Edo has worked magic with the flowers. Gloria has finished with the windows. The fridge is behaving itself.
In less than an hour, Happy Endings will be open for business. And any moment now Mum and Dad will arrive to inspect what they’ve taken to calling ‘The Investment’.
Dad stepped in after the bank took all of three minutes to turn down my application for a start-up loan. ‘You’re to take my pension pot and put it into your business.’ After he left the navy, Dad went into the construction business. Without his help, Happy Endings would never have got off the drawing board. He’s got so much faith in me it’s scary. Then again, as he says, I’ve got a great location on a busy high street, slap bang in the middle of London, how can I fail?
And I know I can do this. It’s what I want more than anything. From now on I’m devoting myself to business. Nothing else matters. Not that there is much else, to be honest. Other than Gloria and Edo, I don’t exactly have a red-hot social life. My choice, I know. Over the past five years, I’ve become a bit of a recluse.
But today, I can’t even begin to describe my sense of purpose. I’m nervous, yet exhilarated.
In short, I’ve never felt more alive.
Which is a bit odd perhaps. Because I see dead people. All the time.
It’s an occupational hazard.
Whenever I meet someone new and we get to the bit where they ask me, ‘So what do you do?’ and I say I’m an undertaker, I get one of three reactions:
1. ‘You’re kidding!’
2. ‘Eeuw.’ Usually accompanied by that two-fingers-down-the-throat gesture.
3. ‘So, okay, when you were small did you pull the wings off flies?’
I wish I could make people understand. It’s not torture. Quite the opposite. I love my job. And is it really so strange?
Think of it this way. I’m an organiser. An event planner. A good listener. A shoulder to cry on. A public speaker. A negotiator. A seamstress. An accomplished multi-tasker. A stylist. I can remove a stain from almost any fabric, I’m a dab hand with a make-up brush, and I’m full of good advice. For example: never wear lip gloss when you’re scattering ashes.
When the unexpected happens, I am expected to rise to the occasion. And I do.
Do I touch dead people? Yes, of course.
What do they feel like? Mostly, they feel cold.
Am I weird? I don’t think so …
I’m just a typical millennial who enjoys shopping, movies, holidays and – mysteriously – housework. I probably keep myself to myself a bit too much but I’ve always enjoyed my own company and I’ve never been great in a crowd.
More than anything else, I’m proud to be an undertaker. Not to mention enormously proud to be opening my own shop. It’s the biggest leap of my life and it still seems unreal – particularly when you think that until recently, I was a semi-disgraced ex-employee.
My life started to go pear-shaped late last year when the business I worked for, a firm of undertakers run by the original owner’s great-great-great-grandson, was taken over by a huge funeral group with headquarters in New York and branches on every continent.
As soon as the deal was done we were summoned to meet our new manager, Jason Chung. ‘Nothing’s going to change,’ he promised us.
But everything did.
Being accountable to a manager who’d never even carried a coffin was a huge change in itself. And that was just the beginning.
My former boss, the great-great-great grandson, was gone in a matter of weeks. He quit the day our new owners announced that from now on we would only be offering headstones made from Chinese granite, a decision that was all about profit rather than the best interests of our clients.
Even while two sets of lawyers continued to argue about whether or not the name of the family firm could be removed – it’s there to this day, because the new owners know the public prefer to deal with supposedly genuine local firms – our professional vocabulary began to change. At staff training sessions, words like ‘care’, ‘service’, ‘respectful’ and ‘time of need’ were cast aside in favour of sentences that were strong on ‘sales’, ‘targets’, ‘commission’ and ‘underperforming’.
That sort of mindset makes me want to throw up. In fact, at a subsequent regional training day, I was overheard during the coffee break saying something to that effect – how was I supposed to know it was Jason Chung’s mother standing behind me? – and my comments resulted in me being sent to Siberia.
Not the place. Even though the new owners have business interests all over Europe, so far as I know, the people of Russia are not yet obliged to be commemorated with slabs of Chinese stone. No, Siberia was our name for the back office. To call it an office was actually an insult to offices.
Thanks to Jason’s mother’s need to overshare my private conversation, I spent ten days there, closeted in a small windowless space that used to be a store room, with only the low throb of the mortuary fridges on the other side of a thin partition for company.
Jason himself cloaked my punishment with a mirthless smile. ‘This is an excellent opportunity for Nina to focus on her administrative skills without any risk of distraction,’ he told everyone.
In practical terms that translated as one mountain of paperwork swiftly followed by another. A cross between school detention and prison. Gloria insisted my incarceration breached several employment laws, and since she’s almost a qualified lawyer she’s probably correct.
Then again, my solitary confinement wasn’t entirely bad. I enjoyed breaking the office-hours monotony by going through all the product catalogues and samples that got sent to us in the post. I didn’t usually get to see these – although I have stacks of them now – so it was interesting to discover you could pick up a third-hand hearse for under four grand. Which I seriously considered once I got into the preparations for Happy Endings, although in the end I splashed out on a simple pale blue van with my business name and contact details discreetly on the side and a properly equipped interior from a company that was offering a cheap finance deal. I think it looks uplifting yet still properly respectful.
Happy Endings may be a shoe-string start-up, but if it weren’t for what happened on my final day at work, it probably wouldn’t exist at all. So I shall always be grateful Jason Chung’s mother is a sneak.
Here’s what happened on that last day.
I’d spent most of the morning on the phone, unenthusiastically informing recent clients that by completing a customer satisfaction survey they could win a weekend in Devon. Then, having finished with the post, I moved on to the next batch of papers, and discovered a pile of burial applications in need of processing. They were going to take me at least forty-five minutes – always supposing the Wi-Fi in Siberia wasn’t playing up again – and I was so not in the mood.
It was a quarter to one, fifteen minutes before my lunchbreak was supposed to start, and I was feeling peckish. I’d been trying to stick to the 5:2 diet and this was one of the days when I was not required to starve myself.
I straightened the applications, grabbed my coat and umbrella – the April showers were in full flood – and prepared to make a dash for the deli next to Queen’s Park tube station.
I knew that if Jason saw me leave so early, he’d do that annoying looking-ostentatiously-at-his-Rolex-while-tapping-the-glass thing that was supposed to remind me he’s the boss. Happily, he was nowhere in sight and by the time I got safely beyond the reception desk I was weighing the relative merits of tuna and cucumber on sourdough versus a jumbo salt beef hot wrap. And a chocolate orange cupcake, of course.