‘Nothing’s changed,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had enough.’
I sat down beside him. I still wasn’t sure what I was witnessing. ‘You have to see your way out of this. You change all the time. Some days you’re so full of hope. Remember that. Some days all we do is laugh.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘Ted, I’m having a dinner party tonight. I want you to come. I’ve called Claire. She says she won’t come. I need you there, though. I need at least one of you there.’
‘You can’t do this to her.’
‘You have each other now.’
‘Stop this. Do you really think we could be together if you did this?’
‘Will you come, Ted?’ he asked. ‘I’m going to cook a beautiful meal. I want you to be there.’
‘Forget the dinner and come for a walk. Let’s catch a train somewhere. Let’s go to the Blue Mountains. I’ll phone Claire.’
‘I’ve said goodbye to her.’
At least they’d spoken, I thought. ‘She doesn’t believe you, then.’
‘No, she doesn’t believe me. Do you?’
‘Of course not.’
He put out his cigarette and tried to seem indifferent. ‘Come shopping with me for dinner, or you can go. It doesn’t matter. But you should come tonight. You should be there. I want to say goodbye, even if you won’t give me what I want. You can do that for me. You can say goodbye.’
It was a revolting idea. ‘I’m not coming to this dinner,’ I told him. ‘Claire was right to say no.’
‘You don’t think I have the right to leave?’
‘No. We love you. You only have the right to stay.’
‘I can’t tell you everything. Come to dinner. I want you to be happy, Ted. You deserve it. You’re so good. You and Claire are perfect together.’
‘No,’ I said and stood up. I left him; I couldn’t stay any longer. I left him there, and as I walked away I decided that I’d had enough, too. Of Claire, as well – of the endless, humiliating attempts to find something of myself in them. I wouldn’t go to the dinner; I wouldn’t call Claire; I wouldn’t take it seriously.
But when I got back to college, I tried straight away to reach her. She wasn’t home. A housemate said she’d gone to the farm.
‘The farm? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘She took the train last night.’
Then an afternoon that formed into tight circles, each trying to push its way out, and drawn back in. I needed to walk. I went down to the lower ovals, thinking of Claire, my mind working too hard, realising that I had to go to this dinner after all, for Claire was on the farm, and one of us had to go. It would be alright.
The evening came, the circles closing again around an obscene ceremony. I arrived at eight, saw four of them sitting in a huddle on beanbags, smoking hash, Anthony and three from art college, new friends who said they understood this moment, this act – said it was brave: it was a beautiful thing, to leave in this way, at peace. They beatified Anthony. The Anthony who had seen only beauty in Claire, and none in himself. Is that all this was, I thought: everyone needing someone they didn’t understand?
I was overwhelmed with hatred, at last. I hated him: the false intellectualism, the cannabis, the smoke in the front room; high, grey windows without curtains, and candles in the black reflection. I couldn’t stay in the living room with his friends. I went to the kitchen and tried to think of a sentence to break the whole thing, to cut the circle across its axis.
He joined me and asked what music we should put on. He’d brought out some of my opera records, and asked me to choose one.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not listening to opera,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying. I can’t stand this.’
He was too stoned to acknowledge the ugliness; he saw only emotion. ‘It’s so important to me that you came,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one I need here.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied. ‘You’d stop this if you needed me.’
‘I love you, Ted. Come and join the others.’
‘No.’
‘We’ll eat soon. I’ve nearly finished cooking.’
‘Where’s Jens?’
‘He’s in New Zealand. I haven’t told him. I didn’t think it would be fair.’
‘Nothing about this is fair,’ I said.
‘Go and sit down.’ Anthony smiled, told me to relax and have a good time – that’s all he wanted now, for all of us to enjoy our last night together. He said he was happy, finally happy.
‘No.’ I sat down at the kitchen bench and waited, watched him cook, his back to me. It was all a performance, one of his Gothic masks. ‘Don’t do this,’ I said. ‘Don’t even act it.’
He came over to me and held me. ‘Kindness, Ted. That’s what you don’t see, but I do. It’s all that matters, all that I care about now. I’ve been waiting and now I can go. This isn’t a sad night.’
‘This is what you call beauty?’
‘Now that you’re here.’
In that case, I wanted to make it ugly; force the scars into the room before they were glamorised by reflection and thought. Leave. I wouldn’t stay. ‘This is awful. Do you think this is any way to treat us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You want to leave with everything.’
‘No.’
‘Fuck you.’
And then finally a column of clean air in the smoke. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘It wasn’t right to ask you to come.’
I told him I was leaving. He took my hand, led me into his bedroom.
‘Kiss me,’ he said. ‘Kiss me once, properly.’
I kissed him on the lips. ‘That was a brother’s kiss,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take it. Go home, Ted. I want to go to bed. I feel stupid.’
He tried to stand up, steady himself, but he fell back onto the bed. I moved closer to him, leant over him. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’ His hands were on my face and he laughed. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ He fixed his eyes on me and said it again: ‘I promise. Really. You can go. I know how much you hate them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank God you came.’
