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The Mimosa Tree Page 29
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Page 29
Suddenly, there is a loud crack. We turn towards the hallway in time to see a dust cloud explode through the door. It inflates slowly, like a giant, grey balloon. When it hits me the sensation is like being whipped with feathers. But when the dust enters my lungs I start coughing and gasping for air. I am incapacitated with fear, but Harm hooks an arm around my shoulder and pulls me out the back door.
‘What’s happening?’ I scream. ‘Why are the walls shaking?’
‘It’s not safe here anymore,’ he shouts trying to make himself heard above another, stronger sound this time, like the whirring sound of machinery gearing up. We fall down the step and into the weedy sand of the backyard. Above the house the great yellow arm of an excavator rises high into the sky. As the arm rises, the whirring sound gets louder and louder until suddenly it stops and the bucket crashes down onto the house. Heavy wooden beams split like matchsticks. Glass explodes from the windows like showers of glittering water. The arm pulls back towards itself taking with it walls, metal and sheets of roofing. It looks like a giant, house-eating monster.
‘They’re knocking down the house!’ I say. I am feeling hysterical, not sure whether to laugh or cry. ‘Harm, we could have been killed!’
‘Over there,’ says Harm pointing to something behind me.
I spin around, but I only see the usual weedy dirt and scraggly bushes of our backyard. Harm continues to stare through the rain, obviously seeing something there that I can’t. It occurs to me that he’s actually gone mad; that the drug has caused him to lose his mind. And because I am struggling to keep a handle on things myself, the realisation that neither of us is in control is enough to tip me over the edge. I can feel my panic rising again, reaching new and electrifying peaks.
‘It’s all right, Harm,’ I say trying to sound reassuring, though I’m not sure whether it’s for his benefit or mine. ‘Felicia will be here soon. We can hang out with her until this trip-thing passes, then we can go to my house. It’s going to be okay.’
‘You can’t go home,’ he says rejecting my attempts to comfort him. ‘That’s where it’s coming from!’ His eyes are wide, and his mouth is twitching at the sides. I realise with horror that he’s not actually scared – he’s having the time of his life. He points into the sky, but I still can’t see what he is talking about. Exasperated, he turns my head. ‘Up there, Mira. The cloud is there.’
And suddenly I understand.
Towering high above the suburban roofline, black and bubbling and filling up the sky is a mushroom-shaped cloud. The sound of the excavator chomping on our house fades into insignificance and soon all I am aware of is the whooshing sound of blood in my ears. As the cloud grows into the sky, widening and stretching, so does my fear. Just as I always imagined it would, the dust seems to spill up and out from the stem, like a tiered fountain. The sky grows darker and the rain gets heavier. Thunder cracks through the air. I am terrified and shivering with cold, but I cannot seem to move to save myself.
I start to count.
When Harm pulls me to my feet I don’t resist. He leads me through a neighbour’s yard before reaching the street. The rain is so heavy that water has started to pool along the sides of the road. There are signs of general panic all around us. I see a man in his pyjamas tying tarps over loose building materials in his front yard. As he struggles with his giant, flapping, blue bird he keeps checking over his shoulder at the cloud. Through the wind and rain I hear a mother calling desperately for her children to come inside. As we hurry along the footpath, huddled into each other against the wind and rain, we are almost bowled over by a woman with a pram futilely trying to protect her screaming baby. She gives us a frightened look and gestures to the looming cloud.
‘Harm,’ I say tugging at his arm. ‘We have to find shelter. We shouldn’t be out here.’
‘No. We have to get as far away as we can first.’
‘But where are we going?’
‘To the safe place.’
Oh God. He’s talking about the map. My map.
‘Harm. I don’t think there is a safe place. Everything is too connected; you take out one piece and all the others fall.’
‘We’ll head for the train station,’ he says. ‘We can decide where to go from there.’
