Gerard remembers very little of what happened. In our minds it is the wind and the water we all recall. The water that finally carried Dad away, that collected up his belongings the wind had scattered and brought them all together. The possessions floating down the waterways, the bed, the tools, the clothes, making a final tour of the town where he lived all his life and coming to rest in his beloved Bay.
Gerard doesn’t remember flying through the air on a bed or being found in the ruins of the room in the back yard or being flung into the tree or half drowned as he was dragged by Edward back to the house. His memory, as is all of ours, is of the wind and the river.
Mum was thirty-seven then and I believe it was her instinct for the drama of life that saved her. If she’d closed down, she wouldn’t have lived, she would have gone with him. But in the end she was only prepared to go so far. She was willing to enter the odd arena of their supernatural relationship, but she kept a part of one foot on the ground, in the real world.
She’d had a reprise, a respite from his death that had enabled her to stretch out his departure, but the storm which came almost a year to the day after he died forced Mum to choose which road she was going to take.
Finally she had to choose between life and death, between Dad and the drain man. In my imagination Dad had even been offering to allow her to bring Gerard if it was death she elected. He asked her three times. Sailing across her garden on a bed that had been sucked out of her bedroom. Then as the sheet of iron flew towards her, then as the tidal wave swept her away. Each time tested her will to live, to fight for life and for her family. Maybe he had felt her wavering before that and had sensed a glitch in her will to live, a weakness for the past, for what had been. But each time she reassured him she wasn’t going with him. He couldn’t take her and the struggle strengthened her will to live. By the time she got to the top of the steps she had lost three lives, but she had won. She had made her decision.
‘Go,’ she had yelled. ‘I’m staying here.’ And she slammed the door on him.
If I’m ever asked what love is, I think of that: to consider giving up your precious place in life, for someone else, for love. But I never tell people about all this because I know they would laugh and think I was mad or making it up.
For a long time I never heard anything from Dad or maybe I knew we had to get on with living too. Mum and I had both been somewhere in between. I blocked him out after this, and stopped thinking about him. I assumed now he was really dead and gone, and my relationship with my father was of the past. I’d had a father for ten years, now I didn’t, so in one way you could see it as one less parent to worry about. I locked him out, buried him in the anty soil again and mostly forgot about him. I felt guilt about pretending he wasn’t so important after all, and sometimes I didn’t like not knowing where he was. He’d always been in the tree and when the tree went I assumed that was the last I’d ever hear from my father.
Sometimes the memory of him would surface and it would terrify me. He would appear to me as a skeleton, or as a sick man, too weak to live, one who had deserted us. I would even go so far as to say I hated him. I was so angry that he had died and my only way of dealing with it was to decide he was really gone. On some days, though, I went back to the darkest point I had been to after his death. I didn’t know then, how could I, I was only ten, that you have your parents for life, even if you’ve never met them, whether they’re dead or alive, they’re around for good in you. What a curse it is having to know death so young, but to fear it makes truly living impossible.