The Ash Burner Read online

  He’d become very absent when he was stoned, and often this distance in him was a prelude to a physical disappearing. I wouldn’t see him for days – he was either stuck at home or had escaped to other friends, people Claire and I didn’t really know. It worried me as much as it did her. He’d find his way back. But until then, who knew where he’d been or what his father was like. He wouldn’t tell me.

  ‘You love her, don’t you?’ I asked him.

  He replied by saying that was a stupid question, and of course he loved her. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Then why don’t you treat her better? You should be around more, give her what she needs. It wouldn’t take much to show her that you’re trying.’

  ‘We always end up yelling at each other.’

  ‘Why? What do you fight about?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to love someone who’s destroying themself.’

  ‘Do you think you’d love Claire if she was like you?’

  He answered that he’d never understood what Claire saw in him. ‘I’m waiting for her to leave, but I’m not waiting forever.’ It was a bleak joke, but true as well. Eventually, he said, he would have to push her away.

  In a daily way, it was their painting that held them together: in a small town, it gave them a kind of innate support that only they could understand. But it also held the clue as to why they should keep trying. ‘She sees you in your work, I know. I’m sure she does.’

  ‘She hates my paintings.’

  ‘But it’s why she bothers with you. She’ll never leave you. The two of you come together in the way you paint. Or the reason you paint. The way you find answers. You believe in each other.’

  ‘She posed for me the other day. I keep repeating the pose she took. She doesn’t really like it. She wants me to paint her as I see her: some kind of live painting, sketches, like hers. But this stance she had is so graceful. So perfect. She turned away, and was standing with her side showing towards me, with her arms above her head.’

  ‘That’s a classical pose,’ I said. ‘You’re just painting her in a standard way.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But it suits her.’

  He brought out a roll of paintings to show me. I hadn’t asked to see them. As he unfolded them, he criticised me for being indifferent.

  ‘Just show me,’ I said.

  ‘You have to take some. Without asking. Isn’t that the ultimate compliment – when someone steals one of your paintings?’

  ‘Would it still be stealing if you’ve told me to do it?’

  He unrolled his nudes of Claire, or rather his repetitions of a pose that he’d only once painted in her presence, but that had so captivated him since.

  They weren’t exactly studies of Claire, for, as with his self-portraits, he’d given her an unnatural angularity that stole some of her languidness, her ease with the day: her waist was narrower, her face paler. But the most striking features of her look remained: her thick black hair; a face that drew you down the sharp line of her cheekbones to almost girlish, thin lips; her slender arms. The startled, wondering expression in her eyes that asked not only why this painting now, but seemingly why this person in my life. Not even Anthony, searching for the symbolic, could take these from her.

  I told him to turn away for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m stealing one of your paintings.’

  While they were arguing, Anthony hung out with other girls – sometimes girls he’d met through me, and who were impressed by his antagonistic view of the school and the quiet life of the town. Despising sport and avoiding a suntan won you some credit with a certain kind – I suppose our female equivalents, and yet not the ones we could ever quite fall in love with, for they were too like us.

  Sometimes, they gave me a chance as well. I wasn’t hostile to sport, and in those days I was as brown as wet sand. But I did have the most important quality: a missing piece, and, crucially, one that could only be found by leaving Lion’s Head.

  Years on, I still had my scar from the accident. Somehow, when I talked to girls, it was present at the back of my mind. It didn’t always inhibit me, but from time to time it stopped me going beyond the first encounters in the dark or at backyard parties, when the scar remained unseen. It made me self-conscious. Or perhaps I was held back because I was already waiting for Claire. As, in a way, Anthony was held back by the knowledge that they’d get back together. While he was with other girls, his paintings would continue to be of Claire rather than them. They hated him for it and left him.

  Only once did I hear of Claire being with someone else. He was an apprentice mechanic, a local football star called Alex. After they’d been together for a week, he was ready to get married. We were shocked that she could be interested in someone so unlike us. We’d assumed that being awkward and ill-fitting was part of our appeal, but now we found out that wasn’t it at all. I wondered whether there was a gap between what she liked about us and what we liked about ourselves. Maybe our difference was a drawback.

  I scrutinised her paintings for clues of how she saw the world. Like Anthony, she wanted to draw the body, but unlike Anthony she was, at heart, a sensualist. She produced studies of our friends coming out of the water, or sitting in the shade next to the surf club. She only ever represented them in a realistic mode – and she was only ever interested in us in the same way, not as finished thoughts or ideas, but as indeterminate beings shaded in by light and movement. Her paintings were roughly drawn anatomy lessons, and they claimed that the body was symbolic enough. It didn’t need further elaboration.

  She very seldom read the books Anthony gave her. While she was with Alex, she returned them to me. It was after school. She also had drawings she’d done and that she said she wanted me to have. At first I thought she must have come for Anthony, that she was ready for a reconciliation with him. But she had with her a calico bag filled with his books.

