by Anna Maxted
‘You’ve totalled Nancy!’ screams the voice. The voice belongs to a tiny blonde woman wearing emphatic lip-liner and a white coat. Her face is pinchy with rage. She runs towards me until we are standing nose to nose and I can smell her ever-so-faintly rancid breath.
‘N-n-nancy?’ I stammer in horror. Oh God, I’ve killed someone.
‘Nancy, my car, you stupid cow!’
The whoosh of relief as I realise I won’t go to prison plus the slow-brain processing of the fact a twee car-christening stranger is calling me a stupid cow fuse into a rush of adrenaline and I roar, ‘For fuck’s sake stop screaming, it’s a crappy little coke can car!’ She looks shocked – probably didn’t think someone wearing a skirt like this would use the word ‘fuck’. She opens her over made-up mouth to answer back but I am not in the mood. I bellow, ‘I’m sorry! But I am on the way to my father’s funeral and—’
I stop mid-bellow. I stop because a tall dark-haired guy, also wearing a white coat, has jogged up to us and seemingly expects to be included in the conversation. ‘Yes?’ I say icily.
Instantly, the blonde turns coy. ‘Tom!’ she simpers. She’s practically nuzzling his chest. The sneer in my head must have escaped to my face because she shoots me an evil look. ‘Tom, look what she’s done to Nancy!’
We both regard Nancy’s crumpled backside. Then we look at Tom. She looks adoringly. I look snootily, do a double take, quickly attempt to squash it. It emerges victorious as a twitch. Tom is gorgeous. Or rather, he’s got – and I know this doesn’t sound terribly complimentary but you’ll excuse it as a personal fetish – eyes like a husky dog. A cool, pale, piercing blue. Woof. And his teeth. Wolf teeth. I know this, because he flashes me a surprise smile. Pointy canines do it for me. What can I say? It’s weird. I mean, I don’t even like dogs.
‘Celine, it’s mainly the bumper. Stop yelling,’ says Tom. Then he turns to me and says, ‘Are you okay? Do you want to sit down?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m late,’ I say shrilly. ‘I’m late for my father’s funeral, and now this!’ My voice chokes up. Celine is mutinously silent.
‘What!’ says Tom.
‘What about Nancy?’ says Celine sulkily.
‘I’ll deal with the car,’ says Tom. ‘You go inside.’ Celine flounces off. Tom winces. ‘Sorry about her,’ he says. ‘You look like you’re in shock. Will you be okay to drive?’
I shrug. I mean to say that I’m fine but it comes out as ‘I feel dizzy.’ I fiddle with my watch and realise that my father’s funeral starts in less than quarter of an hour. ‘I’m so late! And the Beetle!’
Tom waves away the Beetle. ‘The Beetle is worth about ten pence. Forget it. You can sort it out later.’ Pause. ‘You look a bit wonky to drive. Can I call you a cab?’
I shake my head. ‘It starts in ten minutes,’ I wail. I feel weak and feeble, not to mention a great big frump. To complete this alluring package, a plop of watery snivel runs out of my nose. I wipe it on my sleeve.
‘I’ll drive you,’ announces Tom. ‘I’ve got the van.’
‘The van?’ I say gormlessly.
‘The vet’s van,’ he says.
‘You’re a vet!’ I say.
‘Yes!’ he grins.
‘That explains the white coat,’ I say. Then I decide to shut up. I stand there, gormlessly, while Tom moves the Toyota ‘round the back’. His driving is, I’m alarmed to note, similar to mine. Three seconds later, he reappears at the wheel of a dirty white van with the word MEGA VET emblazoned on its side. Classy. He toots, and I clamber in. Because of my clingy student skirt it’s a gawky (except fatter), knock-kneed manoeuvre.
‘Don’t you have loads of animals waiting to see you?’ I ask, confirming my already stunning reputation for eloquent repartee and dagger wit.
‘Nah,’ he shakes his head, ‘Wednesday’s always quiet. Monday and Friday are the killers. Right. Where are we going?’ Of course, I can’t remember, so Tom scrabbles under his seat and retrieves a ragged A to Z. Once we escape from Golders Green, Tom speeds up. He has no qualms about cutting up police cars. I know we’re in a rush but it feels like he’s trying to take off.
‘Alright, wing commander?’ I mutter edgily.
He glances at me. ‘This isn’t fast!’ he says. ‘You don’t want to be late!’
‘No,’ I say. ‘But I don’t want to be dead either.’
He slows down. ‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ he says.
‘It’s okay,’ I reply.
