The Memory Tree (7 page)

‘You saw me.’

‘Won’t hurt to check again.’ And she sighs as he prowls around, pushing doors, rattling locks. She hears him return to his room and begin his nightly ritual: peering into the wardrobe, looking under the bed, testing the window locks, tapping the walls and finally his voice calling down the stairs.

‘Okay. I’m in bed now.’

She has perfected the timing, and hurries upstairs with his tray.

Sealie climbs into her little blue Corolla. It’s her first car and she has had it for fourteen years. She knows she should replace it soon, but it’s comfortable, like an old shoe. Apart from some wear in the driver’s seat which she has concealed with a sheepskin cover, the old car is still respectable. She knows she’ll drive it till it falls apart. Undeniably middle-aged, Sealie has become set in her ways. A new car would be too radical a step to contemplate with any seriousness. So how, she wonders, can she possibly cope with the massive change she must now confront? She and Zav have made a life. Not much of a life, it’s true. But it’s their life and it’s predictable and safe. A sharp toot tells her she’s blocking the fast lane and she moves over to let the other car pass. She must concentrate on her driving. Leave the future to the future.

Hal is sitting meekly in his silk dressing-gown when Sealie arrives. She’s still uneasy with this passivity, his customary demeanour for the last few years. The medical staff have all assured her that time and treatment have rendered him harmless but she senses a small burning coal behind his mild regard. She’s not sure what it means. She can only hope it’s remorse.

‘Dad? How are you today?’ Sealie fidgets a little with her packages, giving Hal the Cherry Ripe but retaining the wrapping as the rules demand.

Hal accepts the sweet, biting thoughtfully into the rich, dark chocolate, savouring the taste and poking around with his tongue for an errant flake of coconut. ‘Zav not here then?’

Sealie swallows and checks a rising impatience. Zav is never there. ‘No,’ she says shortly. She won’t make excuses for Zav. And why should she? It would be a betrayal. She sits down and accepts a cup of tea from the trolley. Stirs her sugar long after it has dissolved. Clears her throat.

‘Dad. This is the last time I’ll be visiting before you come home.’ She glances at him in an effort to detect his response. He merely nods.
Probably doped to the eyeballs
, thinks Sealie. She can’t resist the question. ‘Are you looking forward to coming home?’

Hal’s eyes flare for a moment. His voice is petulant. ‘Home? This is home.’

Sealie sighs. ‘I’ve explained it all before, Dad. They’re closing this place down. You have to come home. There’s nowhere else to go.’

‘Will Zav be there?’ The same question—over and over and over.

‘Of course Zav will be there.’

‘Poor Zav. Is he still angry? I need to explain.’

Sealie looks at her father. Despite herself, she pities the gaunt frame, the lost eyes, the vulnerable, naked skull. Her hands twist and tear at the red sweet wrapper.

‘Is he still angry, Sealie?’ Hal asks the question humbly, fearfully.

She shrugs. It’s better that he knows. ‘Zav hasn’t forgiven you. He never will.’

‘No. Of course not. Why should he?’ He grabs her arm. ‘If only I could explain . . . He might . . .’ Hal slumps in his chair. His need for absolution bleeds from every pore and Sealie looks at him with pity and horror. He has never asked if she has forgiven him. It’s a question she doesn’t want to explore.

Hal straightens suddenly, with a curious dignity. ‘Tell him he needn’t worry. I’m in the habit of keeping myself to myself.’

‘Yes. That would be best, I think.’

When Sealie goes, I linger beside my grandfather as he catches his breath in a sob or perhaps it’s just a sigh. He picks up the book Sealie has brought and flicks through the pages. He pats his pocket for his reading glasses and perches them on his nose. The book is by a new author. It looks alright, but these new writers aren’t a patch on Asimov or his old favourite, Fred Hoyle. After scanning a few pages he puts the book down and looks out beyond the wall to a cloud that hangs like a greasy dish rag above the grey bulk of the Grampians.

