The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  At first light every day, a ute appeared outside the farmhouse and Nikolas honked, and then the two of us sat in the back for a slow half-hour’s drive into the fields. On the way, we sang loudly and badly. Over the bumps, Anthony claimed a hidden talent for trilling. It sounded like a warble. But I taught him parts of ‘O sole mio’, and it became our song for the mornings. The sun was our sun.

  Most days, Claire stayed at the house. But she spent her time outside, too, and I tracked with almost religious care how her shoulders and arms browned. Very quickly, she changed from the private-school girl back to the daughter of her migrant parents. Her heritage also revealed a source of her trust in the body, the ‘permanent temporary’ as Eric called it. She spoke Greek more than English, prepared long trays of lamb and salad, and took over her father’s work on the home garden.

  ‘It turns out you’re a peasant,’ I said, watching her prepare a meal.

  ‘Is that a surprise?’

  ‘I thought you were a princess.’

  ‘I suppose I was brought up to be both,’ she replied. ‘That’s the Greek way, isn’t it? Greek girls are peasants and princesses.’

  The kitchen was time-stamped with the family’s first wave of prosperity, in the early eighties: the brown cupboards placed evenly along a wall of pale orange tiles; shallow double sinks; plastic appliances dulled by use. It was the decade of our births, too, but Claire moved around the kitchen a little uneasily, as someone who’d been away as much as she’d been at home.

  I’d seen that Nikolas respected her enough not to be too possessive; he didn’t seem to protest that she was home with two boys. But as I stood with her in the kitchen I asked, ‘What would your dad think of Anthony’s paintings?’

  She didn’t want to answer: even Claire kept some parts of her life separate. Eventually she said, ‘Your dad isn’t the only thinker in the world, you know. Mine doesn’t spend hours alone in the study. But he understands me; he knows why I paint.’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ I said, even though I liked it.

  ‘What would your dad say if you didn’t become a lawyer? I know you want to write.’

  ‘You don’t need to convince me. Parents don’t know us that well.’

  ‘But do you really know? Sometimes I think you don’t see it. You don’t see what you’ve chosen.’

  ‘I know my future’s got something to do with him.’

  ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? You shouldn’t need a law degree to feel closer to your dad.’

  ‘No,’ I conceded.

  ‘Change your mind, then,’ Claire said. ‘You might find something better.’

  It was good advice, but for the time being I was satisfied with another task – with weaving the mysteries of my father, in this way, into those of Claire and Anthony, until he became a background stitch. Whatever Dad wanted for me would do.

  Christina, Claire’s mother, would stand behind me at the dinner table and stroke my hair, which I’d begun to grow long. ‘Hair as soft as a girl’s,’ she would say.

  As a joke, Claire adopted her mother’s habit, and also that of touching my forearm when she spoke to me, just as she and her mother did to Nikolas. Once, when I was crossing the highway with Anthony and Claire, and we had to run to make it across, Claire reached for my hand to hold. Was it in preference to Anthony’s, or was I just the closer one? But Anthony stopped and watched us.

  Claire’s parents loved him – I hadn’t expected that, and nor, I think, had Claire. But he was so easy and lovely that fortnight. And he was at his most handsome that summer, especially after, as if in keeping with our song, he let himself take some sun. He was brown, he’d been spending time outside with me and Claire, and he’d proven to be the best worker.

  He allowed himself to be cast as the Adonis among us; and, to Claire’s extended family of Greek migrants, who came for Sunday lunch at the end of our first week, gathering around a long table of plastic serving bowls and carafes of light wine, he was like the sun.

  If there was a counterbalance, it came in the afternoons after work. From the farmhouse we rode on horseback along a riverside track down to a swimming hole that lay some five kilometres away. I rode behind Anthony and Claire, who touched hands across the track. Claire wore a long skirt, which she folded into her lap as she rode. The hem of the skirt swung to a summer rhythm.

  When we arrived, I sat on the bank while Claire and Anthony stripped and ran into the brown shallows under a swinging rope.

  ‘Why don’t you get in?’ Claire called.

  ‘I have a horrible scar,’ I said, trying to be light. ‘I’ll frighten you and that man next to you.’

  ‘Leave your shirt on, then, monster,’ she replied, laughing.

  I didn’t answer. I stayed on the bank and watched them keep a polite distance from each other. This was some kind of courtesy to me, a sign that I could still get in if I wanted. Sitting there I wondered, as I had when Claire posed naked for Anthony, how they could stand to have me along like this. Surely they’d have preferred me to leave them in peace.

  And yet I also understood that there was something about having me there that made it easier for them to get along – to be satisfied in the moment, the sun and the water and the late feeling in the air, each as the perfect companion for the others. If there was something between us that couldn’t be said, those afternoons it went happily unspoken. It could wait.

  I got up and pretended to look for a platypus that lived further along the creek. And then I came back, sat and watched them talking in the water. I sensed that they were talking about me. My response was to continue a nervous habit that I still hadn’t dropped. I traced the scar with my index finger, and wished it would dull. And wished I didn’t find excuses to stay out of the water.

