Bringing Home The Ashes

By Jamieson Allom

Following the death of Australian Graham Pleasance in England, Barry Paterson travels from Tasmania with his wife and sister-in-law to bring his friend's ashes back to his childhood home, via a European river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest. Graham had always fancied going on one, so now, in a way, he would.

In Basingstoke, England, crematorium worker and part-time underworld courier, Kresnik Begovic, is looking for a chance to set things right after a failed delivery. When the burly Bosnian refugee encounters the mild-mannered Tasmanian retiree at a Basingstoke funeral parlour, their fates become intertwined.

Has somebody interfered with the small oak casket that Barry is carrying in his back-pack and is he really bringing home the ashes of his mate?

"A gentle romp through three continents and many countries, Bringing Home the Ashes is a delightful tale of family, friends and unforeseen fortunes."

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Book Reality Experience
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645062908

Book preview

Dedication

For Graham

PROLOGUE

October, 2015. Kresnik Begovic has been asked by Dragan Rakic to collect a small parcel from a London address and deliver it discreetly to a country house, the home of one George Rawlinson, Esq, on the edge of Longparish, a small village west of Basingstoke in Hampshire.

The fiery hues of autumn line the narrow road and its leavings swirl up behind his rushing machine. Nearing his destination, Kresnik steers the bike into a little recess at a farm gate to enjoy a cigarette in the clear country air. He shuts down the Kawasaki’s thudding motor and a quiet envelops him. As he feels for his cigarettes, a symphony of small sounds makes its way into his consciousness: the distant lowing of cattle, birdsong, some kind of machine somewhere (his knowledge of machines stops where the paddocks begin) and, so close that it confuses him, a tiny squeaking sound. The engine cooling? He hasn’t heard it before. Something about to go wrong with the bike? The Kawasaki is getting old, after all. He has his eye on a Honda Valkyrie. What a machine that is. A few more of these ‘confidential’ deliveries for The Dragon and he might be able to afford one.

No, it isn’t the bike. The sound seems to be coming from his pannier, from the package stowed there. He knows he shouldn’t interfere with the package, but he feels compelled to find out what is making the strange noise.

He opens the pannier and takes out his cargo. It is a padded envelope, bulky with whatever is inside. He notices for the first time that the envelope has a pattern of small holes along two edges. More than just decoration, he guesses. The envelope peels open with unexpected ease. Inside is a short cardboard tube, about the diameter of a tennis ball. It too has a series of small holes near its ends. Is Rawlinson, Esq a tennis player? With special requirements? For squeaky balls? Perhaps he is blind; Kresnik has heard of blind people playing lawn bowls. But why the holes in the packaging? They look like air holes to him.

He listens more closely, stops breathing.

Then it comes to him. The sound is that of a bird chirruping. He has heard of the trade in exotic birds, but has not encountered it before. There must be a bird, a live bird, in the tube. Kresnik’s heart lurches. He is carrying a little creature—a frightened creature, no doubt—encapsulated in a tiny dark container. He twists the lid of the cylinder and opens it just enough to peer inside.

He sees in the dim depths a pair of frightened eyes. His little sister’s frightened eyes. Sees mute pleading in those eyes. He and Katarina are in the back of a crowded and stifling truck. A truck that, thanks to Dragan Rakic—The Dragon—has carried them and their cousin Danilo out of the hell of Sarajevo and across Europe, leaving behind their ruined home and the pathetic graves of their parents, heading towards the hope of a new life.

He sees Katarina’s eyes in the dimness, hears again her whimpering. Was this to be their fate, he had wondered, back then—death by suffocation in the fetid dark? He had heard of other trucks being found with bodies inside, the gouged walls a terrible testament to the occupants’ final desperate hours.

The bird must be released.

1

GRAHAM

October 2016. The world in which Graham Pleasance finds himself is one of polished vinyl and scrubbed stainless steel. Its days are visited by odours of Pine O Cleen, piss and porridge, its nights an awful portent of death—the movements, moans and slurping snores of the other unfortunates in his ward, a morbid carriage on a train groaning towards the line’s end.

The food is acceptable, if predictable; he has his own tiny television; his every bodily need is attended to, but what of his other needs?

