by Judy Pascoe
31
I woke the morning after the storm to find myself sardined under the kitchen table. James’s toes were in my face and beyond that was my mother’s back, then Gerard. We crawled out desperate to see how the world had changed in the wake of the storm. We rushed to the back door. The first thing that struck us was the terrifying space left by the tree. It was lying like a lazy drunk across the garden. It had crushed the fences around us, we had no boundaries holding us in. I knew that in one way we were free.
The wind was still strong, you could lean into it and feel as if it were holding you up. Water poured from under the house in a brown stream that gushed across the road from the Lombardelli’s, and raced down our hill and through the Kings’ yard, eventually joining up with the storm water drains that ran down to the creek.
All the houses of the suburb stretched before us in a grid, they lay bare and exposed. I’d never noticed how square the blocks were before. The square houses with their square lawns now with patches missing, walls that had disappeared, roofs blown away, fences crushed, cars and caravans turned over. Then I realized why the landscape was so open and why up on the hill the whispering trees at the monastery had changed shape. The trees of the suburb were bare, they had been stripped of their leaves. I followed the line of destruction from the horizon to our back yard, stopping for a moment at the Kings’ house where Mr King was already stretching a tarpaulin across a gaping hole in the laundry roof. Then I saw our swing twisted in its frame; the rope securing it had broken and the carriage had been free to thrash loose in the frame. I had to climb through the branches of the tree sprawled across our entire back yard to get to it.
Megan was there already standing in the cage of the bent swing.
‘Dad says he can fix it,’ she said.
‘Will he?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine life without it.
‘He reckons he will.’ She was distracted by something behind me.
‘Wow,’ she said, seeing the tree lying in my mother’s missing bedroom.
‘Mum was in there with Gerard,’ I said, ‘when it got ripped off.’
Megan’s mouth dropped open and she took in a little gasp of breath. ‘Are they, you know?’
‘Na,’ I said.
Her amazement was short lived. ‘Did you hear about Mr Lucas?’ she said. ‘He was on the loo when their roof tore off.’
It was my turn to open my mouth.
This was the first of the storm stories that whizzed around the neighbourhood at similar speed to the cyclone itself.
Everyone had their own disasters. We found Gladys wandering around on her front step.
‘My grandfather was struck by lightning,’ she said, roaming through the wreckage in her garden. ‘Was thirsty for the rest of his life,’ she said, trying to make sense of a ball of debris caught up in her front fence.
‘That’s the roof off the Lucases’ loo,’ my mum exclaimed.
‘The trouble it caused.’ Gladys was dithering. We assumed she was referring to the storm. ‘We were forever up and down getting him glasses of water.’ The rest of us had moved on, but Gladys was still stuck on her grandfather. ‘He had a terrible thirst. The mess. The mess.’ She was shaking her head now and pointing to her front gate and the missing sign.
‘Someone stole it.’ She shook her finger at the world. ‘I wired that sign to the gate myself.’
The fact that the gate itself had twisted from its hinges and lay battered on her footpath, didn’t give her a clue as to the fate of the sign, and proved how keen she was to believe in crime and violation before all else. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d seen the sign spinning off her gate and heading for outer space.
We waded back to our house, weaving our way through the branches of the fallen tree. Vonnie was at the end of her path retrieving her upturned clothes trolley.
‘I needed a new one anyway,’ she said, with the same dry delivery my mother had used when we found her in her bed in the back yard. It was housewives’ resignation mixed with a philosopher’s perception. Not downtrodden, a kind of Zen knowledge and acceptance that when things happen, they happen for a reason.
Then Gladys nodded towards the Lus’ back garden, delivering a strange look of awe as if it was the stable in Bethlehem and she’d just seen the birth of the baby Jesus.
‘Have you seen?’ she asked.
‘No,’ we said, craning our necks over the fence to see what she was hinting at. Then we saw the reason for her reverence. The Lus’ back garden had been transformed into a rice paddy. The trenches Mr Lu had been digging all summer had filled with water and saved the low-set house from flooding. We crawled through the hole in the Johnsons’ fence to get a better look. Buddha was sitting on his altar peacefully looking over the calm waters. Another bible story sprung to mind as I watched a school of fish shoot off across the rice field. Was it the story of the women with the lamps and the oil? I wasn’t sure. I just knew it felt biblical.
Mr Lu came out carrying a fishing rod.
‘Hello. Hello,’ he called excitedly.
We watched him hand the fishing rod to Buddha.
32
Then the drain man arrived, his square red truck with the caged-in tray rolled to a stop outside our house. He surveyed the damage from the cabin, taking note of the empty room, the fallen tree, and with some relief my mother’s mood as she came across the road to him. There was intensity in their greeting. That was it, my brothers and I thought, this is going to be our future. Our mother will be skipping out with the drain man. It wasn’t better, it wasn’t worse, we had no control over anything, that was all I remember thinking.
