At its base, Joan stood looking up into its branches. Mauve flowers had recently bloomed at their edges and every few seconds petals floated to the ground where they lay in a ragged circle around the trunk. Her children, Andrew (aged eleven) and Julia (aged eight), had climbed this tree a lot over the years. She remembered where they’d put this foot and that hand, how they’d swung one leg up onto that branch and then that one. There’d been the danger of them falling so, from the patio, she’d paid close attention. If there was going to be an accident, she wanted to know how it had happened.

Today though, there’d be no one climbing the tree but her.

It wasn’t easy. Joan wasn’t as nimble as her children and her skin was soft. Her hands burned from the rough bark. Still, she managed to pull herself up onto the lowest branch and balance there above the ground. She was chuffed by the achievement and she laughed and called out, ‘Huh! Look at me. Tree-monkey of the century.’

Once this excitement had settled, Joan looked up to see if she could go higher. Concentrating, and using the trunk to steady herself, she carefully got to her feet and climbed up to the next limb. This achieved, she hoisted herself onto the next and then the next. It wasn’t long before she was above the fence-line and could see into the neighbours’ properties.

Next door and one over, old Jack Burgess was hanging out his washing. Joan watched him organise his bed linen in one section of the Hills Hoist and his underwear in another. She was reminded of the large stack of dirty laundry heaped beside her machine. But she put the thought to the back of her mind and looked to the next branch.

Before the tree’s limbs began to narrow too much, she found one that suited her and leant back against the trunk. The air seemed cleaner up here. Cleaner and cooler. She realised the headache she’d woken with that morning had dissipated along with her small worries: Andrew saying that she’d bought the wrong apples and he wasn’t going to eat them; Julia demanding that she do her hair in a plait and not a ponytail; and her husband, Peter, complaining that the butter had been left in the fridge and was too hard to spread across his toast.

Joan knew these gripes weren’t serious. Knew it wasn’t how her family really felt. But trying to rid herself of the sensation of the little criticisms – they were like tiny blows she had to absorb – wasn’t easy. Today, though, she felt light, cheerful, exuberant even. Every unpleasantness had vanished.   

With only the sun to go by it was hard for Joan to tell how much time was passing. She thought the need for food and water would drive her down and out of the tree. And when she didn’t feel hungry or thirsty it seemed to her that the day hadn’t progressed much at all. She also didn’t feel uncomfortable despite being perched high up in the branches.

Old Jack Burgess came back out to take his washing back in. He folded it meticulously into his basket which sat on a table strategically positioned near the line for exactly this purpose. Maria Dal Santo, whose house backed onto Jack’s, was weeding in her huge vegetable garden. Neither of them seemed to be moving any faster than usual. In fact, Joan was impressed by how relaxed they seemed, how unhurried they were as they went about their chores. So, when she heard the backdoor scrape along its rollers it was a surprise. It could only be Andrew. She knew exactly the way he pushed it – with unnecessary force. Joan looked down into her yard and saw him on the decking. That’s when she realised that school must have finished for the day.

His head back, he shouted at full force. ‘Mum.’

‘I’m up here,’ she called. But when he couldn’t see her, he shouted again in the same manner but with even more vigour.

‘Come closer to the big tree,’ she told him.

His knees looked unusually large below his shorts as he strode across the lawn.

‘Why are you up there?’ he said after locating her through the foliage.

‘I’m taking in the view,’ she told him. ‘Looking over the neighbourhood. Getting another perspective.’ She smiled.

Then Julia was calling from the doorway. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘In the tree,’ Andrew said back to her.

Julia swung from the doorjamb, one arm clinging to its edge. Then she distractedly did a jazz ballet movement on the patio.

‘Come and have a look,’ he said. 

Leaving the door open, Julia ran across the timber boards and onto the grass. Bees that had been gathering pollen from the dandelions flew away from her feet. Joan could see them shift as Julia skipped to where Andrew stood.

Her daughter stopped beside her brother, her head back as she gazed up.

‘Hello darling,’ Joan called to her. ‘Did you enjoy school?’

‘I’m hungry,’ Julia said.

‘There’s plenty to eat,’ Joan told her. ‘Andrew will help you get something.’

‘No I won’t,’ Andrew said. ‘You have to come down.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘You’ll both have to get something to eat on your own.’

The two of them stood contemplating their mother. Joan felt her heart swell. They looked so angelic from all the way up in the high branches.

It was Julia who lost interest first. ‘My ball,’ she said, disappearing from Joan’s view and returning with a large pink soccer ball which she held up to show Joan. ‘I found it.’

‘Very good,’ Joan said.

‘Did you buy peanut butter?’ Andrew called.

‘Not today,’ she said. ‘If you want something to put on bread there’s honey and vegemite.’

