Nobody seemed truly sorry for his loss. The words drifted into the lad’s ears and they held neither weight or resonance. The funeral, his first, had rolled along with a strange, dream-like autonomy. People came, readings were read and then a coffin went behind a curtain. The whole affair was so ordered and emotionless that he could not be sure that it had even occurred at all and that it wasn’t simply him reciting the order of events in his mind before they actually took place. But no, it was no rehearsal. It had happened. He had cremated his father and now he was back in the dull, semi-detached house in the middle of an indifferent street inside a city that was elsewhere, suffering through what his aunt called a ‘wake’.
It didn’t take long for the sharp-minded lad to realise that the choreography of the funeral was not brought about through robotic propriety but by a collective sense of conjoined experience. The people around him had been to many, many funerals. The 17-year-old boy realised then that someday everyone he knew would die – not just old people but schoolmates and girlfriends. Even unborn babies. Everybody. He carried on shaking the hands of the mourners as they passed him by.
The widow sat in her favourite wooden chair with her head bowed in despondency. Her son stood next to her with one hand on her shoulder. His touch was a vague comfort. She was so tired. In the hurricane of funereal preparation, she had not found any time to herself. When she walked down the aisle on her wedding day that drizzling April afternoon 20 years before, she had fantasised about this very moment. She remembered approaching her husband-to-be and feeling overcome not with love, pride or lust, but with a strange and unsettling feeling that the next time all eyes would be on her would be at his funeral. She fantasised about how wonderful and joyous the funeral would be and how grief-stricken and classical she would be as a widow. Like Maria Falconetti in her passionate and perfect grief. She remembered thinking those dark thoughts on her wedding day and now, here she was. She tried to remember the years in between but they had somehow fallen from her memory. There was before, and then there was now. What had happened in between? She wanted to sleep.
Her son could sense the tiredness in her eyes and yet still the mourners came. They shuffled up to him and parroted the traditional mourner’s phrase, then he nodded his thanks and then they drifted toward the trestle table stacked with food and drink. It was a simple yet laborious routine.
He was young and, up until a week ago, happy in his burgeoning manhood. Indeed, even the maelstrom of his adolescent confusion seemed now to be a distant time in his life. He was a man now, but not because of his deeds, or because of his age or maturity, but because his father had died. He could not understand it.
He looked over to his aunt, on his mother’s side, who was bustling around making the guests feel at ease by keeping the drinks flowing and the white paper plates filled with dreary food. He thought that she was an incredible woman – much more so than his mother, who was, according to stories told around the Christmas Dinner table, generally ignored during the social occasions of their youth. He concluded that he would never marry somebody like his mother. He wanted fire and life. He wanted chaos, adventure and battles. Everything he wanted seemed to be represented in the contrast between his vibrant aunt and his dour mother. He took a break from the queue of mourners and bent down close to his mother, stroking her cheek and kissing her hand. She turned her tired eyes to him and asked if he would fetch her a glass of wine.
The widow’s sister was dizzy from the whirlwind of her duties. She had greeted the guests, fetched drinks, introduced people around and generally kept the whole event on track. She could not remember a single person’s name. Of course, she could place a few faces and match them with their youthful counterparts in her mind but their names seemed to have escaped her momentarily. She stepped back from the congregation and took a drink for herself and collected her thoughts. The patchwork of friends, former colleagues and casual acquaintances painted a muted portrait of the departed’s life and she wondered about those missing – the great friends and past lovers who could well be living their lives blissfully unaware that their friend was no longer with them.
‘Is this the best representation of Daniel’s life and all he touched?’ she thought as she finished her wine and looked over at her sister, draped shadow-like over the chair in the corner. She moved her gaze to her nephew and smiled to herself. He had assumed his duties as man-of-the-house with aplomb. The aunt watched as her nephew shook hands and nodded his thanks to the mourners. ‘How easy,’ she thought, ‘it would have been for the boy to have got drunk and condemned us all.’
She smiled to herself: ‘He is a good kid.’ He had grown so much since she had last seen him. His funeral clothes were ill-fitting and reminded her of a ‘Boy-Alice’ who had bitten into the ‘Eat Me’ cake and was stretching beyond rhyme and reason. However, despite his awkward physical appearance, the young man had an undeniable air about him: that indefinable quality that was in his father and, no doubt, his father before him. Her heart sighed with wistful melancholy as she dared to count the ways the boy would break hearts in the future. When he left his mother’s side, she put her drink down and walked over her to her sister.
