The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  But that wasn’t Anthony, and I loved him almost as much as I loved Claire. I loved how he liked the possibility of disapproval, including mine. And how he pressed always for more. ‘We should kiss on the lips,’ he said, ‘like they do in Scandinavia.’

  ‘Men don’t kiss on the lips in Scandinavia! Where do you get this rubbish?’

  ‘Lighten up, Ted,’ he said. But he wouldn’t let go of me, not yet. ‘Isn’t it funny? Or strange?’ he added, almost to himself. ‘But I’m completely happy for you. I’m happy that you, serious Ted, are finally in love.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I answered.

  He laughed, as if relieved that I was annoyed with him and the stupid things he said. He continued, ‘Did you have to fall in love with Claire?’

  ‘I guess so.’ He let go of my arm. ‘It’ll calm down while you’re away,’ I said.

  As we turned up to the house, we seemed to decide that we could leave it at that: there was a chance that things would settle down. I’m not sure either of us believed it. I hadn’t seen much in my life to suggest that matters of the heart were calmed by time. I needed only to look up from the beach to my father’s study to find how little some people aimed for change.

  Nevertheless, that was the hope that Anthony and I left between us in the air that evening. It circled us like cigar smoke until it was caught by the breeze and carried up to the house, where that night we would have my father’s study to ourselves, just me and Anthony and Claire gazing at the dune from his window. Yes, that’s how we left it. Anthony and I were both in love with Claire. And what was unsaid, what stood between the lines we’d managed or remembered, was this feeling: surely love was strong enough to bear it.

  14

  A few weeks after Anthony and Claire left for Sydney, Dad asked if I wanted to join him on the morning walks that he took along the beach. He’d offered in the past, but this time it felt more like a suggestion – something he thought I needed.

  We left at six, and walked for an hour until we reached the Nambucca estuary and could see across the water to the rock wall on the other side. For most of the way, Dad set a fast pace; it wasn’t easy to talk very much. When we stopped, we spoke mainly about school. He was worried about my marks, and whether I’d make it into law.

  ‘I was the same at your age,’ he told me, ‘a bit up and down. But my dad helped me. He taught himself most of what he knew, but he liked science. He understood it without really having to try very hard.’

  Dad said he wished he could do the same for me now, but he thought I would be better served by extra classes after school. In March, he rang around for a tutor, and found Clive, a local who’d just returned from his doctoral studies in Melbourne. He taught high-school kids in one of the study rooms at the library.

  One of the others there, Brigit, had also come for help with maths and physics. She was in grade twelve at Claire’s school, and told me she’d seen me hanging out with Claire and Anthony.

  ‘You must think about them a lot,’ she said. ‘Are they doing okay in Sydney?’

  They seemed always to be in my thoughts. I could have told Brigit exactly how many days were left until I’d be following them to Sydney. ‘I’m in a friendly year,’ I said instead. ‘And there’s so much happening at the moment. We don’t get much time to think, do we?’

  On the eve of their departure, Claire had told me straight that she wouldn’t email. She didn’t like writing much, and anyway she didn’t see the point. She left predicting that when we met again things would be as natural as ever. That we didn’t need to write for that to happen.

  Anthony didn’t share Claire’s confidence, and insisted that I write every week, and that we keep in touch by letters. He thought you could say more that way, that email was inferior. In my letters to him, I wrote about my studies, and the solitary nights I spent working towards the better marks I needed to get into law. Sometimes I sent him the poems I wrote. I mentioned that Lillie hadn’t been in touch again, and that the idea of Whitby had fallen quiet, as suddenly as the birdcalls changed and started later each morning. I had the feeling that things hadn’t ended all that well between her and Dad.

  The long letters that I received from Anthony in reply were filled with discoveries, most often of the mind. Anthony had fallen into radical feminism, and MacKinnon was quoted at length. Then double consciousness, and Eco, and the Russian masters, and Peter Singer, and from there to Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

  I followed him into these illuminated corners of the shadowed mind, a mind I didn’t really get to see in its own terms. I was worried that he was covering up the fact that the move wasn’t working out. And all this reading seemed to have little impact on Anthony’s obsession with Claire’s beauty, which through the letters still manifested most intensely as artistic admiration. This now seemed to worry him. She was too good for him, he wrote. I wondered why, and asked him to explain what was happening. He wouldn’t answer. He said her hair was longer than it had ever been; she wore it down her back. It was a black flame. Everyone at college was obsessed with it.

  When, without telling him first, she cut her hair very short, Anthony took this to mean more than it did – that she’d finally tired of him. She was telling him it was over by taking away one of the things he’d come to love most about her. They would break up soon, he declared. Then, by the time I wrote back to say he was over-analysing her, and that he’d once loved her hair shorter, he’d already forgotten his preference for long hair and said he’d never seen her face properly until now.

  I knew from watching my father that if you filled the days with enough activities you could confine reflection to those few hours that remained at night. I’d made it onto sports teams and the school committee, and I spent many afternoons in a group organising social nights, fundraisers and school events, or at training and the after-class group at the library.

