Tree Palace (20 page)

‘Things are fine.’

‘And he don’t cry much?’

‘No, he’s easy. He’s happy. You said you’re going out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have a nice time of it.’

Moira moved backwards into the house and closed the door. Then opened it straight away to order Rory inside for more practice. She closed the door again once he’d obeyed.

Zara didn’t like that, making pleasant conversation about a topic she had a right to and having the door closed to snub her. A return snub of Moira would be a good quick avenging but she had no time to think one up, not even a petty put-down. The crossroads were ten minutes away on flat heels. Twenty minutes at least if hobbling on her dress shoes. If she was late for Brent he might drive up to the dwellings or turn his ute around and leave without her.

‘Midge. Can you do me a teeny-weeny favour?’

She granny-stepped over to him and hooked her hand under his elbow. He was standing with a foot on the barbeque to rest his hip and was so surprised by her affection that he lost balance and listed.

‘Just a teeny-weeny favour, please?’

‘Course.’

She smelled of deodorant or perfume—oranges and roses.

‘Run me down to the crossroads in the wag. Pretty please?’

He had no wish to deliver her to some Brent fella on time, but also no wish to say no to her and have her let go of his elbow. He nodded and she let go anyway and raced ahead to the garage, a granny-step sprinting.

24

Midge dropped Zara where she wanted and she waved for him to go and not wait and gawk. She wrestled her shoes on with her finger and shimmied herself to shake off wag dust. There was no sign of lover boy. Midge took his time turning the wag around. ‘You’re too young for the pub, you know,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘You’d get sprung.’

‘I know.’

‘Lover boy must be old if he’s got a car.’

‘Not
old
old.’

Zara shooed him off as if drying her fingernails. She adjusted the bag over her shoulder like a sash to pose with.

Midge drove off slowly, made no dust tail and kept her in view. When the red ute appeared he stopped and watched Zara get in and leave. Wouldn’t it be perfection, he thought, if she’d have held his elbow for real instead of merely wanting something from him? Like a father is held by a loving daughter. But you cannot be a father by appointing yourself. He could not recall so lonely a feeling.

His forearm was resting along the open window and a wet plop landed on it, too clear a droplet for bird mess. Another plop, coin-round and cool, dribbled off his skin and caused the hairs to prickle. He looked up through the windscreen to where the west sky had gone bruisy. The sun was covered over and the road was crawling with shadow. The autumn break should be starting about now but two drops didn’t prove it. On the plains the summer could change to autumn in a night and do it with wild rainstorms and then days of quiet mist. Or there’d be false starts and plops like this and then nothing but more burning summer.

Midge drove on and the windscreen became dotted and smeared. Thunder grumbled but the sky was too thick with black cloud to let through lightning. The wipers needed new rubber for their blades—they couldn’t keep up with the sudden quantity of rain. A sheet of it with hail pellets inside bounced across the road and he couldn’t see ahead. He was driving by memory, swerving left towards the house. He stopped and wound the window up to sit out the fury and hope to God that Zara’s lover boy had done the same if he had any brains.

Moira felt the house rattle and she hushed Rory’s playing. The glad-wrap window was sucked out and cold wind and spray sucked in. Through it she saw the porch canvas start tearing. Rain spears were landing by the thousands, stuck at an angle. They pummelled the roof. The outdoor chairs flipped and slid in the thin lake that formed instantly across the L-shape. She slammed the door and there was water in her hair from the ceiling. Leaks everywhere through the house. They splashed on the table and soon turned one wall to liquid.

She picked up Mathew and he cried. Rory wasn’t crying but he was scared and hugged Moira’s waist and stayed there though she told him to go to Mathew’s little bed and turn it upside down to keep it dry. She had to do it herself with a kick of her toe. The bedding already looked soaked.

It lasted for only ten minutes but what a performance! Nature crazy and flailing about, and then it fizzled. Like a muscle going slack and a final deep sigh of wind and calmness, but the damage was already done. Roof iron had been flung around. There were water puddles on the kitchen floor and more water in the bedroom, on the mattress. The caravan had shifted on its blocks but mercifully not slid off them. Water had leaked through its window frame and got under the lino. Clothes were wet in the cupboard. Zara’s tent had stayed on its ropes but there was a definite lean and the L-shape’s little brown lake was lapping near the entrance. You’d think nature was feeling guilty the way the drip-heavy trees hung their heads in apology and the sun brought the heat back as if to make things right. Cockatoos high above laughed off the incident.

