The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  I watched her walk away. She held her arms out, a snow angel, and against the deck lights a silhouette: her hips and waist were to be held, but not by me. I wanted her, but I didn’t call her back. She was still dripping as she stepped inside, and jumped into the living room and shook her hair. I heard the others laughing as she pulled the screen door closed.

  I stayed outside for a minute before following her in. When people began to fall asleep, I made coffee and took a couple of sips, and then I walked back across town to college. I preferred these long walks home to sleeping at a stranger’s house. I wanted to be downtown in that hour before dawn, during the last untidiness of the night, and during the slow exchange of night workers and the first morning commuters. I walked myself sober and out of the atmosphere of those groups.

  Anthony hated me leaving on my own. But often he disappeared as well, and by mid-morning Claire would be phoning me to find out where we’d gone at the end of the night, and where he might have ended up.

  I seldom had an answer. I told her that he’d be back, and that I’d call as soon as I knew where he was. Overtired, I’d amble back down towards the Cross in case he was there, asleep in the open. And then to Darling Harbour. But who knew why he left like this? Now and again he just signed out, needed to get away from us as much as he’d needed to get away from Lion’s Head. Those mornings, the ones I spent chasing his shadow, made me want to go back.

  17

  The soul selects her own society. If I was possessive of Anthony and Claire, I also knew that in Sydney we would each have to find other friends and other paths to pursue. In the years that followed, they sometimes drifted out of view, and then back in – wasn’t that why we’d come? The city was meant to give us chaos, not the familiar. And if not entirely chaos, then at least the exhibitions, the house in Glebe Point Road and Jens’s good-natured, Danish sarcasm; the drug dealers at the Cross, the serious girls at college who wanted Claire to move in with them and get away from Anthony. There were times as well when those things were too much for me, and I stayed away.

  What I hadn’t expected was that chaos, proper chaos, wasn’t in Sydney but in fact still lay in Lion’s Head, with those things that my father and I had watched over, in ourselves, and in those nights when he listened for Mum in opera and I swam. In the city, the distractions actually formed stillness, and then it seemed that there could be no greater chaos than the waters of home.

  I missed Dad, and during the first years of my degree I replaced my correspondence with Anthony with what became almost-weekly letters home. I told him about Mr Green’s impossible lectures on taxation law, and he wrote back with advice on how to survive not only Mr Green but also taxation law and long lectures, what notes to keep, how to rote learn. Find the main question, he said. That’s the only way you remember.

  In my replies, I confessed to him that I wasn’t a good student. I struggled to remember case names, and then I’d panic over which ones I’d cite in the exams, a panic that stopped me relating to the material in any real sense. I didn’t follow his advice; I didn’t connect what I was learning to the questions that the law wanted to answer, and that quite possibly I wanted to answer as well – I never found out if I was interested or not. Instead, I stayed up all night writing about my friends, and then rewriting summaries of lectures, hoping that some of it would eventually be seared inside, one understanding alongside the other.

  There were exceptions, moments when I joined the brighter students and felt connected to the course. I learnt that I was a good speaker; in my third year, I managed a top mark in legal theory; and, that same year, I felt for the first time properly at home in a law subject – in international law. It was a subject that took me back to conversations that my father and I had once had, and I liked our lecturer, an Englishman – the one with whom Dad had been co-writing reports.

  In the mornings, you’d see Dr Andrews walking hurriedly through Glebe on his way to the university. He was thought to be a little mad, having moved to Australia after he’d formed the notion that he was on an IRA hit list. The imagined threat of a car bomb normally stopped him from driving to work. On the rare occasion he did bring his car, he checked under it with mirrors before leaving for home.

  During the exams one term, he stopped us to ask whose bag was ticking. I hadn’t heard the noise, but now that he pointed it out, it was there – an alarm clock left in a bag, perhaps. No one came forward, and Dr Andrews declared melodramatically that he now had no choice but to dispose of the bag. He rushed it into the middle of the lawn outside and called security. We watched from a silent examination hall while he waved his arms, demanding it be destroyed. It was obvious that the guards were more worried about him than the bag.

  I wrote to my father about the incident, and told him that no one had ever claimed the bag. My father replied that Dr Andrews was an unusual man, but his behaviour was entirely justified: Andrews had written articles about the IRA, and came to Australia as an exile. Dad ended by saying that I should remember him to my lecturer, and he hoped he’d be in Sydney soon.

  When I called in on Dr Andrews at his office, he said, ‘I should have realised who you were, with your surname. Your father married the girl of our year.’

  ‘You were at Durham together?’

  ‘More or less. He was at Durham and I was at the pub.’

  ‘That sounds better.’

  ‘She passed away, didn’t she – your mother?’

  ‘Yes, before Dad and I came out to Australia.’

  ‘Well, you have your father’s knack for argument. You can tell him that.’

  ‘Only in this subject,’ I admitted. ‘I haven’t done well in the others.’

  Dr Andrews took me on from there, and it seemed might help me to some extent understand the law. Survive these next two years, he said, and I’d be free to think again.

