The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  The house was much older and nicer than I’d expected. It perfected that old-fashioned quality Claire and Anthony always had – located them in the same warm tones that occupied Claire’s paintings. That was why it was a home: they had found a painting to become part of. Worn, ash-grey timber floors ran the length of the house. The front windows were narrow and high. As the sun found some space under the clouds, the front room became a small chapel; the floors could equally have been of stone.

  ‘Where’s your housemate?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll be home soon,’ said Claire.

  ‘You’ll like him,’ Anthony told me. ‘You’re very similar. A bit quiet. He likes to be the clever one in the room. Like you.’

  ‘You’re giving me a hard time already,’ I said.

  There was colour in Claire’s cheeks. She smiled at me and said, ‘Have you missed us?’

  ‘Yes. You know that.’

  ‘I’ve been so nervous.’

  ‘It’s just me,’ I said.

  They didn’t have much furniture, but what they did have was lovely: a reading chair, shelves across the living-room wall. ‘How did you afford all this?’ I asked. ‘Did the place come furnished?’

  ‘Our rich housemate,’ said Claire.

  ‘He bought all this for you?’

  ‘He bought it for himself.’

  ‘You won’t want to spend much time at college,’ said Anthony. ‘Don’t become one of those law students who devotes a life to that.’

  ‘Is there another kind? I’m going to go to lectures, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘The different kind is the kind that stays with us. Ted, you’re home now.’

  Anthony wanted to bring out his new paintings while it was still light, and just us, before Jens got back. He presented his latest works as a great change. It was true, something was changing – the subjects had expanded. He’d begun to paint animals, and they expressed a playful side, one that in the past he’d kept out of his work. There were memory pieces of the ladies doing tai chi at the Rotary park. And landscape studies drawn from our fortnight on Claire’s farm, companions to drawings she’d made at the same time.

  Yet I found myself agreeing with something Claire had once said about his work: he painted himself, even in the landscapes. Maybe all artists were like that, or maybe he needed to. In painting, he had somewhere to put himself.

  Claire was still nervous.

  ‘Relax, it’s only me,’ I said again.

  ‘It’s just that I want you to like what we’ve got here. We waited so long to come here. You’re the only one who can really see how we’re doing.’

  I thought her nervousness might also have something to do with Jens not being there yet. He was part of their new life, and of course she wanted me to like him. She said Anthony was wrong. Jens and I were not at all alike. We were both law students, that’s all.

  He arrived with bottles of wine. ‘You are Ted! At last!’ I was going to shake his hand but he pulled me to him with his free hand. ‘I have wine!’

  He put it down on the kitchen counter and laid out glasses. Claire watched me, waited. Those things she knew I’d notice: his looks – ‘properly handsome’, as Anthony might have said – and his dress. His hair, shoulder-length and fair. A beard trimmed short, in places more red than blond. A young man, but older than us in his ease, and more complete in his appearance. That’s the photograph of that day, taken with the timer: the four of us standing at the bench, toasting Sydney while Claire laughs, finally relaxing again.

  We began to drink. Jens rested his wine glass against his lips. ‘My lips got burnt today,’ he said, when he noticed me watching him. ‘I’m learning to play cricket. You should join our team.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  There was only the faintest Danish accent. It was overlaid with a London intonation, the English of an exchange student.

  ‘You should wear sunscreen,’ said Claire, ‘with your skin.’

  ‘You didn’t play cricket in England?’ I asked.

  ‘We were there for a couple of years only. Now my father has just been posted in New Zealand.’

  ‘You didn’t want to go with him?’

  ‘No,’ Jens said. ‘I wanted to come here.’

  He turned to Anthony and Claire, as though to say it had been a good decision. ‘C’mon, Ted,’ he said, ‘let’s drink.’ He seemed to speak in toasts. He tapped the bench and added, ‘I’ve got something else for later.’ He laughed, and I joined in, even if I was still a little jealous of how assured and permanent it all seemed, the familiarity of their new life to them. But it was alright, surely. Anthony began cooking while Jens and I drank too quickly. Jens looked over his glass at me, and I tried to seem at ease.

  Anthony announced that we were going to celebrate our reunion with his Tibetan cooking. It came out as a stew that could have been produced in support of any of his causes: vegetarianism, pesticide-free farming, localism; civil rights in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh.

  ‘It’s very good,’ said Jens. ‘You are the lentil king in this house. No doubt about it.’

  ‘Do you like it?’ Anthony asked me.

  ‘I should,’ I said. ‘I do feel morally improved.’

  ‘Is it the meat that’s missing?’ said Jens, grinning.

  ‘Yes. And the flavour.’

  Claire and Anthony laughed, and Jens reached for his glass. ‘Are you a cook, Ted?’

  ‘No. We’ve always agreed that I’ll pay the bills. So that’s why I get to be rude about Anthony’s food.’

  Jens leant forward. ‘I don’t need to protect Anthony. You’ve known each other for years, right?’

  ‘Five or six,’ I said. ‘He knows I love him for more than his curries.’

  ‘Maybe that’s lucky,’ said Jens. ‘I’m sorry, Anthony, but he’s right. It doesn’t taste of anything. Was that your idea for the dish?’

