Maria in the Moon

by Louise Beech

  ‘You want me to come today?’ asked Fern now.

  ‘I doubt there’ll be any single men,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll go back to bed then.’ She kissed me and softly said, ‘Call me if you need me afterwards, OK? I’ll get wine if you think we’ll need it tonight.’

  I picked up the box from the sideboard.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Fern.

  ‘Pictures.’ I took out the ones I needed and put them in my coat pocket.

  When I got to my mother’s she was in the kitchen by the sink. Perhaps if we do write our own blueprint we make sure that when a catastrophe is predicted in bold italics someone always stays in the kitchen and makes tea and food. Even during the flood, I imagined the first thing people struggled to rebuild or create in whatever temporary home they found was a kitchen. Something must remain constant; a safe theme when the plot tests us.

  Graham wore the smoke-grey suit he’d worn at every wedding for the last decade. He hugged me, answering my unspoken question with a nod towards the kitchen door. I hung my coat on the banister and returned to the kitchen I’d stormed out of a lifetime ago.

  My mother wore a black skirt and jacket with the customary string of pearls, her hair in an upward sweep. She had baked bread and ham and broccoli quiches. The yellow stain on the fridge was still half scrubbed. The floor was spotless.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked her.

  She took a tray of fresh bread from the oven. Its heat warmed my frozen legs.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can put on any sort of face.’ She looked at me, briefly. ‘But you’re right to think we should. You’re brave, Catherine.’

  ‘No, I’m selfish,’ I said. ‘I’m doing this so I can move on.’

  ‘I already said goodbye to him once.’ She turned the tray upside down and let the bread drop with a heavy thud onto the wire rack. ‘I told him twenty years ago that I never wanted to see him again and I still don’t want to see him. Even in a grave. He doesn’t deserve for us to go to his funeral. I’m only doing it because he’s your dad’s brother; Mary’s brother. It’s what you do for the dead.’

  ‘Death doesn’t excuse him.’ I fingered my dress’s thin, shiny belt. ‘It doesn’t cancel what he was. So, don’t go today for him or even for me – do it for you. He was what he was. He fu … sorry … he messed with our past, and if we don’t go he could mess with our futures too. You’ve put on your black suit, so part of you wants to go. Part of you wants to say goodbye. That’s all we’re doing.’

  ‘I’m wearing black because it’s the right colour,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘Why did you forgive him?’ She slammed a drawer closed, held up a bread knife and glared at me. ‘How can you? I just don’t understand.’

  ‘Because he was sorry.’ I spoke quietly. I was cold and wished she’d left the oven door open.

  ‘No, he wasn’t. He was dying. A scared, desperate coward.’

  ‘I think he was sorry.’ My voice was barely louder than the oven fan.

  ‘How can you defend that monster?’

  ‘I’m not!’ I cried. ‘You have no idea! I have to believe he was sorry! I have to or I can’t…’ I wiped my running nose on the back of my coat sleeve. ‘It isn’t about him, it’s about me. About living with what happened.’

  ‘Your dad would never have forgiven him,’ she said.

  That hurt. It hurt in places my body had never been hurt. I knew my dad would likely have killed him. That it would have destroyed him.

  ‘But Dad doesn’t need to forgive him,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have to live with it.’

  ‘I do miss your dad sometimes.’ Mother stared out of the window at the trees covered with fresh snow, their branches bowing under the weight.

  ‘I miss him all the time,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad Henry’s dead.’ She turned, her arms crossed, her pearls askew. ‘If he wasn’t I might have killed him.’

  I nodded and said, ‘I’d love to bury what he did, but that doesn’t work; I already tried it. So, I’ve forgiven him. I’ll see him in the ground and go on.’ I paused. Took a breath. ‘When you found that … those pictures … didn’t you wonder about me? Didn’t you, even for a second, think he might have … you know…?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. We got rid of him and I shut him out of my mind. Have done ever since.’

  ‘But my behaviour. My moods. You must have wondered why I was such a pain.’

