by Tony Birch
I sat down and stared at it for some time, before picking the parcel up and shaking it in order to ascertain what was inside. It responded with a dull rattle.
My grandmother, who had been in the back garden, came into the kitchen as I was holding the box to my ear and shaking it vigorously.
‘Put that down!’ she screamed at me with a sharpness that was both unexpected and, for her, uncharacteristic.
I leapt up from my chair, dropping the parcel onto the tabletop as I stood. She startled Katie as well, who looked up from her homework. Nan immediately regretted having yelled at me.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she whispered. She walked over to the table and picked up the parcel in both hands, nursing it gently as she spoke. ‘It’s just that Jack’s there, in the box. It’s his ashes. Don’t shake him too hard.’
I stepped away from the table while Katie jumped up from her chair.
Nan looked across at us both and smiled. ‘Don’t be frightened, the two of you. He can’t hurt you. Never hurt a fly when he was alive, Jack, so he’s certainly not about to do any damage now, is he?’
She looked around the kitchen before placing Jack’s ashes on the shelf above the stove. She appeared content with his new location. ‘He can stay up there while I fix tea.’
And there Jack remained, wedged between the tea caddy and a spice set that my grandmother had bought at a church fete but never got around to using.
Although we knew it was just his ashes sitting on the shelf, my grandmother’s words — ‘Jack’s in there’ — revisited us from time to time. I often thought of Jack being literally trapped in that box. As a result I could not sit in the kitchen without looking up at the box and feeling a little anxious for him, while Katie seemed to give the area above the stove a wide berth whenever she was in the kitchen.
My mother was also uncomfortable about Jack’s ashes sitting on the kitchen shelf and suggested to my grandmother that she find Jack a more permanent and suitable resting place.
‘It’s just not right, mum, in the kitchen, keeping him in the kitchen. We eat in here.’
My grandmother attempted to dismiss her complaints. ‘He ate here too, love, remember that.’
Mum would not be put off. ‘What about one of those lawn cemeteries, mum? You could have his ashes put in the ground, with a plaque on top, and a sort of vase buried in the ground to arrange flowers. There’s one out near the airport. It looks neat and tidy, more like a public park than a cemetery. Better than where dad is, with all those broken headstones and weeds, and stray cats everywhere. Even foxes. I’ve seen bloody foxes in there. That cemetery is such a miserable place. Somebody should be made to fix it up.’
My grandmother laughed at her the same way that she did with anybody whose opinion she preferred to ignore. ‘It’s a cemetery. And it’s full of dead people. It’s supposed to be miserable, love. What do you want, a fun parlour? Anyway, there is nothing wrong with where your father is, nothing.’
She looked away from my mother and turned towards Jack. ‘And Jack, he’s not doing any harm up there. Bury his ashes? You must be joking? I wanted him buried before this, but his lot wouldn’t have it. And then what did they go and do? Too miserable to pay for anything more than a postage stamp just so they could get rid of him. What a joke. He’s staying here, with us, up there on the shelf. He’s happy there.’
My grandmother left the kitchen and went into the yard. Eventually my mother got up from the table and went out after her. We could hear them talking under the peach tree. I sat at the table looking up at the shelf above the stove wondering if Jack was happy to be parked next to the tea caddy.
For the remaining years she lived in that house Jack’s ashes rarely moved from their home on my grandmother’s kitchen shelf. Occasionally she would take everything down for a dusting, but Jack would be gently eased back into his place once the cleaning was over. She sometimes spoke about purchasing a more appropriate container for his ashes and even had a brochure from a funeral company mailed to her. It displayed an array of urns, both ornate and austere. But she never got around to doing anything more than leaving him where he was.
But Jack was not neglected up there, above the stove. In addition to talking more openly about her relationship with Jack, my grandmother spoke more and more to Jack after his death, and less to those around her.
Although my grandmother missed Jack, she found her own way of holding on to him. While we were at the table of a night, eating tea, or if she was at the sink doing the vegetables, she was more interested in talking to Jack than she was in having a conversation with any of us.
‘They knocked over Moriarty’s today, Jack. Didn’t even bother to strip the place. Lead, copper, the lot, all gone.’
Or she would be doing the dishes after we had finished eating. ‘Ran into Solly today,’ she would inform Jack. ‘He hasn’t worked for six months. The hip’s gone, getting up and down, up and down from the truck all day. Needs an operation, he says. Can’t afford the time off. There’s no one to drive the truck for him.’
She would then look up at the fading brown parcel and pause for a moment as if waiting for, or perhaps listening to, Jack’s reply.
We were happy enough to go along with her one-way conversations. As she got older I imagined her relationship with Jack to be amusingly eccentric and possibly evidence of mild and harmless dementia as her memory faded.
I sat at the table with her one night as she announced the midweek race results to Jack. I patronisingly asked her what he had to say in reply.
She looked at me with the clearest understanding that I was trying to make fun of her.
‘What are you on about, Michael? What do you mean, what does he say?’
I immediately realised that I had asked the wrong question, but mistakenly assumed that this was the result of her feeling embarrassed, possibly about hearing voices.
