CHAPTER 1

We are wasting our time. But I don’t know. The motor thuds to life like a blow to the heart, and we are spun out onto the sea so wind is smacking our cheeks and the boat pitching and slamming to take speed.  We grab at each other and bits of railing. “Where to?!” shouts the man whose boat this is.  The peak of his cap juts before him, yet leaves his ears burnt red.  I turn to Jo, who is watching Clarial.  The others squint out to sea like tourists come for a ride.

“Where to, Lee?!” asks Clarial.

I search the daze of sunlit sea, hoping to see maybe our father’s boat rolling at the horizon. The ocean stretches tight from headland to headland.  Not even birds hazard its desert face.  “I think..,” I turn to my sisters, “I think he liked to fish off the reef!”

Sidha snorts.

“It’s a lot of reef!” shouts the boatman.

“He won’t be far!” says Clarial.

“Of course he’ll be far!” says Jo.  “He loved to go way out!”

“How would you bloody know?!” says Sidha. “You don’t even like fish!”

The boatman cuts his motor, waits while these five strangers bicker in his little boat.  Only the young man, the one with hair everywhere, smiles at the sea swigging on a tin flask.  Light glints off his naked chest.  The boat burbles forward, lurching at the tumble of waves. “Could you call him on the two-way?” he asks.

“We tried,” says Jo, shrugging, lifting her eyebrows.

The boatman frowns, thinks maybe he is wasting petrol.

“He never forgets his radio,” says Clarial.  “He’ll probably switch on in a minute.”

The boatman pouts. “Who’d he tell was going out?”

We glance between ourselves.

“Michael Mort, is it?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah, he lives close.  A practical bloke, I’d a thought.” He turns and grumbles the motor, the boat bumping towards the glare of sea.  After a hundred metres he cuts the engine again, keeps us pointed into the waves.  The wheel is like a part of his arm.  “What’s he doing out there?” he asks nobody.

We listen to the spank of waves against hull.  Juliard swigs, begins to whistle through his teeth.  “Fishing,” I say.

“Not at this hour.”

Clarial turns to Jo, frowning as if Jo might be keeping the answer to herself.  Sidha shakes his head, and smiles.  And yet to tell this stranger what we fear in our hearts:  that maybe we have misread our father.  He is, has always been a sensible man.  “He’s just wandered off,” says Sidha.  He grins. “Like a dog.”

The boatman hoods his eyes.

Don’t be ridiculous,” says Clarial.  “He’s gone for a ride.”

What the hell do we know what he’s doing?” says Jo.

“He could be anywhere.”

The boatman looks away, steadying us against the tug of currents.  A bunch of loonies, he thinks.  If only we could be like a family, just for now, especially now with our mother barely two days gone.  “Let’s just go out,” I say, “and see.”

The boatman slams his arms forward and we plunge into the sunlight.

*

In the sunless room, I steered dad forward until we stood at the box, waiting. A kind of music fretted at the edge of our hearing, vague as mumbling prayers.  I felt in his arm the cold of fear.  “All right, dad?”

“Yeah,” he cleared his throat.  “I’m fine, Lee,” in his sensible voice.

We leant forward; but it could not have been my mother there in the hollow of that box.  In that cushioned crate.  Someone else in that soothe of velvet, so safe from bruising, was cooling the blue of well-chilled fruit. But not my mother.  No.  No, they had pushed back the hair in a strange style, painted the lips a colour she hates.  And why did she not complain? My mother would have.  A sliver of hair hung across one eye, and I reached to nudge it back, saw my own hand red and viscous as a slice of meat against that blue flesh.  Who and where is my mother? Not surely this lumpen parody, this effigy?  My hand fell away.  “She’s gone, dad.”  My words drained into the curtained walls.

He looked up, blinking, squinting to read his own thoughts.  “Yeah.  That’s right.”  Then from his mouth came not words but a kind of wheeze, a groan become a cough, and he looked down his chest as if watching blood leaking there.  So that reaching around him to hug and comfort, I wanted somehow to shake him, to squeeze, maybe punch.  You’ll be OK, dad,” I said.  “You’re OK.”

“You reckon?”

I held his arm, waiting for the good words, solid as a book, to brace our thoughts.  A window was open, and some wind had invaded, scattering words like torn pages.  The back of my neck felt tight, turning my jaw to cement.  I sniffed the cool air, said, “Did you choose this place?”

He glanced at the box, seemed to expect a rebuke. “It’s the only one in town.”

I flinched with the cool.  When we came in off the torrid street, the sweat chilled in us, stepping into the tender light, the air like a wet towel at our foreheads.  The walls were sky-blue.  A tall man closed in from behind his counter, smiling with perfect teeth.  “Mr. Mort?”  He worked my father’s hand.  “My name’s Bob.”  His face crumpled from the eyes like someone who knows their Bible.  “My deepest sympathy to you.”

“And this is Lee,” said my father, gesturing at the space beside him.  “One of my children.”

Bob smiled, perhaps at the “children”, while we stood waiting, maybe for him to say there’s been a mistake and that my mother is alive and expecting us at home or maybe to be led in prayer, or maybe offered shovels.  “Will there be others?”

“Pardon?”

“Of the family, to join us.”

I thought of my brothers and sisters in the city, our separate lives at last drawn here by our mother, how good for us to come together, a family at last.  Perhaps.  “Not today,” I said.

He nodded.  “Mrs. Mort is ready now, if you’d care to see her.”

