The next morning I woke to the curly call of the magpie. I opened an eye and saw through the dusty fly screens the wide blue sky and began my plans for the day. Then I remembered with a terrible thump in my guts that it was the first day back at school.
Our feet hated it, back in shoes after months of freedom. Itching seams and sleeves, confinement and words again. Still the rain hadn’t come. It started and stopped the night Mum had attacked the tree. It was unheard of, people were twitching and going mad waiting for the rain. Someone had been shot in a nearby suburb. A young father had started up his mower on a Sunday morning and the noise had sent his neighbour into a rage and he’d pulled a rifle from his cupboard and confronted him.
By the end of the week Megan and I had made up. We sat on our giant swing with one foot on the grass rocking us back and forward.
‘Dinosaur followed by three little pigs,’ said Megan, thrusting her head back to see what she could read in the frothing clouds.
‘There’s a tiger I can see,’ I said. ‘And an old woman with only one eye.’
‘And a man on an emu.’ Megan pointed behind my head.
‘We stayed in a house surrounded by sand,’ I said turning to see if I could find the picture she described in the sky.
‘We stayed up till late every night,’ said Megan. We both watched her man riding bareback across the sky on an emu.
‘I wish we were always on holidays,’ she said. ‘Just forever at the beach.’
I thought, I’m so glad we’re not, but instead I said, ‘We’ve got a new teacher, Mrs Britton, and she’s got moles and bristles on her face.’
‘We’ve got Mr Turnbull,’ said Megan.
‘A man!’ I said. I couldn’t imagine that. I could barely conceive of anyone other than Mrs O’Grady teaching me. I’d seen her that morning standing in front of her class with her angel pink lips and her bedroom eyes heavy with pearl-white eye shadow. We’d been lined up to go into church for first communion practice, so I could only admire her from afar.
Gerard had started school that day. I had to walk him home. Mum was at the gate waiting for him and he skipped the last bit home and ran into her arms.
‘How was it?’ she asked, and he didn’t know how to answer.
‘Can I have a drink?’ he said.
‘Of course you can,’ Mum answered. I hurried past the hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers, then I dawdled the last bit down the hill. I got lost staring through a frangipani tree, into the dark space under the house behind the trees. It was an old Queenslander, the only one in our street, like the one, I guessed, where Ab had found Dad the day he died.
Ab told Mum he thought it was a weird place for Dad to have a nap under the verandah of the house they were moving. Then Ab had cried. I’d never seen a man cry. It looked so wrong, like it must really hurt. I had seen Dad shed a tear, though never about his ticker as he called it. His tears had always been tears of joy. At the beach on a glorious day, he’d say:
‘God’s own.’ He’d indicate the plate of dark breakers before him and the moon rising over the dunes.
He was definitely the wrong person to die. It was God’s mistake, Mum called it. A big mistake and she spoke like she was going to get her revenge on God and take him on somehow in a dual. I knew when I saw her looking up to the heavens that she was thinking, ‘So that’s your best shot?’ Like it hadn’t crippled her. I could imagine my mother in the ring goading Him, a featherweight light on her feet and mean, pitched against the Almighty, but not frightened by Him at all.
I could see she was working it out, God was going to pay for this. My mother even suggested it, but never said it out loud, that Ab, a man with a nervous laugh to cover all occasions, should have been taken instead of our father.
I imagined Dad’s last minutes under the dark verandah, blue light falling on him through the gaps in the verandah floor. He’d known how it would go in the end. His heart would flutter, then stop. It would gasp for breath like a fish hauled in and slapped on the deck, it would gasp and flap and finally stop.
Megan’s foot pushed off the ground and the swing rocked gently.
‘Don’t be surprised,’ I said to Megan, ‘if tomorrow morning you see a man with a beard in our back yard.’
That was the only way I could tell Megan and remind myself that the date that my mother had organized with the tree man was almost upon us.
‘Who is the man with the beard?’ Megan asked.
‘The man who is going to cut our tree down.’
‘Oh,’ Megan said, and I wondered if she cared.
Then we both saw it together. The decapitated head floating above us. That head looked so real, cut off at the neck, lying back on its mass of grey curls. It seemed a great crime had been committed somewhere in the heavens and we were witnessing the brutality of it and the head of the victim tumbling down to earth.
‘Mozart!’ I said. ‘It looks like Mozart.’
‘Or Beethoven,’ said Megan.
We looked around us, we couldn’t believe the world wasn’t stopping to gasp at the sight of this head rolling to earth. It lost none of its shape as it floated towards the horizon, not like other clouds that changed expressions, divided into parts, blew away in wisps. This cloud head stayed intact until it dropped below the house line, appearing as if it landed on their roofs, deflating like a punctured balloon.
Then the wind came in, the first hint of a storm, and a string of cloud rabbits raced with the speed of the mechanical ones they use at the dog track, round and round the bottom of the sky.
We should have recognized the signs in the sky that day. We should have known it was an omen, that something was going to happen.
Heads don’t roll across the sky like that for no reason, I remember thinking.
And the line of rabbits kept racing in a fading strip round the inside of the sky’s great dome, like a blue mixing bowl turned upside down, ringed with a pattern of racing bunnies.
The scraping of Mr Lu’s spade sounded heavier than it had all summer, like he was tired of his digging. The sun went behind a purple cloud and the world went suddenly green.
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said to Megan as I slipped through the gate in the fence.
Megan was already skipping down the path towards her house.
The drill of the cicadas slowed to a purr and the frog symphony began. There was a flurry of activity now it was dusk. Doors opened, sprinklers came to life and across the fence Mrs Lucas was dragging in her forgotten laundry.
With the cool change came an explosion of sneezes as the changing wind affected the sinuses of the housewives of the suburb. There was a tightly packed chain of nasal blasts from Mrs Lucas, a sort of, ‘Achar, achar, achar, achar.’
Then a discharge from Mrs Johnson that sounded like a blood-curdling scream. It went on for minutes while every woman in the neighbourhood cleared her nasal passages to adjust to the weather front.
You would have thought we would have recognized all these cues.