by Kim Lock
Mercy looked out the window in time to catch a glimpse of a sign: DARWIN 45. Her pulse fluttered.
‘If you’re sure …?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Mr Cleggett?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who is this box of ashes?’
‘Why, that’s Jenny. Doesn’t it say so on the box?’
‘It does, sir, but what I mean is … who is she? And what shall I do with her? I mean, should I post her to you?’ Mercy dug through her bag, looking for a pen. ‘If you remind me what street number your house is, I can—’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Don’t put her in the mail. I don’t want her back.’
Mercy’s eyes slid to the box in her lap. With a whole new feeling of wariness, she considered the box of remains.
‘Can I ask … why not?’
Now Harry Cleggett laughed. ‘Do you think she’d want to be stuck in the post and end up back here, with this pissant shed, right back where she started? No!’ He cackled so hard he stopped to cough. When he recovered, he went on. ‘She’s had the time of her life with you. She always wanted to go up the centre, but she never got to. She didn’t travel so well, you see, when she was alive. Got terribly car sick. She was never able to stay in a vehicle too long. Even driving to the shops would upset her.’ He sounded sad. ‘But now? Well, she’s got what she always wanted. A journey through the entire country.’
Mercy didn’t know what to say.
‘You’re in Darwin?’
‘Almost,’ Mercy said. Paddocks had begun to appear, the wild scrubby green giving way to cleared blocks. The speed limit dropped to 110, and Pete veered left as the highway split, opening out into dual lanes. Water pipes and power lines flanked the highway. Civilisation was nigh. Leaning towards the front, Mercy asked, ‘How far?’
‘Thirty-five kays,’ Pete answered. ‘Half an hour, traffic willing.’
Jules smiled and kept knitting.
‘Mercy,’ Harry Cleggett said, suddenly serious, ‘can you do me a favour?’
‘Anything,’ Mercy said. ‘Except I can’t take any more of your relatives on road trips, at least not in the next couple of weeks.’
Harry laughed again. ‘Can you leave her there?’
‘Where?’ Mercy looked around the polished Dodge.
‘In Darwin. Leave her there, somewhere nice. Like a park, or the beach. Oh, she did love the ocean. I bet the ocean up there is real nice and warm. Can you do that for an old man, Mercy? Can you …’ He stopped again.
Mercy waited.
‘Can you please take my mother’s ashes to the ocean?’
CHAPTER FORTY
Mother. My mother’s ashes.
Mercy had been travelling across the country with someone’s mother. All along she had assumed Jenny Cleggett must have been the man’s wife. Other relatives or friends had come to mind: a sister, or maybe a lonesome cousin; at one stage Mercy had considered it could perhaps even be a beloved pet horse. But, driving along and pondering, always Mercy had returned to wife. It was the safest, most likely assumption. And given how easily the old mechanic had parted with the van and its cargo of cremains, Mercy had, deep down, assumed that, between the man and this Jenny Cleggett, no love had been lost.
But Jenny Cleggett was his mother. A woman who had wanted, and hoped, and despaired, and battled her own frustrations in this world in order to provide life for someone else. Did Harry love his mother? Was she kind to him, patient with him? Or did she yell at him, call him names? Did Harry Cleggett grieve the death of his mother in a raw, plain way? Or in the elaborate, tangled way Mercy did? After all, he had left her ashes inside the cabinet of a van he’d sold on the side of the road for fifteen hundred bucks.
Mercy looked at the clock. It was three forty. Her flight was at five thirty. The Dodge was hurtling along the highway, shuttling around the thickening traffic with ease. If they got to the airport in half an hour, that would give her almost ninety minutes to spare before her flight.
So she could detour to the beach first, couldn’t she?
Until she checked her ticket and discovered that the dog had to be checked in at the freight terminal no less than ninety minutes before the flight.
Shit.
She thought she had uttered the curse in her head, but then Pete spoke up. ‘Something the matter?’
Anxiety competed with embarrassment, and both competed with the terrible gnawing sensation of relying on someone else—strangers, no less—to provide everything she needed right now. It made her feel both small and weak, and bloated and burdensome, all at once. Biting the inside of her cheek, she was trying to decide where to begin when Pete went on.