He misses his house in Basingstoke. He misses his little walled garden with its tiny pond, surely overtaken in his absence by that despicable duckweed. He misses his bright flowers—oh God, who will be watering the potted hibiscus, its single bloom a radiant splash of colour in his fading life? He misses his records, his rugs, his armchair in the sun. He misses Spencer.

He watches for any opportunity to escape and return home, but his movements are slow and his guards vigilant.

Last week he had been rebuked by the ward sister, the head jailer, for his behaviour in the shower. Scolded, as if he were a child. The young male nurse assisting him had obligingly soaped his body all over, accepting his gestures of helplessness at face value. Was it his dreamy smile that gave him away? Couldn’t an old man enjoy even a moment of pleasure? A moment recalling memories of other young men, when he himself was young and their behaviour was thrilling and dangerous. So thrilling that it quashed any qualms he may have had in leaving behind his stifling post-war existence in Tasmania, so forbidden that it courted incarceration wherever he went.

His ward-mates offer no respite from the bleakness of his new situation. Or at least nothing that he can see in the empty eyes of those pathetic husks of men, from whose brittle bones somebody or something—perhaps life itself—has sucked the very marrow, and with it, all joy. One of them is looking at him now. The mad one.

He wishes the groaning train would get there, get to its destination: oblivion. He recalls talking to Barry about journey’s end, about an exit strategy, how and when to alight. Several options, with him vaguely hoping that the dear fellow would help him off. Barry is the only one who might, but he’s on the other side of the world. The bottom, actually. Down Under.

Today, Graham is captivated by a mystical tower that has appeared outside the window at the end of the long room. From his bed, he can see a great army gathering below the tower. Horsemen. With lances and shields. No one else in this miserable place seems to notice. Dare the horsemen attack this grey stronghold and take on its legion of protectors to free their imprisoned prince? If not those ghostly riders out there, then who on earth can deliver him from this place? His Basingstoke friends? Or will his distant cousins hear his need? His thoughts often turn to those few he can call family. To his antipodean cousins Geraldine and Carol, and to Carol’s husband, dear Barry.

2

BARRY

Barry Paterson stares at his teeth. So many of them. Row upon row of morbid mementos, artefacts from his former life.

To Barry, his teeth are not mere prostheses. Each set—whether a full or partial plate, whether acrylic, synthetic resin, with gold or cobalt-chrome—represents the liberation of some soul, the gift of a confident smile, of crisp speech and decorous dining. The words they helped to form, the thoughts they helped give voice to, the stories whose telling they made easier—stories which might otherwise not have been told. The smiles they made more ready and open, lending renewed confidence and well-being to their owners, and to all those who received those smiles and were, for that moment, warmed by them.

Such reflections are the only thoughts that give Barry Paterson any comfort that he might have had a meaningful place in the world, had some worth.

From the glass-fronted blackwood cabinet, occupying an entire wall of his study, he takes out an antique plate. It is already clean, but he begins to wipe it with a tissue extracted from the pocket-size pack he always carries. He rubs at invisible defects.

Barry Paterson is, or was until his retirement, a smile doctor. At least, that’s how he had liked to think of himself. Dental mechanic, dental technician, dental prosthetist—the formal description and scope had evolved over the years, but they all meant the same thing. In mid-career he had, with rare boldness, attempted to adopt ‘The Smile Doctor’ as the trading name of his small practice in East Launceston, Tasmania. He cringes now to recall how meekly he had yielded to the indignant demands of a local medico—a real doctor—and his equally humourless lawyer and taken down his new sign. The sign had since skulked in a far corner of the garage, damning evidence of Barry’s willingness to be walked over, to submit to the will of others. He wonders now whether there had ever been a time in his life when it was worth the fight?

Despite his new freedom, had his life really changed, had he really changed, in the eighteen months since he had sold his practice and retired? Eighteen months. Nearly five hundred days. A hundred or so holes of golf (don’t let’s think about the number of strokes!), probably a hundred litres of wine, thirty-odd paperbacks, half a dozen concerts, maybe four dinner parties, three funerals, two medical procedures, one proper holiday (a visit to Graham in England) and a partridge in a pear tree. Truly – their latest Christmas gift from Carol’s oh-so-witty sister Geraldine had been a partridge in a pear tree. Bought at a Christmas Tree Shop in New York—as you do. Well, at least they would only feel obliged to bring the thing out once a year.

