What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  ‘And Peter’s ashes. We can’t go home without them.’

  ‘Are they still missing?’ Conrad said. ‘How long has that been now?’

  ‘Six weeks, or seven.’

  Ruby had returned to the doorway. ‘We have two weeks to get them back,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I want them as badly as anyone. But if they’re not found, Valentin will sort it out.’

  Alex stood. ‘I need to go.’

  Ruby stepped aside to let him pass.

  ‘Alex, stay, please,’ Conrad said.

  The front door closed.

  ‘That’s what he’s been like since he’s had this girlfriend,’ she said. ‘Comes home surly and irritable, finds a reason to be provoked and leaves.’

  ‘He didn’t know about going home, did he?’

  ‘In two weeks? No, I haven’t seen him since yesterday. I already told you that.’

  The front door opened again.

  ‘Is that you, Alex?’ Conrad said, shuffling to Ruby’s side in the bedroom doorway. ‘Thank you for coming back.’

  ‘I saw that doctor from the third floor leaving our apartment the other day. Closing the door ever so quietly like he was guilty of something. He knows who I am but he wouldn’t look at me.’

  ‘Is this true?’ Conrad said.

  Ruby wiped her hands on her apron.

  Alex pointed at her. ‘Four o’clock in the afternoon, it was. And when I come in, she’s in her dressing gown.’

  Conrad’s fingers rested lightly against the frame of the bedroom door. ‘Ruby?’

  She sat at the living room table, facing the window, her back to Alex, who waited at the front door. A moment later, he left.

  ‘I never thought you’d do something like that,’ Conrad said. He saw in her face that there was no apology coming.

  RUBY

  Ruby slept under a blanket on the couch. Alex got in late. After he switched on his bedroom light, enough washed into the living room to pick her out. She pretended to be asleep while he stood three feet away, breathing as heavily as if he’d run up five flights of stairs, which he might have done. In the minute he stood there, his breathing didn’t slow. In the hours that followed she didn’t sleep.

  The next morning she helped Conrad to the toilet, arranged the bed and the pillows for his first treatment and manhandled him into place, all the talk instructional. Three pillows under his hips and one under his chest left him nose down in the bed like a plough. She’d learnt percussion from physiotherapists over her years of nursing. After a single session Conrad called it assault, but was willing to submit himself to it if there was any chance it would help clear his lungs.

  Against the mechanical rhythm of her cupped hands drumming on his back, his eyes closed, she felt ready. ‘What Alex said yesterday about Karl Wadek is true.’

  In the silence that followed, Ruby kept slapping away. With all the noise they’d made getting things ready, it was likely Alex was awake and listening through the thin walls.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Conrad eventually said.

  ‘You had cancer and were going to die. You were in that hospital, never coming home. Peter was gone, Alex was closed off from me.’ She paused a moment as her hands continued their constant rhythm against Conrad’s bare back. ‘I was alone.’

  She didn’t buy any of it. It might have been true but it wasn’t justifiable. It wasn’t right.

  ‘As long as it’s over’ was all he said.

  It unnerved her, how forgiving he seemed. She wouldn’t have been if he’d done such a thing. But he never had and never would, she was sure of that. For ten minutes her hands pock-pock-pocked against his back, in silence, until they were both exhausted. The cup of thick, browny-grey sputum Conrad produced was reason enough for his silence.

  It was only then that he had more to say. ‘It’s your secrecy I don’t like.’

  ‘They said you were going to die. You thought you were going to die,’ she said, sitting next to him on the edge of the bed. ‘I knew how wounded you’d be if I told you about it, so I thought, what’s the point?’

  ‘Please don’t say that. “I knew how wounded you’d be.” That’s self-serving bullshit.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And do you mean it started only after they told me I had cancer?’ He sat with his knees pressed together, his palms sandwiched between them. He hadn’t put on a singlet or a shirt.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was after you went to hospital, but before they said you had cancer.’

