The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  The Italian waiters were kind-hearted and aloof. They seemed to sense it when someone needed to waste an evening, and left me to sit on my own against a back wall decorated with pictures of Portofino. Without thinking, I began a sketch of Claire. I didn’t often draw, but now I was reproducing the way she’d stood in my room at Lion’s Head, with her right arm over her head, held there with her left hand. Her face was turned away, turned into the arm. Her thick hair, the musculature of her arms, and her ribs raised against her torso – it was Claire of lines and distance. When I drew her like that, I liked the classical pose, and saw that it suited her. A pose like that could be unfinished, just as her sketches were.

  At nine, I walked back towards the train station, and tried to organise the remaining hours into tasks and activities – find the platform, perhaps a coffee, read and finish the notes that I’d started earlier in the day – but I knew that I was in for a wait of cold boredom. I didn’t think about either Anthony or Claire, but only the promise of sleep after I was allowed to board at eleven-thirty.

  I woke in the upper bunk of the sleeper at eight. I had slept without moving, a dreamless night. I could remember getting on board, but not falling asleep, nor the train leaving the station. I was completely alone in a six-berth cabin: other passengers might have come and gone, but I had no memory of them, either.

  My eyes adjusted to the faint light inside, and I lay still, waiting. An outline of silver bordered the curtains of the cabin window. I reached across from my bunk and drew the curtain towards me. The light inside barely changed: all that happened was that the faintness inside became part of a longer view that moved out. I stepped down to the lower bunk and sat facing the view. We’d entered the last valleys as they reached down to the fjords. A thick frost had settled over the farms and home fields, but also into the light on the conifers: the light was as white as snow.

  And that’s how that morning remains with me: the impossible perfection of the light that merged inside to out; the disappearance and dissolution the movement seemed to contain. And, strangely, how at the same time it insisted on the soul – the sense that at any moment the world could be illuminated for the singular observer, for us on our own. I was twelve again, young enough to swim and search for my mother, still unknowing in the way that mattered. I was in hospital, watching the light on the wooden window frame. I was talking to Claire that afternoon shortly after we’d first met, when she asked if I felt my mother was still with us.

  As we reached the fjords, the light yellowed. In my journal, I worried that it was all delusion, an echo of what I’d lost, a search for beauty. But behind the caution remained the more urgent feeling, about how we found the ones we love, even after they seemed to be gone. Was it absurd and sentimental, I wrote, to think that the answer lay in the light?

  I wrote down the answer that came to me, as we pulled into Trondheim. I’d left Anthony for my own sake, when I should have stayed for him. The horrible truth was that I’d needed to be clear of him, of the responsibility of his love. And now I felt him coming back, in the light between the window and the world outside. What surprised me most was that I welcomed him.

  24

  I fell out of the Scandinavian autumn into a Sydney spring, and into all the openness and abundance of the harbour when it starts to warm. Dad met me at the airport. He stood in a brown jacket, reading the newspaper. He didn’t people-watch, not even at the airport, and he tended to look uncomfortable in a crowd, for others noticed him. But seeing him there, before he saw me, I felt such pride in his good looks and self-possession. You sensed he could have stood there all day, holding a place in the world as long as it allowed him to stand still and read.

  We went by taxi to Glebe Point Road. ‘Can you bear it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think it’d be a good idea for you to be here in Glebe today. Otherwise, it’ll get bigger and bigger and you won’t want to come back.’

  A city of total openness, and yet a couple of suburbs back from the harbour also a city crumbling. Dad’s favourite hotel was betraying its age. In the years since we’d first come to Sydney together, the rooms hadn’t changed at all. They got older, that’s all; the paint faded wherever people usually rested their hands, dropped their bags.

  I switched on a light and the room revealed its tiredness, and then seemingly my own. And just as suddenly, when Dad left me to sleep off the flight, I was back in Anthony’s place and knocking over the furniture to get to him. Lifting his hands from the sheets, crying because life and death were real. And the half-step of a foreign clock said: Sleep. You’re jetlagged. Told me to let it disappear in the time difference and face it better when I woke up on Sydney time.

  But the room revealed normality, too. In the time it took to unpack a bag, the world I thought I’d left forever, that couldn’t be reclaimed, was familiar. I was inside it again. The body didn’t forget the habits that had once constituted its place in Sydney, and the mind gradually caught up. I spent the morning in a coffee shop writing – I would keep going with the journal now that I’d started one. And then I walked to the university library, suspended above a future that my father was negotiating on my behalf. I took up a desk, loaded it with books on international law, and for the sake of familiarity resumed the persona of a student. Perhaps I’d leave for Denmark again.

  It was a pretence that could last only so long. During our dinners, Dad said he’d mentioned me to people that he’d met with during the day. I was reminded again of how fondly others viewed him – how they wanted him in their lives. As in Lion’s Head, they crowded around him at the first chance he gave to let them help.

