by Judy Pascoe
‘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.
16
The first time I saw the drain man in our house, properly inside it, was that night, and he was too large to fit. He was as imposing as Gulliver surrounded by the puny Lilliputians. It didn’t feel right having him encased inside walls, it felt like he would burst through the rotting seams of the house. Mother must have felt the same, I saw her cowering as he spoke. She led him out, through the floor-length window in her bedroom to the verandah, but not before he’d lectured her about the state of the house and the tree and the roots and the steps.
‘Dropping’ – he flung an arm behind him, pointing to the said steps – ‘dropping off the back of the house.’
I stayed awake for hours determined not to sleep, so I could hear when the drain man left, if he left. I lay on my back so I couldn’t get comfortable and kept one finger in my mouth and every time I felt myself lowering into sleep, I bit my finger hard so I’d stay awake. With the added noise of the tree rubbing at the window it wasn’t that difficult. I heard them stirring eventually, crouching down to step through the window back into the house, then moving towards the front door. I knew Edward was still awake, I could see him through my window bent over his books, but with half an ear listening out as well.
He didn’t see what I did though, the two of them by the front door in the shadows embracing. I hadn’t meant to see them, but I had, and my mother was furious and shocked and I must have looked like the spy I was, standing in the hallway not even trying to hide.
They kissed like people on television and I must have squealed because I was so cross I wanted to cry, but I had paid my mother back, without realizing it, ten-fold for betraying me to the priest and Mr King.
17
I crawled up the tree that night to commiserate with my dad. He sang me a lullaby I’d never heard before. It went over and over and soothed me to calmness. And to think I had believed, so stupidly I then realized, that, because of the angels in heaven that I’d been taught about, I would be rewarded for finding my dad in the top of the tree. I thought it would be like Lourdes. People would journey from all ove
r the world to our tree. They would make pilgrimages to be cured of their ailments. I fantasized about my fame, the fame of our house, our suburb. I didn’t understand that you could be taught about the mystical, but be forbidden to believe in it, seek it out or enjoy it. The mixed message caused an anger to descend that made me hate the world, hate my mother, hate Megan and the drain man; my mother the most though.
It hit me then, that I only came to talk to my dead father when I felt lousy. When I felt good I ignored him.
‘I’m so pleased to talk to you any time in any condition,’ he had answered.
I could see my mother in her bedroom window, she was looking straight up at us. I nested in behind a frayed drop of leaves. I knew she knew where I was, but I wasn’t going back to the house, ever. I decided I was going to stay in the tree. I could come down to the lower branches to get food that I would ask Edward to bring me. And if I convinced him I needed it, maybe he could, with Mum’s permission, build me a tree house a bit lower down. I could sleep in there. Really there was no reason to return to earth.
I heard my mother hissing at me from below. She was stuck halfway out of her window. I refused to answer her.
‘I’m furious with her,’ I said.
‘She’s got to get on and so do you,’ my father said.
He was so understanding, it made me cross. It was easy for him, it was so calm and peaceful where he was living, lit by the sunset in the salmon pink gaps between the branches. I wanted him to side with me, his only daughter, but he wouldn’t. He was sitting on the confounded fence like he always had. He would never put me before her and so discreetly he always put her before me.
‘No way,’ I huffed. ‘No way.’
My mother had woken Edward now, her henchman. They were on the top step, their voices transported easily through the balmy night air.
‘Simone. Come down now,’ my mother said.
‘No way, creeps,’ I replied.
It must have been after midnight. They advanced down the stairs, Edward behind my mother. I could see him clutching the top of his pyjama bottoms, trying to keep them from falling down. Any spring there may have been in the elastic waistband had been washed out long ago. Aware that the neighbours may be listening she sent Edward out in front. She stayed back in the shadow of the laundry door. James was awake too, I could sense it. He was somewhere in the house watching.
I felt sorry for Edward having to do my mother’s dirty work.
‘No,’ I said when he was halfway up the tree, before he’d even said a word. ‘I’m not coming down, so you might as well not bother to come up.’
‘For God’s sake, Simone,’ he said. ‘I need to go to bed. I’ve got exams tomorrow.’
I remembered some elephantine Aunt or other had commented on that, at the time of Dad’s death – ‘. . . and with Edward’s exams coming up . . .’
‘I’m not coming down ever,’ I said. ‘I hate you all and I’m going to live up here now.’
‘Why don’t you start as of tomorrow?’ said Edward. ‘And give me a break.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re so bloody selfish,’ he said, retreating down the tree. But mother wouldn’t have it and she demanded he climb up again.
‘What’s so good about this bloody tree?’ he said, settling on a branch below mine, resigned it seemed to life in the tree with me.
‘I can talk to Dad. That’s all,’ I said. ‘And Mum used to, but now she doesn’t any more.’
‘What do you mean, talk to him? Dad’s dead.’
‘You haven’t even tried. So how would you know?’
‘Because I know there’s no point.’
I wished he would, but I knew he was locked into the logic of his textbooks, he couldn’t let go of that and I didn’t hate him for it.