  ‘Could you give these to him?’ she said as I approached her.

  ‘He’s still here at school somewhere. I saw him before.’

  ‘It’s alright. I don’t want to see him. I’m sick of all his books lying around my room.’

  ‘He won’t take them,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care. You have them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She could have left then, but instead she stepped a little closer and said she wished Anthony would stop reading altogether, and just paint and paint and paint. Paint forever, until he had it all worked out of him. That was where he’d find himself.

  I didn’t agree, not in those days. ‘He doesn’t want to find himself. Why do you think that?’

  ‘He’s the same as you. Your stupid fathers.’

  ‘I miss you,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck with Anthony,’ she replied.

  I didn’t tell him that Claire had been, or that I had his art books in my room. I didn’t want him to think it was over.

  Because Claire boarded, the three of us had seldom been together in the evenings. Anthony and I had once talked about trying to break her out. Now he missed her more and more, and was jealous of Alex. A little drunk on cheap wine one evening, he asked if we could make a night visit. It might bring her back.

  The break-in was much easier than we’d expected. As it was a hot night, we managed to walk in through a back door that was kept open to bring the breeze into the dorms, and then climbed a wide staircase of wooden panels and hospital-white ceilings. Her room was called Little Annex; and, as if acting as conspirator, the school had placed the words in raised, golden letters on the first door at the top of the stairs. Our goal was impossible to miss.

  She shared the annex with three others. They lay dead still and pretended not to notice Claire’s escape until just before the door closed again. Then I caught their eyes opening, and I knew the whole thing would be all over both her school a
nd ours before the end of the next day. It didn’t matter. I handed Anthony the cask, and the three of us chased our own shadows across the hockey fields.

  Claire complied until we got to the far walls. I guess she hadn’t wanted to make a fuss when she saw us in the dorms. But suddenly she stopped, breathless, and tried to yell at Anthony, or perhaps at us both. ‘What are you doing?’

  I felt there wasn’t a straightforward answer to that. I wanted them to be together, and I didn’t know why. Or, I thought it might be because I was in love with them both, and in love with their togetherness.

  Anthony wanted more wine. ‘Come for a drink,’ he said.

  The thought of Alex seemed to flash in Claire’s eyes, and maybe also the thought of how unfair she was being to him. ‘Why did you come?’ she asked, this time quietly. The sprinklers came on in the next field, thinning the sound of the crickets.

  ‘It’s the three of us,’ he replied.

  ‘No,’ said Claire. ‘I’m just along for the ride, aren’t I?’

  ‘It’s the three of us,’ I told her.

  Again, Alex was present as a thought, and as a choice that might end the whole thing for good. She could have a proper partnership. And then she asked, ‘Where are you going?’

  We decided on a wall of stones and boulders that braced the first, wide bend in the river as it drew out of town. It counted as a local scenic spot: there was a wide gravel car park for those who wanted to stay in their cars. The last of these was leaving. When the car reversed and turned to face the road, its headlights scanned the river and then us. Anthony turned away, but Claire met the gaze of the lights with her own open stare. Her skin suddenly blanched white.

  We sat on the rocks and began to drink. It was so intensely dark now that we couldn’t see each other. You forgot where you were sitting until you spoke, and then the others appeared as well, outlined by replies in the darkness, a sonar system. It seemed the moment to chart something. For I knew this was the standing configuration now – the three of us listening for each other.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t ask questions like that.’ It was Claire. Other times, she would have waited for Anthony to speak. ‘Enjoy this,’ she said. ‘It’s so quiet down here.’

  ‘I feel like it’s slipping away,’ said Anthony.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re slipping away. I know we’re all going to leave, but I often think about losing you.’ I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or Claire, or to both of us. He went on, ‘Don’t you worry that we’ll lose it all when school’s over?’

  ‘No,’ said Claire. ‘Can’t we have each other forever?’ Irritation in her voice, as though she and Anthony had had this conversation before.

  ‘I’m sorry I brought it up,’ I said.

  Anthony asked, ‘Can you see the river? My eyes are getting used to the dark.’

  Yes, it was pulsing now, or that dank air that hovered over it and eventually stood in for a visible surface. A layer of heat came into view when my eyes adjusted, but disappeared when I looked again to the longer darkness of the sky.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  A car came down the driveway behind us, its lights off. I turned around as they switched them back on, and felt the last flicker of Anthony’s shadow as it fell behind the rocks. Two police officers stepped out. They recognised me, the magistrate’s son. ‘You shouldn’t be here this late,’ said one, a younger officer called Gareth. ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are your drinks?’

  ‘In the river,’ I replied.

