Read Not What They Were Expecting Online
Authors: Neal Doran
Rebecca stood, stunned. She’d never seen her mother-in-law like this, and couldn’t quite believe she needed anyone. And it seemed weirder that anyone would depend on Ben. She told herself off for thinking that way about him. She’d been fond of him. At family gatherings she’d sought Ben out, she’d always thought it was mainly because she wasn’t scared or intimidated by him. They could stand awkwardly together until he got lost in one of his explanations of sustainable subsistence farming, or the changing role of the local newspaper, and she knew all she had to do was occasionally nod.
She realised that after so many years of proximity, she loved him. And Margaret too, if she thought about it. As the two women stood across from each other, surrounded by coffins, Rebecca didn’t know if she should hug her. She knew she didn’t want to, but felt she ought to. But she wasn’t at all convinced it was what Margaret wanted, and hated the idea of forcing physical contact on a widow.
She cursed her awkwardness. James was normally so huggy, but his family never were. She’d never been tactile herself, although her dad had always been one for cuddles and headlocks and pats on the bum. Weird how they’d gone the opposite way to their parents, but then both ended up eventually with someone who was like them. Rebecca wondered what Bomp would be like, she hoped she’d not have the same awkward response to holding her own child.
Then she wondered whether maybe in recent months she hadn’t been physically there enough for James, but stopped herself. This wasn’t the time for thinking of that stuff, and she wasn’t going to start blaming herself either. She wasn’t.
It was the day of the funeral, and James was anxious for things to start, so that they could be over with sooner. He was standing at a North London crematorium with his mum, having driven them both there because Margaret wouldn’t condone an unnecessary additional journey in a gas-guzzling car just to follow a hearse. He looked over at her, in her multi-coloured dress, that was pulling a little around her stomach, and which screamed out against the backdrop of greys and blacks around them like the statement it was supposed to be. James understood his mother wanted to say something, to make a point about life and death and the way we choose to mark it, but it really did piss him off.
They’d arrived at the crematorium before Ben. The planned pallbearers – Margaret and James, James’s uncles, and a couple of Ben’s friends – had had to stand outside waiting for him. It was a nice enough day, a little overcast, but hardly a backdrop for tragedy. At first it felt to James like standing outside the pub with the smokers. People they knew had been filtering in the door, and after the hellos and sorry-for-your-losses they’d headed inside to get a seat, with James directing them to where they could find the others. Then it had felt more like waiting for a cab at the end of a night out as all the mourners got settled and the six of them waited outside. James, a generation younger than everyone else, didn’t know what to say to anybody. He’d asked his two uncles about work and the cousins he happily never saw, and that was it. For once he was out of small talk.
Finally, the hearse could be seen, coming down the private road of the crematorium, past the empty fields. Everybody stood a little straighter, the men surreptitiously loosening their shoulders for the weightlifting about to happen. James put his arm around his mother.
‘All right, Maggie?’ he asked.
‘They’re very late,’ she said.
‘I’ll take the delivery charge out of the driver’s tip,’ he muttered back.
The young undertaker they had met at the funeral parlour (why was it a parlour? That was an expression Ben would have known the origin of), came across to shake and hold Maggie’s hand for a little too long.
‘And are these gentlemen the pallbearers?’ he asked.
‘I think I can manage to help lift despite my feeble female frame,’ she replied, causing him to start fiddling with his cuffs again.
The undertaker lined up the lifters as evenly as possible by height. James was going to have to stoop a little, but he was at the front with his mother. After checking with the crematorium that they were ready for them, the undertaker had them lift the coffin.
When they’d hoisted it up the first time, Ben had almost gone flying.
The cheap chipboard and Ben’s light frame provided much less resistance than any of the pallbearers had imagined. There was a moment it had reached everyone’s shoulders, then it kept rising a couple of inches, hung in the air for a split-second, then dropped down onto the pallbearers’ braced arms, bouncing slightly. There was a lot of feet shuffling and James was sure he heard a muffled ‘fucking hell!’ from someone, he wasn’t sure if it was his uncle or the undertaker. James thought it probably wasn’t the time to give his dad the bumps, and felt a smile and a tear on his face. The first time for both in days.