‘I’m going to stay up here,’ I said. ‘Until she promises to stop kissing the plumber.’
‘Did she kiss him?’
‘And not just a little kiss, either,’ I said.
‘What else then?’
‘It was like a kiss with arms.’
I could see Edward shake his head. He seemed in no hurry to move now either.
‘What is going on?’ my mother called up. I could hear she was seething through the grille of her locked teeth. Neither of us answered her.
‘Would one of you speak?’ I heard a rustling below us and realized she had started to climb up after us.
‘Where are you?’ She had stopped at a point below Edward. Her voice was hoarse with restrained fury. She was trying to whisper, but I felt the entire neighbourhood knew we were in the tree.
‘Simone is upset,’ said Edward. ‘Because she saw you kissing the plumber.’
Edward had taken up my corner and I felt huge affection for him. My mother didn’t reply.
‘All I know is it’s one o’clock and it’s school tomorrow and I get in trouble from the teachers if you’re tired,’ Mum finally said.
‘Whose fault is that?’ said Edward.
I couldn’t remember him ever answering her back in that tone.
‘I should be in bed. I’ve got exams tomorrow, but you wake me up like a madwoman and force me up this tree,’ he said to Mum. ‘I don’t care if she stays up here or not.’
Maybe because there was this distance and branches between us Edward felt liberated to speak in a way he couldn’t have face to face.
‘It’s none of your business what I do with the plumber,’ she said.
‘It is, if you’re kissing him,’ I said.
‘Ssssh!’ my mother hissed.
‘And I don’t want you to kiss him,’ I added.
Suddenly I became aware of this other silent person. The fourth party. The tree.
‘You don’t know,’ my mother said, sounding feeble and close to tears, ‘I’m so lonely.’
‘How does that make us feel,’ said Edward.
‘See, you don’t understand that I can love you, but still be lonely.’
‘You can talk to Dad,’ I said, speaking to the bark on the branch in front of where my chin was resting.
‘I can talk to him, that’s true, but I can’t touch him.’
‘Imagine how he feels,’ I said.
‘You’re so on his side because he’s dead. He’s got such an unfair advantage!’ She raised her voice.
She’d started to say that we would love him more than we loved her because of that. That he had died young, and missed out on decades of yelling at us. A job she had to do exclusively now. It gave her more wrinkles, she said, wrinkles that should have been shared out between the two of them, and it made us hate her more than him, that was her argument.
I don’t know who moved first, but finally one of us did, and the others followed back down to the ground. We stared at each other, then acted like nothing that had been said had really been said. But it was too late it had been, and we slunk up the back stairs as a volley of mangoes fell from the tree in the Kings’ back yard.
18
Skirting around the house to the front steps, that’s what we kept doing all week while Edward did his exams, and we wondered what our mother would do with the house falling apart and the drain man’s visits that were extending by half an hour on each occasion. The back door was now firmly shut. I didn’t see Megan, I didn’t stand by the back fence and call her and she didn’t call me. It was easy in that first week because school was finishing and we had exams too, but then we broke up and normally before us would stretch seven golden weeks of sunshine and beach holidays and hours and hours of playing with Megan. Not these holidays. There was no sign of anything normal.
On the last day of school Mrs O’Grady my teacher found I’d been under the school building, hiding by the blackened stumps where the red soil was drilled with the holes of the ants’ nests. I’d heard the school bell ring, it was three o’clock, time to go home, not for the day, but for seven weeks. I’d heard my class having their party on the floor above me, believed I could smell the sugar from the
pink icing on the fairy cakes I’d seen Katherine Padley bring in a large square Tupperware container. Of course our mother had forgotten we were supposed to contribute something to the party. I felt them treading on the boards above me and in my cave I felt safe. After I’d heard the bell and the commotion as everyone dived for their bags and cleared their desks, I heard them run off. I peeked out from under the building. The gum trees rattled their leaves and a gust of wind carried the scent of the eucalypt down from the mountains; I felt there must be a storm coming.
Somewhere there was a rain-soaked eucalyptus forest. The school incinerator was burning the last of the year’s rubbish, sending it into a brown funnel of smoke up to the never-ending blue. In the dry tufts of grass in front of me I found a grass trap. Two lumps of grass tied in a double knot. Lethal if your foot landed in the trap when you were in full flight. Head over heels you could fly. I untied the trap I had seen Tommy Butler set for the teacher on play duty that lunchtime. As I untied it I looked up and found myself staring at Mrs O’Grady’s kneecap. I thought my absence had gone unnoticed, but I’d forgotten there was my desk and school bag giving me away, and my mother had apparently been embarrassed into returning to the school with enough drink, diluted, to go around the whole school. The container with my name on it was hanging from Mrs O’Grady’s manicured hand. That was apparently when Mrs O’Grady noticed I was missing. She’d told my mother, I was about – that is actually how she’d put it. It was odd to hear that my mother had been shamed into action and I wasn’t sure if I was more embarrassed that she’d returned to the school with a late contribution than if she’d dismissed it all together. Of course she was forgiven because of her husband’s unexpected departure and I could imagine there was whispering in the staff room and those connections reiterated.