I woke the morning after the storm to find myself sardined under the kitchen table. James’s toes were in my face and beyond that was my mother’s back, then Gerard. We crawled out desperate to see how the world had changed in the wake of the storm. We rushed to the back door. The first thing that struck us was the terrifying space left by the tree. It was lying like a lazy drunk across the garden. It had crushed the fences around us, we had no boundaries holding us in. I knew that in one way we were free.
The wind was still strong, you could lean into it and feel as if it were holding you up. Water poured from under the house in a brown stream that gushed across the road from the Lombardelli’s, and raced down our hill and through the Kings’ yard, eventually joining up with the storm water drains that ran down to the creek.
All the houses of the suburb stretched before us in a grid, they lay bare and exposed. I’d never noticed how square the blocks were before. The square houses with their square lawns now with patches missing, walls that had disappeared, roofs blown away, fences crushed, cars and caravans turned over. Then I realized why the landscape was so open and why up on the hill the whispering trees at the monastery had changed shape. The trees of the suburb were bare, they had been stripped of their leaves. I followed the line of destruction from the horizon to our back yard, stopping for a moment at the Kings’ house where Mr King was already stretching a tarpaulin across a gaping hole in the laundry roof. Then I saw our swing twisted in its frame; the rope securing it had broken and the carriage had been free to thrash loose in the frame. I had to climb through the branches of the tree sprawled across our entire back yard to get to it.
Megan was there already standing in the cage of the bent swing.
‘Dad says he can fix it,’ she said.
‘Will he?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine life without it.
‘He reckons he will.’ She was distracted by something behind me.
‘Wow,’ she said, seeing the tree lying in my mother’s missing bedroom.
‘Mum was in there with Gerard,’ I said, ‘when it got ripped off.’
Megan’s mouth dropped open and she took in a little gasp of breath. ‘Are they, you know?’
‘Na,’ I said.
Her amazement was short lived. ‘Did you hear about Mr Lucas?’ she said. ‘He was on the loo when their roof tore off.’
It was my turn to open my mouth.
This was the first of the storm stories that whizzed around the neighbourhood at similar speed to the cyclone itself.
Everyone had their own disasters. We found Gladys wandering around on her front step.
‘My grandfather was struck by lightning,’ she said, roaming through the wreckage in her garden. ‘Was thirsty for the rest of his life,’ she said, trying to make sense of a ball of debris caught up in her front fence.
‘That’s the roof off the Lucases’ loo,’ my mum exclaimed.
‘The trouble it caused.’ Gladys was dithering. We assumed she was referring to the storm. ‘We were forever up and down getting him glasses of water.’ The rest of us had moved on, but Gladys was still stuck on her grandfather. ‘He had a terrible thirst. The mess. The mess.’ She was shaking her head now and pointing to her front gate and the missing sign.
‘Someone stole it.’ She shook her finger at the world. ‘I wired that sign to the gate myself.’
The fact that the gate itself had twisted from its hinges and lay battered on her footpath, didn’t give her a clue as to the fate of the sign, and proved how keen she was to believe in crime and violation before all else. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d seen the sign spinning off her gate and heading for outer space.
We waded back to our house, weaving our way through the branches of the fallen tree. Vonnie was at the end of her path retrieving her upturned clothes trolley.
‘I needed a new one anyway,’ she said, with the same dry delivery my mother had used when we found her in her bed in the back yard. It was housewives’ resignation mixed with a philosopher’s perception. Not downtrodden, a kind of Zen knowledge and acceptance that when things happen, they happen for a reason.
Then Gladys nodded towards the Lus’ back garden, delivering a strange look of awe as if it was the stable in Bethlehem and she’d just seen the birth of the baby Jesus.
‘Have you seen?’ she asked.
‘No,’ we said, craning our necks over the fence to see what she was hinting at. Then we saw the reason for her reverence. The Lus’ back garden had been transformed into a rice paddy. The trenches Mr Lu had been digging all summer had filled with water and saved the low-set house from flooding. We crawled through the hole in the Johnsons’ fence to get a better look. Buddha was sitting on his altar peacefully looking over the calm waters. Another bible story sprung to mind as I watched a school of fish shoot off across the rice field. Was it the story of the women with the lamps and the oil? I wasn’t sure. I just knew it felt biblical.
Mr Lu came out carrying a fishing rod.
‘Hello. Hello,’ he called excitedly.
We watched him hand the fishing rod to Buddha.