The Bat(93)

The priest threw earth into the grave in Lutheran manner. Harry had been told that Andrew had belonged to the Anglican Church, which, alongside the Catholic Church, was by far the biggest in Australia, but Harry, who had been to only a few funerals, couldn’t see that this service was much different from those in Norway. Even the weather was the same. When they had buried his mother, turbulent, blue-grey clouds had chased each other above the cemetery, but fortunately they had been in too much haste to rain on them. There had been sun the day they buried Ronny. At that time, though, Harry was in hospital with blinds drawn because the light gave him a headache. Just like today, police officers had constituted the majority of the funeral gathering. Perhaps they had sung the same hymn at the end: ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee!’

The gathering dissolved, people began to move towards their cars and Harry walked behind Birgitta. She stopped so that he could catch up with her.

‘You look ill,’ she said without an upward glance.

‘You don’t know what I look like when I’m ill,’ he said.

‘Don’t you look ill when you’re ill? All I’m saying is you look ill. Are you ill?’

A gust of wind blew, and Harry’s tie lifted and covered his face.

‘Perhaps I’m a little ill,’ he said. ‘Not very ill. You look like a jellyfish with all that hair flapping in . . . my face.’ Harry took a red strand out of his mouth.

Birgitta smiled. ‘You should thank your lucky stars I’m not a box jellyfish,’ she said.

‘A what?’ Harry said.

‘A box jellyfish,’ Birgitta said. ‘It’s very common in Australia. Its sting is worse than an ordinary jellyfish’s, you could say . . .’

‘Box jellyfish?’ Harry heard a familiar voice behind him say. He turned. It was Toowoomba.

‘How are you?’ Harry said and explained that it was Birgitta’s hair blowing into his face that had prompted the comparison.

‘Well, if it had been a box jellyfish it would have left red stripes across your face and you would have been screaming like a man being given twenty lashes,’ Toowoomba said. ‘And within a few seconds you would have collapsed, the poison would have paralysed your respiratory organs, you would have had difficulty breathing, and if you hadn’t got immediate help, you would have died an extremely painful death.’

Harry held his palms up in defence. ‘Thanks, there have been enough deaths for today.’

Toowoomba nodded. He was wearing a black silk smoking jacket with a bow tie. He noticed Harry’s gaze.

‘It’s the only thing I have remotely resembling a suit. Besides, I inherited it from him.’ He nodded towards the grave. ‘Not recently, but a number of years ago. Andrew said he’d grown out of it. Rubbish, of course. He didn’t want to admit it, but I knew he’d bought it to wear at the banquet after the Australian championships. He probably hoped the outfit would experience with me what it never experienced with him.’

They walked along the gravel road as cars slowly passed.

‘May I ask you a personal question, Toowoomba?’ Harry said.

‘I reckon so.’

‘Where do you think Andrew will end up?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you think his soul will go up or down?’

Toowoomba wore a serious expression. ‘I’m a simple man, Harry. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, and I don’t know much about souls. But I do know a couple of things about Andrew Kensington, and if there’s something up there, and if it’s beautiful souls they want that’s where his belongs.’ He smiled. ‘But if there’s anything down there, I think that’s where he’d prefer to be. He hated boring places.’

They chuckled quietly.

‘But since this is a personal question, Harry, I’ll give you a personal answer. I think Andrew’s parents and my own had a point. They had a sober view of death. Although it’s true to say many tribes believed in a life after death, some believed in reincarnation, the soul wandering from human to human, and some believed souls could return as spirits. Some tribes believed the souls of the dead could be seen in the firmament as stars. And so on. But the common thread was that they believed humans, sooner or later, after all these stages, died a proper, final, definitive death. And that was that. You became a pile of stones and were gone. For some reason I like the thought of that. These perspectives of eternity leave you so weary, don’t you think?’

‘I think it sounds like Andrew left you more than the smoking jacket, that’s what I think,’ Harry said.