by Judy Pascoe
I heard my brothers, too, jumping from their beds and sprinting down the hall. They arrived by my mother’s bed a second after me. Gerard was asleep in the bed beside her. Mother was already sitting up listening to the howling wind, she had an ear turned towards it as if she was trying to decipher a meaning from its melancholy wailing.
‘It’s a cyclone!’ Edward tried to scream above the noise.
‘It can’t be, there wasn’t any warning,’ she said.
Not that any of us had listened to the news that night. It did explain, however, why I’d seen Mr King clearing his garden, bringing the bins into the laundry and tying down the swing.
‘Did you listen to the news?’ Edward asked.
‘It’s just a bad storm!’ Mum yelled back as a fresh pile of debris smashed against the side of the house and we dived for the floor. The wind seemed to have upped its strength in that one gust. It stayed at that pitch, screaming like a tortured cat, the life being twisted from its scrawny body.
The walls of the house sucked in, then out. I heard the first crack then. I thought it was the roof beginning to tear at the corner, but the noise came from the edge of the house.
We slid on our stomachs to the long window we used to crawl through to get to the verandah. I scrunched my eyes up and stared into the black, but there was nothing to see. Then we realized why. The verandah had been torn from the side of the house. It went with a gust of wind and very little fuss, maybe assisted on its way by the lashing branches of the tree, now jumping triumphantly in its place.
The room illuminated for a brief second with a strobe of light and we faced each other with terror. I had been hoping Mum would tell us what to do: that she might make it better or say things that would take away my fear, but in that brief flash of light I saw her fear was as great as ours. It was as if she was reading the thunder and the wind and it was relaying a message of terror and destruction.
Without the buffer of the verandah between us and the tree, the branches began to knock against the wall of the house, there was nothing to keep them back. They punched and slapped at the walls.
‘Come on!’ Edward screamed, as another wave of tiles and scrap hit the house. He knew we had to move to the other side of the house, we were in the direct path of the wind.
‘No. Stay together,’ she demanded.
The branches were pounding the wall so violently that the cupboard doors rattled open. Inside I saw all the garbage bags and boxes Mum had stacked on top of each other. All his possessions she kept threatening to throw away, she had piled them back inside the cupboards.
I felt a vibration beneath my feet and I lost my balance. The floor dropped an inch then sprang back to meet us. I believed it was the roots that hugged the foundations of the house. It felt as if they were pulling at the stumps. The floor dropped again, and this time it didn’t return to support us. All at once windows blew out and we were suddenly standing outside.
The doors of her wardrobe blew away and the garbage bags began to spill open. Dad’s clothes, his photographs, all his books and papers, everything he owned began to be sucked up into the sky. His fishing shirt filled and danced out into the night like a drunk jester. His flip-flops flew towards the only unbroken window left, shattering it on the way out. His golf clubs rolled across the floor and spiralled off into space. It was all released to the wind. I felt him leaving and taking his possessions with him. There was a system in the way that it happened. His newest possessions went first. Work clothes, papers, handkerchiefs, pyjamas, tape recorder, cassette, then a line of photographs of us, of Mum, of his parents all sucked out into the blackness. Then the things he had owned since he was a child, it all went in a kind of order.
We were glued to the spectacle, we watched until the stream of possessions trickled down to the last few. As the final items escaped into the night there was a flash of lightning. Through the smashed windows of the room, I saw Gladys’s face at her door looking out at the chaos, her Neighbourhood Watch sign spinning on her front gate like a Catherine wheel. I went to point it out to the others, but now it felt as if the whole room was being pulled away. It tipped again, the floor dropping out from under us.
I heard the crack then. It wasn’t lightning. The sound was amplified so it vibrated in our bodies. It came from the room where we were standing, Mum’s room, it was cracking from the house. The bed was tipping with the floor. There was nothing between us and the black air swilling with turning fragments.
‘Get out!’ she yelled. She knew she had no time to save herself or to save Gerard.
