by Sarah Butler
On the day of Mac’s funeral, Stick sat in his suit, staring at the black-and-white newspaper picture of Owen Lee, which he’d Blu-Tacked back onto his bedroom wall. Mrs McKinley had called to ask if he wanted to talk to Rob about the court hearing, about what to expect, but he’d said no. He was going to see Owen Lee. He was going to get some answers. That’s all he needed to know.
‘Will you be OK on your own, love?’ his mum said as he came downstairs. The front door was open and Stick could see the taxi pulling up outside.
‘I won’t be on my own, will I?’
‘I just meant in the taxi. I would have come, except you know what work are like.’ She tugged at his jacket, smoothed her hands down the lapels. ‘You look smart,’ she said. ‘You look right smart.’
It was the same place Sophie was buried, a big, well-kept place north of town. Stick stared out of the taxi window and watched the houses get posher: bay windows and loft conversions and repointed brickwork. He recognised the cemetery as soon as they got there: gold lettering on a black board at the entrance; low gates that wouldn’t stop anyone from climbing over; the road snaking up between neat grass verges. The whole place was neat – he remembered that too. It looked like someone had gone round with a ruler and a pair of scissors, making every blade of grass exactly the same height. They passed the bit full of trees, flowers tied to their trunks or in vases shoved into the circles of soil around their bases. Sophie was in that bit, but Stick realised he’d never find her grave even if he spent all day looking.
And then the taxi turned a corner and Stick saw not trees and plaques but gravestones, in small groups on a shallow hillside like they’d clustered together for safety. He wanted to leave – open the car door and walk back to town, let them all get on with it without him. He wanted to go back to the place near Strangeways and find J and say he was sorry and then drink vodka with her until he could forget that Mac was dead. But she thought he was in Spain, and he didn’t even have her phone number.
Outside the car, the air was cool on his cheeks, a breeze fussing at his hair as he walked up towards two massive black Mercedes and a hearse with a white coffin lying in the back. He headed straight for Aaron and Shooter, who were both in smart black suits, their hair slicked. They touched fists and nodded, then stood in an awkward silence.
‘Is his dad here?’ Stick whispered and Aaron tilted his head towards a tall man with balding blond hair, a beer belly, features too big for his face. As Stick looked, Paul lifted his hand up and out, gesturing into the sky as he spoke, the same way Mac would have done, and something inside Stick pulled tight.
‘His mum’s proper drugged up,’ Shooter hissed, flicking his eyes left.
Mrs McKinley stood propped up on either side by her sister and Lainey. She was wearing the too-expensive dress and had painted her lips a bright, bloody red. Her eyes were dull, her mouth slack. She looked like she’d fall if either of them let go.
A man from the funeral home gathered the six of them together and handed out pairs of white cotton gloves. ‘Just take one handle each,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Up on the shoulder. Walk slowly. Follow the person in front.’
Paul ground his cigarette out with his toe and turned to the group. ‘Check your shoelaces, lads,’ he said. ‘We don’t want anyone falling over.’
Stick looked down. He was wearing his old school shoes, polished by his mum but they still looked knackered. The laces were tightly knotted.
‘And bend at the knees. You should always bend at the knees when you’re lifting something heavy.’
Mac would have laughed at that – ‘You’re right, I’m a heavy bastard.’ Stick saw Shooter’s mouth twitch. He almost laughed himself but if he started maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop, so he held his face tight and turned with the rest of them to where the coffin now sat on a flimsy metal table with thin concertinaed legs.
It must have cost a fortune. Polished white wood. Each panel edged with a carved border. Gold handles. He imagined white satin padding inside. And Mac. In the dark. Nailed in. Stick turned to the man from the funeral home. There are stories, he wanted to say, where people are still alive, even though everyone – doctors, parents, everyone – thinks they’re dead, and they get put in a coffin and then wake up and can’t get out. Fingernail scratches on the inside. He didn’t say it, but as he curled his fist around the handle – which felt fake, which felt like it would break – he pictured Mac punching his way out, the wood splitting and him sitting up, roaring with laughter.
‘One, two, three. And lift.’
