The Ash Burner Read online

  He took it back to the desk, and I sensed then that there was still more to ask, parts concealed. When he returned, he said, ‘We can look at it again whenever you like.’

  I felt I would be searching for her forever, and for what might be unlocked in the moments when my father spoke like this. I thought I could see her black hair as she leant forward to kiss me. A fragment of place: a street of red buildings, a stroke of yellow light against wet windows, her steps along the pavement, an overcoat that swung at her ankles, my hand finding hers in her pocket.

  6

  Dad had always called me Ted, and so that’s how everyone knew me; I suppose it was better and easier than Theodore. But that’s what people called him – Theodore, or more often Mr Haigh. He said it was Mum’s idea to give me his name, and joked that he would have preferred a less cumbersome handle for both of us.

  I never found it easy to ask him to bring her photo out, but now and then I pressed him to fetch it. I tried to replace my early impressions of Lillie with this, the correct image of Mum, and beneath the image tried to find a memory of us by the ocean wall.

  He didn’t enjoy these moments. They seemed to cost him more than they gave me. I had never seen my father cry, but once when he held the photograph he put his fingers to his mouth in a way I hadn’t seen before. I’d made a promise, and I would keep it. It was a crucial one for him, and each time I got to the beach, and looked towards the surf club and its warning signs, I read them as reminders of the photograph, and its effect on him.

  He now tried a little too hard to be light-hearted. I wouldn’t get out of school as easily next time, he told me. And he said there was a reason he’d been reading Greene: the high school had finally agreed with him and set The Quiet American. I’d be studying it in the coming year. We could read it together, he said. A joint project.

  But from then on we began to read things differently. That was what happened in the space of those weeks in the hospital, and in the space between being hauled out of the sea and onto the rocks and telling Claire why I’d ended up on them.

  After the stitches healed and the cut was completely closed, he offered to take me swimming. I replied that I’d prefer not to go in the water again.

  ‘That’s not how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I’m not going in.’

  He put his hand on my arm. For a moment, I thought he was angry again. He said, ‘You’re alright now. You got away with it. Don’t forget that.’

  There would be a scar, that was all. One that would remember itself as tightness across the skin, more noticeable on hot days or if I walked a lot. By the end of my first weeks in high school, touching it had become a habit, a kind of companion. My stomach was very flat and the mark was raised, a dull and uneven red line that was uglier than the gash it had replaced. I traced it with my thumb, and with my hands I learnt its line, as the tongue learns the lines of a worn-down tooth.

  I thought of Claire breaking us out of the hospital, and wondered what it had all meant – her ability to take me from thinking too much inside to being out in the street, eating fruit in the mid-morning sun.

  At night, I lay in bed and felt the escape all over again, and felt also a desire that grew around the scar, part of how it healed. I wanted to have Claire there, asking questions while Anthony stood at the window. To have her distance, how self-contained she could be, but also those moments when she demanded to know something, and revealed the questions she’d been forming while she was away. When she watched my father and me, as though we were cracks that ran across adjoining windows.

  I watched out for her through mine, across the lawn and the path that once witnessed my escapes from opera lessons and their light residue of cigar smoke. When she didn’t come, when the fantasy of an unexpected visit dulled into reality, I let her in through another window, and I lay instead as close to the memory of her as I could. I touched her lower back, and felt her hand on mine.

  7

  Dad had bought our place straight after we moved from Yorkshire, but although he paid for it outright it never possessed him any more than it did on the day of the purchase. He said firmly that he wasn’t ever going to return to England, but I’d begun to see that he wasn’t ever going to be quite here, either. He tended the garden. He painted a section of wall or a room every few years. But otherwise his only improvement was to rearrange the place around his books and his record player.

  After I came back from hospital, the place felt unbearably still. His study was the exception, but only because it so strongly bore the character of his books and papers, the life of his mind: he made a clearing among the columns of materials that he was reading and working on. It wasn’t something that he did for the house; it was something he did for himself, or even to escape a part of himself.

  And he took the escape with him wherever we went. If ever we travelled by road, on country drives we took each year or when he was required on circuit, he brought a backseat of reading materials excerpted from his various projects: cases and court matters, but also books on music, poetry and civil rights – which he believed were the three components of understanding how people got along.

  When we got back from these trips, I always noticed the flavour of smoke in the rooms where my father spent his time: it was by far the most permanent mark that he left on the house. The study; the annex at the back of the house where he kept more of his books; and the kitchen where he drank coffee, and where he would turn up as an unexpected visitor, his cigar smoke trailing behind him – these three rooms accepted the smoke into their walls. If it were possible I think they would have captured the music as well, for he hummed and smoked constantly as he walked between rooms. I watched and felt I understood more now.