And while on statistics, how many times had he and Carol had it off together since his retirement? Three or four? Even that would be counting the night of his retirement party, if ‘party’ was the right word for the awkward gathering of preternaturally down-in-the-mouth dental colleagues and their unfortunate spouses. That night was made less forgettable only by the post-party activity, when his gin-giggly wife demanded that he fill her cavity then and there.

Barry smiles at the recollection. Even feels the beginning of a rare stirring. He stands and goes to the window, still carrying the plate and tissue. There she is now, in the garden, clipping and pruning. As he regards his wife of forty-something years, it occurs to Barry that, for Carol, there is no regret in living an ordinary life. She seems content with who she is—and why shouldn’t she be? Happy to wear the comfortable cardigan of conformity, enjoying an easy connection to others around her—her lunches with friends and former colleagues, her movie-going, her book club, her Pilates; Carol’s retirement from primary school teaching clearly suits her well.

For Barry, ordinariness is an unwelcome cloak, but he knows it fits him perfectly. It feels as if it was made for him, confirming that he is indeed unremarkable; confirming what he has known since that day in his boyhood—the day his father walked away—that he is even less than ordinary; he is insignificant. The cloak weighs on him, snags on ordinary things and holds him back; it scratches at his flesh, prickles at his heart. Can he ever divest himself of it?

He sits down heavily, leans back and gazes at the ceiling. No answer up there, only some fine cobwebs on fading paint. (That’s something he could be doing: painting.) Does life just fade away like that paint? Or does it dry up like Carol’s flowers past their time? Is he facing a shrivelled future? Are there to be no new, uplifting experiences? No arousal from the torpor of Barrydom?

In an oblique view from the window, across the garden, he can see distant mountains, Arthur, Barrow and Ben Lomond, the familiar range that forms the visual limit of his small, everyday world and his small, everyday life. A life that feels as if it is dwindling to an unheralded end. He is a nobody, in a provincial city on an insignificant island at the bottom of the world. Graham Pleasance—he who would never have let his life dwindle—would say the arse end.

Barry replaces the plate and looks again at the gleaming display of dentures, his little museum of mastication—from early models in antiquated wood, ivory or porcelain, to modern-day models made from the most life-like synthetic materials. He recalls his visit to the Dental Museum of London. Just as he recalls Carol’s remark: ‘Are you serious, Barry? A tooth museum? We’re in London!’ He went alone.

Dear Carol, so tolerant of the dull ways of her husband. He swivels in his chair to look out the window. What’s she doing now? She seems to be talking to herself.

3

CAROL

Shit!’ Carol Paterson says. She has pricked herself.

In the tree above her, a brightly-coloured bird pauses in the act of prising open a gumnut with its hooked beak.

Cuss-ing, cuss-ing, the rosella shrills.

‘Sorry,’ Carol apologises to the unseen bird and to the garden for her vulgarity. She glances around to see if anyone might have overheard her lapse—anyone human. A passer-by, perhaps? Or old Mrs Thurston next door? She sees no one.

The watching plants are indifferent to her outburst. The flowering gum, getting too big for its boots; the acacia, gorgeous when a mass of frothy yellow; the variegated pittosporum hedge, calling to her for a bit of shaping; the dark-leafed hebes, now resplendent with their perfect purple points; the frivolous daisies, and the camellias—loved when in bloom, resented when surrounded by a carpet of rotting petals, strewn like after-party detritus or abandoned dreams. All are silent, immobile in the still morning air, their individual scents, so loved, melding in a gentle perfume potpourri.

Carol sucks her finger where the rose thorn has pierced her floral-patterned, cotton glove (bought only last week at Bunnings) and drawn blood. Perhaps you need a little pain occasionally, to remind yourself that you’re alive, she thinks as she sucks. A little prick. She giggles to herself. What’s the word? Fellatio, that’s it.

She wonders, not for the first time, whether Barry ever yearns for a more adventurous lover than she. Perhaps he wonders that about her—what she might dream of. They have joked about it a few times over the years, over the decades, both asserting their satisfaction with the state of play. Or perhaps acceptance is the word.