  When my father next came to town, we met outside Dr Andrews’s office and caught a taxi down to the Opera House. For an evening, we were returned to those nights we’d spent together in Lion’s Head, to a meal by the water and then a concert of Bellini, Donizetti, Strauss and Verdi. He asked after Anthony, and I told him that we were seeing less of each other.

  ‘Is that because of his drug use?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is he painting?’

  ‘Yes, they’re both very good.’ They would soon be having their graduating exhibition. ‘Anthony’s work is selling, but Claire doesn’t show hers very often.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let go of them, if I were you,’ said Dad.

  It was a brief exchange, but that advice changed the nature of my next letter home. I began to excerpt a suite of thoughts about Claire that hadn’t stopped since I’d arrived in Sydney – things I could never have said to him in person, or indeed have said to Claire.

  Dad,

  You told me once about how you and Mum met, the story about going up to her on the bench. When you were talking, I got the feeling that you’d already decided to marry her, or that you hoped to marry her, before you talked to her, if she’d have you of course. You interrupted her on the bench because you knew you’d eventually propose to her. I see now that the same thing has happened to me, but in my case it was Claire who sat down next to me, interrupted me. After the accident, when I was in hospital, Claire sat next to me and I feel that the two of us decided on that day that we’d marry. You must agree that’s possible, that we can see the whole cycle of some events the very moment they begin. But I’m not sure whether that’s what was going through Claire’s mind, or ever has struck her in the way that it struck me.

  I’m completely bound to Anthony, and I won’t give my feelings away to Claire, even if she knows anyway. He isn’t jealous, and I could kick him for that. I want him to be jealous. I would be. He shows me that I would be a terrible husband, possessive and demanding – not at all like Anthony. Their relationship gets wors
e and so I find myself keeping some distance. I want them to work it out, and I can only get in the way. Is that right, Dad? Should I let them be?

  I love her, and I wonder whether you still love Mum as much. Does it last that long? You don’t have to answer, I know you don’t want to talk about it. But with this time away from home, I find myself thinking that I will drift out of the world in that way you have, and one day end up on my own in Lion’s Head. That’s how it goes, right?

  I love you, Dad.

  He replied that same week, but he didn’t answer my questions. He said he’d be in town one of these days, and we’d talk better then. He had something to give me: the picture of my mother that, he wrote, he should have given me years before.

  18

  I did as I’d promised in my letter home, and needed to do for myself – I gave Anthony more time alone with Claire. For months at a time we wouldn’t see each other, and then, as though to even the ledger, we met even more regularly than before. It felt as though our years in Sydney were to be structured by the two extremes.

  On the days we got together, he was as hard to flee as he’d been when he came in through my window on early mornings in Lion’s Head. Once in a while, Claire would join us for an hour. She wanted to know how I was doing in my studies, whether I would stick it out. And she would ask after Dad. But usually it was just Anthony and me, and once I’d skipped one class I was ready to skip them all.

  Each time, he asked if I’d met anyone. When I said that I was still single he told me to relax, to read less, get myself off campus and spend more time with him and Claire and their friends. He was hardly the one to tell me to think more about people than work. His life concerned only painting; the various battles he fought in the everyday world were merely the final signatures he gave to his brushstrokes, the life markers of his style. He fought with the teaching staff – about the canvases he wasted, the cost of paints, studio time, access to the best models. And Claire, as well, was still part of his work, which was too much a part of him. I told him that was why they fought so much. He ignored my criticisms and said, ‘You might as well be getting sex, even if you’re too serious and well-read to have a relationship. Our friends sleep with anyone.’

  I answered that they smelt of art materials and incense; it was off-putting. He retorted, ‘You smell of books. You spend too much time in the library. You know too much about the law. You’re even getting a bit dusty, like your father. Like your friend Andrews.’

  It wasn’t true. I was still a very ordinary student. When I wasn’t in class, I wasn’t in the library, but more often wandered around Newtown and Glebe instead. I caught the ferry to Mosman and then climbed the streets of hillside homes to Bradley’s Head Road and down the other side to Balmoral Beach. It was the sort of beach where you could sit in shorts and a T-shirt and read without anyone thinking you were odd, unlike Bondi, which was closer but seemed to demand the baring of flesh.

  Anthony came if there were going to be rocks and cliffs to climb, as we’d had growing up. He liked the shapes and shadows of headlands; despite himself, that was part of what he loved about Sydney, too. We’d walk and walk, and he’d swear about cars and traffic and the abrasiveness of life. And then, over the course of an afternoon, the anger settled and we were back to talking about Lion’s Head, art books, and records that he wanted to give me. Half the books in my college room were his.

  I was never angry – that, he said, was why we were so different and why he loved me so much. No, I replied. Anger wasn’t a character trait, as he seemed to paint it. Anger was an emotion. And, anyway, didn’t he realise how often I was angry with him? I hated it as much as Claire when he went missing, and when Claire had to collect me to go looking for him. I said, of course the world was abrasive if you picked arguments with drug dealers and art dealers and then slept at their houses.