He was a heavy bastard. Stick wavered and fidgeted with the rest of them. Got it on his shoulder, the wood pressing hard onto the bone. A slow shuffle up the narrow road to the left of the grassy slope. He was behind Mac’s dad, and stared at the back of his head, the neat line of newly cut hair, a red spot on his neck.
They turned right, along a strip of concrete marked with painted numbers and lines, the coffin hard and unstable between them. He’d have a bruise on the top of his shoulder – they all would, the blood colouring beneath their skin. Mac was there, in the box, he was right there. Dead, Stick told himself. Dead. But it made no sense.
He didn’t see the hole until they were almost standing in it. Deep. Straight-edged, with wooden shuttering flat against the sides to stop the whole thing collapsing. Almost worse than the hole was the massive pile of earth next to it. Someone had covered it over with a sheet of bright green fake grass, as though then people would think it was just a hill rather than however many tonnes of soil ready to be shovelled back on top of Mac in his expensive white coffin.
Another crappy metal table had been set up on the concrete strip and they lowered Mac onto it. Without the weight of him on his shoulder Stick felt too light – untethered. He glanced at Mac’s dad, who had a fag in his mouth, clicking the lighter against its end and sucking the smoke in hard. The drivers, with their grey suits and black leather gloves, carried the flowers from the hearse and laid them to the left of the grave. And then other people started walking up and adding more flowers and the pile kept growing – red, yellow, pink, purple – like Mrs McKinley’s living room. Cellophane and handwritten cards. Stick looked down at his white gloves. He hadn’t brought anything.
Next to the hole were three new graves. Two still had flowers heaped over the mounds of dry soil, dead stems in water-stained wrappings. Stick thought about the coffins underneath, choked with earth. There was a wooden cross with a cheap-looking brass plate at the head of each. Stick peered down at one: Alice. Fell asleep, April 2011. Why did they write that kind of shit on graves? Iain McKinley, fell asleep, 18th June 2011. They wouldn’t write stabbed by some cunt while wearing coconuts and two grass skirts. They should write that.
There must have been fifty, a hundred people jostling to get around the grave. And more kept arriving, standing close together and craning their necks to see. The man from the funeral home looped straps through the coffin’s handles and motioned the six of them to step closer.
‘Take a strap. Keep it slow and steady. It’ll rock a bit but don’t panic. You just need to line it up with the grave and then slowly lower it down. OK?’ He looked each of them in the eyes.
Stick tried to stop his brain from freewheeling. He took the strap and tried not to think that it had been used for this before, for other people: old people, kids – it happened all the time, death, didn’t it? He let out a noise as he took Mac’s weight, didn’t mean to, but a couple of the others did the same, a kind of grunt. Slowly. Slowly. There wasn’t much room between the side of the hole and the coffin. Down. Down. It was deeper than six feet. Must be dug deep so they could bury his ma on top of him. Stick let the strap slide a bit too fast and the coffin lurched and wobbled. He gripped his hand into a fist and it steadied.
And then it was done: Mac at the bottom of the hole, and the funeral-home man gesturing to Stick to drop the strap so it could be pulled out, rolled up, ready for the next poor dead bastard who needed it. Stick too
k off the gloves – his hands felt cold and naked without them.
A priest was standing at the head of the grave with his Bible open and ready. He looked up at them all and then started bollixing on about the uncertainty of life and the certainty and comfort of death. Stick wanted to jump down into the hole with Mac, but he kept himself upright, kept himself still, listened to a bird trill away to itself in the trees up at the top of the hill.
‘Iain was a popular boy with lots of friends.’ The priest had a posh voice; he sounded like he’d said the same thing a thousand times before. ‘A good student, a loving son, Iain was about to embark on a trip to southern Spain before his life was tragically cut short.’
Before he was stabbed to death by a twat called Owen Lee. Stick wanted to push the priest to one side and say, ‘He wasn’t a boy. He definitely wasn’t a good student. He was my best fucking mate.’ But the priest was on to the prayers now. Heavenly Father. Soul of Christ. Mac didn’t even believe in God, so what help was all of that now?