It took us the entire day to clear away the tree. Gradually as the hours wore on and more of the branches were taken away, the space opened up before us and we were all intrigued by the view. You could see the streets of trees stripped bare to the horizon, the jacarandas and the frangipani and a gum two blocks away full of lorikeets screaming. Still we felt self-conscious without our green cloak to shield us. It would take us a long time to get used to the open space left by the tree. The view was one thing, we could even see the sun set now, but the gap left by the tree, symbolic and otherwise, we felt in many ways. We were on show now, everyone was watching us to see what we would do next.
The devastation of our house seemed too much in the beginning. The idea that no matter what, even if your father died, you were always safe in your own house, that security was gone too. It represented more pain and another death.
There was emptiness in our lives now which we had managed to put off for a year. Even for Edward and James who had never really believed in Dad’s presence in the tree, because we had, we had kept him alive for them.
Gerard and I went with Mum and the drain man on one last trip to the dump. She felt scrawny, my mum, I remember thinking that, as I slid along the bench seat in the front of the drain man’s truck to sit beside her. I felt bigger than she, like she was so frail I wanted to pick her up like one of my old dolls and wrap her in a blanket. We drove through the streets of devastation.
Along the river the picture was different. The water had taken whole houses. The scenes were more bizarre, a caravan halfway up a tree and dead animals ebbing in the floodwaters. The roads were rivers and people were rowing along them as if they were in a Venetian canal.
Then we saw our bearded tree man, slicing his way through a jacaranda that had fallen across a street. We waved to him, but he was busy slicing a corridor through the trunk to create a passage wide enough for cars to get through. Now he didn’t appear so like the grim reaper with a chainsaw for a scythe. He was a Samaritan helping the victims of the storm. I wondered if he even remembered he had a date at our house. Maybe he would call round later and see that his job had been done.
‘When are we getting the next storm?’ Gerard asked excitedly, unaware of the anguish on people’s faces and the smell of death in the air.
We rattled down the hill into the dump. The man stationed in th
e corrugated-iron shed waved us in, then ushered us along the aisles of junk to where the rest of the tree lay dying in the wet heat. We jumped out and watched the drain man manoeuvre the truck back and lift the tray. The logs clattered down and joined the heap of tree.
The drain man jumped down from the truck and joined the dump man. They stood apart from us, the dump man scuffing his work boots in the orange earth watching my mother. Mum was standing by the tree having a cigarette, farewelling the giant that had been with us for all my life. It would no longer be our witness, no longer stand guard over us.
The significance of the moment was lost on Gerard and me. We were chasing each other over the pile of wood, our feet skating out from under us as the logs rolled and slid under our feet. Mum was so preoccupied she didn’t even bother to yell at us. She threw her cigarette into the dust and squashed the life out of it with the heel of her shoe.
33
In many ways I was relieved he was gone, not bothering me any more, lingering outside my window, calling me in the middle of the night. I collected butterflies and played with Megan and most of the time I was happy. Then something would happen, some unexpected emotion would jump on me as I rounded a new corner in life and the feelings would leak out, and sometimes it was difficult to dam them back in.
Seeing Katherine Padley’s father at my first Communion, that set me off. It was the way he took this photograph of her, like she was the most beautiful and the most clever girl in the class. I wanted that and I howled so much I went red and ugly to the point where even my mother became embarrassed, and she was never one to worry about causing a scene. She had to drag me out of the church I was howling so loudly, gulping and gasping with despair. I had no idea where the noises were coming from.
So I stood with my mother in the toilets with tears coursing down my face and her trying everything to hold them back. She tried to repair me, but these were tears from the pit, from that far below they were avalanching as they raced to the surface and burst forth in their own form. She was wiping my face, a red blotch of sadness. She wasn’t used to other people’s outbursts, just her own. She didn’t know how to act. She tried being nice, being reasonable, affectionate, understanding, manipulative, then at the end of her repertoire, when all else had failed, she did anger.
‘Stop it,’ she screeched so loudly from the toilet in the school hall, the entire congregation must have heard. ‘Just stop, Simone.’ She was trying to be strict with me as another puppy yelp escaped unexpectedly from my stomach. It was hurting, the tears were coming from so low down.
‘You’ve got to pull yourself together and go in there and hold your head high.’
She had no ability to deal with another person’s pain. Her own dramas were the most important thing, even when someone else needed to have one.
By the time I got back to the church my body was only sometimes shuddering from the centre. She looked at me sternly as if that would stop the involuntary movement, but I had no control over it. She pushed me off in the direction of the altar and I took up my seat beside Katherine Padley. She patted my arm, like she had the day I’d spent too long in the confessional. I sighed, knowing the whole congregation felt sorry for me, I hated that. I read their thoughts. Poor girl, no Dad.
I have no recollection of the ceremony, of what happens at a first Communion. I remember there were envelopes from all the old aunts with money in them, and from Uncle Jack. And that by some miracle the first communion dress Gladys had made for me was shredded in the storm by glass from a falling window. It seemed that fabric was never meant to marry, man or God, Gladys said.
