The Tree (13 page)

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 and 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.

That was the end of that era. Life wasn't always full of grief, sometimes we forgot Dad for ages, occasionally then we were torn apart by the memory of him, then it would go away and in time return sporadically, just like an old friend.

And it all went on, life for everyone. There was no death anywhere making Dad's death even more irregular. Eighty-year-old aunts had their jubilees and gold and silver and ruby celebrations, and friends' parents became grandparents and it seemed nobody died anymore. I actually longed to see death again, thinking that if I could watch it, someone else's demise, then I could understand it. Or maybe it would remove the pain of my father's death. But everyone seemed immortal.

Occasionally I thought one parent down, only one to go. And I suspected my mother wouldn't die for a long time. She'd live on like a Woolly Mammoth so I wouldn't have to go through the grim affair of her death until I was so much older that I hoped I wouldn't care as much. And the sky that had appeared to open and take my father away was eventually sewn up again where it had torn apart. The jagged seam mended and the sky became the vast blue above that represented the possibility in a life that you could make anything happen.

Then secondary school came and I was desperate to redefine myself, not to be the girl whose father had died. I dreamt of going away to school where no one had borne witness to my past, but there was no money for that, so I spent my secondary school with all the girls who limited, I felt, who I was and kept me trapped in that identity. I longed to be described as something else, the smart girl, the girl who was good at swimming, even the bad girl or the girl who smoked and went off with boys. But I was forever the sad girl whose father had died, that identity was propped up by everyone.

I don't know if my brothers had the same problem. They went off to a different school where they became known by their last name. Their first names were never used. Even Gerard the baby grew up and became O'Neill. I asked what they were called if they were in the playground for example and the teacher wanted to single them out. If someone called, O'Neill and they both responded, then it was, ‘Not you, O'Neill. You! O'Neill!'

And they'd point to the particular O'Neill they were after. My brothers didn't think this was funny or unusual.

After the initial freedom of escaping the straitjacket of school I remained somehow living alongside of life, outside the gates of the city. I was always drawn to people who were missing a loved one, sometimes even a limb. It was a great curiosity to me to know people with both parents, they to me had everything.

I had so few memories of my father, and my mother either didn't want to share hers or she didn't have enough to go round. My brothers were similar. Edward had drinking insights, recollections of Dad at football matches or being shown how to knot a tie or make a dove-tail joint. Nothing that helped me.

I was looking for something broader, an image of him as a person rather than as a father.

‘What's your strongest memory of Dad?' I asked James from a standing start, no warning at all that I was about to knife through the niceties straight to the personal.

‘I've only got the vaguest memory of you in all of it,' I said.

‘I remember not existing,' he said. ‘Not feeling like I was wholly on earth,' he said. The words could have been mine.

That was the oddest thing. James had always felt like me, thought like me, but I'd ignored him I suppose for that reason. I was more interested in what Edward thought and how much Gerard knew and as my mother was always the focus, we all had relationships with her that somehow precluded relationships with each other.

There was an anger towards my mother, all four of us had it, all for different reasons. It would still cement us when we were together and she wasn't there. It was our intimacy, our unexpressed anger at her. We could recall plotting against her, trying to poison her at one point with something from Edward's Chemistry set, but it was bright green, so she knew immediately there was something wrong. We had mixed it with lime green cordial, which she never drank anyway, so we gave her that warning, but she swore she was going to call the cops and get us all put in a children's home.

She still floated above it all, my mother, usually wearing something no one would ever consider wearing, but somehow pulling it off. Even though Dad's death had happened a long time ago, there was a part of all of us resentful and lost in the thin walls of that house. We were all of us a bit indistinct. But sometimes I was as angry as I'd been the day she'd betrayed me to the priest and Mr King. It was the pain and hurt of a ten year old. I thought the boys were immune to it, but I saw glimpses of their anger.

Once we met for a picnic, the whole family. My mother was still as thin as a post, with very little interest in food, but obsessed that everyone else should eat.

‘Get a sausage for the kids!' Mum yelled over to my brother Edward who was turning the blackened crescents on the portable barbecue. He waved his tongs in my direction. I grinned back at the sight of him sweating over the hotplate. The smoke twisting up through the grey rattling foliage of the scraggly gums to the heavens above. He passed some sausages around to the children. Then I noticed him stack a plate of food and pass it to our mother.

