The Ash Burner

by Kári Gíslason

  ‘Before I met Isabel, Bell, I hadn’t known that you could meet yourself, if you understand me. Or that there was such a thing as a complete meeting of souls. I know I never felt it with a man, and I haven’t felt it since. I was at home when I was with her.

  ‘We talked about this quite openly, she and I. She felt the same way. It’s the reason she left you in my care; I suppose it was also the reason that, in a way, I sided with her against your father. He was wrong and of course he knows it – he knew it.’

  ‘They fought?’

  ‘Yes, they fought and she left. It was a terrible thing for her to do.’

  ‘And then we left, for Australia?’

  ‘Yes. When your father took you away, he asked me to come with you. You and I had grown very close. Bell left when you were three – I took care of you for almost a year. You were starting to see me as your mother. I loved being close to you, but I didn’t want that. It wasn’t fair on Bell. So I said no. We didn’t know where she was, but I told him she’d come back. I stuck by her, Ted, and you must as well. You have to stick by them both. When Isabel died, I only wanted to be alone. I decided that talking about her was impossible, and it’s been impossible ever since. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d lost my dearest friend. But I’ve always wanted to tell you.’

  She pressed on. ‘I came to visit you in Lion’s Head to tell you, tell you what a good friend your mother was. I wanted you to know the truth. He wouldn’t let me speak about it. He thought it would hurt you too much.’

  I felt an urge to turn the television on, flush out the two ghosts around us with a soap opera. I said, ‘You did the right thing by staying. You stayed here for her.’

  And then I couldn’t resist asking. ‘What did they fight over?’

  ‘Your father could be possessive. You wouldn’t know that.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t sound like him at all.’

  ‘He was different with Bell. He wasn’t quite himself. He needed her so strongly. And she wasn’t to be owned in that way. Isabel was a strong woman.’

  ‘But why leave? Was that a reason to leave us?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m sure she was always coming back.’

  I reached for my bag and an envelope. ‘I brought a photo with me, of me and my mother, one that my father took when we lived here.’ I drew the A4 print out of the bag. ‘This is a copy of a picture he gave to me when I was young.’

  I handed it to her.

  ‘No,’ she said. She held the picture for a moment longer, and then gave it back to me. She was angry about something. ‘What did you expect to find here? Did you know that you’d have to deal with all this?’

  ‘I knew there was more.’

  ‘Are you glad you came?’

  ‘Yes, I need to know. It’s all come very late, probably too late.’

  The television turned itself on. ‘Damn thing,’ Lillie said. ‘Or is it me leaning against the remote?’ She searched for the controls in the blanket. ‘When did you get that picture?’ she asked.

  ‘I was twelve or thirteen. Dad showed it to me, just after the accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t taken by your father. It was taken by a friend of Isabel’s. I remember the day. Your father went in to get tea, something for us to have by the water, and left them together, with you and me. He took the picture.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Yes, a friend of Bell’s.’

  Angie came in with cups, as if to signal that our conversation had come to an end. ‘I sleep too much,’ Lillie said, seemingly out of nowhere. ‘There’s nothing you can do about that.’

  ‘You’ve been asleep mostly when I’ve come.’

  ‘Yes, I expect so.’ She began to stand. ‘Wait here.’ She didn’t want any help. Then she inched towards a letter-writing desk in the hallway, and stopped to examine keys that hung from a band at the back of the desk.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, actually, give me a hand. It’s a damn thing to unlock.’

  The lock resisted, and then opened. Lillie stepped in front of me, and from underneath drew out a cloth envelope beaded with buttons. From it, a photograph of my mother.

  ‘What happened between them?’ I asked again. ‘Did my father leave her because of this other man?’

  ‘No, no.’ She shook her head. ‘No, she left him. Because your father was so angry.’

  ‘Did she leave us? I mean, did she actually move house?’

  ‘That’s right. She left Whitby. She didn’t say where she was going. She wrote, but she wouldn’t say where she was living. Not even to me. Your father followed a postmark once. He was desperate to find her. She’d sent a letter from London. He went to see if he could find her there. Of course it doesn’t mean much to get a letter with a London postmark.’

  ‘Did she write to him again, when she came back?’

  ‘Possibly. She didn’t tell me. Have you looked?’

  ‘Yes, but perhaps not well enough.’ Only now did it occur to me where he might have kept her letters.

  Lillie went on, ‘He waited a year. Then he gave up. He said he couldn’t wait any longer. He gave me the house and made his plans. That’s when he moved to Australia. When the two of you moved.’

  ‘And you didn’t agree.’

  ‘I knew she’d come back. But he took it all so badly, because he knew that he’d pushed her away. And he still thought I was just taking Isabel’s side. Wouldn’t stop saying I should be coming with you. But she was my friend, Ted. I thought that things would come right. Most of all I wanted to be here when she got back. I was here. She came back for you and your father. Yes, I knew she would.’

