Since his father died, Chris keeps coming across small reminders everywhere, set like mousetraps ready to snap, like little buried landmines. Today, for instance, they’re in his father’s car, which his mother says she can’t bear to sell. It smells so characteristically, still, of shoe polish and peppermints, and in the back seat lies the woollen tartan scarf his father had worn for years. Each detail had assailed Chris as he’d opened the door, reaching over to stow the box in its calico bag on the back seat.
“Here, here,” his mother had remonstrated. “At my feet.”
Where else? he’d thought sourly, finding the right key for the ignition, as the lifetime habit of keeping his responses to himself closed his mouth in a firm and well-worn line. A line that suggested nothing, broached nothing, gave nothing away.
His father’s car has some kind of cruse-control check that beeps at him every time he inadvertently goes above the set limit, and he keeps jumping when he hears it, feeling a ludicrous amount of guilt.
“I told Shirley, that’s where he’d rather be laid to rest, in the place where he shared such precious times with his son. He had lots of happy memories of all those fishing trips.”
All those fishing trips. They’d been twice. Once at the Easter break, and once for the first week of the September school holidays. After that his father had given up. Both trips are still etched vividly in Chris’s mind, like so many of the powerless indignities of childhood.
His father’s forced cheeriness slowly evaporating into his usual taciturnity as he got tired of trying. Chris coughing into the acrid smoke. Trying not to move too much in the stuffy sleeping bag at night. Then the packing of the car on the last day, the esky empty and leaking melted ice, and his obscure sense that he’d failed some test.
It was Scott who’d moved on, though. Chris had been going to introduce him to his parents, he just had to wait for the right moment, he’d told Scott in increasing tones of self-recrimination. It wasn’t as if he was ashamed of him, God no. But he’d gone anyway.
“You obviously... you’ve got to live the way you see fit.” He was whispering. Every word like a pulling stitch as he panted slightly, eyes shut tight against the possibility of looking his son in the eye. “But there’s no need to... well...throw it in her face. It would kill her.”
Spending his last hours worrying about her. It had killed him, not her. He’d taken that tiny admission, heavy and impervious as a lead sinker, and clung on to its icy weight all the way down to the depths.
It’s nauseating, this revisionism; it infuriates him. This, he thinks savagely, this is the best she can summon: the two of them travelling alone to enact a ceremony in the presence of no lifelong friends, no neighbours who care enough, no extended family, in a place whose symbolism is wholly an invention. This is the reality, he imagines saying to her, just you and me, your 35-year-old son who you cast as the perennial bachelor, this pitiful pilgrimage I can’t wait to be finished with.
Soon she won’t camouflage her disappointment so well, and then she’ll raise the stakes. “I don’t understand why you can’t just stay,” she’ll say petulantly. “I know you’ll think I’m stupid but I feel nervous here alone in the house at night.” She will pause, he is certain, and then add, “And it’s not as if you’ve got a wife and children at home waiting, is it?”
Chris imagines her looking in the mirror that morning, trying the scarf on, lifting her chin in that way she has, every small decision an aching effort. He wishes he’d told her she looked nice, when he’d arrived at her door. Her expression as she faces the camera, obedient and tremulous and trying not to blink, makes his throat feel tight; there is a stinging behind his eyes.
“You,” is all she says.
No possibility that Chris might be permitted to feel the same violent shirking resistance, no likelihood that he will just be able to stand upend the box and shake the contents into the water without touching them. No. Now that push has come to shove, it’s going to be him.
His father had trodden the coals down, crushing them neatly, scattered some soil over the top just like Chris is scattering the contents of the box now over the water. Small handfuls. That smell of wet ash, and the cicadas beating like the ticking of a clock, and his father giving the site one last glance around and saying, “Great spot anyway, don’t you reckon, Chris?”
Why hadn’t he answered with enthusiastic assent? What would it have cost him to give his father that, instead of a shrug, just for the small mean pleasure of feeling his father turn away, defeated?
Chris thinks they can probably get back there by 4.30. As he nods and agrees what a nice gesture it would be, he sees a small smear of ash on the lapel of her jacket, and absently, tenderly, without interrupting her, he brushes it off.