  ‘So that was a lie too?’ He kept going, rather than make her admit to that. ‘Why did you do it? Why did you want to sleep with another man?’

  ‘I didn’t want to sleep with another man, Conrad,’ she shouted. ‘I wanted to sleep with you. But you were so sick – from TB and emphysema and probably from living with me as well – I couldn’t do that. I thought I’d never have you home again.’

  ‘It wasn’t only because I was in a hospital, though, was it? It was because you were so angry with me. For our miserable life. For Peter’s death.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said more quietly. ‘I was angry with you – I am right now – but that’s not why I slept with Karl.’

  He pressed himself to his feet.

  ‘I was alone, Conrad. I told you that. I was so sad and angry and alone.’

  ‘I’m not sure what’s the most disappointing,’ he said, shuffling around the foot of the bed. ‘That you gave in to your own pathetic justifications about keeping it secret to avoid hurting me, or that by keeping it secret you put Alex in the position he’s in now.’

  She followed him with her eyes.

  ‘He knew about it and guessed I didn’t,’ he said. ‘He’s just a teenage boy, Ruby, and he’s so scarred by Peter dying and me nearly dying. And by our ridiculous secrecy over his adoption. He’s hurt by us, so he used what he knew to hurt you. Hurt us both.’

  She was silent.

  ‘He has enough guilt on his plate, don’t you think?’

  ‘When I came to get you at the police cells, they told me they thought Alex was driving,’ she said. ‘The steering wheel had been wiped with your handkerchief and the only explanation for that was to hide his prints. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? About all his guilt?’

  She knew Alex drove because Conrad had been sick and drunk and incapable. She accepted Alex was inexperienced and the weather and roads and car and darkness meant Conrad’s decision to ask Alex to drive was stupid and dangerous. She knew it was wrong to blame Alex, but that didn’t stop her. They were both to blame. They killed Peter together.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ He was swaying about on his feet.

  ‘I was going to, in the cell, but blame wasn’t important to me back then.’

  He sat on the bed.

  ‘My boy,’ she said. ‘I’d lost my baby boy.’

  ‘We lost him,’ he said. ‘We all lost him, but it was my fault.’

  ‘I’m angry and ashamed and heartsick and guilty and sorry and innocent,’ she said. ‘And I want to go home.’

  ALEX

  What would Peter have become? Alex wondered. What was he robbed of because I killed him? Maybe he would have built those cities under the sea. Maybe he would’ve convinced me to go home. Maybe we would’ve stayed in Moscow together. Finished school and university and got jobs and been friends and brothers together.

  Alex walked through the front gate of the Donskoy Cemetery, only a half-mile from the flat. He’d always known there was a cemetery behind the high red-brick wall. He and Peter had walked past it a hundred times. It announced itself on a wide steel ribbon that bridged the main gate, the four dark domes of the chapel clearly visible from the street. But until Peter’s body was burned in there he hadn’t known there was a monastery in the back corner of the grounds that housed Moscow’s only crematorium.

  Snow blanketed the pathways. Rows of headstones poked up like the backs of chairs in an outdoor theatre closed for the winter. In some sections, the h
eadstones were of polished black marble, with epitaphs etched in gold. But it was at the foot of the plain concrete crosses that flowers were more often left – red roses, single or in bunches, their stems pushed into the snow, old and wilted, but still bright and freshly coloured.

  The monastery stood on a slight rise, grey and boxlike. A single narrow window on either side of the wide entrance reached only half the building’s height; the second storey, if there was one, would have been in darkness. A central square turret rose above the shallow pitched slate roof. It reminded Alex of a fortified keep in a medieval castle. Two wings extended from the back, thick chimneys rising from them. A sign at the main entrance directed enquiries for the crematorium to the rear.

  The door was plain, as if it were the back door of someone’s house. It opened to a small, windowless room with wide floorboards, unpolished and dusty. A single frosted-glass light fitting hung from the ceiling. A counter, its top hinged at one end, kept the public separated from whatever happened on the other side of the door in the back wall. With so little effort made to welcome people, it was hardly a reception area. There was no bell on the counter, no chime at the door to make staff aware of arrivals, no notice offering instruction for visitors. Nowhere to sit and wait.

