When we saw him lying at the bottom of the tree in a heap, little Gerard, I was surprised how sick I felt. My mother screamed and ran to him and Uncle Jack grabbed the phone.
Seeing her child twisted in a damaged ball was the last straw for my mother. She wailed and howled even after she’d discovered that he was alive. He would mend but not my mother. Whatever had snapped inside her when she saw his body heaped at the bottom of the tree could never be fixed. And she was furious that she had been forced to witness that moment. Those slimmest seconds when she had believed him dead and the acid of that image had already burnt her guts and by later that afternoon her clothes were hanging from her body, the weight seemed to have dropped off her in a few hours.
She bellowed at the Neighbourhood Watch women to leave. She cursed them for not wanting to play under the tree. She blamed them for his fall, for losing the game, for allowing her to win the tree she didn’t want.
Her prize was above us, all around us, and she shouted at it like a mad woman until the ambulance arrived for Gerard and Jack took her under the house to calm her down. She yelled at everyone randomly, but mostly the tree because she believed it had called to Gerard, beckoning him into its arms. His youngest, the delectable innocence, who could blame Dad for calling to Gerard and who could blame Gerard for seeking out his father.
I felt my stomach fizz when I saw his arm twisted back, bare white bone exposed, shattered and sharp like a broken teacup. I thought, who would I fight with? Who will I poke when I’m feeling angry? I feared I would never do battle with Gerard again.
The Neighbourhood Watch women moved up the drive in a wavering line that lapped towards the front gate as the ambulance arrived. I’d heard the siren coming, as I had months before when the fire engine came for me stuck in the tree, scooting down the main road, parting the traffic at the lights at the bottom of our hill. Then I saw the drain man’s van flash by behind it. My mother saw it too. The longing and bewilderment came into her eyes and the old aunts posted themselves at intervals around her, like a force field that was meant to keep her in and him out. All of them chattering and asking questions like a line of sparrows on the telephone wire. Twittering on about fractures and breaks, arthritis in later life. I wished someone would take an air rifle to them. Then suddenly they went quiet, their prattling hushed. They were monitoring her mood, she had gone into shock, and they tightened in around her.
The drain man was still waiting for her to signal him, to give him permission to open the door of his van and step down the drive, but she didn’t. He must have seen the helix of old women around her and assumed it was one of them that was injured. The gravel crunched under the tyres of his van and he drove off as the ambulance men trotted down the drive carrying the stretcher.
The coil of relatives wrapped around my mother was an unwieldy mass. It moved with her wherever she went. It hung with her over Gerard as the ambulance men placed him on a stretcher. It hobbled up the hill with her to the back of the ambulance which is where attempts were made to remove it, but there was no arguing with them, they were as one and they climbed in beside my mother and Gerard to protests from the ambulance men saying it was against the law, there was no room, they just couldn’t do it. All cautions were ignored and the posse was locked in the back of the ambulance. It took hours at the other end to move that many old ladies in high heels up and down hospital corridors.
What happened to Gerard is that he broke his arm and his collarbone and he was unconscious, but he would be fine, he would mend, but not my mother, she was broken and possessed.
She came back from the hospital to find the drain man at the house. Jack had stayed with Aunt Cath in Casualty. Cath had fallen off her heels hobbling down a ramp and had been admitted for observation. With Jack absent the drain man must have sensed an opening, but his timing, which had been so sensitive and impeccable to date, was way off the mark. My mother took one look at him and bawled she never wanted to see him again. That was just her opener.
‘Or any man as long as I live,’ she followed with.
He tried to defend himself. He’d seen the ambulance, he said, and he needed to know what was going on. It had worried him for the rest of the day not knowing.
I could see how difficult it was for her, she was touched by his concern, but she didn’t want to allow herself to be.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘And never come back. Ever! You make everything worse,’ she said, though her eyes said something different. Her eyes said confusion.
He left, the drain man, looking so defeated. For the first time I could remember, I felt sorry for him.
Her real anger though she held back for the tree. It was the sight of Gerard with his arm in a sling, his collarbone and ribs strapped, her perfect child damaged that sent her back into a temper.
She watched him playing on the floor with a pile of toys and that triggered something.
There was a distant trembling of thunder and the clouds were gathering in the west. My mother’s mood matched the brewing storm. The stirring, the rumbling. She had been holding something in that was near eruption. It was oozing around the corners of her sanity.
I heard her then in the kitchen, in the cupboard under the sink, then in her bedroom, flinging open the cupboard doors and tearing garbage bags from a roll. She began to throw all his belongings into them. Last time they had been packed away with tenderness. Now there was no order to the way she was doing it. Clothes, papers, books were all mixed together, nothing was going to be recycled or handed on, it was being treated as trash. She thumped around her bedroom and slammed the doors and drawers making no secret of the fact that everything was going.
When she had finished and the garbage bags were brimming, two deep along her bedroom wall, the wind began to pick up bringing with it the first sprays of rain. She moved through the house then, on the prowl, and glided down the back stairs. The weight in her movements increasing as she flung open the lid of Dad’s tool box. I heard the scraping of metal on cement. She was dragging the heavy head of the axe across the cracked cement floor and out into the garden. Then she picked it up and swung it at the trunk of the tree.
Inside we put our pillows over our heads and tried not to listen to her while she bellowed at him at the top of her voice. She blamed him for what had happened to Gerard. The neighbours, everyone in the suburb, heard.
The drought broke that night and between the cracks of thunder and the plops of rain we could hear her screaming at him. She accused him of taking her child, or trying to, of calling to him and forcing him to climb the tree. Then the neighbourhood knew what the tree was about, if they hadn’t before, they did now.
I couldn’t bear it any longer. From my window I could see her taking wild swings at the tree with the axe. I was terrified of going near her in case she didn’t know what she was doing. I started to shake. I was afraid she would kill me if I went too close.
I found Edward on the top step watching. We knew we had to get her inside. We called out to her.
‘Mum . . .’ I tried first.
‘Go away!’ She punched at my plea with an angry grunt.
We took a step back.
‘Come on in, Mum . . .’ Edward tried next, sounding as normal as he could.
In the following silence we heard the axe drop. We could just make out her figure staggering into the strip of light my window cast on the back yard. Then we saw there was a shadow by her side. It was Vonnie hovering over her, a great guardian angel. She was steering Mum away from the tree, towards the house. She led her up the back stairs and past us into the kitchen. At the same time Uncle Jack pushed open the front door.
‘Just cut the stupid thing down!’ Edward yelled. He’d taken enough of her madness, he was finally blowing. ‘I’m going to, if you don’t.’ He stormed out of the kitchen and made for the back door.
‘No!’ my mother screamed after him.
Uncle Jack went straight to Edward directing him back to the kitchen.
‘It’s been a long day, troops.’ He held Edward by the shoulders and spoke softly to his dark hair. ‘I suggest we all hit the sack and reconvene for a debrief at 11.00 hours.’
No one had any better suggestions so we nodded and drifted our separate ways. Vonnie stayed on though. I could hear her talking to my mother in her small intense voice under the interrogating fluorescence of the kitchen light.