I was going through some old stories, and, as a decisive moment in this one takes place on a weekend where Wales play Italy, I was put in mind to share it.
— T
*
REMAINS
The cure for grief, she said, is most certainly motion. That’s what she said at the memorial, amongst her candles and incense. I don’t know if she came up with it herself or heard it somewhere. I joked after that it probably came from a motivational poster or a Facebook post. I meant no harm by it.
It was several weeks later when the intercom buzzed; La Poste was downstairs with a package they needed me to sign for. I hadn’t been expecting anything. In the lift back up to my apartment, I tore the strip off the cardboard packet and looked inside. There was a second package within, a padded envelope which had been sealed and wrapped excessively in duct tape, the heavy-duty, silver type. It came with a note. Dearest Owain, it began, please don’t be alarmed.
Once inside, I called my sister.
- What fresh hell is this?
- Alright, love. Package arrived then, has it?
- Gail, what the fuck?
- She brought mine over last week.
- Oh, she did. So, you knew about this?
- Owain.
- Tell me then, what are you going to do with your portion? Snort it up like Keith Richards?
- Don’t be awful.
- Well?
- I was thinking of going up to Llanberis next week, taking Rhys up on the train up Snowdon.
- You know that wouldn’t have been his first choice.
- Well, that’s as maybe. But I want Rhys to come with me and I can’t be dragging him up Tryfan. He’s only 6!
- Right.
- I do want to keep some, regardless. I don’t care what she says. And I was thinking maybe next time we go to Spain, the Med, you know?
- So, you’re going through with it then. You’ve thought about it.
- What else is there to do, Ow? She said it’s what he asked for. It’s out there, no doubt about that, but it seems harmless enough. No?
- Alright, well.
- Did her letter mention what she has planned?
- What’s that?
- Goa. First stop of the tour.
- Fuck’s sake. Can you honestly imagine dad like some hippy out there on a tropical beach?
- Smoking ganj, what?
- Alright Gail, talk to you.
- Don’t be giving her a hard time about this.
- No, no. I know.
- Take care love.
Inside the second envelop were three small, clear plastic sandwich bags containing my father’s ashes. I set them out on the living room table. In her note, Sandra had explained that it had always been my father’s wish to travel the world. He’d told her that. They’d discussed it. From his hospital bed, he’d told her, she said, that his greatest regret was not travelling more. My dad. Who had only made it once to Paris in the fourteen years I’ve been living here. And who, in secret, ate McDonald’s every day of his trip so he wouldn’t be forced to face frog’s legs, snails or any of his other provincial stereotypes. Desperate for a jaunt to the sub-continent, he was.
I sent Gail a text. Did she send ashes to Martin too? Our brother was in no fit state for that. No, love. She did him his portion and set it aside x At least she wasn’t completely dense. Have you spoken to mum? Gail took some time composing her response. I stared at the jiffy bags on the table. The fine, light grey particles. They looked as if they’d been sieved. There was a pureness to them. I held one and felt its weight, firm and soft, coy in my living hand for movement, shifting. I wondered what it was I held. Odd, I thought, deference to a zip-lock bag. It was in no way momentous enough a carrier. Still, she had packed them well, tightly, conscientiously. Her care was evident. I reread her letter. So was her sincerity. Mum knows x was all Gail said.
When Ondine came in from work I was sitting on the sofa, listening to Nos Du, Nos Da. It was one of the few albums that both me and dad could enjoy together; Meic Stevens was as close as he had come to psychedelia before Sandra showed up to lead him all the way from retreated bachelorhood to the astral plane. Divorcé-hood. Solitude. She had been good for him, after all.
- How are you, baby?
Ondine sat down next to me and kissed my cheek. Immobile but for the welling in my eye, I chanced a smile. She had been everything those past few weeks.
- Pretty song, what’s he singing about?
- I don’t know, honey. I don’t remember the words anymore. I don’t understand them.
- Won’t it say on the sleeve? You can translate for me.