We didn’t know where to go. We only had a second, we headed towards the only opening we could see as the floor was giving way below us. Mother was torn between her escape and a sleeping Gerard. She chose Gerard. Her life wouldn’t have been worth living without him and we leapt out of the room as the floor went and they slid away.
29
We huddled together under the kitchen table with no idea where they were. In my mind they were together, Mum, Gerard, Dad, and his possessions, had all gone to the same place. I didn’t know where. I knew they were all dead. For a while I sat with the feeling of being saved, but it didn’t last long. It was soon overtaken by a peculiar pull, a feeling that it would be better to be with them, than under the table with my brothers and the screeching wind. It was in the house now, gusting up and down the hallway. Jesus and his bruised heart were plucked from the wall above the fridge and spun off into the black space at the end of the hall. I was sickened by the wind, by the sound of it. It was unrelenting. It made me want to rant at it and scream for it to go away because it felt like it had a centre. It was some force personified and it was playing with us.
When we dared to come out from under the table, we went to the back door to see if there was any trace of them. In the darkness I could see the earth at the base of the tree, it was billowing in and out, huffing and puffing as if the wind was coming from the centre of the earth. The branches of the tree were like cracking whips, their ends flicking like angry cats’ tails. We didn’t speak to each other, there was no point, we wouldn’t be heard above the screaming wind. Then we somehow all agreed without speaking to open the back door. It flung into us with such force Edward was thrown back. We picked him up and pulled ourselves out of the house and joined the mad night. After our noiseless decision to look for them we couldn’t contain the silence and we were screaming at each other because we knew we were going to die. We had no choice but to search for them, even though I accepted already that they had been cast like Dad’s possessions to a far corner of the world.
The wind was so strong our weight didn’t seem enough to keep us planted on the stairs. My middle was being sucked back then violently pushed forward. I knew if I let go of the railing I could be vacuumed up into the black air above us. Then in a sheet of white lightning we saw the mess, and the trees of the suburb arching like mad dancers, throwing their arms and cupping the air that was filled with flocks of bricks and wood and the Kings’ laundry roof which was being peeled off tile by tile. Across the fence we saw Vonnie’s laundry door flip open like a gate on a cuckoo clock and her clothes trolley flew out and was propelled down the path towards her clothes line unmanned.
The ground at the base of the tree was still swelling and bulging, then shrinking back like a burst balloon. As the air was sucked out it choked like a dying breath, the skin of the earth then clinging tightly on to the skeleton of the roots. It was more terrifying than the sound of wind. It felt like we stood between two never-ending high-speed trains.
We were at the bottom of the stairs sheltering just inside the laundry when we caught sight of part of Mum’s room hooked on our back fence. To get to it we had to pass the tree. Logically there was no reason to visit the remains of the room, it was an inevitable path and we were driven towards it. We took a wide berth around the base of the tree, the branches flicking like a bully trying to whip you with his wet towel, and moved towards the carcass of the room. You could see that i
t had once been a part of a house but now it was a room from a dream that had come to life. We had stumbled upon a miracle, I thought, as we peered through the doorway which was positioned sideways like a window. Inside we saw the bed tipped vertical and sheltered by an awning of wall. The bottom of it was jammed against our back fence and there lying in the bed was Mum and Gerard. They lay side by side strapped in by the bed linen. The sheets were tied about them, they were bound to the bed like two mummies. Mum looked down, not that shocked to see us, and in her most deadpan voice, as matter-of-fact as a nurse taking a pulse, she said:
‘And that’s why you should always tuck your sheets in.’
As we peeled the bedding back and pulled them out, the walls around us were beginning to vibrate and flap. The room was preparing to take off again. Another blast of wind and it would be lifted off into space and blown across the suburb.
