Free Dying by Cory Taylor Page A

didn’t think to do something similar before
burying Mum’s ashes, something to make the occasion more fitting.
    As it was, Jenny and I stood by and watched while two young council workers dug a
hole at the corner of the pink granite slab at the base of the Murray plinth. The
soil was rock-hard after weeks and weeks of dry weather, but the workers chipped
away until they had gone about two feet down and about a foot across, just wide enough
to fit the beige box. I handed it to one of the workers, he placed it in the hole,
his colleague covered it with dirt and tamped down the loose soil with the back of
his shovel. We thanked them and they left. And that was all. Jenny and I said nothing,
no prayer, nothing formal, only pausing to arrange the lilies in their vase, before
saying goodbye to Mum as if we were just leaving her for a moment, to godown the
road for a coffee. We didn’t know what else to do. When I think of it now, I wish
I’d at least thought to pour Mum’s ashes into the hole so that they could mingle
with the dust, instead of leaving them in the box. But I didn’t, and I’m sorry.
    I’ve only been back to visit the grave once since then, after the stonemason finished
carving Mum’s inscription. Her name was there: Everil Mary Taylor (nee Murray), and
her dates 1921–2008, but I didn’t sense that she was there, and I wasn’t tempted
to talk to her or catch her up with all my news. Actually, I had a powerful feeling
that she had long ago fled the scene and that the question of where she belonged
in death was still wide open. And I realised that this was probably nothing more
than the price she’d had to pay for wandering so far from the place where she was
born, that at some stage there was a point beyond which belonging was no longer an
option. Her little medicine bottle full of dust was only an approximation of home,
not the real thing, just like my burying her ashes was only a gesture at belonging,
one that was bound to fail.

    My father’s name was Leslie Gordon Taylor, but everyone knew him as Gordon or L.G.,
and we children sometimes called him Captain Taylor. I never knew where he camefrom
because he kept it a secret. Even Mum didn’t know with any certainty. According to
her, Dad’s account of his past varied so often she could never be sure if, or when,
he was telling the truth. It was known that he grew up somewhere in Sydney, but we
were never taken to see his childhood house, or to meet his family, and his parents
came to visit only rarely when I was growing up, certainly not often enough to leave
any lasting impression. I cannot even recall now what they looked like.
    If he talked about his boyhood at all it was to say how unhappy he’d been, cooped
up in a little suburban box with a mother and father who didn’t understand him, and
no brothers and sisters to share his ordeal. He declared his father a bully and his
mother a doormat, and told us he’d stormed out on them at the age of fifteen, never
to return. He was vague about what happened next. There was a job as a jackaroo for
some wealthy Victorian squatter, which ignited his love affair with horses, and where
he might have picked up his patrician affectations—the cigar-smoking and the penchant
for tailored clothes—although these could equally well have been acquired later,
in the air force, where his character was truly forged, and where he grew his trademark
handlebar moustache.
    He was as hazy about his war as he was about his childhood. The air force to start
with: it was obviously where his passion for flying began, and where his problemwith authority emerged full-scale. He never said why he was thrown out, only that
it probably saved his life, since so many of the other trainees had gone on to be
blown to bits in the bombing raids over Germany. After that he simply got lucky,
he said: one day he bumped into a recruiting officer for the British Army in India,
who immediately convinced him to sign up for officer school.