The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  I didn’t have the marks for that world. But instead of saying that, I replied, ‘I don’t know. It’s just my father and me. We don’t have any other family, except an aunt in England. It’d be hard to be away all the time.’

  ‘But your dad never visits. What difference would it make?’

  ‘He’s been. He and Dr Andrews go to dinner. It’s a late romance.’

  ‘You even spend your summers here,’ Jens pressed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you miss the beach?’

  ‘I live in Sydney. In a way, it’s the same as living in Lion’s Head – Sydney’s so close to the sea.’

  ‘Copenhagen is on the sea. You’d feel at home there, too. You could live at my parents’ house, if you wanted. They’ve got plenty of space. No one’s ever there. You’d have the place to yourself.’

  I had no interest in going to Denmark, but there was no way of convincing Jens. I got the feeling he’d decided I needed saving. ‘Where’s your mother?’ I asked. ‘She isn’t in New Zealand with your father?’

  ‘She won’t leave Denmark, not that far, anyway. Dad says they live at a convenient distance.’ Jens smiled. ‘He’s a cold bastard.’

  ‘Like you?’ I tried to joke. It fell flat. At last, we gave up on Denmark, and changed the subject.

  ‘Have you seen Claire?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s your friend, too. Not just Anthony.’

  ‘Yes, she’s my friend, but she needs time. I can understand that. We were so close, as a group.’

  ‘Is that what she said?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  Jens glanced over to a group of girls who’d slid in along the bench next to ours. Without turning back to me, he said, ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s staying away.’ He got up and said hello to the girls. ‘You’re law students, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said one.

  He pointed to me, and they arched their backs. ‘That’s Ted.’ Then Jens added a line that only he could manage: ‘He’s very serious. I’ve been trying to lighten him up for a while, but now I need to get some drinks.’

  ‘Why are you so serious?’ a girl I knew asked. Her name was Olivia.

  ‘I’m not.’

  We joined their table. At the end of the night I slept with Olivia, and woke up wondering if I really had. That’s how it felt when I was with someone, a waking sense of improbability at how time ticked along and brought new people in. She spoke about a time we’d met in the past, at a party. I pretended to remember, and then apologised, ‘I forgot.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  It was very early in the morning. I was still drunk. The light in her bedroom was divided along a border of blue dawn and streetlights. I asked if I could leave; I wanted to walk home. I crossed over to Glebe Point Road, hoping to find a café open and then hoping to find Anthony home. But Jens answered the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘The other girls are here.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course not, Ted.’

  ‘Is Anthony home?’

  ‘No. But come in. Have a drink. I haven’t slept at all. I’ve got the football on.’

  I heard it, the crowd noise of a Premier League game. ‘It’s okay,’ I replied. ‘I’m going home to bed.’

  Jens didn’t want me to go. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, I had a question for him.’ It was a bitter one; the last thing to do was reveal it. ‘I wanted to know how he could sleep with other girls.’

  ‘Go home,’ said Jens. ‘It’s not your question.’

  19

  Dad rang to say he was visiting. He and Dr Andrews were going to devise a course on maritime law together. We should have dinner while he was in town. When he phoned again to say he’d arrived, he told me to come over to his hotel first. He had something for me.

  People often find ghosts in photographs, but my experience that afternoon was that the ghost inhabited the person holding it. The way he lost my mother was inhaled again, as he gave me the photograph and breathed another farewell.

  ‘I don’t want you to give it to me,’ I said.

  ‘I’d like you to have it,’ he answered.

  ‘I’d rather you told me about her. To me, that’s more important. I feel like I hardly know her, even though she’s such a big part of our life – well, your life. You hold on to her memory, but you don’t share it.’

  ‘You wrote to me about Claire. You asked me about letting her go.’ He stopped. ‘I don’t know why people are in such a rush to let go.’

  ‘They want to be happy,’ I said. ‘They can’t be happy together.’

  ‘Can’t they?’

  ‘They each want to start a new life.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a new life, Ted,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean people can’t be happy.’

  It was three months since I’d seen Claire, and since her and Anthony’s break-up. I felt that Anthony had been avoiding me, too. He didn’t answer his phone. I walked from the hotel to the college, and then I rang her at home to ask if she’d join me and Dad for dinner later that evening. I said I needed the company.

  ‘Are you sure you want to take me?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s plenty I could say to your father.’

  ‘I thought you were angry at me, not him.’

  ‘Yes. Actually, yes, much more angry at you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t call for three months and then ask me to have dinner with your dad.’

  ‘I had to wait.’

  ‘Maybe I should make you wait, as well,’ she said.

  She didn’t, though. She agreed to come to dinner at Ming’s, an over-large room of plastic tablecloths and cardboard kittens. My father had long loved it, and wanted to eat there at least once every time he came to Sydney. That evening, we ate early, before the large families arrived and crowded the place with the reassuring noises of old relationships and conversation. We sat at the end of one of the long tables, like the only ones on a bus, hoping there might soon be other early commuters.