‘Doesn’t matter, Nan.’
‘Oh yes, it matters, Michael. What do you mean, what’s Jack saying?’
I stumbled for the words that might get me out of my predicament. ‘Jack … um … Jack.’ I pointed to him. ‘What does Jack say, you know … you know… when you … ah … talk?’
‘Talk?’ She pointed at me and began to laugh, almost hysterically. ‘Talk! Don’t be silly, love. Jack’s dead. Dead as a doornail. He doesn’t talk to anyone. I talk to him. I miss him, so I talk to him. That’s all. He doesn’t talk back. I wish he did. But he can’t.’
She sat back in her chair and laughed quietly to herself.
I had managed to stay at high school in the time that we were at Nan’s largely, I have since come to realise, as a result of the support I received from Jack. I finished school and got a job as a copy boy on a city newspaper not long after he died. I also moved into his bungalow, inheriting his extensive library, which I began to read from, sometimes discovering notes that Jack had written to himself in response to what he had read.
In the years after Jack’s death my grandmother also visited Liam’s grave a little less. She continued to tend his garden, but she no longer visited weekly. She still spoke of him to Katie and me, reminding us occasionally that we had come from him, ‘your blood, your own blood’. But with Jack also dead she seemed to balance her own memories in favour of him.
When my grandmother was diagnosed with kidney disease some years later and realised that she had little time to live, she retreated into a world of silence, choosing to speak with nobody, not even Jack. Each of us had gradually left her Canning Street house — first me, then Katie, and finally mum, who sought a life of her own for the first time.
And then my grandmother left. She moved into a small flat around the corner from the house. And of course she took Jack with her, debating with herself for hours about where to locate him, before deciding on a shelf next to the few of his books that she had not
passed on to me.
She was admitted to hospital in the weeks before she died. She was in a great deal of pain. The painkillers she took rendered her incoherent for much of the time, although she knew enough of what was going on around her to ask a request of me.
I had been sitting in an armchair next to her bed as she slept. I was watching the evidence of my grandmother’s now-tenuous hold on life show up in the regular blips and bouncing arcs of the electronic heart monitor parked alongside her bed.
She lifted herself from the pillow and called to me.
‘Love … love.’
I moved towards the bed.
‘Jack’s ashes. You know where they are?’
Of course I did. I thought that maybe she was going to ask me to go over to her flat and bring Jack into the hospital so that they could be together.
‘When this is all over, when I go, you let Jack rest in there with us. Put his ashes in there with us, with me and Liam. Please. In with us. In the ground.’
On the day of my grandmother’s funeral the sun was shining over Melbourne General Cemetery. I watched as her coffin was eased into the ground, to where my grandfather’s resting bones had been waiting patiently for her for so many years.
I stayed behind with Katie as family and friends left the cemetery. Just before the gravediggers and their shovels went to work, I unwrapped the aged parcel that had surrounded the sealed metal container housing Jack’s ashes. The brown-paper wrapping disintegrated in my hands. I unscrewed the lid from the container. Katie cupped her hands together as I poured some of the ashes into them.
‘He feels just as soft as ever.’ She laughed nervously.
We leaned forward together, over the open grave. The gravediggers watched on curiously as I tipped the container forward, while Katie opened her hands. We listened to the sound made by Jack’s ashes as they rained down gently and tapped on the lid of my grandmother’s coffin.
Redemption
I visit the cemetery regularly, every few months or so, to tend the garden about the grave of my grandparents. I find the cemetery a peaceful place to be. Sometimes I come just to sit.
My two young daughters often accompany me. They enjoy the cemetery. We park in the street at the northern end. As we walk in through the narrow gate and pass the hand-painted sign reminding us that the cemetery closes at 5 p.m., I habitually look across to the city skyline that forms a backdrop to this city of the dead. The skyscrapers align themselves with the monumental tombstones, columns and obelisks marking the more salubrious places of rest.
My daughters have their own favourite grave sites that they visit. As we pass Michael Dawson, a man from Kildare, who died in 1875, they look up at the imposing figure of his guardian angel Gabriel holding sentry over the grave, with a massive stone sword in hand. They pay their greetings to Gabriel before moving on to the cave, their cave, a grotto commemorating, ‘In evergreen memory’, Elvis Aaron Presley.
As I weed and water they run from gravestone to gravestone, between the laneways and burial plots, reading the names of those who lie in the ground just below their feet. Occasionally they stop and peer into the ghostly images of the dead, the photographs mounted on the black marble headstones in the Italian section of the cemetery. They run their fingertips across the gold-lettered inscriptions recording both the expanse and fleeting moments of a life.
As we walk from the cemetery they always ask a series of curious questions.
‘Daddy, all of these dead people here, how many of them are there?’
‘Do they sleep here, dad?’
‘Do they get wet and cold when it rains?’
We walk alongside the wrought-iron fence on our way back to the car. They pick up decaying flowers that have been blown from the floral tributes by the wind and catch between the iron bars of the fence.
‘Daddy, do they talk to each other, all the people here? What do they say? The people down there in the ground together, are they lonely?’
