Ash

She got the news before she heard the news. The two missed calls on her mobile from her aunt during the night were enough to alert her to the fact that he’d died.

Her aunt would not have called otherwise. No one from her family did. International calls were expensive. And no one wanted to talk to each other anyway.

She got the kids to school, and it was several hours before she was able to catch her aunt directly and confirm her father was dead. She called her husband and he said he would come home from work. She rang both her siblings.

What needs to be done? Her sister had asked. Nothing, she replied.

Her aunt said she would handle the arrangements that end and let them know when the ashes could be collected. She would need to fly to England at some stage. She broached the issue of money for funeral costs with her aunt; was brushed her off and told the local council would look after it. A poor man’s burial. What both thought, but neither said.

It was a month before he was cremated. Vaguely scandalous from the point of view of their Irish background and her Spanish present. Try explaining that to people. A body being left to rot.

She worried about the urn, scrolled amazon looking for something small, cheap and flight friendly. In the end she bought nothing. She looked up regulations for transporting ashes; would need to be declared, brought in carry-on, death and cremation certificate to hand. She sighed. She would put them in her check-in and say nothing, she knew.

She was to bring the remains from Kilburn to Meath for a small funeral mass. Ireland, the eternal resting place, ha. Who would even go to it they wondered? Still, it would be good for them they reasoned. Have a ‘proper’ goodbye. Normal, healthy.

What her aunt gave her in London was laughable. She was struck at once by the weight of the plastic bag. Always a waif of a man when well, he could hardly have weighed much more than this in death. Opening the bag back in their room, they saw what was touted by the funeral home as a biodegradable recipient was in fact a brown paper sack, slotted into a flimsy, narrow cardboard box to keep its shape, two metal staples closing it. She had stared. Her husband stifled a guffaw. I suppose we’d had better go to Tesco for some cling film. Or this will go all over your suitcase.

They came back with the cling film, some sandwich bags and a costa coffee cup for scooping. She decanted what she estimated to be about a third into a Ziplock bag, borrowed a stapler from hotel reception, reclipped the bag and her husband got to work sealing the box. She closed the Ziplock bag. What she had now was her share. She did not want to hold onto it. Tomorrow, she would relieve herself of the alien, white powder.

The next morning, after a salty fry-up at the hotel, they started to walk. The first place they stopped was her old primary school and his. Yellow, sandy coloured brick building opposite blocks of flats, wire fence and gate to the front, high, black wall and railway track behind. She used the costa cup to scoop out some ash and threw it through the gate at the chalky gravel pathway. Blended in quite well, not very noticeable. Then it was Saturday. Not many people about. Shame.

She thought about a time she had stood here long after the bell had rung for home time. Not able to remember how old she was, sixish, for she knew if she crossed the road without an adult she would get a smack.  She was alone, her sister in the infant’s class in the ‘annex’ some walk away. She only became aware as the minutes passed that her sister would be waiting too. Was she alone? Was she trying to hide behind the shape of a tree so that no one from the office would see her through those brown tinted windows? She didn’t dare move. She didn’t dare go back in and she couldn’t go forward. The interminable wait only came to an end when she spotted an uncle walking through a break in the flats and was able to call out to him.

She went to the pub next. It was a stone’s throw away from the primary school. That uncle or another must have gone to get her sister as her dad, slumped on a bar stool, had been in no state to. She left more ash at the doorway of the boozer. Its sign and shiny brown tiling preserved but now split into luxury apartments. She wondered vaguely if anyone would see what she was doing and say something. She almost willed it. This very place had been the site of so many arguments, punch-ups, it would be fitting.

His childhood home was across the road from the pub. She was going to be rid of this ash in no time. The front garden looked much the same, same fuchsia bushes with their striking yet incongruous blossom. The building looked smarter, a lick of paint, new windows? She really did not want to be seen here and flung a small bit of ash with her bare hand rather than with the voluminous costa cup. The powder would be noticeable on the bush and perhaps there would be someone in the living room looking out, if they still used the front room as the living room. Rooms were not in short supply in that house. What was missing had been something else.

They were a big family. Five brothers, three sisters. So many children, was a wonder anyone got looked after properly. When she was a child, three of the brothers lived at home, two after marriages breaking down and one confirmed bachelor, her dad’s twin. They each had their own small bedroom on the top floor of the three-story house. Dinky in proportions if nothing else. The state of disarray and overflowing ashtrays, fag-stained duvets fascinated and disgusted her in equal measure. Desiccated droppings from the three dogs left on the landings. Shame.

Their dad had died when she was two. ‘A good man’. She wondered did her father think of him when his mood blackened. When you felt the very particles around you start to shift. When you saw him, inside his own head, plunging through a trap door giving way beneath his feet. Dropping. Sucking you down with him. Nothing to grab on to and nowhere around you safe. The sting of a slap. His needing to get away from you, not even being able to look at you. Shame.

She was thirsty. She felt the familiar vibration of cells in her arms and legs. A tingle, a fizz. She tried to swallow it down. They were done here. They would need to get a bus up the High Road to her childhood home next. You could swipe your bank card to pay these days and not undergo the searing embarrassment of him pretending he didn’t have enough coins for the fare, your sister offering to walk to escape it.

The old house, which was really an Edwardian redbrick split into six flats, was now gated she knew, so she would not be able to go into the garden. She didn’t care. She would go round the back and tip a cupful over the fence on the back bushes. The more illicit the dumps the better. She tipped it near where the pear and plum tree used to be, home to a red squirrel. Foxes in the back garden, hedgehog in the front. Marvels of inner city living. She could see the sash window of her old bedroom and remembered the gaudy red and white wallpaper her dad had hung to go with the bright, red metallic bunkbed they shared. She remembered the dull red stain of blood below the light switch that no one ever wiped away or even noticed. She remembered the smashing of glass.

She exhaled violently. She was starting to tire. Shall we go for a drink? The tingle had become a distant throb, travelling up from her chest to her neck, would reach her head before long. The thirst. Shame.

They sat before their pints, glistening in the artificial light, fizzing. Her husband shifted, uncomfortable in his seat. She picked up the glass and groped for an appropriate toast and gulped. The cool liquid calmed the fizz, soothed the urge to rip her skin off, fling it somewhere and flee.

Wait, this is all wrong. I forgot the chaser. Her husband dutifully went for the small glass of brown liquid she never drank. Without thinking twice, she threw what remained in the costa cup into the brandy, watched the white ash cloud and swirl, tossed it back, smacked her lips. It burned all the way down. The thirst went away. Shame.