‘Forgive my overhearing, but it sounds like you’ve had somewhat the unwitting adventure.’ He smiled over his shoulder. ‘We grey nomads have been known to pack quite a lot, but I don’t believe I’ve met anyone who has packed, how should I say …’
‘A dead relative?’
‘Yes.’ Pete gave a small laugh.
Mercy looked at the box in her lap, so much more banged-up and dusty than when she’d first found it. ‘I’m sorry to have brought it in your car without telling you what it was.’
Between the front seats, Jules’s slender hand appeared, gave a dismissive wave and disappeared again. Outside, a truck-sized depot of fast-food restaurants rolled by. Pete manoeuvred the Dodge around traffic, nipping in and out, and Mercy had forgotten they were actually towing a caravan.
‘My mother died when I was just a boy,’ Pete said, startling Mercy out of her mental counting of minutes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘My father married again, very quickly, because a man in the early sixties with three children and no wife is a man quite out of his depth indeed.’ He flicked on the indicator to zip into a gap in the next lane. ‘Our stepmother was a tremendous woman. Selfless, patient, kind-hearted—to be honest, I’ve never known how my father managed to make her agree to marry him, to take on his motherless children and raise them as her own. But she did. And do you know what my brothers and I did in return?’
Jules’s hand reached out and squeezed Pete’s forearm.
‘We made her life quite unpleasant. We put mulberries in the washing machine, so all the laundry stained purple. We threw mud on the clean washing. We took her best church dresses and hid them under the chooks’ nesting straw, down the bottom of the yard. We swapped the sugar for the salt, so one day she put salt in all the CWA ladies’ tea. None of our pranks were terribly original, I’m afraid, but they were awful all the same. And this went on for years. But our stepmother never complained, never even mentioned it to our father. Kept it all to herself. And we didn’t even have the decency to feel bad about it until we’d grown up and had children of our own.’
Mercy imagined Peter Boothey as a child, muddied hands throwing dirty globs on pristine white sheets. She saw the pain and anger in his face. Then she saw her own coffee mugs smashed against the wall, she saw herself sitting on her couch for weeks, months—years. The unreturned calls; the abandoned world. Flames licking the dark sky.
‘Somehow,’ Peter went on, ‘Stepmother knew that we were acting out our pain, so she simply endured it.’ He paused for a long moment. ‘We’ve all done things we regret.’
Mercy saw Jules nod her head in silent agreement.
‘Because, do you know what I think?’ Now Pete sounded quite chipper. ‘Sometimes, pain is simply pain. It hurts, and when it is felt in the moment, there’s nothing can be done but endurance.’
Mercy looked out the window. ‘Be here now,’ she said.
Wherever you ARE.
A red light approached and the vehicle rolled to a stop. Traffic congested. Palm trees fanned a blue sky. It was three fifty-five pm; she needed to check Wasabi in for the flight now.
The airport was fifteen minutes away.
And she still had the box of a mother’s remains on her lap.
CHAPTER FORTY-O
NE
The heat was stupefying. Mercy crossed the blistering carpark and headed towards the freight terminal, clutching Wasabi and gasping like a fish. She couldn’t get enough air. She felt like she was trying to breathe in an armpit. The thick smell of jet fuel; cicadas screaming, frogs shouting. Sunlight pelted onto water from a recent downpour lying everywhere and she was sweating from every single part of her body. Even her eyelids.
‘It’s going to be okay, Wasabi,’ she said, voice shaking. The dog licked her chin.
There would be no convincing the airline that Wasabi needed to stay with her. She was trying desperately not to picture herself sitting alone, strapped into her seat awaiting take-off, while her little sausage dog was in a crate below, in the dark guts of the plane. Other than his brief jaunt into the bush at Alice Springs, it would be the furthest she had been from her dog for two years.
She stepped into the terminal and her sweat-slick skin turned immediately frigid. Outside, her shorts and T-shirt had seemed too much clothing; inside she felt naked. The hot-cold flash felt exactly like the first sensations of panic.
