Читать книгу Keeping Faith - Roger Averill - Страница 16

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I had heard the story many times before, but was told it again when Dad decided to build the aviary around the remains of my tree.

When I was born Mum wanted to mark the occasion by planting a tree; giving me a kind of floral twin, something to grow up with, to measure myself against. Dad thought the idea slightly idolatrous and argued the only mark I needed was a watery cross dappled on my forehead, a christening.

Five days after my birth, the day after Mum was released from hospital, Dad came home from work and, walking around the back of the house, noticed a spindly wattle tree planted near the paling fence. Wattles were Mum’s favourite. ‘It’s like having a tree of daffodils,’ she would say.

I don’t know if they argued about it, but if they did, Mum won, because the tree stayed and each year on my birthday she took a photo of me standing beside it. The day I turned six the wind had blown the blossom from the branches, the photo showing me standing ankle high in a drift of yellow flowers. By my eighth birthday the tree was fully grown. Rather than stand in its shadows, Mum suggested I climb it and photographed me perched on one of its lower limbs.

In the August of the year I turned eleven a fierce storm lifted four tiles from our roof and tore two branches from my tree. Inspecting the jagged stumps, crumbling a shard of wood between his fingers, Dad announced my tree was dying.

Apparently Mum hadn’t known that wattles grow fast, die young. Dad wanted to chop the tree down, saying it was dangerous, that a branch could fall and break the fence, hurt someone. Mum said he could prune it, making him leave the trunk and three of the larger branches.

The tree continued to die and on my twelfth birthday Mum took two photos: one of me cutting the cake, the other, slightly off centre, shows me straddling a new pushbike in front of the garage.

‘Pass another nail.’ Dad’s body was jack-knifed at the waist, his face red from bending down. ‘Hold the wire … a bit over … That’s it. Watch your fingers.’ Thwack! Thwack! The wood gave no resistance as the fencing nail bit, then sank into the grain. Dad stood straight and stretched his back. Gracie was sitting on a patch of dirt behind him, making mountains from the sawdust, picking up the nails we had dropped, the ones that had gone skew-whiff when he miss-hit them. Dad turned to see her test one with her tongue.

‘Gracie!’

He lunged and ripped the nail from her. Stunned, not knowing what she had done wrong, Gracie began to cry. Having hauled her first to her feet, then into his arms, Dad swung round to me and said, ‘I thought I told you to watch out for her?’

‘I was, but …’

‘She could’ve choked. Couldn’t you, Gracie.’ Gracie was burrowing her head into his neck. I hated the way he blamed me for her mistakes. Carrying her to the house, calling back to me, he said, ‘Pick them up and put them in the garage.’ When he wasn’t watching, I grabbed a nail, bent like a boomerang, and threw it as hard and as high as I could. I heard it land and roll on the metal roof of the garage next door, then bent down, collected the other deformed nails and put them where he had said.

The idea of building the aviary around my wattle tree had excited Dad when he first thought of it. He figured it was a way of prolonging its usefulness. But now, trying to make it work, to please everyone, he had decided it was more trouble than it was worth. First he’d had to convince Mum it wouldn’t harm the tree’s recovery, reassuring her by promising to draw up plans that showed how it could be done. Later, when Mum left the room, slumping his head into his hands, he muttered, ‘Pray tell me, how can a dead tree recover?’

We worked on the plans one night after tea, at the desk where Dad wrote his sermons. The desk, a roll-top, had been a twenty-first present from his parents; he had already told me that when I turned twenty-one he and Mum would give me one just like it. It looked out of place in their bedroom, flanked on one side by a small, three-tiered bookcase, and on the other by Mum’s dressing table. Sitting at it, Dad could reach back and touch the crocheted quilt covering the bed. It hadn’t always been like that. I could remember the day he moved the desk from the spare room. Mum was pregnant with Gracie and struggled to help him lift it, Dad all the time protesting that she shouldn’t even try. With the old den completely empty, he covered the carpet with torn, threadbare sheets. Convinced that the baby would be a girl, he began painting the room a light, coral pink.

Building the aviary, we found that the wire lacked tension and needed to be pulled and held taut before being hammered into place. I struggled to pull it tight enough and then when I did, tended to lose my grip just as Dad was about to drive the nail home. We tried reversing roles, Dad holding, me hammering, but swapped back after one of my blows glided from the head of the nail onto his thumb.

We heard the wire door slam and looked up to see Mum carrying a tray of cups.

Sprawled on the grass, we had our afternoon tea. Dad lay on his back, closing his eyes to the sun. Gracie, her cheeks still stained from tears, crept towards him. She looked at me and then to Mum, asking permission, daring us to dare her to tickle him. I could see Dad’s eyes roaming beneath their lids, straining to see between the lashes. Mum smiled and Gracie scurried her fingers across Dad’s chest, ferreting them into his armpits. Pretending to be ticklish, he squirmed and bucked like a fish landed on a jetty.

‘Make me an angel, Daddy. Make me.’

Dad grabbed her around the rib cage and held her up to the sky, like an offering.

‘Look, Josh, I’m an angel, I can fly.’

Mum stayed and helped Dad with the wire, while Gracie, having fetched her dolls and teddy, began her own tea party. Dad gave me the job of measuring and cutting lengths of dowel for the perches — a job I enjoyed as it meant using the extendable tape measure, pressing the button, watching the metal strip retract like a lizard’s tongue.

While I worked inside the aviary’s frame, Mum and Dad worked their way around the outside, gradually surrounding me with wood and wire. Dad enjoyed working with Mum. When a piece of wire pierced her finger, he made a point of kissing it better. He didn’t leave it at that either; kissing her on the neck, then whispering something in her ear. Mum laughed and brushed him away.

‘Too much Song of Solomon, that’s your problem.’

Dad took some nails from the box and dangled three from his mouth like miniature cigarettes. Trying to speak with them like that, without moving his lips, he mumbled, ‘What do you reckon, Josh? She’s going to be all right, isn’t she.’

He meant the aviary, not Mum.

‘Finished!’ he said, hammering in the last nail with a flourish, giving it an extra blow for good measure.

Mum put her arm around his waist. ‘Looks great.’

Dad squeezed her. Gracie was running round in tight circles inside the aviary, flapping her arms and chirping like a bird. Mum ran into the house for the camera. Aiming it, she said, ‘Stand still, Gracie. Okay, look this way. Now you, Josh.’

I grabbed Gracie and pulled her in front of me, my folded hands hanging like a pendant around her neck. We smiled at the camera.

‘Lindsay, you too. Perfect.’ CLICK! ‘You look like a bunch of gaol birds.’