Coming home for the holidays smells like smoked ham and smoked gum trees. Death rolls in through the windows with the wind while Mum passes me the prawns. We speak not of the fires nor the change in the air as the bush burns far enough away for us to stay seated for the sake of Jesus Christ.
I’m five hours south and death follows me everywhere. Between Christmas crackers with foul jokes and useless tangles of plastic, my father grunts, it’s nice to have you all here, averting his eyes from the empty chair at the table.
My brothers and I shuffle in our seats as Mum taps her champagne glass a little too loudly. Thank you, boys, for coming all this way, but she can’t finish because there’s a lump in her throat where her words should be. My eldest brother holds her bony elbow and my youngest brother looks for the humour in the situation he always thinks is there. But neither laughter nor tears can help us now. The dog barks from the front yard and the fires burn on the telly and my father grunts, alright, dig in.
I pretend to like the oysters I know Mum spent too much money on. Her boys home for the holidays and a red saver sticker on the platter of a dozen molluscs at the only supermarket in town means daylight robbery of the worst kind. But she brought them home, brought her remaining boys home too, and that’s more than can be said for my brothers and I. We brought only ourselves, no children, no partners, no rings on any fingers. But for Mum and my brother’s missing seat at the table, it’s enough. For Mum, the brother lost to the waves is enough reason for her to still love us all the same.
The dance our fingers perform around the dinner table is enough to subsidise the silence. They tango with the pepper, waltz with the salt, backflip the gravy and Macarena the beer. The dog barks again and I see the annoyance flicker across my father’s face. And again, she barks, and now he lifts from his seat, ready to bark right back, when the sound of wood crackling and wind cackling lifts us all up. Gravy still around the corners of our mouths, we move to the front door to see the old gum laying across the drive, and we see the old girl barking like hell as she high-tails it to nowhere. Bloody hell, the old man barks right back.
Coming home for the holidays smells like smoked ham going cold at the lunch table and smoked gum trees growing flames in the bush. Between burnt soil and rubber, under fallen logs and ferocious winds, Christmas Day becomes a search for the one thing our parents can’t afford to lose any further. Lost children and lost homes, lost countries and lost lives, ham goes cold while dogs are hunted; Christmas is once again overwhelmed by the smell of death singing its way through the bush, through our home. But the buds buried under the eucalyptus tree that lays across our driveway will regrow. We can’t see them yet, but in a month, in six, or another Christmas from now, the buds will sprout once we’ve given them enough time.
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