The Letterbox Tree, page 1
To my children, my terranauts – Oscar, Leni and Yve – you carry all my great love and hope for you, and the world we live in, into the future. – R.L.
This one is for my Amelie. I see the past and future in your eyes. I promise to spend the rest of my days making your future a sweet one. – K.G.
Contents
Nyx
Bea
Nyx
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Authors’ Note
About the Authors
‘You’ve got to understand, Nyxie,’ Dad said, his voice the usual strange mix of urgent and hopeless, ‘when the floods come, and they’re gonna come, someday soon, home will be gone. In my lifetime we’ve lost Tranmere, Lauderdale, Seven Mile Beach. The floodgates and seawalls we’ve built over the years have only made things worse. The old Airport’s been under water for almost a decade and Battery Point and Taroona are just memories kicking around in the heads of some really old people now.’
Usually, I tune out, because Dad rattles off his List of Doom – that’s what I call it – all the time, but there’s something about the way he’s speaking today that’s scaring me.
‘It’s all changed beyond belief – even in my lifetime. Tasmania isn’t one island now – it’s at least two. Please, love, you’re a smart kid. We have to leave. We are leaving. You can fight me all you want – but you can’t fight the future.’
There it is. Proof. He thinks I haven’t heard him setting things up, arranging things, he’s been too scared to tell me. But he’s done it. Dad’s finally done it.
Everything I’m chewing turns to dust in my mouth and I push away from the table so hard I set the battered orange pendant light over our kitchen table swinging. ‘I’m going outside,’ I say curtly and back it up by slamming out the back door so hard the swollen weatherboards of the lean-to back section of our house all shake at once.
Dad’s mad with his talk about the flood. Tasmania’s, lutruwita’s, a dust bowl, only the edges of which are drowning. The rest of it is hot and gusty, gritty and dry, most of the ancient forests gone, along with regular snow fall, which I’ve only ever seen pictures of. Fire’s always been a bigger problem than water Always, as far as I can remember. That, and the lack of fresh food, which is so expensive no one around here eats anything but cryo – if they’re rich – or rehydro, if they’re not. The seas around us have turned so acidic that wild oysters, mussels and clams are mostly gone, crabs and lobsters, too. Whole flocks of birds and bats have fallen out of the sky, at once. Bushfire season is all year round now, and we’re all living like we’re holding our breath, collectively, all the time because there’s no water to put it out with. Just chemicals, which only make our land and our rivers worse after the rotas leave, first dumping their giant loads of dry powder over the fire front and peeling away through the choking air like giant bees, which are pretty much all gone as well.
‘Nature’s turned her back on us,’ my teacher told my class sadly, one of the few times we were all together in the one place, ‘because we turned away from her first.’
I burst into a run – across our hot and dusty backyard full of dead things and through the sagging gate in the falling down wooden fence; up through the guts of a network of old cobblestoned alleys filled with falling down old houses just like mine, two hundred, almost three hundred years old. People are used to seeing me bolt through the back streets of West Hobart, nipaluna, in the twilight; so no one calls out, no one tries to stop me. It’s too hot to care, my hair’s already stuck fast to my face and neck, so that I can’t really see properly to run.
I can’t believe Dad’s ranting about the flood again, the flood to end all floods he calls it, that’s going to wipe out everything I’ve ever known; my whole entire life.
Unless we move first.
As far as I’m concerned, my dad’s the flood. I know he’s fallen in love with some lady he’s met in a chat room for singles that he goes to in his head, where I can’t hear what’s happening or being said, or promised. I don’t hear the words he’s using, but I hear him laugh out loud – bursts of silence punctuated by loud laughter, the kind of real laughter I used to hear before Mum got sick and died – and I know he’s found someone on the Northland; which is what we call the land mass to the north, funnily enough. ‘Australia’ takes too long to say, and this was palawa country before it was ever even Australia, everyone knows that, so we don’t say it so much these days. And we don’t really feel part of it anymore, on our island everyone stopped calling The Apple Isle a long time ago because they’re all gone, the apples. There’s no water for growing apples, or any other kind of fruit for that matter.
I reach the old sports ground that once used to be green, people say; a great green oval where people came together to do things during the day, whenever they felt like it. No one can be bothered doing things in groups now while the sun’s out. It’s too horrible, and you could catch something because ‘we are all seething hotbeds’, my teacher often says wisely, ‘of killer germs and disease. Remember the pandemic that wiped out millions? And the ones after that?’
I only go to school now when it’s unavoidable and there’s a detention involved if you don’t show up, because I can downlink the rest. Everything not just at your fingertips, but behind your eyes, speaking direct into your head, any time you want it. Some people never go outside anymore. They think it’s too dangerous.
I reach the tree. The great towering pine that is the only surviving bit of green out here only because it’s at least forty metres tall, with thick, twisted roots that go deep into the ground. People care enough about it to come out and water it sometimes, talk to it, the way I’m doing now with my words, and my tears. Otherwise, the world is dust.