After this jolly exchange, we’re silent. Then Tom says, ‘How did he die?’
I pick the skin on my lip. ‘Heart attack,’ I gasp, as the van squeals round a corner. Tom, rather sweetly, gives a loud tut. I want to change the subject. I need to change the subject. I wrack my fuzzy brain for information that may be of interest to a good-looking vet who I have known for not very long and produce the conversational corker: ‘I’ve got a kitten called Fatboy.’ Jesus, what’s wrong with me? My command of the English language seems to have vanished. Suddenly I possess the vocabulary and articulation of a three-year-old and am forced to suck in my cheeks to prevent myself adding ‘What’s your favourite colour?’
Thankfully, Tom says politely, ‘Oh yes? Any particular sort?’
Here at last is my chance to prove that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I do actually own an IQ. And what do I say? ‘He’s orange.’
I am considering an emergency operation to have my voice box removed, when Tom says kindly, ‘Orange. Good sort of cat.’ This inspires me to silence. I stare at my lap and imagine my father lying dead in his coffin, starting to rot.
Seven excruciating minutes later, we screech up to the cemetery gates. ‘Thank you it’s so kind of you, thank you,’ I say awkwardly, trying to inject some bouncy gratitude into the flat monotone. ‘What shall I do about the Toyota?’
Tom waves me away. ‘You’d better rush. Just stop by when you have a moment. You can sort the insurance and stuff with Celine whenever. She won’t mind.’
This is the most outrageous lie I’ve heard since my mother denied fancying Steve McQueen. But I let it pass. ‘Thank you,’ I say again.
‘It’s alright,’ he says. He nods towards the mass of cars jamming the cemetery entrance. ‘Will you be okay?’
I nod stiffly, give a silly bye-bye-baby wave, and turn away. My eyes are watering. It’s ridiculous. Being shouted at I can take. But gentleness. Spare me. Even the word makes me cringe. It’s almost as bad as ‘tenderly’. Blue eyes and pointy teeth notwithstanding, I go right off him. I see Luke in a too tight navy suit hovering just inside the iron gates with an impeccable Tina and a sleek Lizzy and run gratefully towards them. Tom roars away in his dirty white van, and I don’t even look back.
Chapter 5
LUKE IS A nicotine addict. Not only does he need a pre- and post-coital fag, he has to have one during. It is, he tells me, why his last girlfriend left him. He singed her on a sensitive spot. He says he could give up any time but refuses to chew gum as ‘it gives you stomach ulcers’. He smokes on the tube platform (‘the no-smoking signs refer to the track’), he smokes in the bath (‘for me as a bloke it’s the equivalent of a scented candle’), and he smokes while he eats his thick crust pepperoni pizza in front of A Question of Sport (‘it’s a stressful programme, you wouldn’t understand’). Did I mention that as well as smoking his insides to soot, Luke says what he thinks without thinking? So it’s no great surprise that when I burst through the cemetery gates he grinds his toe agitatedly on one of five smouldering fag butts and shouts, ‘Helen! You, mate, are dead!’
‘I’m what!’ I say.
He has the grace to blush. ‘I mean,’ he stutters, ‘your mum is going mental. She’s murderous. Everyone’s waiting in their cars.’
I look at Tina and Lizzy. Tina flicks her fingernails, looks down at her Jimmy Choos, and mutters ‘Bloody hell!’ Lizzy pulls a woeful face and wails, ‘Oh poor Helen!’
I take their discomfort as corroboration. ‘Hang on,’
I mutter, and weave my way through what looks like a staged motorway pile-up – studiously avoiding eye contact with the goggling faces inside the cars – to the big shiny black Jaguar parked behind the big shiny black hearse.
As I approach, the window shoots down. ‘Where. Have. You. Been?’ spits my mother from under a great black saucer of a hat.
I’m surprised at her courteous restraint, then I realise the chauffeur is listening agog. I bend down, wave guiltily at Nana Flo who is clutching a lace handkerchief so tightly her knuckles are white, and say I got held up. ‘What’s going on?’ I ask, to distract my mother from her fury.
‘They’re in the cemetery office,’ says my mother in a high, hysterical voice, ‘they’re doing all the paperwork and [sniff] we’re not allowed to get out of our cars until it’s done, and – oh I’ve had enough! I’m getting out! I can’t just sit here! Mind out!’ I hop to one side as my mother leaps from the car. Immediately, hordes of car doors click open and swarms of po-faced, droopily-dressed people start plodding slowly towards us. I stiffen in fright. No offence to our family friends and relatives but it’s like Night of the Living Dead.
