In the space that has been provided for it, it is a totem on a square patch of soil, belly up and dark, perhaps soft – becoming, in a season of wet, like mud. Has the soil come from here? It has been trucked.
To where our suburbs will encroach forever the procrastinating grass. There, in the half-light, is the lemon tree. It droops, sickly. A mole of the air, it never meets light directly – is shaded over, by the house, a new shopping village.
Lemons, indeed, are now in season, but its fruit are pellet-like, diminutive. Perhaps, squeezed, they are acerbic. The couple to whom this tree belongs, on whose block of earth it has found roots, eat few leaves and little fish.
I imagine the tree came to them one Sunday in a pot, their parents helped them to dig out a hole for it in the centre of their yard. It had stood young and upright, prepared by the horticulturalists at some hardware store or nursery. Shovelled in, they thought no more about it.
~
A passable tree lives off light and brief rain.
So far as I know.
So far as I know, my grandma had one in her backyard. She would take her kettle out to water it sporadically. It stood by her rotary of washing, witness to her daily rituals of
clapping
tapping her wrists
knocking her joints, her neck, where the column of the spine meets the round head
A classical program for immortality, at least until you are eighty, eighty three.
My grandma did not eat much fish. Nor was she one to drizzle it if she did. The lemons on her tree would grow heavy and fall.
Then one noon day, my mum decided she would bake. I was sent to retrieve a lemon off her tree. That lemon, alien, full, I felt, of spores, was to be spiked in its flesh and its skin zested. In fact, it was my mother’s first attempt to bake. A cake as dry as beach sand, but not to say un-tart or un-beige, with a dash of yellow citrus.
I’ve not been back to see it for years, though it must still be there. I had forgotten all about it, until this minute.
But their lank stalk, darkened and forgotten, is a kind of wayward witness. A dog, sometimes – a dark pug waddles over to it for relief. People stand in its vicinity, perhaps talking, but never quite near it. For the couple has split their yard with half a square of synthetic grass, for, presumably, the convenience. Someone hangs out the washing. There are soft sounds of speaking and smothered scapes of narrative television. A warm glow that is, one day, replaced by cool energy savings.
There is a used lawnmower that can only mow dirt, for the other half of yard is bare, cracked or sodden. One morning the parents had appeared and ripped out the grass at its feet, churning life over into mounds. Then rolled in that half square of plastic. Then nothing.
~
There is a wedding.
And a tea ceremony is held at the house to which the yard is attached. Decorations of red tissue paper are hung up above doors and down the length of walls. A marquee is raised in the backyard, heavy blue, and the lemon tree used for its anchor, its other corner that traverses mud is weighed down by the lawnmower, which looks to have been dragged across the stodgy earth. Its wheels are caked in crust.
At some point a man walks out into the yard cradling a suckling pig wrapped in aluminium foil, he stumbles, turns around in a wide arc, and returns into the house. There is clapping. And the tinny sound of speeches passed through old speakers. Children wander out and are warded from crossing over onto dirt.
Of course, no one steps near the tree. For it, at an angle, food was shuffled out of sliding doors and onto trestle tables, trays upon trays, cooked or ordered, fried fast or fried deep. Children ate on paper, dropping food onto the turf that’s plastic. The pug, nose to floor, took advantage.
For it, a well-dressed group assembled in a circle at that perimeter of dirt, to converse about time-off – about the joy of bicycling somewhere Vietnamese. And someone else, blocked from his passage back through marquee and sliding door, straddled the line of turf and dirt, in good shoes, and frowned and looked at it for a long time.
Then the call goes out for the next stage, the ceremony. After a ruckus, the house is silent. And the loose folds of the marquee flap in the wind and rhythm in rain returning.
Perhaps amidst its interminable dying, it will first feel grass from Bunnings budding at its feet – for the parents, two weeks ago, furrowed the soil and sprayed out seeds from a carton. A seat with bronze shoes will depress the sparse ground, handed down to the couple by further relatives. Some debris of living will course their line of fence, losing down years, their colour.
Back then, one finds one expects. Expects to hear the sound of a newborn radiating through glass. And, one morning, a child, down-dog on its hands and feet, by a lemon tree – who sink, back into the earth.