  12

  By the time we got back from the farm, my aunt Lillie had arrived in Lion’s Head. Dad had told me she’d be visiting, and I’d come to expect a dark-haired relative with my father’s rocky, Yorkshire bearing; that particularly Northern way of displaying self-possession.

  She had none of that, though; she was still the woman I’d once misremembered as my mother. Her hair, now grey, was wavy and blew across her face as she spoke. She was constantly fighting with the wind to keep it in place, and her other habits were somehow part of this struggle with her hair – as though at any moment the whole of her might become scattered. It kept her hands busy, and she moved her face from side to side in order to shift the weight of it.

  She was older than my father – I suppose in her early fifties when she came to visit us – and yet she bore the air of someone much younger. You had the feeling that coming into middle age had been a relief for her. If there was one thing in which she was settled and in no sense scattered, it was her singleness; Dad said it had always been that way, since she was a girl, and that you knew even then that she wouldn’t ever marry. Growing older had allowed her to meet that destiny still more happily.

  Then again, her attitude to herself was a happy one anyway; it was like the happiness that I saw in the photograph of my mother – direct and unhurried. Lillie knew how to laugh at herself. She told me she’d come to visit us in Australia because she wanted to see the birds. And then she laughed at herself for saying such a thing to me. ‘I’m very fond of birds, but no expert,’ she added ceremoniously. ‘They are God’s creatures. And our most loyal companions. Yet most of the time people don’t even think to notice them.’

  ‘You believe in God?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I believe in God.’

  ‘I thought our family wasn’t religious. Dad said it was more Mum’s side. He makes a point of it, actually. He says he prefers to find God in the things people do, rather than in the idea of God.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ she answered, a little sternly. ‘But, yes, your mother was brought up that way – she had a more conservative upbringing, I suppose. Much
more so than me and your father. But she thought about religion in her own way, too. And maybe I was more from your mother’s side of the family, anyway. At least that’s how I felt when I met her. I felt like I’d finally met the real side of my own family.’

  ‘You were close?’

  ‘Oh, we were the best of friends.’

  ‘You lost her, too.’

  ‘Yes. We have that in common.’

  ‘You and Dad?’

  ‘The three of us.’

  But Lillie and my father were spending very little time together. He never took holidays, and, even now when we had a rare visitor, he held to a regime of retreating to his study in the evenings. It fell to Anthony and me to be Lillie’s guides, to turn on the fan in her room and make sure the mosquito coil was lit on the back balcony outside it. And mid-mornings, Lillie drove my father’s car while we gave directions, as often as not to Nambucca, where we spent our time searching for the right place for a cup of tea.

  ‘Would you like to see the rocks?’ I said. ‘We can walk to the heads from here.’

  ‘Oh, I can see rocks any time.’ I wondered what could be so special about Australian tea, but she added, ‘You, on the other hand …’

  So we took our seats in one of those over-quaint cafés in among the shops, rather than along the sea front. She could wait until the afternoon to go for her walk for the day. Anthony told Lillie about his paintings, and that he and Claire were leaving for Sydney soon.

  ‘I expect you’ll miss one another,’ said Lillie.

  ‘Not a bit,’ I replied, watching him. ‘Anthony’s the most difficult person in Lion’s Head. There’ll be a whole week of celebrations when he leaves.’

  Anthony had something better to say. ‘What Ted means is that he’ll miss Claire the most.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Lillie. She looked at me and then at Anthony, and I think for a moment didn’t quite know what to say next.

  We ordered a late breakfast of scones. A wave of light rain blew past the awnings. ‘Don’t you want to see more of Dad?’ I asked. ‘I wish he’d take a holiday so he could join us.’

  She considered the idea, one neither of us thought realistic, and answered, ‘Well, I feel like I have him here. You are your father thirty years ago.’

  ‘Are we that alike?’

  She pushed her hair aside, to examine me more closely. ‘Your mother’s there, too. You’ve some of her mannerisms, her way of watching the world. And qualities, too. You’re rather serious, Ted, aren’t you? As she was. I see it when you’re reading. You read as though you need interrupting.’

  ‘Dad once said the same thing about her.’

  ‘Yes, I know the story. I was wondering whether he’d told you.’

  I could tell that Anthony didn’t want to interrupt, but all the same I suddenly felt exposed in front of him. I said to Lillie, ‘Still, I wish Dad was around for your visit.’

  ‘Don’t. There’s no one in the world I understand as well as your father. And your mother. We spent a lot of time together, even after they married and came back from Durham. I was there when you were born. Your dad hasn’t changed a bit since then. I don’t mind that, I expected it.’

  ‘I thought he was more open to people once.’

  ‘Then you saw an unusual side of him. Your father has always expressed himself in silence.’

  ‘But he talks so much about the voice. I know more about Haydn than I know about my mother.’

  ‘No one knows their parents,’ confided Lillie.

  ‘I want to know them.’

  ‘Then one day you’ll have to come to Whitby to find out for yourself.’ Lillie seemed to grow angry with me. ‘There’s only so much I can tell you, Ted. Come for yourself. You’ll see everything. Bring your dad with you. He needs to come home, even if it’s just for a day. An afternoon in Whitby would change a lot.’