Pull yourself together, Winfield
, he said to himself as they slowly walked inside.
They had carried the coffin to the front of the room, that wasn’t quite a chapel, but wasn’t really not a chapel either. Because of the traffic hold-up, they were carrying Ben into a room full of mourners, who instinctively turned as the casket approached, in the same way they would for a bride. The music that was playing as they walked in was Billy Bragg, ‘Between the Wars’. It was a song that had haunted James’s childhood, and wound him up no end in his teenage years when he considered a bunch of decidedly middle-class artists and professionals claiming a bit too much solidarity with miners and dockers and people who actually had to do horrible difficult jobs. He’d had his first serious rows with his parents to a backdrop of songs like this, as he’d tried to work out who he was by identifying what he wasn’t. And what he wasn’t was like his mum and dad.
Then there had been eulogies. James had read an extract from Orwell. He’d told Rebecca it was the first time he’d picked up the book, the day they were going to the cremation. He could still remember his dad having given it to him when he was twelve. ‘I’d wanted a Nintendo, so took against Orwell from then on.’
He looked up at Rebecca as he spoke, the only person he could keep eye contact with without being worried about crying. Reading it out loud in front of everyone, he could kind of see what his dad must have been getting at. It was
Down and Out in Paris and London
, and he was reciting Ben’s favourite passage about the social standing of beggars.
There was a comparison that did not put the owners of newspapers in a favourable light, which raised a muted snort from Ben’s work colleagues, and James wondered if maybe his dad had a sense of irony and self-awareness he hadn’t really appreciated. The writing also had a youthfulness and passion that James hadn’t really appreciated at the time he’d been hoping for something a little more Super Mario-ish. He could see why Ben wanted him to read it. But then he thought he’d bet Orwell wasn’t close to getting behind on his mortgage and with a wife thirty-two weeks pregnant when he was extolling the virtues of being bottom of the pile.
But still… It seemed that everything that annoyed him most about his dad when he’d been alive was making him miss him the most right now.
He finished reading, and sat back down between Rebecca and Margaret. Rebecca gave his hand a squeeze and whispered ‘well done’ in his ear. The rest of the ceremony passed without James taking too much in. More was said by people he barely recognised from his father’s life. He really can’t have spent his whole life looking vaguely out of windows and doing the crossword. James felt a pain that he would never be able to ask him more about that.
Tales from the Cryptic
, he thought to himself. Jesus, his dad was going to haunt him through puns.
Finally, it was over. Margaret got up and said a few words and James could tell she was struggling. There were no tears, no obvious signs of somebody trying to cope, but the references to the everyday sexism of the undertaker and pernicious presence of Christianity in a room intended to be used for all types of death ceremonies were half-hearted at best. He wasn’t sure if anyone else could tell, or maybe she was fine and it was just him, but he felt sure there was a conviction and a life missing from what she said. For the first time he could see his mother saying what she felt other people thought she would say, rather than what she wanted to say. It was very weird. And then the music started, and the coffin began sliding away.
The second it first moved hit James in the gut. The casket, his dad, was rolling towards these two dark heavy curtains. It looked and worked like a supermarket till conveyor belt. He didn’t know what was behind the curtains but he couldn’t help but imagine it was a huge cave of flames, like some giant pizza oven. It was fucking barbaric. He was never being cremated. He wished the conveyor belt could be put into reverse, to slide back out of the darkness, and that life could keep rewinding, back out into the hearse, and keep going back until the night Ben died didn’t happen.
Rebecca put an arm around his waist, and he leaned his cheek on the top of her head.
He was never being cremated.
Rebecca was doing her best to hide, or rather help, in the kitchen back at Margaret’s at the gathering after Ben’s funeral. Her mother-in-law had sidled up to her while she was doing some last minute vegetable chopping for dips and hugged her, leaving a hand on her belly.
‘Ben was so looking forward to this one,’ she’d said.
