Chapter Twenty
Saying Goodbye
It’s the day of the funeral. Only two days have passed since the horrors of the train station yet I have managed to shower six times within that period. My suit is hanging on my bedroom door and I am sitting on the bed watching John and the kittens. The kittens are now moving around a lot more, not walking - more clambering over each other. As a surrogate father I start to worry about how I may not be ready for all this. When do their eyes open? When do I move them onto solid food? What sex are they? At what age will they start trying to hump each other? Calm down, Noel, just Google it later like all good fathers do.
Getting dressed I find my tie still in the half Windsor knot from my gran’s funeral where it was last used. No, I don’t have my suit dry cleaned every time I use it, I air it out until the next death. Referencing back to my made up laundry rules, the suit and tie are on the three-day rule and this is their third day. The shirt is fresh – actually, it’s new as I’ve put a bit of weight on around the neck since Gran died. I don’t think it’s related; I’m just getting old or eating more.
The family will be gathering at my mum’s around about now. I like it here; here I don’t have to make idle talk with relatives I hardly know; here I don’t have to feel the need to keep my spirits up. Hannah’s there though, she’ll be waiting for me. We could sit on the stairs, her on my knee hugging me tight and no one would bother us. Oh, how will she be dressed, in black? A child dressed to say goodbye to the dead, how awful.
The heavy soles of my shoe are loud on my metal stairway, as I descend. A night of rain leaves moisture in the air. However, the clouds look to have nothing more than a light shower left in them. Rays of sunlight crack through the cloud like a daytime Pink Floyd concert. My gran told me the beams of light were the fingers of God which is something that is equally beautiful and horrifying. She also used to say that thunder was God laughing, which I am now thinking is the reason for my atheism; best not to believe than to have such an interactive deity.
Mum’s house is as I expected; crying women and uncomfortable men. Auntie Lilith sits sipping at a glass of water or something with a similar visual quality; vodka, fizzy lemonade, acid - fingers crossed. She also has a tissue for drying her eyes. I see no tears so it must have been doing a good job.
I look for Hannah and finally find her in the first place I should have looked - her room. She’s sitting on the bed in a grey dress and tiny black cardigan, the script to our play in her hands.
“Thinking of doing rewrites for next year?” I ask with as much pep as I can muster.
“No, I’m looking for Grandad.”
“In the play?”
“We forgot to put him in.”
“The play isn’t about us, Hannah.”
“Of course it is.” It really isn’t.
“That’s what you think the story is about.”
“Look, mum and dad are here…” She flips through the pages to where it mentions the main characters’ parents.
“There’s Frank…” Here she is referring to a guy who dressed up as Santa and she links this to our brother because he once dressed up as old Saint Nick for the kids. Hannah caught him in the kitchen eating a mince pie without his beard on so we had to come clean.
“Here’s Shelly…” This is a woman who helped out in a soup kitchen, which, yes, Shelly did do but unlike the character in the play our sister was paying off her community service.
“But we left out Grandad.” She bursts into tears and throws herself into her pillow, face first. Holy shit, it is us. She had come up with all the characters, I just helped with the words. I never saw that she was using us for inspiration.
“And so you’re Snowanna?”
A muffled “Yes,” escapes from the pillow.
“And am I Joel?” She sits up frowning like it was her chosen profession.
“No? Joel is Jonathan.”
“Jonathan?”
“Yes, his mum and dad don’t believe in God and he said that means he does get a Christmas.”
Hannah’s frown turns, with a slow exhale, into the disappointing look of a single mother.
“Do you even listen when I’m talking?”
“You wrote it for Jonathan?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m not in it?”
“Why would you be in it? You hate Christmas?”
Shocked to find out that a play I help to write is semi-autobiographical and hurt to find I’m not even in it, when describing my look I’d like to use the word flummoxed, a word created when someone found a bovine stuck in their chimney.
On the way to the crematorium I tell Hannah we’ll write a nice little piece in the play for Grandad, which will be in next year’s play. This seems to cheer her up a tad and she starts reeling off some possibilities.
“Grandad liked singing, maybe a street choir or a leader of a brass band.”
“That’ll work.”
In the crematorium people dressed in blacks and greys pile down the aisle like an undisciplined army of ninjas. The ninja bit is a reference to their darkly dyed garments; they’re not jumping all over the place brandishing oriental melee weapons. Frank, Clive, Uncle Nick, me and two of the guys from the funeral home take the coffin from the hearse and up on to our shoulders. I’m a little scared of this bit as I’m known to have a little bounce in my step. At this point of the story I shouldn’t need to explain that this is a literal bounce: I am not commenting on my sunny disposition. The bopping walk of mine was the cause of many schoolyard taunts and something I could do without whilst I carry the coffin of my beloved grandfather. We place my grandad onto an oak altar left of the podium and join our family members in the pews. Once seated my eyes become fixed on the casket. I find it hard to conceive that he is in there, that after centuries of dealing with the loss of those around us, the best mankind can come up with is us sitting around listening to a stranger telling us things about those we have lost - things we already know - while the deceased lies in a box. Don’t reel off anecdotes, we know them, we were there, we lived through them. He can’t be in that box. Life’s a hidden camera show; he’s backstage watching our reactions and then when we die we are let into the joke. If that is the case I guess that’d make God the prankster host - Beadle in an unconvincing beard.