‘Wait!’ I say. ‘Slow down.’ I try to pull my hand away, but he grips it tighter and with a quick movement he has me locked against his side. My feet are moving, they are touching the ground, but somehow he is carrying me. I can’t see where I am going through the rain, but it doesn’t matter because I am not choosing the direction. Harm is holding me so tightly that I have become part of his body. I have no choice but to follow. I glance back to the cloud. It’s still there; bloating, churning and haemorrhaging into the sky, but it seems to have grown wider and lost some of its distinct mushroom shape. Everywhere I look the sky is turning into a boiling mass of grey and black.
I turn away from the cloud just in time to be walloped in the face by the low-hanging branch of a tree. It feels like I have leaves and flowers in my mouth and across my face. I spit and wipe at my cheeks, and when I look down at my fingers I see they are covered in mimosa flowers. They are all over my hands and clothes, exploding through the veil of rain like tiny yellow fireworks.
Suddenly, I am back home in my kitchen.
Mum is at the sink washing dishes. She is humming, and I am standing behind her, as close as I can be without touching. I am vibrating softly to her humming. The kitchen is warm, it smells like butter and garlic. The walls glow yellow in the sun. I want to touch her, but I am afraid I will break the spell. I am afraid that she will be taken from me again.
The sound of squealing car tyres snaps me back to the street.
Harm takes us on a mad dash across a four-lane intersection. The traffic lights are out, and cars are banked up on all sides. Desperate motorists push into any available space, and everywhere horns are blaring. He manages to manoeuvre us safely to the other side, but the effort leaves me breathless and I fall to my knees on the pavement, struggling to calm down. Harm stands with his back to me, hands on hips, staring at the passing train that is blocking our passage to the railway station. His outline seems to smudge as the train moves past him.
The train sounds like my mother humming.
‘Harm,’ I say as something occurs to me. ‘Is this real?’
But he ignores me.
I leave him and go back to my mother’s kitchen.
My mother is at the sink, and I am inching closer to her. I try to get as close as I can without actually making contact. I am a whisper away, feeling her warmth, smelling her, remembering the softness of her skin. I hold back for as long as I can but finally I am unable to resist.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she disappears.
I fall forward onto the sink, through the space where she was standing. I am crying. Sobbing. Feeling my loss all over again. I look down at my hands which seem to be holding the weight of my pain. They ache. They are my hands, but they don’t feel like my hands anymore. They feel calloused. There is a burn on my thumb that I can feel without seeing. I spread my fingers out and wiggle them and though they are not touching I can feel the plump edges rubbing against each other. On my ring finger I can feel the cold tightness of a gold band.
And then I realise.
I have stepped into her.
I am seeing my hands, but feeling hers. She is still humming but not around me, she’s inside me now. We are together, she is alive in my body, in a safe place where she will never die or grow old.
She comes with me to the street.
Together we look back to the cloud that has tormented me for so many years. My skin is prickling with cold, but my heart is warm. My mother says, Look Mira. What a beautiful cloud. Have you ever seen something so amazing? And suddenly I am not afraid of it anymore.
‘Come on, Mira,’ says Harm. ‘It’s time to go.’
I stand and face him. I am smiling. Inside me I can still feel my mother’s wa
rmth.
‘No, Harm. I’m not going.’
‘But it’s not safe here anymore.’
‘Maybe, but I can’t just leave,’ I say thinking of Siena and Via. Of Marco and Sera and Felicia. ‘What about our families and friends? Who is going to make sure they are safe?’
‘I don’t care what happens to anyone else.’
I scrunch up my eyes. I’m not crazy about my family but that doesn’t mean I want them dead. I want them to listen to me more, I want them to back off and let me make my own decisions. I wish they were smarter about my world and could show me better how to live in it, but I don’t hate them.
‘Harm,’ I say again. ‘It’s time to go home.’
Harm reaches out, but I put my hands behind my back and step away from him. He looks like I’ve stabbed him. His eyes are wide, and I can see the cloud reflected in his oversized pupils. He is a boy trying not to cry, and the mother in me wants to reach out to him, to take away his pain. I feel terrible, but I know that this is the right thing to do.
