The Family Tree (6 page)

She got up and went inside just as the front door slammed noisily. Jacob appeared, looking furtive, but as this was his standard expression Kate ignored it and smiled at him brightly. ‘Did you have a good night?'

‘Nah, not really.' He slopped down into a chair and stared at the table top as if it might offer him some answers.

‘That's a shame. Do you want a coffee?'

‘Yeah, okay. Ta.'

Kate didn't bother trying to make conversation because she knew it
would be both frustrating and futile. Of her three children, Jacob was the one she understood the least. Moody, difficult and, she strongly suspected, not very happy. She had always assumed twins would share similar characteristics, but from the moment they emerged, her two boys could not have been more different. And not simply because one was extroverted and the other introverted, but also physically. Where Caleb was tall and muscular, Jacob was barely five foot five and just plain skinny. All over. Then there was Caleb's smooth dark brown hair compared with Jacob's unruly sandy mop that had not one but
two
crowns as well as a retarded cowlick.

As Kate poured coffee into two mugs, Shelley could be seen making her way from the bungalow and up onto the veranda. She was dressed in her pastel pyjamas and was carrying Emma, clad in a Wiggles T-shirt and disposable nappy. The sliding door shot open and they came through into the house.

‘Coffee?' asked Kate.

‘God, yes,' replied Shelley with feeling. Her hair, still stiff with whatever hair products it had been lathered with last night, bunched up on one side and waved back on the other, so that she looked like she'd been caught sideways in a tornado. Then there were her eyes, with dark puffy bags and the pink tinge of an albino rabbit.

‘Good night?' asked Kate sardonically.

‘Not bad. Not bad at all,' Shelley grinned and lowered Emma into the highchair kept near the kitchen bench. Then she pulled out a chair opposite her brother and sat down, looking at him for a few moments. ‘What's up with Shorty?'

‘I told you not to frigging well call me that.' Jacob abandoned his perusal of the table surface to glare at his sister.

‘Don't swear.' Kate brought the two coffees over to the table, giving Shelley the one she'd prepared for herself. Then she put the kettle back on. Emma, who had been playing with the beads set into the edge of her highchair tray, soon bored of this activity and started trying to climb out of her seat. Kate went over and strapped her in.

‘Thanks, Mum.'

‘You need to do this straightaway, Shell. She's too big now just to sit. Too adventurous. Aren't you, honey?' Kate gave Emma a kiss and then got the toaster out for her grand-daughter's breakfast. The kettle boiled so she got another mug ready.

‘You never use my pancake maker,' said Jacob accusingly, staring at the toaster.

‘I do so. Just not today.'

‘Listen, Mum.' Shelley tried to run her fingers through her hair, but when they got stuck in the bird's nest at the side, she abandoned the attempt with a grimace. ‘Could you do me a huge favour? See, I've been invited to a New Year's Day lunch thing but Daniel's picking Emma up at twelve. Could you just hand her over for me?'

‘I'm going out,' said Kate. She poured out her coffee and avoided Shelley's frown. The toast popped up so she buttered it and cut it into triangles before putting it on a plastic plate featuring cross-eyed farm animals. Emma chortled and immediately grabbed one piece to thrust deep into her mouth. After blinking and gagging slightly, she managed to get the exact distance right and started sucking happily.

Shelley was tapping her fingers on the table. ‘Well, what's Dad doing? Or Caleb?'

‘Dad's at work and Caleb must be still out. So it looks like you'll have to make other arrangements.'

Shelley ceased the finger-tapping and took a sip of coffee, deep in thought. Her face cleared and she glanced across at her brother. ‘Um, Jake . . .' She chewed her lip and then grimaced. ‘Nah, doesn't matter.'

‘That's right, you wouldn't want
me
looking after her, would you?' Jacob sneered. ‘It's not like I'm
responsible
, or even
dependable
, or –'

‘Terribly mature,' finished Shelley smoothly.

‘Get stuffed!' Jacob drew himself up and pointed across the table at his sister. ‘Anyway, look who's talking!
I'm
not the one trying to offload my frigging kid!'

