Dust

By Susan Al Hafar

Inside a small ordinary-looking plastic blue jug, something rattles. Something quite tiny and a little bit heavy moves inside. Quite inappropriate is the noise. Each time the little jug is tipped forward and its contents splash out, staining the blood red peonies, a quiet clank can be heard. Like the black box on an aeroplane, the thing inside the jug remains. Indestructible despite the fire. And what an intense fire it must have been. Hot enough to burn a human body, leaving behind dirty grey dust. There is a part of the body we don’t think about very often, a small bone that sits at the base of the spine. The tailbone. This is what was left inside the jug after my father was cremated.

I didn’t know you’re not supposed to burn the dead. He had said, it was what he wanted; to be scattered on the flower garden outside the church. The church he never went to. He told me this when I was twenty-two-years-old, a couple of years before the event of his death. And so I felt it my duty to instruct my family of his wishes when the time came.

Dad and I had been walking at the time, taking a shortcut home through the grounds of the family church. It was the closest Anglican church to our house and the one my mother went to every Sunday, religiously. My mother was Catholic before she married my Dad. It was quite ironic that she changed her religion to my father’s (when he never practiced it himself). Anyway, that bright sunny day, when I was walking with my father, he told me, pointing at the roses, the tulips and the peonies that grew in the well-kept garden alongside the church. It was there that he wanted his ashes to rest.

So the journey begins. The solid mahogany coffin, carried by a few firm hands of stronger family members, floats down the aisle. It drifts purposefully along, between the church pews; pews stuffed with old bibles and well-used hymn books. It sails outside into the dazzling sunshine that seems to dance and glisten off the polished wood. A shiny-black hearse sits waiting, crouching like a wild black cat. The cargo is loaded on-board to be taken away. I watch as the vivid red pohutukawa trees wave gently in the wind. And he is gone.

The sapphire sky is a canopy that hangs high above me, stretching out and up for what seems like forever. Splashed with fluffy clouds that swim slowly and elegantly through the azure, the sky is a breathing ceiling that respectively keeps its distance. My body shakes with uncontrollable emotion and I am a shell, an empty vessel ripped apart from the inside out. I am not alone with the sky, I am surrounded by mountains painted every shade of green, dense with bushes and trees. And the air is thick with the certainty of death. Everything changes.

The white ceramic basin blocks quickly. It shouldn’t. The water stops washing away my embarrassment. It adds to it, makes it worse. A nurse in a stiff white paper hat like a decorated cake, is coming now, angry.

‘’It’s a hospital, it’s supposed to be clean, children shouldn’t be allowed, there are sick people’’, she says.

She doesn’t know it’s not my fault. I’m only thirteen. My brother, Luke, was driving, he speeds up around the corners. I don’t get this sick when Dad drives. I worry the nurse will send me out. The nausea subsides. A huge scar like a railway track adorns the patient’s bare chest. I look at Dad, lying in the hospital bed, weak, defeated.

‘’It only hurts when I laugh’’, he says.

Luke asks him if he wants to play table tennis and chuckles to himself. Dad declines with a smile. Then Luke makes fun of Dad’s hairless legs. Dad tells us they shaved them in case they needed an artery during the operation. A thin wire hangs out messily at the end of the long scar, Dad says this is his zip fastener, should the doctors want to unzip him again.

The small white ball bounces. Quick and hard, back and forth, across the dark green wooden table. It hits everywhere, high, low, unpredictable. The players race to reach it. Laughing. Sometimes it gets caught in the net. Cheers of jubilation and sneers of disappointment follow.

‘’Look at that’’, Dad says looking over my shoulder behind me, trying to get me to turn around. I laugh at his tricks, his cheating. I try not to get distracted. You play to win. Always. This time I win. He doesn’t want to play anymore. He was the same with my brother before me. Defeated, he no longer plays.

One day, Luke arrives home, pale and weak. Having donated blood, he is dizzy, nauseous.

‘’Quick, go downstairs’’, Dad says, jumping up excitedly. ‘’Let’s have a game of table tennis’’, he says. Elated at his victory, Dad is once again the champion – undefeated.

The wind whips my hair around, blonde curls slapping my face as I try to line up my shot. I hold the club between my legs and push my hair firmly behind my ears. Placing my palms together I close my eyes and whisper: ‘’Dear God, please God, please let it go in. Thank you, Amen.’’

‘’I heard that!’’, Luke says. ‘’What did I tell you before? Praying’s cheating. Dad always tells you that. Don’t pray, just hurry up and hit it.’’

‘’Okay, sorry’’, I reply.

I position my hands carefully, one above the other. Gripping the club tightly, I stare longingly at the hole then back again at the ball. I draw an imaginary line with my eyes and take a deep breath of damp, salty sea air and swing back.   The heavy metal club connects with the small white ball and sends it spinning quickly across the green carpet. But it’s not straight, it hits the side, then the other side. All of a sudden, I see it gliding gracefully towards the hole. It circles around a few times and falls in.

