The Tree (8 page)

Once Edward figured out there wasn't going to be a lot going on in the summer break, he got a job in the supermarket stacking shelves. The rest of us ate peanut-butter sandwiches from plastic picnic plates in front of the television. Outside it was sweltering. The sky was blue, but we preferred to stay inside. If we couldn't go to the beach, we refused to convene with the world at all. My mother objected for a few days, then gave in to the slovenliness. After all, when she yelled at us to play outside, she was usually hanging over a
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drinking a mug of soup. After a day or two she was slouched in front of the television with us watching the cricket. It was so boring, nothing happened for hours, but that matched our mood. The cricket was slow, the heat made us slow. We lived on Weetabix as well and, conveniently, as the Kings were away, there was no one to testify to our laziness so we felt no guilt about not using the back of the house and staying inside all day. We prayed for rain, we even went to church mainly for that reason, because my mother knew it was the only thing that would save our house or that was the theory expounded by most of the misters. We had been told that a tropical downpour would soak the earth and satisfy the thirsty roots of the tree and stop them interfering with the foundations of the house. Going to church to pray for the drenching was one superstitious step away from performing a rain dance in the back garden, and I half expected she would do that before the holidays were over.

There was one particularly bad day. I didn't know why at the time, but I realized much later that it was guilt, always guilt. There were stirrings and murmurings at the base of the tree and some scratching and rustling in the night. We found our mother the next morning asleep by the trunk of the tree, laid out and pale. Was she dead or just asleep, or had she tripped over and knocked herself out? None of it seemed to add up to a satisfactory answer. We edged about the picture trying to understand it. I leant in to touch my mother's face, which was so pale it looked like an outline. Then I saw my mother move her fingers. She woke and sat bolt upright.

‘What's going on?' she asked in her usual sharp tone.

Once we realized she was still alive and that this was just another of her outlandish responses to losing her husband, Edward mumbled something about being late for work and he was gone, up the side of the house he disappeared. And the three of us were left again with our mad mother and the horror of another empty, dry, blue sunny day stretching before us.

The question, what are you doing sleeping under the tree?, didn't seem possible to ask. It was clear she had spent the night there and really we all knew why. The previous evening I'd overheard her with the drain man; he was trying to convince her that the tree had to be cut down. The back steps were still out of action and the floor near the back door was beginning to sag with the lack of support. Still my mother argued she wanted to wait.

‘Wait for what?' The drain man had raised his voice.

The silence bore through the night. There was only the sound of Mr Lu digging his series of trenches. Then I heard a wavering reply from my mother. ‘He's still with me.'

I'd heard a set of keys jangling and the front door close, then his van started. I tried to analyse how he was feeling by the revs of the motor; injured with underlying dull pain, the vibration of the engine seemed to say.

The next morning, my mother laid some keys in the centre of the kitchen table. All day they sat in the middle of the table with no explanation as to why these two keys joined by a twist of red and white twine had entered our house. There was an uncomfortable feeling around them. Gerard picked them up and started to play with them.

‘Don't,' my mother said. ‘You might, I don't know . . .' She took them off him.

‘Why can't he have them?' I asked.

‘Because they might break.'

‘What are they for?' I asked.

‘They're just keys,' my mother said angrily.

We discovered the next day, driving to a mystery location, that the keys were for a beach house at Tin Can Bay that was owned by the drain man, and that was where we were heading. We also discovered then that mother had given the drain man permission to cut the tree down, hence the reason she had spent the night beneath the tree. Guilt. Always guilt.

We discovered all of this driving up the highway with the late afternoon sun flickering on and off as we sped through a forest of pine trees. What was more shocking than that revelation was that the telling of it caused her to stop the car at a roadside stall selling pineapples and beg the woman there to let her into her farmhouse to use the phone. The three of us sat on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon while my mother attempted to find the drain man. When she finally did he was at our house, chainsaw poised. Mum sobbed and pleaded with him to leave the tree where it was. He did.

The beach house was like a long boat beached in a sandy thicket of emerald green pines. The needles filled the soil and poked into our feet as we approached, all of us barefoot after the six and a half hour drive. The pricking needles seemed a bad omen. They spiked our feet all the way across the sand trail that led to the house. There was a letter box, fifty-nine it had on it in white blocky letters, fifty-nine Illana Drive. The drain man had written the address on a scrap of paper and his writing appeared quite florid and learned looking for a plumber, more like a bookkeeper, I thought.