  ‘Oh, fuck you all,’ said Anthony, and picked up our plates. ‘Shut up or I’ll make you eat more.’

  And that was how the night went, by turns a little awkward and lovely, warm. After dinner, Jens pulled out a small plastic bag of black hash. He sprinkled it into a long cigarette that he rolled one-handed. ‘Something I learnt from a Scotsman in Shepherd’s Bush,’ he said, giggling.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, of course not, Ted.’

  Again, I was laughing with the others. Anthony put his arms around my neck and kissed me. I was drinking much too quickly. Then the hash took hold. I leant forward in my chair and stared at the floor. ‘The wood,’ I said. ‘What wood it is.’

  ‘Is it moving?’ asked Jens.

  ‘No. It’s the grain. It’s such a grey grain. How did it get so weathered? Did it rain? We’re inside!’

  ‘It’s the type of wood,’ said Claire. ‘It’s an old-fashioned wood. That’s the way it goes.’

  ‘They had different wood in the old days?’ asked Jens.

  ‘Of course they did,’ said Anthony. ‘The whole world was different in the old days.’

  ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ I said. But when I got there, I stopped at the sink and looked in the mirror. I checked to see whether I was turning grey, along with the floorboards.

  Claire woke me with coffee and the sight of her legs under one of Anthony’s long shirts. She noticed me staring at the soft turn of her inside leg. ‘You’ve seen it before, right?’ she asked, smiling.

  Not quite. I’d seen the blue period, not the Degas. She pushed me along the couch and sat down. Her hair still smelt of hash and Anthony’s awful cooking.

  ‘Do you want me to put some music on?’ she said.

  ‘Not yet. It’s too early.’

  ‘How’s your dad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She put her hand through my hair and said, ‘Ted the swimmer.’
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br />   ‘Once,’ I said.

  I finally asked about Anthony, and how thin he was. She turned the question on herself. ‘I don’t know why we look so terrible. We don’t eat enough.’

  She lit us cigarettes. I asked, ‘Have you stopped eating meat?’

  ‘I suppose. But I only ever ate meat when I was on the farm. It doesn’t make any difference to me. Maybe you can talk to him. Tell him to take better care of himself. He gets so pissed off when I bring it up.’

  ‘Does he use anything stronger than hash?’

  ‘They’re all on acid.’

  ‘Him more than the others?’

  ‘He drifts off. You know him.’

  I said I’d talk to him. She stood up. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said without turning around, still a little stoned.

  But by the end of my first week in Sydney, I was used to Anthony’s appearance. It was another version to be added to the many others that met and played off each other in his self-portraits, and then somehow migrated into the world of his everyday. The debt to the blue period had been folded into a Gothic collage of medieval scenes. In them, he existed as several characters, each blended or obscured by their relation to another. Sometimes his faces were painted over each other; it was hard to tell which he preferred, which one was meant to invite the sympathetic gaze. What mattered most was the confusion.

  ‘You won’t ever resemble your father,’ I said to him. ‘Even the most accurate self-portrait doesn’t look like him.’ We were in his room, and I sat on the bed while he rolled his paintings out in front of me.

  ‘That’s not what worries me.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘That it’s too late. It’s too late to come out of it.’

  ‘Come out of what?’

  ‘Well, you’re right. Him. But not how he was. I hate what he left me with. Grime.’

  ‘That isn’t you,’ I said. ‘That’s a memory of the life you had. You’re out of that now.’

  ‘I’m such a coward. I’ve turned into it.’ He stepped over to a bundle of pictures in the corner of the room.

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘That’s because you’re Ted. You’re like your father.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t compliment me. You’re avoiding the issue. Listen to at least a bit of what I’m saying. You’re out of it now. You made it to Sydney, to this. I can’t believe you got such a good place. It even comes with its own Dane.’

  He brought out new studies of Claire, ones he hadn’t shown me on my first night in Sydney. ‘Do you like these?’ he asked.

  They were gentle portraits, melancholy but also like Claire’s drawings in how they presented fragments rather than whole ideas. They were genuine studies. ‘I like your work,’ I told him, ‘but I always look for happiness in them.’

  ‘Take some of them, please. I don’t like having them around all the time. Decorate your room.’

  I said I didn’t want them – I didn’t have anywhere to put them – but he gave me a roll all the same. ‘You have to visit me,’ he insisted. ‘I missed you last year. Now that you’re here, I realise I’ve been waiting all year for you to arrive. We’re addicted to you, Ted.’

  ‘Then do me a favour, too, and take better care of yourself.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he answered. ‘Everything will be fine. It’s the three of us again.’

  I walked the pictures up to the Mitchell Library, read at a desk, and then carried them with me through the open, stone corridors of the university – back to college, where I unrolled the paintings and tried to find one to put on my wall. The best candidate was a portrait of Claire sitting, fully dressed on a high-backed wooden chair. It wasn’t quite a stately pose, but holding it up against the wall gave me the feeling of having arrived at court. I didn’t want it above my bed. I rolled the pictures back up, and left the wall blank.