  ‘I thought it was because of your dad’s death. You were never the same after he went. I should have been … kinder. But I was hurting too. Maybe I was resentful that I was left with it all. With you. Wrong, but … well…’

  I didn’t mind. I liked her honesty. We knew where we stood with one another.

  Graham came into the kitchen.

  ‘If we’re going, we should go,’ he said. ‘We have to pick up Mary and Martin and Celine, then be at Hen … at his house for twelve.’

  ‘At his house?’ I asked. ‘We go from his house?’

  ‘It’s OK, Catherine.’ Graham put his arm around my shoulders. I didn’t think I would ever get warm or want to eat homemade bread again. ‘We don’t have to go inside or anything, and we’re all here with you. They just bring out the coffin and we follow the hearse to the church.’

  ‘They’re letting him in a church?’ My thoughts were ridiculous. No one knew what he was; they only knew him as a tragic old man who’d taken too many pills and died in his chair.

  ‘It’s a public-health funeral,’ said my mother, putting three quiches on the windowsill to cool. Her heels clacked on the tiles. She avoided the H-shaped crack. ‘Just the basic necessities: collection of the body, church service, hearse, coffin and the committal at the grave. The intention is that anyone looking couldn’t tell the difference between this and any other funeral.’

  ‘Except there’s a monster in the coffin,’ I said.

  My mother glanced at me but said nothing. I guessed the word ‘monster’ was allowed. Maybe she’d ignore the odd necessary ‘fuck’, too. And yet today of all the days I had no pressing urge to say it.

  ‘We don’t have to go,’ said Graham.

  ‘We’ll go,’ I said.

  White flakes stuck to the kitchen window. It always seemed to snow when I hurt. Mother sniffed a ham quiche and wondered aloud if three was enough; Graham assured her it was more than enough for six.

  In the hallway, I put on my coat and prepared for the cold. Mother opened the door. Snow blew in, disturbing the tiny bells on the Christmas tree so they chimed our departure.

  She held the door open as we stepped onto the drive, and as I passed her, she softly said, ‘Catherine…’ she kissed my cheek ‘…you look nice in that dress.’

  I looked down at the fabric, tempted to irritate her by telling her it was Fern’s. But I resisted. This was maybe the closest I’d ever get to an apology, and I didn’t want to slap her again. So, I kissed her powdered cheek and got in the car.

  ‘Does Celine know?’ I asked Graham as we approached her street.

  ‘We just said he’s a distant relative.’

  ‘Why is she coming?’

  Graham pulled onto the kerb and pressed the horn. ‘I said she should.’

  ‘Why?’ I demanded.

  ‘I just thought she should. She owes you, in light of what she did.’

  Celine emerged from her ostentatious detached house wearing a furry brown jacket and suede trousers, her styled curls bobbing in the wind. When she got into the back of the car her perfume outdid the cold, making me sneeze twice.

  ‘Mark not coming?’ I asked, without my usual sarcasm.

  ‘He’s away.’ She fluffed her hair and said ‘Hi’ to my mother and Graham. ‘He should be home for Christmas. Sorry about your uncle.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

  Aunty Mary was waiting on her doorstep as we crawled up her drive, grit spitting away from the tyres like tears. Martin stood at her side. Sh
e scanned the car windows, and I knew she was looking for me. So I leaned forward and caught her eye. She touched her cheek. Slamming the door, I ran over to her. She wrapped me in her arms and pulled my face to her chest and said, ‘Oh, Catherine, you should have come to me. Oh, Catherine.’ The name I’d endured for twenty years surrounded me as much as her warmth. Then she whispered, ‘Don’t press me too hard, dear; I’m not quite accustomed to my colostomy bag yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ I pulled back, suppressing a smile.

  ‘I’ve never been to a funeral with a colostomy bag,’ she said behind her hand, cheeks pink. ‘I didn’t think I had a black dress with enough room to feel comfortable, but I got this one in the Epilepsy Charity Shop yesterday.’

  Martin patted my arm and headed for the car.

  Mary kissed me, chafing my chin, and I realised she was almost as scratchy as Uncle Henry had been. Gagging, I ran to her sculpted hedge and threw up into the snow. I heard her saying ‘Catherine’ again, over and over, asking if I was OK, saying we could go inside and have a cup of tea and cake instead like when I’d stayed home from school.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to. I’ll explain to the others.’