- I don’t know, Dini.
- Is everything ok? Did something happen?
- I got a packet from the Moon Child today. Dad’s ashes.
- Oh baby.
- She gave some to Gail too, and there’s some for Martin, maybe later on. She has some herself. She wants us to travel. To take these, these little baggies, and go about scattering his ashes in all different places. Because he wanted to travel, she said. To see the world. She’s going to take him to India.
- That’s beautiful. Don’t you think?
- I’m tired, baby. I couldn’t find anything to keep them in, the ashes. They’re still on the table, sorry.
- So, where would you like to take him? Next weekend we could go up to my parent’s place in Cabourg if you wanted to.
- I just want to find somewhere better, somewhere nicer, to keep them first. An urn or a box or something. Something more than a fucking taped up plastic bag, like something that was found in a drug bust.
- Ok, baby. I’m sure we have something. And if not, we can find something tomorrow. We can go out and buy something.
She leant her head against my chest. I didn’t feel like crying anymore. We sat that way long after the record ended, listening to the fuzz and trips of its going rotation as the room turned dusk around us.
*
A year or so later, on no particular day, neither his birthday nor his anniversary, we took the train to Brest, where we rented a car to drive out to Corsen on the tip of Finistère. Ondine sat in the passenger seat, my father’s ashes in her lap, my child in her belly. In the box in which his remains were being kept, there was only the one packet left. The Sunday following their arrival, Ondine had gone out early, leaving me asleep, to a brocante at Edgar Quinet. She came back with a newly made mahogany case, a little more ornately carved than I would have chosen myself, but nevertheless a handsome thing: sturdy, sombre and appropriate. Above all, it was a touching gift. With the ashes inside, I put it in the cupboard of my bedside cabinet and tried not to think about it.
And I managed not to too, think about the remains at least and what it was I should’ve been doing with them, until a postcard from Goa arrived. In her brief note, Sandra described the pre-dawn beach ceremony she’d organised as “blessed”. To Gail, she’d said it was “sublime”. I didn’t know what to make of it. We did laugh, but not, I think, unkindly. I was due at the time to take a trip to Tbilisi, where I’d been invited to speak at a conference. Ondine said it was the perfect chance to fulfil Sandra’s request. Even if I couldn’t do it for myself or for dad, I could, she said, do it for Sandra.
- Think of her, after all. She’s lost her partner, her lover. It clearly means a lot to her.
I couldn’t disagree. But told her never to refer to my father as anybody’s lover ever again. That was a French touch too far.
Gail thought it was a good idea too, and I asked her how she’d gone about it, which she had, twice. Once up Snowden, as she’d said, and again on her summer holidays in Blanes. Don’t ask me how I got him through customs! She howled.
- But how did you do it? I mean, like, what did you say?
- Up the mountain, it was so windy, we were just trying to make sure we pointed them the right direction so as not to get a face full!
- Gail.
- I don’t know Owain, you can say whatever you want. Rhys shouted, “goodbye taid!” In Spain I went alone, just down to the water’s edge one evening, slipped off. That was just for me.
- And you’re keeping the last?
- I am.
So leaving the other delegates to their post dinner discussions, I’d slipped away myself. First to my room, then out through Tbilisi and up to the Narikala fortress. We’d been taken there the day before on an organised excursion and I’d picked out my spot. I stood at the point I’d chosen, between crumbling ramparts and broken-down walls, as high up as I could get, looking out over the river, city lights on the far banks, the blocky stalagmite of the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral jutting all illuminated. Where could have been better? Far, foreign and mystical. I weighed the bag a moment in my hand and poured him into to the Eastern night. I felt abandoned.
When I told Ondine about it on my return, she asked me what I’d said, what I’d been thinking of. I couldn’t say. Nothing. Not losing my footing, maybe. Being able to get back down to the town and my hotel. Not getting lost. I didn’t mention my subsequent emptiness. That the gesture had made no sense to me. That I couldn’t connect it to dad.
