Like a House on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

these invitations are leading, and already feels exhausted with the thought of what hopes will have to be quashed before much longer.
    Soon she won’t camouflage her disappointment so well, and then she’ll raise the stakes. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t just stay ,’ she’ll say petulantly. ‘I know you’ll think I’m stupid but I feel nervous here alone in the house at night.’ She will pause, he is certain, and then add, ‘And it’s not as if you’ve got a wife and children at home waiting, is it?’
    The whole campsite looks different — enlarged with signposted nature trails, composting toilets, designated fireplaces. Chris thinks of gathering wood all those years ago, his father’s lecture, as they walked, about snakes and bushfires. The way he’d taken a trowel he’d brought along specially and dug a shallow rectangular hole for their campfire, and laid the sticks out in a grid.
    His mother puffs a little as she walks up the sandy track from the car park, and Chris consciously slows his walk down. The thought that she might want him to say something, some kind of spoken farewell on the jetty, fills him with a queasy panic. It was bad enough doing the eulogy at the funeral, then he’d amazed himself by breaking down afterwards, while he was talking to the minister at the reception. The other man had stood patiently, holding a cup of tea, as Chris snuffled into a handkerchief, fighting to regain his composure. How could he even begin to tell this stranger what he was really grieving for? He’d taken a breath before realising he couldn’t even articulate what it was himself. Just the strain of the day, he thinks now. Keeping it all together.
    They reach the jetty that he remembers, and his mother makes a little exclamation of relief.
    â€˜Oh, this is lovely,’ she says. Her voice is trembling. ‘I don’t want to say anything, Chris. I just want to do it. But it’s so hard. I should have opened the box and saved some, to keep for myself.’
    He hurriedly feels in his pocket for some kind of container. ‘We’ll pop some ashes in the camera bag,’ he says. ‘Then you can take some home with you and scatter them under the roses, maybe.’ He’s desperate for a quick solution, to stop her dissolving into maudlin helplessness; he’s the one with the resolve. ‘The camera bag,’ he repeats with an indulgent chuckle. ‘Imagine what he would have had to say about that!’
    He’s rewarded with a wan smile. ‘Better than a matchbox. Remember how he always hated me smoking, till I finally gave up?’
    Chris walks to the end of the jetty and extracts the box from the bag, crouching on the weathered boards to open it. Inside, there is a square polystyrene tub, securely sealed with tape. He picks at it.
    â€˜Here,’ says his mother, surprising him. She hands him a pair of nail scissors and he holds their sharp coolness in his hand for a moment, pausing.
    In a minute , he thinks, stalling. Not just yet .
    â€˜Lovely we’ve got the place to ourselves,’ she murmurs. ‘I’d hate there to be anyone else here. Lovely to have the privacy.’
    Chris glances up, out across the glittering water, wishing he’d worn his sunglasses. He has a sudden clear memory of his father, sitting in the dinghy, both their rods swinging without bait and the fishing forgotten. His father had sat squinting out at the glassy still surface of water all around them, disconcertingly unfamiliar in his cotton sports shirt and towelling hat.
    â€˜Don’t reckon we’ll catch anything, do you?’ he’d said.
    Chris remembers shaking his head.
    â€˜Not that it matters, though. Just good to be out here, isn’t it?’
    It’s funny, he’d forgotten that moment until now. His father’s hopeful smile.
    Chris rises and takes a photo of his mother