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Authors: Judy Pascoe

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BOOK: The Tree
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36

Many years after that I called on my father again. I don't know why, still no one else had died. I hadn't even been able to expunge my grief for him at someone else's funeral.

I don't know what made me decide I needed to talk to him. It was the anniversary of his death and I went to his grave. I said, sorry.

‘Don't be,' he said.

‘But I've shut you out, forgotten you, left you for dead.'

‘You have to and you're here now.'

‘I'm an opportunist,' I said. I don't know why I said that.

‘Love your mother,' he said. ‘She's a good woman.'

‘I know,' I said, over and over again. ‘I know, I know, I know. I just regress when I see her. I become ten.'

‘Next time see if you can be eleven.'

Instead of flowers, I left a pile of sodden tissues on his grave.

It seems a long time ago that I was rocking back and forth on that swing with Megan, not a care in the world apart from which figures were sprinting past in the raw blue above. That is a million miles away, almost. If every day is one hundred miles, then every year is thirty-six thousand, five hundred miles, then twenty years is seven hundred and thirty thousand miles away, not a million, but a long way.

But the past is a place I like to visit and the clouds are still in my life in massive formations. Sometimes they appear in pictures that contain everyone's lives and everyone's story. I see my own as well in great layers and they make me think of Megan and how we could compare our stories in the cloud friezes. My story would be contained in hers and hers in mine. The story of the tree would be in there but from both perspectives. I miss the freedom of interpreting the clouds with her from our great swing and the freedom of being a child at dusk.

Over the years I've noticed the eccentricities surface in all four of us. We all lay dormant in our pupae until later life. It wasn't until then that we all allowed ourselves to take up the gift of freedom that our mother had demonstrated to us daily. They all have their own stories, my three brothers, and I can't tell them for them. We have talked about the tree and what it meant, but it has been gone a long time and now there is a brash eucalypt in its place.

They've never really said why they wouldn't climb it and talk to Dad. That all remains unsaid. I knew it embarrassed them at the time and they didn't believe it, or if they did they would never admit or act on it. James might have, I thought, on a desperate day, but it would have been like saying a prayer out of habit or hope, even when you don't believe in God.

Edward has the most children and it's not a Catholic thing, he just has a lot of children and they all have perfect teeth. Gerard unexpectedly took over Dad's business from Ab and has made a great success of it. James was a late starter, later even than me because he wandered the world for many years.

‘Thursday's child,' my mother would always say, ‘has far to go.'

He joined a religious sect for a while. Mum went to rescue him from somewhere in France. I imagine her pulling him out by the ear, as if he was still eight years old. They got on a plane and she brought him back. She didn't even go in to Paris. None of us could believe that.

‘Why would I want to?' she said. ‘That's not what I went for, is it? I went to get your damned brother back.'

Still all wasn't squared with God, or at least that's how I felt my mother saw things. If she'd felt even with Him there wouldn't be this anger. Since Dad's death she had shaken her fist at Him symbolically and promised to get back at him.

It was two Christians who bore the brunt of her grudge. She couldn't take Him on in the ring, so she had to pay back some of His disciples.

There were words at her front door apparently the day she opened it and found the two women on the top step. Words along the lines of God being unreliable and a shoddy excuse, open to any interpretation that took your fancy. The two Christians took it well by all accounts. Then there was a push and much evidence debated in the court room as to whether a foot was placed inside the threshold before or after my mother attacked. She paid the price though, my mother, for closing the door on the foot of one of the women. It wouldn't have been such a bad injury, but the woman was wearing sandals and she broke her ankle and her foot in several places.

Mr Lombardelli was a key witness at the trial. He was just passing on his way to lawn bowls and he saw the whole shocking scene. My mother wasn't ever convicted, there wasn't enough evidence, but the shock of it was terrible.

37

About the same time, Mum turned fifty-five and she said she'd come to the end of her time in the suburbs and she sold the house. We hated her for doing that. We couldn't believe she could be so selfish, but we knew it was time for her to move on. She had outgrown it and so had we. The eucalypt that had been planted in place of the poincianna had always looked a desperate substitute. All the memories were with us anyway, deep inside, we didn't need the house any more. We didn't know that then, we cajoled and objected and tried to work out reasons why she should keep it. She was retiring, she said, and moving to the beach, up north.

‘It's not some geriatric, shopping mall shit hole,' she said. ‘Like old people seem drawn to.'

‘What are you going to do there?' I asked.

‘How should I know,' she answered.

‘You won't know anyone.'

‘So, I'll meet people.'

I was just trying to put her off.

She was right though. It was a little settlement, old and untouched, just south of where we had spent that summer holiday after Dad had died. And she met him again, the drain man after eighteen years. It was a casual thing at first. They'd never stopped thinking about each other in all those years. They hadn't kept in touch, but they always knew through acquaintances what the other was up to. They met at the end of a jetty where they both were fishing. My mother is a great fisherwoman. She loves the fight.

It began with just the two of them going on fishing excursions out to the Bay, then as the months went on we realized it was more serious. When I first saw him again in the driveway of Mum's house, I cried, the great welting sobs returned. It reminded me of what my dad would look like if he was still alive. He would have been similar, not that old, still young enough to have his health and his retirement. Why, why, I thought as I sobbed, eighteen years after his death, did he have to go so young? It was hard to explain my tears to my mother and the drain man, but they knew. The drain man was still Dad's replacement, even after all those years.

They live together now in a beach house surrounded by hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers. The drain man's name is George, but we call him Hunk, because he still is.

It's not like a normal love affair, the type you get used to hearing about. They are two deeply attractive souls engaged in the struggle of relating, and they emanate a charge when they are together.

In the beginning we compared him to Dad, not bit by bit, but in the mere fact of his presence. He knew and he was gracious. He let us be cruel to him and ignore him when we visited our mother and he was there. He never demanded anything. He is still and certain looking, but there is a side to his silence that is the result of repression rather than the hush of wisdom, which means he is great fun to tease.

And he allows Mum her grief and there is still a pull, I see it on Dad's anniversary and his birthday when we go to the grave. George doesn't go, he accepts that Mum's relationship with Dad has to go on and that their life together isn't finished and that he is still with her.

The drama returned to my mother's life, it was a joy to see it, but in a different way or maybe a way I could accept. She learned to shoot and that was a turning point in her life. The power of the gun and the potential destruction, it was a comfort to her and it put her madness in perspective. She became an excellent markswoman. She began to compete. She was so herself wherever she went that she stunned people. She would be invited to stalk deer in Scotland or shoot pheasant in England or cull kangaroos in central Australia. It didn't matter where she went, people always commented that they had never met anyone so clearly free to be themselves. It was the perfect balance for her, shooting and fishing and her hunk. She had finally found a flatter path for a while.

Outside her new house is a poincianna tree, not as big and grand as the one in the yard of her old house. It's a miniature, not yet matured, but its branches hang to the ground. There is a row of them, they stretch all the way down both sides of the street to the bay at the end of the road. I sometimes imagine the dead in all of them, stepping across from tree to tree, playing and laughing, whinging and moaning and chattering on to each other like a bunch of mad galahs.

A
BOUT THE AUTHOR

Judy Pascoe was born in Brisbane and completed a degree in Journalism and Media Communications there before moving to Melbourne to join Circus Oz. She jumped ship in the UK and has since worked as a stand-up comedian, television presenter, script writer and author.

For more information about the author,
visit www.judypascoe.com.

BOOK: The Tree
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