What We Do With the Ashes

The instructions run to four pages and were written in 2016 on the good paper, which is the detail that has annoyed Sinead most consistently over the past fortnight.

He typed them. He had a typewriter, latterly for effect, and he used it for the will and for this and for nothing else in about eleven years.

Page one is the where. Page two is the how. Page three is a list of eight people who are to be present and a note that a ninth, named, is not to be told until afterwards, which has caused its own difficulties. Page four is about the weather.

It is 05:40 in a car park on the north coast and the weather is not what page four specifies.

"It says settled," says Marcus.

"It's settled."

"There's a swell, Sinead."

"There's always a swell. It's the sea. It's the defining feature of the sea."

Aoife, who is the youngest and has spent the fortnight in the role she has occupied since roughly 1994, says: "Can we not."

Their father wanted his ashes scattered from the rocks below the old coastguard station, on an ebb tide, at first light, in settled weather, by his three children, in that order and with — page two, paragraph four — "no ceremony of any kind, and I mean this, and I know at least one of you is planning something."

Marcus had been planning something. He has been carrying a folded page in his jacket for a fortnight and has told nobody, and the instruction has been quietly eating him since the first reading.

The urn is in a rucksack in the boot. Nobody has wanted to be the one holding it in the car.

"He wrote it nine years ago," says Marcus. "He wasn't ill. He didn't know how any of it—"

"He knew exactly," says Sinead. "That's why he wrote it nine years ago."

This is true and everyone knows it is true. Their father had watched his own father's funeral be taken over by a cousin with opinions, and had said, more than once, over a period of decades, that he was not going to have that.

The eight named people are in three cars. They have been in three cars for twenty minutes because nobody has got out.

Aoife gets out.

She does it without deciding to, which is how she does most things, and once she is out the rest of it becomes inevitable, which she also knows.

The path down to the rocks is worse than anyone remembers. Their father did it in his seventies. He did it, Sinead thinks, in a coat and ordinary shoes, and complained about none of it, and the fact that she is finding it hard in walking boots at forty-eight is doing something to her that she cannot address at the moment.

At the rocks the swell is exactly what it always is here and Marcus stops arguing about it.

They do it in the order specified. Sinead, Marcus, Aoife. No ceremony of any kind.

It takes about ninety seconds and it is nothing like anything and afterwards the eight named people stand about on the rocks in the way people do, and the light comes up, and nobody says the things that people say, because they have been instructed not to.

Marcus takes the folded page out of his jacket.

Sinead sees him do it and says nothing at all, which is possibly the kindest thing she has done for her brother in twenty years.

He looks at it. He looks at the water.

He puts it back in his pocket.

"Right," he says.

Later, in the car park, Aoife will ask him what was on it and he will say a poem, and she will ask which one, and he will say it doesn't matter, and she will let it go, and he will keep the page in that jacket for another four years without reading it again.

But that is later.

For now the three of them stand on wet rock in weather that is not settled, having done precisely what they were told, in the order they were told, with no ceremony of any kind.

Which was, of course, the ceremony.

Their father had known that too. He knew it when he typed it, on the good paper, in 2016, when he was not ill and had no reason to be thinking about it at all.