She looks at the prickly culprit. Roses are not her favourite plants, but loyalty to her dear, departed mother—well, departed anyway—has obliged Carol to keep the thorny things alive and in reasonably good health. And, she has to concede, the cabbage roses (Centifolia to those who know about these things) have, in their brief blooming time, a lovely pink hue and a beautiful scent. A bit like her mum really, especially the prickly bit. She smiles at the thought, adjusts a cane stick which lends support to a heavy bloom, and inhales the flower’s perfume, its memories.

She works her way into a standing position and unfastens her rubber knee pads. (Bunnings.) Her knees complain. Somewhere in the distant past, probably before Melanie was born, she could execute the rising manoeuvre in a fraction of the time and with a degree of feminine grace. Adventurous coupling positions ditto. Well, moderately adventurous. The thought causes her to glance across to Barry’s window. Across a lavender border she can see the back of his head as he sits at his desk. His hair is thinning.

Where did those years go? Vanished, as if snipped from her life by the Great Gardener in the sky—just memories now, scattered across her consciousness like those fallen, once-living petals and prunings.

She looks again at the study window. What’s he up to in there? Surely he’s not rearranging his teeth? There has to be another pastime for him. Perhaps they should plan another trip together, that would be something to look forward to. Maybe to the UK; they really must visit cousin Graham, he’ll surely be out of hospital soon.

4

KRESNIK

Kresnik Begovic idles the Valkyrie along the gracious parkland avenue leading to Basingstoke’s Evensong Crematorium. What a morning it is, bright and clear. Sometimes, the grey damp of this country can depress him, but on days such as this he is taken back to the warm, free summer days of his boyhood in Sarajevo, in the time before the horror.

There is Nigel’s car. Always early is the efficient and officious Nigel Harrington, Kresnik’s immediate boss. Nigel could—and would, given an opening—tell you to two decimal places how many miles his car, that pampered little Suzuki, would do to the gallon. Still, that’s the nature of Nigel’s position here, isn’t it? Caution, following procedure, checking and double-checking, meticulous cleanliness. Kresnik suspects that Nigel would fold and file his socks and underwear in strict days-of-the-week sequence.

He punches in his security code and lets himself in through the service entrance at the rear of the building.

‘A full line-up today,’ he hears Nigel say.

‘Good morning,’ Kresnik responds.

‘And keep an eye on the Pulva. It’s about due for a service.’

Kresnik knows he will have to make sure that the morning’s candidates—candidates for heaven, or whatever improbable and probably undeserved afterlife they might have believed in—are cooked, cooled and boxed before the first of the afternoon’s little group of hopefuls appears through the chapel curtain. It would not do, his uptight overseer has drilled into him, for the coffins to be queueing; not only would it be unseemly, but it would increase the risk of some unforgivable post-mortem mix-up.

Kresnik has heard of such mix-ups from old Stan Winkler, who was around when the previous crematorium was operating—in the days when the equipment, the procedures, and the recruitment all had a little less rigour. Stan claimed it had upset his conscience not one jot if some of Mrs Jones’s remains were swept up with those of Mr Smith, or even if their name tags were inadvertently misplaced. Who would know or care, he had thought—until the day a foreign object in the form of an early metal hip joint was spotted by the startled siblings of a young Mr Smith as his grieving family scattered his ashes in the shallows of his favourite surfing beach. Splonk.

‘Oh, and number three is obese,’ calls his supervisor. ‘A hundred and ninety kilos.’

Kresnik answers ‘Right.’ He knows that an abundance of body fat in an already heated cremator can, if not properly managed, overtax the gas-handling system and lead to emissions of smoke and odour. Nobody wants to see smoke coming from the crematorium’s chimney.

At 9.45am, a simple oak coffin complete with coiffed candidate, number one, coasts across the recessed rollers through the crimson curtain and appears in the dim receiving area. On the outside of the curtain, a small gaggle of grey-haired mourners—mourning or not, that’s their designation—begin to shuffle from the chapel across to the quiet meeting room for a cup of tea and a few minutes chat about the deceased, patting themselves on the back for having outlived her.

