Last Day in the Dynamite Factory Read Online Free Page B

them? It was something he and Jo had never discussed.
    Chris is stumped for a response. ‘Let’s think about it for a while,’ he suggests. ‘We’ll find somewhere special.’

Ashes Day. A morning limpid and cool.
    For four months Ben has been dithering over where to put Jo’s ashes: beneath the jacaranda tree in the backyard, on her sister’s grave in Melbourne, or scattered to the winds from the top of Mount Nebo. Tellingly, he’s chosen Coolum Beach.
    He’ll be up already, polishing his shoes and ironing his shirt. Chris lies in bed listening to kookaburras chortle in the spotted gum tree outside the window. Beside it, the jacaranda is draped in a swan song of purple blossoms.
    Beside Chris, Diane sleeps on.
    She thinks it’s a mistake to scatter Jo’s ashes where Liam died so long ago. ‘It’ll re-open old wounds,’ she says. ‘What Ben needs is closure.’
    What a diminishing word: closure. Grief compressed, parcelled and disposed of neatly. Chris wonders, sometimes, about Diane and grief. She seems to stand outside it, not immune, but unwilling to surrender to sadness. Chris wasn’t surprised by Ben’s decision. Every year on the twenty-eighth of December for the past forty years he, Ben and Jo went to Coolum Beach to float flowers on the ocean in memory of Liam. Despite its tragic associations, Chris still loves the sea, though he has never swum since. He thinks scattering Jo’s ashes where his cousin died an appropriate reconnection of mother and child.
    Ben has gradually established a life without Jo. He’s eating properly, going for walks, frequenting his Services club and tinkering in his shed. His housekeeping skills, however, are sufficiently questionable for Diane to insist on hiring him a cleaner. Though Ben resisted, Chris agreed. He knew it wasn’t the cleaning Ben objected to but someone else doing what Jo once did.
    Diane stirs, blinks and proclaims her morning mantra: ‘I’ll get tea.’
    Chris throws back the sheet and goes to the ensuite. Without glasses his face is a blur. He dips his head at his mirrored self in an unconvincing search for bald spots. His blond mop needs cutting but so far there’s no evidence of balding. Jack Ward, Chris’s unknown birth father, must have had a good crop. Chris has almost given up wondering about the man who has never been more to him than a name on his birth certificate, except in his head, where he has variously been saint, demon, war hero and wino. Chris squints at the blobby reflections of his mouth and blue eyes. His mouth, according to Tabi’s cool observation, is his best bit. ‘Sexy … for an old bloke.’ He squirts foam on his face, runs the safety razor under the tap and pulls it slowly across his chin like a snowplough.
    Diane, swathed in her peach silk wrap, brings in his mug of tea and sets it on the handbasin. She leans against the doorjamb with a smile that suggests Chris is silly to persist with the razor while the electric gadget she bought him for his birthday lies in the drawer. He tries not to let her smile irritate him because it also hints at loneliness. Chris glances at her reflection while taking the razor under his nose. Not a single thing he could complain about, yet something inside him rises up, then flattens out again, like a lone wave on the sea.
    â€˜Archie’s still asleep, I suppose?’ he says, frowning at his shiny face. He hates the shine. One day he blobbed on some of Diane’s face powder to de-shine it, and she caught him at it and gave him that smile she’s giving him now and he nearly wrenched the handbasin off the wall and crowned her with it.
    â€˜Of course.’
    Archie is always asleep at this time of day. It’ll take him exactly ten minutes to be ready to go with them to Coolum. There’s no point waking him earlier. Their son is a night person, only managing to get to work at the