3

M
Y GRANDFATHER BUILT HIS HOUSE
of brick. No fragile wood or straw for him. He built his house of brick on a large block that faced the river. While his contemporaries were looking at their environment and employing architects like Robin Boyd, Hal settled on a hybrid of deco and thirties modernism, a strange mish-mash of curved walls and windows piled in a seemingly random fashion, one upon the other. He had it rendered and painted white, and spent some time and effort creating an English garden, with extensive lawns, roses, lavender and some fine deciduous trees. The effect was not unpleasing and at night, when the lights were turned on, the house was transmogrified into an ocean liner setting sail through dark seas. I like to think of Hal as captain of that ship and Paulina its guiding spirit, standing at the wheel beside him.

Inside, the house was large and rambling, with generous rooms and high ceilings. Because of its singular shape, there were odd little nooks and crannies and when they were young, the children made these their own. There were rules of ownership—no less rigorous for the fact that they were unwritten.

Sealie’s bedroom was at the bottom of a staircase that led up to a strange little tower attic. This room at the top of the stairs was her private place and she often spent time there with her secret treasure boxes.

‘How would you like this?’ Paulina asked one morning when Sealie came into her mother’s room to have her hair brushed. ‘The lock’s broken but it’s still very pretty, don’t you think?’

Sealie held the box in her hands. It was black and shiny with a picture of a beautiful lady in a long dressing-gown. There was a tree with trailing branches and a funny little curved bridge. Inside, the box was lined with shiny red fabric and there were three small shelves, like steps.

‘What can I put in it?’ she asked. Did she have anything beautiful enough to put in such a wonderful box?

‘Your hair ribbons, maybe? And the little Scottie dog brooch Nana gave you?’

‘And the blue feather I found? And my best shells?’

Paulina laughed. ‘It’s a treasure box, Sealie. You can keep all your treasures in it.’

So began Sealie’s lifelong habit of keeping everything in boxes. The attic room gradually filled with shoe boxes, chocolate boxes, cigar boxes, biscuit tins, toffee tins, jewellery boxes, hat boxes, dress boxes and two large trunks, all containing some treasure, some secret, some part of Sealie’s life. As she grew older, she put her favourite out-grown dresses there in one trunk, her ballet costumes in the other. When the young woman turned sixteen, Mrs McLennon thought it was time to start a hope chest or glory box for her, and gave her an embroidered tablecloth and a set of six dinner napkins. Her father gave her a camphor wood chest and thus began a new collection of towels, embroidered sheets, tray cloths, table cloths and satin nightgowns laid away in readiness for her wedded bliss. She expected bliss of course. Why else would the chest be dedicated to hope and glory?

That first box was always her favourite, though. Whenever she held it, she could feel a soft brush stroking her hair and smell her mother’s perfume.

There’s another box in that attic. It’s a cream, embossed cardboard box, lined with pink tissue paper. Inside are my baby photos. Me with my mother, my father, with Grandad, with Mrs McLennon and a tall black man. Me with seventeen-year-old Sealie, my pretty young aunt. She hasn’t opened this box in a very long time.

The round room was my father’s. It wasn’t exactly round, but it had a curved outside wall and was known from the beginning as the round room. It was on the house’s ‘off-side’, and the window looked out onto the neighbour’s fence so it was a gloomy room even in summer. Paulina first used it to store an old sofa, a table and some broken chairs and then left it to itself, airing it a couple of times a month. Zav found this room ideal, providing him with a place to play with his mates on rainy days. In later years, they gathered there to smoke forbidden cigarettes and discuss girls and football.

Like Sealie, Zav used his room to store his ‘stuff’ as he called it. Unlike his sister, however, his stuff could not be contained. The floor, the table, the chairs were festooned with books, jumpers, meccano pieces, flashlights, toy cars, footy cards, toffee papers and comics, while the walls were home to cricket bats, tennis racquets, camping equipment, bike parts and a large, unidentified metal ‘thing’ that he had rescued from a neighbour’s hard rubbish collection.
You never know when something like this might come in handy
, he explained when Hal saw him struggling with it up the path.