The rough bark of the lower branches scratches up my palms and fingers but I keep climbing. Up and up to the branch that has become my own – that overlooks the dustbowl of the old sports oval – with the small, hollow knot at waist height, a bit bigger than my closed fist. I used to be scared that snakes would come out of there, but no snake has been seen in West Hobart since 2055. It’s been too hot, even for snakes. Maybe they’d all just lain down in their holes, one day, and died.
There’s no breeze tonight, but the air is a little cooler because it’s filtering through the branches of the tree that keeps on going, keeps on growing, against all sense and reason.
I dig a scrap of torn paper out of the pocket of my shorts and grip the stub of my pencil tight. My handwriting is terrible because just about no one uses paper any more to write with. Paper is hard to come by. This bit is off the back of an old book going spotty and yellow in my mum’s last box of things that I keep in my bedroom.
It’s faster now to just send words out through one of the little rooms in your head and Dad’s embraced the chatting in a big way because we’re dying out here, he says. We’re marooned and getting more and more cut off as more people leave and nothing is made, nothing is grown, nothing is renewed. When the systems are down, and the chat rooms are closed to him, Dad’s moods are blacker than black. ‘We might as well be dead and buried already!’ I hear him roar through the walls of my bedroom as he bangs and crashes around in his own space. ‘What is the point?’
But I hate those rooms. I hate that people can knock on the doors of the rooms in your head, day or night, even when you have an invisible sign up that says: Not talking or No callers or Not welcome. The signs are always up in my head. But it doesn’t stop people trying to sell me things or cross my very clear boundaries, 24/7/365. The calls I hate the most are the ones from strangers asking if they can see my legs, or my hands. It’s creepy.
Using my hot, sticky thigh as a table, I write:
Until I fill up one whole side of the paper and have to turn over the scrap. There is a page number in a lower corner on the other side and not enough room to write all that again and, anyway, I’m crying so hard I can barely see, so I write in big screaming letters:
I REFUSE TO MOVE. I LOVE IT HERE.
I underline: LOVE IT HERE.
Home might be dying, and drier than the bone of a long dead animal, but it’s still home. I don’t want another one.
Then I shove the scrap into the hand-sized knot in the tree and hope that the wind carries my words away, like it always does.
Usually, I feel better as soon as the words pass out of my brain, into my fingers, onto the paper. But this time, the rage is still there and I bury my face in my crossed arms and howl so loud that I get feedback. All the sensors and the ingestibles inside my body sending the reverb from my own howling back into my ears, from the inside.
My mother peers at me over her half-moon glasses. She knows. She always knows. She always sees the heart of me.
She always sees my sadness.
And this sadness is big, and deep, and coloured the vivid green of the leaves of my pine tree.
She knows that, inside, I am tearing; rending; falling apart.
My father has no idea.
‘Excellent, if I do say myself,’ he grins at us, through a mouthful of ratatouille – not the traditional kind, with eggplant and zucchini. My dad’s ratatouille is a study in found objects. This version has peas and sweet potato. Another bowl of it might contain kale and sultanas.
‘Bea?’
Mum taps her fingernails on the table. Today, they are decorated with pink and purple stickers. Her best friend, Ali, has gone into business selling them.
Ali had asked me if I wanted some – they came in kid versions, too, she said, with unicorns and flamingos on.
I told her I couldn’t wear nail stickers, when I was climbing pine trees all the time.
‘It won’t be so different,’ Mum says now.
‘What are you talking about?’ Dad looks from one to the other of us, completely bemused.
‘It will be,’ I mutter. ‘It won’t be here. It won’t be home.’
‘But there’s so much you don’t like about here,’ Mum reminds me. I dart a sidelong glance at Dad. I never like talking about this stuff – the bullying stuff – in front of him. Dad was bullied as a kid, too, and he always tells me that I just have to ignore the other girls and get on with things. He says that’s what worked for him. He says they’ll get bored of it, in time.
But they haven’t bored of it, yet. It’s been five years and they haven’t bored of it.
It was like they marked me out, on our first day of school – I was ‘different’. I lived up the hill in West Hobart. My parents were ‘crunchy’. They were ‘nerds’, too. Before I started school, I never realised there was anything wrong with binge-watching the Lord of the Rings movies, at least once every couple of months. I never knew that keeping bees and making your own honey and beeswax lunch wraps was weird.
Those girls let me know, in no uncertain terms, that the life I lived – the person I was – was, is, freakish.
My hand-me-down uniform and home-cut hair are pathetic. My glasses make me look like a frog. The fact that I have hearing loss and sometimes have to ask our teacher to repeat things … that was flipping bizarre.
I am bizarre.
I spend all day at school, feeling like I am the only person who’s come there from another planet.