There were only three other houses in the forgotten street, but through the green mash of trees below was the Pacific. From above it appeared static with some dancing white foam on top of the green-blue plate of water, and our longing to cast ourselves into the waves was powerful. We threw some things into the house; one room lined on each side with a row of unmade single beds, then we charged towards the sea. The temperature of the sand rose as we galloped through the scrub towards the beach. Then the undergrowth ran out and the white sand took over and the heat soared and we dashed for the blue water, yelping and squealing. To stand still would have caused our feet to blister. The water was rebirth, baptism and heaven come to earth, and we played like seals for hours, piercing the waves with our bodies, then torpedoing towards the shore, our heads and shoulders figure-heading the waves, steering into the shallows where we fell beached on our sides and allowed the waves to roll us over.

Our mother's limbs looked gloriously unknotted as she played with us for the first time since Dad's death. Squeezing with all her strength, she pinched the sides of an old plastic tube of suntan lotion she'd found in the bathroom, sending a jet of the stuff across the sand. In previous weeks this would have sent her into a rant, and we waited for her to begin, but instead she opened her mouth wide and laughed. The silence had been broken, the death was gone between us.

When the sun dropped behind the hill we crouched in the twisted trees that grew between the sea and the house. We spent most of our time in that band of trees. We ate outside, barbecuing everything: sausages, vegetables, even fruit was tossed on to the hot plate, bananas, tomatoes, pineapple, all were blackened on the fire.

It was so spidery in the house we only went inside when we had to. More bugs would come out at night seeking out our reading lamps and smashing into the light shades as they circled wildly. We met Edward from the bus and brought him back to show him all the hiding places we had found in the twisted trees. We watched him experience the scorching sand and the hot Pacific, our unconscious, our reason, our God. If we couldn't spear the waves there was no point in living. Hours we spent in the stunted scrubs pretending to be soldiers waiting to ambush the enemy. We stayed there until it was dark, only limping home after the scarlet streaks of clouds had turned to grey then black.

The drain man was there one day when we returned, sitting with my mother on the cement step at the front of the house. We formed a bewildered flank before them. It was us and them and we weren't sure how we all fitted together, neither were they. My mother dithered, talked about feeding us for a long time before she pushed off from the cement step and headed in the direction of the kitchen. The drain man responded by driving three stumps into the prickling sand and handing Edward a cricket bat. We played on into the dark in a flood-lit patch at the front of the house. None of us wanted to enjoy ourselves now because it felt like such cold-blooded betrayal.

That was the first night they spent together under the stars on the beach and I cried because Dad was four hundred and ninety miles away, connected by the same canopy of stars, I knew that, waiting for us to return and oblivious to all of it. His replacement had been so quick and brutal and we evacuated the house the next morning with boxes of cereal and bottles of milk and swore to each other we were going to live in the stunted trees for ever.

We hovered in the trees listening to the squawking of the giant gulls and the waves hissing below, then we heard their voices coming up the path from the beach. We stopped, still not sure what to do. For days we had been waiting to ambush somebody, now that there was someone to ambush we couldn't do it. Then Gerard called out: ‘Mum!' And dropped from the tree on to the path behind her. There was wailing and blood. He'd fallen on to a tree root and a gash opened up in the bottom of his foot and the blood seeped out.

The crisis diverted the meaning of the moment and somehow Edward and I ended up on either side of the bloody plot of sand. The others had all gone with Gerard to the bougainvillaea-covered hospital. James wouldn't stay with us, he needed, he said, to be with Mum, he didn't say that, but we could feel it. The drain man's presence had the opposite effect on us. Edward and I wanted so badly not to be anywhere near her. Also we wanted James to go with them to keep them separate. It was a telepathic plot. We'd looked at each other, Edward and I, and known what the other was thinking. If they, our mother and the drain man, just had Gerard, they could pretend he was their child. They needed reminding there was four of us and that we would never be his family.

We crawled back into the trees. ‘He's the favourite,' said Edward.

‘Who?' I said.

‘Gerard. Who else?'

‘I thought James was,' I said.

He was so unselfish, my mother was always saying. It made me sigh and roll my eyes up to the fluorescent kitchen light.

‘Gerard is,' Edward repeated. ‘James was Dad's favourite.'

‘No,' I said. ‘I was, wasn't I?'