  Maybe he wanted more of my stern, self-important rebukes, for a week later he took a job waiting tables at a strip club in the Cross. The girls were sure he was gay and adopted him into a circle that was concerned only with hair colour, tans and a collection of beauty techniques – all of which Anthony related to me as essential education and context for all the literary heroines I fell for and might one day write. He loved the girls as much as I loved Emma Bovary, and brought them to parties where, they told me, they felt more false than they did in the clubs.

  While I listened to them one evening, and watched their crossed legs, I glanced across to Anthony. I was more and more worried about his appearance, which only ever got worse. When the girls left for a better party, he yelled about the awful businessmen who lunched at the strip club. While he gesticulated, he bumped one arm against a side table.

  ‘Why do you keep working there?’ I said.

  ‘I need the money.’

  ‘There’s other things to do. Why don’t you sell your body? Or run drugs.’

  ‘How do you know I don’t?’

  ‘Or you could teach painting to housewives. They’d love you. All that angst wouldn’t bother them. They’d find it charming. You could return to your tai chi roots. Ladies by the waterfront.’

  ‘I’d rather model for them,’ he said. ‘I think there’s something morbid about teaching. Or, about me teaching. I taught myself; I don’t know anything about technique. I still don’t.’

  I looked at his arm. The spot where he’d hit it was already swollen and blue. ‘Your body’s a mess.’

  ‘Actually, the opposite. I don’t have any of the shit in my body that you put into yours.’

  ‘And I don’t bruise when I bump into a coffee table.’

  ‘You’re much fatter. You should walk more.’

  ‘I should move in and clean you up.’

  He stopped me, stood up and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘We need more to drink.’ He added, ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you something. Claire wants her own place. She wants to move in with some girlfriends. It’s her way of breaking up.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. We need booze.’

  He stood waiting for me to release him. I said, ‘She just wants you to clean up. It’s not easy to watch you doing this to yourself.’

  ‘I don’t blame her at all.’

  ‘You’re defeating yourself if you let her go. Then you’d be right about everything.’

  ‘I’m black all the way through.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you want to leave? Go for a walk?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He apologised for drawing attention to us, and sat down. ‘I’m just scared, Ted. That’s all it is. I get these awful dreams.’

  ‘What dreams?’

  ‘I go to the doctors and I ask them over and over to examine me and all they’ll tell me is that it’s black fluid inside. I tell them that there must be something else there. I say I can’t be made only of black fluid. I get so angry about it. So they look again, but they can’t find anything.’

  ‘Claire sees something. That’s why you have to keep her close. Don’t let her move out.’

  ‘She should be with someone else, someone like you. You’re in love with her. It’s such a good thought.’

  ‘I hate it when you say that. Be jealous, for Christ’s sake.’

  He faced me. ‘You’re all kindness, Ted. It’s the nicest thing I can say to you. Claire said it, too, by the way. It’s always been so obvious that you’re in love with her.’ He stood up again. ‘We’re all hypocrites, Ted.’

  ‘I don’t want any more to drink,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  Anthony wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t try. Instead, they fought for another two months about how he wasn’t stopping her, until it was too late. Claire moved out to a share-house on the other side of the campus, in Newtown. I heard it first from her. I was on the bus when she phoned, wanting to give
me her new number and address. She said this time it was final.

  ‘Are you going to be okay?’ I said.

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘It matters to me that you’re going to be okay.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Anthony? Can he stay where he is?’

  ‘Jens is around until the end of the year. He’s going to pay my share of the rent.’

  The bus was crowded. I hated having this conversation in public, but I didn’t want her to know that there were others there. It made me quieter; I must have seemed distant. ‘I’m going to leave you alone for a while, aren’t I?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe that’s best. I don’t know.’

  ‘Normally when people aren’t sure, it means they want to be left alone.’

  ‘Normally that’s it.’

  At last, I decided to tell her it was hard to talk now – there were too many people around – and we hung up. I got back to college, and took the staircase to my room. I promised myself that I would leave her be. I’d concentrate on my exams. Eventually, I’d take any job my father thought would suit me; I would live on the North Shore and I’d walk to work in the mornings and catch the ferry home in the afternoons.

  Why? Because Claire would always be in love with Anthony.

  Jens and I had begun law in different years, but he travelled through the course slowly – he seemed in no hurry to return to Denmark – and so we were often in the same lectures. After them, with brains softened by subsections and case law, we drank together at the student bar. With Claire gone and Anthony at the house or missing somewhere, Jens and I tried too hard to be convivial, and rushed when we spoke. But we couldn’t find topics we liked to talk about together. We drank too quickly instead, and as best we could avoided talking about absent friends.

  He suggested time and again that I should do some further studies in Copenhagen, after I’d finished my degree. ‘They’re taught in English. And then afterwards you could go into diplomacy,’ Jens said. ‘It’s just the life for you.’