  Soon it would be Anzac Day, when I’d be reading out a poem to the school assembly. ‘I’m nervous,’ I told Brigit as we waited to start our lesson. ‘The local MP’s coming.’

  ‘She’ll love you,’ replied Brigit. ‘What poem did you choose?’

  ‘It’s a Dylan song. It works read out rather than sung.’

  ‘We love Dylan at my place. Mum puts him on every second night.’

  Clive arrived, and we settled down to our work. Brigit sat across the room from me, at a table that faced mine. She had the habit of sitting cross-legged, and bundling her skirt into her lap. At the front, her blond hair was knotted into braids.

  Often, Clive blocked the view to her desk – he liked to stand between our desks. But once I looked up from my book to see that Brigit was watching me. For a moment, I thought she wanted to say something, but as quickly she turned away, as though I’d been the one who was meant to speak.

  Afterwards, as we left the library, I asked her about school and then about her brother Joel, whom I’d met a few times.

  ‘I’m going home to study,’ she said.

  ‘Haven’t you done enough for today?’

  ‘Mum’s expecting me.’

  Brigit seemed to be inspecting me again, and this time I tried to meet her gaze with a less blank expression. ‘You can come and have dinner with us, if you want,’ she said eventually.

  Brigit and Joel lived with their mum, who was from Holland. She’d moved to Australia to be with Brigit’s dad, but he’d left a few years before and now lived in Brisbane. He’d married again and had young kids with his new wife.

  ‘We all get along,’ Brigit told me as we walked to her house. ‘Even Mum loves Jenny and the girls. We alternate Christmases at their place and ours.’

  I liked theirs very much: compared to our house, everything seemed so fresh. In the living room a low couch and beanbags sat in front of a slim, wooden bookshelf lined with framed pictures and a collection of painted plates.

  ‘What does your mum
do?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s a psychologist.’

  I must have looked surprised, for Brigit added, ‘Don’t worry. She doesn’t try to work out people she knows. Or my friends.’

  After I met her, I couldn’t imagine Brigit’s mum interfering in anyone’s life, not even her daughter’s. She told me to call her Tess, and then cooked pasta, offered us a glass of wine, and said she’d be going out to a committee meeting. Did we know where Joel was?

  ‘I think he’s still at the park skating,’ said Brigit.

  ‘Well, there’s a plate of pasta for him when he wants it.’

  When Joel came in an hour later, he called out hello from the kitchen and Brigit called back about the pasta.

  ‘Too easy,’ he replied, and a moment later we heard his bedroom door close.

  ‘He won’t come out again.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. What do fifteen-year-old boys do in their room at night?’

  ‘Their homework,’ I joked. ‘Or write poems about girls.’

  I left Brigit’s place at eleven, and then remembered I hadn’t told Dad that I’d be in late. I found him sitting in the study, reading and seemingly unconcerned.

  ‘I know her mother,’ he said when I told him where I’d been. ‘She helps out at the court now and then.’

  I waited for more, perhaps a flicker of interest in Brigit’s mum. Nothing. But after I said goodnight, I looked for something similar in the evening I’d had with Brigit. Wouldn’t that be good, if we could switch our attention to those who were close by?

  In the months that followed, I often ate at Brigit’s place after class. We helped each other with maths and physics questions, and in between we sometimes exchanged short family biographies. She told me about how much she loved her little half-sisters in Brisbane, about Joel’s obsessions with skating and surfing, about her mum’s inability to stop working all the time.

  In return, I gave Brigit the story of my mother’s death, if not in the way I’d once explained it to Claire. I didn’t say that I felt Mum was with us here in Lion’s Head, or that I’d once tried to meet her in the water, in swimming out to meet her in the deep. But I told Brigit that one day I hoped to travel to England to visit Mum’s grave, and see where I’d been born.

  ‘Hasn’t your dad wanted to go back before?’

  ‘I don’t really know. We’ve never talked about it. We don’t talk about Mum very often.’

  ‘Do you think you should? I guess not all families are like that. Talking about everything, I mean. Sometimes I wish Mum didn’t want to talk over everything. I think she loves it when we hit a new issue.’

  ‘What will she say about this?’ I asked.

  ‘This?’

  ‘Yes, about me coming over after class all the time.’

  Brigit hesitated. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe something about not forgetting the basics.’

  I waited for her to explain, but I had to ask. ‘What are the basics?’

  She feigned a serious tone, maybe her mother’s: ‘Don’t do all the chasing.’

  The next day, during our morning walk, I raised with Dad the idea of us going to Whitby one day.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, stopping for a moment. ‘Lillie would love to see you again.’

  That would be fine, I thought. ‘And we could visit Mum.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it a nice place, where she’s buried?’

  ‘I suppose so. There are some pretty gardens there. And the sea, of course.’

  ‘Don’t you miss Yorkshire?’

  ‘I miss some things. Walks, a bit like we’re taking now. When I was young I used to walk or run everywhere. I especially liked the mornings – after it stopped raining in the night and the wind dropped. The sea was still. You could smell the seaweed and the fish. I miss things like that. It’s very pretty.’

  ‘It sounds like a nice place for Mum to be.’