And Hal? His place, his space was at Paulina’s side. After she died, he tossed in their bed, embracing the nightgown she left under her pillow. Her perfume lingered for a few precious nights, gradually dispersing into the darkest corners of their room before it dissolved into nothingness. When he was sure that Paulina’s spirit had gone, Hal left the cold bed, took his clothes from the wardrobe and went out, shutting the door. He padded softly to the guest bedroom and slid under the covers of the single bed, pulling the quilt up to his chin. The bed was too small for his large frame, but from then on, he slept in it every night until the day they took him away.

The room was austere, with a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, an armchair and a side table with a reading lamp. He asked Mrs McLennon to tidy the other bedroom, but not to move any of Paulina’s things. She looked doubtful, but did as he asked. Hal kept the door shut and visited the room occasionally as one might visit a shrine. On their wedding anniversary, and on Paulina’s birthday, he filled the room with flowers. But he steadfastly refused to commemorate her death and was at pains to treat that day as ordinary.

For the first few years, Mrs McLennon took the children to Mass on their mother’s anniversary. There they would pray for the repose of her soul, travelling afterwards on the bus and train to place flowers on her grave. Sealie made little gifts for her mother—a drawing, a plasticine statue and in the third year, a matchbox covered in Easter egg foil. With impulsivegenerosity, she put her blue feather inside on a nest of cotton wool and tied it with a yellow hair-ribbon.

Looking at her handiwork with pride, she skipped up to the grave.

Mrs Mac was shocked. ‘Selina! Show a little respect. This is no place for leaping about like a jumping jack!’

Sealie stopped short. It was the best present she’d ever given her mother. She couldn’t understand why Mrs Mac sounded so cross. Her lip trembled and her joy evaporated.

An appalled Mrs Mac hugged and petted her. ‘I felt that ashamed,’ she confessed to her sister, Alice, later. ‘Poor little thing. She put her present down all quiet and guilty looking— and she’d been really happy.’ Mrs Mac’s own face fell. ‘I try that hard to do the right thing, but you can’t replace a mother.’

The truth was that Sealie’s memory of her mother was fading. The little girl knew from photographs that Paulina had been a beautiful woman, and her own memory was of them dancing together, her mother borne on air, like a cloud-wisp or a spiralling autumn leaf. Sealie remembered Paulina in a pale blue evening gown, dark hair brushing her shoulders. She remembered her in a shiny red coat, laughing as they ran hand-in-hand in the rain. And she remembered her mother’s perfume as she came in to say goodnight. As the years went by, these memories became more stylised, like illustrations in a book of fairytales. As she matured, Sealie wondered what her mother was really like. She had no memory of scoldings or being forced to eat her vegetables or to clean up her room, although she knew these things must have occurred. Having a saint for a mother was all very well, but she would have given anything to be the daughter of a real, live, fallible, flesh-and-blood woman.

Zav was older, and his mother more established in his memory. Unlike his sister, he missed a real woman. His mother was like everyone else’s, but special—not because she was a saint or a beauty, but because she was his.

As for me, I find it difficult to call Paulina
grandmother
. I can only think of her as a beautiful, young ballerina. Poor woman. I idealise her too.

4

M
Y GRANDFATHER
H
AL WAS OBSESSIVE
by nature and Paulina had been his grand passion. Her death left him bereft, and he couldn’t let her go. He had been raised in a Catholic family, and while turning to the church in his initial sorrow and loneliness, he soon detected a hollow ring in the formulas. What was the church up to? All this praying for her soul would not bring his wife back. They were lying. If Paulina’s death was God’s will, then God was not the loving Father they all pretended he was. This so-called God had taken his wife, the mother of his children, and expected to be repaid with love and veneration. What a joke that was! A sinister, evil joke; a lie created by the church and perpetuated by mendacious priests who refused to hold their God accountable. In his anger, Hal challenged the hapless Father Murphy.