We dived out into the rain that was now blowing horizontally into our faces, piercing our skin like fat darts, and we began our attempt to crawl back up the garden. Most of the debris was flying at head height. It was being torn off the houses, thrown into the air, then cascading like a waterfall down to the ground. A sheet of galvanized iron flew towards us. It was tumbling like a magic carpet out of control. Edward saw it first, it was heading for Mum and Gerard. He ran at them and pushed them to the ground. We watched it fly back up into the air, like it was on a roller-coaster ride.
The shock of being almost decapitated awakened my mother. I could see it in her eyes as she picked Gerard up, struggled back to her feet and made a dash for the house. James and I got to the back steps first. In the second we had before the others made it I looked up to the missing piece of house, where once Mum’s room had nested. Now there were only the wooden stumps left spiking the air, like the legs of a wrecked jetty. The tree was thrashing in the space the room had once occupied. All those tons of foliage the room had been holding back were free to lunge and flail in the extra space.
Then the wall of water was upon us. It must have swept down from the top of the hill and across the road. It took Mum’s feet from under her and carried her and Gerard away. Edward yelled at us to stay on the steps as the bank of water kept coming. The garden was a lake and they were gone.
Edward went after her, trying to find their bodies in the dark. He yelled and bashed the water with his hands. We watched helplessly from the steps as the water continued to flow out from under the house. It was getting deeper, rolling on to the Kings’ back yard. Edward’s call was furious, like an animal bellowing. He slapped the water again with his hands and tried to run, though he was waist deep.
I knew we would make it, the three of us, but Mum and Gerard were in danger, they were fragile and the storm was so angry I knew it wanted to take someone. It must have been a few seconds later when Mum emerged, but it felt like longer. She was spluttering and screaming she had been pushed down the yard to the back fence. There was no sign of Gerard. It was the first thing she called.
‘Where is he?’
There was nothing, only the howl of the wind.
She faced the tree and screamed, a blood-curdling scream, it cut through the wind. ‘Give him back!’
We all looked up then and saw that Gerard, arm still plastered and in a sling, had been thrown into the branches of the tree, he was clinging on like a bush baby. The branch waved about threatening to drop him into the water.
Edward hesitated before climbing past the bubbling pool at the bottom of the tree. It was boiling over like a mud pool, sending up jets of water as the ground was belching and the hollow under the tumulus taking in tons of water. Mum was trying to haul herself back to the house, but she had no strength left, there was nothing to hold on to and she was a terrible swimmer. James ran into the house and ripped the sheets from his bed. We tried to tie them together to throw out to her but we wouldn’t have had the strength to pull her in.
My mother’s relief at being rescued from her bed then surviving the sheet of iron that almost tore her head off, was turning now to exhausted fury. She yelled at the storm, she wouldn’t be taken. She dared it to try, or take any of us for that matter.
The lightning and thunder were so violent, they had been insignificant to the strength of the wind, now they were matching it. There was no time between them; I tried to count the gap in elephants – one elephant, two elephant. It was only a few seconds.
The tree was moving too, not only lashing its branches at Edward and Gerard as they tried to escape, but the trunk was shifting. The wind had loosened the earth around the base and the water filled the cavity. It was lifting the tree higher into the sky.
Edward was swimming away from it. I thought they were going to be pulled down into the grabbing tongues of its roots. Gerard was spluttering as he surfaced for a moment before he was dragged underwater by Edward, who was fighting with all his power to get to us. It felt like a Bible story in a suburban back yard, like the woman who turned to salt or the babbling tower that split apart, or the Red Sea parting. I didn’t know which one, but it had that strength. Edward got to Mum and hauled her, still raging, towards the steps.
Dad said, he had to leave her now. He said it was time for him to go.
I heard it. I don’t know how. I just heard it inside my head.
She answered him. She never wanted to see him again. He was a menace, he was stopping her life. I heard that as well, though all she said was, ‘Go.’
‘Go,’ she called into the wind. ‘Go.’
