April 2022: I’m so excited I can hardly type. This morning I received the news that I have won the Northern Beaches Commendation Award in the 2022 Northern Beaches Writing Competition for my story It Won’t Come When You Call It. The Commendation Award is for Northern Beaches residents only; given this size of this Council area and the incredible creative talent that resides here, I’m overwhelmed and delighted. The Competition itself was open to residents all over Australia.
Under the rules of the competition I couldn’t post it here for another twelve months but now, April 2023, I can. Scroll down a bit for the entire story.
The Competition had a theme: Tree. Whether it was a tree with leaves and branches, a family tree, a decision tree … authors could write anything relating to the theme.
I didn’t find out about the Competition until a couple of weeks before it closed. As you can see by the inaction here on this blog, I don’t write a lot at the moment. I blame social media for that; I seem to now have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to writing thanks to Facebook. But I digress.
So. I got thinking, along the ‘what if …’ lines most writers head along. My husband was away on a work trip and I nursed a glass of chardonnay and developed characters and a storyline over dinner. The wettest summer in decades, the local floods, the trees that simply slid down the hills were my inspirations. If nothing, my story would be topical and relevant. After dinner I headed to my laptop and with the sound of rain dripping endlessly outside the window wrote the first draft of around 2,500 words in just under three hours.
Part of the competition was to provide an image to go with the story, and that was fun too. I’m learning to to master Procreate on my iPad, so whipped up a custom image of the story’s climax which you can see at the top of this post.
After several revisions, taking out deadwood and irrelevant words and phrases, checking I wasn’t repeating words too often (how many different words are there for rain? Probably as many as the Inuit people have for snow after this year!), I was ready and submitted my story with one day to go before entries closed, wishing it good luck as I pressed the submit button.
And here we are. I’m certain the people across the bay from me heard my shout of delight when I got the news I was a winner.
And, here’s It Won’t Come When You Call It:
1988
The sapling had slid off our garden bank into our driveway. Clay onto clay. It looked, with its root ball and attendant sticky mud, like a tiny tropical island in a murky sea.
The rain was neverending. There was a new stream running down the hill and, apparently, under our house.
We had moved up from Melbourne five months ago, Andy and I, starry eyed. Andy had landed a job in Sydney and after scrimping for two years in a rented tiny apartment in St Kilda we wanted a house. Near water. With views. And it had to be cheap.
What we got was a rundown weatherboard house we jokingly called The Shack. It had Pittwater views, wooden balcony railings almost obliterated by cockatoos, rotten floorboards, termite damage, a leaking roof, a steep clay driveway our car struggled with and 1980s interest rates. We were 20-somethings and fit; we didn’t care. We could fix it up.
We had King Parrots charming treats from us, and screaming Rainbow Lorikeets patrolling the sky like fighter aircraft. Cocktaoos made us laugh with their cleverness. Boobook owls broke the evening silence. Wallabies ate the flowers I planted and if they didn’t, the clay soil killed them. It was bliss, until three months later it started raining. Andy was learning to surf by then and I’d bought a kayak and paddled it for two weeks with the paddle the wrong way around until a kindly local set me right.
Cityfied babes in the bush, we were. I still wore my Melbourne outfit of black on black and hadn’t yet discovered stripey Breton tops.
It was in tight black jeans and t-shirt, my wild 80s perm sagging by the second and the whole ensemble covered by a sodden black raincoat, that Andy and I surveyed the sapling with our knowledgeable neighbour Fred, who’d lived here most of his life.
“Let’s get it down onto the road and Council can clear it up,” Fred suggested. “You can’t put it back there, there’s no soil and it’s going to grow too big, anyway. It’s a Scribbly Gum. I’d plant a callistemon there once you fix the bank and put in a retaining wall.”
“But look at it!” I exclaimed, with all the sentimentality of a 19th century woman gazing at a basket of kittens. I almost – almost – clasped my hands. “It’s only as tall as I am. What a waste. Can’t we take it up the back and plant it? All its roots are there.”
Fred gave me a look that told me I was a bloody idiot. He was in his fifties, with the leathery skin of a longtime fisherman and the unsentimental outlook of an outdoorsman.
Andy was enthused. “The first tree we’ll plant here, Callie. This sapling.”
I grinned at him; delighted, complicit. Our land. Our tree.
Bear in mind that in Melbourne, we’d only had a peace lily that survived on its wits. No garden. No outdoor plants. Certainly no trees.
