Marzipan Moon

M is for Marzipan Moon.

It was Sunday and exactly twelve and a half days after Daniel's
birthday. He hadn't enjoyed his birthday but he was already enjoying
today. In fact, it was the most enjoyable Sunday he had had for a very
long time. Which meant a lot because traditionally Sundays had long
been good. Until recently that is, when everyday had seemed to slump
before him beneath a sorrowful cloud of grey. And the reason why life
had looked so bleak? Because every heart beat and nervous breath was
tainted with the certain knowledge that he would be the last ever Cribb
of Cribb and Sons Undertakers.
It wasn't that he would have to sell up because business was bad - so
long as people kept dying business would always thrive. Besides which,
they were a well-established firm; they had been around for almost a
rude amount of time, or so it seemed to Daniel considering his present
predicament.
No, the problem that confronted Daniel was the same as the one that
had confronted his father and his father's fathers across the
generations. It was the difficult business of creating an heir, which
in turn involved the even more tricky business of winning the heart of
a future wife and the seemingly impossible task of persuading her to
embrace the family business. In a very small number of years it would
be his turn to look to the future existence of the Cribbs. Daniel's big
fear was that he wouldn't succeed.
It didn't matter how he looked at it; this monster simply would not
diminish. It didn't even help knowing that he wasn't the only person
living with unconquerable fear - there was a boy called Jason Clefitt
at his school who also lived in the shadow of fear; or rather he used
to anyway. Daniel spent much of his time thinking about his future
task. It seemed to him that it would be the biggest challenge he would
ever have to overcome. If only it was as simple as it had been for his
father and perhaps his great grandfather too. It seemed clear that his
mother's family had helped out more than once over the years. The same
noses, the same hollow cheeks, the same dark eyes that seemed to stare
out from the bottom of wells. The two families - the Cribbs and the
Huxtons of Huxton and Sons Slaughterhouse were definitely too similar
in appearance by far. However, this time round there was no young Miss
Huxton for him to visit on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps with a misplaced
clutch of hyacinths from the day's big funeral. The big funerals were
always held on Sundays and that's why they were once the best day of
the week.
It hadn't been a bad week really; he'd managed to salvage a couple of
gold fillings and a titanium hip replacement from the soft bed of
powdery ashes in the crematorium. He'd exchanged the gold for cash from
old Mr Hargreaves at Hargreaves Pawn Shop. The shiny metal joint,
however, he'd decided to hold onto just in case Cribb senior needed one
in a year or two. Recycling was a traditional task for any undertaker
and it went a long way to supplement his small allowance. Despite his
treasure chest, he didn't spend wildly, knowing as he did how
transitory possessions were. Aside from business, his week at school
hadn't been so bad either. The bullying had subsided to a bearable
level and he was no longer forced to enter the classroom to the
adolescent strains of the 'Adams Family'. Even the stream of dead mice
that he sometimes found in his school locker or satchel had dried
out.
In retrospect, perhaps this sudden upturn of school life was largely
due to Jason Clefitt's recent absence. Of all his school peers he made
Daniel's life the hardest. Daniel even began to wonder that, had he
gone sooner, he might have succeeded in asking out Anya - the pretty
daughter of the launderette owners on the corner of his road. In view
of his bigger problem, the bullying he had received from young Jason
Clefitt seemed unforgivable. You would have thought that Jason would
have shown more compassion to Daniel seeing as they both knew fear so
well. In Jason's case it was a phobia of marzipan, the lightest hint of
its sweet, yellowy fragrance made him grind his teeth and stick out his
tongue until the tip went purple. Yet Jason never showed any sympathy
for Daniel's predicament. In fact, one day he placed a straw dolly on
Daniel's desk and proclaimed it the 'Bride of Dracula'. Tears streamed
down Daniel's face as Jason showered him with dead fly confetti. The
worst part had been watching the laughter pour from the faces of all
his real future brides in the class. That was all history now, all just
so many cobwebs blowing pathetically in the breeze. Events like that
simply made the present situation all the more right, all the more
absolutely, deliciously right and just. Yes, Sundays were definitely
the best days again.
Two closely linked events created this perfect state of affairs. The
first involved the Cribb tradition of being given full responsibility
of your first cadaver on the twelfth day after your twelfth birthday.
This momentous event involved spending twenty-four hours alone with it
in the cold confines of the Cribb and Sons morgue. During this time all
sorts of strange behaviour was both possible and natural. For instance,
some people vomited profusely on first sight of the corpse, others held
conversations with it as though it were still living and still others
were so deeply affected that they would see its unstaring eyes looking
out from the eyes of other people for months. The second event
concerned Jason Clefitt. He probably would have treated Daniel
differently, if only he'd realised that he was destined to slip on a
pile of wet sycamore leaves in front of a bus. And that today, his
cold, little corpse would end up resting on a slab under Daniel's
watchful eye.
Daniel stared deeply into the distorted world reflected in Jason's
eyes. This strange land seemed to be made of gold and populated solely
by tumbling buildings and odd-limbed beasts. Looming right in the front
of this golden world was a gigantic moon held effortlessly in space by
the hand of a monstrous grinning giant. Daniel smiled as he remembered
the difficulty he'd had buying all that marzipan, he smiled again as he
remembered the fun he'd had shaping it into giraffes and waltzers and
fairground slides, then he smiled even more as he moved the marzipan
moon closer to Jason's purple tongue.