The very bones

Liz Breslin

So she hands you the container and you paddle out, its weight balanced between millimetres of neoprene and fibreglass. You make it past the breakers and the breakers behind and then you push yourself to sit, bobbing on the calm. You wait some heartbeats. I’ll show you, it bangs out. I’ll show you. And then you wait some more. This is the calm before the, after the, after it – breathe – after all.

The lid, sucked on by a plastic ring, won’t give when you pull. So you balance with one elbow, twist awkward with the other. If this was the movies, you think, there’d be a portent of drums and an undercurrent of violins and a big set would come in while you were twisting, taking you by surprise, taking the decision away. But the horizon only ripples as you start to shake.

It’s unrecyclable plastic, the urn. You start to shake the bits of blended bone that people call ashes over to your right, where they clump and dance to the tide.

You remember learning to dance. Not the ballet lessons you were excused from in the church hall that smelled of chalk and sweat. The teacher took your mum aside and suggested that tap might be a better fit. It wasn’t. Nor was jazz. You had the surf, when they had time to take you there, and other things – books, dreams. You didn’t dance for years. Not at the school fundraiser featuring the principal’s wife’s band, while the light caught particular at one girl’s whirlgig red hair. Not at the church youth club parties. Not even at uni, tanked with two-for-one cream cocktails. You stood, arms folded, and pictured the peel of wave after wave after wave.

You learned, finally, in the arms of Cuba. Twenty three and chasing your dreams and there you were on a beach. The surf was less than average. The government, in fact, were arresting surfers as suspected escapees. And the beer was cold and the guitar guy vibing and she put her left hand in the left hollow between your ribs and your hip, her right hand on your right shoulder, her chin draped on your left collarbone, her lips. Dance, she said. and you did. You danced with her until your visa ran out.

It wasn’t because of the dancing that he cut you off. Family, he said. Duty. No kid of mine, he said. In my day. You’ve got to know the value of a good, hard day’s yakka, he said. Contribute. Surfing is for bums and layabouts and if you don’t change your tune you won’t get a cent. And then he spent a lot of Christmases while your own dad was lying cold in the ground laying out sentences that ended up about swanning off around the world chasing waves and don’t test him and meaning what he said. And then he rewrote his will. Everyone in the family knew it. He made sure they all knew it. Everyone at the weekly meat-raffle too. Sausages, chops, brisket and rump. And they knew enough to know not to upset him, either.

There are a lot of countries that won’t let you in with only a one way flight, but you worked out fast enough that you could show them a ticket onward instead of a booking to go back. So that’s what you did. And that’s how come Aussie, Indo, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Portugal, Ireland, Cuba, Canada, San Diego. You pitched yourself in the row of baches behind the million-dollar baches. Your flatties laughed when you called them that. Laughed when you called them flatties. A lot of arm-punchy-laughter in between the waves. The serious business, a surf with the first possible tide every day. Two if it’s good. Home to refuel on pasta, rice, beans. You jobbed in hostels, in markets, under tables. Nights you couldn’t sleep you went out dancing.

You got really paddle-fit, your deltoid muscles hard, defined. You learned to swim out through the chop without thinking, turtle-roll as second nature, pop up and pace to the front of your board if it was a longboard day and that kind of mood. You tell yourself you can remember the first surf, that day you stood on the beach at Karitane, looking up at your actual dad. It’s the story that she told you over and over, the one you loved to hear when he was in the hospital and later, in the ground. You, holding your birthday-present board, hot pink foam on top and a black and white monster below. Him pushing your back gently so you stepped forward, revealed yourself goofy. How you insisted on fixing the legstrap yourself while your board bashed around in the shallows. How he taught you to paddle through the very first day. How you both could have walked out anyway. He placed your hands – here, here – gave the board a little shove into the whitewash. Up! Get up! One foot, two, you stood up, so straight, and waved and she waved back to you from the beach and your dad was standing waving beside you and you were all in the right place at the right time and snap. That’s the picture that stayed on the mantlepiece till her replacement husband took it down during one of his knowing the value of things sessions. Did she try to grab for it? Did you? Is that how you both ended up on the floor, crying over pieces of glass?

