and I just. I dunno. I cried so much I yelled.
And then when my mum died ten years later, again I remember such clear weird little details of it: I was out drinking the night before and woke up in the most drunk sleep pose ever (entirely face down, face entirely enveloped by the pillow, and surrounded by a tacky pool of your own saliva, and honestly sleeping for six hours in that position I don’t know how I’m not the dead one) and the first thing I did was look at my phone because I am a millennial and I remember it being early, even for me – in the 6 a.m. hour, still, an hour I am incredibly unfamiliar with – and I had three missed calls from my sister and so I knew already what that means, and I called her quickly – still face down, somehow, I did not turn over for this phone call – and she said ‘Yeah it’s your mum she’s—’ – and a little pause – ‘—she’s gone, mate’, and I remember saying ‘okay’ and crying exactly one tear – such a pathological number of tears, it was out of my left eye and I remember it dropping with a soft thump onto the pillow beneath me – and I said ‘okay,’ and then, ‘what can I do?’
And it turns out one of the major things I can do is buy a ‘sorry you had to find my mum dead!’ beer basket for the neighbour. I am searching online for somewhere that delivers next day, and I cannot decide which beer basket seems more appropriate – the £35 version, eight craft beers and one tube of salted snacks, or the £55 version, all that and more? I am torn because obviously finding an actual corpse is probably quite a bad shock but also I am poor and 25 and my parents are dead and now I’m the only one left to provide for me and also I have a funeral to pay for and £55 for some beer and some ribbon is a lot. I spend like 15 minutes hovering the mouse between the £35 option and the £55 one. What, truly, is the price we put on the act of finding our mother dead in her bedroom on a mild June morning? I sigh and I click. It turns out it is £55.
My parents are dead and so I can tell you from experience that literally nobody alive knows what songs you want playing at your funeral, so if this is important to you then put some sort of system in place now, because here’s what happened with my dad—
‘What … does anyone know what music Dad liked?’
‘What CDs does he have in his house?’
‘He literally has one CD and it’s Eric Clapton’s Greatest Hits.’
[Extremely tedious half-hour while everyone tries to remember out loud a single instance of them seeing my dad enjoy a song]
‘I think he liked jazz so let’s bang some Miles Davis while we lower him into the pit.’
‘Cool.’
And with my mum—
‘This again. What’s in the CD pile?’
‘Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews from Catatonia, Baby It’s Cold Outside CD single.’
‘Inappropriate.’
‘Jiggerypipery, the self-titled album by Jiggerypipery, who are a local tour band who make what the back of the CD describes as “fun bagpipe music”.’
‘A hard no.’
‘And U2, The Joshua Tree, on tape cassette.’
‘I do not understand how someone can live sixty plus years and this is all they have to show for it.’
We ended up playing the soundtrack from the musical Sarafina! for reasons I cannot recall now. For the record, I see my funeral as the only time I can force my friends to sit and endure my music tastes – the AUX chord is always snatched away from me at parties because obscure lyric-less drone music does not exactly get the vibe popping, so I literally have to wait until I die to take it – and so I want Ratatat’s Germany to Germany/Spanish Armada/Cherry movement from the first album, Rome from their fifth album, then whichever 14-minute-long Fuck Buttons song is in my Spotify most played library when I die. Follow these instructions to the letter or I shall haunt you all forever.
My parents are dead and suddenly the home I grew up in has shifted, imperceptibly enough to feel alien, to feel like a house, now, rather than a home, to feel like four cold walls and a roof. The fridge doesn’t work. There’s no food in. The cats are not pattering about. My sister, deranged with the repetition of administration and grief, has gone back to London to work. It’s just me, alone here, padding around this place I own now, feeling as if I’m a ghost.
I got trapped in a wardrobe, here, once. This was when my parents were alive: I remember, actually, it was a rare moment of peace for them, a searingly white-hot day and I watched them, out of their bedroom window, my face and nose pressed tight against the net curtain, and they were chatting and repotting plants and seemingly both in a good mood, so I left them to it – I was, like, six at this point, maybe five – and so I turned around and went to play imagination games in the spare room at the back of the house, and ended up clambering into this old wardrobe – my mother, a sort of amateur seamstress, had stuffed it with old plastic bags of rags and fabric ends and half-done pieces of knitting, which were sort of slippery and fun to climb – and then the whole thing started to creak and tip and long story short it collapsed on me, vacuuming me entirely to the floor.
Now: a normal child, in this situation, I imagine, would scream. Yell or something. Thump on the wardrobe panels. Beg for a fraction of help. But I think I just accepted that hey, I guess this is how I die, swaddled in dozens of clothes bags, trapped in pitch blackness beneath a wardrobe. It was about 20 minutes before they came inside and found me, muffled steps up the stairs turning to quick sharp noises of alarm before my dad heaved the wardrobe off me, and I remember both their faces staring down at me, and the light pouring in, a combination of extreme did-my-child-die and just bafflement, and my mum just said: ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ and I replied: ‘I just didn’t want to be any bother.’
I just remember that story a lot because whenever I try and recall my parents being together in the same room and not mad at each other that’s all I can ever think of. Me politely resigning myself to living the rest of my life out as a wardrobe boy, RIP, 1987–1992.
My parents are dead and I’m shopping at Tesco for vol-au-vents. Planning a wake is like planning the most vibeless party in actual existence: all the same motions as planning an actual party (invites, finger foods, the chilling of drinks) but none of the buzz or excitement, extremely low chance of anyone getting laid. In my trolley is: a tray cake, feeds 15; a number of 3 for 2 party foods, including cocktail sausages; a light and refreshing mix of own-brand lemonades and colas, as well as a respectful two (two.) boxes of beer. My sister is off in the far reaches of the shop buying lasagne supplies – my mother had this tradition where she would throw a party every Christmas and invite everyone round (and she was the exact type of woman to call such a party a soirée, to give you a bead on my mother), and for whatever reason her showstopper party food was ‘a lasagne’, she would make like four or five of these great, heaving lasagnes for people to eat great huge cubes off from slowly oily-going paper plates – and my sister intends to honour that tradition, God Bless Her Soul, by making her own lasagne, which everyone will tell her at the party in a quiet voice – it’s a very good lasagne, thank you – but with all the unsaid context being but it’s not Hazel’s lasagne, and I think my sister knows this, deep down. Anyway we are politicising the lasagne.
The point is that I am tired, so tired, it has been two weeks of admin and grief and sorting and nothingness and it’s still not over, yet, and I am taking a brief moment of respite while my sister weighs up beef vs lamb mince to lean on the trolley and stare at the freezer aisle and sigh, and someone says Joel, they say Hello,
