Read Not What They Were Expecting Online
Authors: Neal Doran
‘You won’t believe this, Becs,’ James said as they sat together. ‘The reason no one could help him when he had the heart attack? No one knew where he was, so nobody could find him. It was only when the office PA mentioned he hadn’t been seen since the time he usually disappeared with the
Guardian
crossword for half an hour that people realised. By the time they tracked him down and broke the cubicle door in he was already dead. What is it with us and dads that get themselves into trouble in toilets?’
‘A Westernised shame about basic bodily functions certainly doesn’t help. It can make celebrity millionaires out of comedians who make fart jokes,’ said Maggie, still spaced out but with a ghost of her normal attitude around her, ‘and also stops women doing perfectly sensible things like going into a room to check on someone, just because they’re afraid to break the taboo of a gender-specific stick figure on the door.’
Rebecca mmm’d thoughtfully.
‘Can’t put it off any longer. We’d better go,’ said Maggie, rising to her feet, ‘bureaucracy doesn’t end with death, it claims that too.’
‘Do you need me to drive you?’ asked Rebecca.
‘You head home,’ said James, ‘we don’t know how long this could take, and you need to keep rested. Maggie can drive and drop me home.’
He gave her a hug, leaning his bulky frame down into her shoulder, squeezing her tightly. She hugged him close back, not thinking about the crazy mix of emotions they’d gone through in one night, focusing on the comfort they both needed. They stepped apart and she saw him hurriedly run his hand across both eyes.
‘Well,’ he said with a strained clearing of his throat, ‘you’ll know where to find me.’
At the hospital, Maggie had wanted to go and see the body by herself. James knew it was understandable, but he couldn’t help feel a little twinge that this was typical Maggie, making sure the drama was all about her, the moment framed so she could tell everyone about how it affected her.
The art would be next. There’d be a whole new type of art. With a sigh, he told himself off for being so uncharitable, especially at a time like this. But his brain was not behaving itself. He didn’t know how to act. He didn’t know how to accept the news. He almost felt like he shouldn’t. It was too sudden. It shouldn’t be possible that Ben was dead. He welled up a little at that.
A member of hospital staff showed him into the room. What kind of job was that, he wondered. Must be bloody miserable if you spend half your life unveiling dead relatives. Then he was alone in a quiet room with his dad. He could hear the sounds of the rest of the hospital in the distance, the ping of a lift, empty hospital trolleys rattling along, somebody singing. And here he was with his dad. His embarrassing, weird dad. He didn’t look all that different. Greyer, maybe.
James’s hand hovered at the side of the gurney Ben was laid on. He’d never been a tactile man, Ben. As a child James had never worked out how you could hug a dad lounging deep in a chair with a newspaper folded out across his lap. He hadn’t really known how to speak to a man who seemed only able to manage to listen to two sentences before taking a diversion into a world of his own full of puns and obscure facts he thought had meaning. As a very young boy James had never been able to find the thing that would make his dad hang out in his world for a while, despite days poring over animal encyclopaedias and books about ancient Rome trying to find an interesting fact his dad might not have known. Trying to be, as best an eight-year-old can, another version of him.
He felt like a kid again right then in the fluorescent-lit room. He wanted to hug his dad but he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
He put his hand on Ben’s chest and cried.
The week after Ben’s death was one of the longest of Rebecca’s life. She was continually plagued by this feeling she should be doing something, at a time when there didn’t seem to be much for her to do. There were a lot of things to think about, at a time when she didn’t want to think about anything.
One thing she had decided. She wasn’t going to talk to James about what was going on when Ben had died. It wasn’t the time now, and she didn’t see when it would be the time in the future. He’d still be grieving by the time Bomp arrived, and she didn’t want to spoil that. And she didn’t want to know.
There could be an explanation.
It could be nothing.
It could’ve been a one-off.
In her head, he’d had his yellow card, next time he’d be off.