I remember looking in a mirror at the great drops of water clinging to my face and my mother trying to hold them back and reconstruct me. And my mother then choosing a hymn from Dad’s funeral to cry to. It was as if she had to compete for the drama prize after my breakdown. It was her turn then to be led from the church.
We’d both recovered by the time the professional photographer arrived. He wasn’t anyone’s Dad. He was being paid to take our picture so he treated us all the same. I felt I looked a million dollars by then, dressed as one of God’s little angels. But the photograph stands testament to this day, in it I looked like I only half belonged. My mother was having a cigarette around the back of the vestry, she’d gone without one for a few hours and the trauma of having to deal with my raw emotions, then hers, was too much. My three brothers, as brothers should, couldn’t care less.
Then I went back to the way I remained for years, with no idea when or why the feelings would overtake me. That was because I was suspended in deep freeze, trapped in a gaseous fog in a glass beaker, like some experiment from my brother’s Chemistry class.
34
You would have thought, we all did, now the third point of the triangle had been rubbed out, that my mother would have taken up with the drain man without fear or guilt. No one would have blamed her, she was thirty-seven and still bony, wild and attractive. But when the tree went, so did her desire to be with the drain man. They were all part of the same structure. He belonged in the same equation as Dad, and when Dad was removed the sum fell apart.
My mother had used them both, in a strange way. Her relationship with the drain man allowed her to keep a part of herself in the land of the living. He was the balance, and Dad’s opposite, that was his attraction. He possessed everything my father did not. But when Dad left, the drain man had no counterpoint. He was just a man, a mortal. What had seemed like superhuman power before became very mundane. He was just alive, and, compared to being dead, it wasn’t that interesting.
I doubt if my mother was conscious of this; we certainly weren’t. It was only years later that I understood. She never talked about it, how they finished, but I remember the night. It was a few weeks after the storm and we assumed she was leaving a respectable gap between Dad and taking up permanently with the drain man. The phone rang, it was him, I could tell by the way she kicked her shoes off while she was talking to him and dragged the phone into her room like a teenager. She sat on the bed and entwined her legs while she pulled the telephone cord through her fingers.
The four of us were watching television, it was a Friday night, one of the last Edward spent with us. He had just shaved for the first time, not that he had a lot of reason to, but he was impatient to move on to the next phase of his life, the world of aftershave and girls. For him the answer to the last year was looking forward not back. I wish I could have done the same.
We all slumped knowing what the phone call meant: Mum was going to take up with the drain man and our lives would be over. Immediately we started arguing over a bottle of Coke and some bags of crisps. She got off the phone, said she was going out and went straight to the bathroom, yelling through the door at Edward for leaving such a mess and using her razor. Not long afterwards the drain man arrived. He sat on the sofa beside me while Mum was colouring her mouth in with red lipstick. I was so exhausted, I couldn’t move.
‘What’s on, guys?’ he said, not at all nervous. I thought we were within our rights to expect him to show some fear or anxiety at taking over from my father, but he didn’t. I thought, you cocky bastard, think you can just walk in here and take our mother away from us. I said nothing else, neither did he. Then nothing for fifteen minutes, we watched the television in silence. When the programme finished and there was still no sign of her, he went off to see what was wrong. That felt like pure antagonism, how did he get the right to go into the bathroom to see if our own mother was all right? Of course she wasn’t. She was on the floor clutching her lipstick. She couldn’t do it. They didn’t end up going anywhere. They sat on the floor in her room instead, drinking beer.
Her room was a building site, there was no verandah, no windows, but there were four walls and a roof and a mattress on the floor. The romantic aspect of the room didn’t escape us. There was no electricity in there, so they lit a candle and burnt it on to a plate. We waited up, assuming this was my mother’s last episode of regret a
nd remorse before they actually spent the night together in our house. We had accepted the inevitability of it, we all wondered how long it would be until we were forced to meet his children at some hideous suburban beer garden.
Then an odd thing happened, he left. There were no dramatics from my mother, she wasn’t yelling after him and throwing bottles. There was shuffling at the front door as she maybe kissed him before he left. But I’d learnt the sounds of a long passionate kiss and a short perfunctory peck, and this was the latter.
I was lying in my bed running for joy, my legs cycling through the covers. He’s dumped her, I thought. Gone back to his wife. They always do, according to my mother. But it wasn’t the case, my mother had called it off.
We couldn’t believe the attraction between them had just died. They had a look about them when they were together, they were meant to be. We had prepared ourselves for a stepfather. Then when it didn’t happen, when she called it off, we couldn’t believe our luck. We kept thinking the next weekend he would show up, then the next weekend, that maybe she would change her mind and call him, but she didn’t. In the months to come, I shocked myself, I changed my mind, I prayed he would come around again because my mother was as miserable as sin.
But we eventually realized he wasn’t coming back. With the death of the tree had come the death of my mother’s feelings for the drain man. The silence seemed to fall on her and I hated seeing such a passionate woman frozen in her stride. Sometimes it would fire out of her and she would be mad and crazy and yell at us and dress in purple for a week, but a lot of the time she was just normal, life’s most hideous crime.