Once Edward figured out there wasn’t going to be a lot going on in the summer break, he got a job in the supermarket stacking shelves. The rest of us ate peanut-butter sandwiches from plastic picnic plates in front of the television. Outside it was sweltering. The sky was blue, but we preferred to stay inside. If we couldn’t go to the beach, we refused to convene with the world at all. My mother objected for a few days, then gave in to the slovenliness. After all, when she yelled at us to play outside, she was usually hanging over a Woman’s Weekly drinking a mug of soup. After a day or two she was slouched in front of the television with us watching the cricket. It was so boring, nothing happened for hours, but that matched our mood. The cricket was slow, the heat made us slow. We lived on Weetabix as well and, conveniently, as the Kings were away, there was no one to testify to our laziness so we felt no guilt about not using the back of the house and staying inside all day. We prayed for rain, we even went to church mainly for that reason, because my mother knew it was the only thing that would save our house or that was the theory expounded by most of the misters. We had been told that a tropical downpour would soak the earth and satisfy the thirsty roots of the tree and stop them interfering with the foundations of the house. Going to church to pray for the drenching was one superstitious step away from performing a rain dance in the back garden, and I half expected she would do that before the holidays were over.
There was one particularly bad day. I didn’t know why at the time, but I realized much later that it was guilt, always guilt. There were stirrings and murmurings at the base of the tree and some scratching and rustling in the night. We found our mother the next morning asleep by the trunk of the tree, laid out and pale. Was she dead or just asleep, or had she tripped over and knocked herself out? None of it seemed to add up to a satisfactory answer. We edged about the picture trying to understand it. I leant in to touch my mother’s face, which was so pale it looked like an outline. Then I saw my mother move her fingers. She woke and sat bolt upright.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked in her usual sharp tone.
Once we realized she was still alive and that this was just another of her outlandish responses to losing her husband, Edward mumbled something about being late for work and he was gone, up the side of the house he disappeared. And the three of us were left again with our mad mother and the horror of another empty, dry, blue sunny day stretching before us.
The question, what are you doing sleeping under the tree?, didn’t seem possible to ask. It was clear she had spent the night there and really we all knew why. The previous evening I’d overheard her with the drain man; he was trying to convince her that the tree had to be cut down. The back steps were still out of action and the floor near the back door was beginning to sag with the lack of support. Still my mother argued she wanted to wait.
‘Wait for what?’ The drain man had raised his voice.
The silence bore through the night. There was only the sound of Mr Lu digging his series of trenches. Then I heard a wavering reply from my mother. ‘He’s still with me.’
I’d heard a set of keys jangling and the front door close, then his van started. I tried to analyse how he was feeling by the revs of the motor; injured with underlying dull pain, the vibration of the engine seemed to say.
The next morning, my mother laid some keys in the centre of the kitchen table. All day they sat in the middle of the table with no explanation as to why these two keys joined by a twist of red and white twine had entered our house. There was an uncomfortable feeling around them. Gerard picked them up and started to play with them.
‘Don’t,’ my mother said. ‘You might, I don’t know . . .’ She took them off him.
‘Why can’t he have them?’ I asked.
‘Because they might break.’
‘What are they for?’ I asked.
‘They’re just keys,’ my mother said angrily.
We discovered the next day, driving to a mystery location, that the keys were for a beach house at Tin Can Bay that was owned by the drain man, and that was where we were heading. We also discovered then that mother had given the drain man permission to cut the tree down, hence the reason she had spent the night beneath the tree. Guilt. Always guilt.
We discovered all of this driving up the highway with the late afternoon sun flickering on and off as we sped through a forest of pine trees. What was more shocking than that revelation was that the telling of it caused her to stop the car at a roadside stall selling pineapples and beg the woman there to let her into her farmhouse to use the phone. The three of us sat on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon while my mother attempted to find the drain man. When she finally did he was at our house, chainsaw poised. Mum sobbed and pleaded with him to leave the tree where it was. He did.