Andrew didn’t answer. Julia attempted to bounce her ball but it dribbled away disappointingly.

‘It needs air,’ Andrew said.

‘Will you kick it to me?’

‘It’s flat.’

‘Can you tell Andrew he has to play with me?’ Julia looked up at her mother.

Joan remained quiet. Given the distance between them it seemed like the best thing. Andrew was turning at any rate, lumping off towards the house. When Julia disappeared inside after him, Joan could hear cartoons playing on the television. She returned to what she’d been doing, which hadn’t been much other than contemplating the neighbourhood, the view, the very fact of life.

When Peter, her husband, arrived home from work, he wasn’t as easy to subdue. ‘What in the hell are you doing up there?’ he said. ‘You’ll break your neck.’

‘I think I’m going to spend the night here.’

‘Excuse me. Have you gone mad? You’ll fall.’

‘No,’ Joan said calmly. ‘I don’t think I will. Or, perhaps, just as a precaution, I could tie myself to the tree.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Joan. Come down immediately.’

‘I’ll need a rope,’ she said. ‘If you want to help, you could get the camping rope. You know the one that’s a bit stretchy.’

‘And how in the hell am I going to get it up to you?’

‘If you tie it to something heavy. Like the brass doorknob we never got around to fitting on the bathroom door, you can throw it up into the branches. Once it catches on one, I’ll climb down to where it lands.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Peter said. ‘Why don’t you just come down?’

‘I will tomorrow, I promise,’ Joan said. ‘But for tonight, I’m staying up in the tree.’ She paused. ‘The knob is in the shed, on the bench along the far wall.’

Peter huffed and stomped off towards the house. He didn’t reappear straightaway. It occurred to Joan that he was hoping she’d come down from the branches under her own steam. But Joan was happy to wait. Other than the fact it had grown dark, it seemed that hardly any time had passed. 

When Peter did come loping across the yard, the back security-light tripping and illuminating his path, she realised he was approaching from the shed. Having already tied the brass knob to the end of the elastic rope, he stood under the tree looking up.

‘Joan,’ he said.

‘When you’re ready, Peter, aim for one of the branches and throw it up.’

Without speaking, Peter did as Joan asked. After several attempts, he managed to hook it around a branch two lower than the one she was on.

‘That’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘And that’s it?’ he said. ‘You’re going to stay up in the tree?’

‘I’ll be down in the morning to cook breakfast for everyone.’

Peter left her to it. Joan climbed down the necessary branches and got hold of the rope. Back in her special spot, she tied herself to the trunk. She intended to stay up and enjoy the view. The moon had risen and there was a surprising amount of light around. But she didn’t want to cause any trouble to herself or her family by falling out of the tree. So, it was best to err on the side of caution. After looping the rope around the trunk and herself, she secured the knot.  

When the sun rose, and just as she’d promised, Joan climbed down out of the tree. Nobody noticed, certainly at first, the changes that had taken place in her.

Actually, the children had to be encouraged to get out of bed. She called to them while she emptied their school bags of yesterday’s mess so she could repack them with today’s lunches. Peter eyed her. ‘Everything alright?’ he asked as he sat at the bench to eat his boiled egg.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ she said in an upbeat fashion, which he seemed to accept. She saw him off at the door as usual, with a lidded mug of coffee.

In Julia’s room, her daughter’s pink colour scheme creating the effect of a warm cave, she bent down to tie Julia’s shoelaces.

‘There’s something on your head, Mummy,’ Julia said, leaning forward to get a better look.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Two little plants are growing.’

Joan put her hand up to check what it was that Julia had seen. And just as Julia had described, she felt two little shoots – surprisingly robust ones – springing up from the centre of her head.

Wanting to downplay it and get the children off to school, she laughed and said, ‘Well that’s a funny old thing.’

Seeming satisfied with this and neither child appearing to remember that their mother had spent the night in a tree, they went off to school in their usual clattering manner. Joan Mercer examined herself in the bathroom mirror. By then the seedlings – corn stalks – were close to twenty centimetres tall, and if she looked straight at her reflection it appeared that they were growing behind her. However, she only had to lower her head – the plants tilting and shifting with her movement – to know they were growing from inside her. Still, Joan didn’t seem too concerned about her new addition. Besides, she had a lot of housework to do. She’d spent yesterday up a tree and last night no one had thought to clear away the evening meal or wash the dishes.

So, with her usual vigour, she cleaned the house, sorting out the fridge and making way for the groceries that she’d order online as soon as she was done. Going shopping in her suburb in her current condition wasn’t a good idea. It would be best not to frighten people. She’d already called into work at the auto shop where she did the books. Luckily, she could do a lot of the tasks her job required here at Peter’s desk by clearing a spot for her laptop and logging in.

