Free Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe Page B

humpback whale washed up dead on Sandon Point, he drove there as soon as he heard to spend the afternoon sketching the decomposing beast, the ventral grooves like the ridges and furrows in a white field, the barnacles encircling the shut-tight eye, the massive penis hanging limp across the bloated belly.
    It’s all a bit morbid, Rob, I told him over the phone when the photographs arrived. Not something I’d have on my wall.
    I heard him laugh down the line. We were as unforgiving of wall-destined art as we were of photorealism: Isn’t that nice, dear? It looks just like the thing it’s supposed to look like.
    To hell with it, I said. These are the lemon peel years, after all. You may as well call a spade a spade.
    There is no photo board at the Horse and Jockey, no reminders of what Robin or anybody else looks like or used to look like – little help to Laura, who sweeps the room with the same vague smile she uses everywhere, a look that hovers between recognition and introduction. Enough to make one believe they haven’t been forgotten. Not so much as to unsettle anyone she hasn’t actually met. Searchlighting, I used to call it.
    She sees me standing there with Ruth, and the light goes on but I don’t know who it’s for. I watch her drift towards our table, and I think of all the things it’s too late to understand. Beneath her grey silk dress I know her body is as soft as old money, as over-handled paper. Something folded small .
    Esther, she finally says. Let me look at you, she says, and brings her hands up to my face. I let her look, without knowing what she is looking for.
    You’ve hardly changed, she says, but she’d hardly know. A ridiculous longing growls through my bones. For all of us, for what we all were and didn’t become. And when did longing move from my belly to my bones. When did that happen.
    We gather outside the pub, Susannah holding the earthenware jar that is holding Robin. The sound of the trucks pulling into the service station next door is like whale song. The sky has held. Nobody has thought to cry yet.
    Okay, Susannah says. She puts her hands on the youngest daughter’s bony shoulders. Let’s do this.
    We walk single or double file along the side of the highway until finally we stand by the pitiful creek, eleven of us, our good shoes sinking into the soft mud. Susannah takes the cork lid from the jar. She dips her slender hand inside to scoop up a handful of Robin’s ashes.
    I remember when we were little, she says. About ten and twelve. That Christmas he gave me my present all wrapped up in red tissue paper and silk ribbon. He’d taken so much care. When I opened it there was just a rock. Not quartz or anything special. It wasn’t shaped like a duck or a woman’s face or what-have-you. It was just an ordinary little rock. He thought it was so funny, nearly killed himself laughing, and Dad made him sit on the back step until lunch was called. Next Christmas, I gave it back to him, wrapped even more beautifully. And he gave it back the year after, in a little wooden box Joe helped him carve. It went on like that for years, until I can’t remember when. But when we were clearing up his things last week, there it was. He’d been holding onto it all that time.
    She opens her hand over the water, and the rock drops into the creek with a gentle plip amid the shower of ashes.
    I expect the girls to baulk at this, but they pass the jar between them, each reaching in for a handful of their father’s ashes. They stand at the creek side, eldest to youngest:
    I remember when he had to quit drinking, he went through his collecting phase. Some people just eat more when they stop drinking, but he collected things. So every week we’d be dragged along to a Sunday trash-and-treasure, helping him dig around for paper moon portraits or cigarette tins or whatever. Always small things, and they got smaller and smaller, until it