THE NEIGHBOUR
Opposite our block in the hills east of Perth, in Western Australia, there used to be an old wood and asbestos house on stilts with an external stone chimney stack, a tin roof and two rusty rain water tanks. The house stood beside a gravel road on a 10-acre paddock which was half fine loam and half broken cap-rock of coffee coloured bauxite. The paddock was completely cleared except for an old peach tree over the septic tank, a beautiful fig above the bore, and a huge three hundred year old red gum. This red gum was arguably within falling distance of the house and was the bane of the property's owner's life.
Bruce, the owner, was a nice enough fellow whose good works for the old people in the district was well known. He was good company down at the pub. He was the resourceful sort of bloke you could always count on if you were in trouble. But there were some things in life about which he had a strong phobia. Gum trees were on the list, along with blacks, possums, gays, dirt roads, and fast drivers - in no particular order. He once said that it had been his ambition in his youth to be a mercenary in the Congo (now Zaire). His politics were somewhat right of right. He had a son whom he named after an American machine-gun. We kept on the good side of him, tried not to shower his house too much with dust as we drove past on our gravel road, voted for supporters of his favourite projects at the Shire council elections and never discussed South Africa.
The phobia about red gums stemmed from the habit of eucalyptus trees of suddenly dropping branches, particularly in hot weather. Cattle run this risk whenever they seek shade from the summer heat. Bruce had tried to destroy this tree by burning his rubbish against the trunk, but the bark of the eucalyptus is designed to resist forest fires, and this made no impression. He tried pushing the red gum over with a front-end loader but its roots were locked into the cracks in the bauxite cap-rock. He rightly feared to chainsaw it for there was no telling in which direction the huge upper story of branches and foliage might fall. He could not ring-bark it; that would kill the tree successfully but would guarantee a rain of dead branches for years to come. He did not have the money to hire a professional forester. He could only fume. He would intercept me on the road if I went for a walk and I would nod non-committally as he poured out his views on the failings of this species of tree in general and of his tree in particular.
One year a family of possums took to running round the space between his ceiling and the roof every night. This infuriated him. I can sympathise. Possum have the ability to squeeze into a roof through the minutest of cracks. The messes from their toilet spots make ugly stains in the plaster which resist over-painting. We had some possums for a while in our roof. They would get into the cavity wall and eventually find their way into the kitchen. They would then drop off the top of the wall onto the fridge or into the sink in the middle of the night, making an expensive noise from falling bottles and breaking crockery. We would catch the possums in a rubbish bin and set them free miles away in a national park, but they always seemed to be back the next night. After weeks up a ladder unsuccessfully, and incompetently, trying to close all the gaps in the roof, our neighbour tried sitting in bed with a .22 calibre rifle and shooting at the sound of scampering above his head. His wife however soon put a stop to that. Then he hit on a wonderful plan.
For a small fee it used to be possible to hire possum traps from the Shire. Nowadays one has to hire a licensed operator as the possums are protected. He hired a trap and baited it with slices of apple and peach. He managed to catch one. It was grey, and rabbit sized, and had a fluffy tail, big eyes, large upright ears and a sweet pink nose. However, Bruce was not into the beauty of nature. He had this perfect plan. From a mate in the pub, he obtained a half stick of gelignite that he tied firmly to the tail of the poor possum. He took the unfortunate animal to the base of the old red gum tree and let it go. He reasoned that the possum family probably had a nest in the big red gum and so set out to rid himself of a number of problems in one go. The theory, so he told us, was that the possum would make a dash for its nest in the tree and the exploding gelignite would deliver a quick and painless death to all the possums and also destroy the old tree.
Whether there is a fundamental justice in this world which occasionally finds an outlet, or whether the possum was the re-incarnation of a Japanese fighter pilot, or was simply courageously vindictive, we shall never know. Instead of going up the tree, the possum ran in the opposite direction, up the external stone chimney stack and, with great presence of mind, squeezed into Bruce's house and blew the ceilings in and part of the roof off.
I assumed his wife was out shopping at the time. I never asked. For a long while they did not live in the house and only came to visit the sheep and check their water. Some years later he came into some money and built a neat brick and tile project bungalow back from the road and the dust. He had a chandelier in the lounge room and kept everything immaculate. Then he sold the property. The new owners demolished the remnants of the old house and did many more improvements, erecting a machinery shed and white-painted post-and-rail fences. A cock-eyed-bob (mini tornado) passed over the property and demolished the old red gum. The tree fell away from the house into the paddock so, in the end, all that worry was about nothing.
