Huts47

It was sick. I knew it was, but I couldn’t help it. I was glad I was going to another funeral and not to work. At least Jammie Macintosh had the sure and certain hope of resurrection to play with.

I put one foot out of the bed and pulled it back in, as if I’d been stung. I couldn’t find enough energy to get up and move about. I knew now why they were called a half, because they only left that much of you intact. And I had been drinking doubles, so I didn’t even have that to lopsidedly lean on.

Ideally, I’d have liked a long lie. I’d the blankets strung around my head like an Egyptian mummy. But it didn’t work. There was a far noise. And there was near noise. And there was general background noise. Dad was like a 96-year-old woman. He was the only man I ever knew that put the telly on for company. And when you’d get up out of bed, stumble down the stairs, into a world that never changed. There’d be the dim aquarium light of the test card girl sitting with her bear and : ‘I was watching that,’ dad, tapping out his plans, with his feet in the kitchen, with a mug of tea, within reach, that you could walk on, and his back to the living room. But competing with the test card music was Radio Athlone. Dad brought the old country to our kitchen, every sleeping hour, even though he’d never been there. And dad was his own one-man band. He banged every door, trumpeted up and down the stairs and whistled like Dixie while chewing PK gum. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him, but silence.

‘Get up,’ said mum, poking her head around the bedroom door, ‘do you know what time it is?’

Of course I knew what time it was. I’d been watching a luminous Big Ben tick away the last three hours of my long long life.

Mum ignored me, hiding under the blankets from her, and laid out my clothes as if I was going to school.

‘And is smells like a brewery in here,’ she said, as if I was listening to her and not The Farming News on Radio Athlone a continent away.

Mum didn’t have a clue. She left me out one of my dad’s white shirts. And a black tie that thick I could have used it as a turban. But I didn’t care and just put it on.

‘You look nice,’ said mum, which meant all that I needed to complete the bank manager look was shiny black shoes and a short back and sides.

‘You’ll need these,’ said mum, giving a final rub to my shoes.

‘There you go young fella.’ Dad put a plate of toast down in front of me and a mug of tea.

He was as proud of his culinary handiwork as any hard working chef. But I was passé, having seen it all before. And I’d heard him rattling it all together at with the speed of a combine harvester stuck on first gear First he’d made the toast. He didn’t put margarine on right away. When he reheated it about an hour later he put the margarine on. Then when he’d tortured the toast enough to make it give up any pretence to be foodstuff, he manoeuvred the new improved industrial product onto a plate he’d already used, which saved dishes. He waited patiently, like a waiter, until he heard movement. Then Dad, the chef, reheated the margarine, so that it glazed and peeled off the toast like sunburnt skin.

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking a bite.

I’d learned not to turn down his toast, just leave it lying until it turned up a couple of days later. I took a gulp of tea instead, but it tasted like coal tar. He’d reheated the tea enough to put a skin on it.

I’d have been glad to get out, even if it was my funeral. Me, mum and dad stood briefly at our front door. We walked together slowly across the road to where the hearse was waiting, positing ourselves at the back of the group, neither family, nor not family of the bereaved, but something in between. Even though we were outside, people talked in whispers. Some wandered over, with a fag or a question or both and shook dad’s hand first, before moving back to the place they started.

Mum whispered Bundy hadn’t slept for four days since the tragedy, while I tried to stifle a yawn. Bundy kept us waiting like a bride. Finally the front door opened and George, Bundy’s brother stepped out. He wore the fixed face of a policeman, but had on his other, funeral uniform, black tie and black Crombie. He looked as if he’d put on a bit of weight, but it was difficult to tell with him. Another two men hurried out behind him, moving with the easy concern and unctuousness of the professional mourner. One settled himself into the driving seat of the hearse, and his confederate into the other, mourner’s car.

Bundy looked startled by the daylight, startled by the people standing waiting, and startled by the cars in our street, as if she just couldn’t figure it out. She lost about half her body weight. And the last time I’d seen such a skin colour was in a B movie at The LaScala, but she’d on the same clothes that she usually wore, which swamped her and left her adrift, standing, blinking in the sunlight.

Mum pushed her way through and moved swiftly up the path, putting her arm through Bundy’s. Bundy clenched at mum’s hand as if that was all that was holding her up, and she lay her head on mum’s shoulder as if she was a little girl.

‘Whyyyyyy?’ Bundy howled.

Everyone looked and tapped their feet and lit up fags and put them out fidgeted and got on with the business of not looking, until it was safe.

But I looked at mum being mum. Bundy was a big woman, but she seemed to collapse into herself so that there was nothing left but her shell. I knew it was not just Jammy, her husband, Bundy was mourning, but also her child, Little Addy and it was the incarnate pain of that which made me look away.

I don’t know if it was a memory, or a trick of the light, but I seemed to see a movement, Little Addy, with his dummy, clutching onto the ocean of his mother’s long black skirt. With a swirl of the skirt he was gone. I wanted to ask somebody, tell somebody, but nobody would believe me. And mum was too far away, with Bundy, sitting in the front car with her.

Me and dad and the rest of the mourners walked behind. St Margaret’s chapel wasn’t far. Canon Mallon was waiting, with Holy water and muttered prayers; the two main doors spread open, to welcome the entourage inside.

Mum sat with Bundy in the front row. Dad and me sat a couple of rows behind. The chapel was almost full, but it was just as if people had come from everywhere and nowhere, because somebody else expected them to. Jammie’s funeral was a matter not of life and death, but repetition and routine. With Bundy sitting on the front row, people could relax and put on their normal faces. It felt as if there would have been a bit of banter and carrying on if it wasn’t for one, not inconsiderable thing: Canon Mallon.

Bundy slumped, finally toppled, and slept, like a child, on mum’s shoulder, which was the only blessing, as Canon Mallon entered the pulpit. Perhaps God was a better man than Canon Mallon, but there was no forgiveness there, no diluting of Canon Law. Suicide was theft of the worst kind. It was theft of life itself. And for this there could be no forgiveness for Jammie; only the opening up of the gates of hell for all eternity. Canon Mallon would not bless the coffin. Nor would he allow it to be buried on consecrated church ground, with his son.

Padre Pio, all the Saints in heaven and Canon Mallon condensed time. There was no hocus pocus with Canon Mallon at Holy mass, no stigmata, no weeping statures. He did it the old-fashioned way, scooping up Latin, English and Limerick from the liturgy and rifled words at you from the gawping maw of his mouth like pepple-dash. It was like the school dance, standing up and kneeling down and looking about and wondering what to do next, even though you were supposed to know. Then you were transported outside smoking a fag and wondering: What the fuck was that?

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked Dad in the car going to the cemetery.

‘Put Jammie in a hole in the ground and get drunk,’ dad said, squeezing my shoulder, ‘everything always looks better in the morning’.