by Judy Pascoe
Mrs O’Grady led me back to the empty classroom and sat at her desk while I collected my things.
‘Thank you, Mrs O’Grady,’ I said, as I went to leave.
‘Thank you, Simone. It’s been a pleasure having you in the class.’
I stopped at the door, I didn’t want to leave. Mrs O’Grady was pretty and she wore a different dress every day of the year. Her lipstick was pale pink, like an angel’s lips and I knew she had no children and I dreamt she would take me home. When I was at kindergarten I thought the teachers lived there, but I had worked it out now, they had their own houses, they didn’t stay at school over night. I wanted to go to Mrs O’Grady’s house and not mine. I knew she’d have a spare bed with clean sheets. I remembered then that I’d found a rock for her on the way to school that morning. I took it out and went up to her desk.
‘Mrs O’Grady.’ I handed her the smooth rock. I had realized when I picked it up how happy I was that I wasn’t a rock, that I was a girl and I could have been a rock, but I wasn’t. It was smooth quartz.
‘Thank you, Simone,’ she said. ‘I’ll really treasure this.’
And I don’t know why, but I burst into tears. She pushed her chair out from her desk and then her pale pink lips were talking in my ear. The same way they had done when she’d picked me out of the class the day my dad had died. The same way she’d consoled me on my first day back at school.
‘It’s a lot to ask a child to deal with.’ I think she was crying and speaking to herself.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said. ‘Please don’t make me go.’
She couldn’t look at me or speak, she just held me and I cried.
‘You’ll have such a wonderful time . . .’ She couldn’t finish, because she knew I wouldn’t have a wonderful holiday. I was condemned to seven weeks with my grieving mother and three brothers and a best friend I wasn’t talking to.
Mrs O’Grady didn’t offer to drive me home, I wondered if it was because it would remind her too much of the day I had driven home with her to my house. My mother half-insane at the door, telling me Dad was dead. They’d always known about his heart problem. They’d known since birth, since marriage, since children, but it made it no easier when, as had been predicted by the doctors all his life, he died at forty-three, at work, moving a house from Toowoomba to Graceville.
I’d felt his heart once when it was fluttering. He’d move his head away from it as if he were trying to disown it.
‘Ticker’s gone haywire again, Dawn,’ he’d say.
Sometimes people would ask how he was and he would laugh. His merriment was infectious.
‘Not dead yet,’ he’d say.
It was the greatest joke ever. Not for Mum, she always looked worried. Dad didn’t and now I knew why. If he died, which he did a few weeks later, it wasn’t going to be his problem, it was going to be Mum’s. I think he must have known he would soon be off the hook, floating away from us, having a marvellous time. There was not a second even for him to extract himself from life. When the time came he just got up from the table and walked out the back door and never came back. Well, that’s what it felt like. The clock just stopped, it didn’t run down slowly. It just stopped.
He and his partner Ab had been moving a house, that’s what they did. They found old Queenslanders often raised up high on wooden stumps and they chopped them in half, sometimes quarters, loaded them on to semi-trailers and drove them through the streets late at night to their new places of rest. All Dad’s tools were still under our house. The long jacks they used to raise the houses from their stumps and his tool box full of saws and hammers. There were parts of houses, twists of staircases, cornices from ceilings, sections of verandahs, railing, half slabs of tongue and groove walls. All stacked and not moved since his death. Ab had promised he’d come and collect it all, but I knew he couldn’t face us and Mum, and we couldn’t face him or the prospect of losing the last bits of Dad. The bits that represented his work, the thing he loved, wooden houses, and the idea that you could move them on the back of the truck, he never got over the novelty of that.
Couples would come to Dad and Ab’s allotment and saunter along the corridors of houses bought on spec by Dad and Ab and choose their dream house. It always gave Dad a thrill, not just the business, what he loved was the life in these houses, often surrounded on all sides by verandahs with full-length doors that opened out on to them.
‘You’re virtually living outside,’ he’d say. ‘With nature. In nature. That’s pretty special. Beautiful houses. The best in the world.’
He’d talked about the day when he would buy a block of land somewhere, then find the house with the widest verandah and move it there, in the dead of night, and rebuild it, bringing it back to life, that was the dream. His dream, not my mother’s. My mother had no interest in what surrounded her, she was not house proud, she liked books and cigarettes and people and watching television.
Finally I walked out of school with my case full of books and the empty drink container. Up the hill I walked as slowly as I could, savouring every step of peace. The mountains at the back of the house held such promise. I wished I was a traveller. I could keep walking towards the line of lilac and green humps set against the ocean of sky. They were away, way beyond the drive-in movie and the monastery where the weekend before my mother had suddenly packed us all in the car and taken us to confession. Something we rarely did, but mother was superstitious and I figured she needed to get something off her chest.
Below the mountains was Megan’s school with its amphitheatre-shaped sports ground. She was probably at home already. Maybe she was calling for me, I quickened my pace.
When I got back I saw that Megan was already there, packing up the caravan with her father, they were leaving that afternoon to go on holiday. I watched from my bedroom window. The momentum caused by the possibility of travel seemed to fill them with such promise and energy and the thought of staying put made me feel so dull. We had slipped into a depression we couldn’t move. All we managed to do was mirror each other’s moroseness. I caught Edward sneaking a look at the Kings’ packing too. I mostly knew Edward as someone who sat behind a stack of books. Now that he was out from behind them he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. His study had given him the perfect escape from Dad’s death, but now the reality of it was beginning to touch him. He had no father, and not even any books.
James had actually worked up the guts – we’d dared him to do it when we’d met at the top of the hill on the way home from school – to ask Mum if we were going on holiday anywhere this year. The response he got from her was a deadly glare that seemed to indicate we’d be lucky to even get a trip into town. Gerard couldn’t care less, every day was a holiday for him, though these were his last days of innocence. The final weeks of freedom before he found out what it was like to have the precipice of returning to school hanging over you.
19
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 Woman’s Weekly 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.
20
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 tr
ee 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.’