That night I wanted to hurt my little brother Gerard because I wanted to get to my mother. How could she abandon what she had believed in so strongly? It couldn’t have just been pressure from a priest. Her relationship with religion had always been fickle. It had never involved going to church or believing in God. She had however believed that everything happened for a reason, until Dad had died, then she’d said that even that, the last wobbly cornerstone of her belief, had been knocked out. Anyway it wasn’t like her to be influenced or worried by what a priest thought. So I pinched Gerard so hard three times in a row until he woke up crying. I’d stood over him for ages getting up the guts to hurt him. He was asleep I knew because he was purring with such pleasure it was putting me off my attempts to sleep. But I wanted him to pay for my mother’s betrayal so I found a squidgy lump of skin on his arm, picked it up and twisted. I felt so bad, but nothing happened. I tried again. This time he rolled over and murmured. By the third time I was feeling more desperate so I squeezed harder and he sat up sharply, already crying.
‘Daddy,’ he called, ‘Daddy,’ and I felt very badly.
I dived for my bed and landed on the pillow just as my mother arrived.
‘Daddy,’ Gerard sobbed.
My mother took him in her arms and cuddled him close.
‘What is it?’ she kept asking.
‘She pinched me.’ He pointed towards my bed and sobbed on.
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘He had a dream and I can’t get to sleep because he snores,’ I shouted. And the whole plan backfired because my mother took my little brother away to sleep with her. It suited both of them because it meant my mother had company in the bed she had been terrified to sleep in for the past weeks and my little brother got what we all wanted – to sleep in bed with our mother.
‘Why do I have to sleep by myself,’ I’d often queried. ‘You’re older than me and you get to sleep with Dad and we have to sleep by ourselves. It’s not fair.’
She just said, ‘Go to bed.’ That was her answer because I knew she didn’t have an answer.
Then the back steps started to separate from the house and we were finally forced to do something. There was a gap between the house and the top step and it was widening. The roots under the house had tightened their grip on the wooden stumps that held up the house, pushing them upwards. These had in turn raised a section of the house slightly and caused the steps to drop off. For the first week my mother just locked the back door and tied a rope across the bottom of the back steps and told us not to go near them. I had to use the front steps when I wanted to leave the house to go and play with Megan. It was like the back part of the house was dead, it belonged now to the realm of the tree. I noticed also that the branches had grown to touch the house all along the back wall.
‘Why don’t you come down the back steps any more?’ Megan asked.
And Megan must have told her dad or her dad had asked Megan why my mother was using the front steps to get to the laundry at the back of the house, so that night there was another mister. It was odd to see Mr King, a quiet tuba playing member of the Salvation Army, lifting the latch on the gate in the back fence and squeezing through the gap normally only used by us children.
He came to the back steps, saw the rope and the rift in the stairs, took a step back and re-routed to the front of the house, parting the dusk as he moved, leaving a trail of slippery green air in his wake. Mother invited him in and he sat at the kitchen table.
He’d never been in the house, he observed, not in all the years they’d been neighbours. There was no reason, he added. Mother agreed, she’d been in their house once, she thought, but that had been fifteen years ago.
He said, even though they’d known each other a long time, they didn’t know each other that well, but because Megan and I were best friends, he wondered if he couldn’t speak directly to her. He said he’d just seen the back steps and wondered if he couldn’t help.
‘I know someone who could come and look at the tree,’ he said.
My mother met Mr King’s gaze. We all waited to see what she would say. Edward’s giant Physics book slid off the sewing table taking the snack he had concealed behind with it. It seemed no sooner had she appeased one neighbour than another one took up the torch.
‘Clean that up,’ she yelled to Edward, redirecting her irritation.
‘Isn’t that funny, you call me Mr King and we’ve known each other sixteen years,’ he reflected. ‘Call me Andrew.’
‘I don’t know if I can,’ she said. ‘I’ll try.’ She took a breath. ‘I know it needs some attention. Andrew. I’ve got someone looking into it.’ She was dithering.
‘I don’t know how to approach this and I think I’m probably going to do it badly . . .’ Mr King said almost to himself, pausing for a moment before he plunged into what he knew was going to be a quagmire of barely held but deeply ingrained religious beliefs. ‘I don’t begrudge your religion,’ he said, ‘and I try not to judge people by their God, but there seems to be a certain amount of superstition involved in your religion . . .’ A smirk it looked as if he wasn’t expecting visited the edge of his lips.
I had no idea what the Salvation Army believed in, I thought they were just a brass band, I didn’t know they had their own God as well.
My mother cocked her head, she didn’t seem to have any idea what Mr King was edging towards.
‘. . . which I can’t understand, but each to his own. Megan told me they’d climbed the tree the other night and I was mad with her, but then she told me why.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘And I’m struggling with that. It’s hard for one religion to accept another’s, especially when it involves your own children’s safety . . .’
At which point my mother pulled Mr King out of the house. They were standing on the front steps, a halo of moths diving into the porch light above their heads. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but I guessed I was being betrayed again and now I wished I’d never told anyone about the tree, not Megan, not my mother. Neither of them believed anyway or only when it was convenient for them. I hated them, but I didn’t want to let them know how much I hated them, all I knew was that I would punish them through silence, that was the only response I knew to anything.
After Mr King descended the front stairs in his black work shoes taking some of them backwards as he was still facing my mother, who appeared to be working hard to convince him of something, she tip-toed around me. That wasn’t like her either. I decided she must be guilty or too weak to let people know what she believed, or maybe she didn’t know what she believed.
Later that night when the drain man arrived, taking the eight front steps in a single bound, I realized it wasn’t that simple for her. She was unclear about what she felt because it wasn’t always convenient for her to have her dead husband in the tree outside her window. It sometimes helped, but the trouble it caused at other times, when the drain man arrived, for example, made it confusing.