  Unwittingly, perhaps, he’d turned our house into a chapel in its final decline, a place to worship what he regarded as real: the law, the work of the mind, but always most crucially the voice. The voice was what made opera interesting, and what made listening the greatest art of all: the tonal range of a brilliant singer was not only up and down the scale, but across it as well. He taught me that the best voices were cross-hatched with meaning.

  Music, he said, was God for the materialist, the humanist. His record player sat on a side table, on the only part of the house that was properly level. It was as fixed as an altar, bracketed on one side by his office and on the other the hallway to the annex. When he put a record on, the ceilings and the windows lifted enough to let the ocean come in.

  It was just the two of us, a point he stressed more often after the accident. He had to take care of me, as I was to take care of him. He liked to sit and talk to me until I got too tired to listen. Composers’ lives, absurd librettos and legal histories were his pet topics for these discussions. He thought I should know opera and now assumed that I would want to be a lawyer; I was spared none of his obsessions. He said the kernel of most problems lay in the old world. The solution to all of them lay in the voice, in the willingness to talk and listen.

  I loved these conversations, not because of his philosophies or what he taught me, but because his own voice was so rich, and such a beautiful instrument. Afterwards, when it was time for me to sleep, he closed the door behind him. Instead of listening to his voice, I heard his chair creak as he pushed against its back. When it creaked again, half an hour later, the sound was followed by footsteps along the wooden boards of the hallway, and he was standing at my door, listening to check I was asleep. And then he returned to his Beogram, with its rosewood plinth and a sound to rouse the sea.

  Such was the strange, dislocated world of tenderness and absence that I would have liked Anthony and Claire to make whole. I was sure their presence could enliven the rooms in our house, just as they’d brought the light into the hospital ward – the certainty that, under even the deepest seriousness, life always holds
the possibility of a surprise. Olives on a quiet Saturday.

  I wanted their close friendship. It was an infatuation.

  I wanted to phone Anthony to tell him that he and Dickinson were right: the soul did select her own company, and my soul had selected them. It had selected them to take the stillness out of a house that needed more than music and commemoration, to take the stillness out of a father who didn’t want to fall in love again – maybe, after all, Claire was right to ask why not. Maybe I was wrong to love that he didn’t.

  But for some time after I got home Anthony and Claire sailed into a middle distance that reflected, I suppose, our age differences: they were both a grade ahead; Claire was a year older, Anthony almost two. I saw them around, for they stood apart from the life of Lion’s Head as clearly as white sails stand clear of sand islands behind them. But, like those white sails, they didn’t appear to move very much. They existed out there in a separate channel. Only when you looked back to watch them again, did you notice that they’d changed.

  They were an old-fashioned couple. Like everyone else they smoked, but in a more careful way: they sat at the bench near the old cinema, with their legs crossed, leaning forward and talking, often arguing. They could have been waiting for the doors to open, or for the 1920s to end – their separateness placed them decades in the past, and from afar they were silent movie stars. Sometimes I saw them from the other side of the river as I rode into town. As I neared, we waved to each other. But they didn’t call me over, and for my part I thought it rude to interrupt couples sitting on benches. Perhaps if it had been Claire on her own I would have stopped. I would have done what Dad had done for Mum, and persuaded her to stop reading and talk instead.

  In a small town like ours, the standard modifications were to cars, motorbikes, and sometimes even bikes, which, like the locals, were got up to appear bigger and rougher than they really were. Anthony and Claire tackled their uniforms. Instead of bringing themselves forward into the fast life of adulthood – short skirts and top buttons undone – they adopted a more distant style. Anthony wore trousers and fitted shirts, and Claire was one of the girls who left their skirts long. It was partly nostalgia. But also, in those days, I think it was their pleasure in formality, which in a way stood for the city and foreignness – a future that would take them into the greater world.

  When I saw them, I thought again on that odd notion of some things in life being too beautiful. Too beautiful, I wondered, for either me or Anthony, or too beautiful to be accepted? At that age, most of us admired only sweetness, but Claire’s beauty lay somewhere further out, beyond the bright, brown skin and coastal freshness of other girls. They were prettier than her. Her thick hair was in no sense Pacific; it belonged entirely to the Adriatic and to Greece. And if she was sensual, her body was also lazier than those around her, absorbing the light and energy into itself. I would watch her, trying to catch her eye. When she finally looked at me, shocked me with her stare, I thought that beauty – or this quality of being too beautiful – might lie in the moments when she decided I still needed figuring out. Beauty wasn’t only where the eye rested. Beauty lay in its demands.

  It took me the best part of two years to heed those demands, and to say anything much beyond a greeting. But gradually, the age difference between us, which had seemed to measure such a wide arc of understanding when I was turning thirteen, became less important. There were sympathies that mattered more than age.

  I heard from others that Anthony and Claire wanted to be artists. In Lion’s Head, this meant that they were part of a light comedy that the town constructed around them – their pretentiousness and their hopes of leaving. But they didn’t seem to care. That was what marked you out as an artist, I thought: you were willing to show your hand and risk seeming gauche. And so I took my chances one afternoon, sitting near them at the side of our school athletics carnival. Claire had come down from her school to watch.