  ‘She loved it. The coast was her natural home. When she moved there from Durham she said she felt like she’d come back. She would have adored Lion’s Head.’

  I was going to ask about their first years in Whitby, and about Mum’s swimming. Before I could, though, Dad began walking again. A little later, when we stopped at our turnaround point at the beginning of the estuary, he asked about Anthony. ‘Did he get a chance to talk to his mother before he left?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘She helped him to pack.’

  ‘And his father?’

  ‘He avoided him.’

  Dad thought for a moment. ‘Well, he’s clear of that man now.’

  I hoped so. Anthony had so seldom talked about his father that it was hard to tell what the final impact would be. ‘I don’t always know what’s going on with Anthony,’ I said, ‘just that he needed to get away.’

  When we got home, Dad asked whether he could read one of my poems. I’d never talked to him about my writing, but perhaps Anthony had.

  ‘I’ve written one about our walks,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Will you read it to me?’

  ‘I don’t want to read it out.’

  ‘Leave me a copy, then.’

  ‘I’ll copy it out neat,’ I said. But I did better than that – I typed it up later that day and left a printed copy on his desk.

  Walking with Dad

  We walk too fast to speak.

  Whatever could be said

  is left silently between our steps instead.

  We have the same rhythm,

  Dad and I.

  When we rest, me puffing,

  watching the sea,

  he’s telling me what to read.

  The Road to Wigan Pier,

  if you want to go north.

  Dad rests his hand on my back,

  almost says more,

  but we’ve stopped long enough.

  When it was time to nominate our choices for university, Brigit said she was going to put down Brisbane as her first choice. She wanted to be close to her dad. She’d be able to live with him, and help out with the girls.

  ‘What about you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure Brisbane’s great.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It feels like a long way away, for some reason.’

  ‘It’s the same distance from here as Sydney. We’re halfway between.’

  ‘I guess we are.’

  The next week, Brigit didn’t ask me to dinner. She was as nice as before, helpful with my maths problems. But it seemed also that she’d decided something about me, something that couldn’t be changed. I replaced her missing invitation to dinner with my own. ‘Dad’s not too bad in the kitchen,’ I told her.

  ‘I should study,’ she said. ‘And so should you if you want to get into Sydney law.’

  15

  I told Dad that it was simple. I wanted to go to university in Sydney because that’s where Anthony and Claire were. He asked whether I wouldn’t be happier in Brisbane, in a new place – Brigit would be there, and I could make new friends. It seemed that however much he liked Anthony, my father feared his influence. He was still firmly the Yorkshire man, and he expected effort to yield results. He didn’t want me to return from Sydney with four undergraduate years spent studying Anthony’s relationship with the world. For him, that was a greater concern than the one that had formed in my mind: that I’d waste them waiting for Claire.

  Here and there in Anthony’s letters an actual fact about their lives in Sydney had slipped through reflections and crises, and over the months I was able to assemble the following. They’d found a place, a share-house that was leased by a law student from Denmark. Both Claire and Anthony loved art college, but Anthony was arguing with the lecturing staff; he’d threatened to leave, but had been persuaded back by the course coordinator. Sydn
ey was expensive, sometimes they didn’t eat. But it was everything they’d hoped for: a proper city, a kind of artwork in its own way, reaching towards the even greater cities. Now and then, Claire visited her parents at the farm. The bus took her directly inland; it didn’t stop at Lion’s Head on the way. But Anthony was sure he was never coming back. They went to parties: Claire was doing well, but she didn’t much like the art world.

  So I left Lion’s Head feeling I knew very little, and unsure of what to expect. When Dad finally delivered me to my college on a grey January day, I all but forced him back into the car, rushing him to say goodbye so that I could phone Anthony.

  He told me they lived close by – their share-house was on Glebe Point Road, where Dad and I had stayed on his work trip. I followed Anthony’s directions through Victoria Park, along the green and hemmed-in base of the university grounds, and crossed over to Glebe. I had a dim awareness of all the things that I wasn’t stopping to see, things that would usually have halted me, especially as they were to be mine, my home: the bookshops; the cafés; the posters that fought for space on doorways; the mess of ground-floor apartments with their doors open, hallways cluttered with books, bicycles and unmatched furniture.

  I was too anxious and excited to stop.

  On the phone, Anthony had said they were all at home. But for a brief moment, I didn’t think it was Claire. A girl standing in a light dress against the pale wall of a house, a girl so obviously at home here that it seemed to be someone else. She didn’t look herself, but part of the city. I only really knew that it was her when she saw me and ran over, a silver fish in the shallows. She jumped up and held me.

  It was the beginning of a glorious day. Anthony seemed much better than I’d feared. He’d lost weight, and wore loose clothes, I thought to cover just how thin he was. But he was so overjoyed to see me, held me for a long time and kissed me on the forehead; his excitement persuaded me that the restlessness and flickering darkness of his letters were more a matter of rhetoric and flourish than experience. In those first moments, seeing him buoyant and Claire so at ease, absorbed by Sydney, I was sure that everything was alright and that moving had, after all, been the only thing for them to do. Theirs was a true escape, then; his father could finally be allowed to fall behind him.