Digging her fingertips into Wasabi’s fur, Mercy approached the counter. Pete and Jules were waiting for her in the carpark. They would accept nothing less than taking her and Jenny Cleggett to the beach. ‘It’s not far,’ Pete had promised, checking the map. ‘Only a few minutes. And better you dipping your toes in the water than waiting at the airport for an hour, isn’t that right? Besides,’ he added, ‘you wanted to get to the other side. You’re not quite there, yet.’
‘You’re late,’ the woman behind the counter said now, tapping at a keyboard. The attendant was a smallish, pinched-looking woman in her thirties, with hair gelled into a bun so tight the skin around her eyes was strained.
‘I know,’ Mercy said. ‘My car broke down. I had to—’
‘Check-in for accompanied animals closes ninety minutes before a flight.’ She pointed to the clock. ‘That was seven minutes ago.’ There was not a single hair loose on the woman’s head at all, and Mercy self-consciously patted her chopped curls. The humidity had sent what was left of them into wild puffs.
‘I’m sorry. Can you please …?’ Mercy lifted her arms, holding Wasabi forward like an offering.
The expression on the attendant’s face was both condescending and long-suffering. If Mercy had to guess, she would say this woman adored how much power she had. Mercy imagined her going home at night, perhaps to a thin, nervous-looking boyfriend, and gloating over who she had turned down, chastened or reduced to tears that day. Airports were emotional places at the best of times, what with all those grief-filled farewells, separations or joyous reunions. Mercy could almost feel the bitterness seeping from this woman, resentment that she was stuck handling dogs and cats and oversized packages instead of being up there, at the main terminal, where all the real heart-rending happened.
Though Mercy wanted to snap or beg, she felt an old, practised calm come over her. When confronted with a desperate need, most people reached for anger, threats or emotional blackmail. But now Mercy felt her old tools dredging up, rusty and unused, and turned to the best one in her arsenal: empathy.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Mercy said. ‘It sucks that I’m late. That must be really hard for you.’
The woman looked at Mercy warily.
Shuffling Wasabi onto her hip, Mercy leaned forward, putting one hand on the counter and stage-whispering, ‘And you must deal with this all day.’
The woman waited.
‘I bet you get all kinds of people. And you have to be nice to them. Even the cranky ones. And that must be very frustrating.’
The attendant continued to stare, although Mercy detected the smallest upwards shift in her brows.
‘And besides, you’re probably not paid enough, right?’
There was a beat, and then the woman said, ‘Who is?’
‘Lawyers. And politicians.’ That got a small laugh.
‘I’m really sorry to be a pain. You must work very hard to stay so nice to people.’
The attendant gave a short sigh, glancing at her watch. ‘Look, I can’t—’
‘Please.’ At that moment, Mercy knew she wouldn’t be above begging. If she had to get on her knees, she was quite certain she would. Maybe from there she could crawl onto the conveyer belt, disappear into the building and put Wasabi onto the plane herself.
‘A random act of kindness,’ Mercy said. ‘That always gets likes.’
The woman glanced from side to side. She sighed again. She deliberated so hard Mercy restrained herself from grabbing the counter and wailing. Then, after a long, long time, her hands pecked at the keyboard. Labels shot out of a machine.
‘All done,’ she said. ‘I’ll take him through.’
Mercy lowered her face to Wasabi’s silky fur, then handed him over.
By the time Mercy returned to the Dodge, tears were rolling down her cheeks. Her legs were quivering so much she thought she might pee right through her shorts.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she said to Jules. ‘I don’t think I can leave him. I think I’ll have to go get him.’
Jules gave her another frankincense-scented hug.
Mercy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the freight terminal. Wasabi was in there, somewhere, his plump little body being packed into a crate. Would he be frightened? Would he be wondering where Mercy was? Would he think, after all he had done for his mistress, that she had abandoned him?
Mercy put her hands over her face. She was falling to pieces, and she couldn’t believe it. She had come so far and now she was going to fall apart entirely.
