I laugh a lot in my job. I guess, with darkness has to come light, and you’d be amazed how gallows the humour can get. ‘You don’t have to be mad to do this job, but it helps,’ they say. But I wonder if we’re not all a bit mad already, and it’s just a question of when, not if, the lid comes off.
I find it hard at the best of times going home and straight to sleep after a night shift. Your body is exhausted but your mind is on overdrive: Will Levi take another overdose? Will John be on the psychiatric ward, yelling for his Dennis the Menace wig? These are usually the things I am thinking as I leave the office for my bed. Today, however, it was Joe’s Facebook message.
We were having one of those freak, early spring warm spells – Peckham’s teens had already stripped to their Primark hot pants – and so I decided to walk to Oval rather than get the bus. Camberwell was alive and kicking: African ladies in tropical-shade headdresses, stalls piled high with okra and plantain, spilling onto the street. A watermelon rolled onto the pavement. As I put it back, I could just make out the wiry form of Dmitri, the owner of the shop, sitting like a drying chilli on his deckchair at the back. I passed Chicken Cottage and the launderette, where the aroma of fried chicken turned into the heavy, bluebell notes of Lenor. Across the road, in the park, a group of teenagers were dancing to some rapper blasting from a pimped-up beatbox. The heart of South London couldn’t have been beating harder if it tried, and yet, amidst all of this life, I was thinking about death – of Joe’s mum, and my mum, and everything that happened in Kilterdale, and how I really didn’t want to go back there, for a funeral of all things. The question now, of course, was how the hell was I going to get out of it?
Eventually, I caved, and went into Interflora in Camberwell. The woman behind the counter was eyeing me up over her half-moon glasses, as if she knew my game.
‘Can I help you, madam?’ she said eventually.
I smiled at her. ‘No, I’m just looking, thanks,’ and continued pretending to browse around the shop, which didn’t take long since you couldn’t swing a cat in there.
‘Okay, well if you need any help …’ she said, going back to her book, but I could feel her eyes on me; they were following me round the shop. Eventually, I felt compelled to speak.
‘Uh, actually, could you recommend flowers to send to a funeral, please?’
She perked up at this and took off her glasses.
‘Well, the classic of course is the lily,’ she said, getting up from her seat behind the counter and coming round to the front. She had a matronly bosom and was wearing a lilac, pussy-bow blouse. ‘But you can have bouquets arranged with carnations, roses; anything you like.’
I nodded, remembering the carpet of bouquets left outside the crematorium at Mum’s funeral. The messages that all started, ‘Dearest Lil …’ and finished, ‘Always in our thoughts.’ I remember being so depressed that Mum had now become merely a thought in people’s heads. How long before she wasn’t even that?
‘May I ask who it’s for?’ asked the woman. She was much more friendly now. ‘Is it a close family member? Do you know what sort of flowers they liked?’
‘Roses,’ I said, ‘peach ones.’
I must have spent more time with Marion up at the vicarage that summer than I remembered.
‘We do a lovely wreath with peach roses,’ she said. ‘Some irises, green foliage … When is the funeral?’
‘A week on Friday.’
‘In London?’
‘No, up North. A little village near the Lake District.’
She let out a little gasp. ‘Which one? My son and daughter-in-law live up there.’
I hesitated. Nobody had ever heard of it. ‘Kilterdale,’ I said.
‘No … my son lives in Yarn!’
I was genuinely shocked. In fifteen years of living in London, I could count on one hand the number of people I’d met from anywhere near my home village, it was so back of beyond.
She said, ‘It’s glorious up there. Always fascinates me how anyone would move from somewhere like that to here.’
There was a long pause. It was only when she spoke again that I realized she’d wanted an answer to that question. ‘Anyway,’ she looked a bit embarrassed that her foray into conversation hadn’t been more productive, ‘that needn’t be a problem. You can have a look at what the wreath might look like here – I have some in the back – and then we can contact an Interflora branch near where the funeral is being held.’
I felt my shoulders relax. ‘That would be great, thank you.’ Then, as I watched her bustle into the back of the shop, the nagging guilt crept in.
‘I had no idea, I’m sorry. Now I do.’ Joe had said in his message. But he did have an idea, even at sixteen. Whilst other lads in his year were worrying about popping cherries, getting it on with Tania Richardson, Joe was dealing with me, posing as his sane-and-together girlfriend but who, inside, was collapsing with grief. Now here I was, copping out of his mother’s funeral.
I was kicking myself for even joining Facebook, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be in this position, and Joe would never have found me. I only have fifteen Facebook friends, as it is, most of whom are work colleagues. I say things to my sister, Niamh, like: ‘Why does this person I did swimming with twenty years ago want to be my friend?’ Which she thinks is hilarious. Niamh is nine years younger than me, the accidental result of a drunken, food-themed fancy-dress party for my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary – yep, my sister was conceived whilst my parents were dressed as a ‘prawn cocktail’: Mum as the prawn and Dad as Tom Cruise in Cocktail – and therefore thinks I am geriatric. ‘It’s a social-networking site, dumb-ass. You social-network on it,’ she says. I don’t think I’ll ever like it, though: I don’t want blasts-from-my-past being able to find me, or to see pictures of the sorts of drunken states my sister gets herself into. I worry about her. She turned twenty-three in January and I still worry about her.
I picked up some freesias and inhaled their lovely scent, wondering how long you could leave a message like Joe’s before you answered it, and decided two days was already too long.
‘Here we are …’ The lady clattered through the plastic strips of curtain separating the shop from the back, carrying a peach-flowered wreath. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ she said, holding it up. ‘They’ll be able to make you one up like this in no time.’
I sniffed it.
‘Yes, it’s lovely. How much?’
‘They start at seventy-five pounds and go up to a hundred.’
‘Seventy-five pounds?’ It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it.
‘It is expensive, but then when you think of what it’s for … what those flowers say. Your personal goodbye.’
As if I didn’t feel guilty enough already.
Going in person would say a hell of a lot more, I knew that. I knew that for much less, fifty quid perhaps, I could get a train ticket up to Kilterdale, or fill up my car with petrol. So, I wouldn’t even be able to plead poverty if I sent the flowers.
‘I’ll have a think about it,’ I said, having decided to do nothing of the sort.
‘Okay, well don’t leave it too late to order.’ She went a bit frosty after that. ‘They need time to make it up.’
I made a swift exit out of there.
Honestly,