My father stared with his open mouth.  I squeezed his arm, seeing how the skin sags at his jaw, pinches his eyes, how he hunched like someone expecting a beating.  “Dad?”  I said, waiting for the strong words to come out of me, the comfortable words to wrap around him, to straighten him up, my collapsing father. “OK, dad?”

He shuffled forward, staring, his only help the cool hand of Bob at his arm.

Bob

I put them in Number One Chapel.  It’s a bit quieter, and not so cold.  When they came in, the old bloke seemed fairly rattled, and started to go nearly as blue as his wife.  Around his eyes he had that redness people get when someone dies.  I got him in there before he fell over, but still they insisted on standing up.  “It may take a few moments, to bring her in.”

Lee looked at the old man and said, “That’s Ok.  We’re fine.”

I smiled, but he wasn’t fine, and I thought of my own father before he died, how he had that gawp of someone standing at the edge of a cliff knowing he has to jump.  My hands twitched to sit him down.  “Tea?” I asked.

“No thanks.”

Out the back, Ron was loading the body into a box.  She wasn’t much trouble, the old lady.  Old flesh is soft, the fluids and gases come out easily. Much easier than dealing with the lively ones.

I admire Ron at work, in his mask and glove.  After the removal, he makes the incision from throat to pelvis, peels open the ribs, and pulls out quite a few kilos of organs.  Then the blood is suctioned out through the jugular, and replaced.  With an electric saw he opens the skull, but its amazing how easily the brain slides out.  The university pay pretty well for those.  It is, after all, dead meat.

Miriam takes over, dressing the body.  We’re lucky to have Miriam.  After she’s stitched the mouth shut, she does the cosmetics and wax.  I try to get her a life photo to work from, but it’s a delicate matter so I don’t push for it.  Then Ron slips a tube down the chest for excess gas, and we’ve got the finished product.  I like to think we bring some comfort to the survivors, getting the deceased up to a good likeness.

It’s not hard work.  Except maybe when some bloke tops himself with a rifle, and I have to scrape bits of brain off the ceiling with my hand or a broom.

But Mrs Mort came quietly and well-corked against leakage.

This is what I remind myself when they come in, droopy with grief and fear.  They don’t want someone crying or slit-mouthed with doom.  They want someone who has death well in hand.

Father

It was wrong, seeing her there in that box.  As if they had laid her in a canoe and pushed her out onto a lake; while I stood there with my feet in sand.  We have never been apart before.  It’s not possible.  Too much of me is in her for only one of us to die.  My life, my warmth.  She holds in trust for me my life, and I hers.  So what was this body lying there in her likeness?  My Becky, I squeezed Lee’s hand on my arm.

“Dad, let’s sit down.”

“I’m alright.”  I leant against Lee, steadied myself.

“Sure?”

What is sure? My wife was sure.  As certain as opening my eyes and seeing.  If we called the other’s name, someone said, “Yes?! Coming!”  But if I touched her now, it would be like feeling an arm that has been lopped.  I stroked my arm, and it hung like a plastic limb.

“Sit here, dad.”  Lee lowered me down.  Poor Lee, both parents turning to clay without warning.  I struggled to sit up, my legs failing on me. “I’ll get some water.”

“No, no.”  I cleared my throat, made an angry sound.  “I’ll be OK.”

“Of course.  You’re upset.”

“Yeah.” Upset.  Of course.  So my teeth ground down against their chattering, my palms wet with fear.  Upset enough I’d stained my pants.  I stared up at a soft window, gilded with a cross, trying to get breath, and courage.  People expect courage.  But what can you hang courage on when you are dangling?  Only your slow slipping of fingers, the heavy weight of loss, when parts of yourself are already falling away.  The relief then of letting go.  I closed my eyes.

“Life goes on, dad.”

I thought of smiling, gave up the effort.

We listened to the mutter of empty music, could taste the dustiness of chilled carpet. “I’m sorry, Lee.  I’ll be OK.”

“No, dad, that’s all right.”

I leant like a child against my child, wanting to fall to the floor, the comfort of floor, knowing you can’t fall any further.  Is it right for a father to sprawl, or should I prop in a chair like a monument to past grandeur, some stone effigy?  “At the funeral, Lee..”

“Mm?”

“Don’t let them lie about her.” A moment passed between us, of understanding. “We’ll get a clergyman with his feet on the ground.”

“Know anyone?”

“No.” We smiled.  I looked across at the casket, floating just beyond reach, and felt the cold of water lapping at my ankles, the soothe of a tide moving out.  She lay in the canoe, and it was only a short space to swim.

Lee

I had not seen before my father so slumped and staring, so deep in thoughts his mouth sagged open.  A thoughtful man, yes.  But now he gulped, and squeezed back his neck as if he was drowning without trying to save himself.  I pressed his hand.  “Come on, dad.  You’re very much alive.”

His eyes flinched towards the box.  “More fool me.”

“Don’t say that.”

He looked around, his eyes wet with salt.  “Sorry.  You’re right.”

“I’ll ring the others.”

We stared, knowing who these others were, asking in our eyes should they come, and will they, given the nature of families.  “You sure?”

“Your family, dad.”

He looked away into the dull light, nodded.  His chin hung towards his chest.

“Dad….” I searched the walls, mute with curtains, empty of pictures, looking maybe for a proverb, some small text.  I could not even find a scratch in the wall.  And my father slumped beside me, beached in the shallows of his grief, unwilling to move, sipping the dead air.  I latched my arm around him.  “I’ll take you home.  You’ll feel better there.”

He stretched, rolled his feet. “Yeah, home.”

“I’ve got my car.”

“Not a hearse?”  He smiled.  My dad again.