Free The Tree by Judy Pascoe Page B

still be lonely.’
    â€˜You can talk to Dad,’ I said, speaking to the bark on the branch in front of where my chin was resting.
    â€˜I can talk to him, that’s true, but I can’t touch him.’
    â€˜Imagine how he feels,’ I said.
    â€˜You’re so on his side because he’s dead. He’s got such an unfair advantage!’ She raised her voice.
    She’d started to say that we would love him more than we loved her because of that. That he had died young, and missed out on decades of yelling at us. A job she had to do exclusively now. It gave her more wrinkles, she said, wrinkles that should have been shared out between the two of them, and it made us hate her more than him, that was her argument.
    I don’t know who moved first, but finally one of us did, and the others followed back down to the ground. We stared at each other, then acted like nothing that had been said had really been said. But it was too late it had been, and we slunk up the back stairs as a volley of mangoes fell from the tree in the Kings’ back yard.

18
    Skirting around the house to the front steps, that’s what we kept doing all week while Edward did his exams, and we wondered what our mother would do with the house falling apart and the drain man’s visits that were extending by half an hour on each occasion. The back door was now firmly shut. I didn’t see Megan, I didn’t stand by the back fence and call her and she didn’t call me. It was easy in that first week because school was finishing and we had exams too, but then we broke up and normally before us would stretch seven golden weeks of sunshine and beach holidays and hours and hours of playing with Megan. Not these holidays. There was no sign of anything normal.
    On the last day of school Mrs O’Grady my teacher found I’d been under the school building, hiding by the blackened stumps where the red soil was drilled with the holes of the ants’ nests. I’d heard the school bell ring, it was three o’clock, time to go home, not for the day, but for seven weeks. I’d heard my class having their party on the floor above me, believed I could smell the sugar from the pink icing on the fairy cakes I’d seen Katherine Padley bring in a large square Tupperware container. Of course our mother had forgotten we were supposed to contribute something to the party. I felt them treading on the boards above me and in my cave I felt safe. After I’d heard the bell and the commotion as everyone dived for their bags and cleared their desks, I heard them run off. I peeked out from under the building. The gum trees rattled their leaves and a gust of wind carried the scent of the eucalypt down from the mountains; I felt there must be a storm coming.
    Somewhere there was a rain-soaked eucalyptus forest. The school incinerator was burning the last of the year’s rubbish, sending it into a brown funnel of smoke up to the never-ending blue. In the dry tufts of grass in front of me I found a grass trap. Two lumps of grass tied in a double knot. Lethal if your foot landed in the trap when you were in full flight. Head over heels you could fly. I untied the trap I had seen Tommy Butler set for the teacher on play duty that lunchtime. As I untied it I looked up and found myself staring at Mrs O’Grady’s kneecap. I thought my absence had gone unnoticed, but I’d forgotten there was my desk and school bag giving me away, and my mother had apparently been embarrassed into returning to the school with enough drink, diluted, to go around the whole school. The container with my name on it was hanging from Mrs O’Grady’s manicured hand. That was apparently when Mrs O’Grady noticed I was missing. She’d told my mother, I was about – that is actually how she’d put it. It was odd to hear that my mother had been shamed into action and I wasn’t sure if I was more embarrassed that