  In the end, I was offered a clerkship at a commercial firm that occupied two floors of a building on George Street. I knew what it meant. I would accept the favour, and spend the next thirty years accumulating the wealth I’d once promised to spend on Anthony and Claire. I didn’t need the money anymore, but I accepted the job just as happily as if I did. I’d be busy; that was important. And I accepted my father’s advice: he said you regained your confidence through work, if never entirely your old self. What had Jens said? Not everyone got the tap on the shoulder. Not everyone sacrificed themselves for a cause, because not everybody’s sacrifice was needed.

  It was sorted in a week. By the end of that period of worldly excitement, and with Dad gone home, I wanted only to know where Claire was. Though I had no real thoughts of contacting her. Or, rather, I’d come back with strong ideas about not contacting her. I didn’t want to know how she was; that was something I couldn’t hear yet. Perhaps she’d be with someone else by now. I didn’t look up any of my friends, either. But I expected to run into them one day, and maybe they would tell me that Claire was married. One day she would figure that life went on in one form or another, and that in one form or another you eventually gave someone your remaining self. It would be her acquiescence, just as a job in commercial law was mine.

  Every afternoon it was the same: I left the office and caught the bus to my new share-house in Newtown, past the house where she had lived. Until one night, I rang Dad to ask if he knew where she was living.

  ‘Has she moved back to Sydney?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she’s been on the farm since you left. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No. We didn’t write while I was away.’

  ‘Then she’s still there.’ I was going to hang up, but Dad kept me. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you rang. Anthony’s father has been in touch. He says there are some paintings – a bundle of them – that Anthony left for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Possibly Claire, too. He didn’t want to speak for long, and nor did I. He’s going to drop them around.’

  ‘I’ll come up on the weekend,’ I said.

  ‘And Ted …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s somethin
g else to talk about.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Is everything alright?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when you’re here.’

  ‘Can I bring Claire? If she’ll come.’

  I decided not to call her first. I thought it would make us both more nervous to have our reunion announced ahead. I caught the train to Lion’s Head, and borrowed Dad’s car for the drive to the farm. The road left the coast: the first rise followed around to the back of a range that blocked the views down to the sea, and replaced them with a scrub face punctuated by narrow driveways. When you came down on the other side it was all valleys tipping into creek beds, a landscape that gradually slumped into its trickle of brown water and blocks of silver reflection. Most of the farms in the area were still used for cattle, but here and there were orchards like the ones Claire’s parents had started.

  Another hour passed, and the road narrowed to a single-lane track. After two or three kilometres along it I felt lost, or rather I felt so far from the sea that the road seemed to be performing a kind of disappearance. On both sides, small tracks returned deeper into the bush, and I would’ve got lost if I had to find a side road. But the track ended at Claire’s farm, and with the thought that I didn’t know anything about how Claire had filled in the months between Anthony’s death and that late afternoon. It was almost exactly a year.

  And then – my first sight of her told me that she had been waiting, here, since I left. She walked around the side of the farmhouse just as I spoke to her father, who had let me go after a tight hug. She ran to me, and with her I felt again the complete, enclosed world of a wave. For the body remembered it, and how she tied me to the world.

  ‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘Don’t go away again. Now you’re back.’

  25

  ‘Come inside, Ted,’ said Nikolas. ‘You’ll stay?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, I’ll check with Dad. I’ve got his car.’

  ‘You should have brought him, as well,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen a lot of him the past year. We know about Copenhagen and your adventures with Jens.’

  ‘From Dad?’

  Claire turned to her father. ‘Dad’s been helping him with his vegetable garden. We think it’s finally getting there. Oh, and the beach wall.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ I said.

  ‘You were busy with your studies,’ said Nikolas.

  ‘I mean, he didn’t tell me after I got back.’

  As we walked inside, Claire asked, ‘How long have you been home?’

  ‘A few weeks,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken this long to come up. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see me.’

  I rang Dad to tell him I was spending the night at the farm. Christina put me in the spare room, and for an hour after dinner I lay awake, hopeful that Claire might visit. She didn’t come, and the following morning we drove back along the long dirt road down to the highway and out to Lion’s Head.

  ‘It’s good to see the ocean,’ said Claire. ‘I want to go for a swim later. I haven’t been out of the valley for a few weeks.’

  ‘And you haven’t been back to Sydney?’

  ‘No, Dad went to get my things for me. I’m not sure I ever want to go back.’

  ‘That might change,’ I answered. We were going north along the highway, and as always the traffic in the opposite direction was thicker. It was like driving beside a stationary train that was heading the other way. ‘Your work might take you there.’

  ‘I like life on the farm. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it until I went back. I mean, went back properly – for longer than just a visit.’

  ‘What about your painting?’

  ‘I’m not too worried about that anymore. I prefer this.’ She was gazing at the view, opening across to Lion’s Head and the water.