  My mother was watching from the car. I saw her starting to open the door, but Graham touched her shoulder and she remained where she was. I held up my hand; the universal sign for ‘I’m fine’.

  I said the same to Mary: ‘I’ll be fine. It just comes over me. It will only get worse if I don’t go today.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Flakes of snow landed on her shoulder, making her a bride.

  Of all the words I looked for only ‘fine’ resurfaced.

  ‘Catherine, I’m not going to say what I think of my brother. You don’t need to hear that.’ Aunty Mary shivered and pulled her grey shawl a little tighter. ‘But I will say that I’m sorry we didn’t see what he did. I can’t believe it. I do, I mean, I do, but back then I never in a million years thought he’d have done that to you. I thought he just liked to look at those … at those … awful pictures. It’s no excuse, but I thought your eczema and your moodiness was because your dad had gone. How stupid I was! I’m sorry we let you down.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to b—’

  She put her finger on my lips. ‘I am. I understand why you’re doing this and I’m with you; I’m at your side today and in whatever you must do. I can’t imagine your hurt but I can at least try and lessen it. Come on.’

  She held my hand and we went to the car. We climbed in the back, everyone shuffling along to make room until we were packed in like a bridal party wearing too-big dresses.

  ‘Mind my bag,’ said Aunty Mary to Martin, and I wasn’t sure whether she meant her leather clutch or the one attached to her abdomen.

  It took half an hour to get to the house. I couldn’t help but think of it as Sid’s home because he had died there, looking out onto a car park and the back of a supermarket while holding a phone and talking to me. For me, until I saw him buried, Henry was still alive.

  The building he’d lived in was unremarkable: three floors of drab, small-windowed flats near a bingo hall, supermarket and burnt-out factory. Renovation work was going on downstairs, the flood damage still apparent in the salt-streaked walls and crumbling plaster. But there were no clues that a man had killed himself here. That a man who had tormented his nine-year-old niece had lived within its walls, fooling people into befriending him and a crisis-line worker into affection.

  ‘Here’s the hearse,’ said my mother. ‘Graham, will you?’

  Graham got out and spoke to the pallbearers, and they went into the building.

  ‘I feel sick,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Celine. ‘Now I do too. I hate funerals.’

  ‘Why’d you come, then?’ I demanded, hand over my mouth.

  ‘You’re my sort-of stepsister,’ she said.

  I laughed and the nausea passed.

  ‘Oh God, here’s the coffin.’ Aunty Mary put a fist to her mouth.

  It was dark wood, significantly simple and utterly flowerless. Graham followed the pallbearers to the hearse with his head bowed and waited until they had loaded it into the back before returning to us.

  I wondered what Henry looked like inside it. My memory gave me a virile, laughing man: bearded, tanned, strong, insistent, cruel. But Sid had been weak, ill, pathetic, kind. Who had really died? Could the spirit of a powerful man go on? I wanted to lift the lid and see the face I was bidding goodbye.

  ‘No one loved him enough for flowers?’ asked Celine.

  ‘A council funeral doesn’t include them,’ said my mother.

  The hearse pulled away, and we followed at the same respectful speed. Aunty Mary cried and tried to hide it, her face in Martin’s waistcoated chest.

  I didn’t mind if she was sad; he was her brother. I said to her, ‘It doesn’t hurt me if you cry.’

  My mother stared at the back of the hearse. The wipers swished back and forth to brush away the snow.

  ‘I thought he was just a distant relative,’ said Celine, looking uncomfortably at Mary.

  ‘Even blood can be distant,’ I said.

  The church was one that would have been pretty rising behind a blushing bride and her enamoured husband in wedding pictures. Partially hidden by evergreen trees, the spire tapered off into a rusted weather vane. Doors formed a perfect archway to frame newlyweds.