  Five identical wooden containers were stacked up one end of the counter. About the size of a shoebox but not as long, each one had a latched lid and was accompanied by a piece of paper bearing a handwritten name and a ‘process start date’.

  Alex was aware of a dull but constant heavy drone coming through the wall behind the counter. Furnaces. Under the two chimneys. Or ovens? What are they called? It was sinister, that rolling, droning thunder.

  Alex knocked on the countertop, but knew he couldn’t possibly be heard through the wall. The sheet of paper that sat atop each of the five containers showed a late December process start date. Each lid had a hinged hasp and a slot to fit over a U-shaped staple fixed to the container wall. They were the type you could padlock but none were. Alex lifted one of the hasps but let it drop. He stepped back from the counter, shoved his hands deep into his pockets. The hasp hadn’t seated itself properly after his tampering. He re-seated it then walked to the far end of the counter and knocked against the countertop again. He swung up the hinged section and knocked on the door in the rear wall.

  He opened the door, the rumble of the furnaces instantly louder. This room was as small as the reception area, windowless but brightly lit. The concrete floor had a central grate, two feet square. A clean steel-topped bench ran the length of one side wall, beneath a large ventilation duct. Two round holes about six inches across opened through the steel benchtops to a ledge underneath. A stone pestle and mortar sat on the bench beside each hole. On the ledge, open-topped lead boxes, perhaps a hundred of them, were neatly stacked, while up the far end of the bench was an equal number of latched wooden containers, identical to the five he’d seen on the counter outside. The lead boxes were liners for the wooden containers.

  He couldn’t walk inside.

  The room had two more doors: one was plain and unmarked, while the other bore a sign that read Kameri, Chambers. Next to the door was a trolley with a long, flat tray sitting above what appeared to be two bicycle wheels. It had the rear legs and handles of a wheelbarrow. A toothless rake, stained with ash, rested across the tray.

  Alex was about to leave when a man opened the signed door. ‘Ya mogu vam pomoch? Can I help you?’

  There was an incredible roar at his back, a wave of scalding heat rolling across the small space to Alex. A heavily bricked structure, squat, about five feet high, dominated the inner room. Fronting the brick chamber was a heavy steel door, like that of a baker’s oven, a wide chimney reaching up to the ceiling.

  ‘You should go back outside,’ the crematory worker said.

  Alex was slow to answer, trying to process how such a seemingly ordinary man could work in such a place. Average height and weight, dark hair, brown eyes, younger than his father. ‘Ya Aleks Murphy,’ he said. ‘Ya proshel chtobysobratostatki moyego brata. I have come to pick up my brother’s remains.’

  The attendant wore street clothes. No apron or overalls. No gloves. Alex stared again at the ash-covered flat rake on the trolley and the pestle and mortar on the steel benchtop.

  ‘Do you have the paperwork?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know there was any.’

  ‘You will receive a letter from us when the ashes are ready.’ The man pointed at a tiered shelving unit in the corner, the height of the room and stacked full of larger open-topped lead boxes. Their walls were discoloured, mottled like baking trays, and they held bones, dry and crumbling, obviously human. Each was accompanied by a sheet of paper identical to those with the five smaller containers outside. ‘Your brother will be there,’ he said. ‘But we will notify you when he is ready.’

  Alex didn’t reply.

  ‘Come with me, please.’

  Alex flinched at the crematory worker’s touch but let himself be guided back into the reception room and around the counter.

  ‘My brother Peter was cremated in mid-November.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Alex pointed at the five containers. ‘Those were processed more than a month later.’

  The crematory worked nodded. ‘I’m sorry. There has been a problem with the equipment and we are still waiting on a repair.’

  Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Behind the wall the furnaces still roared.

