Saving from Monkeys (23 page)

After that first day when she'd been more worried about me being used by Elliot than Nan's condition, I hadn't considered that she'd be even in the slightest affected by the whole thing. Now my heart gave a painful thud at seeing her suddenly reveal a less controlled side.

"Oh, Mum," I moved towards her, but she held up a hand to stop me and took a little step back.

"You look after him today," she said fiercely, looking first
at me and then Jonah. Then, when she saw that her words had had a sufficiently powerful impact, she turned suddenly and disappeared after Elliot.

"Well,
bugger me," Jonah swore, rubbing a hand across his face and sinking down onto my bed. "This is mental. Has he been like that ever since...?"

"Yep."
I could've hugged him all over again for summing the whole thing up so perfectly.

"What about you?" He added, as I started to walk over to collect up the bag I'd dropped earlier. "Are
you
OK?"

I froze, completely floored by the genuine feeling behind the question. Oh God, Abi had found herself a seriously lovely guy. Who would've thought in all those years of cleaning up his vomit while he sat beside me mumbling apologies, that he'd be here breaking my heart by being so incredibly sweet?

"I'm..." I waved my hands around, hoping some word to sum it all up would occur to me. It didn't, but I think Jonah got it anyway.

"Right
, stupid question."

"No," I reassured him with a little sniff. "It was an incredibly nice question.

Knowing that even extraordinarily kind guys were bound to get a bit fidgety when faced with a weepy girl they barely knew, I quickly changed the subject. "How's Abi?"

"Good," his expression immediately lightened at the mention of his girlfriend, and I was horrified to find that just made me want to cry more.
"Worried about you, but good. She wanted to come down as well, but-"

"She's on her scholarship," I finished for him. 'My best friend's mum's boss's son's grandmother has died' probably didn't rate highly as far as excuses for missing a class
went. I missed Abi, but really, if I was struggling to hold it together in front of two, fairly stoic men, I trembled to think of how I'd be if my best friend swept in and enveloped me in understanding and love.

Tearing up just thinking about it, I determinedly turned my attention back to my bag, and instantly hit a snag.
How on earth was I going to pick it up without breaking rule number 6 of the girl code, never show your undies to your best friend's boyfriend?

Geometry had never been my strong suit, so I gave up on considering the angles needed for the task after a second and instead said something I'd been meaning to say for a while. In some ways it wasn't the time, in other ways, in the clichéd way that death made you realise what was important in life, it was exactly the right time.

"The you and Abi thing," I plucked at my tight dress, feeling bit awkward, "I think in the past I've always been too busy whining about Elliot to say it, but I think it's great."

Jonah smiled and I got a little buzz out of finally having said the right thing to someone, not that I wasn't planning on immediately ruining the moment...

"Add your own traditional threats about harm befalling your testicles if you muck her about." Well, it had to be said, didn't it?

He nodded seriously, "
OK, I'll get right on that."

"So..." I once again looked down at my bag.
So close and yet...

"Do you want me to get that?"

Jonah seemed to have cottoned on to my conundrum and leant across the bed to snatch up the strap. I smiled feebly at him as a surge of wetness once again sprang forth in my eyes.

"You keep being this nice to me and I'm just going to keep on crying," I warned him, thoroughly disgusted with what a wet blanket I was being.

He looked a bit freaked out, but as he handed my bag to me he pointed out, "Today I think you crying is the least of my worries."

He was so right and I suddenly felt insanely guilty for having stood there and talked about him and Abi when Elliot was on his way to Nan's funeral in such a state.

"We should go," I threw my bag onto my shoulder, hearing a clattering as the stuff inside banged together.

"Yeah."
Jonah headed for the door, but as he stood back to allow me to go first, he pointed awkwardly at my face and said, "You've got a bit of..."

Ah yes, the weeping Cleopatra disaster.
I gave a half-hearted scrub at my face with my rapidly disintegrating tissue and then shrugged, finding that, honestly, I didn't give a monkey's what I looked like.

"Screw it,
goth looks good on me."

~*~

Despite the clearly non-denominational life Nan had lived, Mrs Sinclair had rustled up a funeral in the massive church about a ten minute's drive from the house. This must truly have been a feat of 'money trumps all' as it was quite a popular venue, and Nan had only passed away a few days ago. I couldn't shake the feeling that someone's wedding had probably been bumped for this.

Standing outside the imposing building, I fervently wished Elliot was with us. I was the most selfish creature alive because, although part of my need for him was to make sure he was
OK, a big part was about not being sure I could go in without him. Jonah was awesome, but he didn't make me smirk or cringe and his hair just plain wasn't floppy enough. For this reason, I balked just outside the large wooden doors, my hands grasping at the strap of my bag in an ever tightening grip.

Streams of complete strangers in highly appropriate grey and black outfits, which contrasted vividly with mine, went past as I stood at the entrance. I ignored their weird glances.

"I'm freaking out," I admitted to Jonah, who, bless him, hadn't said anything when I'd suddenly frozen up.

"Yeah, I figured," he said calmly, shuffling out of the way of people trying to get past us into the church.

"What happens to people when they die?" I asked in a rush, the answer all of a sudden taking on great importance.

"Shit," Jonah cursed with an awkward laugh, "that's a bit deep, isn't it? Can I have an easier question?"

"I mean, do you think Nan's in there?" I pressed, jerking my head towards the hall.

He gave this a moment's thought and then asked, quite perceptively for someone I'd always chalked up as a bit
dense, "Do you want her to be?"

