About the same time, Mum turned fifty-five and she said she’d come to the end of her time in the suburbs and she sold the house. We hated her for doing that. We couldn’t believe she could be so selfish, but we knew it was time for her to move on. She had outgrown it and so had we. The eucalypt that had been planted in place of the poincianna had always looked a desperate substitute. All the memories were with us anyway, deep inside, we didn’t need the house any more. We didn’t know that then, we cajoled and objected and tried to work out reasons why she should keep it. She was retiring, she said, and moving to the beach, up north.
‘It’s not some geriatric, shopping mall shit hole,’ she said. ‘Like old people seem drawn to.’
‘What are you going to do there?’ I asked.
‘How should I know,’ she answered.
‘You won’t know anyone.’
‘So, I’ll meet people.’
I was just trying to put her off.
She was right though. It was a little settlement, old and untouched, just south of where we had spent that summer holiday after Dad had died. And she met him again, the drain man after eighteen years. It was a casual thing at first. They’d never stopped thinking about each other in all those years. They hadn’t kept in touch, but they always knew through acquaintances what the other was up to. They met at the end of a jetty where they both were fishing. My mother is a great fisherwoman. She loves the fight.
It began with just the two of them going on fishing excursions out to the Bay, then as the months went on we realized it was more serious. When I first saw him again in the driveway of Mum’s house, I cried, the great welting sobs returned. It reminded me of what my dad would look like if he was still alive. He would have been similar, not that old, still young enough to have his health and his retirement. Why, why, I thought as I sobbed, eighteen years after his death, did he have to go so young? It was hard to explain my tears to my mother and the drain man, but they knew. The drain man was still Dad’s replacement, even after all those years.
They live together now in a beach house surrounded by hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers. The drain man’s name is George, but we call him Hunk, because he still is.
It’s not like a normal love affair, the type you get used to hearing about. They are two deeply attractive souls engaged in the struggle of relating, and they emanate a charge when they are together.
In the beginning we compared him to Dad, not bit by bit, but in the mere fact of his presence. He knew and he was gracious. He let us be cruel to him and ignore him when we visited our mother and he was there. He never demanded anything. He is still and certain looking, but there is a side to his silence that is the result of repression rather than the hush of wisdom, which means he is great fun to tease.
And he allows Mum her grief and there is still a pull, I see it on Dad’s anniversary and his birthday when we go to the grave. George doesn’t go, he accepts that Mum’s relationship with Dad has to go on and that their life together isn’t finished and that he is still with her.
The drama returned to my mother’s life, it was a joy to see it, but in a different way or maybe a way I could accept. She learned to shoot and that was a turning point in her life. The power of the gun and the potential destruction, it was a comfort to her and it put her madness in perspective. She became an excellent markswoman. She began to compete. She was so herself wherever she went that she stunned people. She would be invited to stalk deer in Scotland or shoot pheasant in England or cull kangaroos in central Australia. It didn’t matter where she went, people always commented that they had never met anyone so clearly free to be themselves. It was the perfect balance for her, shooting and fishing and her hunk. She had finally found a flatter path for a while.
Outside her new house is a poincianna tree, not as big and grand as the one in the yard of her old house. It’s a miniature, not yet matured, but its branches hang to the ground. There is a row of them, they stretch all the way down both sides of the street to the bay at the end of the road. I sometimes imagine the dead in all of them, stepping across from tree to tree, playing and laughing, whinging and moaning and chattering on to each other like a bunch of mad galahs.