My mother’s funeral was simple. A body in a box surrounded by people she hated. I stood behind the perspex window and watched as the cheap coffin moved slowly on a conveyor to the incinerator. My step-brother, David, stood next to me, wearing an old grey suit, worn at the elbows. Twenty minutes earlier, as we walked from the car park, he had demanded to see the will.

“There has to be a mistake,” he said. “It was my father’s house. He might have left it to your mother but Dad had dementia. He was bonkers.”

He put extra stress on ‘my father’s house’, making it sound biblical and possessive at the same time.

“I want to see that bloody will.”

For 15 years my Mum ironed David’s shirts, pressed his pants and made him lunch. He was Peter’s only child. The product of an alcoholic mother who died young and a father who couldn’t say no to his gawping boy. While David was a prick, he was a harmless prick.

Peter’s side of the family considered me over-read, under-worked and cunt-struck. The bastard child of Mum’s first true love who beat her, left her when she was pregnant with me and who drank himself to death in a Kings Cross bed sit.

Mum left me the house on the island knowing I’d flog it as soon as she croaked. She knew I’d never get a woman after my marriage to Samantha ended. I’d need the cash and she was right, as usual. She thought Samantha was the gold standard in womanhood. The epitome of purity and feminine joy. At dinner, Samantha got the good cutlery, the nice place mats and the best cuts of meat. I brought a few women over to meet her after the divorce. They never measured up. She called my girlfriends ‘lipstick pigs’ – behind their backs of course. Mum had manners.

As the casket entered the incinerator, the steel doors closed behind it. David stepped away from me as the gas jets fired. We never really got on even when we lived together.

I’d left the McNally’s Juvenile Reform Centre when I was 16. I did a year for stealing sports cars and flogging them to two Vietnamese brothers called Bing and Bong in Cabramatta. They stripped them for parts. It didn’t take much detective work to bust a 15-year old kid driving a Porsche across the Hay Plain.

A week later I got a letter from Mum’s solicitor who said the value of the property was $97,560. Unfortunately, she had borrowed money from the bank using the house as collateral. Subtracting all debts including medical and alcohol bills, I was to inherit $5247.

I hardly ever rang Samantha up. The marriage only lasted three years and she took off to Cairns with Roger, my Best Man. She wasn’t a bad person. Just predictable. She put the middle in middle class. As the phone rang, a fly buzzed against the window pane and a car blew its horn in the street. When Samantha picked up the phone, the dam burst.

I blubbered Mum had died and I was so lonely. I said I missed Mum’s voice and that I was sorry that I’d fucked her around in the marriage and how was Roger? She listened quietly and I could almost smell the Cairns frangipani coming down the line. I told her about David and the stiffs on Peter’s side of the family and she laughed.

The tears stopped and I noticed one of my housemates had put a bunch of flowers on my desk. We had a Japanese student living with us. Kioko was kind and thoughtful.

I told Samantha that Mum had pissed my inheritance away.

“All of it?”

“Pretty much. I think I’ll get about $5000. I wasn’t expecting much”

“Jesus. What happened? When my Mum died she left me the house and $400,000 in super.”

I tried to imagine how much $400,000 in superannuation was. But I didn’t know anything about superannuation or how it worked.

“I put the money in an investment property and Roger renovated it last Christmas. He did it all himself. It’d be worth $900,000 if we sold it tomorrow.”

We talked a bit more but the conversation was struggling. She told me to keep my chin up then hung up.

I walked down the street, bought my usual can of coke, a family size block of Dairy Milk chocolate and a weekly lottery ticket. My kitchen hand salary allowed me to buy chocolate but not enough to pay the dental bills. I walked past the window of the local Flight Centre as there was a young woman who worked there. I did my stupid little wave and she waved back.

Two weeks later, Samantha’s letter appeared with the gas bill. She drew little circles over the i’s.

Dear Callum,

I’m so glad you rang me and shared your terrible news. I loved your Mum. She always looked after me on the island. Our divorce hit her hard and when Peter died, she had no one to turn to. Roger sends his commiserations. He says he thinks about you a lot.

I wanted to raise one matter which has been bugging me. I know you know the truth of it. Back when we first got married, you borrowed about $3000 off Mum and me. Now that you have Jo’s inheritance, I would like you to pay the money back. I figure with interest over all those years, it must be close to $4000. I’m not saying you should pay it all in one lump sum but it would be nice to clear up the loose ends.

Be brave Little Bear.