The priest closed his Bible with a slightly too-enthusiastic snap, took a handful of soil from a white box and dropped it onto Mac’s coffin. The sound made Stick jump. Crappy Manchester soil on polished white wood. It looked like spilt coffee. It looked a mess.
Mrs McKinley took a handful of soil and did the same as the priest. Thump. Spill. They were taking it in turns, clockwise around the grave. Stick didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be down by the canal with a joint, throwing stones at some target Mac had chosen – a plastic milk bottle, a rotting piece of wood, a bloated condom.
He wanted that girl J to be there, standing next to him, her hands in her pockets, her skinny shoulders hunched up towards her ears. The silver stud on her top lip. The bright stripe of pink hair.
They were waiting for him – someone he didn’t know offering him the box. He took it, got a handful of soil, dry and gritty in his palm. Everyone was waiting for him. Fuck them. Fuck all of this. He wanted to turn and throw the soil at the priest, with his softly-softly voice and his smug face. Or at Aaron who was standing there crying like that was OK. Or lift his arm and let the earth fall onto his own head. Instead he did what everyone else had done – held his hand over the grave and opened his fingers. Thump. Spill.
Stick rubbed his hands together to get rid of the dirt. He stared down at the coffin. Don’t have died. They should be in Spain, drinking beer, washing dishes, clubbing until the sun rose. Don’t have died, you bastard. The first court hearing was on Friday. Owen Lee in the dock. A load of bloody clothes in clear plastic bags with paper labels tied on with string. Don’t have died. Please. Don’t have fucking died.
Everyone was going to the Queen’s. Free bar and a buffet. Stick wanted to stay at the cemetery, watch them fill in the grave with all the soil hidden under the fake grass and then catch a bus home and get into bed, put his duvet over his head and try to make his mind go quiet. But Mac’s uncle offered him a lift and it was easier just to go than think up an excuse.
They got lost on the way back and the pub was already on the way to drunk-loud when they arrived, the sandwiches half gone – stray bits of cucumber and lettuce littering the trays. Stick took a handful of crisps and chewed without tasting them.
‘Kieran!’ Mac’s ma was sat at the bar with two glasses of white wine. She beckoned him over.
‘Kieran, love,’ Mrs McKinley slurred, her voice still raised even though he was standing right in front of her. ‘Give us a hug. Come on.’
He let her pull him towards her. She squeezed him tight, then sat back and put her hand on his head, stroked his hair.
‘So nice,’ she said.
‘Need to get it cut.’
She shook her head, kept her hand where it was. ‘You used to have such nice hair. Smart. You and Iain with your smart hair and your uniforms, off to school.’
They’d dump the ties soon as they got out of sight, scuff up their shoes so they didn’t look like knobheads.
‘Come on, sit here, by me.’ She dropped her hand and felt into her bag, took out a scrunched-up tenner and half threw it at the barmaid. ‘I put three hundred quid behind the bar,’ she told Stick. ‘They said it’s done, though. What’ll you have? Come and sit here, talk to me.’
Stick ordered a pint of Foster’s, sipped at it and tried not to stare at the smear of egg mayo on her dress.
Mrs McKinley finished her wine and started on the next glass. ‘Iain was going to drive lorries,’ she said, as though Stick had asked her a question. ‘Like his dad,’ she said, looking over towards the fruit machine where Paul was feeding in another quid, his fingers dancing over the lit-up buttons.
Stick frowned. ‘Is that what he does?’
Mac’s ma nodded vacantly.
Last summer, Stick and Mac had found a fucked-up door down by the canal. Half of it was burnt black, but they got it in the water and it stayed afloat, even with Mac standing on it. Stick had run along the path and Mac had paddled with a branch he’d yanked off some tree, his arse hanging out of his trousers. ‘I am transport and logistics,’ he’d shouted. ‘Anyone need any transport or logistics?’ And then later, drinking cans of warm beer and watching the sun dye the undersides of the clouds pink, he’d told Stick he was going to have his own truck; no, his own fleet of trucks, ‘Mac McKinley’ printed in two-metre-high letters across the side of each one.
Mrs McKinley tapped her fingernails against the bar and said, ‘Talk to me, Kieran. Talk to me some more.’
