by Judy Pascoe
He followed my mother down the side of the house to the septic tank. She pointed out the man-hole cover and we watched him lift it off.
‘Same trouble as next door,’ he said, flinging the heavy square of cement on to the grass beside him. He peered inside, then he was gone, striding up the side of the house towards his van, stopping for a moment to stare up at the tree on the way.
‘Great tree,’ he said. ‘No good for your drains though.’
A minute later he came back down the hill carrying some drain-clearing device. He fed the arm of it down into the dark pit of the septic tank, glancing once at my mother. In that instant he took in the mess of hair, the odd un-matching clothes, the bare feet and the uncertain eyes. He seemed to see it all and know it.
‘Stand back,’ he said, as a load of chopped roots and mashed cockroaches spewed across the grass in front of us.
They stood together for an hour hosing the chopped roots down the yard towards the back fence. The spray from the hose plumed above them as they continued to talk into the orange dusk.
Edward had got fed up waiting for her and was cooking burgers in the electric frying pan. He squeezed blobs of tomato sauce over each lump of meat, then flipped the round of meat on to another saucy bed he had spread on some stale bread. We sat around the kitchen table eating and trying not to feel like we were waiting for our mother. Only Gerard objected openly by kicking his legs hard against the wall behind him. Finally Edward pushed him to the back door. I watched him from the top step run down the yard to our mother. She picked him up and he stuck to her, his legs and arms clinging like the frogs hanging on the porcelain toilet bowl.
When she finally came inside, even under the flat fluorescence of the kitchen light, I could see that her face had gained an evenness. The corners of wildness that had moved in months earlier seemed to have leached away. She took Gerard to the bathroom, washed his face, cleaned his teeth and tucked him in his bed. Then she came into the kitchen to tidy up. The worktop was a row of bowls and plates covered in a film of flour from Edward’s cooking. She wiped away the powder then started scratching at the burnt meat on the frying pan. Then she found her washing-up gloves and began to clean.
The noises of the house were different that night. Scrubbing and scouring, mopping and brushing. Buckets were filled and tidal waves of grubby water were emptied. She dusted the top of the kitchen cupboards, she pounded rugs, poured disinfectant into her sponge and wiped everything, the doors, the handles, the windowsills – under the kitchen table. Then the clearing began. The acres of sympathy cards and letters from distant relatives focusing on a memory or a phrase about our father, they had been scattered across the dining room table, she piled them up and put them in a box.
I lay in bed and listened to the rubbing and scratching, then the purposeful steps of my mother transplanting her tidying frenzy into another part of the house – her room. Cupboard doors creaked open and I heard the flumph of clothes being tossed on to the floor. The sound became lighter as the pyramid of possessions was growing. Then a rattling in the very top cupboard; papers and boxes being lifted out. I stood by my door and listened, concern pressed into my brow. Did my dad know he was being evicted from his house?
The back door rattled and I jumped. My mother who was careering around her room with boxes and colliding with the cupboard doors, stopped. We waited. Me, my mother, my brothers, the tree, all waited for the second knock. It was the drain man, we all knew that, with his brazen smile and a bottle of beer.
I peeked around the edge of my curtain. I could see him on the top step. My mother had slunk to the back door; I saw her caught behind the fly-screened door. She hesitated, then I heard him say her name.
‘Dawn.’
My mother was twitching and jigging and side-stepping.
‘Come in. No,’ she said, staying safe behind the screen door. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Come in. No go.’
I wondered, as did the drain man, what she meant. I noticed her eyes darting in the direction of the tree.
‘I’m sorry. Tomorrow? I know I said tonight, but – ’
‘Dawn, I’ll leave this here.’ He raised the bottle of cold beer he had in his hand. ‘Tomorrow night, maybe,’ he said, and then the drain man left, his feet turned out in his workmen’s boots as he hopped down the back stairs, the cold bottle of beer left on the top step.
The door opened and my mother skimmed down the steps taking the bottle of beer on the way.
That night the tree shook with jollity. It was a forced laughter though; I assumed a result of my mother’s guilt.
While my mother was visiting my father, I crept into her room and found his possessions piled on the bed. Boxes of papers stacked by the door for disposal. The curtains were drawn so he couldn’t see in, as if she was trying to hide the fact that he was being moved on. When she returned later that night, barefoot and merry from the beer she had drunk in the tree, she replaced the pile of clothes. I heard her re-hang each shirt and re-fold each jumper and pair of pyjamas. The heat I had felt from the tree when the drain man was on the back steps abated and the animals went about their business, trawling the sky in search of food.
7
My mother saw the grey heads first, bobbing up and down through the Venetian blinds, like a line of yachts seesawing towards a finish line. It was a trickle of grey-haired women stepping down the path towards our front door.
‘What are they doing?’ she said, watching the women. Like a determined flank of soldier ants they marched closer.
‘What do they want?’ She jogged nervously on the spot.
The inevitable knock on the door sent my mother into a spin, zig-zagging across the cool wooden floorboards. We dived for cover. It struck the same chord of recognition in all of us. They resembled so completely the grey stream of women who came to our house the afternoon after our father’s funeral. It brought back the pots of tea, the muffled voices, the sniffling, the occasional howl, then the sound of tissues being plucked.