‘Kid! You?' Shelley looked at him scornfully. ‘The only kid
you'd
have is some sort of virtual offspring. Otherwise you've got –'

‘That's
enough
,' snapped Kate furiously, her head starting to pound.
She glared from one child to the other. And suddenly she realised that this was a scene that had been replayed so many times she already knew exactly what would happen next. Now that she'd intervened, they would limit themselves to narrow glances and hissed abuse whenever her back was turned. Nothing had changed in years. She could replace this image with a ten-year-old Shelley, her hair in pigtails, and an eight-year-old Jacob, with glasses and skinned knees, and the basic script would be exactly the same. The actual
words
might be different, especially their vulgarity, but the discourse remained identical. As she registered this, Kate glanced over at the table with a sort of sick wonder, and watched as Shelley treated her brother to one of her slow up-and-down sneers. And he retaliated with his middle finger.

Enough was enough. Kate took a sip of her coffee and then plucked her handbag from the end of the bench and walked out of the room, without even a backwards glance. Through the lounge room, out the front door, down the steps, into the garage. She slid into her car, started it up and reversed out without waiting for it to warm up. And, as she shot out onto the road and changed gears, she glanced back at the house and saw Shelley, standing at the lounge room window and looking down, rather stunned. Kate had the sudden urge to proffer her
own
middle finger, but instead she put her foot down on the accelerator, quickly leaving the house, the children, the bickering, the
weight
of it all behind her as she drove away.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she reached the Wellington Road roundabout without meeting Sam's car coming the other way. Then she veered right and drove, with growing contentment, up the winding road towards Belgrave. She had no idea where she was going, and didn't much care as long as it was away. And it was a lovely day for a drive. Warm and still, with a few puffs of cloud threaded across the sky.

Kate found a car-park on the side of Belgrave's winding main street and got out to stretch. New Year's Day tourists clustered around the various shops that were open, or sat outside the Puffing Billy café, enjoying coffee and cake and public holiday sunshine. Kate joined in, window-shopping her way along the anonymity of the touristy town.
Here she wasn't anybody's wife or mother, she was just Kate. Stealing back a few hours in which she came first. And whenever a sliver of guilt uncurled, and her mind touched on the work she'd intended getting done today, or Sam arriving home to find her absent, or Jacob's obvious unhappiness, or even Shelley now having to find somebody else to look after Emma, she would jerk it away. And summon up a sense of self-righteousness that lent her support.

At the huge bookshop at the end of the main street, Kate stopped to peruse the piles of books in the window display and wasn't at all surprised to see the distinctive shiny black cover of
So you want to write? Then enough with the excuses – just do it!
She walked back to the car slowly, her hands deep in the pockets of her tracksuit pants, and then drove out of town and down the mountain, through Tecoma and past Upwey before coasting by the national park area and into Ferntree Gully. By the time she put her blinker on and turned off the highway, she knew exactly where she was going, had probably always known, but still felt better to have not gone there directly. Less childish, less maudlin.

His house was the oldest one in the area by many years. All the other original residences had been bulldozed when their land had been sold off for residential developments. Even That Bugger's house next door had been razed many years ago to make way for a block of units, and the radish patch where Angie's mother had frolicked with the forbidden fruit was now a row of carports. But Kate could still point to each and every landmark she had grown up with. The red-brick house to the left was built over what had once been an apple orchard, and the white-rendered two-storey nearby covered the dirt area where the old Ford truck had been parked, next to the huge corrugated-iron shed. With its white paint so flaky that she and Angie had been able to peel off large sections to develop their own works of art. Employing paints made from mushed grass, or the glassy red sap from the gum trees, or the brown pigments they would extract from the crumbly clay dirt that surrounded them.

