The Tree

by Judy Pascoe

  ‘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.

  9

  ‘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.’

  10

  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 talki
ng 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.’

  11

  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 co
ntinued 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.

  12

  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.