It was a terrible return to that fearful hot day. The heat in the church had been unbearable, even with all the doors open. That much black cloth on a February day in a church in the sub-tropics with only the ceiling fans to churn up the air can push the temperature beyond the tolerable.
It was too much for the old folk. Aunt Kit folded at the knees ten minutes in and the rest of the church swivelled to watch as she drifted to the pew, so convinced they were that she was going to drop dead and upstage the service and the untimely death of her niece’s husband. Waiting in the wings for such an event, Uncle Jack in the seat behind extracted the smelling salts from his chest pocket. Once Aunt Kit had come round and her hat, a flat, black saucer darted with a purple feather, was rearranged on her white tufts of hair, Uncle Jack offered her his hip flask of brandy. When it became clear Aunt Kit was revivable and she’d had more than a few nips of brandy, the congregation returned to their ruminations. They bowed their heads to the power of their Creator, they thanked him again that it hadn’t been their turn this time.
I could see from my seat beside my mother, through the wall of louvred glass, my class lined up outside the church. The blood-red glass was difficult to see through, but the yellow and orange panes were less opaque though they distorted their faces giving them all monstrous chins and shallow foreheads.
The heavy box in the aisle beside us seemed too black for my father. I wished it was decorated, painted with some swirls and messages.
Now, as the women, the busy beavers who had supplied the tea and sandwiches at our house for the mourners, came down our path, we scattered in fear, leaving our mother to open the door.
‘Yes?’ Her bare feet and thin legs greeted the women. Gladys Havelock led the way holding up her Neighbourhood Watch folder. ‘Dawn, the rota! It’s your turn.’
Mrs Sanders patted my mother on the arm on her way into the house.
‘I thought you were going to remind her,’ she whispered to Gladys.
‘Didn’t I?’
Gladys looked at my mother who shook her head.
‘Too late, the gang’s all here.’ Gladys clamped a clipboard to her side.
The mass of grey-haired widows pushed into the lounge, pressing elbows into each other’s sides and exchanging worried glances. The unspoken consensus seemed to be it would be good for everyone to continue as normal.
My mother watched the stream of women take up their seats in her front room. They shuffled and sighed and waited to be offered tea. But mother didn’t drink tea, so she didn’t offer.
‘Anyone have anything to report?’ Gladys started.
‘It’s been dark, this last week, at night,’ said Mrs Sanders.
‘I’ve seen someone dark,’ Mrs Drummond, old and deaf, chipped in.
‘Were they black?’ Mrs Layton was on the edge of her seat trying to choke back her fear.
‘Very . . .’ Mrs Drummond hesitated. ‘Black as the night. I couldn’t really see they were so black.’
‘I saw you looking at something the other night,’ said Mrs Sanders.
‘I was watching Sandra.’ She nodded towards Mrs Layton.
‘I was watching, Daisy.’ Mrs Drummond referred to the woman sitting next to her.
‘I was watching Gladys.’ The old woman spoke gruffly, not sure what she was being accused of.
‘What were you watching, Gladys?’ Mrs Layton sucked in her lips and the skin of her chin shrivelled.
‘I thought I saw you, Dawn.’ Gladys leant over to my mother. ‘Up your tree.’
Lying on the cold tiles in the hall, I slid an inch closer to see how my mother would respond. There was a pause and it felt to me like the ceiling was starting to lower. They’d seen my mother up the tree. They might try and take her away from us, that was my first thought.
I noticed though she didn’t comment. I saw her perfect non-reaction. Mrs Layton tried again. ‘There has been a lot of noise coming from up there, the last week.’
‘Maybe it was the fruit bats.’ My mother spoke without a hint of sarcasm.
Her face had tensed slightly, but no more than it was already from being confronted in her own home by a group of uninvited pensioners.
It was true my mother had made very little effort to cover her tracks. The Johnsons who lived directly beside us were old and the Kings behind had a noisy house full of children, so she was safe from the nearest neighbours. But she had made no attempt to conceal her tree climbs or to disguise the noise they made. Especially the night the drain man called. After he left she was so loud I was sure the entire suburb must have heard. Vonnie, who lived next to Megan’s house and directly behind the Johnsons, saw my mother struggling for another excuse. She cut in.
‘All the kids were up there again. I noticed the other evening.’ She sounded as if she was displeased, but there was a playful tone in her voice.
‘After what happened, you’d think you’d be a little more careful.’ Gladys challenged my mother with a look of scorn.
‘I see the roots have got in the drains again,’ she continued.
‘Not badly,’ said my mother.
‘Not what the Johnsons said.’ Gladys sounded very pleased with her private knowledge.
‘It’s been worse,’ Mum countered.
‘Have you got any plans’ – Gladys hadn’t finished yet – ‘for the future, assuming present root growth continues. Not that it affects our side of the road, but I would have thought your immediate neighbours may be interested.’
‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Vonnie. ‘And the Johnson’s back yard is so full of gum trees. It’s questionable which tree is doing the most damage.’
Mum was off the hook for the minute, thanks to Vonnie, and the old girls huffed and puffed and waited for the cups of tea my mother had no intention of offering them.
8
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 shee
t 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.