The Tree by Judy Pascoe Read Free Book Online

branch until we could see them, the idea of communing with the dead quickly forgotten when there was real-life intrigue before us. We lay on either side of the snake’s forked tongue and watched. We could just make out in the shadows that they were drinking a bottle of beer.
    â€˜That stuff’s foul,’ said Megan.
    â€˜I know,’ I said. I could imagine smearing away the goose flesh on the outside of the bottle with a fidgeting finger.
    â€˜Do they have sex?’ Megan whispered across to my branch.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘He clears the pipes when the roots get in.’
    â€˜Do we like him?’
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘He likes my mother.’
    There was movement, their voices scooted around the edge of the house. My mother’s mood had changed. She stepped back into the light. In and out of the shadows her face moved. The drain man was beside her. There was some demand from my mother, then a clipped reply from him. Then he was gone.
    The tree began to vibrate. I could feel a rumbling. Megan looked spooked. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. We reversed down the tree quickly, the bark scratching at our bare legs.
    We didn’t speak until we reached the ground.
    â€˜I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Megan said, anything but disappointed that she hadn’t managed to speak with the dead. It was far more interesting for her to see my mother drinking beer in the dark with a plumber than it was to talk with my dead father.
    â€˜Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

11
    I’d only been back in my bed a minute when I heard a scratching on the wall behind me. I jumped with fright before realizing it was only the rats running inside the walls. Since Dad had died the rodents had moved in. They knocked on the wall by the end of the bed, rapping on the timbers. I was too frightened to move. I was scared if I made a noise I wouldn’t hear them chewing through the walls above my head. Then I’d miss the crucial moment to escape before they attacked me.
    The volume of their scratching increased suddenly. It sounded like three of them were fighting, chasing each other in a whirlpool of rat limbs. I heard my mother stirring in her bed on the other side of the wall. She punched the fibro hard with a book trying to shut them up.
    Then my wall breathed in, I saw it and I felt it. Then out, it billowed. I gasped. I heard the shattering of glass and my mother scream. I jumped from my bed and ran to her room and found her squashed against the bedhead, her arms over her head. By her side, lying in her bed, was the snake-tongue branch. It stretched from the window across the room to the bed, where its frayed tips lay draped beside her. As she dared to drop her hands from her face I could see her expression change from fear to grief as she realized that the branch lay on my father’s side of the bed.
    That was when I first understood that whatever was between my mother and the drain man was serious, he wasn’t just another mister. I could see her recognize it as well, and now my father was letting her know he wasn’t going to give her up that easily. Even if nothing was happening with the drain man, he was aware that whatever my mother felt for him, my father, and no matter what intimate moments they had shared at the top of the tree, they were limited. Even though those moments seemed real, as real as any moment of dialogue any two living people could have, they could never share a bed again, their relationship would never involve the flesh. I understood then that there was something in the hardship of real life that was so vital it transcended the spiritual. The fact that he could never compete with the realness of human contact struck me like a blow. And there was this other thing called sex, and I didn’t understand it or know what it was, but it had to do with beds and men and women, and I realized I hated my mother for whatever it