Arnold was pushing his lawn mower aimlessly around the oval. Looking back at his work, he realised the God-awful mess he was making and switched off the mower. He didn’t want to believe that Helen had burnt her bed. But the smouldering pile of ashes in his back yard was hard evidence. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ muttered Arnold.
The pain was too much to bear, and it was all he could do to steer the mower towards his ute with the intention of going home. What was happening to his life? His family?
His two sons Gabriel and Vivian were not a bit like him. Like Helen they had shown no appreciation of the things he had amassed over the years, the wealth of bits and pieces he’d collected like a magpie. They had stopped inviting their friends over, and finally, ashamed of him, or so he surmised, they had turned away from him.
The boys were as different from each other as they were from him. Gabriel was loud where Vivian was quiet. Gabriel insulted and jibed his parents in a good-natured fashion where Vivian spoke little. In one respect only were the boys similar — their disgust with their father’s junk and sympathy for their mother.
Gabriel had joined the army, a career move Arnold was entirely unable to comprehend. Vivian, his younger son, had held a succession of jobs, as though he was on a freight train jumping from car to car, not staying in any one place for longer than a month. In the emails he sent home he spoke of travel, of wanting to see the country and meet its people, yet he never mentioned friends or spoke of the places he’d seen. Finally he had found work in underground mining in a far-flung part of the state. He’d been there ten months now, a record.
On a rare visit home, Vivian had set up an Internet connection on the only one of Arnold’s thirty-eight computers that worked. At the sight of a keyboard Arnold panicked. For him, writing and sending off an email was akin to dealing with the supernatural. But Helen loved to tap out long emails; she wrote them with ease and dispatched a multitude. She badgered Gabriel and Vivian about their jobs, people they’d met, and whatever else she could think of but which ironically, only served to push them away. However being loving sons they emailed her back, once a week.
Communications with their father were infrequent, and brief.