  16

  In my first year away from Lion’s Head, Anthony eased my entry into a group that wasn’t quite mine to join. He wanted me, or perhaps himself, to feel I’d arrived in Sydney at the same time as him, and a backfilling exercise began. Most of his new friends were in the various departments of art college: painters, sculptors, photographers and jewellers, filmmakers – it was as though Anthony had chosen one friend from each form. For his sake, they offered me a place as observer, and eventually, I think, liked me as their privately sponsored non-artist – one to keep at hand, in case.

  I didn’t tell them that I wrote, or that I had artistic hopes of my own. Saying that would have been like telling them I was in love with Claire. No, I was in Sydney to study law and to be with my friends. I joined them at their shows around town, and normally ended up at the after-parties. And although I was quieter than most others there, I gradually discovered I was the type you could talk to at the end of the night, when things settled down and there were reasons to stop yelling.

  Most of the exhibitions were held in a gallery above a Thai restaurant in Newtown. You climbed a narrow, wooden staircase of trapped spice smells that were gradually replaced by those of budget wine and cigarette smoke from the other direction. At the top were small rooms with walls pock-marked by the dents of past exhibitions.

  I wasn’t always sure what to make of the paintings and installations I found. The aim was to shock; that was obvious even to me. But beyond that, it was merely identity politics doing its best to confiscate art. At one show, I turned from a collection of close-up portraits of vaginas and tried to tell Jens that I didn’t find the works very appealing.

  Jens replied that the trick was to stare for as long as it took for the vagina to disappear.

  ‘What do you find in its place?’ I asked him.

  ‘Deep space,’ he replied. ‘I am looking past the pubic hair and into the origins of the universe.’ I liked his response; it made me laugh. ‘At least Anthony doesn’t paint close-ups,’ said Jens.

  In the next room, a black-and-white film played. It repeated a scene in which a cut was made with a razor blade into the side of a torso, just above the ribs.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ he asked.

  ‘It makes me sick. I really don’t understand it.’

  ‘There’s some erotic charge there, don’t you think?’

  ‘Would you find it an erotic experience to be cut like that? Or do you want to do the cutting?’

  ‘Don’t be so serious, Ted. I know about your accident; Claire told me. She said you wouldn’t like this room.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Let’s go then. If you don’t like something, you can leave.’

  Jens led the way out, and we crossed town to Rose Bay, to the home of a gallery owner who liked to be surrounded by students. Apparently, he was chasing Anthony. His walls were covered in nudes, the type that oversimplified the body into a few strokes of ink. Hundreds of art books were collected on scaffolding trestles. Outside, on the deck, the floors were lined with Persian rugs. He said he’d bought them in Shiraz.

  For most of the night, I sat beside a swimming pool with a girl whose boyfriend was inside talking to Anthony, both high on acid and as far away from each other as they seemed from us. I could hear their laughter, but I hadn’t spoken to either Anthony or Claire since we left the gallery.

  The girl sitting next to me said she always liked to be the one who got to choose the music at parties. It played on outside speakers concealed in the corners of the patio roof. I thought of my father, and how he might like some of it – she’d put on Elvis Costello. Her name was Beatrice.

  ‘Like Dante’s?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. What does that mean?’

  ‘It would mean you’re out of reach,’ I replied.

  She wanted to tell me she wasn’t like her boyfriend; this fact seemed urgent. She didn’t like acid, and only ever listened to new music. She said she liked music more than grass – it did more
for her. I told her that I liked the smell of grass; I thought it was a bit like the smell of cigars.

  A thin film of smoke crossed the surface of the pool. Beatrice took off her dress and slipped into the water. She was naked, and as she swam backstroke towards the edge, she lifted her waist to the surface. I saw a small island of pubic hair and wondered whether I ought to find the origins of the universe.

  ‘Come in with me,’ she said.

  ‘But your boyfriend?’

  ‘He’s in another world. He doesn’t care.’

  I stayed out of the pool, but shifted to the edge of a step. I was wearing shorts, and felt the water reach up to my knees.

  ‘Come in,’ she said again. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘I can’t swim.’

  ‘I know you live at the beach.’

  ‘I can’t swim,’ I repeated.

  Beatrice dived under.

  ‘Strange boy,’ she said when she came up again, and swam to the step. She lifted herself out of the water. Her shoulders were high and pinched. Then she put her hands on my knees. ‘Come into the water, friend,’ and she pressed herself against my chest, kissed me. She pushed again. The small of my back was against the edge of the pool.

  ‘You’re strong,’ I told her.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘You feel very lovely.’

  My shirt was wet. A light shone from under the eaves, revealing my scar through the cotton. ‘Go inside to your boyfriend,’ I said. ‘He needs you.’

  ‘I don’t care about him. He’s selfish. He only comes for drugs. Get in with me. I want you to fuck me.’

  ‘No.’

  Beatrice put her hand over the scar. ‘It’s sexy.’

  ‘No. Your boyfriend’s inside.’

  Beatrice slipped away and stepped out of the pool, stood behind me, dripping. For a moment, I thought she was going to push me in. But she put her dress back on. She said, ‘Claire will never love you the way she loves Anthony.’