  I walked again along the estuary wall, and returned to my room with the print and its new companion, the photograph that Lillie had given me. I looked at Mum and wondered if she really was happy that day, as I’d long thought. Pictures, as my father hinted, can lie – lit from an invisible point, captured by an invisible hand.

  I lay on the bed, and felt again the kindness of his gift that day, after he’d been angry with me for swimming out and had replaced his anger with a photograph. He’d reached for something – if not an apology, then some form of consolation that could only be found in the past, in a lost world. It still existed because it had been captured, perhaps by someone he’d seen as a rival. He showed me a photograph that part of him must have wanted to tear up, but a photograph that he knew I could love.

  And now a companion, a colour print of a young woman sitting in the same spot as that day. The estuary wall, rocks painted by rain, the water behind a silver sky of low clouds and sea birds. A last picture of her, taken by Lillie, the one who stayed for her. In her eyes, the invitation, held across the world. Meet me here.

  Meet me in the water.

  32

  I walked from the room to the water’s edge, and examined the pub signs. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. It was a summer Saturday, late afternoon now, and tourists brought a lightness to the river, warmth. The boats drifted by, and were chased by seagulls searching for movement, any sign of food. People caught your eye, and then turned back to their friends. A smile on a sunny day. A surface that shone in the river light.

  Walk, I thought. Walk until the tremor is replaced by tiredness, the satisfaction of being merged with the world – dusty, hot, not just into its glare but out of your role as witness, the latecomer.

  I needed to be a participant in something. But too soon even the souvenir shops were closing; more dogs were being walked in the last hour of the day; the restaurants bleeding soft light onto the pavements and the awnings.

  I sat and drank at a pub for an hour, at a bench on the corner of the esplanade. Then I bought a bottle of scotch from an off-licence and joined a line-up of slightly drunk people at a fish-and-chips shop. Their faces were rosy under the fluorescent bulbs. I took my fish dinner and climbed the st
eps up to the abbey, found a bench, and watched from under the wide cover of a clear night as the stars came into the world. There was a new one every few minutes.

  The food was too greasy. Or I was getting too drunk to care about eating. I couldn’t swallow. It was late, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to my room. I wondered about the length of the bench and whether I’d fit. Fuck it. Nothing bad would happen now, no Whitby mugging. Nothing stranger than going back to a room and my photographs, back to the unreality of a moment when I’d followed my father to his home and found the reason he’d left. No reason to fight it.

  I missed him. I wanted only to be back in Lion’s Head, near his ashes. I wanted to speak to Claire, tell her that in the end I’d done as he’d asked. I’d left the ashes in his study, and come for my mother on my own.

  I’m drowning, I thought. If I stay under for a moment longer I’ll stop breathing. Had I learnt that yet? That it can happen. But there was no release in drowning. There couldn’t be. I cried, as though there were release in that. Stupid tears as I leant against the bench. I collapsed, not wanting to stop myself, the lunatic sobbing on his own in the park, and there was something very calm in it.

  I looked again along the bench. Too short. But I rolled down and hung my legs over the end. A constellation of ocean lights still brighter below, all part of the reflections of pubs and shopfronts and stars. Too drunk. From the bench I rolled onto the grass, fell. I covered my face. It was ridiculous, I saw it. I stopped crying at last, and laughed. And then I fell asleep.

  I woke at first light. The scotch was gone; I thought someone had finished it for me. I checked my wallet and my watch. It was five.

  ‘My mother died after we left,’ I said out loud, hoping there might be a way for her to hear me from Lion’s Head. ‘She died of a swimming accident after we left.’

  Then you were right. She was with you all along; she was swimming with you.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  I thought you wanted me.

  ‘And you came.’

  I sat up. ‘Why did you leave for the farm? Have you ever tried to work it out?’

  I can’t work it out on my own. Is that what she would say?

  Or, Come back.

  There is always a way back. It lies in the future, I know, but much of it also lies in the past. In a hangover in Whitby, and in that summer before Anthony and Claire moved to Sydney, in how our souls had selected each other.

  I returned from Whitby. I came straight into the study and finally took out my father’s old recording of I Puritani, and there found the last letter from Mum to him. In it, she said that she was back in Whitby and that Lillie had told her we’d left only shortly before. Could she come to Lion’s Head, join us here and try to start again? He’d written a letter in reply, but kept it here with hers, unsent. I wondered if he hoped that one day I’d find them. In the end, there had been no reason to send it, but then no reason to keep it, either. It had been intercepted by the news that Mum had died.

  He’d written, Yes, come over. We’d be waiting for her here – in the end, in a letter hidden in a record sleeve, like a spot of light inside the circle of smoke. But also they were together at last, for I’d brought my mother’s ashes back to Lion’s Head, and now I put them beside his.

