Free Dying by Cory Taylor

distraction. There was always the topic
of how they were doing in school, and what their favourite subjects were, and what
they thought they might like to do when they grew up.
    ‘Gamer,’ said the older one.
    ‘Oh God,’ said his mother, her head in her hands.
    After an hour or so there was nothing left to say. Everyone had trains to catch,
or planes, in the case of Shin and me, and Eliot said he had another appointment
somewhere else. In our rush to get away we almost forgot the ashes, sitting in the
beige plastic box inside the Bulgari bag, until Ben remembered and went back for
them. He handed them to my brother, who passed them to me.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    ‘Nothing to thank me for,’ he said.
    ‘It’s what she wanted,’ I said.
    ‘If you say so. I thought I might have taken them upto Beaconsfield and scattered
them there.’
    ‘I thought of that too,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think she belongs there.’
    ‘How would you know where she belongs?’
    I couldn’t think of a reply before my brother was out the door and down the stairs,
leaving the question hanging in the air, unresolved. That was how it was with him
and me. Every conversation was an argument, every encounter another chance to raise
some point of disagreement, then leave before it could be settled. We were combatants
before we were brother and sister. I was ashamed for us. A different family might
have managed to put all of this history behind them and say goodbye to their mother
in style. As for us, all we could manage was an hour of faked good fellowship followed
by a hasty retreat. I was glad Mum wasn’t there to see it. She would have been inconsolable.
    Jenny was with me on the day, in 2010, when I interred Mum’s ashes. She drove to
Brisbane from the Gold Coast, where she and Ranald had retired to their holiday house.
Ranald was too sick to go anywhere by then; he spent his days in an armchair in front
of the television with the volume turned up so loud Jenny had to leave the house
to get any respite.
    ‘It sends me batty,’ she said. ‘He won’t use earphones.’
    She was driving me up through Toowong cemeterytowards the Murray plinth. I had the
beige box on my lap and Jenny had brought a bunch of white lilies and a vase.
    ‘Your mother always said, out of us three girls, she was the lucky one,’ said Jenny.
‘We’d married men who were tolerable, but she’d married one who was intolerable,
which gave her a reason to leave. I still think she was very brave though.’
    ‘I don’t think she felt brave,’ I said, remembering how long it had taken Mum to
end her marriage. Years and years of conciliation and backtracking before she finally
made the decision.
    ‘Does your father know she’s dead?’ said Jenny.
    ‘Apparently he didn’t quite take it in,’ I said, repeating what Ben had told me.
By that time, I had become completely estranged from Dad. It was a consequence of
so many things: the divorce, my father’s mental instability since then, my desire
to shield Shin and the boys from his worst excesses, and my illness. But Ben would
sometimes go with Eliot to visit my father in his Sydney nursing home, and would
subsequently relay news of Dad’s condition to me. ‘He’s very far gone.’
    ‘She told me she wanted to outlive him,’ said Jenny. ‘Even by a day.’
    ‘There’s no God,’ I said.

    I’ve never been to a Japanese funeral, but friends tell me there is a traditional
ceremony after the body is cremated where the mourners pick through the ashes of
the deceased with a special set of metal chopsticks. Bits of bone are lifted out
for closer examination, signs are read, whether of fate or character I couldn’t say,
but apparently the ceremony can be funny—some of the comments about the dead raise
a laugh, whether intentional or not. In any case, I imagine the ritual is helpful.
I imagine the mourners derive comfort from this last act of intimacy with the person
they have lost. I’m only sorry that I