I didn’t think then and I still don’t that my father was the tree, or the tree my father. The spirit of him or some memory or part of him was undeniably there, so it became the focus of our memory of him, past, present, future. It was how we kept him alive, forcing him to stay near us. How much of what happened with the tree was caused by his presence there is difficult to say and sceptics find the suggestion ludicrous. What happened may have been coincidental, but it appeared as if the tree was acting like a jealous husband. It had lunged through my mother’s window grabbing for her, as if he were trying to take her with him so she could join him in death.
It may have been that it was the gesture of a sad and lonely spirit wanting to do the most banal of human activities, go to sleep in his own bed with his wife, a pleasure he had been robbed of. No matter which way I thought about it, seeing the branch on my mother’s bed made me sad, but also terrified of the power of the dead.
The drain man turned up a few days later saying he wanted to check our drains, he was still concerned about them. We knew it was really to see our mother. Seeing a living man and noting, though I was too young to put words to it, the way he looked at her, made me see the power of the living. It was immediate and grounded, not wafty and indefinite like our relationship with our father.
My mother and the drain man stood at either corner of her bed. The branch pinned across the covers wasn’t a sight that was easy to comment on.
She had stalled him downstairs by the laundry for half an hour trying to hide the damage in her bedroom above. It was difficult to see it from the ground as the tree grew so close to the house. You could stand immediately below the catastrophe and be unaware of it. Eventually I noticed her manoeuvre him into a position where he could see the unbelievable sight of the branch skewering the house.
‘Holy shit,’ he said. Then, ‘Sorry,’ when he saw we were all watching him.
Mother appeared to be reassured by his reaction somehow. He looked things over for a long time before he made any comment.
‘Jeez, Dawn. It’s a bit freaky.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She finished his sentence using the same rhythm, in the weird way they’d had from the start.
The fact that she knew, that he knew she’d made no attempt to have the branch removed magnified its strangeness.
‘I guess I should do something about it,’ said Mum. ‘I just wasn’t sure what to do. Where to start.’
The drain man skirted the room searching for a reason as to why my mother might be so odd as to want to keep the branch of a tree in her room.
He looked at her. ‘Are you serious?’
Mum just looked at him.
‘I’ve heard about people building houses round trees. I wouldn’t recommend it though, the plumbing’s a nightmare.’
She smiled and I saw her wonder for a second, if she could let him in on her secret. Then I grasped the reason why she couldn’t. They were standing by the bed, the air felt gluey with the tension between them. The weight of the heat seemed to allow them to look at each other for longer than I had seen grown-ups look at each other before – if that was what they were doing. His dark, earthen eyes met her imperfect blue irises and I knew that he was going to lie in my father’s place, on my father’s bed. I will never see my father again, I thought. He will leave us for good if this man comes in here. This man who may have a wife, children. The children would have to come on weekends. I’d heard about this. I’d have to share my room with more boys. Chances were he’d have three boys with names like Jack, Stephan and Timothy, and then there would be six boys and me, and I held my breath until I fainted and toppled down on to the un-vacuumed hall carpet. I came round a minute later and was sick over the gritty rug at the door of my mother’s room.
I didn’t have to worry about more children. My brothers and I discovered later that night when we listened to my mother and the drain man talking in a dark corner of the verandah that he did have children, two daughters, adopted from Malaysia, but they were older. He and his wife had fostered many other children, but had no children of their own. This placed a stress on their relationship that eventually caused them to separate. We heard all this listening through the open window of mother’s bedroom. They were only feet away from us but it was difficult to hear sometimes above the sound of the beating cicadas.
When we heard their chairs grating along the wood of the deck we scattered, but they were only topping up their glasses with beer. Finally the drain man left; we watched from the front window. Mum waved him off from the dewy grass of the footpath in her bare feet. I saw her sneak a quick look about her, checking to see if the neighbours were watching.
That night I heard my father calling to me again. I put a pillow over my head to stop the noise. I didn’t want to talk to him. I went to my mother, but she wasn’t in her room. Now that the branch had been removed it seemed so empty in there. We’d become accustomed to it lying across the bed. The drain man had cleared it all away that afternoon, lowering it with ropes like a coffin into a grave. The leaves had fluttered down in eerie circles.
‘Simone,’ I heard my father calling me.
‘No,’ I said, and I searched the house more desperately for my mother. I found her huddled on the sofa with the television on, watching a late movie. I saw her confusion as the black and white film flickered on her face. She didn’t bother to take me back to bed.
For the next week she seemed to sleep anywhere but in her bed and the tree began calling me again. It drove me mad, but she was cross with him, she said, for complicating her life, for leaving her and for a while she turned her back on him. It seemed easier to think of him as dead than partly living with us. His memory was an inconvenience and though my mother didn’t know it at the time or maybe she did, it was stopping her getting on, stopping us all. It had been useful for her to be able to talk to him, but not so useful for living with the living. And the drain man was very much alive. He seemed to be life itself: the way he walked, he was cemented to the earth. It made my father seem even more dead. They were earth and air and my mother was the fire between them. There was no water to be seen anywhere. Water may have lubricated it all, oiled the awkwardness that I felt between the three of them. The water that was there kept getting blocked in the drains.
Later that week I heard her scream. She was under the house. She was hanging the clothes there to dry because it looked like rain. I wasn’t desperate to see what fresh horror she’d found, so I didn’t hurry. I dawdled down the stairs and found her staring at a tree root that had churned a path across the cement in its search for water. The knuckles of the roots protruded like an arthritic hand that was attempting to straighten. We could see that one of the wooden stumps that supported the house was being pushed up by the roots and would eventually force itself through the floor. My mother became immobilized again. She didn’t want anyone to know because it meant being told what she knew already, that the tree was pushing the house over. Her only hope was if it rained, then there was a chance that the tree would get enough water and it would stop the ground contracting and the house from shifting. She knew eventually she would have to decide between them, the house or the tree. The house our safety, the past, and the only way she knew to have a future. And the tree, her husband, the past, and the only way she knew to have a future. Her way of dealing with it was to ignore it and hope it would go away.