Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [29]
‘Yeah, funny, alright,’ I say.
I walk beside him and think of how strange it is having such a father in our lives, for the two of us to be bound together in that way.
When he surfaces in our conversation we call him ‘Dad’ once or twice for comic effect, but we always fall back into Phytos, which in my mind has the dusty resonance of an old curse. We sometimes argue about who looks more like him, and in the stillness of photographs it’s me, but then I can’t put on his voice the way my brother does. And the smile that obliterates doubt in almost everyone, including the wearer, the dazzling smile that made me want to try anything as a boy, that is my brother’s.
I stare across at my brother, the face set, that brilliant glint in his dark eyes. I tell him that we have never talked about what happened between him and Phytos; that I’d like to. The thought actually frightens the shit out of me, but a part of me needs to know just more than the hazy detail. I know that he won’t tell Mum anything else. He wants her to sleep at night. He flashes me a grin then stares off down the road. We’ll talk about it, he says. We’ll have a beer and talk about it someday.
THE CRICKET
PALACE
Charlotte Wood
Wendy pressed ‘send’, knowing that Leonie had almost certainly not expected her to say yes. It was Leonie’s second wedding, after all, and had been arranged at short notice. They wanted to marry while they were still on their trip, her email said, but the whole thing would be very casual.
And Wendy was seventy-one years old, and Greece was a long way away. She knew it was quite possible Leonie did not really want her to come.
Too bad, she thought. I am going to Greece.
Sitting in front of the computer she remembered Athens, with Jim. Staying near the Parthenon, in a small hotel room with a large crack across its dingy porcelain basin, and making love every day because it was holidays, and walking and walking until late into the evenings. A fistful of old lust gripped and turned, briefly, inside her.
She looked across the room at the jar of remaining ashes on the telephone table. She kept what was left in a squat terracotta jar with a warm grey ceramic lid, which they had bought together many years ago in Shanghai, at the insect market. The jar was a home for a fighting cricket. Most of the cricket houses at the market were small, many made of rusted, cut-down food tins. But this—this was a mansion for a cricket. It was satisfyingly smooth and cool to hold, and its girth was covered in columns of fine black calligraphy. Of course they never knew what the characters meant, but they had called it the cricket palace.
For years Wendy used it to keep salt in, next to the stove. But when the crematorium people gave her the ugly plastic urn, her most urgent thought was Get him out of there, and she emptied the ashes into various containers about the house: a small inlaid wooden box Jim gave her once, a silver sugar bowl with a hinged lid that had belonged to her mother, and the cricket palace.
A good while later—too long later, most people seemed to think— Wendy and her sister Ruth, Ruth’s husband Alan and their children Leonie and Paul, as well as the few friends Wendy still had left, stood awkwardly on a steep, narrow slope just off the walking track in the national park at Bradleys Head, and Wendy’s voice went thin as she read a poem, and she tossed Jim in desultory handfuls towards the knuckled ground beneath the angophora trees.
She hated leaving the little flung piles of white gravel there in the scrub, had an urge to kneel and scrabble the bits back up with her fingers, but she knew Jim would have liked it. Just chuck me here at the end, he had said often enough as they marched that bush track above the harbour.
But there was still the cricket palace. Sometimes, when she talked on the phone, she lifted the lid and swirled her