"No!" I said, horrified at the thought. "I want her to be flying over Mt Everest or throwing hairbrushes at
right-wing politicians; chatting to Martin Luther King or sitting on a cloud badgering an angel for a go on her harp. I don't want her to still be stuck
here
."

I chewed at my lip, wincing as I hit the patch that had barely recovered from the last time I'd worried at it. Jonah stayed quiet beside me, waiting for my next move.

That next move became very clear to me when I thought about Elliot, alone in the church apart from his emotionally repressed parents. I also remembered the way I'd run out on him on Nan's last night, how I'd hidden outside the door, unable to cope with seeing her actually dying. I wasn't going to do that to him again.

"We go in," I sighed, and just in time too as it looked like the service was about to start. "And if it looks like I'm going to be such a selfish cow again, please feel free to slap me."

He looked a bit bewildered by this, but unlike Elliot, Jonah wasn't the sort to follow up on the stuff I said, he just held the door open and gestured for me to lead the way.

~*~

Crammed together on a pew towards the back, I looked down the church aisle and caught sight of Elliot's dark hair and propeller up the very front. He didn't look round, so I tried to send vibes down to him that Jonah and I were both there and, literally, had his back.

Unease bubbled in the pit of my stomach as the pastor/reverend/priest/whatever he was came to the front and started some banal speech about why we were there.
Frankly, if people didn't know why they were there, they shouldn't have
been
there, I thought crossly. This wasn't some drop-in BBQ, it was a funeral for the coolest person who had ever lived, not that the pastor/reverend/priest/whatever he was seemed to know that. He read from a script clearly written by Mrs Sinclair. A script that talked about Nan being 'spirited' and 'full of life', the kind of euphemisms she would have detested.

I watched as, down the front, Elliot's shoulders got tighter and tighter until I was sure that his propeller hat was going to
come flying off and go whizzing around the room. What had his mum been thinking of, churning this rubbish out? She had to have known what Nan would have thought of it...and how Elliot would react.

The pew I was on creaked ominously as Jonah shifted
uncomfortably, and I knew he was watching Elliot slowly losing his mind too.

The opening nonsense out of the way, we all shuffled to our feet for the Lord's Prayer; so far, so predictable.
I couldn't help a small smirk over the 'lead us not into temptation' bit, as that was pretty much all Nan had ever done for me. She had
loved
giving me a shove in the wrong direction, wasn't that what the whole thing with her wanting me to be with Elliot was about?

I pulled a fresh tissue from my bag. It actually
hurt
to cry now, the skin around my eyes was red, puffy and very sore, but I just couldn't seem to stop. I tried to think about all the names Nan would have called me if she could have seen me, and how much she would have hated me ruining the look of my slutty dress by being such a sook, but it didn't help.

Matters took a turn for the truly weird when we all sat down and the pastor/reverend/priest/whatever he was resumed his position at the head of the congregation.
"And now," he said, in practised tones of solemnity, "John Hargraves will read a eulogy."

John
who
? I sat up a little straighter and peered through watery eyes at the middle aged man standing up and going round to stand at the lectern thingy. He was wearing a plain suit, was of medium height and had short brown hair. He was absolutely and completely nondescript, and I had no idea who he was.

"Esther Davis was born in 1931," he began soberly, "the only child of-"

He broke off abruptly as Elliot suddenly leapt to his feet. The back of his neck was a brilliant red, suggesting his face was too, and, in that get up, he must have been quite a sight squaring up to John Whatsisname.

The hall was already hushed, but it seemed to get even quieter as everyone waited to see what would happen next. What this meant, of course, was that Elliot's coarse words reverberated like a shot through the silent space.

"Who the
fuck
are you?"

I flinched and grabbed at Jonah who nodded and murmured,
"He's back."

"Elliot!" Mrs Sinclair leant out from the pew and looked like she was trying to tug him back down beside her. He easily evaded her grasp, his attention still focused on the stranger up the front.

"No, I'm serious. Who are you? I've never seen you before in my life."

"You have actually," John said, chuckling awkwardly then clearly remembering he was at a funeral and instantly dropping his smile. "Your mother brought you into the office once, but you were very young so you probably don't remember me."

"The office?" Elliot repeated, turning to look at his mum with a stare that, even from a distance, made something inside me curl up in horror. "You mean this clown
works
for you? You
delegated
your mum's fucking eulogy? Is that who the rest of these jerks are?" He swept his hand out to encompass his audience. "Some bloody rent-a-crowd? What is
wrong
with you?"

I shoved at Jonah's shoulder and he got the message, sliding out from the bench and then hurrying with me down the aisle to flank Elliot as, chest heaving, he glared at his mum.
All week I'd longed for this spark in Elliot, this
presence
, but now it was here, I could see why he'd been holding it back. He was falling apart.

"Maybe she wasn't the best mum," he continued, his voice strangled. "I get that she wasn't the type to tuck you into bed every night and sing you a song about how you were her perfect f
-ing princess. And that sucks, sure. But this," Elliot gestured contemptuously at John, "getting some
random
to talk about her life like you can't even be bothered? That's sick. You're sick."

"Mate, come on," Jonah gripped him on the shoulder and gave him a little shake. "Let's go, yeah?"

Elliot held his mum's gaze for a moment longer, then abruptly started to march back up the aisle towards the exit. With his back turned, he didn't see the way his mum slumped forward or his dad scowled, but even if he
had
been facing the right way, I doubt he would’ve registered it. His eyes were glazed and it felt like Jonah and I were guiding a blind man as we helped him outside.