There are plenty of them out there who do not own cats. I shall keep looking.
I need a public place where sad people go…
I didn’t know the first thing about planning a funeral, but when I went to the register office this morning to get Mum’s death certificate they gave me a leaflet with a helpful checklist to work through, and another one with a list of local funeral directors. Back home, sitting at the dining table, a pad and pen next to me, I listened to answering machine messages about out-of-hours services and how much they would like to call me back. The third one I tried – Co-operative Funeralcare – had a live person on the other end of the phone.
‘My mother died,’ I said, by way of introduction.
The woman who answered was very professional and calm. She told me she was deeply sorry to hear that, and that the best way forward was for them to come and see me to discuss possible options for the funeral.
I looked around the living room, at the state of it. ‘Can I come to your office?’ I asked. ‘I could do with the fresh air.’
I felt dazed by all this, the suddenness of it, and all my routines had been profoundly disturbed. I’d hardly slept, hadn’t really eaten, for what must be days. Last night I had gone to bed early and after two hours of restlessness got up and watched television until four o’clock. Then I’d gone back to bed and the next time I woke up it was ten to eleven. I felt adrift, as if I lacked any sort of plan or purpose, feeding the cat – who wasn’t interested – then making toast which I never got around to eating. I decided to get my act together, starting with planning Mum’s funeral.
As the day dwindled I drove to the small shopping centre on the outskirts of town, a concrete walkway lined with shops, at the end of it the Co-op where I used to stop on the way home from work to get groceries for Mum. Next door to it, to my surprise although it must have been there for years upon years, was the Co-operative Funeralcare.
I stood outside for a minute as I was early, window-shopping for headstones. Most of them were sculptures of Mary, her hands out in welcome, or Jesus pointing to his heart. Or an angel looking sad. At the edge, a plain headstone made out of red granite, the only words carved upon it, in a garish gold lettering, ‘In Loving Memory’. Not, as I would almost have expected, ‘Your Loved One’s Name Here’.
I went inside.
‘Ms Hayer?’ The woman behind the desk was soberly dressed in a white blouse and dark grey skirt, a
bleached-blonde
bob tucked neatly behind ears that sported a single diamond stud. She regarded me with sympathetic blue eyes, head tilted to one side.
I’m not going to start crying, I wanted to say. You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to cave in.
‘Yes,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘You must be Jackie?’
She took me through into an office next door that was decorated like a living room, comfy but upright sofas, a coffee table which held several leather-bound albums and a box of tissues. On the wall, a large framed print of a woodland shrouded in mist. A big, solid-looking Swiss cheese plant dominated one corner. The window looked out over the car park at the back, people coming and going with their shopping.
Jackie talked me through the options for running a funeral. They could do the whole lot for me, she said, from the coffin to the cars, taking care of the deceased, planning the service in conjunction with the crematorium or the church of my choice. Or, if I preferred, and some people did nowadays, they could do a very nice Humanist service and arrange a natural burial in a wood specially designated for the purpose. And it could all be done for one simple cost, with interest-free payment options if need be.
I wanted to sign up, get it over with. She glanced up at the clock on the wall above my head and said I could probably do with thinking about it, and if I wanted to go ahead she could see me the next day. She gave me a brochure with the different coffin designs and wood colours in it, a brochure about woodland burials, and a sheaf of other bits of paper.
When I got back out into the shopping arcade, it was chilly and nearly dark. Most of the shops were closing. I stood there for a moment, disorientated, wondering what had happened to the day.
‘Are you alright?’
I looked round, surprised, to find a man standing next to me. He was tall, in a brown jacket with a scarf around his neck, and although his head was shaved he was younger than he looked. He wasn’t smiling and yet he seemed to know me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m OK.’
‘Very well,’ he said.
He hesitated next to me for a moment. Did I know him? I felt as if I should have known his name and I tried some out, experimentally, in my head. Ian? No, that wasn’t it… Dave? Simon? The trouble with recognising people unexpectedly was that it was possible that I knew him from work – not as a colleague, but rather as a subject – someone I’d worked on, some nominal whose face was familiar and yet I’d never spoken to them, never would.
He put a hand on my upper arm. ‘Now,’ he said, gently, ‘it’s just that I think you look as though you might be lost.’
His hand was still there, on my arm, warm and quite firm. It felt as though I was leaning against him. As though I’d initiated the contact, not him, and it was such a curious thing. At the same time as knowing that this was strange, unwarranted, being touched like this – even with layers of clothing between his skin and mine – it was comforting. It was comfortable. I felt a little struggle inside between the part of me that thought this was unnecessary and intrusive, and the part of me that needed to be comforted.
And the word bubbled up inside me like it had been held down and suddenly released. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not lost. I’m not lost. I’m just…’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Annabel,’ I said. ‘What’s yours?’
His hand was still there and then it slipped away from me. My upper arm felt suddenly chilled, as though a draught had passed over it. All around us people were hurrying home, carrying bags of shopping, bundled up against the breeze that blew around the walkways. It felt like coming round. I could hear noises, people talking; two older ladies came out of the hairdressers next door laughing, and fitted clear plastic rain hoods over their newly set styles.
‘Ed,’ he said. ‘I am Ed.’ His eyes were dark green. I couldn’t remember ever looking into a pair of eyes and being aware of their colour before. If you’d asked me what colour my mother’s eyes were, Kate’s, Sam Everett’s, I couldn’t have given you an accurate response. But his eyes were green.
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. The tone of his voice had changed: he sounded suspicious, wary. I didn’t like that at all. It was as though there had been some sort of test and I’d failed it.
‘That doesn’t sound like your name.’
He laughed, exposing his teeth. ‘Well, I assure you that it is.’
