by Judy Pascoe
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.
13
‘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 th
e 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.
14
‘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.
15
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.