Kate parked her car by the kerb and walked up the driveway past the
weatherboard house. The old gate protested as she pushed it open, and she passed through into the backyard, where she closed her eyes for a moment and imagined that when she opened them she would see her father in the vegetable patch. He would be dressed in his dun-coloured overalls, over a white singlet that had seen better days, while on his head would be a broad-brimmed hat that would be better placed on a cricket umpire. His stooped posture would emphasis his lack of height but his wiry physique would be carrying not a spare inch of flesh. Just suntanned wrinkles and ropy muscle.

He would be working steadily. Up one of the regimented rows and down the next. Perhaps armed with his spray bottles, with which he would dose each plant after careful examination. And her internal conflict would be instantly soothed by the repetitive nature of his labour – repetitive not just in the sense of what she was watching, right then, but in that these were the same actions she had seen him perform for as long as memory served. It would be like looking at the stage that had set the scene for the entire spectrum of her life. Giving her tacit permission to regress, and to shed all her different adult personas and just be his daughter. More selfish, more simple, more secure.

Kate opened her eyes and the backyard was empty. And although she had known it would be empty, it couldn't be anything
but
empty, nevertheless his image had been so strong that she was pierced anew by a sense of loss that brought tears to her eyes. She blinked, recognising that it had been a mistake to come but also acknowledging her lack of real choice. The house and its empty backyard were like a magnet whose power only grew as their numbered days were counted off.

Kate wiped her eyes roughly, almost angrily, and pulled the gate closed before taking a deep breath and walking over to the wrought-iron setting. With only one chair remaining, it sat between a dull pewter-coloured Hills hoist and a large lemon tree with a trunk so gnarled that it seemed to be growing in several directions at once. Ignoring the thin covering of dirt that blanketed the wrought iron, Kate pulled out the chair and sat, facing away from the house.

She stared at where the vegetable patch had once spread its way across
almost the whole backyard and, with an ache that felt like molten lead, registered the fact that it could barely be seen now. This, more than anything she might see in the house itself, forced her to acknowledge that he wasn't there, and hadn't been for quite some time. Because her father would never have let it reach such a state. Weeds now as high as the winder on the Hills hoist, with only their undulation indicating the corrugated nature of the earth beneath. Apart from that, a few straggly silverbeets at the end closest to the gate were all that could be seen of what was once a thriving garden. With rows of crisp lettuces, and golden-orange carrots, and snow peas, and celery, and turnips and a patch of dirt-encrusted potatoes just beneath the ground up in the top corner. The same corner where, on a chilly morning last June, her father frowned as he flexed his left arm and then, moments later, grabbed desperately at the paling fence as a shaft of vicelike pressure gripped his chest.

At least that was the way Kate would have liked it to have happened. Short and sharp. Just as it had been with her Uncle Frank long before. Bitterly, Kate turned away and stared down towards the swirling patterns of the wrought-iron table top. She prodded roughly at the dirt that filled the centre umbrella hole until it caved in, falling in a solid lump that shattered as it hit the ground below. Then she started picking at the paintwork, sliding a nail underneath one section and flaking it upwards to reveal a solid knob of red-brown rust, while wondering, not for the first time, why she kept coming back here. It was macabre, as well as masochistic. But it was also an option that would soon be gone, just like her father. Because now that the permits had all but gone through, within a few months the old weatherboard would be razed and the remains of her father's vegetable garden concreted over to provide foundations for the block of twelve units to be built here. By Sam.

Kate stopped picking at the table and brushed away the tiny flakes of paint, revealing a brown circle that now surrounded the rusted protrusion. She wondered absently whether, if vital enough when alive, if
needed
enough when alive, a person could leave some part of themselves behind. Then maybe if someone close concentrated harder than
they had ever concentrated before, maybe that person could call the other into being. And a dreadful emptiness could be filled, if only temporarily.

Kate lowered her head slowly down onto the table, feeling the metallic coolness of the wrought-iron press against her cheek. She stared at the flaked brown circle, now so close that, with only a bit of effort, she could actually visualise it as a face. With close-cropped grey-white hair and fine lines punctuating the features, ageing them well beyond their seventy years. She reached out a finger slowly and traced it along the side of the face, down to the jawline.