She wondered what the other women in her life would have done in the same circumstances. Sophie was a tricky one to gauge but she’d probably have taken it as par for the course, and found a way to work it to her advantage. Joan would’ve been confrontational. Her mother? That was the worst one.
She would have dealt with it exactly the same way as Rebecca.
While she was trying to figure out what to do with the mess in her life, Rebecca spent a lot of time with Maggie, helping her with preparations for the funeral. And she spent a lot of time with James, the most time they’d had together in ages. She took the week off, and was just doing a little bit of work from home, and he was completely off on compassionate grounds from his dole job.
Sometimes it was awful. They could almost feel like strangers. He’d stay up late watching his mindless horror movies, more often than not something with the undead coming back. He’d try to joke about all of them returning from the grave because they hadn’t been able to get six across before they died. Rebecca hated the jokes about Ben. She knew it was his way of coping, but it just said to her he couldn’t express how he really felt, and that couldn’t be good. She was aware of the irony in that observation.
Sometimes the time they spent together that week was wonderful, the closest they’d been in as long as she could remember – although her memory only went back about three months in her current condition. There’d been a day shopping – she didn’t have anything to wear to a funeral that would fit her these days – and it had been brilliant. They’d spent hours at Westfield and it was almost as good as a city mini-break. The crowds weren’t crazy because it was mid-week, they ordered too much food at a Jamie’s, James had a couple of beers with lunch, and Rebecca didn’t even mind that they’d had to ignore the nearby sushi place because she couldn’t eat anything from there. They’d toured the posh shops, trying to keep straight faces while they asked sales people, obviously trained to deal with this kind of smartarsery, about the price of jewellery and watches they could obviously never afford. They’d boggled at the price of designer label babygros that would fit for a week and were probably dry-clean only. But they got a little thrill shooting through them when they considered that they really would need tiny clothes like this soon, even if they would be from George at Asda rather than Donna Karan from New York.
The actual shopping part had been good too, despite what they were looking for, and despite the miserable choices for a pregnant woman wanting to look sombre. James spent probably too much time picking out the tightest tartiest things he could find from the wrong end of the shops as suggestions. Then, when she was battling into outfits in cubicles he’d find accessories to wear to go with the handbag she’d dumped with him. When she came out to show him another charcoal dress that was either a bit too clingy, or looked too much like a tent, he’d be wearing a cloche hat or holding out ridiculous heels and wondering if they’d have them in his size. He stopped, though, after putting on some clip-on earrings, a fascinator, and a brightly patterned scarf, then demanding ‘how do I look?’ to a woman coming out of the changing rooms who wasn’t Rebecca.
They’d carried on giddily all afternoon, stopping for tea and big ice-cream sundaes whenever Rebecca got a bit weary, and buying baby toys and paraphernalia whenever they saw it. There was a tiny T-shirt with the word
Babble
across the front in Scrabble letters that they picked up as the first piece of Bompalomp’s clothes that they’d bought together. It seemed a fitting tribute to Ben who loved the game. Eventually they’d stumbled home with fish and chips and a trashy comedy DVD.
It had been lovely until bedtime, and James had made a move for sex.
For the first time in the day, the doubts about where James had been the day his dad died returned, although putting it that way made him sound like a murder suspect. As his hand slid up and down the length of her thigh, and upwards underneath her pyjama top she stiffened. When was the last time he’d done that? In what circumstances, with who? There’d be no chance he was gay, was there? After all, look at her father, maybe on some subconscious level she was attracted to a type.
But she could be making the whole thing up in her head, being a crazy hormonal pregnant woman. He could have been on work drinks. But why lie about it? Maybe he’d had a job interview, or had been arranging a surprise for her. She knew she should have asked him about it, and that she still could.
But not now, after such a good day. And not tomorrow, because it’d be the day before his dad’s funeral and that’s not the time for a scene, neither would be the day after, then after that… She also knew that she was too scared to know the answer. So she’d turned around, and given him a cuddle, and a kiss looking into his hopeful and expectant eyes. The chaste nature of the kiss and hug had been enough for him to get the message ‘no’ and, despite a raised eyebrow attempting one last hopeful try at reversing the decision, his hands settled around her into more neutral positions. She’d said good night and spooned into him. He’d kissed the back of her head, and she shut her eyes and tried not to think.