Three flag bearers stand at the side of Grandad, old war veterans, older than my grandad in fact; the eldest looking ninety and then some. He struggles with the weight of the long metal staff of his flag. His face is conflicted between colour, fighting between either becoming pale from the lack of blood, or bursting into a fiery red as the blood gushes to his brain. Not knowing if it is coming or going the skin blotches like one of those heat reactive T-shirts from the early nineties. Please, someone, let this old timer sit down so that my grandfather’s funeral doesn’t get upstaged by a death.
The ceremony is a humanistic one. The speaker, neither a priest nor a family member, speaks of death as I know it; the final goodbye. He isn’t that blunt yet his sugar coating is by no means sweet. It’s a lot of ‘He lived a good life’ and ‘He’ll live on through our memories’, which says that when we die he’s totally gone. You cannot tart up death without God, that’s why even in times of reason and logic religion still flourishes. All atheists can do is say, “It’s really fucking short, stop worrying about the end and enjoy your one and only chance at the glory that is life.”
Grandad never spoke of religion. I know that Gran prayed every night and had unquestioning faith but he never showed his feelings either way. Now I know, he was atheist, huh. That’s got to stick in Lilith’s throat; forget trying to get a Protestant into a Catholic funeral, he’s not even on the same page.
A deep red curtain slowly closes around the coffin - I suppose so the bereaved don’t see it descending into the furnace. The music begins to play. Now I remember the song. I now remember the words and now I remember how to cry.
It is a melancholy tune that
sings about the virtues of faking happiness, a haunting melody about putting on a brave face. Fuck you, Nat King Cole, I scream in my head as I defy his proposal.
Memories of my grandparents in their kitchen form in my mind’s eye; Grandad baking, my Gran reading the paper with a cup of hot molasses within a hand’s reach. He sings this song and she hums along, their love something pure in this world, a love you don’t see anymore or at least I don’t. A love that seeps from them and fills the room, it’s something you could feel with all five of your senses and now the last flickers of that magic have gone out.
Everyone exits into the car park. People hug and cry, even my brother and I hug, neither of us are massively affectionate and there is definitely some awkwardness, but there is no hesitation in the embrace. As the reassuring hug of brotherly love comes to an end I spy a figure leaning on a car at the far end of the car park. My first impulse is to make as though I haven’t seen him but curiosity gets the better of me and so I saunter on over.
“Why are you here, Dad?”
“Can’t a man pay his respects?”
“No, he can, but as far I know Grandad hated you and the feeling wasn’t one way.”
“Yeah, he hated me, thought I’d wronged his daughter.”
“You did wrong his daughter, more than once.”
“Ok, I know what I did, better than you do, Noel. I hurt that man and he tried with me. He knew it was your mother’s choice.”
“It’s a bit late to get his forgiveness, Dad.”
“I’m not here for that.”
“Well, I hope you’re not here for mine.”
“No. I’m here because he was a good man and any good that’s in you is his doing and I love him for that. I was a shit dad, Noel, and I don’t need you to wave a piece of paper in my face to know it. I just don’t know how to be a dad. Ok, Noel.”
“Me and Frank never wanted much, Dad.”
“I know, but it was more than I had. I shouldn’t have come, see, son.”
He heads off down a sloping embankment to the side of the crematorium.
“Dad!” He turns to look back at me.
“I’m still a Winters. Don’t get too excited, I just don’t know what I did with those papers!”
The funeral is over but the ritual isn’t. Everyone returns to their cars and heads off to where else but our local public house, The George.
The sombre mood of the day begins to fade in The George. There is still the odd moist eye yet the mood has changed gear into fond reminiscing which then leads to jokes and laughter. I head to the bar to chat to Nails who is working.
“Condolences, Noel.”
“Thanks, man.”
“You want a free one on me?”
“I’ll take a coke.”
“So, you really are quitting?”
“What am I to do? Drink’s killing my dad and fags have killed my grandad.”
“Moderation?”
“I don’t think I have it in me.”
Toby joins us and the three of us chat about how all of this brings up thoughts of our own mortality; an age old conversation repeated in every dialect of the world, every possible and impossible scenario debated by both the highest intellects and the lowliest morons. Maybe if we spent less time pondering the end we could spend more time enjoying the present. Toby’s Jewish upbringing has left him agnostic, whereas Nails’ old fashioned working class upbringing has taught him not to ask too many questions. Ignorance may be bliss but Nails had that bliss knocked into him whilst his dad was knocking the shit out of him. Me? Devoted atheist? I don’t know where I’m at these days. I don’t believe in a big man in the clouds but that doesn’t stop me looking for more than I can see. I want all this love and pain to be about something. I don’t want my emotions to be chemical misfires.
I slip out the back door and head home, a funeral in a jovial mood is no place for me.