Moira was not in the mood to accept apologies or see the good side of weather over the bad. Mathew needed the honours done and she couldn’t lie on the bed as she normally would and let him nuzzle her. She did it standing. She had nowhere dry to set him down so she kept him in her arms while cleaning the place, using one hand and Rory’s help to tip the mattress upright to be aired. The sun was bright despite the lateness of the day. It could shine all it liked, a special dusk-yellow effort of amends, but she was still furious.

Rory’s music page was sodden. ‘This means no more music,’ he said.

‘It does not.’

‘Page is all mushy.’

‘So?’

‘I can’t read it.’

Moira said nonsense. Her page of practice writing was mushy also but that wouldn’t stop her practising. She told him to hang it somewhere. ‘Or spread it outside on a rock. It’ll unstick.’

She had him spread her page beside his and made him take the end of the broom. He swept water from the house and she used a towel to sop what remained. It was tiring holding Mathew and mopping but the wet wood and dirt were already smelling rotten.

‘Why you bothering learning anyway?’ Rory asked.

‘What?’

‘You got by so far.’

‘I don’t want to just
get by
.’

Rory said he didn’t understand.

‘I need to get a licence, for one thing. And if I could write I’d be able to write to Shane and say hurry up and write to me and say I miss him. Sweep harder. You’re leaving water behind.’

25

Midge stuck a new glad-wrap window in place and then began hammering on the roof. The sunlight was fading but he took a kero lantern up with him and could see well enough to put nails where iron had lifted and let the storm through. He dragged strips of spare iron once used for the shed and laid them over the rust areas which hail had penetrated. He banged and bent them into shape. Chances were there’d be more rain through the night so he worked quickly, a patch job. He knocked the rain tank with his knee and it was like knocking something solid instead of hollow.

‘Moira!’ he yelled. ‘The tank. It’s full. It’s chockers.’

He ran his fingers down the corrugated sides and felt the chill of water through the metal. The tank’s overflow pipe was dripping. Through the aeration hole at the top he breathed in rain’s aroma. A cross between no smell at all and clean cotton.

Mud oozed between Moira’s toes. It tickled and she giggled, slipped and slid to show Mathew what rain looks like when it was captured. She knelt, turned on the tank’s wing tap and held his tiny fingers under it and said, ‘Rain water.’ He smiled showing his pink gums, and wiggled his legs. ‘This means showers and washing, Mathew. No trotting track for ages and none of them laundromat fur balls.’

She drank a palmful and so did Rory. Midge climbed down to have a turn. Limpy wanted some as well. They filled a bucket to wash their feet and topped up the jerry cans for the kitchen.

Night settled starless and cold. You could hear water draining among the trees and in the ruts of the road. Midge set up lamps at the house door and reattached the porch with a double amount of nails. The canvas was mud-caked but still in one piece. The poles were buckled—he stood on them and yanked and they straightened. He re-roped the tent so Zara wouldn’t have skewed walls to contend with. He wanted to sweep her floor dry before she got home and check her clothes and bed weren’t muddied but he was loath to go into her private place and touch her private things. He’d best let Moira do it, though she was busy with cooking cans of stockpot for their dinner. He mentioned it to her but she said, ‘In a minute.’

The minute never came. After dinner and wiping the house floor again with rags and a towel she was so tired she lay on the bed to sleep without the mattress. She put a blanket over the springs, eased herself onto the coils with Mathew there on top of her and told Rory to leave her in peace and pull the door closed.

She woke when Mathew woke and ached where the springs dug into her skin. She sat at the table in the dark and did the honours. Kept falling forward in half-sleep and shook her head to rouse. When Zara got home she heard Midge greet her and explain the storm damage. He had stayed up waiting for her. ‘I couldn’t sleep till you was safe home.’