‘I hate the way they encourage you.’
He laughed again. ‘I’ll get new ones. I’m sick of them.’
‘And remember your old ones.’ I held him and said, ‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes. I promise. I promise. I’m better. You have to go. I’m so tired.’
I stepped outside with the feeling I was filming myself walking home. It was dark and raining, most of the orange lamplight held in the wet streets. If I observed the scene from far enough away, I could be convinced by what he’d said; it was all nothing more than another melodrama, another letter from Anthony, another poem. Performance. As I reached the end of Glebe Point Road, I thought that he was mainly just cruel, and that I couldn’t bear his cruelty any longer.
But the side of me that watched the film also saw something truer. I saw it, didn’t I? Through the disbelief and anger, still it was there. He wanted to go and I wasn’t stopping him.
The group stayed up until two, apparently, I suppose only for another couple of hours after I left. It seems they still spoke openly about what Anthony had planned, but now they wanted him to stop. A debate: leaving was beautiful, but was it too hurtful to those who loved him? Yes, he’d changed his mind. All he felt now was tiredness. He wanted his own bed. They could go. That was between one and two, or around the same time I fell asleep. They were sure they’d talked him out of it, that life had claimed him, not death. They wanted to go out, to dance, and so they left him on his own.
I woke just before five, and knew. The sky and sea had merged and fallen apart again, the last circle of night when the horizon forms again. I knew. Anthony was dead; my mother was
dead: the same idea that belonged only in silence, behind the spoken. You’re too late. The weakness in the legs, in the steps I took to close the circle, from college to Glebe Point Road, past the boarded-up grocers, the café with its grille pulled down.
The front door was unlocked. I ran inside, down the hall to his bedroom, and found him lying on his back. He’d taken pills and cut his wrists. A thick red stain on the sheet, on either side of his body, and red drops on the grey floorboards. Blood in pencil lines along the gaps in the timbers. His eyes were closed. I kissed him, and wished there was less beauty in the world, less art. I sat with him, and asked my mother to take care of him. I asked him to forgive me.
21
Anthony died on 12 November, a month before my twenty-second birthday. I rang Dad, and told him that I’d spent the day at the hospital and the police station, and then caught the bus back to college.
‘Come home,’ he said. ‘The funeral will be here, I’m sure.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you called Claire?’
I said I’d phoned her first, from the hospital. ‘She wouldn’t come to the phone. Her dad answered.’
‘She’d guessed?’
‘Yes. I got the feeling from Nikolas that she guessed as soon as I rang.’
Dad said again it was time for me to come home. I shouldn’t stay in Sydney. He’d come and get me.
‘I want to stay with him,’ I replied.
I said I’d catch the train the next day, but in the morning Dad called to say he was waiting for me downstairs. I found him in the dining hall. I didn’t cry, not then, but as soon as I saw him I put my head against his shoulder. I wanted that part of him, the perfect hollow that belonged to me, and was there even when Claire and Anthony were gone. The sense of him being with me.
‘I was worried you might stay,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t help to be here any longer.’
‘I’ve got one more exam.’
‘I’ve talked to Andrews. He says you’ve done enough for a pass. Take the pass and come home with me. We’ll leave after you’ve had something to eat.’
It occurred to me that Dad had been driving all night. ‘Aren’t you tired?’
‘I had a good run down.’
We left the college and walked out into the low sky of a Sydney morning, watched how it reached down and joined the traffic up George Street, insisted on another start.
But by evening, when we reached Lion’s Head, the sky remained blurred by that reluctant haze in the last hours by the beach. Claire phoned to say she wouldn’t come to the funeral. She couldn’t.
Nor did Anthony’s father come. His mother was there, and twenty others. Only two went up to the coffin, Eric and my father. I found I couldn’t manage it, but Dad said he’d place my copy of the Dickinson inside. He asked, ‘Is there anything you want me to say to him?’
You had no right to go. You have destroyed us both. Claire hasn’t come, did you expect that she would? She won’t say goodbye. What have you found, something better?
‘Say that we love him,’ I replied.
When we got home, Dad asked me to join him for a drink in the study. It was a long time since the two of us had sat there, but all the same I half-expected him to start work, as he used to. I would have been happy with that, to sip on a tea with a splash of scotch and watch him at his desk, listen to the odd remark he wanted to make about a case, one that at last he could expect me to understand.
He took his familiar place at the desk by the window, but instead of working, he turned to me and said, ‘I think we should visit Claire tomorrow.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘If she wanted to see me, she would have come.’
‘I don’t think that’s it. My guess is that she wanted to see you, but she couldn’t stand to go to the funeral.’
‘She should’ve come.’
‘Why don’t we drive up to the farm in the morning.’
