And so that’s where things stood for a while. Eliot kept our mother’s ashes with him in the Blue Mountains. The idea of a party-like memorial service faded away. I spent time in Japan thinking about other things. It wasn’t until I returned to Brisbane a few months later that the question came up of where her ashes were to be permanently placed. I knew the answer. She wanted her remains to join those of her parents and grandparents in Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery. She wanted her name added to the others on the big pink granite plinth dedicated to the Murrays. She had taken me there some years beforehand to show me. We had packed a picnic and had sat on a nearby bench enjoying the spectacular view over the city.
‘Bury me here,’ she said.
‘Happily,’ I said.
At that stage I was still brushing off any premature death talk. Mum wasn’t sick then, or not that I could tell. It’s only now, looking back, that I think she suspected something was wrong, or else why start choosing burial sites?
About a year later, I rang my sister to suggest a plan.
‘I was thinking we could all meet up in Sydney next weekend,’ I said, ‘have lunch together, drink a toast to Mum, then Eliot could hand over her ashes and I could bring them back here to do the deed.’
‘Where do you want to meet?’
‘Chinatown. BBQ King. We could get one of the rooms upstairs. Mum loved that place.’
‘Who’s going to call Eliot?’ she said.
‘I was hoping you might.’
The fact is I was scared of my brother. He was too like my father for me to feel comfortable with him. I had been frightened of him ever since we were children together.
Sarah, being the oldest, was less easily awed.
‘Chicken,’ she said.
Eliot arrived at the BBQ King a little later than the rest of us. Everyone was there: his son Ben, then in his mid-twenties, who had been a favourite of my mother’s, Shin and me and our two boys, Sarah, her daughter and two grandsons. Unfortunately Sarah’s son wasn’t with us because he wasn’t speaking to his mother at the time.
‘Mum adored him,’ I told my sister. ‘He should have been here.’
‘I tried,’ she said.
She stood up when Eliot came into the room and went around to kiss him. I preferred to remain seated. In his hand he had a large paper carry bag with Bulgari emblazoned on the side, which he placed on an empty seat.
‘Is that her?’ said Ben, peering inside. ‘What an ugly box.’
He removed the box from the bag and placed it on the table. It was beige plastic, the size of a small shoebox, with Mum’s name written on the front in marker pen.
‘Put it back,’ said Eliot.
Ben did as he was told, carefully settling the bag back on the seat so it wouldn’t fall.
‘It’s so small,’ said Sarah.
The talk went badly after that. There was a long argument about what we were going to order. It was the grandchildren who saved us from ourselves. Ben and the others regularly steered the conversation back to Mum, making sure the occasion was about her, and what she had meant to them growing up, and how they still missed her. And the great-grandchildren provided a useful 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 up to 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 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.