  I like them here with me. In love, as they loved each other. Across the dull ache of a foreign line: the waterline, the scar on the stomach. Try not to fuss with it, I still hear him say.

  Claire comes in and asks, ‘Have you been up all night?’

  ‘Yes, writing.’

  She looks outside. ‘I think I’ll go for a swim,’ she says.

  Through the pines, the sun flickers an opening. Seems to promise, as soon as you get in, you’ll be back again and the world can start.

  But first Claire asks, instead, ‘Do you want to come to bed?’

  She fetches a glass of water and follows me into the bedroom. On this side of the house, the pines that once stood over my room, deciding what light would make it, have only grown higher and thicker, and now block the morning sun more completely. I feel Claire’s hand against the small of my back, touching me.

  ‘Turn around,’ she says. Her hand finds mine. She kisses me and pushes me onto the bed. We seem to fall asleep straight away. And then, ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you were.’

  I’m facing away. She puts her arm around me. ‘Do you want to talk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I love you?’ she asks. ‘Are you going to say that?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘You want me to tell you something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go for a swim.’

  ‘When will you start painting again?’ I ask in return.

  Claire takes her hand away, rolls onto her back. ‘When I’ve got time.’

  I start to laugh, but I want her to think about it. ‘We could set up a studio.’

  ‘I don’t need a studio. My paintings aren’t big enough for a studio.’

  ‘But a separate area.’

  Small branches break onto the roof. ‘How did you ever sleep? It’s such a noisy house.’

  ‘I didn’t want to. I used to get angry with myself in the mornings when I woke up and realised that I’d fallen asleep. I’d lie here trying not to drop off, and the next thing I knew it was morning and Dad was in the kitchen making coffee. Humming. That was the first thing I heard, him humming. I never noticed that the house was noisy. And then I’d decide that the next night I was going to stay up after him, and beat him to the kitchen in the morning.’

  ‘Did you manage it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You stayed up last night.’

  She rolls back to face me, and I feel her breath, and a reminder of wine on it. ‘Let’s go down to the beach,’ she suggests, as she sits up. I reach for her waist. But she resists, and puts on a singlet. ‘Put your shorts on,’ she says, and stands up and walks towards the window.

  ‘Is it open?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The trees were much lower. You’d get the moon. Even at night I could see across the road.’

  I join her by the window. There’s blue morning light over the yard. I put one leg out of the window, and feel for the folded metal over the wooden stump. Then I jump down backwards onto wet grass.

  ‘I’m out!’ I whisper, although there’s no reason to be quiet. ‘Come down.’

  We cross the yard and then the dirt road, and stop for a moment on the other side. Then Claire runs up the beach path, laughing. ‘You can sit and watch if you want,’ she tells me.

  She glances back over her shoulder, and the sun does its contracted work, and convinces me that, in all things, time is nothing, only ever a beginning. She is fourteen again, a year older than me and as impossible still, too beautiful, as perhaps she’s meant to be.

  ‘Are you going to swim?’ she asks.

  There’s only the slightest wave, less than a breath. But it’s the sea’s invitation, given as openly as before.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my sincere thanks to the University of Queensland Press. In particular, I am indebted to Madonna Duffy, Judith Lukin-Amundsen and Ian See for their support and careful editing of the manuscript. Their feedback and suggestions have greatly improved this novel, and I’m very grateful for their help and enthusiasm.

  Also by Kári Gíslason

  THE PROMISE OF ICELAND

  In 1990, at the age of seventeen, Kári Gíslason travelled to Iceland, the land of his birth, and arranged to meet his father. What he found was not what he expected.

  Born from a secret liaison between his British mother and Icelandic father, Kári moved regularly betwe
en Iceland, England and Australia. He grew up aware of who his father was, but understood his mother had promised never to reveal his father’s identity. It was a promise his father would also ask him to keep.

  A decade later, Kári made the decision to break that promise, and he contacted his half-siblings, who knew nothing of his existence. What led him to this decision and what followed makes for a heartfelt and riveting journey traversing landscapes, time and memory, of one man’s search for a sense of belonging.

  ‘Gorgeously told … a quietly moving and affecting memoir … Highly recommended.’

  Krissy Kneen, Avid Reader

  ‘[A] memorable, finely crafted book.’

  The Age

  ‘A deeply charming account of displacement, of not really knowing where you come from and how that makes it difficult to know where you belong.’

  The Sunday Mail

  ‘A powerful memoir about landscape and identity.’

  The Advertiser

  ISBN 978 0 7022 3906 9

  First published 2015 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Kári Gíslason 2015

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,

  criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior

  written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Author photograph by Nicholas Martin

  Typeset in 12/17 pt Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Epigraph and quote on p. 200 from Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld, translated into English by Leif Sjöberg and WH Auden, and published by Faber & Faber, London, 1964.