I agreed, but in the glowing morning I left the house early, and walked along the beach towards Nambucca, all the way to the estuary. It was an uninterrupted horizon of sand, and then the water as reflection alone, without depth. I thought about how good it would be not to have to turn around. There was something in that thought that I understood about Anthony, but not enough to pierce the reflection, the strangeness that shone on the surface.
Tears came. It was the first time I’d cried since I was a child, and started as a choked coughing, as though I were out of practice. I looked away from the sea, so that an empty beach might witness it, the way the shock insisted on a display. And then I stopped and stood at the water’s edge, and for a moment felt as though I was stopping everything. That it was possible. There was an origin point here, at the shoreline, that could always be returned to as a finality.
I walked back to the house, my thoughts cleared by the false solace of tears and blue water. Happiness came, an odd pleasure that lay at the beginning of grief. The energy given to the ones left to mourn. I wondered if Claire would feel it, too. Would she admit to some relief?
The following day I rang her and said goodbye for a second time, and for a second time I offered to leave her be, my strange way of asking her to come to me, to help me through this. Dad overheard the conversation, and later that afternoon said he was willing to send me to Denmark for a year, to join Jens in the course there, the one we knew would be a waste of time, and what I needed most.
On the phone, I asked Claire if she needed that sort of time. She answered, ‘Maybe that’s best. Maybe it’s best if you go away. I think it’ll help you.’
22
Jens had returned to Copenhagen a couple of weeks ahead of me, leaving New Zealand and stopping just long enough in Sydney to close the house. He met me at the airport and drove me into town. It was mid-January – when Christmas had been and gone, and days were merely a pulse of white light between nine and three. But in the shop windows and the cafés, in the lanes between the long mall and its parallel streets of locked-up bikes and painted rails, there was also companionable warmth.
Jens and I would be taking the same postgraduate course in international law. ‘Our first class is tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t worry about being late. Sources of international law. We’ll spend the day learning that there aren’t any.’
It was two months since Anthony’s funeral, but I hadn’t seen Jens since before the dinner party. ‘I didn’t think you’d ever leave Sydney,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because of Claire. Have you seen her?’
‘No. She went back to the farm. I think she’ll be there for a while.’
‘You visited her there?’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t seen her?’
‘No.’
‘Welcome to Denmark, then,’ he said. ‘You should be fine. This is the one part of the world where we deal with suicide as badly as you have.’
‘Is that it, then?’ I said. ‘Is that your line on me?’
He took a hand off the steering wheel and gripped my arm. ‘I’m your friend.’
‘Yes.’
I didn’t want to talk. He went on, ‘I’m trying to be funny. It’s because I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’m not sure what I’m doing here,’ I replied.
‘We’ll find out, then.’
In Sydney, Jens had seemed too assured for us, or for the group he’d chosen. In Copenhagen, however, he seemed perfectly adapted to the narrow streets, the sweep of girls on bikes, slow drinkers outside, bright windows and white shops. He had the Scandinavian way of being odd while also clearly belonging to the establishment. But he insisted he was a radical. Sometimes, he swore he wanted the whole machine brought down. But in all other ways – maybe even in this way – he was being deeply social. When he said the types of things Anthony had said,
it was merely disarming, as though he were complimenting the machine by saying it needed destroying.
He was putting on weight, and it suited him. Most days, he seemed to drink only coffee until lunch and then beer until midnight. I never saw him drink anything else, never water. His hair was growing with him, and got redder as it got longer and saw less of the sun.
For the first time, I liked him completely and unguardedly. If in Sydney I’d befriended him for Anthony’s sake, now I wanted more than anything to be around someone who was Anthony’s opposite – someone less vulnerable, and yet less impenetrable. I was quite sure this covered Jens, even if, like Anthony, he wore his opinions loudly. He’d joined the Socialist Party, and each week we met and smoked a great deal of pot and cigarettes, and organised demonstrations. And they ran an English-language reading group. That year, Jens said, we’d cover Dante, Wordsworth and Ibsen. At the end of the year, we’d probably return to Dante.
Fine. I thought I was probably a socialist, too. I had learnt about art from Anthony’s friends, and perhaps I could learn about politics from Jens’s. I loved the authors that were being covered. Perhaps, as Jens argued, they were radical authors, proto-socialists. So I nodded when Jens and the others said that everything was political. At my request, as a tangent we read Ich und Du, a German philosophical work that I’d met through Anthony’s and Dad’s reading about Dag Hammarskjöld, who’d been translating the text into Swedish at the time of his death. It was about understanding God through the meetings we have with the people around us, and had influenced some of Hammarskjöld’s thinking about God and political interventions.
The day after the reading group, Jens was impatient to tell me what he really thought of the text. ‘Some people are waiting for God to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Here it is. Here’s what I want you to give your life for. From now on, you can leave yourself and your desires behind. You now have the shield of duty.” Do you see what a privileged view that is? Not everyone gets that tap on the shoulder. God leaves a hell of a lot of people alone. What are they supposed to do?’
The Ash Burner Page 13