A man attends a funeral that feels more like an awkward high school reunion, with all the accompanying social anxiety.
Image generated with OpenAIAuntie Bee had made one of her famous cakes. To be fair, it was a rare social occasion when she didn’t. But this particular cake, placed on a doily on a plinth by the door, was something special. For a start, the size of it was off the scale, though it also seemed as if Bee had had a dose of the shakes during the final preparation; the whole thing was dripping with cream, collapsing like a Mediterranean office block after some terrible, unspecified disaster. I asked my father, seriously, whether he’d ever seen anything like it.
‘Well, Bee has always been a little deaf,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe she thought you said it was a birthday party?’
But today, of all days, I was in no mood for levity. Honestly, a fucking cake. We were sweating in 35 degrees of heat, no air con, and the beer tasting warmer than the tea. The cake, though, wasn’t the only thing. Someone else had inflated a handful of helium balloons, and these nestled pinkly against the ceiling like the hairless testicles of a pubescent giant.
‘Right, so what are your thoughts on those?’, I asked, glancing upwards.
This time my father pretended not to hear. It was supposed to be a wake. The scene in front of us, however, had more in common with the departure lounge of a small regional airport: the rows of low-slung metal chairs, the lingering breath of vapid dislocation. Granted, there was a decent turnout. No-one could argue with the numbers milling around the buffet table, like gannets tearing at the rubbery flesh of a recently stranded whale. And yet this morning I had imagined a sense of occasion, even gravitas. I’d hoped for a rich seam of ritual to carry us through the ruins of the day.
‘Why don’t you get yourself another drink?’ my father said, gesturing towards one of my cousins draining a can of high-strength cider. ‘It might calm you down.’
‘I don’t really feel like it.’
This wasn’t exactly true. I was gasping like a man cast out to sea.
‘Then,’ he continued, ‘if that cake of Bee’s is still bothering you, go up there and stick a big fat finger right through the middle of it. I doubt anyone would really mind.’
This was typical. My father had a habit of squinting at life from a distance, a half-smile on his face as if he was still deciding whether the whole thing was worth the effort. He was considered wry and self-effacing, a quiet man who held his counsel, whereas the truth was that most of the time he just couldn’t be arsed. It was a neat trick for which I envied him deeply.
‘Can we just forget about the cake now?’ I said.
‘I was just trying to help.’
‘I know you were.’
In truth, of course, we both knew I was stalling. Killing time had always been something of a speciality, but sooner or later I would be obliged to enter the maelstrom of what could be loosely termed social interaction. There would be conversations with people I’d known either as a child, and so would barely remember, or as a teenager, and so would recall through the prism of arrogant insecurity. The dread of these conversations was visceral, almost tangible. Looking out across the crowded room, I pictured myself being dragged at high speed through a tunnel of my unimpressive past, every encounter soundtracked to the quiet mastication of a grey sausage roll.
And yet already that day I could list various achievements. I had thanked a priest. I had read a poem about clocks and dogs. I had even shaken hands with an undertaker, later recognised as the boy from school who had – unfairly in my opinion – been expelled for barricading himself in the staff room before declaring it a republic. All this gave me courage. And so, leaving my father far behind, I approached the bar in a spirit of renewed fortitude. It was here that those first conversations took place, most of which proceeded as follows:
‘So, Tim. Would you like a drink?’
‘That’s kind of you, thanks.’
‘Ah, I see you’ve got one.’
‘Yes.’
A pause then while my interlocutor scanned the floor, the walls, those ghosts which hover at the fringes of our collective consciousness. This pause would vary in length, ranging from a heartbeat to a pop song.
‘And how’s Linda then? Is she not with you today?’
Ah, Linda. Everyone around here knew Linda, or at least thought they did. We were from a place where our lives were updated like daytime soap operas whether we still lived here or not. Linda’s character was the siren; dark and mysterious, she was the foreign woman who led local men astray. To be honest, I admired their imagination.
‘No, Linda’s over in Portugal now. She helps run a hotel. Well, it’s a golf resort. People go there to play golf.’
Linda was, in fact, living with her mother in a semi-detached bungalow in Ealing. I knew this from the videos she posted from her mother’s spare bedroom, promoting health supplements which were sent to her in the post. Her skin encased in different levels of make-up, each video felt like a horror film directed to scare me in a new and utterly original way.
‘A golf resort?’
But if I mentioned golf – by far the most popular pastime in these parts – we were sure to get beyond Linda, whose character was always badly drawn. We could stride confidently into new lands. Golf was safe, golf was certain.
‘Yes. That’s what I just said. A golf resort.’
‘I still play a bit myself. Would you ever fancy a round one day, that is if you’re going to be sticking around now?’
‘I would, I would. Who doesn’t like playing golf? That would be grand.’
At this point, having safely navigated a path around saying anything significant, a hand would wipe its clammy condolences across my forearm. It was the signal that I was free to go.
‘God love you, Tim. Well done on the poem, by the way. And what about that cake, eh? Your Auntie Bee was always a great one for baking.’
