Dying (9 page)

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 cemetery
towards 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 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 go
down 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 came
from
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 problem
with 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. He duly shipped out
to India for training. Six months later, his training complete, he expected to cross
into Burma to fight the Japanese, but they surrendered before he could pack his jungle
kit. I was never sure if he was pleased about this, or resentful, because it had
deprived him of the chance to prove himself in combat. In any case, the end of the
war saw him transported back to Australia anxious to launch his career in civil
aviation as soon as possible, since flying was his true vocation.

Not that it was an easy calling. In the early days, when Dad was starting out, it
was full of risks, all of which he seemed to relish. Along with travel. He couldn't
stay in one place for longer than a year or two, or in the same job. He appeared
to be in a perennial state of high dudgeon about the incompetent way airlines were
run, about the primacy of commercial pressures over everything else. He fought with
almost everyone he ever worked for. As a result, we lived like gypsies, forever packing
up and
moving on, which suited Dad perfectly. He was at his best when he was leaving.
It didn't worry him if we had to change schools yet again, abandon friends and neighbours,
repeatedly adapt to new surroundings. Anything, apparently, was better than settling
down in some barren suburb like the one he'd escaped from as a teenager. That was
Dad's nightmare, the thing he feared the most. I think he would have preferred to
die than end up back in the same place he had started out.

He was in his seventies before he started to examine his beginnings with anything
like equanimity. Growing up, he had always had a suspicion that, given how unsatisfactory
they were, his mother and father were not his true parents. He remembered another
couple, periodic visitors to the house, who came from Glasgow and bore an air of
old-world refinement, people to whom his mother and father had deferred. In the hope,
no doubt, of confirming his theory, he chose them as the first quarry in his genealogical
hunt.

‘They were called Auchincloss,' my father told me. ‘There are five of them in the
Glasgow phonebook. We've got to be related.'

He travelled to Glasgow, where he discovered the truth. It was not what he had hoped.
The couple were not his parents, but his father's relatives by marriage. And his
father was not who he had said he was. Originally from
Ireland, my grandfather had
run away from a violent household at the age of fourteen or so, and ended up in Glasgow,
where he changed his name from O'Neill to Taylor. An aunt took him in, and not long
after that he joined the merchant navy and started travelling the world, eventually
jumping ship in Sydney.

‘I never knew any of it,' my father said. ‘I might have had more respect for him
if I had.'

He showed me a tiny grey photograph of my grandfather scrubbing the deck of a ship.

‘He was just a kid,' he said, the first kind word I'd ever heard him say about his
father.

My father spent a week in Glasgow meeting relations he never knew he had. He came
back changed. It would be too much to say that he was at peace—he was never at peace—but
there was some sense that he had laid a few ghosts to rest and decided not to run
so hard. There was also some recognition of the price we had all paid for his insistence
on always moving.

‘It was tough on your mother,' he said. ‘I don't blame her for quitting when she
did.'

He wrote to her asking for her forgiveness, but she didn't reply. By then, I am sure,
all her reserves of compassion for Dad were exhausted.

My father's spiral into severe dementia probably started around the same time as
my mother's. I should have recognised the signs, but I saw so little of him that
it was hard to keep track. By then he was living in Canberra, where he had seen out
his working life as a mail sorter for Australia Post, and now lived on a modest pension
at a hostel for public servants. I went to see him there a couple of times, and Shin
and I once visited with the boys on our way to the snow for a holiday. Now and again,
he would turn up in Brisbane and knock on our door.

‘Howdy,' he'd say. ‘I was just in the area.'

He'd proffer a shopping bag or two of groceries. ‘I didn't want these to rot in my
room while I was away.'

He gave the boys volumes from his library about planes and the history of aviation
and was miffed when they didn't show proper appreciation.

‘I'll take them back if you don't want them,' he said.

As much as he enjoyed spending time with us all, he was really in Brisbane to see
Mum. At that time she was living in an independent living unit a short walk from
our house. Within minutes of his arrival he'd bring up her name.

‘How's Ev getting on?' he'd say.

‘Fine.'

‘She didn't reply to my last letter.'

‘That's probably because you asked her for money.'

I knew this because my mother always showed me his letters, or read them aloud to
me, her outrage mounting. It was twenty-five years since their divorce and my father
was still trying to wangle money from my mother any way he could.

‘He won't stop until I'm dead,' she said. In one particularly cruel missive, however,
he suggested she leave him her unit in her will, offering to pay half of any legal
costs that might entail.

I now think this obsession with money was a sign of the deeper malaise that was about
to engulf him. But at the time I saw it as nothing more than vengeance. He had not
forgiven my mother for divorcing him. He resented her hard-won financial independence.
He'd always scoffed at her job: school teaching was so drearily middle class. It
had transformed her from the adventuress with whom he had fallen in love into a suburban
frump. Going right back, it was clear that he was aggrieved my mother had family
money and he didn't, even though, as my mother pointed out, it was her family money
that had made all of his unfettered roaming possible.