The pub smelt of farts and cheese-and-onion crisps and old carpet. Framed black-and-white photos lined the walls – pictures of the estate being built, some party at the pub with flags and bunting. The food table looked depressing: limp bits of salad, half an egg sandwich, biscuit crumbs and something yellow spilt across the paper tablecloth.
‘I was going to have a cake,’ Mrs McKinley said. ‘Because it’s a celebration, isn’t it? It’s a celebration of his life.’ She took a large gulp of wine. ‘I couldn’t think which one to get though. They don’t do funeral cakes.’ She laughed.
Stick watched Mac’s dad, stood with two other men now, waving his arms about as he spoke, resting them on an imaginary steering wheel and then lifting them up again, fingers spread. Mac never said he drove a lorry. Mac never said anything except he was a lazy twat who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
Stick started rolling a fag and Mrs McKinley patted his arm. ‘You go on, love,’ she said.
Outside, he smoked slowly. The estate was quiet. A man stood watching his dog run in crazed circles on the grass behind the pub. Ricky’s little sister and a girl Stick didn’t recognise pushed a pink plastic doll’s pram up the street and round the corner. A white van with spots of grey undercoat along one side sat with its engine idling – a man in the driver’s seat with a newspaper spread over the wheel. Stick thought about Owen Lee standing in a courtroom, handcuffs cutting into his wrists.
‘You didn’t write on his Facebook page.’ Lainey stood in front of him. She wore shiny black leggings, baggy at the knees and stomach. Black high heels and a tight black top. False eyelashes and big rings of eyeliner. Her hair was piled up on her head like one of those film stars from forever ago. He hadn’t even heard her come out.
‘You’re supposed to be his best mate,’ she said.
‘I am. Was. I just haven’t—’
He’d spent enough time thinking about it. Lay in bed typing versions over and over in his head, but none of them sounded right. He’d thought about uploading the photo from his phone of Mac and Lainey, Aaron and Malika, but he hadn’t done it.
Lainey wiped her forefinger under one eye and then the other. ‘It was all right, wasn’t it?’ she said.
Stick dropped his cigarette butt on the concrete and ground it under his foot. ‘The priest was a twat.’
Lainey frowned. ‘I thought he was sweet. And nice Mac’s dad came.’
Stick scowled. ‘Not much use coming once he’s dead, is it?’ Stick thought about Mac stood outside the
Printworks, jabbing the end of the cigar towards Stick, saying you should make nice with your dad, before we go.
‘Everyone’s inside,’ Lainey said, and Stick shrugged and followed her back into the pub, to the large booth opposite the bar where Shooter, Ricky, Aaron and Malika were sat, talking about riots in Greece – firebombs, tear gas, street fights with the police. Stick sat with his head down and said nothing.
‘Hey, Stick.’ Aaron tapped his shoulder. ‘I had an idea, about Ranger.’
‘Not now.’ Malika hit him on the arm.
‘Thought I’d change his name,’ Aaron said. ‘To Mac. You know, like a tribute.’
Mac would kill himself laughing at that, Stick thought – I die and they name a dog after me.
‘That’s fucked up.’ Lainey leaned over the table, her breasts ready to spill. ‘That is proper weird.’
‘Nah, it’s a compliment.’ Aaron pretended to tug at a dog’s lead and said, ‘Hey, Mac. Sit.’
Malika hit him again.
Stick picked up a beer mat and turned it round and round between his thumb and finger.
‘You all right, mate?’ Aaron asked.
He wasn’t about to cry. He wasn’t about to lose it. He just wanted to drink his pint and have everyone leave him alone.
‘I’ve been making enquiries,’ Ricky said. He had his black Yankees baseball cap perched on top of his head. ‘Should shoot the bastard if you ask me.’ He lifted his right hand, fingers out like a gun barrel, and pretended to shoot, making quiet explosions with his mouth. ‘But there are other ways.’ He grinned.
Stick nodded. ‘Hearing’s Friday.’
‘Hearing smearing. Got to sort that shit out yourself.’ Ricky was shadow-boxing now, right, left, right, left.
Stick stared at the tiny amber bubbles racing up to the surface of his drink and wondered where they came from, and if he sat there for long enough whether they’d ever stop.