‘Really?’ Rebecca felt terrible for sounding so surprised at the idea that a man had been excited about the arrival of a first grandchild. It didn’t seem polite. Especially not at his funeral.
‘He thought it’d be a great opportunity to share some of the wisdom we’d gathered over the years, and in the time we’re going to have as we get older. He’d suggested that once he’d retired we could have taken the little one on their first visit to Addis Ababa.’
Rebecca was touched and terrified at the idea that her in-laws would want to spend so much time with their grandchild, but she didn’t think she’d be leaving them unaccompanied in any place more exotic than the local Jungle Land indoor play area.
‘And it’s important to me too,’ said Maggie, ‘you couldn’t believe how much it means to have something to look forward to still, on a day like today.’
There were unexpected tears in Rebecca’s eyes. In the moment of closeness, she thought for a second of asking Margaret about her doubts concerning James and what she should do.
‘And thank you for everything you did to get us here too,’ Margaret continued, before Rebecca could work up her courage. ‘I couldn’t have done it on my own. You can see why funerals are so much a community event in so many places, and frankly I was a bit surprised our neighbours were found so wanting.’
‘It can be tricky, knowing what to do for the best,’ said Rebecca.
‘Fear of death looms large,’ said Margaret with an exaggerated raise of her eyebrows. ‘But you have a quiet strength. It reminds me of someone.’
Rebecca hadn’t known what to say or do, and settled for a heartfelt ‘well…’
Maggie tied back her hair, and produced a tray of dips from under a tea towel on a workbench that Rebecca thought really needed a good bleaching.
‘Now I can take it from here,’ declared Maggie. ‘An evolved life starts now. Although you can get that son of mine in here to help with this. He knows better than to leave the hospitality chores to the women.’
With that she was gone, as the first carloads of people came through the door.
Looking around at the people at Ben’s after-funeral gathering, Rebecca noticed that Ben and Margaret were a bit weird even for their social circle. Aside from a couple of older blokes in bedraggled suits with thinning hair that looked like any life it had left in it was applied to resisting the order of a comb, nearly everybody looked like your average late middle-aged couple, like her mum and dad. She thought she spotted someone that looked familiar. From the TV maybe. She could imagine him ending everything he said as if he was expecting a round of applause, and guessed he must have been a politician she’d seen on
Question Time
.
Then she heard a barked laugh above the quiet hum of people remarking on the buffet and whether the weather was good for a funeral. It was her dad. She’d been dreading this moment even more than the funeral. She hadn’t seen him in weeks, or spoken to him since she’d had the visit from the journalist.
Rebecca hated occasions like this, feeling even less comfortable in a crowd than usual. Did you smile at a funeral? You did, but how much? You needed to be friendly, but not too happy. She found herself contorting her face from a smile to a bit of a sad face, and then having to beam again as people commented on her enormous belly. But then, at least Bomp was something to talk about. She’d felt a bit awkward too, almost insensitive, walking around with this exhibit for new life at a time when everyone was marking the end of one. But at least that conversation in the kitchen had been another one of her moments with Margaret that were as sweet as they were confusing.
Rebecca could see James greeting people as they came in. Confident hugs and handshakes, and patient acceptance of compliments about his dad as he waited for coats, and steered people towards drinks. She knew he didn’t like this stuff, but he could really do it. She, meanwhile, felt much more comfortable in the kitchen, getting things prepared and avoiding the small talk. And wiping down surfaces that
really
needed it. But she knew she couldn’t stay there forever and headed out to the living room to mingle, with a glass of orange juice that she knew straight away was going to cause heartburn. Never before had she quite so wanted a warm glass of ethically sourced, but incompetently made white wine, but being the drunk heavily-pregnant woman at her father-in-law’s funeral didn’t sound the greatest idea. She wished she’d worn better shoes too. She hadn’t taken into account what a long day with so much standing a funeral could turn out to be. It was getting worse than a wedding.
‘I see Margaret went all out to get the place spick and span for the gathering,’ said Howard in as close as he usually got to a quiet voice as he joined his daughter.