There is a strange and unfathomable bond that most sisters share – a divine thread that binds them come sunrise or twilight. These sisters did not have it. As the widow sat on her little wooden chair she recalled, reflexively, all the mean things her elder sister had done to her in their youth. Even though the widow had had the better toys and larger hugs as a child she could still not, to that day, get past the simple, irrefutable fact that she was the youngest. It felt like it was a terrible cross to bear. She felt like victim of pity and undeserved leniency. Nobody had ever taken her seriously. She knew it meant absolutely nothing, therefore it meant everything. It was a doublethink that the widow had struggled to quell her entire life. Out of the corner of her eye the widow could see her sister approaching and when she bent down to put her arm around her shoulder, the two sisters felt a strange and unfathomable bond form. Suddenly they were magnets. The widow tilted her head on to her sister’s chin and felt her trio of soft kisses on her crown. Those three kisses that were once an irritating signature now seemed heavenly. The two sisters sat quietly while the other mourners ate quiche and drank flat cola.
After quietly placing his mother’s drink on her little side table, the lad left the two women in privacy and slunk out of the living room. He needed air. He wanted to open the front door, stand in the middle of the street and breathe. If he did that, he might have the courage to go back inside and stow away his disdainful feelings for all the actors in his house. He knew it was wrong to be angry and he knew that they truly wanted to show their respects but it was all too placid an affair for him to stomach. He was young, it was summer and he should have been drinking down at the reservoir with his friends. He stood in the hallway and looked at the front door and all it offered. He walked towards it but stopped when he got to the bottom of the staircase. He looked up towards the dark landing and grew heavy with dread. He exhaled in sadness and ascended the stairs.
The boy pushed open the door to his parent’s bedroom and saw that only half of the bed was made. His fortress of reserve was under attack. He stood in the doorway and realised it would be now be known only as his ‘mother’s bedroom’. He clenched his jaw and looked to the ceiling, hoping that the angle of his head would prevent the tears from deserting his eyes. He breathed fiercely and looked back into the room. The time had come to do something he had feared to do since the day he heard the heart-monitor beep its single-tone dirge. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile phone. The green light filled the dark landing with a supernatural aura. He scrolled through his contacts list until he came to entry that said ‘Dad Mobile’. His finger hovered over the ‘Delete Entry’ button. The boy looked around for any sign that, possibly, this was actually a dream. When he heard the raucous laugh of a mourner downstairs, he knew it to be reality. He pressed the button and deleted his father from his phone. His battlements were stormed and his emotions breached. He went into the bedroom, climbed into the bed and buried his face in his father’s pillows so the congregation below could not hear his screams.
The food and drink was plentiful but seemed oddly inappropriate. A lonely guest looked at the table, resplendent with little cakes, sausage rolls, mini scotch eggs and triangle sandwiches. He felt a pang of confusion. If he stood with his back to everyone in the room and just looked at the table, he could quite easily believe that he was at a birthday party. ‘But then,’ he thought, ‘what is funeral food?’ He felt awkward and unwanted. He opened the tap on the box of wine and poured a modest amount into a plastic cup. He had known the departed for most of his life, off and on, throughout the years. In their dangerous teens they had raised hell in bars and nightclubs. They had driven scooters all around the city and really made a scene. He and the dead man had then met ‘real women’ and moved to different districts to start families. They drifted apart, only to find each other again in their thirties at a reunion. They talked, they drank and they laughed. Though they had never been ‘best friends’, if such a thing existed, the two men had made a connection and enriched each other’s lives in some way or another. He could not remember a time before he knew the man and now he had to conceive of a life ahead without him. He looked at his plate of food, and his large gut that the plate rested against. His white shirt was straining to hold his paunch. The buttons looked like a line of scrums desperately trying to clasp the two sides of his shirt together. He used to be so cool. His dead friend too. And not only cool, but noble. His friend had helped him with his financial and emotional troubles on numerous occasions over the years, which had a detrimental impact on his own family. Many times his friend’s family would have gone without so that his own didn’t have to. And now that man was dead, and he was in his house eating his food and shaking hands with his son; a son who looked so much like his father and had the same vice-like grip. It was like being faced with an avenging angel. As the lonely man drank, he was overcome with the sense of being a fraud.