The closest thing to a surprise occurred when, mid-afternoon, she caught a glimpse of her refection in the lounge-room window while she was vacuuming. The corn stalks were close to a metre high, and as she took in their considerable bulk, she became aware of their weight. Actually, she felt a little wonky on her feet. If she leaned forward, she was in danger of toppling over.

By the time her children got home, there were eight cobs of corn growing from the plants, and when Peter came in, grumbling about the traffic and saying he couldn’t wait for driverless cars to come into operation so he could utilise the time by doing something productive, the corn had ripened. Each cob, complete with a furze of brown hairs poking from their tops, was fully formed.

‘What have we here?’ he said when his complaining was done and he saw that she had two grown corn plants coming out of her skull.

‘Dinner,’ she said rather wittily. ‘Hope you feel like corn.’ And that’s when Joan Mercer reached up and pulled a corn cob from one of the plants for good measure.

Before bed that night, the corn had perished and was leaning rather significantly to the left. Joan went to a part of the yard where she could hide behind a large grevillea. There she shed her dead corn plants, admiring their ghostly bodies before returning to the house.

The following morning it didn’t take Joan long to realise there were more shoots springing up from her head. Unafraid and thinking they might be corn again, she began to devise other dishes she could make with the fresh produce. It wasn’t long, however, before she realised the shape of the plant was circular and nothing like a tall corn stalk. Zucchini, she thought, recognising the wide leaves as they splayed out in the shape of an umbrella hat.

Julia giggled at the sight of her mother when she arrived home from school. Tiny zucchinis had formed on the plant by then and there were small yellow flowers on their ends. Julia wanted to pick them and so Joan dutifully sat on a chair while her daughter climbed up on another to reach into the centre of the plant and take the yellow flowers from the fruit.

‘People eat those flowers,’ Joan told her.

‘Yuk,’ said Julia. ‘We’re not going to do that.’

Joan laughed.

When Peter got home, complaining about the traffic again, he also laughed at her huge ungainly headdress. When it came time to begin cooking the evening meal, Andrew was allowed to do the honours. Standing beside his mother as she kneeled on a cushion, he picked the perfectly formed zucchinis from the plant and placed them in a dish.

‘You’re like a paddock, Mum,’ he said, stacking the produce neatly. ‘It’s like you had a farm inside your brain and it’s just decided to start making food.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’re a bright boy. That’s exactly what it’s like.’

The family weren’t overly happy about the soup that Joan made that night. They would have preferred beef patties or lamb chops. They made jokes about her not being a cow, and it was funny enough and kind of sweet. Sour cream and fresh rolls from another supermarket delivery, helped. And, all in all, it was a nice enough evening.

‘I wonder what you’ll grow tomorrow,’ Andrew said, helping to take the dishes to the sink. ‘Maybe potatoes.’

‘Oh,’ Joan contemplated the suggestion. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think potatoes would be good.’

All week, Joan produced a different plant out of her head. An aubergine with three large fruit, grew – she cooked moussaka with this – and a gargantuan broccoli plant. The funniest though was a pumpkin vine that trailed behind her like a wedding veil, eventually its fruit slowing her down until all she could do was catch up with her sewing. The children needed costumes for book week at school and this she could achieve from the sunroom floor, the pumpkins sitting up on a chair behind her. 

‘It’s been fun hasn’t it?’ she said as she joined Peter in bed after she’d successfully detached the pumpkin vine from her noggin ten or so minutes before. ‘I wonder what the morning will bring.’

‘Little Athletics,’ Peter said. ‘It starts tomorrow and I’m afraid I’ve made an arrangement to play golf with David. Will you be able to take the children?’

Joan, of course, couldn’t be certain of anything since her night in the tree, but she didn’t want this new circumstance of hers to dominate things completely. ‘Depending on what’s happening with my head,’ she said in a joking manner.

He turned and frowned at her. ‘I hope this isn’t going to go on indefinitely.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Despite the convenience of having fresh food, it takes quite a bit out of me.’

Saturday morning was the first morning since Joan Mercer had been growing plants from her scone that she woke with a sore neck. It was because of the size of the young tree that was sprouting at an alarming rate out of her. Already it was pushing against the top of the bed, dislodging Joan almost to the end of the mattress. Peter too had been displaced all the way to the bed’s edge.

‘What’s this then?’ he said, as Joan struggled to sit up under the weight of the branches.

She looked at herself in the mirror. ‘I think it might be a cherry tree.’

Joan tried as best she could to carry on as usual that morning. She got the kids in the car despite the struggle not to crumple under the considerable weight of the trunk. The problem, however, came when she went to get into the driver’s seat so she could transport the two of them to their running and jumping events. She attempted several angles but nothing worked. Even hanging the trunk out of the window wasn’t possible. She simply couldn’t get in behind the steering wheel.