With her final scream came an explosion. The noise was not familiar, it was mechanical and filled with the sound of twisting roots and cracking wood. The tree was unearthed and it was falling. With great majesty it began to drop. It fell towards the missing room, slamming at last on to the spikes of the wooden stumps, its branches splayed out like two long arms. The great root ball at its base was levered out and the roots fanned like Medusa’s hair slippery with snakes.
The torrent of water kept sliding down the hill. The next wave came carrying Dad’s tool box with it. High in the water it floated off down the yard followed by his work bench, the jacks he used to move his houses, his old hat and work gloves, they all flowed on a great wave that cleared the back fence and headed out into the suburb. The bed unsnagged from the back fence and went too, all of it floating down the hill towards the creek. I imagined it flowing on as the rain continued, from there into the river. And I dreamt all night of its path as we slept under the dining-room table. I saw it join up with Dad’s clothes, his photographs, his papers, his gardening shirt, I saw everything amass at the mouth of the river then empty out into the Bay where it dispersed and was gone for ever. All the possessions that represented a life, a hat, a shirt, some photographs, some bits of wood and tools, and Dad was gone.
30
Gerard remembers very little of what happened. In our minds it is the wind and the water we all recall. The water that finally carried Dad away, that collected up his belongings the wind had scattered and brought them all together. The possessions floating down the waterways, the bed, the tools, the clothes, making a final tour of the town where he lived all his life and coming to rest in his beloved Bay.
Gerard doesn’t remember flying through the air on a bed or being found in the ruins of the room in the back yard or being flung into the tree or half drowned as he was dragged by Edward back to the house. His memory, as is all of ours, is of the wind and the river.
Mum was thirty-seven then and I believe it was her instinct for the drama of life that saved her. If she’d closed down, she wouldn’t have lived, she would have gone with him. But in the end she was only prepared to go so far. She was willing to enter the odd arena of their supernatural relationship, but she kept a part of one foot on the ground, in the real world.
She’d had a reprise, a respite from his death that had enabled her to stretch out his departure, but the storm which came almost a year to the day after he died forced Mum to choose which road she was going to take.
F
inally she had to choose between life and death, between Dad and the drain man. In my imagination Dad had even been offering to allow her to bring Gerard if it was death she elected. He asked her three times. Sailing across her garden on a bed that had been sucked out of her bedroom. Then as the sheet of iron flew towards her, then as the tidal wave swept her away. Each time tested her will to live, to fight for life and for her family. Maybe he had felt her wavering before that and had sensed a glitch in her will to live, a weakness for the past, for what had been. But each time she reassured him she wasn’t going with him. He couldn’t take her and the struggle strengthened her will to live. By the time she got to the top of the steps she had lost three lives, but she had won. She had made her decision.
‘Go,’ she had yelled. ‘I’m staying here.’ And she slammed the door on him.
If I’m ever asked what love is, I think of that: to consider giving up your precious place in life, for someone else, for love. But I never tell people about all this because I know they would laugh and think I was mad or making it up.
For a long time I never heard anything from Dad or maybe I knew we had to get on with living too. Mum and I had both been somewhere in between. I blocked him out after this, and stopped thinking about him. I assumed now he was really dead and gone, and my relationship with my father was of the past. I’d had a father for ten years, now I didn’t, so in one way you could see it as one less parent to worry about. I locked him out, buried him in the anty soil again and mostly forgot about him. I felt guilt about pretending he wasn’t so important after all, and sometimes I didn’t like not knowing where he was. He’d always been in the tree and when the tree went I assumed that was the last I’d ever hear from my father.
Sometimes the memory of him would surface and it would terrify me. He would appear to me as a skeleton, or as a sick man, too weak to live, one who had deserted us. I would even go so far as to say I hated him. I was so angry that he had died and my only way of dealing with it was to decide he was really gone. On some days, though, I went back to the darkest point I had been to after his death. I didn’t know then, how could I, I was only ten, that you have your parents for life, even if you’ve never met them, whether they’re dead or alive, they’re around for good in you. What a curse it is having to know death so young, but to fear it makes truly living impossible.