Read The Tree for Free Online Page B

and I wanted to spend every day with her for ever, but I was still worried about her school. Who were all the children there? Would they hate me if I had to go there because if they took Mother away, whoever they were, to this place, wherever it was, we might have to move and go to another school and be contaminated by children who weren’t special Catholics. It was exciting and dreadful all at once.
    â€˜I’ll meet you tonight,’ I said. ‘In the tree at the first branch. No sounds though. If we get sprung, Mrs Johnson’ll call the fire brigade again.’

10
    The night was a throng of wildlife: possums kicking mangoes to each other and skidding across the roof; squadrons of bats patrolling the sky; tree frogs belching out their nightly chorus, and all underscored by the drone of the cicadas.
    When things had calmed and the night was breathing again, I rolled to the door of my bedroom and stepped as quietly as I could down the hall. My mother was fidgeting in her room, but she rarely checked us again after she had done her nightly rounds.
    Jesus and his throbbing heart watched me drop out of the house, scraping my stomach on the windowsill on the way down. As I fell, I cut my foot on a sharp branch of the rhododendron tree under the corner window. On the ground the grass stabbed at my feet, it was that dry in the western corner of the house. I wondered why I hadn’t used the back door as I bent my leg up to try and see how bad the cut was. Surely the lock on the back door couldn’t be as loud as my pained landing.
    James and Edward were still awake, goading each other to sneak into the kitchen and steal food. What they ate amazed me, gargantuan meals followed by slice after slice of bread. James was putting on weight, his grief was silent and fed on bread and strawberry jam, the colour of Our Lord’s burning heart. Edward’s grief was confused. He was torn between roles – husband, father, son? None seemed to fit. He tried to help Mum by talking to her after dinner about grown-up things and Mum let him, but it was the string of Misters to whom she really relieved the burden of how she felt. Her grief was a monologue she could unload on to anyone. Somehow her broken dam of grief had blocked the rest of us. Ours was notched up in explosive arguments. Fighting over the remnants of a meringue pie a neighbour had baked or scuffles over seating arrangements.
    Megan was waiting on the lowest branch. We’d climbed the tree many times before so we scrambled up the first few branches easily. Taking turns, then, on top of the fifth branch to hug the tree, stretching a leg around the trunk until we could feel the dead branch on the other side. From the dead branch it was a step up to the snake-tongue branch, so named because it divided in two as it travelled towards the house, its feathered end tickling the weatherboarding. This was the branch that rubbed against the house and threw a shadow across the wall above Gerard’s bed.
    Once on that branch, you had to shimmy up to the cave, a kind of hollow in the trunk with a fan of branches above. That was the place where I had first talked to him. If you waited for the bats and the possums to silence themselves, breathed three times deeply, then you could hear him speak. But as I waited on the snake branch Megan, who was straddling the tree to step on the dead branch, heard a whisper coming from the verandah. She tapped my leg, alerting me to the low voices. I shrank to a ball on the branch and pulled Megan up.
    Through the curtain of foliage we could see my mother’s bare legs and the outline of the drain man leaning on the railing of the verandah. My mother was beckoning him to move along the verandah to the front of the house. As she disappeared into the shadow of the house, I saw her throw a glance to the top of the tree. It was only a flash, a twitch on her forehead, but its minuteness spelt guilt.
    We edged along snake-tongue