  That afternoon, while Anthony stayed at the house, I joined Lillie for a walk along the beach, and also, by the end of the day, in mimicking her favourite local birdcalls. She and I made Eric wonder by trying to bring the birds to the front steps of the house. I was still surprised that we could have so close a relative who was open to the world. Where was my father’s introspection?

  But under it all was a similar kind of prompting, rather like my father’s. She shared his desire, and Claire’s, to guide me past my closed world of rumination, past that habit of my parents. My father had voiced this desire in lessons about opera and in his insistence on the material world of legal rights, while Lillie, certain that my father wouldn’t ever open the family file for me, eventually left me with a note that ended with this: Birds migrate. That’s a miracle. There are all kinds of mysteries. All in the hands of God but also in how we listen to them, and follow them home.

  I folded the note and began my own family folder, one to match Dad’s drawer. For now, it consisted of letters from Anthony and Lillie that had been slid between the Dickinson anthology and my journals, which themselves were mainly poems about Claire, but also about windows, smoke, and the warm salt in the evening air.

  My father would drive Lillie to Sydney to catch her flight. And he told her he would go to Whitby if she ever needed him. But otherwise there was no hurry to go back to England.

  He said he’d spend a few nights in town. By the time he returned, Anthony and Claire would be down there in Sydney, too, on his heels. As he left, he hugged Anthony and asked him to pass on his best to Claire. He said he was sure they’d succeed at art college. They were meant for that life.

  13

  Low trees climbed up the squat rocks of the Head, and down its back to the water’s edge. At the end of the day, dust blurred the low sweep of earth and rock that shaped the isthmus to the other side of the cliff. But behind us, an orange projector flickered through the leaves, and the sea was lit like a screen.

  Anthony sat with his arms around his knees.

  ‘Is there anything you want to talk about?’ I said.

  ‘Not really.’ He handed me a cigarette. ‘I’ve never asked you: does your dad know you smoke?’

  ‘Yes.’ He’d known for about a year, I thought. ‘He says he doesn’t want me to smoke cigars, though, like he does. He thinks he smokes too many.’

  ‘Do you? Smoke cigars, I mean.’ When Anthony didn’t get an answer, he said, ‘Mine would kill me. There you go. No, hang on. He’d kill me if he found out, even though I think he knows.’

  ‘That’s no secret. Everyone knows your dad wants to kill you.’ It was meant as a joke. But it was too dark, even for then. ‘Don’t ever come back,’ I told him. ‘That’s the main thing, isn’t it? If you’re going to go, go for good, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ But he had something he wanted to know, a final something before he and Claire left. That’s why we were still sitting at the beach while she was up at the house. He asked, ‘Will it be hard for you when Claire’s gone?’ And, as quickly, he checked himself. ‘You don’t have to answer that.’

  I wasn’t sure what to tell him. Perhaps it would be a mistake to tell him anything at all. But Anthony wanted it said, and that evening seemed to be the moment to share it – probably the last chance before they left. Not share, no. Rather, say openly aloud.

  After a pause, he said, ‘I can’t believe we’re going. I have that feeling that it might all be a fantasy.’

  ‘Yes. That’s just because it’s close. It’ll feel real when you’re on the train. Then you’ll know it’s the best thing you’ve ever done.’

  ‘You’re not as impatient to leave, though.’

  I turned towards the house. ‘Not in the same way,’ I conceded. ‘You’ll get to start again. And that’s why you’re going. You can paint, and no one’s there to tell you that you shouldn’t.’

  ‘Will you go to Sydney?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it’ll be the three o
f us again.’

  ‘I’ll come down and make sure you’re looking after Claire.’ I wondered whether we could stop there. ‘Should we go up?’

  ‘You have to tell me,’ he said, ‘if there’s something on your mind.’

  ‘There’s always something on my mind. It doesn’t mean much.’

  ‘Truth is better than kindness.’

  ‘That sounds alright, even if it’s completely wrong.’ But with that I finally gave him what he wanted. I stood up and took a step back, towards the house, and told Anthony that I was in love with Claire.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she knows. She’s too much in love with you to notice.’

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with myself on this, but Anthony undid the apology before even I could. ‘She notices everything,’ he replied warmly. He wasn’t ready to get up, and I hovered behind him. ‘That’s who she is,’ he said without turning around. ‘Isn’t that what you love about her?’

  I supposed it was.

  ‘She doesn’t make it obvious,’ Anthony said, and finally stood up. He brushed the sand off his legs. ‘She’s not going to tell you she knows you’re in love.’

  ‘Have you talked to her about this?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a stillness between us, a spot of darkness in which I wanted to add that Claire had noticed for the simple reason that there was a part of her that needed to notice me.

  Wanted to notice me.

  I thought that underneath it he was angry. But he laughed and hugged me, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I never much liked these kisses of Anthony’s, and even less so at that moment. I wasn’t sure, as he was, about testing the gentle and decorous ways of Lion’s Head. And by all the rules, now wasn’t the time of day for Anthony to kiss me on the beach. This was our chance to have a fight, and for him to leave in anger. To accuse Claire of disloyalty and vow never to speak to me again.