‘We’re going to die,’ he says looking past me to the cloud.
I shake my head. ‘It’s not real. It’s just a cloud. It was always just a cloud.’
‘It’s a warning,’ he says, unwilling to let the game end. ‘A sign.’
‘Harm, it’s a storm cloud. It’s a sign that it’s going to rain.’
He is breathing so quickly I can see his chest rising and falling through his shirt. For a while I think he is just overcome with emotion, and I wait for him to be able to say what he needs to say. But when I hear him begin to wheeze I realise he is having an asthma attack.
‘Oh fuck,’ I say pulling the bag from his shoulder and letting it drop to the ground between us. ‘Where’s your pump?’
I feel blindly in the bag for the Ventolin pump. I finally locate it in the inside pocket of his jacket, but as I grab it I dislodge the map. The wind flips and tumbles it and we watch as the rain begins to smudge the colours and soften the edges of the paper.
‘The map,’ he wheezes. ‘Get your map.’
‘Let it go,’ I say. ‘We don’t need it anymore.’
And suddenly the map blows towards the tracks and under the wheels of the passing train. Then Harm stops wheezing. In fact, he stops making any sounds at all because he isn’t actually breathing. He drops back on his elbows as I push the pump to his lips and begin to squirt the Ventolin into his mouth until he starts wheezing again, and then begins to breathe. I hold him to my chest as he cries. And I smile as I realise my mother is holding him too.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ I say into his hair. ‘Everything is going to be okay. I’m taking us home.’
***
Harm’s attack has snapped me out of the trip and it’s a strange feeling; like stepping out of a movie theatre into daylight. He leans into my side as I guide us across the tracks, through the wind and rain and towards the terminal building. He is weak after his attack, and it’s a struggle to hold him up but I don’t let go. We slip in through the doors just as it starts to hail. It pelts down like a shower of rocks, and when the doors close behind us the sounds just stop like someone has turned off a tap.
We find a bench and huddle together for warmth, creating a sizeable puddle around us. We look like we have been beaten then drowned. Harm’s pants are muddy and torn at the leg. His tangled hair is plastered to his face like strands of yellow liquorice. I have a long tear in my shirt, twigs in my hair and blue flowers over my head and shoulders like sprinkles on a cupcake. I laugh.
‘What?’ says Harm.
‘These flowers,’ I say rubbing them through my fingers in fascination. ‘I was sure they were yellow, and round and furry like flowers from a mimosa tree,’ I say.
‘Part of the hallucination,’ he says picking petals from my hair.
I smile. ‘A good part,’ I say. ‘How are you feeling, Harm?’
‘Like I’ve been through a war.’
I grin. ‘But you survived right?’
‘With everything but my pride,’ he says.
‘So how long does this stuff last?’ I say, fascinated by how my fingers seem to grow comet tails as I wave them through the air.
‘I think we’re over the worst of it now. It’s hard to say, but I think we should stop feeling the effects completely in few hours.’
‘All of them?’ I say, checking to see if my mother’s hands are still in mine. They are, but softer; just a light touch.
‘Sometimes the things you see or understand on the trip stay with you for weeks. I’m sorry, Mira. I had no idea it would be that strong. That was scary, even for me. This trip was different from the ones I’ve taken before. Usually they last a bit longer but feel a lot less intense.’
‘It was explosive,’ I say. ‘I guess that’s why they call them A-bombs. You were right, it really blew my mind.’
‘I’m the guy, remember? The one that’s here to corrupt you. It’s my job to keep opening up those doors,’ Harm says with a sweep of his arm.
‘I think you just blew them off their hinges,’ I smile. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I think I’ll be leaving all the doors closed for a while.’
He nods sincerely. ‘That is a wise decision.’
‘I’m still having trouble working out what was real and what wasn’t. Like the house. Did they really knock it down or was that part of the hallucination?’