Inside, in the innards of the crematorium, Kresnik watches his finicky fire-chief squint at the documentation accompanying the coffin and scribble his initials in a column on the day’s work sheet. Then Nigel looks across to Kresnik and says one word: ‘Knee.’

Kresnik removes the coffin’s name tag and places it in a small slot next to the furnace door. He knows that inside the coffin there should be an additional, heat-resistant tag engraved with the same name: Brenda Braithwaite. Is someone up there or down below expecting Ms Braithwaite? Or has she already arrived, just her accoutrements to follow, hot on her trail?

Kresnik removes the coffin’s brass handles and drops them, along with the brass screws, into the metals collection box. He then wheels the coffin on its stainless steel trolley to the warmed-up cremator (Never call it an oven, Kresnik), presses a button to open the door, slides coffin and candidate from the trolley into the long furnace, closes the door and punches figures into the computerised controls.

As the gas jets surge, the temperature in the cremator rises quickly to nearly a thousand degrees Celsius. Soon the candidate’s body will be reduced to a few kilos of carbonised bone fragments and some scrap metal. The casket itself will leave but a few blackened screws and staples.

Outside, the big Bosnian lights a match and watches the living flame, before putting it to his thin, black cigarette. Djarum Black. Smoking is not permitted inside the building. Nor outside, actually. Not even here, screened from view by the LPG gas tanks.

He savours the distinctive aroma of the cigarette. It is the smell of his father, his childhood—a pungent curdling of happiness and horror. Through the smoke, he thinks of the man who engineered his and his sister’s escape from the turmoil. He has let Dragan down, Denilo too, he knows that. Not much has been said about his failure to deliver the package to the Longparish address, but he knows it has been noted, and it weighs heavy on him. He must find an opportunity to make amends, to redeem himself.

When the cremator and its contents have cooled, Kresnik sweeps the remaining material from the floor of the furnace, removes the ferrous metals with a broad magnet, and picks out the discoloured metal pieces of a knee joint prosthesis. He drops the objects into the metals box, then transfers the lumpy bone remains to the cremulator—the pulveriser. He starts the machine and listens as the bone fragments are rapidly reduced to a coarse powder—the ashes.

The second of the day’s procession is awaiting his attention, a cardboard coffin marked with a dozen or so messages, scrawled in black felt pen. We’ll miss you mate. Catch you later. Give ’em hell.

It is a procession that never ceases, day after day. Kresnik only sees the closing stages, of course, never the beginning, not even the chapel service.

Sometimes, as he goes about Basingstoke, shopping at Tesco or visiting the Whitehart Inn or the Queen’s Arms, he will look at the people around him and wonder whether one of them might be the next to break free of the routine of life and roll into his fiery world.

5

ESCAPE

Graham Pleasance is expecting a visitor, his friend Roger. He convinces himself that this will be his opportunity to escape this place, to return to his house. And to rescue Spencer from his neighbour’s care.

‘How are we this morning, Graham?’ It’s that irritatingly cheerful nurse, the big one in the blue uniform—what’s her name?

‘We, my darling, have been better.’

‘Have we emptied our bowels?’ As if shitting were a joint activity. The image was too awful: a wasted old man and a large-bummed woman squatting side-by-side, comparing notes as they noisily defecate en duet.

The man in the corner, that one with the toothless, demented grin, winks knowingly at him. Across the room, a feeble, white-haired skeleton of a man mumbles his deathly secrets as his wife sits silently at his bedside.

Graham’s keepers have told him that he cannot return home, that he needs continuous care and should spend a while in ‘respite’. But he knows, in moments of clarity, what that really means. Transition to a care home, that’s what it means. The beginning of death, that’s what it means. Enduring a non-life like those of his friends Jim and Anne, who for several years now have been incarcerated in such a place, watching their lives and their children’s inheritance draining away with each assisted shower.

Why, even his own friends seem to have decided that he can no longer look after himself. Both Roger and Delbert have been inspecting care homes ‘on his behalf’. Without seeking his permission or his views. Treating him like a child—he who could, in his day, run rings around them both. Still could, couldn’t he, if only Mr Parkinson would back off a little.

He will not