But the first thing I heard that night was the rattle of rocks against the wall outside, right behind my head. They sprayed against the weatherboarding with such force I thought Megan’s brother had fired them with his slingshot. That woke me up, that and the door slamming as a gust of wind went through the house. I felt a fine spray on my face: it was the rain hitting against the window so hard it leaked around the edge of the frame. A wall of windows along the back of the house blasted closed in the next gust of wind and that woke the rest of them. I stayed in bed a long time listening to the wind and rain, trying to gauge their strength. The drought had broken, that much I knew.
I finally dared to look out the window into the back yard. Outside the tree was dancing, like a mad skeleton. Arching and folding in two with the force of the screaming wind. The branches were tugging at the power lines, they pulled and wrenched at them, straining them to their limit. A few attempts later they snapped and their ends sprayed about in the dark air, hissing like a basket of live cobras. A second after that the house plunged into darkness, all my fear jumped to my throat and I ran into Mum’s room.
I heard my brothers, too, jumping from their beds and sprinting down the hall. They arrived by my mother’s bed a second after me. Gerard was asleep in the bed beside her. Mother was already sitting up listening to the howling wind, she had an ear turned towards it as if she was trying to decipher a meaning from its melancholy wailing.
‘It’s a cyclone!’ Edward tried to scream above the noise.
‘It can’t be, there wasn’t any warning,’ she said.
Not that any of us had listened to the news that night. It did explain, however, why I’d seen Mr King clearing his garden, bringing the bins into the laundry and tying down the swing.
‘Did you listen to the news?’ Edward asked.
‘It’s just a bad storm!’ Mum yelled back as a fresh pile of debris smashed against the side of the house and we dived for the floor. The wind seemed to have upped its strength in that one gust. It stayed at that pitch, screaming like a tortured cat, the life being twisted from its scrawny body.
The walls of the house sucked in, then out. I heard the first crack then. I thought it was the roof beginning to tear at the corner, but the noise came from the edge of the house.
We slid on our stomachs to the long window we used to crawl through to get to the verandah. I scrunched my eyes up and stared into the black, but there was nothing to see. Then we realized why. The verandah had been torn from the side of the house. It went with a gust of wind and very little fuss, maybe assisted on its way by the lashing branches of the tree, now jumping triumphantly in its place.
The room illuminated for a brief second with a strobe of light and we faced each other with terror. I had been hoping Mum would tell us what to do: that she might make it better or say things that would take away my fear, but in that brief flash of light I saw her fear was as great as ours. It was as if she was reading the thunder and the wind and it was relaying a message of terror and destruction.
Without the buffer of the verandah between us and the tree, the branches began to knock against the wall of the house, there was nothing to keep them back. They punched and slapped at the walls.
‘Come on!’ Edward screamed, as another wave of tiles and scrap hit the house. He knew we had to move to the other side of the house, we were in the direct path of the wind.
‘No. Stay together,’ she demanded.
The branches were pounding the wall so violently that the cupboard doors rattled open. Inside I saw all the garbage bags and boxes Mum had stacked on top of each other. All his possessions she kept threatening to throw away, she had piled them back inside the cupboards.
I felt a vibration beneath my feet and I lost my balance. The floor dropped an inch then sprang back to meet us. I believed it was the roots that hugged the foundations of the house. It felt as if they were pulling at the stumps. The floor dropped again, and this time it didn’t return to support us. All at once windows blew out and we were suddenly standing outside.
The doors of her wardrobe blew away and the garbage bags began to spill open. Dad’s clothes, his photographs, all his books and papers, everything he owned began to be sucked up into the sky. His fishing shirt filled and danced out into the night like a drunk jester. His flip-flops flew towards the only unbroken window left, shattering it on the way out. His golf clubs rolled across the floor and spiralled off into space. It was all released to the wind. I felt him leaving and taking his possessions with him. There was a system in the way that it happened. His newest possessions went first. Work clothes, papers, handkerchiefs, pyjamas, tape recorder, cassette, then a line of photographs of us, of Mum, of his parents all sucked out into the blackness. Then the things he had owned since he was a child, it all went in a kind of order.
We were glued to the spectacle, we watched until the stream of possessions trickled down to the last few. As the final items escaped into the night there was a flash of lightning. Through the smashed windows of the room, I saw Gladys’s face at her door looking out at the chaos, her Neighbourhood Watch sign spinning on her front gate like a Catherine wheel. I went to point it out to the others, but now it felt as if the whole room was being pulled away. It tipped again, the floor dropping out from under us.
I heard the crack then. It wasn’t lightning. The sound was amplified so it vibrated in our bodies. It came from the room where we were standing, Mum’s room, it was cracking from the house. The bed was tipping with the floor. There was nothing between us and the black air swilling with turning fragments.
‘Get out!’ she yelled. She knew she had no time to save herself or to save Gerard.
We didn’t know where to go. We only had a second, we headed towards the only opening we could see as the floor was giving way below us. Mother was torn between her escape and a sleeping Gerard. She chose Gerard. Her life wouldn’t have been worth living without him and we leapt out of the room as the floor went and they slid away.