Well said Eliza quite frankly. What do you think happened to the money.
I have no idea. Maybe she never had any.
She shook her head. She must have. I can’t believe Mum took everything.
Maybe she spent it.
On what.
There used to be a lot more in here. Dodge was always going out to auctions and second hand stores when I was younger and taking things with her and bringing back more than she took. Heaps of old stuff really. It all seemed worthless to me but you know you can’t tell with old stuff.
Eliza drummed her fingers on the back of the threadbare sofa. What happened to it all.
We got rid of it. It’s gone. That was a long time ago now. I can’t think what she could have ever got for those trinkets. I want to know can’t I say anything straight. Have a real cigarette. Eliza tapped up a slightly squashed Stuyvesant from its packet and began patting the pockets of her jacket for her lighter with a rapid movement that might have been nerves and I realised also as if for the first time that in a shallow way I was falling in love and maybe she was too. Maybe it was just beginning to have a friend. I guess it must have been as lonely on the farm in Yass with no one but her mother and the surrounding sheep as it was to live exclusively for a mistress in the Cross. It was Caprotinia the day of the. Caprio. Went under, no a loir wild fig tree. I love long life. Posh, damn short shrift high school don’t remember anything. Two figs to the captor of that profound navel from down here over your pretended arsehole. Who the hell gave me this extravagant education.
That night I was woken by the sound of something metallic crashing onto the floorboards of the dining room. At first I held still in order to put nothing between my ears and the other end of the flat as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight that fell in through the open blinds spreading pink amid the wales of my woollen bedspread, shining on the rim of my alarm clock and in the silence that followed between the ticks of its infinite helix I threw the cover off and walked carefully, I won’t say pattered down the corridor to the living room. There was no light on anywhere and still no noise. I did not want to go any further without some kind of weapon but standing in the dark of the corridor at the entrance to the living room I could see through the open doors of the dining room to where a faintly luminous body was bent over something on the floor. It was Eliza. Again. Who else would it be. When she saw me walking towards her she jumped up with the metallic object in her hands and I reached and grabbed it only out of fear that she might drop it again but as she raised her hands in surprise now two pale palms against the shimmering obscurity of the dining room that for years had been no more than a hoarding house for family silver if it wasn’t the effect of Fagan himself it was Jack Dawkins or the Artful Dodger coming at me for his share with streaks of ash down the thighs of his nightie and with an equally vacant reflex I swung the lidless urn to one side and out of her reach. She yelped, then recovering she said my name and asked me to turn on the light. I did, and saw that her hands too were covered in ash. What is that she said.
It’s an urn I said.
She flopped down on the floor one bare leg either side of the little pile of burnt bones and the copper lid. She seemed as half asleep as I was. Come on I said in the atavistic fuddle of the early morning, no use crying over spilt milk. I was not long recovering my senses though. What I asked was she doing.
She looked at me and waited, her eyes resting opaque and patient on mine until at last her mind seemed to withdraw something that it must have been almost holding out, face down as it were, and it was with the kind of disappointed but levelling calm of a card player who folds before getting in too deep that she said she was looking to see if Dodge had hidden her money anywhere and I didn’t bother to ask why she was doing it at one o’clock in the morning. O God how can I wash my hands. I suggested she rub them over the top of the urn first. She did, interlocking her fingers, rubbing the backs, making a fist of each hand and rubbing out the ash from the creases in her knuckles. She went to the bathroom then and I got a dustpan and brush. I had to feel for them in the dark in the cupboard under the sink then I took them back to the dining room and crouched and swept up the ash that had fallen on the floor and turned up the dustpan so that it ran off one corner into the urn. Thanks said Eliza through her collar as she wiped her face in the doorway.
How do you feel now.
She almost said she felt like a cigarette. I thought she was going to start drooling again. Here I said and pulled out a chair from the dining table. Let’s talk a bit before you go back to bed.
She sat down and put both elbows on the table and her head between her hands. Did she say what she wanted done with those.
No. Remember she didn’t leave any instructions.
That’s right.
It’s cheaper to cremate than bury.
How could she not have any money. It doesn’t make sense. She should have been rich.
Maybe she had an expensive habit, that can add up.
But like you said she must have had a pension or something. Otherwise how else was she keeping you. And anyway it was more than two million, that’s just what Mum spent on the sheep. There must have been a real fortune between grandma’s and grandpa’s families. They were bloomin bankers and squatters. It was ying and yang. Someone’s money must be hidden somewhere.
What did you want to do with it.
Get off the farm start a business.
What kind of business.
I don’t know, travelling sales. I’d like to travel.
And the flat.
What about it.
If we sold the flat.
But you live here.
There is a law you know that it goes to your mother.
Mum wouldn’t kick you out, she doesn’t need it. Besides what about the family matinee act or whatever. You can have the flat.
We could sell it I said. We could go halves and then you could get off the farm and I could get out of here.
She drew back slowly. It struck me then that I might have taken her reserve the wrong way, that she may rather have doubted her good fortune from the beginning, suspended as she was between the files and musters, deferring even conjectural investment until she could put her hands on something concrete, afraid to find that there was nothing there but unable to admit that it was possible, as if she had been holding her breath, not daring to let herself go in case there was, impossibly, nothing to take back. But no sooner had the idea rung out than I felt with all this outward stimulation that I recognised another kind of restraint, that Yass, whose misted hills appeared to roll about her pupils as they drifted from me over the dim walls of the dining room held her somehow locked in like I had been that she was still in some sense pinned back to that far from littoral shore as for thirteen years I had been by Dodge and the keys and some other illegible force, some manifestly prurient though untold indenture, perhaps her false but fantastic interest, in the foul and motley wallpapered flat (apart from skoo l, I’ll have this coven between the covers in no time), the former’s, I mean Eliza’s eyes flying open even as I told out to myself for the last time and with the faintest, the very faintest regret the modest changes I had briefly foreseen, which were I would be the first to admit rather a failure of imagination than otherwise, all more or less this side the dictates of my intangible legacy, flying open as I was saying at the sudden recovery of such a pinched square of floor space, like a stump grubber’s on still colder ground who, severed the red thread in the navel string, hoes up from the decorated threshold of an expired cult the tessera going to reveal the actual value and dispensability of the whole familiar plot, our anonymous, adverse brother, adrift in the unbounded troughs. And Eliza, I have not forgotten you, pushed up against me, cast forth before your time from the same infant quarter that might in a single blow be subtracted to a real escape route, through whose b darkened rooms da you, of your dried tears like the underglaze, in the French sense, were beginning to sense a way out of the vast and smothering enclosure of your immediate inheritance.