Ashes

 

‘Today we’re taking my grandpa and grandma for a car ride.’

Paula doesn’t reply and keeps staring at her mobile phone; mother doesn’t reply either and stays hypnotised by her show. It’s one of those morning TV hells where presenters tear people apart for a roaring audience. While a sobbing peroxide blonde talks about shagging her brother-in-law I sneak into the lounge and soon I’m in the shed forcing grandma’s urn open with the peen of a rusty hammer. It’s already quite hot and I’m sweating before I begin but at least the top surrenders at the first attempt. Inside there’s a small transparent bag. I pull it out and look in: ashes and tiny bone fragments; it must weigh a couple hundred grams, no more than that. Next I do grandpa’s and it’s the same – they say couples end up looking like one another in time and I guess they’re right. I remove the little ID plaques and pocket them. Then I return the ashes to the urns, loosely replace the covers, and stash my grandparents one on top of the other in a supermarket bag.

The supermarket must have opened since I last was here nine years ago – I don’t recognise its name.

*

It happened fast.

His right leg started to turn black round early spring and before summer they chopped it off. A couple of months later he was legless and mindless. But it was grandma who kicked the bucket first, out of nowhere. Friday afternoon she was watering the hydrangeas and Saturday morning the strong stomach pains started and mother called an ambulance and grandma was driven straight to A&E.

I was there when she died a week later. I arrived at the prearranged time to find a doctor and mother waiting outside the intensive care unit. The doctor asked if I really wanted to see her, said that she was dying, that I had to properly understand what was going on, because this wasn’t the kind of stuff people should do without proper understanding. I said that I understood and went in. Grandma was wearing a mask and there were pipes and cables and machines with lights and beeping sounds; she was conscious and held my hand and like that she passed away.

One minute here and the next minute gone.

It’s quite strange if you think about it. I’m not sure there’s anything to understand. I’m not sure it can be understood.

*

And now she’s in a supermarket bag, with grandpa on top, which must be the first time in half a century.

The supermarket has a foreign name. Mother says that most supermarkets in town are Chinese now, that now everyone says ‘I’m going to the Chinese’ when they mean ‘I’m going to the supermarket’. But then everyone here is racist. I wasn’t aware that everyone here is racist when I left exactly twenty years ago today. 13 April, 2002: exactly twenty years ago. I hadn’t realised this either. I’m not sure why I clock it right now, when mother tells me about the Chinese supermarket.

And of course I hadn’t planned to deal with the ashes today because of an anniversary that I ignored. I just happened to be back home today and mother finally gave up, after I’d hammered on for years that she couldn’t keep the ashes among her books forever. But there’s a certain ring to the number twenty, something round, and now I can’t see how I could possibly deal with the ashes any other day.

*

A few months after grandma’s death, grandpa was sent to a residential home. He soon took to painting, shit painting – not as in bad quality painting but as dirty protest. Apparently he’d stick his index finger under the nappies, scoop some crap out and design abstractions on the wall next to the bed. The residential home manager called one afternoon to tell me about it. I borrowed mother’s car and drove there, to take some cash to keep the manager happy and to interview the artist.

Grandpa didn’t acknowledge his creative feats, said that he had never painted with shit. Then he spent the rest of my visit talking about the porn films the nursing staff would shoot at night, using some of the vacant beds in the room. The description of the filming gear was quite convincing but the scenes didn’t seem to match the sexual mores of the time.

*

And now he’s also in a Chinese supermarket bag as I drive on the riverside avenue. I’m driving them both, grandma and grandpa, unbelted on the passenger seat. And I’m driving mother and Paula too, sitting in the back, their belts securely fastened.

Everything has changed round here and I can’t find a spot to access the river. There’s the sand processing plant where grandpa and I used to go fishing but now there’s a sentry box with a security guard at the entrance. And there’s the marina by the park but that’s where the sewers discharge, and even if grandma once said she wanted her ashes flushed down the toilet, that was over twenty years ago and she could have changed her mind since then. And then there’s Paula, and things need to be handled sensitively, lest she take a terrible memory of this place back to London.

‘Where are we going, dad?’ she asks.

‘We’re taking my grandparents for a ride,’ I say, recycling my joke.

‘But where?’ she asks.

‘I’ve no idea, no idea, just enjoy the ride… By the way that’s where I used to play every day when I was your age,’ I say, pointing with my head towards the park. It looks much smaller than I remembered it; the grass is dry and the kids kicking a football raise dust clouds.