But before she knew it, the Dodge was away and they were slipping down palm-lined streets. Pete kept up a steady stream of chatter about the dog, asking her when she had first got him, and what he liked to eat, and where he slept, and what tricks he knew. It wasn’t to distract her, Mercy realised, it was to keep her connected to the dog. To help her understand that her companion hadn’t disappeared, that her comfort—her ability to be comforted—had not left her forever.
‘Imagine how happy he’s going to be when you hop off the plane,’ Pete said. ‘That little tail will be waggling like a propeller!’
And that made Mercy think of landing in Adelaide, of getting off the plane, and it halted the narrow, throat-closing myopia of anxiety. It made her remember that this too shall pass.
Be here now, and know that whatever now is, is transient.
It took ten minutes to get from the airport to Nightcliff Beach. Skirting a peninsula was a winding drive lined with palms and frangipannis. Houses on stilts hid in shady frond canopies. Through mangroves lining one side of the road, Mercy spotted glimpses of blue, until the mangroves and palms opened up and fell away revealing a wide, flat, sparkling sea.
Once, several years ago, Mercy went to have her teeth cleaned and her regular dentist had been away. Mercy reclined on the chair under the hands of a small, ferocious woman, who had handled the sharp steel instruments with the ease and grace of a baton twirler. After she had ground away inside Mercy’s mouth for forty-five minutes, Mercy had come away feeling nothing short of excavated. Her tongue couldn’t stop probing the back of her lower incisors, feeling the deep, rough chasms that had never been there before. It had been unsettling, imagining the chunks of calculus that might have been sitting there all along, unbeknown to her, so smooth and familiar but underneath quietly rotting.
At the sight of the ocean, Mercy felt that sensation now—excavation. As though something long calcified inside her had just cleaved up and lifted away. The Arafura Sea stretched to the horizon in a flawless sheet of blue. No surf, rips or rocks marred the glittering sheet, no bruises of seaweed or deep holes. For as far as she could see, there was just calm, supreme, breath-taking blue.
Mercy had made it. She was here.
Mercy had made it to the other side.
Atop a low cliff was a small carpark, and Pete pulled the vehicle off the road.
�
�We’ll wait here for you.’
Mercy shook her head. ‘You’ve been so kind. I don’t want to keep you any longer. I’d like to do this alone, if that’s okay.’
‘If you’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Pete inclined his head.
Mercy double-checked nothing important had fallen from her bag; Pete took her phone off the charger. Then she tucked Harry Cleggett’s mother under her arm, opened the door and slid out into the heat.
She was preparing to wave the couple off when Jules suddenly opened her door and stepped out.
In Jules’s hand was an amber-coloured glass dropper bottle. She tucked it into Mercy’s palm, closed her fingers around Mercy’s hand, and squeezed.
‘What is it?’
Jules gave a beatific smile.
The label was a sticker that read Skullcap. Nothing else. Mercy held the bottle up but the liquid inside was obscured by the dark glass.
And then Jules spoke the first words Mercy had heard from her for the entire two-hour journey.
‘There’s a difference between pain, you know, and suffering. The former is a fact to surrender to, the latter is a choice.’ Jules gestured to the bottle. ‘One dropperful, under the tongue. Sometimes we all need a little help for calm.’ She winked.
Purple skirt fanning out behind her, Jules climbed back into the Dodge.
‘Wait!’ Mercy cried, stepping forward.
Jules rolled down her window. Cool air billowed out.
‘There’s something I have to ask.’ Mercy hesitated. It seemed a ridiculous question, but the idea of letting them go without knowing felt impossible. ‘For the last week, every time I’ve seen Bert he’s mentioned you two, and I have to say, the picture he painted was … well, to be honest, it was very different.’
Pete and Jules exchanged an amused look.
‘Nothing impolite, mind you,’ Mercy hastened to clarify. ‘He just implied that the two of you were, well …’
‘Wild?’ Pete said.
‘Right.’ Mercy laughed.
Jules’s eyebrows quirked.
Pete seemed to consider it for a long time. Then he said, ‘It’s not just herbs for calm that Jules works with.’