I saw it, everyone seemed to except Edward. It was a plate of charcoalled food, the scrag end of everything. Gerard found it very amusing.

‘Mate, that's burnt to buggery,' he said.

And I saw Edward's face. He looked awful. And he'd thought he loved her, I could see him thinking. If he did why had he passed her a plate of inedible food?

‘Sorry, Mum,' he said.

And Mum raised an eyebrow of acknowledgement in his direction to let him know she understood the symbolism of it.

That day she snapped at James as well. He often treated her like a child, patronized her if she got a word or a fact wrong.

‘Don't treat me like an imbecile because I'm not one, and if I am one, so are you,' she finally said.

And I saw James have to tunnel into himself to find out what his problem was. She had no time or etiquette for helping us work out our anger. She was angry too, she said. It was a fact of life. It didn't stop us wishing she could be a little more helpful.

I had my own score to settle with her. We'd agreed to meet, but it had to be somewhere neutral, I thought. Somewhere without domestic distraction, I said. Not that either of us was interested in domestic detail, but we would have the excuse of it, if it was there.

I wanted an apology. I don't know what for. I just knew I felt I deserved one, for having to be her daughter, like every mother should apologize for their behaviour, for their choices, what they did and didn't do. I was prepared to apologize too for being an adolescent and this was the moment I had chosen to do it. I was hoping my mother knew this, that she could read my mind.

We met up a mountain above the heat of the suburbs that stretched out to the sea below us. We sat in the cool rainforest; not the crows and sparrows of the suburbs, but the cracking call of the whip bird and the tinkling of the bell bird punctuating our conversation. And the picture of the suburb below, it was our inescapable identity card that we both held in our hearts. It was a peculiar meeting because we each wanted something from it, to take away to start anew, a resolution to begin again.

My mother had burst through the door dramatically: the car was overheating, she was lucky to make it up the hill. What did we have to meet up here for? Her eccentricities that had always amused me had over the years begun to grate.

It was her idea, I reminded her.

Now looking at each other we couldn't remember the reason for the meeting. To see each other, to exchange snapshots of our past, our version of it, but why now? Why not last year or the year before. I didn't know.

‘What was Dad like?' I asked, not knowing I was going to. My mother wasn't fazed, didn't stop to take it in or hammer the importance of the moment home by leaving a long pause.

‘Oh, I don't know,' she said.

‘You do.'

‘I don't. I've almost forgotten him.'

‘No you haven't,' I said.

‘I've tried to forget him and I've spent so long doing it, it's almost worked.'

I tried again. ‘What was he like when he was young?' I asked.

‘You've seen pictures,' she said.

‘I've seen pictures, yes, but was he, I don't know, funny, happy?'

‘He was like you.'

That was all I got out of her, but it helped somehow.

‘Tell me again how you met him?' I said.

‘They,' she started, referring her gaze to the suburbs below, ‘your father and Ab, moved a house on to the block next door and I made them a cup of tea and that was that.'

I'd heard it before, but I loved the feelings the description gave me. I'd invented the picture of that day. The house brushing the trees as it came down the street, bumping up over the gutter. My mother watching with her mother as half a house floated past the window.

‘Did Gran say make them a cup of tea?' I asked.

‘No way, I saw your father and said, I'll take them in a cup of tea.'

It was a powerful portrait for me, my parents' meeting. Their eyes seeing each other for the first time. In the nether world four children are already waiting to parachute to earth to join them.

From the hindsight of the mountain I could see the fences and boundaries of the suburb below. I could escape geographically, but not mentally. I could be angry with my mother, throw things at her and yell at her, demand my apology or that she read my mind, but it wouldn't change the fundamental problem that she was not my father and that was what the problem was.

I didn't know that all I wanted, all I needed, was my father's love. I didn't know why I didn't know it, why someone couldn't tell me. Firstly, that I could have it and, secondly, that my mother wasn't going to give it to me. It had taken me such a long time to work that out. The years of pain, trapped in my foggy beaker.

Slowly then over time my feeling towards my mother softened and she became what she always had been to me – my mother. I realized I was asking for something I couldn't have. I couldn't have a father's love from a mother or the other way around. People were separate, and I had to accept that sometimes you don't get the other, or you have it for ten years, or ten days, and you have to make that enough to last for a lifetime. But you can't get the same love from anyone else. And it ruins your life if you try. That was a liberation for me learning that finally, but it came a long, long time later. I learned this, and that some roles remain unfilled.