‘Mum? We’re going to be late for the funeral.’
‘Put the kettle on, Mikey,’ she calls from the shower.
He brings her mug of tea to the bedroom and sees her straightening her hair which isn’t that colour really and getting a brand-new black dress out of the cupboard and snaking it down over her bra and pants like it is a second skin. So that’s what you wear to funerals, he thinks, sort of the same as what you wear to go clubbing only a bit longer. She has got him a new jacket with a free footballing tie. He doesn’t even like football.
The cemetery building looks like a church, a library and a swimming pool all rolled into one. Mikey feels nervous; in the gents’ there is a large man in black at the other end of the urinals, crying and pissing at the same time. They’re early, but there are already so many cars the parking is full and there is a sign directing people to an overflow.
‘Have they all come for Nanna?’
‘Don’t be daft, they’re for the one before, every twenty-five minutes,’ she explains. ‘There’s thousands buried here.’
Thousands? Thousands dead in the tsunami, that’s what it says on the news, but that’s in another country, not here. Under every one of those stones, a body? When the rabbit Paul got him died, Paul said if he was a normal boy he would cry, but it was an ugly rabbit and he’d never wanted it anyway. Stiff with its eyes open and its head at a funny angle, and how in the nightmares he never tells anyone about, the rabbit turns into his mum. Other dead things, not including the enemy on Lockdown who don’t count: a mouse in a trap; a black-and-white cat, perfect by the side of the road except for a thin line of bright red blood running from its whiskers to the dull leaves in the gutter; and something else, a bird in their old house thudding against the French windows, falling onto the carpet, still alive when he stretched out its wings, still twitching when he pulled its legs. He doesn’t know why he did that, doesn’t want to think about it now.
‘There’s Diana’
Between the pink cherry trees, between the cars parked like toys on either side of the road, a black hearse is rolling towards him. It stops, the coffin is sliding out on a tray and propped up beside it like a doll is a tall woman, also in black, with dark glasses which make her look like a spy.
The sound is turned down, the murmuring around him of the little gangs of grown-ups when they don’t want you to hear, the sudden and unexpected fluttering of a flock of fat pigeons, traffic droning beyond the cemetery walls, and their spiky heels grating on the gravel as they scratch towards each other.
‘Valerie, you haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Nor have you, Di.’
It’s her then. That makes sense. She doesn’t look like she’s part of their family, but she does look rich. Stupid kissing, kiss, kiss. Not him, no way.
‘Lovely flowers, Di!’ says his mum.
The white lilies sprout from the coffin like a tropical jungle.
‘I’d love them to have been Wynhope lilies,’ says his aunt, ‘but I’m afraid Edmund insists on keeping them for our private chapel, so I had to place a special order in London.’
She sounds rich too.
‘And you must be Michael.’
‘Say hello to your aunty, Mikey.’
Paul used to say his mum sounded common, but Mikey thinks she sounds just fine. He kicks the stones and studies the grit and the dirt that lies beneath the pale pebbles.
‘Mikey!’
The boy and his aunt face each other. Behind them there is movement, the silent movie of the undertakers manoeuvring into position, the bare branches of the beech trees shifting in the wind and tissues falling like snow, soundlessly from sleeves onto soft grass, but the boy and the aunt are frozen.
‘Well, go on then, Mikey.’
But having not said hello, now he can’t find hello. Hello has gone and left nothing in its place. He takes a very deep breath as if to find hello, but his new for-the-funeral jacket is very tight and the new for-the-funeral tie is pressing on his throat and they won’t let hello back up again from wherever it’s hiding.
‘Hello, Michael!’ says Diana.
So, she had the word all the time.
Inside, there is space and light and whiteness and windows, and at the same time it is all mixed up with blackness and rumbling music and the coffin on a stand with the lid nailed shut. No one would hear you, even if you screamed. It strikes him as odd that although a lot of people die in Lockdown, you never see them buried. He can put that right if he becomes a person who makes computer games and he is wondering about that when suddenly, without warning, the coffin disappears. It is extraordinary, like magic, black magic, because there is a lot of black. His mum is right, all the people come in the front door and leave out the side except the dead person, who slides through the curtains and that’s that.
Chapter Six
Lunch is in a bankrupt country house where they’d made a business out of dying, plastering fire exit signs on the wood panelling and selling egg-and-cress sandwiches to mourners. It is every bit as ghastly as Diana has predicted; she is so relieved Edmund has not been forced to mingle with the half remembered remnants of her suburban past, it is bad enough for her. The old women cluster around the child as if mere proximity to youth can provide an antidote to the funeral, and of course it is all about Valerie, poor Valerie, hugs and kisses and condolences for Valerie; most of them barely remember that there was another daughter called Diana, or if they do, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
It strikes Valerie that probably both she and Diana are out of place here, for different reasons. If anything, Diana looks more lost, giving orders to the girls in black uniforms serving the tea rather than listening to the old folk with tears behind glasses and memories clasped in handbags. Valerie does try, she says things like, have you caught up with my sister Diana, she’s over there; oh yes, Diana, they say, I’ll see if I can catch her later. When it is all over, waiting for her sister in the empty hall, sprigs of green cress on the parquet floor and coffee spilled in saucers, Valerie realises it isn’t just her family that Diana turned her back on all those years ago, it was her younger self. As Mikey slips his hand in hers, she knows it isn’t such an easy thing to do, to step away from your childhood.
The automatic child locks on Diana’s 4x4 snap shut. Behind her, Mikey is asleep on the back seat. Valerie is also exhausted, she closes her eyes and allows the bland music on the radio and the hypnotic beat of the windscreen wipers to iron out her crumpled grief.
‘Wake up, they’re playing our song.’ Diana is singing along to something. Valerie doesn’t recognise it, but she doesn’t say so. When the song is finished, Diana apologises that Edmund is not going to be at Wynhope when they get there. He has to be in London, apparently.
That is a strange decision, not to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral, even if you didn’t invite her to your wedding, but blearily Valerie concludes it probably wasn’t the right sort of funeral, not his sort of people.
‘He worshipped his mother, but she died of cancer when he was ten and then his father was so depressed afterwards that he shot himself when Edmund was a teenager.’
The Google search Valerie did on her phone the night before brought up images of a country house, a good-looking tanned man with an oversized cheque for charity in his hands and a smile for the camera on his face and several old newspaper articles about a death at Wynhope House which she didn’t bother to read.
Diana explains. ‘He doesn’t really do funerals any longer, and who can blame him?’
Do