I spend the next ten minutes suffocating in a blur of powdery, lavendery, lipsticky kisses, awkward nose-clinking hugs, warm breathy murmurs of ‘I’m so sorry!’ and ‘so sudden!’, a sharp assertion of ‘You must be relieved he went so quickly’ (oh, delighted), a shrill exclamation ‘Helen! I hardly recognise you! You’ve lost your puppy fat!’, and ‘You are taking care of your poor mother, aren’t you – such a shock for her!’ I glance at my mother who is lapping it up like Fatboy having stumbled on an illegal bowl of ice cream.
‘Yes,’ I say grimly. ‘She needs a lot of looking after.’
I spot Uriah – done up like a dog’s dinner – emerging from the cemetery office with the minister. Who, I recall in a stab of panic, left two rambling messages on my answer machine which I ignored then forgot. Uriah, meanwhile, looks distinctly annoyed at the anarchic milling crowds but as I approach his lips twitch in a careful smile. ‘Miss Bradshaw,’ he says. ‘How are you?’ I tell him I’m fine. He nods quickly, then says, ‘We’re ready to embark on your father’s last journey, if we may. Do you wish the arrangement to stay on the coffin, or shall we remove it?’
I’m stumped. ‘Er, what do people normally do?’ I say.
‘Most folk prefer to take it off,’ he says. ‘They often like to donate it to an appropriate hospital ward – in this case, the cardiac unit,’ he adds helpfully. How jolly for the patients.
‘Oh fine, do that then,’ I blurt. I become aware of a dip in the noise level. During which a woman’s voice exclaims, ‘I hope he’s not going to be buried over the other side. I hate the walk.’
I turn and my heart thuds as I see that the dark draculaesque coffin has been rolled out of its hearse and six sober-suited men are slowly hefting it on to their shoulders. I stare at it in horror. This solid, ugly, stark token of death. Jesus! My father is in there. Dead. Cold. Stiff. Starting to rot. How long before the rigor mortis is softened with the stink of decay and . . . I am wrenched from my rotten thoughts by my mother who storms right up to Uriah and shouts in his face: ‘Morrie’s Cousin Stephen wants to carry the coffin!’
Not by himself, surely, I say in my head. Cousin Stephen is about ninety-three and the height of a Munchkin. ‘Mum,’ I begin, glancing nervously at Uriah, ‘we were supposed to sort—’
Uriah stops me with a light touch on my shoulder. ‘It’s not a problem,’ he says grandly. After a short flurry – and when I say short I mean short – Cousin Stephen is promoted to a pallbearer. Uriah somehow organises everyone into a long straggly line, eyeballs Luke into extinguishing his cigarette, and takes his place in front of the coffin, with the minister.
My mother, Nana Flo, and I stand behind it. I glance at Nana to see if she might faint but she has a strong, angry look about her, like she’s preparing for battle. My mother is trembling and her face is swollen with tears. I hug her and nearly collapse as she promptly relaxes her entire weight on to me. She clings with one arm, and uses the other to keep her hat from whizzing off her head and spinning across the white sea of gravestones. I feel as if I’m acting a part in a film. It’s ridiculous! Today is a chill, blustery Wednesday morning. I should be sitting at my desk in an overheated office, slurping a double espresso and leafing through the Sun on the pretext of doing research. Instead, here am I, with a great troupe of people, in the bloody countryside, stumbling over the muddy earth behind a big brash coffin containing my dad, towards a freshly dug grave to bury him deep in the ground – bury my father – who only last week was cheerily celebrating the dropping of his handicap with fat cigars and a round of brandies for his putting pals in the Brookhill Golf Club bar. I wonder how Tina’s £195 shoes are negotiating the dirt.
For the first five steps of the funeral march, the coffin is – thanks to squat Cousin Stephen – wobbly and uneven. Thankfully, Uriah’s men hoick it up and off Cousin Stephen’s short shoulder until he is actually standing underneath it. He is forced to be content with placing a nominal hand of support on its polished surface and our bizarre procession shuffles on. I glide forward like a zombie. Everyone is hushed and the only sound is a plane droning overhead and the wind whipping the soft, feathery branches of the elderly yew trees.
I feel sick. I am dreaming, and soon someone is going to wake me, tell me it’s a mad, twisted nightmare, and I’ll open my eyes and I’ll be in my warm soft bed and this surreal situation will vanish. Disappear. End. Stop. ‘STOP!’ roars my mother in a voice that God could have used to part the Dead Sea. Everyone – including, unfortunately, the pallbearers – jumps about a foot in the air and staggers to a hurried halt. Nana looks dumbstruck.
