the house and we were finally forced to do something. There was a gap between the house and the top step and it was widening. The roots under the house had tightened their grip on the wooden stumps that held up the house, pushing them upwards. These had in turn raised a section of the house slightly and caused the steps to drop off. For the first week my mother just locked the back door and tied a rope across the bottom of the back steps and told us not to go near them. I had to use the front steps when I wanted to leave the house to go and play with Megan. It was like the back part of the house was dead, it belonged now to the realm of the tree. I noticed also that the branches had grown to touch the house all along the back wall.

‘Why don't you come down the back steps any more?' Megan asked.

And Megan must have told her dad or her dad had asked Megan why my mother was using the front steps to get to the laundry at the back of the house, so that night there was another mister. It was odd to see Mr King, a quiet tuba playing member of the Salvation Army, lifting the latch on the gate in the back fence and squeezing through the gap normally only used by us children.

He came to the back steps, saw the rope and the rift in the stairs, took a step back and re-routed to the front of the house, parting the dusk as he moved, leaving a trail of slippery green air in his wake. Mother invited him in and he sat at the kitchen table.

He'd never been in the house, he observed, not in all the years they'd been neighbours. There was no reason, he added. Mother agreed, she'd been in their house once, she thought, but that had been fifteen years ago.

He said, even though they'd known each other a long time, they didn't know each other that well, but because Megan and I were best friends, he wondered if he couldn't speak directly to her. He said he'd just seen the back steps and wondered if he couldn't help.

‘I know someone who could come and look at the tree,' he said.

My mother met Mr King's gaze. We all waited to see what she would say. Edward's giant Physics book slid off the sewing table taking the snack he had concealed behind with it. It seemed no sooner had she appeased one neighbour than another one took up the torch.

‘Clean that up,' she yelled to Edward, redirecting her irritation.

‘Isn't that funny, you call me Mr King and we've known each other sixteen years,' he reflected. ‘Call me Andrew.'

‘I don't know if I can,' she said. ‘I'll try.' She took a breath. ‘I know it needs some attention. Andrew. I've got someone looking into it.' She was dithering.

‘I don't know how to approach this and I think I'm probably going to do it badly . . .' Mr King said almost to himself, pausing for a moment before he plunged into what he knew was going to be a quagmire of barely held but deeply ingrained religious beliefs. ‘I don't begrudge your religion,' he said, ‘and I try not to judge people by their God, but there seems to be a certain amount of superstition involved in your religion . . .' A smirk it looked as if he wasn't expecting visited the edge of his lips.

I had no idea what the Salvation Army believed in, I thought they were just a brass band, I didn't know they had their own God as well.

My mother cocked her head, she didn't seem to have any idea what Mr King was edging towards.

‘. . . which I can't understand, but each to his own. Megan told me they'd climbed the tree the other night and I was mad with her, but then she told me why.' He shook his head slowly. ‘And I'm struggling with that. It's hard for one religion to accept another's, especially when it involves your own children's safety . . .'

At which point my mother pulled Mr King out of the house. They were standing on the front steps, a halo of moths diving into the porch light above their heads. I couldn't hear their conversation, but I guessed I was being betrayed again and now I wished I'd never told anyone about the tree, not Megan, not my mother. Neither of them believed anyway or only when it was convenient for them. I hated them, but I didn't want to let them know how much I hated them, all I knew was that I would punish them through silence, that was the only response I knew to anything.

After Mr King descended the front stairs in his black work shoes taking some of them backwards as he was still facing my mother, who appeared to be working hard to convince him of something, she tip-toed around me. That wasn't like her either. I decided she must be guilty or too weak to let people know what she believed, or maybe she didn't know what she believed.

Later that night when the drain man arrived, taking the eight front steps in a single bound, I realized it wasn't that simple for her. She was unclear about what she felt because it wasn't always convenient for her to have her dead husband in the tree outside her window. It sometimes helped, but the trouble it caused at other times, when the drain man arrived, for example, made it confusing.