The friend turned from the table and looked over at the crowd and to the widow and her sister. He had often wondered if he was known among his friend’s other social circles. Had he spoken about him? Was he known? As he looked over the faces in the room he knew that he was not. He was alone at the funeral. He finished a sausage roll and hovered behind a group of laughing guests until an opening appeared and he made himself known. The other guests seemed pleased to meet him and when they asked him how he knew the departed all the man could do was swallow a piece of Scotch egg and say: “Oh, I was just someone he knew.”
The widow finished crying, stood up and looked around for her son. He was standing in the doorway, eyes bloodshot and face weary. She knew instantly what he had just gone through. From across the room they looked at each other, neither offering smile or frown but instead exchanging entire conversations just with the shared hue of their eyes. Finally, when they had said all they had to say to each other, the boy winked and smiled in the same manner that his father used to. It was such an organic and preternatural gesture that the widow’s heart leapt when she saw it. He was there! Her husband was there! He had come from the grave to say a last goodbye.
“The world is a wonderful place,” she whispered to her sister, and she broke into a huge smile, holding out her arms for her son. He strode across the room and the fell into a tight embrace that went entirely unseen by everyone except the widow’s sister.
By nightfall, many guests remained. The conversations had become a little louder as the drink supply had diminished. Even the widow and her son had joined the congregation. They could no longer be considered mourners. The widow’s sister had slipped out of the conservatory and hidden herself away in a dark corner of the garden to smoke a cigarette. As she lit it, she looked into the conservatory and watched her sister and nephew. They laughed and joked and seemed to thank people with sincerity. She could not hear her sister’s words but she knew that they were genuine by the lilt of her head and the way she closed her eyes to say “thank you” – a gesture she only offered when expressing genuine gratitude or apologising honestly. The nephew seemed to be growing by the second. He was not awkward or shy, but bold, strong and clearly funny. He made jokes and teased guests and received many slaps on his shoulder in boisterous gestures of camaraderie. The widow’s sister lit another cigarette and watched the boy become his father’s son. She wanted him.
The momentary sting of lust was battered away by a ram of anger. She looked at the boy and images of his father were conjured in her mind. She inhaled her cigarette through tight lips, looked to the stars, exhaled and said to herself: “Are you happy up there Daniel? Now that you are dead, are you happy? You worked so hard, and you were so tired and you were treated so badly by her. Why did you stay? What was wrong with you? Could you not see? Since we first met, could you not see that it should have been me? Did you not feel anything for me? Even when I would come around late at night, covered in bruises from Alex? You and your ‘perfect wife’ would give me tea and look at me with pathetic eyes as I cried. Could you not see that we were with the wrong people? I would pretend to sleep on your sofa and wait for you to creep downstairs in the dead of night and… and… I waited and waited and saw how she treated you and hard she was and unfair and how tired and… it was me, not her! It should have been me, I was the one for you, I was the one, me, not her… I would have been so good to you, I would have loved you so much and taken so much care of you and been a better woman and given you more children. It should have been me, not her. You bastard… you made me hate her. You made me loathe the way she looked at you and how she treated you. Damn you, she was my sister. What right did you have to do that? You made me hate my own sister for the way she treated you and the way she denied me. You made me hate my own sister! So, fuck you. Fuck you Daniel, I’m glad you’re dead.”
She finished her cigarette and calmly extinguished it on the patio. She no longer felt dizzy. She was light as the breeze. She looked into the conservatory. Everybody was still drinking and talking. She went to the door and gripped the handle before smiling to herself.
“See you on the other side Daniel.” And with that, she opened the door, walked into her sister’s dancing embrace and gave her three large kisses on her forehead. Her nephew hugged her and then a lone, fat and generally nondescript guest handed her a plastic cup of wine. And they all danced and sang raucously until three in the morning, when the neighbours complained about the noise.
This short story, by Graham Thomas, is taken from 'Various Sorrows & Joys', a collection of short stories and poetry by Graham and Luke Searle