Our backyard already had trees, stretching in untidy ranks up the hillside. Some of them were on their last legs with dead limbs, and Fred had already told us we needed to get rid of half of our trees, the dying ones and the ones that were invaders and didn’t belong here.
Andy and I prevailed so Fred helped us lug the sapling, firstly on a wheelbarrow that got stuck in the clay then weighing a ton on a tarpaulin, up the side of our house and, with several stops to catch our breath, onto the slope behind.
He helped us plant it, telling us how big a hole the roots needed and muttering about fertiliser and adding more soil once it was planted and how there was sandstone under the clay up in these hills. We slid about and fell on our bums and got wet to the skin and finally planted the thing not as far up as Fred would have liked.
“I want to see it from the kitchen window, I don’t want it obscured by the other trees, it’s going to look beautiful with that scribbly bark,” I told the boys. Besides, we were stuffed. The thought of dragging the sapling up another five metres had rather taken the excitement away. I was already aching all over and filthy. So the sapling got planted at what Fred considered to be almost in the danger zone.
Such a perfect form she had, planted in her new home, reaching for the sky. I called her Seraphina the Scribbly Gum and Fred, when I mentioned it later, almost managed to hide a look of disgust.
He snorted. “It won’t come when you call it.”
We learned from neighbours and the news a lot of trees had slid down the hill in the wettest weeks anyone could remember, and it wasn’t just trees. Houses, too. We were told, afterwards, when we hired a builder to look at our house as it had developed cracks, that another week of rain would have seen our house with its porch on the street.
* * *
Who knew the internet was going to be the next world-changing thing? Andy did. He was a software engineer when not a lot of people outside IT knew what that meant. He knew people who knew people and had a hunch about the future. As the internet took off a colleague asked him to be a partner in an IT business, and he leapt into it with all the joy of a kid taking a running jump off Church Point wharf.
As Seraphina grew from a sapling into a tree, so did our finances. The business, over the years, paid the mortgage off and put drainage traps and pipes around it and up into the hill behind, so sliding down the hill wasn’t a future option. We got rid of the dangerous and unwelcome trees. We had the driveway concreted. We extended the house and clad it in fireproof boards, sold the ancient and recalcitrant LandCruiser and parked our new cars in our new garage. We had three water-loving kids, who revelled in their bushy home. We could have afforded to move to waterfront Newport but loved our parrots, our National Park and Pittwater views and our big, peaceful bush block.
And Seraphina thrived, elegant and graceful. When the children were small we hung a swing from one of her lower limbs. I took photos of her bark with its graffiti scribbles made by moth larvae and marvelled at the beauty of them. Her limbs grew in sinuous curves and her creamy blossoms drew birds to take nectar. Kookaburras used her to survey the back yard for food. She was flanked by callistemons and cabbage tree palms.
I never, for one moment, regretted dragging her up the hill and giving her a second chance.
2022
Rain bomb, BoM said. As if we hadn’t had enough already. It seemed summer, usually thought of in months, had been a fleeting bunch of sunny days interspersed among clouds, showers, storms and rain. La Niña had worn out her welcome. I’d been wishing her gone for weeks.
Even Lara our Labrador – apparently born part dog, part dolphin – had started to refuse to go out in the rain, sulking soulful-eyed in the laundry and waving her tail apologetically.
I looked morosely through the rivulets of rain out the kitchen window after breakfast. Our back yard was sodden; squelchy underfoot and reluctant to dry out on non-rainy days. In pride of place among our trees Seraphina was the star, her branches and foliage heavy with rain, her trunk darkly soaked. I hadn’t been up into the yard for a week. Last time I’d tried I’d nearly lost my footing. If my boots hadn’t sunk so far into the soil and kept me upright I’d have skidded towards the kitchen on my bum.
We’d built retaining walls between the yard and the house, creating gardens with native plants that, based on experience, wallabies didn’t eat. Nobody had a gorgeous garden here; the wallabies saw to that. Water was flowing over the walls now in cascades, etching a watercourse beside the prostrate grevillea and coursing out into the courtyard in an ugly brown stream. The soil up the hill simply couldn’t absorb any more.
Grabbing the raincoat that never seemed to dry out these days and shoving my bare feet into my gumboots, I checked the courtyard outside the kitchen. This was a peaceful area that didn’t get the prevailing south winds and while there wasn’t the water view we got from the front, it was usually a pleasant place to sit with a mug of tea. However, right now the water wasn’t seeping down through the pavers any more but staying on top in spreading puddles that covered the feet of the little metal table and chairs.
