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a lean-to on the side. She caught him dropping
cigarette ash into the stew and told him he could pack his things and go.’
    ‘No me go, Missy,’ Jenny intervened, delivering the familiar punch line. ‘You go.’
    They both laughed at the thought of their eighteen-year-old mother trying to exert
her non-existent authorityover the staff, although I sensed an underlying sadness
to this story, too. Jenny knew what it was like to be the sole woman in a household
of men. No matter how kind they were—and my grandfather was by all accounts very
kind—it must have been unspeakably lonely for my grandmother, and there must have
been times when she was afraid. And what about the cook, lost out here, so far from
anywhere he might have called home, his fate in the hands of a teenage girl.
    We stopped again, just before the boundary gate of Beaconsfield, so that my mother
could get out and fill one of her medicine bottles with soil. I watched her walk
a few yards to where the dirt was fine and sandy. She went down on her haunches and
scooped up a handful or two until she had enough.
    Back in the car, she stuffed a tissue into the neck of the bottle to stop the dirt
escaping. ‘A piece of home,’ she said.

    Mum kept her bottle of Beaconsfield dust for many years and through many moves, until
it was finally tossed out or lost, then forgotten along with everything else she
had ever held dear. I don’t know if she had any concept of home by the time she died.
She talked obsessively about going there,begging me to take her home every time
I saw her. But I wasn’t sure where she meant. She had made so many homes by then,
more than twenty. Some she had loved and some she hadn’t. She certainly didn’t mean
the nursing home where she lived out her days.
    ‘This is your home now,’ I’d tell her, trying to pacify her.
    ‘Liar.’
    I wasn’t with Mum when she died. Shin and I were living in Japan temporarily, trying
to figure out a way for him to establish a base back in his home country. Before
I left Brisbane, Sarah and I met up with a funeral director. We planned to arrange
for Mum’s funeral in advance, given that she was so frail. We felt a simple cremation
was best, with a memorial service to be held later, at a time that suited the whole
family. We didn’t want anything religious because Mum had long ago given up on the
church. Sarah suggested a party; Mum had always so loved a party.
    ‘If we do it this way,’ my sister said, ‘you won’t have to rush home if she dies.
What would be the point? You’ve been grieving for her all these years anyway.’
    I was grateful to her for saying it, and for her sisterly concern.
    What we didn’t do was discuss our thoughts with Eliot. I can’t say exactly why communications
with ourbrother were so poor. The simplest answer is that we all lived separate
lives in different cities—me in Brisbane, Sarah in Newcastle, and Eliot in the Blue
Mountains, west of Sydney. The more complex explanation is that the fractured way
we grew up had left us leery of each other. This was especially true after our parents’
marriage started to fray. My sister and I could at least have a conversation, swap
news on the phone about our kids, comfort each other about our mother’s devastating
decline, but my brother was much harder to talk to. I called him perhaps twice a
year to update him on Mum’s health. Apart from that, we never spoke.
    According to Sarah, as Mum was dying, Eliot was the one she wanted to see, only Eliot.
He came to sit with her, keeping a vigil at her bedside, holding her hand.
    ‘He was very good,’ my sister said, ‘and very helpful when we had to clean up her
room, get rid of all her stuff. But then he blew up.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because he thought it was selfish not to have a proper funeral. He thought we were
just thinking about ourselves.’
    ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe we were.’
    For whatever reason, Eliot went ahead and arranged a funeral service in the