  My father was ageing, but I liked it in him. There were new, bronze creases in his neck and across his hands; I wondered if I seemed older to him, too – I was about to turn twenty-two and I thought I could see the difference. Anthony was right about my father: he could sometimes look dusty. Especially when he travelled. But this time he even seemed to be wearing the clothes he’d driven down in; it was unusual for him not to change before dinner, for his early-evening rituals of a gin and a cigar. Perhaps because of the emptiness of the restaurant, we sat more closely than we usually would.

  ‘I’ve been busy in the garden,’ he said to Claire. ‘Actually, I’ve got some questions for your father. I’m sure he’d be able to help me.’

  Claire released none of the anger that she’d hinted at, and which in person seemed to have an uncertain target, Dad or me, or perhaps Anthony. She touched Dad’s arm in that way of her mother’s, and said he should phone her father. ‘He’d love to hear from you.’ And then, ‘Dad used to tease me that I’d marry Ted one day.’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ I said.

  ‘I’m still counting on you taking care of me,’ she said quickly, her tone uncertain.

  That seemed a rather distant promise now. ‘Jens thinks I should be a diplomat. He says there are excellent subjects in Copenhagen. It sounds good. I can do them in English.’ I watched Claire, but she didn’t meet my eyes. When she did look up, it was to check my father’s response.

  ‘I’m not sure how it would benefit you,’ he said. ‘You’re better off going straight into practice here.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you pay?’ I asked, suddenly angry. ‘I doubt I�
��ll be ready to start work next year.’

  ‘This is turning out to be an expensive dinner,’ he said to Claire. Then to me, evenly, ‘I’ve spoken to some friends. There are firms that will take you, even though your marks aren’t at the top.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think the marks are the point.’

  ‘The point?’

  ‘I think they tell me exactly what I should be doing next year. The only subject I’ve done well in is International. Not much point hanging around here, is there?’

  I didn’t know where my unpleasantness was coming from. Across me had swept an anger that I’d only seen in Anthony and Claire, never in myself. I felt it drawing me to a position that had very little to do with what I really wanted.

  Thankfully, the food came out. Dad wasn’t one to stand down from an argument, or to quiet me – he was too calm for either. But perhaps for Claire’s sake he watched the food being served and said, ‘We can talk about this tomorrow, if you’re serious about going.’

  I couldn’t drop it. ‘Why wait?’ I wanted a win, in some ways against them both, but in other ways against my father only – a performance for Claire, for the princess and peasant daughter both. ‘Claire, would you prefer it if we talked about this later?’

  ‘Would you do what I asked?’

  ‘Yes, you know that.’

  ‘In that case, stop talking and just say you’ll stay in Sydney with us.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘With us.’

  ‘There you are,’ said my father. ‘You’ve been told.’

  Claire had now finished art college. But, even more than me, she resisted the next step, into work, whatever that meant for someone like her. Her parents sent money so that she could stay on in Sydney, but soon she’d have to go back to the farm if nothing came up in town. Anthony, I heard, had gone from waiting tables in the Cross to working as a salesman in a Rose Bay art gallery that occasionally hung his paintings. Jens told me this, for Anthony still didn’t want to meet. When I finally did catch him on his mobile, he said he’d write to me soon.

  ‘Anthony, I live around the corner.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Can’t we just meet up?’

  ‘I’m at the gallery day and night.’

  ‘Are you saying you’re too busy?’

  ‘Have you seen Claire?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her.’

  ‘I know. You’re going to have to talk at some point.’

  There was a silence. ‘Are you okay, Ted?’

  ‘Let’s meet,’ I insisted.

  ‘I’m writing first. I want to write to you. Like when you were still home. Say hello to Claire.’

  Mostly, she spent her mornings invisible. Neither she nor the others in the house seemed willing to answer the phone before lunch, as though that were when a calling time should begin, the drawing room finally revealed. In the afternoons, when at last there was enough movement in the world to stir them, she came out to shop, or catch a bus to Clovelly or Bronte.

  After our dinner with my father, I took to meeting her for these beach trips. On the bus together, we still talked mainly about Anthony, but also her paintings and the girls she lived with. They seemed to be like her – beautiful, a little angry but also busy and ambitious for their art, at least in the afternoons and evenings when the light was feline enough for the girls to appear. I told her that my father and Dr Andrews were working together.

  I joked about what a funny pair they were. In reply, Claire asked whether I’d met anyone nice. I said, ‘Of course I have. Law girls are easy.’

  ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘Nicer than me?’

  ‘Much nicer than you.’

  ‘Why do you come to the beach with me, then, and not them?’

  ‘Historical reasons.’ She hit me on the leg. Before I could think better of it, I asked, ‘You didn’t leave Anthony because of me, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I couldn’t stay.’ She checked herself, and then said, ‘That’s all.’

