I’d only been back in my bed a minute when I heard a scratching on the wall behind me. I jumped with fright before realizing it was only the rats running inside the walls. Since Dad had died the rodents had moved in. They knocked on the wall by the end of the bed, rapping on the timbers. I was too frightened to move. I was scared if I made a noise I wouldn’t hear them chewing through the walls above my head. Then I’d miss the crucial moment to escape before they attacked me.
The volume of their scratching increased suddenly. It sounded like three of them were fighting, chasing each other in a whirlpool of rat limbs. I heard my mother stirring in her bed on the other side of the wall. She punched the fibro hard with a book trying to shut them up.
Then my wall breathed in, I saw it and I felt it. Then out, it billowed. I gasped. I heard the shattering of glass and my mother scream. I jumped from my bed and ran to her room and found her squashed against the bedhead, her arms over her head. By her side, lying in her bed, was the snake-tongue branch. It stretched from the window across the room to the bed, where its frayed tips lay draped beside her. As she dared to drop her hands from her face I could see her expression change from fear to grief as she realized that the branch lay on my father’s side of the bed.
That was when I first understood that whatever was between my mother and the drain man was serious, he wasn’t just another mister. I could see her recognize it as well, and now my father was letting her know he wasn’t going to give her up that easily. Even if nothing was happening with the drain man, he was aware that whatever my mother felt for him, my father, and no matter what intimate moments they had shared at the top of the tree, they were limited. Even though those moments seemed real, as real as any moment of dialogue any two living people could have, they could never share a bed again, their relationship would never involve the flesh. I understood then that there was something in the hardship of real life that was so vital it transcended the spiritual. The fact that he could never compete with the realness of human contact struck me like a blow. And there was this other thing called sex, and I didn’t understand it or know what it was, but it had to do with beds and men and women, and I realized I hated my mother for whatever it was she had done to make my father mad. There was this bed and two men involved and I sensed that meant trouble. So Dad’s attempt to assert his claim over my mother was so poignant, I wanted to cry.
Edward arrived and gaped at the damage before him. My mother still hadn’t moved. The bed and floor were covered in glass. She motioned for Edward to stay where he was, though his instinct was to rush to her. She pointed to her shoes thrown down in the corner of the room. Edward, in bare feet, leant in and retrieved them. He threw them to her on the bed and she slipped her feet into them and carefully swung her legs down to the floor. The fragments of glass scrunched under foot and she took her time getting to us. At the doorway she turned back to look into the room. It didn’t appear as if she found it strange or out of place that the branch we called snake tongue, that had for years rubbed against the side of the house on windy nights, forcing me to lie awake listening to it grinding its bare knuckles on the weatherboarding, had flung itself into her room. My mother waved the damage away; shrugged it off as if it were an inevitable household accident waiting to happen, like a top-heavy vase of flowers sitting in a gusty spot. She walked away from it down the hall pushing Edward and me towards the bank of moonlight at the kitchen window.
It was near one o’clock and somehow the excitement of having a reason to be awake in the middle of the night overtook us and as my mother was oddly chatty we wanted to stay with her. Her moods were so unpredictable any chance of being with her when she wasn’t dark and erratic were moments to cherish. There was a joy in her movement and her voice. Edward, I could tell, was appreciating it as much as I. She fed us, cooked a meal even with what felt like genuine love. It seemed a weird response to the drama. I put it down to adrenalin and the fact that her moods had become so random due to the shock of Dad’s death. We were all in shock at the time, but we didn’t know it. Whatever the reason for her cooking the meal we were grateful and just after two o’clock I went back to my bed feeling happy, until I remembered the branch.
I don’t know where my mother slept that night, but I have a feeling it was in her bed amongst the devastation. That made me sad because I thought she was going insane. I knew that meant we would have to keep looking after her, making sure no one knew about what was going on, and I cursed the day I climbed the tree and talked to my dad and believed that it would help my mother to tell her to climb the tree and talk to him.
The branch stayed where it was for the rest of the week, while my mother’s moods continued to fluctuate. Mostly she seemed happy and in no hurry to have the branch removed from the side of the house and the damage repaired. It wasn’t what most people associated with normal mother behaviour. Mothers on the whole seemed to be cleaners by nature. Things that were broken were thrown out or fixed, drains had to be cleared, toilets unblocked, light bulbs changed, saucepans scoured, that was natural mother behaviour. Leaving a gaping hole in the side of your house with a branch sticking out of it was irresponsible. It was unthinkable mother conduct.
It was only when she found us using it as a tightrope that she was forced to act. As the week had gone on we had begun to sneak into her room and dare each other to walk from the bed to the trunk of the tree. The rules didn’t allow us to sit or use our hands in any way, other than stuck out from our sides, wavering, like a tightrope walker. It was much more dangerous than it looked. Standing on the bed it was an easy enough dare, but once outside the window the dense foliage shielded a view of the ground below, disguising the fact that it was a long way down.