The Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

in a paper bag crushed behind the door of my mother’s bedroom. My mother called to warn Gladys that I was on my way over with the dress and a bag of beads that had been passed on from a cousin in far north Queensland. She asked Gladys if, as a favour, she could alter the dress to fit me and do something with the beads that had originally been intended to decorate the bodice, and as Gladys was such a wonderful embroiderer . . . I wondered as she continued to flatter her, if Gladys was aware of the ploy. Which, I assumed, was that Gladys, by doing this favour for my mother, would be seen not only by God, but also by most of the congregation to be helping a needy young widow. And if they didn’t see it, they would hear about it, as her needlework was legendary throughout the suburb. In the process of completing the task she would gain some empathy for the family and soften her attitude towards my mother and the tree. That was the plan, I think.
    As I crossed the road the sun blazed down from above a row of unchanging suburban pines growing along Gladys’s side fence. Her house was in the middle of the block of land, surrounded on all sides by grass burnt brown in the mid-summer scorch. It was a perfect square, Gladys’s house, and every window was closed, locked, barred and bolted. The Neighbourhood Watch sign on her front gate rattled as I closed the gate behind me.
    Gladys opened her security door and I felt the cold air from inside rush about my ankles. Unfortunately only the front room was air-conditioned, and standing in Gladys’s sewing room at the back of the house was like being torched with a hairdryer. The stiff white fabric of the dress prickled and the chunky homegrown seam where the bodice joined the skirt itched like mad. A line of pins holding up the hem around the sleeve dug into me and the caramel carpet at my feet was like dirty sand clotted with occasional brown boulders of old lady furniture. It made me feel faint. I longed to escape. I looked around, desperate to find a way out of the over-tidied house full of glass cases crammed with crystal and china.
    â€˜When’s the big day?’ Gladys asked me.
    â€˜Not until next year,’ I admitted, wondering if Gladys would suddenly see through my mother’s strategy.
    I could see her wondering why my mother was so anxious to have the dress done when my first communion wasn’t for another six months and Gladys knew my mother wasn’t the type to be over-organized.
    â€˜I can’t promise anything,’ she finally said, picking up the bag of beads. ‘I’m better with thread.’
    She tutted then left the room.
    â€˜That’s old, that dress,’ she called from the hall. I could hear her digging around in a cupboard in the hallway.
    â€˜All my cousins made their communion in it,’ I answered.
    She returned with a square of folded white silk and I knew immediately the material had been meant for her own wedding. Gladys’s fiancé, we’d all heard about him, had been left to rot in the corner of a prisoner-of-war camp in Changi, Singapore.
    She never married and she never got over it, that was how the story went, and once a year she met a thin man who had shared the cell with her fiancé. To pass the time in the camp they had bet on a dice they made out of paper. He was so old now, the thin man, that he had stopped coming and Gladys had to go and visit him in an old people’s home.
    The sheet of white silk landed on the Formica and she started cutting, the scissors grating across the table top. She was going to make me a new communion dress from the fabric that should have been used for her own wedding dress. It gave me the creeps.
    There was no way I was going to wear a dress made out of old lady material. I ran across the road to tell my mother. When I got there I was appalled to find her circling the base of the tree. Edward was in the kitchen trying to ignore her, the tell-tale