  ‘You still love him, don’t you?’

  ‘We both still love him,’ she told me.

  We arrived at Bronte and sat on a bench that overlooked tanned rocks and oval pools. Her landscape studies, like her studies of people, were still never quite finished. She set them aside before they could appear complete, so they might always be mere sketches – of the direction of the wind, the spray off the crest of the waves, the bends in the top trees after storms. These days she used only pencils or charcoal. I asked if I could keep some of her work, for I thought she would otherwise have thrown much of it away. She said yes, but she didn’t want me to frame them or hang them up.

  One evening, when we got back from the beach later than usual and I walked her from the bus stop to her place, she took my hand. ‘The others are out,’ she said.

  I hadn’t been inside the house before. Her bedroom wasn’t a room of its own, exactly, but part of a long veranda that had been closed and converted. The street-side was walled in by a stretch of glass – purple and green squares. They were opaque, but the headlights of the cars outside crossed the room in arcs of coloured movement.

  The light found her body. Between cars, she disappeared again into the shadow of the room, and I found myself waiting for the traffic, waiting to see her. Moving over to me, she leant forward to kiss me. Then she straightened herself, sitting upright.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘I know. We love each other.’

  ‘I’m yours.’

  ‘No,’ she answered, ‘not yet.’

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘I can’t see you. It’s dark.’ She leant forward to kiss me again, and covered my face in her thick hair, as if to block the lights of the next car to come down the street outside. She said, ‘I need you closer.’

  20

  Nine years after we’d met, Claire and I swapped an enduring clarity for our first awkwardness. What was there to say next? There didn’t seem to be a natural question and answer to follow the night we’d had, and the short, light hours of sleep afterwards. It was six; we had coffee together in her bedroom of sixties morning colours – light like tiles – and perhaps we both thought about how long we’d waited for this moment, but most acutely whether we’d waited long enough. We hardly spoke till I said goodbye. I wouldn’t see her again until long after the next thing that happened, which for a while felt like the only thing that had ever happened between us.

  That day, I rang Anthony and insisted that we meet. I told him that Claire and I had made love. I told him how it had happened, after a day at the beach, at her place. He blushed, but it wasn’t exactly anger, more an awareness that he’d been caught out by his own expectations. ‘How was it?’ he asked.

  ‘It was beautiful.’

  ‘At last.’ Correcting himself, the strangled tone of that phrase, he added, ‘I’m not jealous. I can’t be jealous of you.’ He looked at me to discover whether I believed him. We both saw something else: it was a hope that he still had her, even after she’d been with me, and a change in how he saw his own future. ‘I suppose this means it’s really over,’ he said, as much a question as a statement. ‘She won’t come back to me now. Did you stay the night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you make love again in the morning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She didn’t want to?’

  ‘It was different in the morning,’ I said. I was ready to tell him anything he wanted. ‘Or, we were back to where we were. It felt obvious we weren’t about to start anything. You know she still loves you.’

  He ignored this. ‘I’m glad you told me,’ he said. ‘Always kind, Ted.’

  ‘Have I hurt you?’

  ‘No. You haven’t. I’ve been waiting for this. It’s
a relief that it’s come. I hope you haven’t hurt each other. You think she’s still in love with me. I’d say you’re much too in love with her.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘You should know, Ted. By now you should know.’

  His letter to me came bundled with sketches and postcards, as always more than just the matter at hand. He delivered this one, gave it to me one afternoon, and told me to open it when I got back to college, not before.

  I did as I was told.

  When I read it now, late at night sitting back in my father’s study, I find myself more terrified, shocked than I was at the time. Now, it seems so clear that he was in deep distress, and that this wasn’t merely another poem, another picture, another of Anthony’s performances. The day I received it, it simply seemed every bit an Anthony kind of letter.

  Ted, would you let me go because I’m not happy here. With so much cruelty around us, I’m lying by staying. I’ve always thought of the end of my life as a gentle thing. I want no part of the violence, the whole manliness here. And I feel so utterly alone. Sometimes I need you so much that I almost feel you here. I need you here. All we get is men who need to be men, need to show how great they are. I’m not above or below it. I’m standing beside it and I’m frightened that if I step to the right I’ll be like him and if I step to the left I’ll be like him and if I walk straight down the middle his path will still cross mine. So I want to stand still and just watch him walk by me. I want you and Claire to let me go. I’d rather die now as I am than die like him. Please say yes. Please let me go.

  I folded the letter and placed it back with the drawings that had accompanied it, and spent the next morning at the law library, determined to put it out of my mind. I wouldn’t even call. But at lunch, I went back to my room. I needed to read the letter again. Then I walked with it to Anthony’s place. I would make him take it back, refute it.

  I found him in the café next door, at a corner table. He’d finished a coffee, but sat smoking, watching the traffic.

  ‘Why this?’ I held out the letter.