The three of us trudge to the summit with heads bowed, the north wind twisting the long grass flat under our feet. Our midday sun is a ghost behind clouds pregnant with snow, and nothing in this beautiful, hostile place has a shadow.
Mum holds the box. It’s made of thick purple cardboard, about the same shape and size as a child’s shoebox, and is bound by an unpretentious elastic band. Suddenly, she slows.
‘Here. This is the place.’
The view – all jutting piers, undulating shores and wind-lashed hawthorns – rises to meet us as we scale the crown, and fifty unspoilt miles of the south coast unfurl before us. At the horizon, the sky becomes the land becomes the sea. My eyes smart with the cold.
‘He loved this place,’ Mum affirms for the hundredth time, this recently retired woman who used to dress for any occasion but today wears tired jeans and a shapeless brown jumper. The weather has made an unruly thatch of her hair.
She slides the lid off and the three of us peer inside.
My brother’s reaction is as I’d expected, but I take no pleasure from the vaguely harrowed expression he wears. He’s not a man of science and had been expecting the grey ashes of television drama. What he sees instead is an exercise in simple physics: the pulverised dry bone fragments from a cremulator risen, via convection, through the lighter granules after ten years of sitting in the corner of Mum’s bedroom.
‘It looks like…’ he begins.
‘I know,’ Mum says.
A middle-aged man approaches from a path below, his waterproofs vacuum-sealed against his torso by the swirling wind. A black Labrador leads the way, sniffing at the sparse hedgerows. I look to the others.
‘Shall we wait?’
They both nod. We’ve waited a decade; another two minutes won’t hurt.
‘We should turn our backs,’ my brother suggests, pointing across the green-grey, ‘so he’s taken across the Downs, that way.’
He’s.
We turn away from the wind, though it seems to make little difference.
The approaching man quickens, as if he knows we’re waiting for him. His eyes are apologetic. In his wake, clouds break and snow begins to spiral in small flakes, black against the white sky. They settle on the frozen ground.
So, this is the day it has to happen. My brother’s right: those fragile, shell-like bone particles are him. This is more than a gesture. This is goodbye.
We have arrived at an ending.
Mum begins to pour as she walks along the brow of the hill, leaving a little trail of fragments behind her. As the larger granules run out, the smaller particles are released, catch the wind and disperse in a thousand different directions. My brother reels, having caught some in the eye. We laugh. My mother hands the box to me and I empty a little more. The ash diffuses through the wind in a spectral curtain of swirls and eddies. I can taste it on my teeth. Mum stands back at some distance, lost in thought. I hand the box to my brother and he shakes out the remainder, his eyes red from the cold and the ash.
Then, it is over.
We stand there, cinders in our mouths, our hair, upon our coats, watching the snow mingle with the dust, float back down to Earth a part of it, and with every blink I see a fresh tableau within the churning sky. Candlelit lovers caught unaware through a thin gap in a door. A coffin-shaped Nokia ringing to announce a murder. The beginning of love above New York as a semi-naked silhouette hurries back to bed. Blood leading to the closed doors of an ambulance. All times are here and now and one and the same, condensed, with this moment, into a single journey. And it all seems like yesterday.
We fall into a group hug and stare out over the whitening view. I’m the first to speak.
‘Bye Dad.’
Time travel. It’s an easy, forgiving process. It takes nothing to go back, to rewrite.
It’s often said that history is scripted by the winners. Personally, I think ‘survivors’ would be a better word. I’ve been several people in my time, and my return visits to those others’ pasts are unreliable at best and complete fabrications at worst. I have survived myself, but only just.
Don’t believe a word I tell you. Take it from me.
We return to the car park, our shoes creaking across the compacting snow.
I can see my wife reading a book in the back of the Cherokee. Our son is upright in his car seat beside her, in a sleep which could, and does, survive fireworks and thunderstorms but cannot cope with the imperceptible tread of a parent’s footstep. Sure enough, he stirs, then turns a slow, accusatory head towards me. This extrasensory perception alerts his mother to my presence. She checks her smile immediately, assuming it’s inappropriate. I beam back, but this only serves to make her uneasy. She knows the full range of my smiles, and this one didn’t fool her at all.
She stuffs her book out of sight and winds the window down. Her eyes, pink and watery, focus on the empty box Mum carries.
We all get in without another word. My brother in the back. My mother next to me. I know it’s just my imagination, but the snow slowing the wipers seems grittier than usual. The analogue clock mounted to the Jeep’s dashboard shows it’s much later than I realised. Once again, time ran away from us.
Mum asks if the snow will cause problems for the car. I reassure her that it won’t.
On the way to the restaurant, I attempt to close my mind around the memories and feelings we’ve just thrown into the air. I can’t rationalise or order those lonely fragments of time. All I can do, as the chatter around me grows in its geniality and my son steals the conversation away from the darkness, is watch the narrow roads unlace in the rear-view mirror, my thoughts whirling with the bone particles, hunting for answers, for chronology, trying to get back, right back, to a beginning of sorts.
And then I hit the ice. The Jeep bucks, jolts out of my control. I try to do as you’re told to do in the circumstances and steer into the skid but the steering locks beneath my hands and we glide, in slow motion yet at thirty miles an hour, into an oncoming van, its driver’s horrified face nothing but an open mouth screaming towards us.