The Tree (11 page)

The next morning I woke to the curly call of the magpie. I opened an eye and saw through the dusty fly screens the wide blue sky and began my plans for the day. Then I remembered with a terrible thump in my guts that it was the first day back at school.

Our feet hated it, back in shoes after months of freedom. Itching seams and sleeves, confinement and words again. Still the rain hadn't come. It started and stopped the night Mum had attacked the tree. It was unheard of, people were twitching and going mad waiting for the rain. Someone had been shot in a nearby suburb. A young father had started up his mower on a Sunday morning and the noise had sent his neighbour into a rage and he'd pulled a rifle from his cupboard and confronted him.

By the end of the week Megan and I had made up. We sat on our giant swing with one foot on the grass rocking us back and forward.

‘Dinosaur followed by three little pigs,' said Megan, thrusting her head back to see what she could read in the frothing clouds.

‘There's a tiger I can see,' I said. ‘And an old woman with only one eye.'

‘And a man on an emu.' Megan pointed behind my head.

‘We stayed in a house surrounded by sand,' I said turning to see if I could find the picture she described in the sky.

‘We stayed up till late every night,' said Megan. We both watched her man riding bareback across the sky on an emu.

‘I wish we were always on holidays,' she said. ‘Just forever at the beach.'

I thought, I'm so glad we're not, but instead I said, ‘We've got a new teacher, Mrs Britton, and she's got moles and bristles on her face.'

‘We've got Mr Turnbull,' said Megan.

‘A man!' I said. I couldn't imagine that. I could barely conceive of anyone other than Mrs O'Grady teaching me. I'd seen her that morning standing in front of her class with her angel pink lips and her bedroom eyes heavy with pearl-white eye shadow. We'd been lined up to go into church for first communion practice, so I could only admire her from afar.

Gerard had started school that day. I had to walk him home. Mum was at the gate waiting for him and he skipped the last bit home and ran into her arms.

‘How was it?' she asked, and he didn't know how to answer.

‘Can I have a drink?' he said.

‘Of course you can,' Mum answered. I hurried past the hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers, then I dawdled the last bit down the hill. I got lost staring through a frangipani tree, into the dark space under the house behind the trees. It was an old Queenslander, the only one in our street, like the one, I guessed, where Ab had found Dad the day he died.

Ab told Mum he thought it was a weird place for Dad to have a nap under the verandah of the house they were moving. Then Ab had cried. I'd never seen a man cry. It looked so wrong, like it must really hurt. I had seen Dad shed a tear, though never about his ticker as he called it. His tears had always been tears of joy. At the beach on a glorious day, he'd say:

‘God's own.' He'd indicate the plate of dark breakers before him and the moon rising over the dunes.

He was definitely the wrong person to die. It was God's mistake, Mum called it. A big mistake and she spoke like she was going to get her revenge on God and take him on somehow in a dual. I knew when I saw her looking up to the heavens that she was thinking, ‘So that's your best shot?' Like it hadn't crippled her. I could imagine my mother in the ring goading Him, a featherweight light on her feet and mean, pitched against the Almighty, but not frightened by Him at all.

I could see she was working it out, God was going to pay for this. My mother even suggested it, but never said it out loud, that Ab, a man with a nervous laugh to cover all occasions, should have been taken instead of our father.

I imagined Dad's last minutes under the dark verandah, blue light falling on him through the gaps in the verandah floor. He'd known how it would go in the end. His heart would flutter, then stop. It would gasp for breath like a fish hauled in and slapped on the deck, it would gasp and flap and finally stop.

Megan's foot pushed off the ground and the swing rocked gently.

‘Don't be surprised,' I said to Megan, ‘if tomorrow morning you see a man with a beard in our back yard.'

That was the only way I could tell Megan and remind myself that the date that my mother had organized with the tree man was almost upon us.

‘Who is the man with the beard?' Megan asked.

‘The man who is going to cut our tree down.'

‘Oh,' Megan said, and I wondered if she cared.

Then we both saw it together. The decapitated head floating above us. That head looked so real, cut off at the neck, lying back on its mass of grey curls. It seemed a great crime had been committed somewhere in the heavens and we were witnessing the brutality of it and the head of the victim tumbling down to earth.

‘Mozart!' I said. ‘It looks like Mozart.'

‘Or Beethoven,' said Megan.

We looked around us, we couldn't believe the world wasn't stopping to gasp at the sight of this head rolling to earth. It lost none of its shape as it floated towards the horizon, not like other clouds that changed expressions, divided into parts, blew away in wisps. This cloud head stayed intact until it dropped below the house line, appearing as if it landed on their roofs, deflating like a punctured balloon.

Then the wind came in, the first hint of a storm, and a string of cloud rabbits raced with the speed of the mechanical ones they use at the dog track, round and round the bottom of the sky.

We should have recognized the signs in the sky that day. We should have known it was an omen, that something was going to happen.

Heads don't roll across the sky like that for no reason, I remember thinking.

And the line of rabbits kept racing in a fading strip round the inside of the sky's great dome, like a blue mixing bowl turned upside down, ringed with a pattern of racing bunnies.

The scraping of Mr Lu's spade sounded heavier than it had all summer, like he was tired of his digging. The sun went behind a purple cloud and the world went suddenly green.

‘See you tomorrow,' I said to Megan as I slipped through the gate in the fence.

Megan was already skipping down the path towards her house.

The drill of the cicadas slowed to a purr and the frog symphony began. There was a flurry of activity now it was dusk. Doors opened, sprinklers came to life and across the fence Mrs Lucas was dragging in her forgotten laundry.

With the cool change came an explosion of sneezes as the changing wind affected the sinuses of the housewives of the suburb. There was a tightly packed chain of nasal blasts from Mrs Lucas, a sort of, ‘Achar, achar, achar, achar.'

Then a discharge from Mrs Johnson that sounded like a blood-curdling scream. It went on for minutes while every woman in the neighbourhood cleared her nasal passages to adjust to the weather front.

You would have thought we would have recognized all these cues.

But the first thing I heard that night was the rattle of rocks against the wall outside, right behind my head. They sprayed against the weatherboarding with such force I thought Megan's brother had fired them with his slingshot. That woke me up, that and the door slamming as a gust of wind went through the house. I felt a fine spray on my face: it was the rain hitting against the window so hard it leaked around the edge of the frame. A wall of windows along the back of the house blasted closed in the next gust of wind and that woke the rest of them. I stayed in bed a long time listening to the wind and rain, trying to gauge their strength. The drought had broken, that much I knew.

I finally dared to look out the window into the back yard. Outside the tree was dancing, like a mad skeleton. Arching and folding in two with the force of the screaming wind. The branches were tugging at the power lines, they pulled and wrenched at them, straining them to their limit. A few attempts later they snapped and their ends sprayed about in the dark air, hissing like a basket of live cobras. A second after that the house plunged into darkness, all my fear jumped to my throat and I ran into Mum's room.

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.

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 it 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.