The drains that ran from the garden under the house had been doing their thing but water had pooled over the top of the drain trap and for a few metres around the trap. All that lovely topsoil being washed down … and the leaves. The trap grille was probably blocked with leaves. We’d had a day and night of strong winds as well as rain; only to be expected.
I sighed.
Andy, wiry and tough from decades of surfing and sport, was down the front clearing the traps in the driveway so water could drain cleanly into the stormwater. Lara sat under the garage eaves, dry, watching him. The courtyard would be my job.
I carefully walked down the side steps – so slippery now – to the garage and took a shovel back up with me. The rain was absolutely pelting down; almost painful on my skin under my clothing.
The trap was covered in leaves and I heaved them to one side. Immediately water cascaded into the trap; it was hard to dig the silt out as the water swirled around then escaped through the pipes.
The leaves tried to join in and I moved them a second time, away from the edge of the water. Really, I wasn’t thinking. Weeks of rain had addled my brain. Why hadn’t I picked up one of those big garden tubs when I went for the shovel? What else was I going to do with the leaves?
Sighing, I rested the shovel against the retaining wall and headed back beside the house for another trip to the garage.
It was twenty paces to the staircase at the side. I had done fifteen when I heard a crack that chilled my heart.
I turned as the crack was followed by a WHUMP, to see Seraphina lurch forward, drag herself out of the ground and fall towards the house.
It took a second.
Literally, a second.
I didn’t have time to move. I couldn’t move. I watched in horror as our beautiful tree headed towards our beautiful house and came to rest just short of it, with a horrible crunching noise as her branches broke. The earth shook. It really did; it trembled with her fallen weight.
I started to shake too, and fumbled my way to the back step. My legs didn’t want to hold me up, and I thumped my bum onto the step, feeling my heartrate jump in a way it only did when I ran hard uphill. I put my head in my hands, feeling dizzy.
“Callie!” Andy clumped up the side steps, taking them two at a time despite them being slippery as glass, Lara at his heels. “Callie, love, are you ok?”
I lifted my head to see him stiffen at the sight of stricken Seraphina. “I – fark – Jesus – the tree – the house –“ He stammered.
“Missed it by THAT much,” I said shakily as Lara sniffed and licked me.
Andy plopped down beside me, and hugged me tight. When I felt safe again and the trembles had stopped, I looked at the courtyard.
Seraphina had fallen across the retaining walls (breaking the first one), the trap and the shovel. The shovel had been toppled to the ground. If I hadn’t thought to get the garden tub … if I hadn’t moved …
The tallest, slimmest branch had a cluster of twigs, bony fingers with absurdly long leafy nails. They touched the wall of our house, still moving, caressing, stroking.
The sentimental part of me, the one that named the tree, wondered if she was giving thanks for the second life we’d given her.
The imaginative part of me wondered if she’d just tried to kill me.
The realist part of me put together the mix of heavy wet branches, saturated earth, a windy night and physics.
On either side of the slender stem heavier limbs branched out. Lethal at the velocity with which they’d fallen. They spread across the courtyard, broken twigs scattered almost to our feet with the impact.
Up the hill her broad, shallow roots stretched for metres, ripped from the ground and pointing accusing fingers at the clouds. Mud had been flung in clumps around the yard with the violence of her death.
I made myself take real stock of the situation.
One second, I thought. One bloody second. That’s all it took.
“Andy, love, is it too early for a treble Scotch?”
We sat sipping single malt under cover on the balcony, Seraphina out of sight but not out of mind.
I looked at the bay across the roofs of the houses on the lower side of the road. God, it was muddy. White boats that usually moored in restful blue looked dowdy in brown water. I thought of anything but the tree touching our home with its ladyfinger leaves.
Neither of us said much; I think we were both too deep in thought.
By the time I was sucking on my ice cube, Andy tapped my shoulder. “Look.” He pointed to what was once Fred’s driveway but for the last ten years had been Ginny and Jack’s.
A sapling had slid from the edge of their driveway onto the road, gathering its roots and a metre of muddy soil. A little island floating on a wet, grey sea. It looked so vulnerable. It looked like it was only my height. It looked like a Scribbly Gum.
“Council,” I said firmly, “Can get rid of that one.”
The end.
Caroline Sully's fiction 