‘Ed,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You need to remember that.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I’ve got to come back here tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will meet you here tomorrow.’
‘Alright,’ I said.
I think he said more. There were other things he said, too, things I couldn’t remember.
A few minutes after that, or maybe it was an hour, or maybe it was a whole day, I was back in my car in the car park, and the engine was running. The heater was on and it was warm in there, and I was looking out through the windscreen into the darkness and the car park was almost empty. There was nobody else around. I looked at the clock and it was gone six o’clock. What time had I left the funeral people? It felt like just a few seconds, as though I had walked away from the place and got into my car and started the engine and then waited for something to happen. It was as if time had slipped out of my reach.
‘The strangest thing,’ I said aloud. It was like waking up slowly. When you were lying in bed in the middle of the night and you realised you were awake, not asleep, but you’d been lying on your hand and it was numb and it felt as if it belonged to someone else and you had to lie still and wait for it to belong to you again. I felt like that. But I felt good, too, warm inside and comforted.
And I knew what it was. I’d just met an angel.
Vaughn called me at work this afternoon to tell me that Audrey was at her mother’s.
Fortunately I stopped short of asking him why he thought this information might be of interest to me. I’d finished work for the day and packed up, and was almost ready to leave when he’d called. I was in a hurry to get to the Co-op before going out to the college, and so I found I was standing there with my coat on, talking into the telephone receiver and feeling mildly annoyed.
‘She wasn’t at home,’ he said, with boyish enthusiasm. ‘She wasn’t ignoring me at all; she’d just gone to stay with her mother. She said she’d told me about it, but that I clearly hadn’t been listening.’
‘Or you’d forgotten,’ I added helpfully, thinking that it was entirely possible that he really was slipping into some kind of early dementia.
‘Anyway, I thought I’d give you a ring to let you know,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d be worried.’
I ignored the slight hint of sarcasm around this last comment. ‘And did you find a ring?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking when the best time to propose might be. What do you think?’
Of all the people to ask. As if I would have the faintest idea about such matters.
‘You could take her away somewhere,’ I said. ‘For the weekend. Or something like that.’
‘Weston-super-Mare?’ he said.
‘Not Weston-super-Mare. Somewhere romantic. Paris, or Bruges. Or maybe even Rome?’
‘Rome?’ he echoed, as if I’d suggested going to Siberia. ‘Surely I should be saving somewhere that exotic for the honeymoon?’
‘Vaughn,’ I said, ‘I’ve really got to go.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear chap. Am I holding you up?’
‘Yes, you are rather.’
He rang off, and I went home via the supermarket to buy small essentials. And after that, one of those delicious coincidences happened that make me occasionally consider that some higher power is guiding my hand in my enterprise. I came out of the Co-op with the intention of waiting outside in the precinct, to see if I could see any new subjects, any looking promising among the recently bereaved. And there she was – the woman I’d seen at the checkout on Tuesday evening. And, whilst she hadn’t appeared to be ready just two days ago, she certainly looked it now. Observing her, I felt a particular thrill of affection and excitement that convinced me more than anything else that she is the next one.
She had a bag, a kind of canvas satchel in a grubby shade of brown, the strap worn across her body. It looked heavy. I wondered why it suddenly gave me a jolt, the sight of that bag, and then I realised it was because Helen had had one just like it. It was her school bag – covered over with notes and signatures and drawings in felt-tip pen, a CND button badge, another, larger badge with ‘Free Mandela’ on it under which some wag had written ‘with every purchase’.
In my last year at Gaviston Comprehensive I acquired a friend, of sorts. She had joined the school in the sixth form as her previous school had no facility for students wishing to study at A-level. For the whole of the lower sixth, I barely noticed her. She was one of the confident ones, a girl who had no problems making friends. She blended in with them all, the ones who went out every weekend and spent the rest of the week talking about it.
I survived without such complications.
I was walking home from school on a Friday, and it was already dark so it must have been winter. Helen was walking home too, about fifty yards ahead of me, and I paid her no attention. I think for part of it she was walking with another girl, and then at some point her companion took one of the side roads and they said their goodbyes. Helen carried on walking and I slowed my pace a little to allow for the brief interruption in her stride, not wishing to narrow the gap between us.
At the top of the hill she crossed the main road and then took the alleyway which ran behind the Leisure Centre and would emerge again in Newarke Street. The alley was lit by a single street-light halfway along its length.
She was slowing down, which was annoying me. I slowed my pace to avoid catching up, not just infuriated because of her pace but also that the very thought of it was taking my concentration away from what I’d previously been thinking about, namely the difficulties in maintaining resonance frequency with a minimum electrical current.
We were about a quarter of the way up the alley when I realised there was someone walking in front of her, someone who had also slowed their pace. A few moments after that, Helen stopped walking. She was about to step into the pool of light created by the street-light; in fact she was partly illuminated by it, her hair a bright orange halo around her head. She looked back, and saw me, then back the other way.
Clearly I must have seemed less threatening than what lay ahead, because she turned then and started walking in my direction, her step quickening. I tutted with annoyance, not wanting to have to stand to one side in the narrow alley to let her pass with enough room between us, not wanting to have to smile or nod or whatever one was supposed to do in situations like this one.
Despite all this, I had a jolt. That’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t even think it was the expression on her face – which was strange. It was that I was looking at her properly for the first time, and she was looking at me, and her mouth was forming the word: ‘HELP’.
She came up to me and behind her was another of the sixth form girls, another of those whom I preferred to have nothing whatsoever to do with. I couldn’t even have told you her name. She was striding in our direction and Helen was behind me, not moving further away, just behind me as though I was expected to do something – stand in between them? Act as some kind of physical buffer so we could all continue to walk home in the same direction?