  ‘Not the chambers,’ the man said. ‘The bones don’t burn fully. I showed you. They must be ground, but our grinder is broken.’ It sounded like he’d delivered the same explanation more often than he’d wanted. ‘In the meantime, we have been doing it by hand.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex said. He couldn’t hold the man’s gaze.

  ‘So there is a backlog and I work this shift alone. But I will get to your brother.’ He smiled without parting his lips.

  ‘All right,’ Alex repeated. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It will be soon. I’m sorry.’

  Alex gulped at the cold air outside. On his way back to the gates he slipped and fell on the icy path, landing heavily on his hip. People visiting their loved ones stood and watched as he picked himself up and continued with a limping jog towards the gates.

  RUBY

  A week before they were due to leave, Valentin knocked on the door holding three one-way tickets to Melbourne and a bottle of Dom Perignon. Ruby leapt at Valentin and clung to him.

  The noise brought Alex to his bedroom doorway. ‘What’s happened?’ he said, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He’d spent more time at home the last week since Conrad had come out of hospital.

  ‘We’re all set!’ she said, unlatching herself from Valentin. ‘Valentin has come through with the tickets, so we’re all set.’ She kissed his bearded cheeks and hugged him again.

  ‘Perhaps some champagne for breakfast,’ Conrad said. ‘Alex? Would you like to join us?’

  Alex tied the cord of his dressing gown before sitting at the living room table. ‘We still don’t have Peter’s ashes.’

  ‘Alex, don’t worry. I’ve spoken with Ruby and I will sort it out,’ Valentin said. He opened one of the tickets. ‘See what I have? Your ticket home. For so long you’ve wanted this.’

  Alex took it from Valentin but didn’t look at it before dropping it to the table. ‘He was your favourite,’ he said to Ruby, ‘and you’re just going to leave him here.’

  ‘Alex, you knew we were leaving,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I thought it would be later. And what about the trip to Odessa? Isn’t that important anymore?’

  Ruby had wanted to spread the ashes from the pier in Odessa, Peter’s favourite spot. Before Christmas she and Alex had talked about taking the train down there after Conrad died. They’d have spread Conrad’s ashes there too. It was the only civil conversation they’d had since Peter died.

  She sat at the table. He’d stung her. ‘Three times I’ve been
to the crematorium. Have you been, if you’re so worried?’

  ‘You haven’t been, have you?’ he said. ‘The attendant said nothing about anyone else having come for the ashes. And if you’d spoken to him you’d know there’s no point going back until they’ve sent the letter.’

  ‘Why would you accuse me of lying?’ She couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. She didn’t want to.

  ‘Ruby, please,’ Conrad said.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I can’t believe you’d do this,’ Alex said. ‘Desert your Miracle Boy.’

  She leant across the table and slapped his face harder than she thought she was capable of. She’d never hit him before. ‘He’s dead.’ She paused. ‘You …’

  Alex absorbed the impact with no more than a slight turn of his cheek, before drawing back into his chair. He narrowed his eyes. ‘I what?’

  She held her head still, a little bowed, watching Alex’s hands.

  He wiped at his reddened cheek, then glanced up at Valentin, who had stepped in between them, standing at the end of the table. ‘I’m not going to hit her back.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, more gravel in his voice than usual.

  ‘But I’m not getting on that plane with you,’ Alex said to Ruby. ‘I already told you that.’

  ‘You’re coming,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not. And I told you last week I wouldn’t go without Peter’s ashes.’

  ‘But I have your ticket.’

  ‘Give it to him,’ he said, pointing at Valentin. Alex picked it up and pushed it into Valentin’s trouser pocket. It fell to the floor.

  Valentin bent for it. ‘Alex, you should go.’

  ‘This isn’t about your brother, is it?’ Ruby said. ‘It’s about the girl.’

  Alex gazed up at the ceiling, but if what she’d said wasn’t true, he’d have reacted. Shouted at her, launched himself at her.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘About her or anything else.’

  ‘What is the big secret? Why don’t you talk about her?’