*

Grandpa croaked alone. I’d spent some hours with him during the day, in the hospital room where they’d taken him when he started with the chest pains; they didn’t let me stay the night. When the phone rang at precisely three in the morning I knew exactly what’d happened – you always know someone’s dead when the phone rings at three in the morning.

We drove with mother to the hospital. He was lying on a stretcher, covered with a blanket I didn’t lift. I can’t remember much more, only that I was relieved he’d died. Not only because it put an end to his decay but because I had a plane to catch four days later – not a holiday but an exit plan. Would I have left all the same if he hadn’t died? Pointless to ask that question now.

That was twenty years and four days ago. There was no shit painting in that hospital room. Not on the walls.

*

I drive to the old pier and park the car nearby. Its entrance is now boarded up. Mother says that they must’ve shut it off when a large section fell into the river seven years or so ago. I get off to look for a way to sneak in but the fence is too high and there’s barbed wire everywhere. I go back to the car and soon we’re heading north. Mother says that most of the beaches are now boarded up too, that the city sold them to build tower blocks and gated communities on the waterfront. We might end up flushing the ashes down the toilet after all.

But I keep driving along the riverside avenue, towards the docks where the passenger ships leave for the islands. It’s midweek and low season and we might find a quiet spot to scatter the ashes.

The old riverside promenade looks more or less the same – there’s just some more bars on the beach. The rowing club is still there and they’ve painted the ridiculously English club house blue. The fishermen’s quarter is still standing; the shops are now closed but the fishermen will soon return on their boats and hang their haul out to die in the sun.

‘I’m hungry,’ says Paula, never lifting her eyes from her mobile phone.

‘As soon as we’re done with this we’ll grab something to eat. You can eat very fresh fish here.’

‘But I don’t like fish,’ she says.

‘And what would you like to eat?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe we can order Chinese,’ I offer.

‘I don’t like Chinese either,’ she says.

Mother nods along.

*

I can’t remember if it was when grandma or grandpa died, because both funerals were held in the same directors’, and they get mixed in my head. Uncle and I were drinking coffee at the petrol station in the corner, taking a break from the rest of the family and the stench of flowers. He was there throughout the whole thing, both times, because mother was broken and useless and there were still many things I had to figure out about dealing with other people’s deaths.

I can’t remember what I talked about with uncle either, only that he was there. He was a simple but nice man and this is a good memory. It takes me away from all the sorrow, even if we were drinking coffee during a funeral. Mother says he was terrified when it was his turn, that he behaved like a child, crying all the way into nothingness. But who are the living to judge?

I don’t know where they held his funeral, nor what happened to his ashes, if he was cremated. I was already away when he died and people don’t wait for you to return when it’s their time to go.

*

I park the car in the empty parking lot by the docks. There are two guys fishing on the northern end of the elevated esplanade but the other side is deserted; I can see some stairs leading to the beach there.

I feel like a criminal, carrying my Chinese supermarket bag – there’s always something criminal in the disposing of a body. Two bodies. Ashes. But it has to be done, had to be done for a long time. The thought of them on that shelf has haunted me for twenty years.

Some weeks ago, still in London, I had a dream. I was in mother’s house and there was a weird green slimy matter dripping from the ceiling and leaking from under the skirting. The slime flowed and flowed and I couldn’t make it stop. It smelled of hydrangeas and cigarettes. I woke up sweating and decided there and then that there’d be no way the ashes would stay in that house after this trip.

*

I can see her watering her flowers in her light blue summer dress. I can see him smoking in the corner, leaning against a lamppost.

Then I can’t see them anymore.

*

We go down the stairs. The beach is fine here: sand, no rubbish, there’s a short wooden jetty opening into the river. The men fishing on the other end of the esplanade can’t see us and there’s no one rowing or swimming right now. No boats, no yachts, no ships, no kayaks, nothing but the river and the islands, beautiful across the water. I get the urns out of the Chinese supermarket bag, place them on a wooden plank, remove the covers. The ashes, in their little nylon bags, get some sun for the first time in twenty years – they shine. I watch Paula draw two hearts on the sand with a stick and feel mother’s presence behind me but I don’t want to turn around and meet her eye.

Now I just need to scatter the ashes, that’s all I need to do. Get the little bags out of the urns and just scatter the ashes, let the river take them away. And then we’ll grab something to eat and then we’ll get on with our lives and soon we’ll fly back to London. Scattering the ashes is all I need to do right now. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

 

Fernando Sdrigotti is an Argentine author, translator and cultural critic. He is the author of several books, including Shitstorm (Open Pen, 2018), Grey Tropic (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) and Jolts (Influx Press, 2020). He lives in London.