‘I dunno, I'm nobody's favourite.'

‘Yes you are,' I said. ‘You're Mum's favourite.'

‘Who cares anyway,' he said. ‘Two more years, then I can move out.'

I knew he meant it; how would I ever see him again?

‘Don't go,' I said pathetically, as if the wishes of his creepy sister, as he often called me, would make him stay. I was turning a flat rock over and over in my hand wondering what it would take to make him stay. I couldn't contemplate living at home without Edward, I'd go with him. I couldn't live with my mother, that man and my other two brothers.

We built a stone wall with the smooth rocks that poked out of the sand like lumps of butterscotch. Our medieval wall extended and curved to enclose some sheep we made with burrs from the eucalyptus bushes. I fantasized it was just us in the world working in the sand creating a scene of early settlement. It soon deteriorated into a more abstract piling of the rocks that was less functional. Our medieval farm in the burning sand had been the starting point for our stone art. The second paddock lost its form and the stone walls began to slide into other shapes, lines that bent and turned in on themselves, coiling into tight circles. It began to incorporate the scrubby trees. We tied grass around the lower branches. We climbed up to get some perspective on the area under construction. It was fragile work, it had the intricacies of a mosaic floor but no chance of that sort of permanence. We left it, eventually, knowing it wouldn't be there the next day, but we accepted its fate. We had accomplished what we needed to do. We had fertilized this spot together and used the obsessiveness of creation to block out the real world.

We returned home a week later and found the tree in our back yard was a burgeoning umbrella of lime-green feathers, the roots now a complete hairy claw clutching at the foundations under the house. I sensed apprehension in the long grass that knocked in the wind against the paling fence. A hoop of climbing rose had fallen from a rotting trellis that arched from the side of the house to the fence. The overgrownness had made the garden come alive. Dad didn't bother to enquire about our absence. There was no mention or inkling of any interest in where we'd been.

I could still feel the cushion of his affection holding me in the cup of the tree, but I felt the elastic between us was stretching and pulling us further apart. Also I felt he was more eager for my mother, and I was eager for him to want my mother. Or impatient for my mother to behave as she had when she first found him in the tree, when she had slept with the mattress of foliage by her side, when she had paced the base of the tree, when we had found her asleep by the trunk. I wanted to see that longing again because it had made me feel safe. My mother walked out into the back yard. She had just seen the hairy claw under the house. She thrust her face up to the tree. I could feel her eyes searing through the leaves. The tree breathed, I felt it. It sighed and she ran up the back stairs, forgetting how lethal they were, and she shut the door hard.

Then I saw the mule-like legs of Gladys, step-stepping down the drive, like a donkey picking its way along a stony path. Over her arm was the communion dress, the white of it muted by the dense green light radiating from the poincianna tree. Down the driveway she kept pick, picking. She stared up as she came into the back yard, into the realm of the tree, because the tree was a sight to behold. It was like another life form multiplying. The tap root ran its reckless course towards the house and a smaller vein snaked away from the trunk towards the clothes line. Each finger of the tree's roots looked as if it could rub out any part of us, push out a wall, lift the clothes line, pluck us from earth, curl a tentacle around us. It felt so thin, the house and its walls, like it would only take one surge from the tree to consume it. The tree had power and weight and it was going to destroy us. Gladys looked shocked, amazed, furious and satiated all at once.

I wanted to stop her going any further, but too late, she donkey-stepped across the cracking path, and I knew if Gladys saw the hairy claw under the house we'd be doomed. There was complicity between us and the drain man, even, but if an outsider witnessed the damage, it would exist properly. I only then realized the severity of it as Gladys's nose turned to the ground and followed the roots towards the house. I knew then we were done for. She step-stepped closer to the house and dared to stretch her neck through the opening that led under the house. I could tell by the way her shoulders flexed back that she had seen the gnarled hand of the tree grabbing for the foundations. She had seen it all right and made it real.

By the time I got to the bottom of the tree Gladys was gone. Mum caught sight of her tail as it disappeared around the edge of the garage. ‘What's that old hawk up to?' she said. Standing below her at the bottom of the steps, I pointed under the house to the evidence that proved our collective madness. The unbelievable sight of the tree's roots strangling the wooden stumps of the house.

‘She saw,' I said.

‘I don't care,' Mum replied, but I knew she did and she would when Gladys took whatever action it was I knew she would inevitably take.