  Gareth shone his torch, the light a yellow runway over a tarmac of water. Our box of red wine was drifting out, caught in a slow, circular current that was about to join the main channel. White plastic cups were tipped onto their sides, sinking.

  ‘Is your friend in there as well?’ Gareth said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Hey! Come up.’

  Anthony obeyed, and crawled up the rocks to the car park. He was embarrassed. I could see that Claire wanted to say something to him, but she didn’t.

  ‘Are you going home now?’ the other policeman asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want a lift?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we can walk. It’s not far to go.’

  I thought of asking Gareth not to tell anyone, but I didn’t think anyone really needed to be told why Anthony had jumped, and what lay in store for him if his dad found out.

  The next morning, the town heard about Claire’s midnight escape from the dorm. It would have counted against some girls, but Claire was never judged in quite that way. Her failure, if there was one, was in thinking only of escape – of beginning her getaway early, and maybe with the wrong companions. With boys who were in their way more dangerous than the others, because we encouraged her to believe that she was a princess meant to break out of the castle, and not just the clever daughter of hard-working Greeks.

  But it was different for Anthony. Two weeks later, my father received a visit in the night from the police.

  ‘Is he alright?’ I heard Dad say. I came out from the kitchen.

  It was Gareth at the door. He wore the same expression as at the river that night – the opening of a confidence.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Anthony’s in hospital,’ Dad replied. ‘He’s been beaten up.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  Gareth didn’t answer.

  Dad looked at me, and then gave Gareth instructions. ‘Bring Anthony here when he’s ready to leave. I want him brought here. He’s not going back.’

  10

  My only meeting with Anthony’s dad was so brief that in the seven or eight years since it has more or less disappeared, or has come to be folded into a dozen other meetings with families of friends. All I can say is that he was wearing a singlet, as in fact Anthony most often did when he painted – perhaps I am remembering Anthony. I would guess that he was shorter than Anthony; that, like his son, he had his hair cropped short, and that it had receded and must have begun to recede when he was young, at Anthony’s age or only a little older.

  Most acute is the memory of the thought I had: that I was in the company of the man who caused such fear for Anthony and his mother. At the end of the day, I knew him not as a person but as that effect. And, the effect he had on Anthony is where his presence in my memory is located still – in the awareness we had of Anthony’s other life at home, and the escapes it led Anthony to attempt. Into drugs and sudden, new friendships he didn’t share. Claire and I knew there was a life without us, but also that he would never show us.

  Now, for the final weeks of his last year of school, I would get to help him, have him close. That was something good to have come out of the night of Claire’s escape. I admitted to myself that a more troubling outcome was how often I saw Claire. For them, daily classes were more or less finished, and she came over nearly every day, sitting at the end of my bed just as she had four years before, when we’d first met at the hospital.

  I began to dream about her. We met on the ocean floor. I didn’t insist anymore that the whole world was joined down there, a place of meetings. I thought I’d left that philosophy behind with my younger self, left on the rocks after the accident. But my dreams were fixated on the possibility, said that I’d been right to hope for something there. In one that recurred, I walked into the dark, calm water. As I dived in, the ocean floor fell away into a labyrinth of black- and purple-walled caves. But now I wasn’t sure that I was looking for my mother. It was a different feeling, one that caught me more in the stomach than in the chest.

  There, in the water, I saw Claire. I heard her saying my name. Her voice came up from the bottom, released as a perfect song. She disappeared. Then appeared again, swimming ah
ead of me. I followed her. But she remained in the middle distance. All she’d say was my name. She smiled when she turned around, and kept turning around to check I was still following her. She waited for me to swim deeper, and then she went on, deeper and deeper into the caves, until I woke without her.

  In the mornings, I watched Anthony paint. Mostly, he used acrylic paint and pen, very quickly drawing a dark outline for the figures that he filled in with smudges of black ink and only a small colour range – the main colour was blue, which he used for shading the way other artists used the varying heaviness of a pencil.

  When he needed a break, he’d cook breakfast for us – always fried eggs and tomatoes. He was a vegetarian, and now that he was living with us he began a slow campaign to convert me. He never asked me to stop eating meat; only to eat whatever he was having, whatever he’d cooked. After breakfast, I went to school and left him to his painting or reading.

  That November, after I was done with exams, my father asked me to travel with him on a work trip to Sydney. Soon after we’d left Lion’s Head, I asked whether we could go to a second-hand bookshop while we were in the city.

  ‘What book do you want?’ he said. ‘I might have it.’

  ‘It’s a book called Markings.’

  ‘By Dag Hammarskjöld?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ve got that already. I’ve seen it on your desk.’

  ‘That was Anthony’s copy.’

  Dad thought this over for a moment. Then asked, ‘Do you ever suggest books for Anthony to read?’

  ‘Yes. Well, your books.’

  He smiled. ‘Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash in 1961. He was the better kind of Christian, if you know what I mean.’