‘Good grief,’ I say rather stupidly, ‘what’s wrong?’ My mother is sobbing and trembling so violently she can barely speak. Uriah bustles over, full of official concern. ‘Okay,’ I say soothingly, stroking her back. ‘It’s okay, just calm down. What’s upset you?’
My mother is gasping and choking but eventually manages to wheeze out the word ‘ring’. Ring?
‘Ring?’ I say. ‘Ring who?’
This prompts a fresh energised burst of woe: ‘Nooaaaaaaaawww!’ she wails. ‘We-dding ring! His wedding ring! It’s still on his fi-fi-finger-her-herrrr!’ My jaw drops and I gawp at Uriah aghast. He gawps back. He presses two bony fingers to his pale temple as if he has a headache. Which indeed he has.
At first, Uriah tries wheedling. ‘But Mrs Bradshaw,’ he intones, ‘if you remember we did go through this, we filled in the form—’
My mother’s sagging head snaps up sharply like a bad-tempered puppet. Her eyes glint. She is queen of the classroom and Uriah is a silly little dunce who hasn’t done his homework. ‘I don’t care!’ she hisses. ‘I don’t want to hear your excuses! I’m paying you! I want my husband’s wedding ring! Now, get it!’
I am briefly dumb with horror and mortification. I glance nervously at Nana who says nothing but looks at my mother once, quickly, a look of unconcealed hate. I stammer, ‘But you . . . you can’t—’ I stare helplessly at Uriah.
This is a man who knows when he’s beat. He raises a thin, weary hand. ‘We can,’ he sighs.
And so, the rumours rumble back through the chilled, bewildered crowd until everyone present knows that the coffin containing my dead father has been wheeled behind a couple of conveniently tall headstones, the mahogany top prised off it, the gold wedding band forcefully wrested from his pink finger, polished on Uriah’s black tailcoat, and presented to my sulkily defiant mother. (Luke sidles up behind them to peek and later tells me, ‘Honestly, Helen, he looked really well! He didn’t look corpsey at all!’)
After this unscheduled interlude – during which I spy the minister checking his watch – we make it to the graveside. I try to steer my mother’s attention towards the garish floral tributes propped around the hole and away from the fresh pile of earth heaped beside it and the two scruffy men standing not qu
ite far away enough, each one casually leant on a great big sodding dirt-encrusted shovel.
The pallbearers and a relieved Cousin Stephen lower the coffin to the ground. No one is quite sure where to stand. One elderly guest with crepey skin and hair like candyfloss observes in a loud whisper, ‘I would have expected more flowers. But I suppose they’ll come later.’ The minister approaches us and asks if there is anything we’d like him to say. My mother becomes flustered. Someone has given her a red rose to throw on my father’s coffin and she has picked it to bits.
‘Like what?’ she says.
‘Well, er, any particular tribute to the deceased,’ he replies.
‘No one told me about tributes!’ she exclaims rudely. ‘Helen, you should have said! I’d have written something down!’ Talk about ungrateful!
‘Me!’ I cry. I have just about had it with her flouncing. ‘How should I know! Why is it my fault?’ A small worm of guilt niggles its way into my consciousness because possibly vaguely maybe I sort of recall the minister’s message might have mentioned the wisdom of writing a short note for him to include in his address but – I’m sorry, I can’t be responsible for every piddling detail!
‘He was a loving, attentive father,’ I lie, reading off a nearby gravestone, ‘and a wonderful, kind, adoring husband,’ I add in a rush to appease my mother. She sniffs approval.
‘He was good at golf,’ she says. ‘Say that.’ The minister nods, backs away, clears his throat, trots out a thin service and the speediest, tritest, most anodyne accolade I have ever heard bar the one my headmistress made at my school leaving ceremony.
The coffin is then lowered into the grave. I note Uriah nodding surreptitiously to the fourth pallbearer who grabs a rope before cousin Stephen can wimp, sorry – muscle in and make a hash of it. Is it my imagination or are those grave diggers closer than they were? Vultures. We sprinkle dirt on the coffin – Luke manages to hurl a large clod of earth containing a stone at 110mph that goes pank! as it hits the casket and makes a slight dent. I keep my arm around my mother on the pretext of lending her loving support, but really to prevent her throwing herself into the grave. I doubt she will, as her black Jaeger dress cost – according to Tina’s informed guess – approximately £250. But after the ring episode I’m taking no chances.