‘I have no bloody idea. I guess we’ll find out once the storm passes.’
I reach over and smooth his fringe. ‘Thank you, Harm,’ I say.
He scoffs. ‘For almost killing you?’
‘For letting me stay. For braving the storm.’
I put my head onto his shoulder and Harm plays gently with my hair. ‘Are you still going home?’
I look up into his green eyes. ‘Yes.’
He nods like he understands, but he looks away, pretends to get distracted by something across the room. ‘So, you hungry?’ he says reaching down to pick up the bag with our food supplies. He tears it open, pulls out cans of baked beans, precooked meat-pie filling and condensed milk.
‘Um, not really.’
‘That’s good,’ he says throwing the cans back into the bag. ‘Because I forgot the can opener.’
We roll around on the bench in hysterics until a security guard comes over and tells us to behave ourselves. For the rest of the afternoon we just hang around the station, enjoying the now greatly diminished effects of the acid. But as the drug slowly leaches from my system, so does that wonderful feeling of being close to Mum. With each passing minute I feel her slipping away from me again, and the more she slips, the tighter I cling to Harm. But my need for him doesn’t scare me anymore, because now I know for sure that he is clinging to me too.
Chapter 17
By late afternoon the storm has blown over, and Harm and I step outside for the first time in hours. The air smells like freshly cut grass and the streets are glassy and flickering with headlights. It’s still raining; a mere spray of moisture that wets the surface of our clothes and hair without penetrating. We are walking back to the house, wondering if the demolition was real. We amble hand in hand, awed by the devastation caused by the storm. There are fallen branches everywhere and so many leaves that I am surprised the trees have any left. We see a jacaranda split in half and fallen across the street. Golf ball sized hail has shattered car windscreens. Everywhere water is still running like creeks along roadsides, and in a low-lying section it’s pooled knee-high.
‘I’m starting to think that whole war thing wasn’t a hallucination,’ says Harm, shaking his head in disbelief as we walk past a piece of roof sheeting wrapped around a tree trunk.
‘It’s like we’ve just stepped out of the bunker,’ I agree. ‘I’m glad we got to the train station before it really started coming down.’
Harm nods. ‘You know, it’s probably a good thing that excavator showed up when it did. I don’t think the house would have held up against that storm. At least it forced us
to get out of there.’
I put my arm around his waist and snuggle into his side. ‘Harm, where are you going to go?’
‘Back to my parents’ house I suppose.’
‘But they’re horrible.’
‘True, but at least they’re not here right now. Maybe I can find somewhere to live before they come back.’
I hold Harm’s hand tighter. Neither of us is looking forward to going home. I know it’s what I need to do, but when I think about how it will be, just me and my father alone in that house without my mother to hold us together, I feel sick. I’ve lived with my father my whole life, but it feels like I am going home to a stranger. In some ways it’s simple for Harm, knowing that he won’t or can’t work things out with his parents; there is comfort in knowing exactly where you stand, even if where you’re standing feels exactly like shit. I’m not sure I will ever be able to untangle myself so easily from my family, especially not while Via and Siena are around. And while Harm has the freedom to make his own choices, I’ll probably always have to consider everything I do against what they want for me, or how it’s going to make them feel. Does that mean I will never get to know how it feels to be truly me?
‘Check out the headline,’ says Harm, pointing over at the deli window. The newspaper billboard sheet has been torn and dampened by the storm but the writing is still clear: ‘Superpowers sign treaty to cut nuclear arsenals’.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I say.
‘They signed the treaty! They’re going to get rid of the bombs.’
‘I guess the war really is over,’ I say but I am having trouble smiling.
‘Hey,’ says Harm, squeezing my hand and pulling me out of my thoughts. ‘We had fun, right?’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘You know, in between all the crying.’
He nods. ‘Yeah. That apocalyptic stuff was a bit scary too, but you know, before that it was pretty cool.’