Split Second - страница 46
He and Val were like those early mappers. Each charting their own course, not even agreeing which way was up or down.
He stretched, then turned the engine on, reversed the car and set out for the funeral parlour. Glad to be sheltered in the encroaching dark.
The coffin had arrived. Val had put it in their conservatory. ‘This time of year,’ she said, ‘and they still do same-day delivery.’
We never sleep, he thought. No two-week Christmas breaks for those in the funeral business. There’d been a strike once, he remembered, of gravediggers, headlines about the dead lying unburied, corpses rotting, families distraught.
‘I’ve told the boys to come round tomorrow teatime.’ Jason’s closest friends, the lads he’d been at the pub with that last night, heartsick and passionate with all the righteous intensity of youth, wanted to be involved in celebrating Jason’s life. Val, with her customary zeal and focus, had been researching options for humanist ceremonies, eco-friendly coffins and woodland burials. She swiftly involved them in the details and asked if they would like to decorate Jason’s cardboard coffin. Now it was here, plain, dun-coloured, grotesque. Andrew went out and got the rowan tree, carried it in and stood it beside the coffin.
The phone rang. He moved to get it, but she said, ‘Don’t answer it. It’s the newspapers. They’ve been ringing every ten minutes. Over and over. I spoke to Martine, she said to ignore them, not to say a word. They’ll give up eventually.’
‘What if Mum or Dad wants us?’ The phone rang on and on.
‘I’ve told them to use our mobiles for now.’
They paused and listened. The phone sang out for another five rings, then stopped. ‘I’ll take it off the hook,’ he said.
‘I’ve tried that – it does that horrible siren noise after a bit.’
He looked at her, then went into the hall. He unplugged the base station and the telephone jack. ‘Sorted,’ he called out. ‘I’ve disconnected it.’
She didn’t answer. His neck prickled. He walked back through to the conservatory. She was sitting down on one of the rattan chairs, head in her hands, her shoulders moving as she wept.
‘Oh, Val.’ Tears started at the back of his eyes. He moved to her, moved to hold her, her crying raw and guttural and accompanied by a rocking motion. He held her and tried to soothe her, whispering in her hair. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, love. Oh, darling, I’m so sorry.’ Knowing that he couldn’t make it right, couldn’t kiss it better. That all he could do was be there and walk beside her. Even if they were making the journey in different ways, disagreeing about the direction, they must walk on because there was no other choice.
They clung to each other like that until she quietened and his feet had gone numb and his shoulder and top were damp with her tears.
He didn’t know what to say, how to move them back to the business of living, of dealing with the dead. In the end, he resorted to the basest practicalities. ‘Tea, something to eat?’
She shivered, looked at him. Grey eyes lucid and naked, red-rimmed. ‘There’s a shepherd’s pie, it’ll microwave.’
He squeezed her shoulders and clambered upright, the burn and bite of pins and needles sizzling in his legs.
She’d rallied by the time he’d got the food on the table, though he noticed she ate little as she updated him on the progress she’d made for the other arrangements. How she’d asked Jason’s friends to choose some music, but told them it would be nice to include the Bobby McFerrin song ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. ‘Remember?’
‘Lovely,’ he said, but there was a lance in his heart.
That holiday. Driving down to Cornwall with a compilation tape that Andrew had made playing loud. All of them singing that song, rewinding it time and again for Jason, who was seven. In the wake of Val’s parents’ deaths, a horrible year, the mantra seemed tailor-made for them all. Jason had made a video on the camcorder to go with the music. Stop-motion Plasticine cat and mouse, meant to be dancing, swaying their heads to the laid-back beat, but getting the movements right had proved too difficult. The end result was hilarious, had Jason breathless and Andrew and Val in stitches.