  I called out hello but stayed awhile with a group of friends. They seemed happy on their own, Anthony in sunglasses and his own version of the school sports uniform. It was obvious he wasn’t going to compete.

  He waved back, but didn’t call me over. I turned away and wondered what I could say to them. Nothing came, but when my friends said they were going up to the shop for lunch, I stayed on and at last shifted over towards Anthony and Claire’s spot on the grass.

  ‘How have you been?’ she said. ‘Sit here with us.’

  I shuffled further across, next to her. Anthony said, ‘Hi, Ted.’

  ‘Have you been in an event today?’ asked Claire.

  ‘High jump,’ I said. ‘And long jump. And hurdles.’ But I wanted to move the conversation to art. I doubted that they cared all that much about sport. ‘You’re both painting a lot, aren’t you?’

  ‘Trying,’ she said. ‘School’s getting a bit crazy.’

  ‘I won a book about Streeton,’ I replied, awkwardly. ‘I’m reading about the Australian impressionists.’

  I thought I was being quite impressive. But Anthony didn’t want to talk about art, not directly. He seemed instead to want to pick up where we’d left off at the hospital. He said, ‘It’s funny how people meet when they discover something that they need in another person.’

  ‘I met you because you wanted me to read poems,’ I answered.

  ‘You must have needed poetry, then.’

  ‘And you?’

  He didn’t tell me. He asked, ‘How did you go in the hurdles?’

  ‘I came sixth of six.’

  They laughed. I spent that afternoon with them, and over time more and more afternoons. If it was true that we needed many things from others, the more we talked the more I sensed that those things were also out of reach, and out of town, and that perhaps what the three of us needed most was a shared belief in that otherworld that would one day supply everything we longed for.

  To begin with, the future existed only as an excited conversation on the beach. One afternoon, the three of us met after school. For the two hours that Claire was allowed out of school we sat on the dune in front of my house and talked. We rushed through the impossibilities – collected them as diamonds to be spent in the years to come.

  Anthony and Claire would do nothing but paint. We’d get to meet our heroes, not the living ones but the artists who’d come and gone on the same streets. We’d meet them along their faded footprints, in Sydney, and then in Paris and London and New York. We wouldn’t stop until we knew their footsteps as our own.

  A vast world lay beyond our conquering. We didn’t know London or Paris, and that’s what made them seem like the future. There was no familiarity, no streets we had ridden a thousand times. Only those impressions left by the great. Wasn’t that almost as good as art itself?

  ‘But will you do it?’ I asked Claire. ‘Will you leave after school?’

  She was adamant. ‘I can’t spend my life on a farm, like my parents have.’

  ‘You couldn’t stay here?’

  ‘No. Nor can you.’

  8

  No one would ever have called Lion’s Head a showy town, but nor was it hostile to the arrival of something new, as long as the new made sure to camouflage any well-meaning intentions or sense of improvement it might bring. The town had accepted better coffee and café culture some years before. Now, in the new millennium, it seemed you could expect to overhear as many conversations about red wine and the dominance of shiraz as about cricket.

  Anthony and I spent more time together at school; I learnt that he had his views about what the town needed next. We were all so fat, he said. He knew that Lion’s Head was not going to stop eating fatty meats, and so, instead of a campaign for vegetarianism, he advertised tai chi to run at the Rotary park next to the surf club. It was just before the summer holidays. Claire and I helped him put up the posters around town, but neither of us expected a crowd. We thought we would be Anthony’
s only customers.

  The price would get them in, he said. Your first session was free, and after that you could come for a gold-coin donation. His profits would go to an animal shelter on the outskirts of town, next door to the tile suppliers. And though his cause was probably something the town could have accepted, Anthony left his altruism as unspoken as his aims.

  I trusted the town on many things, but I wasn’t sure they were ready for Anthony as a small businessman. And yet on the first day, he managed to attract four teachers, including Miss Weston, who was the youngest there, and six of his mother’s friends. And it went from there, until by the fourth week some thirty middle-aged ladies, dressed in tights and singlets, stood in an obedient semi-circle around Anthony, waiting for instruction. It seemed that none of them cared about the rumours about Anthony that circulated, and that even I, his friend, had started to hear – that he might be gay, on drugs; that his father was a terrible bully. The mayor’s wife, when she joined the group, seemed to agree that what mattered most was getting to spend a Wednesday afternoon outside. And how much better they felt for it.

  Claire and I weren’t really needed. One afternoon, we walked around to the other side of the surf club, which stood on the isthmus between the two beaches, behind the headland. I sat with her while she drew the rocks and the corridor of pine trees that stood as an honour guard to the Head.

  ‘Would you like to be on your own?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could get us a drink.’