  ‘But drawing is what you do.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘You’re wrong. I don’t care if I never paint again.’

  When we got to the house, Dad brought out the paintings – there was a bundle and a roll of them – and set them on the floor of my old bedroom. He left us to go through them together. I wondered whether Anthony had imagined how Claire and I would open the roll like this, sitting on the end of the bed where I once watched these paintings come to life. If so, I wanted to tell him that his death had created two ghosts, one for each of us to look out for, separately.

  The paintings, it was obvious, hadn’t been disturbed since his death. I undid the bundle, and as quickly felt like the witness again – for the conversation was between Anthony and Claire. I waited to see if she would leave. She was crying. I put the bundle back on the floor, and spread open the roll. The bigger pictures were familiar: self-portraits and paintings of Claire. But what caught our attention first was a smaller roll that slid out of the larger one. It was bound separately by its own piece of string.

  The sheets were thick – watercolour paper that Anthony had used for pen and pencil sketches. In the top drawing, he’d traced the subjects in pencil, and then gone over the outlines in dark ink, a technique that created a sense of the figures in relief, and one that Claire had often used.

  ‘He’s copied your style in these,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because it’s us,’ she replied.

  I hadn’t seen it. The first drawing could have been of any two people sitting next to one another, talking. But as we leafed slowly through the others, I saw that she was right. They were sketches that Anthony had made of Claire and me at those times when he’d sat a little apart from us in order to draw on his own.

  ‘What is he saying with these?’ I asked myself aloud.

  ‘He isn’t saying anything,’ Claire said. ‘That’s why they’re so lovely.’

  Half or so had been drawn at Lion’s Head – on the beach at the front of our house – but the last ones were all done in Sydney. There was a sketch of Claire sitting on a bench outside the state gallery; you could make out the main building and a sweep of driveway to the side. And another was of the two of us surrounded by the eclectic shrubbery of the botanic gardens.

  I smiled. ‘You’ll like them because they’re so like yours.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘And I like them because it shows what he noticed about us. I used to think he never saw us properly. It wasn’t his fault. He was too caught up in everything else.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why he left these. To show us.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I don’t want to know why he left them.’

  We walked down to the beach. ‘Are you still afraid of swimming?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably. It’s so long since I’ve tried, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Would you mind if I went in?’

  She stood at the end of a beach towel and unwrapped her skirt. She was wearing a yellow bikini. She stood with her hands on her waist, her stomach pressed out a little. I remembered undressing her, the car lights. Lifting her shirt over raised arms.

  ‘You didn’t think you could write to me?’ I said.

  ‘Not yet. You left, remember.’

  She knelt down and folded her clothes on the towel. Her face was close. ‘Come in with me,’ she said. ‘The water looks beautiful.’

  ‘I’d rather wait for you here.’ I was watching her in her bikini.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

  ‘I like you in it. It’s very yellow.’

  She walked slowly to the shoreline, almost on her toes. Was that how she usually walked on sand? I couldn’t remember. She was straightening her legs for me. When the water reached her waist, she raised her hands and called out, ‘It’s lovely!’

  ‘I love you,’ I called back.

  Then she dived in. Into the split world of water and sky, while I watched and waited for her to come back.

  ‘You should’ve come in,’ she said after, a little breathless, as she
rested on her elbows. I was lying with my head on my arm. The salt water dripped from her face onto mine. I held her hand again, but in a fraction of a moment she drew back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  What for, I wondered? For pulling away, or for me and the mistake I’d made? I said, ‘I don’t blame you if you don’t want to see me. You don’t owe me anything.’

  ‘I never thought I owed you anything.’ She still wore an open expression. ‘Do you think you could stop offering to leave me?’ I wanted to kiss her, reach for her hand again. As if she sensed it, she sat up. ‘The water’s beautiful,’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s not the water,’ I snapped. ‘I don’t need you to tell me what the water’s like.’

  ‘No.’

  Claire waited for me to explain; I was thinking about how quickly and quietly she’d moved away. Then she stood. ‘I’m going home. Will your dad drive me?’

  She started up the dune. ‘Don’t come now,’ she said. For the first time I could remember, I heard sarcasm in her voice. ‘Phone me when you get back to Sydney. Phone me and tell me how much you care.’

  26

  Dad held his hands together. I noticed the patience that was in them, and remembered how I’d once fancied that they showed the fishing boats coming into Whitby at the end of the day; the way that generation after generation had waited for the right weather, for news of those at sea, for prices and economies that never got any better. These were things he’d prepared me for on the few occasions we sat together and talked about Whitby, and the times we talked about my mother. During those boyhood conversations, I felt the sheets of coastal rain; the endless opera weather, as he later came to call it. The smell of wet tobacco. The water’s edge, and a photograph taken of us, with my mother’s arm around my waist. All this seemed contained by his hands and the way, sometimes, that he’d rub them together and release the dust of all those secret places.