The only place I feel really at home is here. In this house. That Dad is now asking me to leave. In two months’ time.
Why can’t Dad see that? A new school in a new place won’t make a difference. I’d been marked out as weird here. Why would it be any different at a new school? There are mean girls everywhere and they will always think I’m a freak.
But there is only one here. Only one home. Only one special tree that I can whisper my problems to. The sky I see above me, from my perch on my branch, is my sky. The currawongs and rosellas who share the tree are my friends.
And besides, we are lucky to live here. Tasmania is one of the safest, cleanest, most stable places on Earth. Why would we want to give this up to live on the mainland, with its crowds and its pollution and its danger?
Why would we want to give up our place? Our home?
My heartland.
I can’t lose this place. I can’t. It is all I have.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I mumble, trying hard to blink away the tears. Only Mum hears me.
‘Honey–’
‘No.’ I shake my head and shrug off Mum’s arm. ‘Don’t. I have to … I’m just going out, for a while.’
‘Be home for dinner,’ Mum calls out after me while Dad continues to tuck into his lunch, oblivious of my pain. ‘We’re having tempeh salad!’
I wave goodbye, over my shoulder, and run to my tree. It stands, at least twenty-five metres high, overlooking the football oval near my house.
‘Hello, friend!’ I call out to it, feeling the weight immediately lifting from my shoulders.
I scale the trunk in minutes – my muscles recognising every knot and twig and foothold automatically – and I take a seat on my favourite branch. Right by that weird knot in the trunk that’s just a bit larger than my fist.
When I settle, I take a moment to centre and calm myself. I breathe in the scent of eucalyptus and clean that is like nowhere else on Earth.
And then I do what I often do, up in these branches.
I talk to the tree.
Sometimes, I do it out loud. But I know Mum will be watching me, out the back windows of our house. She might even have sneaked, already, to the place she considered her ‘secret’ hiding spot, behind the wattle tree somewhere below me, just to make sure I am all right.
She thinks I don’t know. But I always knew. She’s my mum. I can sense her, even if I can’t always see her.
And when she follows me – to watch and make sure I’m okay (because I’m ‘her baby and her heart’) – I talk to the tree in my other way.
I pull out the battered Neverending Story notebook I keep in my top pocket and slip my pencil from its covers.
And I began to write:
I can’t leave this place. I can’t. This whole island would have to disappear before I willingly leave it. They can’t make me go. It will ruin everything.
Then I rip the page out of my notebook and shove the scrap into the knot in the tree and hope that the wind carries my words away, like it always does.
Except that there’s a bit of scrunched-up paper already in there.
I quickly withdraw my fist that’s bunched around my note, as if I’ve just been bitten by a snake.
Without realising what I’m doing, I drop my note and let it blow away on the wind, reaching into the knot for the scrunched-up scrap.
It’s been torn out of an actual printed book – sacrilege! – and it says on one side:
Feeling cold prickles all up and down my arms, I smooth the scrap of paper out and see that across the printed text on the other side of the torn page there is a message written in messy capitals:
I REFUSE TO MOVE. I LOVE IT HERE.
And that’s when I start to shake. I could have written this note. Even the handwriting looks like mine.
On a clean page of my notebook I start a new note.
I look again at the scrap of paper in my hand. They could be my words, on that piece of paper. But they’re not mine. They belong to someone else. Who? I add more of my own.
I’m not all right. I don’t know who I’m saying this to, but the words pour out on the page.
It can’t hurt to be writing back to you like this, if you’ll promise not to tell. I don’t even know who I’m asking to promise. Perhaps I’m only writing to our tree.
Our Letterbox Tree.
But …
You said those things, about hating him and about refusing to move and it could have been me.
That’s me.
Because my dad wants to move away from here very soon and I should want to, too, because school is horrible, the girls are horrible, and maybe school would not be horrible, elsewhere, but …
Maybe it would be.
And, even so, school isn’t everything, but this place …
Is everything.
I’m sorry that this is all in such a mess. My thoughts are nothing solid. They are like paper in the wind, floating and swirling, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s just how my brain is, right now. Because Dad wants to take me away from everything I’ve ever known and the one place – this place – where I’ve felt safe.
Dear you:
Please don’t think I’m unforgivably weird.
Dear you:
I feel like I can tell you anything because right now you’re …
I don’t know what you are. Maybe you can tell me.
I’ll keep resisting.
We’re supposed to be leaving in two months’, but I’ll keep resisting.
Because I don’t think I would survive the agony of leaving.
Write back.
Please.
Please tell me how to stop us moving because I’m out of ideas.
I’ll look for your note tomorrow.
I’m about to tear the note out of my Neverending Story notebook but then I remember that whoever she is that wrote that note – I’m going to keep believing it’s a she, a girl just like me – didn’t have any paper. Because she was pouring out her anger onto the torn page of a real book.