  We followed the coffin down the aisle in pairs, me with Celine, our shoes clacking. Every sound was magnified in the lofty space. By the altar was a life-sized twig stable and inside were stone statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Joseph held a lantern that glowed orange, lighting the Holy Virgin’s face. I saw the one in Nanny Eve’s house; my namesake smashed on the floor. Broken at my hand. Now she smiled at me, pure and encouraging and forgiving.

  ‘God knows how Mary styled her hair without heated curlers,’ said Celine.

  There were other people already sitting in the church: three older men in worn suits and a woman with a cherry-adorned hat perched on a frizzy wig. I couldn’t hide my surprise and stared at them as we found our places at the front.

  ‘Who the hell are they?’ I asked my mother.

  She sighed, resigned more than cross. ‘I have no idea.’

  The pallbearers placed the coffin on a waiting stand with expert precision, and the priest made the sign of the cross. Martin had once joked that it was the sign for put it down and sod off. Father Colahan (named in the ceremony pamphlet) looked like a drunken Hugh Hefner going to a Halloween party dressed as a vicar.

  He said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life;’ and the ceremony began. When he talked of our hope for eternal life, I asked Mother what my dad’s funeral had been like.

  She looked at her hands, folded neatly in her lap and said, ‘The church was full. He was loved.’

  I’d not been allowed to go; everyone had decided that I was too young at eight to witness such a thing, which was ironic considering what I would experience only a year later. So I never got to say goodbye or see my dad in the ground. Mother blew now into her cupped hands, even though big radiators blasted dry heat across the pews. Looking at the Virgin Mary’s motherly face I decided that if I ever had children they would witness every death, say goodbye to everyone who left. How badly written was my life that I’d be at this funeral but had missed my father’s? Suddenly too warm, I undid my coat and let it fall open. Celine looked at the dress and I knew she would not resist a comment.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she hissed. ‘It must have cost a fortune.’

  Father Colahan said we were to entrust Henry to the love and mercy of God.

  ‘It did, but I slept with the Prada shop assistant,’ I lied.

  ‘Catherine, please,’ whispered my mother. ‘Can we not have sex in a church?’

  Father Colahan asked God to give comfort to those who mourned here today. He suggested that, since no one wanted to speak about Henry, he would read a passage from Isaiah 40:20
-31, and the old woman in the fruity hat put her hand up and asked, ‘May I speak, Mister?’

  He nodded and she joined him at the podium, her hat dropping two cherries as she walked.

  ‘I’m not family or nothing,’ said the woman. ‘But I’m sitting here thinking it’s a shame no one wants to talk about Henry.’

  I jerked at the name; I’d imagined she’d say ‘Sid’. Mother touched my knee, and the wedding ring my father gave her glinted in the multicoloured light from the stained-glass window.

  ‘Henry lived two floors above me,’ Cherry Hat continued. She wore a fake fur coat and had a gold bag across her chest. ‘He took me in when I was flooded until I got me another place to stay. We played cards when the water was washing over me new carpets – council ones but still new. Me mother’s chaise longue that we couldn’t move got ruined. But he let me win the game to cheer me up. He pretended he had nothing of value, but I saw his cards when we got done. He didn’t know. He had three kings and I’d had nowt.’

  I remembered going on the bus to my first Flood Crisis shift and seeing Will with his new girlfriend, Miranda; he’d said that I played the worst game with the best hand of anyone he’d known. That I could have four aces and still lose. Uncle Henry had played that game too, but he’d faked it.

  ‘So I just wanted to say,’ said Cherry Hat, ‘that Henry was a good sort. Liked his brandy of an evening. Kept himself to himself but wasn’t rude. Always said “good morning” on the stairs. He missed travel and not having family, but I guess he had ’em cos I see ’em here today, and I guess that’s what matters: that they’re here now.’ She looked at the coffin and said, ‘Rest in peace, Henry,’ then resumed her place behind us.

  Before we left for the burial, I sneaked back into the church and lit a candle. Not for Henry. But for my dad. And for my mum. While the few mourners were getting into the cars, I struck a match for the woman I should have seen blessed and spoken about by her grief-stricken family. For the woman I’d been too young to know. In the draught from the open door my flame flickered. But it stayed alight. Mary – the most famous mother on earth – watched me leave.