And so it was that the afternoon progressed. In some ways it moved forwards with a momentum all of its own. People took turns to stand in front of me until I could be passed onto someone else, although it should be said that soon this brought on a queasy sensation, reminiscent of the childhood humiliations of Scottish country dancing in the local village hall; yes, though to my very core I wanted to be somewhere else – anywhere else – this was all really happening. There was no other option but to remain talking to these people, no escape from the persistent advice that I should really eat something.
But somehow I found the courage to adapt to the situation, as I suppose soldiers must when trapped behind enemy lines. I even started to enjoy myself. A man in a bright blue suit – I had no idea who he was – showed me a surprisingly well-produced film of a cat disappearing into a sink hole. Then, in a secluded corner, I joined a group of my father’s friends watching a football match on a soundless television hoisted on the wall. I liked it there, the images of the green pitch washing over me like the tiny waves of a communal bath. And as we each murmured words of encouragement or rebuke at the screen, I found myself offering opinions which I never knew I had. I became bolder, and more confident. When one of my father’s friends passed me a piece of quiche and a plastic fork, I responded by telling him that it was never fucking offside.
I was succeeding. I was a success.
And yet it wasn’t all plain sailing. There were still moments of excruciating paralysis. After the football match had finished I shared an extended silence with Albert, a man with sunken cheeks and a single eyebrow. Back in the day Albert had taught me how to do the backstroke, had even looked after me once when my father was ill, though it seemed as if the memory of these events, as well as others bubbling to the surface, brought on a sort of stasis between us. We stood there groping for something meaningful to say until, briefly distracted by a fly drowning athletically in Albert’s glass, I began telling him that I now worked undercover for the police.
‘I do a lot of that sort of work these days. Tracking criminals, con men. Illegal immigrants, that sort of thing.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Oh yes, that’s the part of working in IT that no one realises. It’s all online these days, crime. We’re a bit like detectives.’
Needless to say none of this was true, although I’m sure that for a few seconds I had the giddy sensation that it was.
‘Sounds interesting. We always knew you’d do well.’
Of course to function like this, as you can probably imagine, requires a certain nimbleness, socially-speaking, that is difficult to maintain. Since Linda had moved out most of my time was spent submerged inside video games, those beautiful sanctuaries for the serially disaffected, so it wasn’t surprising that I soon started to tire. Thankfully the room was emptying. Through the fire doors at the far end of the room, a line of guests were now spilling out into the asphalt glare of the car park, where an ice cream van seemed to be doing a decent trade in 99s. Briefly then I thought of Linda. That morning, as we waited for the car to bring us here, I had started to send her a text. I wanted to tell her where I was. I suppose that despite everything that had happened between us, there was a part of me that missed her still. Loved her, even. But in the end I couldn’t find the right words, the phrases – it was difficult being so honest, even in my imagination. And anyway I couldn’t bear the thought that she would read the message and not reply.
‘Does Linda know about what happened?’ asked my father.
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ I said. ‘Yes, I expect so.’
I could feel him weighing up whether to say anything more. When I was a kid, he used to tell me that it didn’t matter if things turned out how I wanted them to, whether I was lucky or unlucky or something in between. He would always be there to help me pick up the pieces.
‘I never liked her,’ he said.
‘I know you didn’t, Dad. I know that.’
If there was a time to bolt, I suppose, it was then. Suddenly I felt my knees weaken, as if someone had begun tapping them with one of those tiny hammers they use to test whether your nerves are shot. Maybe that was what Auntie Bee noticed. Her face creased with concern, she floated towards me in a flurry of mauve-scented care.
‘Tim, are you OK? Oh Tim, you look terrible. As pale as a ghost!’
Quickly she led me away from the bar, back through a knot of people to where her cake lay splayed on its dish by the door. A framed photo of my father was lying in the debris of congealed sponge. Earlier, this had acted as a type of flag in the centre of the cake, a signpost in case anyone was unsure why we were all here; there he was, outside the little terrace house we used to live in, a look of surprise on his face while the rest of us grinned sheepishly in the background.
‘Why don’t you take that jacket off? It’s so hot in here, let me get you a glass of water. Now, have you eaten something today?’
It was then that I heard a noise, a tiny sound like breaking glass. It ricocheted inside and out while the room seemed to tilt, its colours running until suddenly I was submerged, the memories washing over me in waves. The arguments we’d had around the kitchen table, about politics or music or anything else I could rub up against; phone calls cut short as I fumbled for something to say, unnerved then by the distance between us. Frightened by what we had both become. And then, of course, there was the Christmas Eve when I’d turned up unannounced with Linda, walking into the house like a returning hero while my father made noises about the years when I’d stayed away. Ah, what a waste of everything it was.
‘You know, your dad was awful proud of you,’ said Auntie Bee. She was looking at me with such tenderness that I had to turn away. ‘It’s hard sometimes, with families.’
It was now all falling down on me, this unquenchable sadness that I’d been carrying all along. Too heavy to hold at last, I sank down onto my haunches and tried my best to breathe. Auntie Bee started rubbing my back, cooing softly while I cried for the first time since he’d died.
