Read Online The Tree by Judy Pascoe - Free Book Online Page A

because I wanted to get to my mother. How could she abandon what she had believed in so strongly? It couldn’t have just been pressure from a priest. Her relationship with religion had always been fickle. It had never involved going to church or believing in God. She had however believed that everything happened for a reason, until Dad had died, then she’d said that even that, the last wobbly cornerstone of her belief, had been knocked out. Anyway it wasn’t like her to be influenced or worried by what a priest thought. So I pinched Gerard so hard three times in a row until he woke up crying. I’d stood over him for ages getting up the guts to hurt him. He was asleep I knew because he was purring with such pleasure it was putting me off my attempts to sleep. But I wanted him to pay for my mother’s betrayal so I found a squidgy lump of skin on his arm, picked it up and twisted. I felt so bad, but nothing happened. I tried again. This time he rolled over and murmured. By the third time I was feeling more desperate so I squeezed harder and he sat up sharply, already crying.
    â€˜Daddy,’ he called, ‘Daddy,’ and I felt very badly.
    I dived for my bed and landed on the pillow just as my mother arrived.
    â€˜Daddy,’ Gerard sobbed.
    My mother took him in her arms and cuddled him close.
    â€˜What is it?’ she kept asking.
    â€˜She pinched me.’ He pointed towards my bed and sobbed on.
    â€˜I didn’t,’ I said. ‘He had a dream and I can’t get to sleep because he snores,’ I shouted. And the whole plan backfired because my mother took my little brother away to sleep with her. It suited both of them because it meant my mother had company in the bed she had been terrified to sleep in for the past weeks and my little brother got what we all wanted – to sleep in bed with our mother.
    â€˜Why do I have to sleep by myself,’ I’d often queried. ‘You’re older than me and you get to sleep with Dad and we have to sleep by ourselves. It’s not fair.’
    She just said, ‘Go to bed.’ That was her answer because I knew she didn’t have an answer.
    Then the back steps started to separate from the house and we were finally forced to do something. There was a gap between the house and the top step and it was widening. The roots under the house had tightened their grip on the wooden stumps that held up the house, pushing them upwards. These had in turn raised a section of the house slightly and caused the steps to drop off. For the first week my mother just locked the back door and tied a rope across the bottom of the back steps and told us not to go near them. I had to use the front steps when I wanted to leave the house to go and play with Megan. It was like the back part of the house was dead, it belonged now to the realm of the tree. I noticed also that the branches had grown to touch the house all along the back wall.
    â€˜Why don’t you come down the back steps any more?’ Megan asked.
    And Megan must have told her dad or her dad had asked Megan why my mother was using the front steps to get to the laundry at the back of the house, so that night there was another mister. It was odd to see Mr King, a quiet tuba playing member of the Salvation Army, lifting the latch on the gate in the back fence and squeezing through the gap normally only used by us children.
    He came to the back steps, saw the rope and the rift in the stairs, took a step back and re-routed to the front of the house, parting the dusk as he moved, leaving a trail of slippery green air in his wake. Mother invited him in and he sat at the kitchen table.
    He’d never been in the house, he observed, not in all the years they’d been neighbours. There was no reason, he added. Mother agreed, she’d been in their house once, she thought, but that had been fifteen years ago.
    He said, even though they’d known each other a long time, they