You cried that day when it was time to come in, ate two bowls of macaroni cheese and slept for three hours in the afternoon. Those were the years sleep came easy. It never comes so easy ever after any more. Night hours clenched, training yourself to ignore her incoming calls at the edges of the dark, given the time difference. Trying not to imagine her hopeful, deliberate dial in the pantry, one hand resting on the flour shelf or scrunched into her apron pocket, the other around the terrestrial hulk of a phone she still called on. You said come on mum, I’ll get you a mobile and she thought she might like that, to be able to text you and look at the pictures. But he said no, and more specifically that that girl, meaning you, isn’t going to get a penny, remember, so don’t you, meaning her, be taking charity off her. Meaning you. You’re not sure, still, some days, where the line is between you and her and you tried not to imagine her out in the rhododendron patch, pulling out weeds, looking over her shoulder. Putting her left hand on the small of her back and her right hand on the creosote fence as she raised herself to her knees and to stand and went and made him his ten o’clock cup of tea.

But you had to leave, right? What else would you do? When she told you the story about your first wave, she never knew to include the part where your legs were shaking so hard to please. Your heart, you found it, bang against a rib and everything came into the kind of clarity that people say should be illegal, on the edge of performing and free. You tried to explain it to a girlfriend once, who said yes sweetie, it means you’re in your element, and tucked a salty escapee curl behind your ear. You wrote about it at university – In my element: surfing and the sublime. But your tutor wasn’t wild about it, nor the rest of your class, so you filed it away with all the other things without words.

When he got diagnosed, you were still in the phase of answering to her every call, just in case, no matter what time it came. Listening is free so you did. About how she finally got him to the doctor, the gruff baby she said he was with the blood tests – he held my hand, she said. His absolute refusal to have anyone sticking anything anywhere, until the PSA test came back sky high. They held hands again, she said, while the doctor told them the probable month-count. So much hand-holding,it was practically public affection. And don’t tell anyone, she said, but he cried, just, a little. It’s only a number, she said. It’s only a number, but still – will you come back? For me?

Listening is free until it ties you and you were genuinely too poor to stump up for a ticket. She offered and you refused. She said she understood. If this were the movies, or you were a dutiful daughter, this could have been the point at which you went back for the deathbed reconciliation scene – one final Christmas where you and he broke the turkey wishbones and there were sausage and bacon pigs in blankets from the freezer from the raffle and she said I have nothing to wish for, I have everything I want right here, to the swell of Beethoven or Whitney Houston.

Instead, here she is, forward, with you. As you bob with the swell, she’s coming in and out of view, her hands around the rain jacket you told her she wouldn’t need. Her head tipped to the horizon.

He lasted ten days longer than they gave him – doctors, what do they know, I showed them, he said – and then refused his next appointment, and the next and the next and the next. She moved him – it took three of them, you didn’t ask her who else did the lifting – to a bed downstairs. What you want to ask her, still, is if and when, and how, in those last times, or before, did you ever wish him dead? You’ve been wishing his very specific and painful deaths since you were thirteen. You wonder if she helped him, at the end.

So it was three weeks after the funeral when you got a call from an unknown number. Not his lawyer, he said, a friend helping your mother with some things. He was calling to confirm, he said, that your step father – you clenched your fist, but didn’t speak – that your step father left everything to your mother, with the caveat that she may not further bequeath it to you in her lifetime. Is that legal, you wanted to know. It’s what he wanted, the friend who wasn’t a lawyer said. And he wanted you to know.

When she showed up at your front door, another four weeks, a taxi, a plane and another taxi later, you didn’t tell her about the call, even when she handed you a large bag of cash and said I’ve transferred the rest. Just like in the movies, she said, I’ve always wanted to say that. You poured off-boil water over genmai tea bags, her favourite, and you sat in silence across the table from her tired face, her fingers interlaced on the cup and sorry, I’m so sorry, she said. I don’t have to stay here with you, I’ve made a booking in town. But I can, if you want. I love the very bones of you.

You wanted, you did, but also there were the flatmates to think of, and it’s complicated, so she stayed in town. That was Tuesday and I can only stay until Saturday, she said, I’ve already got a return ticket and I want to be back for bridge. So we need to deal with this, too.

And that’s when she took the urn out of the bottom of the bag. I want you to take him surfing, she said. I want you to show him. Show him what? is what you don’t ask and you smile and she smiles and shrugs and holds out the container.

Your feet start to pinch a little. Cold. The sun shifts. You look up and you can’t see her any more. There’s quite a rip and you realise you’re drifting, you and the dancing flecks of bone, out and together. But this is not the part of the movie where you get swept, helpless, away. This is the part where you paddle strong across the pull of the tide and towards a more strategic spot. From the side you can see the peelers all lined up. Your shoulders burn as you get into position. Muscles, skin, motion, emotion. You’ve got this. You’ve done this hundreds, maybe a thousand times before. You take the drop. The wave takes you, easy, to the beach. The final crescendo swells. You look ahead. She’s waving.