The bugger of it was that after that, she’d started to feel really, really, horny.
Earlier in the week, she and James had gone to the funeral directors with Maggie, and that had been one of the not good days. There’d been a point where the three of them had been in what was effectively a coffin showroom, with a guy in his twenties, who was apparently their funeral liaison executive. He spent a few moments explaining the range of coffin options, while Rebecca wondered what he told girls he did for a living when he was chatting them up in clubs. Then Maggie had started on the wastefulness involved in the most extravagant of the boxes, the rare and expensive woods to be used once and destroyed, the level of cost people pay when others can’t even afford the price of a decent funeral.
James had quietly seethed at that until she made one comment too many to the increasingly anxious young undertaker about Scandinavian folk traditions of weaving shared community caskets. Then he snapped and told her it was recycling day on Thursday, and why not save all the bother and just see if the council would take him in the purple wheelie bin.
Everyone had gone quiet, until Maggie pointed out that the council had sold off the responsibilities for waste collection to a private company twenty years ago, despite the lack of accountability for best environmental practice and no effective paper trail of where reusable materials were treated. James had sighed dramatically and stormed out of the room at that point, leaving Rebecca unsure what to do next. She wanted to follow her husband, but didn’t want to abandon a grieving widow. That it would have been unfair on the poor undertaker, who, as the blood drained from his face was looking increasingly like one of his clients, tipped the balance in favour of her staying put.
‘What about this one, Maggie?’ she said, pretending nothing had happened.
Maggie went over to look at the casket Rebecca had identified. It was probably the cheapest in the room, but was made from recycled and reclaimed materials and an authentic oak veneer. It was MDF, basically, and looked like an eighties kitchen cabinet, but it looked the best way to get a decision.
‘So the wood’s recycled. And the other materials are ethically sourced and non-toxic?’
Standing behind Maggie, Rebecca caught the eye of the undertaker, who was playing with his cuffs compulsively. She nodded slowly to him, and he confirmed that yes, all toxins were ethnically sourced. He said they’d throw in a free set of handles and a special discount code at the local florist for anyone ordering flowers.
Maggie started to tell him that there’d be no bought flowers at the funeral, that the global airlifting of industrially produced flowers was killing the planet for cheap sentiment and petrol station-bought apologies. She said that Ben had not paid for a flower for thirty years, but that at this time of year he would be in their garden or allotment and would return home with bunches of what he called ‘beautiful weeds’.
She stopped at that point, unable to speak. The undertaker’s eyes flicked, on the edge of panic. Rebecca wasn’t sure what was going to happen next either. In the unexpected silence, the room felt like it was set for an explosion. Instead it looked like Maggie imploded. Her tall frame shrivelled, her head dropped. Covered by the mass of greying curls, her eyes and mouth were obscured but she was obviously on the verge of tears. Her hands shot up to cover her face with a sound like a slap, and she stood there with just the hint of a tremor. Rebecca moved towards her, but stopped, sensing it wasn’t what Maggie would want.
‘We’ll take the one we were talking about,’ Rebecca said turning to the undertaker. ‘We won’t need the discount, I’ll come and see you in a minute to sort out any other details.’
He nodded his head in relief, muttered something that ended in ‘madam’ in the direction of Maggie, and slid out the door.
‘We’d never really talked about it,’ said Maggie, her head still bowed. ‘We’ve been privileged to see departure ceremonies around the world, but we never talked about what would happen when one of us left.’
Maggie took an old rag that looked like it had been used for cleaning paintbrushes from her pocket.
‘This isn’t what he would have wanted. It isn’t what I want.’
‘We can make it how you’d like it,’ said Rebecca, ‘you can bring your own iPod these days.’
‘I don’t know what he’d want. I don’t know what to do. I’ve no one to ask. I always asked Ben and he always knew…’