She’d been dropped at the crossroads and walked from there and was exhausted but chatty, not the slightest bit interested in discussing storms. She said Brent’s car doesn’t leak. You hardly know it’s raining in Brent’s car. He can afford a decent car. They got a proper family business. Not a shitty trant life.

When she got into the tent and lit a lamp she saw brown sludge on the floor and it stuck to her feet and she swore,
fucking shit
. It had got into things under the bed. Her linen was dry but half her clothes were affected. Her pop posters were ruined but she didn’t care about them anymore, only the clothes and cosmetics. And her money hole. Especially her money hole. She pulled back the plastic and scooped away mud. She dug the lid off with her fingers. The hole had water in it but the wad was fine. The plastic-bag wallet had not let a drop through.

She called to Midge, ‘Why didn’t you do something?’

He stood at the tent door. She hid the wad behind her back.

‘Why didn’t you move my stuff off the ground?’

‘I didn’t want to touch your things.’

She swore at him and made him get a shovel and broom and help clean. ‘You are
so
useless.’ It was one in the morning and she had to start work at eleven. No way was she going to sleep knowing she had mud for carpet.

‘Fucking hate living here.’

26

Midge only got a few hours sleep because cleaning for Zara took a while and Moira woke him at dawn and said today was going to be a washing day due to the full tank. Could he rig up a shower screen to the back of the house, please? Could he organise attaching a hose to the tank tap? And while he was at it, could he put something sensible down for a shower mat?

He got a sheet of iron for that purpose, snipped it square and blunted the jagged edges for safety. He had a think and remembered the trailer tarp which would do for a screen. He found two short branches with forked ends to work as hooks. He wedged the branches’ other ends into the house wall by chipping two holes in the crumbly weatherboard. He hung the tarp to the forks and tied its gaps together with packing tape. He nailed its ends to the weatherboard. You entered the shower by ducking under the tarp’s hem. If anyone looked they saw your feet and nothing more. He wiggled an old hose onto the tap. The hose had splits in places and was bleached by being left unused in the sun, but for showering purposes it was effective. It ran the water at low pressure but not so low as merely to trickle. He poked it under the shower screen and said, ‘Bingo. Tree Palace has a bathroom.’

Much of the hose was exposed to the morning sun. The water inside it heated up, which meant Moira had a brief warm stream for Mathew. She knelt on the iron mat and bathed him, then stood and dried him off and put him in the pram beside her while she had her turn. The water was cold by then but it was better than the trotting track. She had Midge standing at the tap. She called ‘on’ and ‘off’ to save water while she soaped up. When she was finished Rory had his go. He didn’t like washing. Moira always stood with him and supervised his lathering—‘Under your arms, Rory’, ‘A good lather-up between your legs’—but he’d got to an age when he didn’t like being nude in front of her. She had to stand outside the screen and call instructions.

When he was finished and dressed and sent off to school, Moira went on tap duty so Midge could take a turn. A breeze had begun ruffling the trees. The storm left droplets hanging from the leaves. Nature’s chandeliers, she thought, watching them sparkle and fall. They so entranced her she forgot about the water.

‘You still there, Moira?’ Midge called out. ‘Water on, please. Water on.’

They even distracted her from Mathew. She didn’t hear him coughing and gagging. He was only a foot away but she was lost among those tree chandeliers and hardly heard him until he was red in the face and hot in the skin. She lifted him from the pram and his brow was burning. The next second he was cold to touch. Then he got hot again.

‘Moira. Water on.’

She blamed herself for bathing him at dawn, the air still damp from the storm. Autumn was close. The sun had warm hands but not as warm as pure summer.

‘Water on.’

Better clothes. He needed better, thicker clothing. A flannelette blanket. And booties and mittens. She reprimanded herself: boneheaded Moira should have thought of these things.

‘Water on. Water on.’

She reprimanded Mathew. ‘Don’t you go getting sick on me now. Are you saying I don’t look after you good? I’m looking after you just fine. Don’t you go making a liar of me.’

‘Water on.’

27

Zara said, ‘You got to be joking.
That’s
better than the trotting track?’

Midge said, ‘Course it is. I rigged it up.’