On the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death I asked them if they would be coming with me to the cemetery, telling them that it was a ‘special day’ to be visiting. We stopped at the florist in Lygon Street. I allowed each of them to choose flowers for the grave. They went for irises, a favourite flower of Nan’s, they realised, without having to be told.
At the grave I brushed the dirt away from the low wall of the plot, and retrieved the plastic milk carton that I keep hidden in the hollow of a tree in the lane opposite the grave. The girls watered while I sat on the edge of the grave.
After they had finished with the watering they harassed me to pay another visit to Elvis before we left the cemetery. As they climbed over the grotto I looked across to the maintenance hut next to the entrance of another laneway. There I could see two workers at a table having their lunch and listening to the radio.
The girls completed their climbing game. Just as we were about to walk away I heard my name being called.
‘Michael, Michael.’
I looked around. It was one of the workers. He was wearing a flannel checked shirt, under a pair of overalls covered in grey mud and smears of yellow clay. A wide brimmed felt hat shaded his face.
He removed the hat as he walked over to me. ‘Michael. Michael, is that you?’
He looked a little older, which he was of course, but still I recognised him immediately. Maybe it was his long beak of a nose, or those taxicab ears that all his mates teased him about, or most of all those extremely long thin legs that had provided him with his distinctive nickname.
‘Scissors? Is that you, Scissors?’ And it was.
He had grown up around Fitzroy, and had been an apprentice with my father in a shoe factory after they both left school. I had known him when I was a kid, and occasionally ran into him at the football over the years. Even so, I was surprised that he recognised me so easily.
We talked briefly about the usual topics that pass between men who share a connection to those days and that place: sport.
‘I see your stuff in the papers sometimes, Michael. I tell all the blokes here, “See this young fella here, writing about the football, the boxing. Taught him everything he knows, old Scissors did.”’
He winked at me and smiled before asking after mum and Katie. When I told him that my grandmother is buried at the cemetery, he wanted to know exactly where the grave was so that he could ‘keep an eye on her — vandals, can you believe it, they’ll even vandalise a cemetery these days. No fucken respect.’
He looked down at my girls and put a hand to his mouth in a mock display of self-recrimination. He then mentioned my father. ‘You seen him lately, the old man?’
‘No, I haven’t seen him, not for some time, anyway.’
Scissors looked at me like he both understood what ‘some time’ really meant, and why it might be that I had not been in contact with him.
‘You know those Little Sisters of the Poor, over there in Fitzroy, the Indian mob? He’s got a room there. I seen him a couple of months back, checking in with Social Security. He looked pretty good. You know where it is, the Little Sisters?’
I nodded.
He gripped my shoulder with his hand. ‘Well, he’s there. Or was, anyway, when I last seen him. If you want to catch up with him, try him there. Look after yourself.’
I sat in the car, watching the entrance to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Three nuns leaving the building crossed the street in front of the car, wearing the striking uniforms I remembered from childhood: a white flowing gown and a habit edged with a series of bold royal-blue stripes.
Limited height must be a prerequisite for the Order, as I noticed that none of the three nuns was more than about five feet tall. I suddenly realised why it was they were called ‘Little Sisters’.
After they had disappeared around the corner I got out of the car
and looked over a brick wall into a garden, to a large statue of Jesus; he had a protecting arm draped around a child, who himself had a hand placed across his open heart.
I walked along the footpath to a heavy metal gate guarding an entrance to a courtyard in the foreground of the main building, a decaying nineteenth-century mansion. I looked in through the wire grille. A brick wall along one side of the yard had been decorated with a series of murals. An elderly man sat on a wooden chair in front of a large painting of a kangaroo hopping through the bush.
The old man ignored me as I rang the buzzer on the gate. Nobody arrived, so I rang it again. Still nobody. I rang a third time and listened closely. Nothing.
The old man looked as if he was about to get up from the chair and open the gate for me, but he appeared to change his mind and rested back against the wall.
I called out to him. ‘Excuse me, excuse me. Is there anyone here? Is there someone in charge here?’
He went on ignoring me. The lack of response at the gate was enough for me to give up on my attempt to locate my father. ‘I tried, at least I tried,’ I would so easily be able to convince myself later on.
I walked back to the car and opened the door, just as one of the Little Sisters who had left a few minutes earlier came back around the corner from Gertrude Street. She was swinging a set of keys at her hip. She reached the gate, put the key in the lock and opened it. I looked at the open car door and then across to the gate.
‘Excuse me. I am looking for somebody.’
After I had shown some identification and lied that I had been away for some years, working interstate before moving back to Melbourne, two of the nuns asked me to follow them to his room.
The inside of the building was austere, without decoration. Little light penetrated its maze of corridors. But I noticed that it was clean, spotlessly clean. As we walked along the corridor I felt the rapid increase of my heartbeat thumping in my chest. I looked down into the patterns of the glazed terracotta tiled floors. One of the nuns asked me a question, but I did not hear what it was because I was concentrating on attempting to calm myself. I could feel my cheeks burning and a drop of sweat running down my back, between my shoulder blades.