Many years after that I called on my father again. I don’t know why, still no one else had died. I hadn’t even been able to expunge my grief for him at someone else’s funeral.
I don’t know what made me decide I needed to talk to him. It was the anniversary of his death and I went to his grave. I said, sorry.
‘Don’t be,’ he said.
‘But I’ve shut you out, forgotten you, left you for dead.’
‘You have to and you’re here now.’
‘I’m an opportunist,’ I said. I don’t know why I said that.
‘Love your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s a good woman.’
‘I know,’ I said, over and over again. ‘I know, I know, I know. I just regress when I see her. I become ten.’
‘Next time see if you can be eleven.’
Instead of flowers, I left a pile of sodden tissues on his grave.
It seems a long time ago that I was rocking back and forth on that swing with Megan, not a care in the world apart from which figures were sprinting past in the raw blue above. That is a million miles away, almost. If every day is one hundred miles, then every year is thirty-six thousand, five hundred miles, then twenty years is seven hundred and thirty thousand miles away, not a million, but a long way.
But the past is a place I like to visit and the clouds are still in my life in massive formations. Sometimes they appear in pictures that contain everyone’s lives and everyone’s story. I see my own as well in great layers and they make me think of Megan and how we could compare our stories in the cloud friezes. My story would be contained in hers and hers in mine. The story of the tree would be in there but from both perspectives. I miss the freedom of interpreting the clouds with her from our great swing and the freedom of being a child at dusk.
Over the years I’ve noticed the eccentricities surface in all four of us. We all lay dormant in our pupae until later life. It wasn’t until then that we all allowed ourselves to take up the gift of freedom that our mother had demonstrated to us daily. They all have their own stories, my three brothers, and I can’t tell them for them. We have talked about the tree and what it meant, but it has been gone a long time and now there is a brash eucalypt in its place.
They’ve never really said why they wouldn’t climb it and talk to Dad. That all remains unsaid. I knew it embarrassed them at the time and they didn’t believe it, or if they did they would never admit or act on it. James might have, I thought, on a desperate day, but it would have been like saying a prayer out of habit or hope, even when you don’t believe in God.
Edward has the most children and it’s not a Catholic thing, he just has a lot of children and they all have perfect teeth. Gerard unexpectedly took over Dad’s business from Ab and has made a great success of it. James was a late starter, later even than me because he wandered the world for many years.
‘Thursday’s child,’ my mother would always say, ‘has far to go.’
He joined a religious sect for a while. Mum went to rescue him from somewhere in France. I imagine her pulling him out by the ear, as if he was still eight years old. They got on a plane and she brought him back. She didn’t even go in to Paris. None of us could believe that.
‘Why would I want to?’ she said. ‘That’s not what I went for, is it? I went to get your damned brother back.’
Still all wasn’t squared with God, or at least that’s how I felt my mother saw things. If she’d felt even with Him there wouldn’t be this anger. Since Dad’s death she had shaken her fist at Him symbolically and promised to get back at him.
It was two Christians who bore the brunt of her grudge. She couldn’t take Him on in the ring, so she had to pay back some of His disciples.
There were words at her front door apparently the day she opened it and found the two women on the top step. Words along the lines of God being unreliable and a shoddy excuse, open to any interpretation that took your fancy. The two Christians took it well by all accounts. Then there was a push and much evidence debated in the court room as to whether a foot was placed inside the threshold before or after my mother attacked. She paid the price though, my mother, for closing the door on the foot of one of the women. It wouldn’t have been such a bad injury, but the woman was wearing sandals and she broke her ankle and her foot in several places.
Mr Lombardelli was a key witness at the trial. He was just passing on his way to lawn bowls and he saw the whole shocking scene. My mother wasn’t ever convicted, there wasn’t enough evidence, but the shock of it was terrible.