- I don’t really know. I just kind of did it.
Still, I’d sent Sandra her postcard with a photograph on the front which was as close as I could find to the view I’d had.
- And what did you write?
My affections had been tersely sent, without elaboration. Writing the card in the hotel lobby, whilst waiting for the shuttle to the airport, I’d been embarrassed by my lack of finer feeling, the bitterness I had for Sandra’s credulous poetry and readily gushed sentiment. I didn’t tell Ondine this.
- Kind words. Not much.
The second packet went into the Tiber. Martin had decided to defer his final year at Aberystwyth and had moved, temporarily, into Gail’s, with a job in town as a kitchen porter. For his birthday, I was taking him to Rome, tickets to Italy-Wales thrown in. Extravagant, but he needed cheering up. When I packed the ashes, I wasn’t sure of going through with it. I wanted to share it with him, needed anyway to speak to him about it, but hadn’t made up my mind as to how to go about it. I would just see how it went. In the end, we didn’t talk about much profound. Not dad and not his illness. But he knew about the portion of ashes set aside for him. He didn’t know how to take it and had been avoiding Sandra as much as he could. I didn’t know she’d offered him a roof, his old bedroom in the family farm. When I asked why he’d said no, he didn’t feel like explaining. We got very drunk.
The next day I woke up feeling like a thug. At some point in the night we’d gone down to the river and tipped the ashes in, dropping the bag into the water too. We’d been moved along by the carabinieri. That was as much as I could remember. I couldn’t even be certain from which bridge we’d scattered him. But I wasn’t sorry that that was how we’d done it. The postcard which I later wrote, without Martin’s input, we didn’t post. I asked him to take it to her. A week later I received a message filled with blessings and thanks, saying he’d put it through the letterbox.
*
Leaving our luggage at the gîte outside Plouarzel, we drove out towards the setting sun. It was a Friday evening. As we’d be there for the weekend, we’d talked about when might be best to do it. Whether to wait until the night before coming home, how big of a thing to make of it. I preferred to go directly. It was why we’d come after all. Pointe de Corsen, the western-most point of the country: wild and Celtic and stuck out in the sea. We parked the car and crossed the beach. Wind-whipped, clouded and tempestuous, the night was coming on in appropriately monumental form.
- He would have loved this, Dini.
I leant into the wind. We walked close, arm in arm and quietly, as the drive had been.
Despite the threat of weather, a group of teens had gathered at the north end of the beach. Sat around a campfire, they drank beers whilst one of them played a folky sounding guitar. Ondine said hello. They waved back.
- You should go and sing a Welsh song with them.
I bent my head in their direction, raising them a stiff hand instead.
When we reached the Pointe, Ondine asked if I wanted to go on alone, right out towards the water, onto the rocks. I told her I wanted her at my side.
- I don’t really know what I’m going to say now.
I felt the package in the pocket of my fleece. Smooth and pliant, kneading to the touch.
- I’m here, baby.
I opened the packet and the ashes flew, quickly invisible, into the gloaming. Mightily inhaled by the Atlantic ocean’s breath, they were beyond us, swept up into blustering atmospheres. Gone, just gone.
- I’m proud of you, baby.
I folded the baggy and slipped it into my pocket, to be kept, I’d decided, in the box she’d bought. We walked back along the road.
The next morning while Ondine was still asleep, I took the car out again to the coast. In the wan dawn, I put my foot upon the sand, watching the grains as they sluiced into my instep. I wonder, I asked myself, the grey sands fine and shifting, what it is I’m stepping on. I moved along to where, the night before, the teenagers had sat. A tide had come and gone, but I could still make out, or so I thought, a ring of char where they’d set their fire. I kicked an empty can. Walking down to the water’s edge, I watched the breakers fringe the shore. I held my breath as the surf rushed the beach and exhaled as the waters washed out in their turn.
La Mer à Morgat, Odilon Redon (1883)