2

‘Megan,’ came a call came from the laundry door. ‘Come in now.’ The voice waited for dissent, but received none.

‘Coming,’ Megan called back to her mother, and jumped down from the huge carriage-like swing we were sitting on. It tipped back unexpectedly giving me an eyeful of upside-down sky. There was a scalloped edge of orange cloud in the west pinpointed with a bright white light.

‘Evening star! Saw it first,’ I said, landing beside Megan.

‘You win,’ she said, skipping down the cement path that led to her laundry door.

Over the fence at the Lucases’ house the light above the stairs switched on and Mr Lucas swung out of his back door. He strolled down the steps, stopped for a moment to consider the evening light, then turned on the garden hose. Lying across the back yard it wriggled like a cut snake as the water lurched through it.

I opened the gate on the paling fence that separated my garden from Megan’s. The blackened wood was spattered with curly green fungus, bleached to white by the summer sun.

The gate swung shut and the lock dropped as the purple dusk fell.

‘See you tomorrow,’ I called, but Megan had already disappeared into the dark antechamber at the back of her house.

‘I’ve got Spelling.’ I spoke to no one in particular then I turned to face the tunnel of darkness before me.

‘Simone.’ I can hear my mother. The fly screen on the back door softened her voice and gave it a lilac tone.

‘Coming,’ I reply.

The melody of our voices was like a lilt criss-crossing the suburb.

I prepared to run across the grass. This afternoon, though, the tree was silent, it had stopped its mournful calling. It stood guard over the house in silence. So then I knew my dad was dead, the ants had got him now, well and truly. I didn’t bother to run up the yard, I walked slowly, getting used to the fact that he was no longer in the tree, maybe he never had been.

The next thing I knew I was climbing the wood ladder nailed to the base of the tree, just to make sure he really had gone. I climbed higher, there was no sign of him, still higher I went checking as I went for his occupancy, until I found myself perched on a branch at the top of the tree peering out at a dusk whisked with great spraying fans of cloud.

I’d climbed the tree a hundred times, but never beyond the fuzz of foliage now below me to this new throne, this new perch I had found ten foot further on. That last stretch had made all the difference. The extra blanket of silence that layer of tree provided blocked out the noise of the world, muffled it, so there was only the last tuft of green above me, then the sky. Now there were other sounds, other voices, and a wind through the branches in a different pitch, the beating of birds’ wings and a voice coming from over my right shoulder.

‘It’s taken me a while to realize where I am,’ was how he started. ‘I woke up and saw your grandfather and then I realized I was dead.’

It was my dad talking. I think I nodded because it was so exciting to discover what I’d always known. If you climbed high enough in the tree in our back yard you came to another world.

‘I realized then that I’d left you all. I didn’t mean to die,’ he said. ‘But it’s not that bad. Tell your mother I’m all right. I’ll always love her.’

The world suddenly seemed perfect from where I sat. Cupped in the fork of the tree, I felt as if my father were holding me. I remembered him again, not as a dead man buried in anty soil, but as a living person. The wind filling his old gardening shirt, making it billow out from the ash-grey hair on his chest. This was a father I had already forgotten, the father who went to work and came home, who had sat in the now empty chair at the end of the table, who could swim and do maths, whose wallet was always open. I didn’t hate him now so much for dying, because for the first time since he died I could remember what he was like when he was alive.

The clouds on the horizon had settled into a pattern of dots and dashes that encircled the suburb. I was starting to feel cold. It was winter now and the mornings were so icy that I kept my clothes at the end of the bed, so I could get dressed under the covers when I woke up. The sun didn’t carve a path across the sky with the same intensity as it would in a few months. Then the heat that could melt the bitumen and fry your face to bright red would return and the grown-ups would be complaining about that. Right now they were whinging about the cold.

Then below, the sounds of the mortal world seeped in. Megan’s father and her brothers had finished tea and were in their garage. They were lowering the model railway set with ropes and pulleys from the side wall of the corrugated garage. I could hear the transformer vibrating on the chip-board table as the train began whirring around the track, revving up the hill to a station where miniature people waited to board. In her kitchen Mrs Johnson was clattering pans and emptying the contents of a saucepan through a sieve, the steam rising to fog her glasses. Above, a line of bats flew almost silently overhead then, in the distance, a faint tinkling, milk-bottle lids strung up to keep the crows away from Mrs Pitteville’s tomato plants. All the sounds conspired to distract me from hearing what my father was saying. Then there was a scream from the back steps. It was my mother, her hand pushing a face full of unkempt hair back from her forehead.

‘Oh my God!’ she screamed and her feet thundered down the boards of the back stairs. The inane grins of my three brothers followed behind her. Edward, my eldest brother who was sixteen, then James, who I saw for the first time was taller than my mother, he was thirteen, then Gerard the youngest, who was five. Their grins slipped slightly from their tracks, when they saw how high I was in the tree. They looked frightened. I wasn’t. Their voices were muted as they were funnelled through the dew-beaded foliage. Louder in my ear was the voice of my father telling me to stay where I was.

The fire brigade came, but their truck couldn’t fit down the side of the house. Hysterical now, my mother beat on the chest of the head fireman. I’d heard their sirens coming down the hill all the way from Keperra, past the drive-in movies, past the Redemptist monastery where the old priests with ears the size of African Elephants lived, past the playing field shaped like a picture I’d seen of an amphitheatre in Greece. I’d heard their sirens, but I didn’t realize they were coming to rescue me. The fire crew had to deal with my mother, swearing at the tree, at my brothers. Screaming at them first to climb the tree, then to stop, then to climb, then to stop. Getting my age wrong when they asked her; telling them I was nine, when I was ten and a quarter. Edward was below me somewhere. I heard him calling to me, not as my father had in two syllables, but in one stern word – Simone.

A ladder hooked on to the branch below. It was followed by a fireman’s head.

‘Hello, love,’ he said. He took my hand and I started to back down the ladder. Easily I could have done it myself, I didn’t need a fireman and a ladder to help me. I had an audience below. Little figures like the people waiting on the platform of Mr King’s train set, they stood in their back yards looking up. I waved down. Megan was below on her carriage-shaped swing straddling the seats like a Russian acrobat rocking the swing back and forth and waving.

‘I can get down myself,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, I’m here now,’ he said, ‘and your mother’s having kittens down there. So let’s use the ladder.’