Samantha x

I put the letter down as a fly hit the wire window screen. I closed my eyes. I had borrowed $1000 for the wedding from her Mum and I had borrowed another $1000 from Samantha as I was broke. But asking for $4000 was a bit rich. Mum’s ashes were still warm on my dresser. When Samantha gets her snout on the money trail, she never gives up. She even called me ‘Little Bear’, her pet name for me. A little sweetness as the knife pierced the shoulder blades.

That night I lay in bed that night, I remembered the laughter we’d shared on the island before we got married. The house wasn’t much more than a fibro shack but the verandah over looked the sea. At night, we’d eat freshly caught fish, knock back the drinks and dance to Tom Jones.

“Remember to look up!” I’d yell and we’d hold hands, dizzy from the dancing and the wine and look at the stars, thrown from horizon to horizon. It made you feel like a speck in the great arc of time.

The following week, I got the bank to write Samantha a cheque for $4000. I wasn’t up for a fight. What’s the point? I could hardly remember living with her and what I did remember towards the end, was mostly bad. The more we drifted apart, the more I hit the piss.

Samantha’s second letter arrived six weeks later on a hot summers day. She thanked me for the money and wrote that it would come in handy renovating their investment property. One of their kids needed dental work too. She wrote there was one final matter.

…. I know I’m going back a long time now but remember that trip we took to New Zealand? I paid for the airfare and loaned you $300. It was about $1000 all up. You were drinking a fair bit at the time and we didn’t go for long but we thoroughly enjoyed driving around the Coromandel area on the North Island. I’m hoping you’ll be good enough to repay that money in the next couple of weeks. It would bury the hatchet between us and I do want to remember our time together in a happy light.

Thank you, Little Bear. Love from Roger and the kids.

There was that ‘Little Bear’ again. There was one problem. I’d never been to New Zealand. We had planned to go but as I was drinking my body weight in alcohol, it was thought, in Samantha’s words, “to be a fucking disaster.”

I pulled out my previous passport. No stamps from New Zealand. I threw the letter basketball-style in to the waste bin, picked up the small urn containing Mum’s ashes and walked down to St Kilda Pier. I could smell the toasted focaccias and coffee from the Saint Kilda Pier kiosk. A kid in a Spiderman mask was trying to shoot invisible spider webs at an old Labrador, tied to a fence. Pow, Pow, Pow, he went.

I made my way to the end of the pier, past the ‘no trespassing’ sign, around the iron spikes, to where the fairy penguins nested. I shook her ashes on the water. I wanted to say something heart-felt, recite from a poem or something like that. Mum wasn’t interest in poetry. She liked gardening and reading detective stories.

I walked past the kiosk when I saw the woman from Flight Centre coming towards me. She wore black jeans, sandshoes and a white t-shirt with the faces of Trump, Putin and Kim Jong-un on the front, with the headline, ‘The Three Stooges’. A black Labrador walked on a lead at her side.

“You’re the guy who walks past my business but never comes in,” she said. “You got a thing against travel? What’s with the urn?”

“My Mum’s ashes. I just scattered them on the water. I was waiting for the right day to do it.”

“You’re an only child, right?”

“Yep, I ate the rest. Sole survivor.”

She said there was a new documentary of The Smiths playing in town. Did I wanted to see it?

“Sure. I’ll see you there at 7.00pm. We can get moody and depressed together”

I walked around the corner on to my street and in the distance, I could see Kioko, jumping up down. She was pulling the shirt sleeves of a man in his 40s, who was keen to climb in to the driver’s seat of a new Holden Calais. She pointed at me and yelled in mangled English, “Callum, quickly. You come. This man is important!”

The man walked to the front gate and straightened his tie.

“Callum Robinson?” he said extending his hand. “My name’s Peter Noble. I’m from the Lotteries Commission. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

I closed the bedroom door, put the empty urn on the shelf, pointed him to my desk chair as I sat uncomfortably on the futon on the floor, with my knees under my chin. I made small talk while he checked my lottery ticket. He looked around the bare walls, the half full basket of dirty clothes and the dead aspidistra on the desk. I’d won third prize in the national lottery.

“Is there someone special in your life, Cal? Winning that much can be a burden as well as a blessing.”

I looked at Mum’s urn on the bookshelf, sitting next to the collected stories of Ursula Le Gunn. I looked at Samantha’s crumpled letter in the waste paper basket and realised the football would be on TV soon. The Tigers were playing Hawthorn at the MCG.

“There is someone but it’s early days. She’s a Smiths fan.”

“That’s nice. My wife and me met at a Cure concert. The old music is the best, isn’t it?”

We walked to the door and I waved him on his way as Kioko made her way down the corridor with two cups of Japanese tea and a packet of Mint Slices.