Free Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe Page A

said. It is a room you can step into and out of at will, though you cannot pick anything up, cannot rearrange things the way you’d like to. Though sometimes you’ll return to it to find that someone else has done it for you: taken things away, locked drawers. It is a room where the titles have been wiped from the spines of all the books and the windows are nailed shut.
    Ruth wakes with a sharp inhale a little after one-thirty. I hear her turn over.
    Esther? Bella, you didn’t snooze. What are you looking at out there?
    Nothing, really. Schoolkids.
    You’re worried about Laura.
    Not worried, exactly.
    Ruth stifles a yawn. Okay, she says. But if you’re not ready to speak to her yet, just affect a limp or something. She’s like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
    A what?
    You know, she scoffs. Motion sensors. She’ll know you’re you just by the way you move.
    Laura has developed a number of methods for recognising people. She’ll wait for them to speak first. She’ll memorise wedding rings, laughter, the shape of their eyebrows. Tattoos and scars are a blessing. When Nola got the mole above her top lip removed, Laura was crestfallen, because without it Nola was a blank page. She told me all of this matter-of-factly, priming a canvas in the studio of the Artists’ Society. It was like being savvy to a magician’s tricks, and I watched her from then on. I saw the little light that flickered on when she recognised a voice or a bit of jewellery. I asked her how she knew that I was me. By the way you move, E. It’s like your feet never touch the ground. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t what started it.
    I know you blame me, Es. But she knew what she was doing. Maybe it began as a mistake, but she knew.
    I know that, Ruth.
    And I know I should be sorry. And I am sorry that it hurt you. But even so, it was something I carried around with me. Something folded small that I could take out and look at whenever I wanted to. And you know how it was, in those days, Es. No one really belonged to anyone … Es?
    All afternoon the sky has threatened rain, despite the heat. There is the kind of tension that will only be eased by some manner of violence. A pin tapped through the blackened nail of a hammer-cracked thumb.
    We should get going, I say to Ruth. Come on, before it rains.
    Nobody understands why Robin wanted his ashes scattered over that muddy little trickle in Tarcutta. And when we meet his sister in the front bar of the hotel, she just shrugs. Robin’s three teenage daughters, all long-limbed and nervous as horses, hiding their eyes behind their dark manes: they do not know either. They sit together, elbows on the same sticky table, sipping at glasses of post-mix cola and red creaming soda. The eldest flicks her eyes up at me, tries for a weak smile, but the other two are staring at the space between their glasses and the earthenware jar on the table. If Ruth is pleased about the choice of container, she doesn’t give any indication. Perhaps it’s too early a work, too clumsy to lay claim to. But I don’t need to run my fingers along the underneath to know her mark is there.
    I never even heard him talk about Tarcutta, his sister is saying. I thought he would have wanted to be with Leonie, but it was right there in the will. He called me a few months back to make sure he had my address right. He said, You’re the executor, okay? I said, Okay. But he never said anything about Tarcutta.
    I see Robin, the reminders scrawled on his hands and wrists for the last ten years of his life. Call Susannah. Slowly filling in the documents, the careful block letters he would use to spell his sister’s name. He rarely spoke about death or sickness or the fear of either, but his work gravitated away from the familiar watercolour landscapes and portraits to portrayals of mortality: boarded-up houses, broken timepieces, a skulk of shot foxes strung along a wire fence.
    When a