The Tree (12 page)

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.

Finally 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.

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.

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 the 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.

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.