‘’Yes, yes!’’, I cheer, jumping up and down. ‘’A hole in one!”

‘’Just luck’’, Luke grumbles. ‘’And you cheated’’, he says.

There is a loud creak as Dad moves the footrest up and leans backwards in the chair. We are at home in our lounge. Dad’s sitting in his favourite armchair, reading.

‘’Dad, I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and I’ve decided what I want for my birthday’’, I say. Dad looks up from his book, raising his eyebrows slightly.

‘’Yes?’’, he says, deliberately drawing out the word.

‘’Well, I’d like one of those silver cross necklaces, a girl wears one at school and it looks nice. So I want one’’, I say. ‘’Now that I’ll be turning nine’’, I add.

Dad’s face changes. He looks serious, angry.

‘’It doesn’t look nice, it’s too religious’’, he says.

‘’But it’s good to be religious, it’s good to go to church. I go to church with Mum. The girl in my class has one, she goes to church. She’s not ‘too religious’, she’s nice, she’s kind. What’s wrong with wearing a cross? Jesus died on the cross for our sins. They tell us stories about him at Sunday school.’’, I say.

Dad shakes his head back and forth slowly.

A couple of years later we’re standing in a different lounge. Furnished more opulently than usual for New Zealand. Ornaments from the owner’s worldly travels are dotted around and displayed like treasures for all to see. The man rushes around preparing his pen, reading glasses, whatever else he needs to perform his duty as a Justice of the Peace. As far as I understand, he used to be a lawyer or a judge, but now he’s retired. Mum knows him through the church. Dad hands the man my passport application.

‘’She needs a new one, now that she’s older’’, Dad tells him. The church man nods.

‘’You’ve all done really well with the landscaping outside the church, it looks great’’, Dad says, making conversation.

‘’All our good work, we do it with the help of Jesus’’, the church man says. I look away, embarrassed. ‘’All thanks to Jesus’’, he continues as he flicks through the documents. I give Dad a look and he raises his eyebrows in agreement with me.

‘’Jesus, our Lord, the father, the son and the holy spirit, amen.’’, the church man says, (oblivious to our embarrassment) and draws a cross with his hands across his chest.

Dad looks at his watch then around the room. I notice Mum, busy talking to the church man’s wife near the kitchen.

‘How did Jesus do anything to help with the gardening?’, I think to myself. Jesus was a man, he lived ages ago. God’s the one that’s powerful. It was God that gave me my Strawberry Shortcake doll for Christmas. Well, He made my parents buy it for me. He listened to my prayers. Her hair even smells of strawberries and she fits perfectly in my dolls house. The church man finishes signing the documents and photos and hands them back to Dad. We say our thanks and goodbyes. We leave.

Outside I ask Dad about it. ”Jesus?! What’s the gardening project got to do with Jesus?! Can you believe it?”, I say.

”Hmmth”, Dad mumbles.

”They’re bible bangers, aren’t they Dad?”

”Jesus was a real person, you know”, he says. ”He existed in history, but…”, he sighed, ”…these people, they don’t have any idea. I’m sure there’s a higher power, a creator. But it’s not Jesus. They’re nice people. They do good work, they help. But they don’t have a clue.”

Time moves forward and I am twenty-seven. Words swirl noisily around inside my head and I hear the voice of the vicar at Dad’s funeral as he reads from the Bible the words of the 23rd psalm: ”even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…He restores my soul. …And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever…” and then in the background I hear a Nasheed CD playing and the soft, alluring, deep voice, speaking before the song starts: ”It is He who created you from dust…God Who gave you life when you had no life. He will cause you to die and bring you to life again. Then you will return to His presence.” This is from the Quran.

I am going through Dad’s things with the rest of my family after he has left us.                      

”Do you want to keep the blue silk shirt you bought him for his birthday?”, Mum asks, holding it out to remind me what it looks like. I look at the material, the colour of the Wellington night sky on a summer evening. Lifeless on the hanger without Dad’s blue-grey eyes against it.

”No, I don’t want the shirt”, I say. The shirt is now an article of clothing that belongs to a dead man. I cannot take clothes from somebody dead. Instead I take from him a simple silver compass. I don’t think he would mind. Despite having owned this compass, he had remained lost, not knowing his creator. For me, I am more fortunate. When I pray and my forehead rests on the prayer mat, I make du’a and ask my creator for things in this life and the next. And I feel washed and cleaned from the inside out. New.    

It was only a few days after the funeral that we made the soft delicate petals of the peonies and the other fragrant flowers in the pretty garden, dirty with the remains of my father’s body and wet with my abundant tears. The jug was returned to the funeral director’s office. The tailbone however remained in my mind as an object unidentified until years later when I was studying Islam. I discovered the tailbone is both a beginning and an end. From it we were created, and with it we will be recreated after we die.

And as a Muslim, I pray that after I listen to the footsteps of the people leaving my grave, I will walk along a path of musk-scented dust and there, I will find paradise.

 

Susan Al Hafar was born in New Zealand and now lives in London. She works in marketing and has a passion for creative writing including poetry.