Andrew got out of the car to assist but soon lost patience and went to get his father to fix it. Although, even Peter wasn’t strong enough to bend the branches and force the tree into the car.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said heading off towards the shed. ‘We’ll trim the biggest limbs and take some from the top. See if that works.’

He revved his chainsaw and told Joan to block her ears so the sound wouldn’t be too loud. Peter delicately – well as delicately as is possible with a chainsaw – trimmed the top limbs first and was making his way down the trunk when the chainsaw became tangled in the lower limbs and slipped from his hands.

It was hard to say with complete certainty what happened next. But the chainsaw, after kicking about, fell across Joan Mercer’s neck and nearly chopped her head off.

Peter was distraught. He tried to stop the bleeding and, perhaps thinking that she might repair, held her body and head together for as long as he could manage. The life had already left her though and soon the three of them were crying over Joan’s death.

The cherry tree, of course, withered and fell from Joan’s head before the day was over. After dragging it to the back of the property, Peter made the necessary calls. Soon the ambulance service and the police came and when all the explanations were given (whatever it was he felt he could tell them without sounding insane) she was pronounced dead by misadventure.

The funeral was held four days later and it was odd to see that some of the people in the congregation, maybe even as many as half of them, had something growing from their heads.

Peter was too distraught to take too much notice of other people though, until Patricia Foley approached him to say how sorry she was and how much she’d liked Joan. On her head was a capsicum plant. The fruit dangled and rocked as Patricia nodded in a consoling way while he told her how distressing the whole thing was.

‘How about I cook something for you and the kids,’ she said. ‘Just to tide you over until you get on your feet. I’ve got plenty of fresh produce.’

‘Thank you,’ Peter said. ‘That’s very generous.’

The next day, Patricia turned up with a stuffed capsicum dish in her arms. He invited her inside. She helped him to make a salad and fell into doing a few housekeeping chores while he caught up on some office-work. When, a few weeks later, Peter had to begin commuting into the city again, it was difficult to know how he was going to manage with the children without some help. So it made sense when Patricia moved in. She’d been doing so much travelling between her own house and the Mercers’, it felt as if it’d help her save time if she relocated.

The quality of the plants growing from Patricia’s skull wasn’t as good as those that had grown from Joan’s.

‘She sure had a fertile head,’ Peter said once when they were discussing it. ‘The vegetables couldn’t be faulted for taste or form. She certainly was a good one.’

Patricia had been living with the family for a month or so by then, and, unlike Joan, had started to grow roots. They were strange long tendril-type vegetation that spread over her feet perhaps in search of moisture and cool earth. Patricia didn’t mind that they slowed her down, but the children complained that she took too long to go anywhere and that they kept tripping up on them.

‘Maybe I should trim your roots,’ Peter suggested.

‘That would be wonderful,’ Patricia said. ‘Otherwise, what am I to do when they get so long that I can’t move at all?’

Peter went to the shed but instead of getting his chainsaw he took his pruning sheers. He had to be careful this time. The last thing he wanted was to hurt Patricia like he’d hurt Joan. A trim, he thought, what could be the harm in that?

Things, however, weren’t as easy as Peter had anticipated. It wasn’t long before there was another horrible accident, and although no heads were severed, Patricia sustained terrible injuries, and in the end, perished too.

The family was distraught all over again.

For two days they wept. The pain of losing Joan came back with the death of Patricia and they huddled together in the house hardly knowing what to say or how to behave.

Of course, there never was much to be done other than think of a way to get on without either woman. They certainly weren’t the only people in the district to experience this kind of loss. But what could anyone do? Even the law. Well, there didn’t seem to be any laws to deal with the mishaps, which became the word the local people used when they spoke of them. They’d say: ‘Oh, she suffered from the mishap.’ And, ‘What could be done, the mishap took her.’ Mind you, there were many ways in which the women in the area with the mishap had perished. Hence, the mishap meant an array of things in a variety of contexts. And, in the end, it seemed that nobody quite knew what to make of it or how to go about sorting it out.

In desperation, people cautioned one another about things like ‘the terrible abundance’, and ‘the gift that had a sting to it’. For a while people in the district watched out for unexpected changes in their family members, especially the female ones. But they all said that there was nothing that could be done if the urge unearthed itself, nothing that would put someone off from becoming fertile.  

As for the Mercers, they tried as best they could to recover from their grief. Now that Joan was gone – even Patricia had left a hole – they felt vulnerable.

Occasionally the family was drawn out to the backyard. They would cross the lawn and stand at the base of the jacaranda tree looking up into its branches and wondering what had possessed her to climb into them. But there was nothing that gave away the secret of its allure or even how it had changed Joan. There was nothing other than its beautiful limbs, its spray of light green foliage and, for a couple of weeks each year, its mauve blossom.

‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ was commended in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.