know at school (she, the girl, was a good five or six rungs up the attractiveness ladder than me – I was an extremely obese smooth-faced 40-year-old mum-of-four looking kid for most of my adolescence, with a voice that seemingly took five years to break, and school hierarchy is defined by exactly two axes – who is hot, or at least if not hot then who get tits or a beard first; and who is hard, and the hard boys get with the tit girls and form these sort of royal allegiances, and kids like me get Really Into Videogames And Robot Wars And Metal Music – and so despite sharing a classroom with me for five consecutive school grades did not, in fact, know who I was) and also a former colleague of my mother’s, which is why she half recognises me more than I do her. ‘It’s Jackie,’ she says, ‘I used to work with your mum.’
And her face crumples and she goes: ‘I heard about the cancer.’ And I nod. And then she goes: ‘How is she doing?’ And I realise she does not know that my mother is dead.
And so now I am stranded here with a trolley full of wake food and a dilemma. Do I, really, want to do this in the middle of a supermarket freezer aisle section? Do I really want to have to explain what all the food is for, and how and why? We can pretend that I went through this – that I, like a lightning flash, rapidly weighed up the pros and the cons and decided logically on an outcome. We can pretend that happened when it did not. Instead, instinct kicked in and
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not so great.’ Technically this was not a lie. And Jackie said: ‘Oh, well,’ and said, ‘give her my best.’ And I walked away thinking: that was a very strange thing that I just did. That was a very unusual thing to do.
My parents are dead and there is always cake at the funeral. It’s weird eating cake and being sad: at my dad’s, his ex-wife, Annie, had made one of the most astonishing cakes I’d ever eaten, a dense low chocolate cake with a mirror-finish ganache that shone like glass, and I was two slices, maybe three slices in – I was, as aforementioned, an especially large shapeless teenage boy with a sweat problem – when one of my mum’s cousins who I had never met ushered me over to his armchair. And he said, do you not think you need to lay off the cake? And I thought: today of all days, dickhead. Today of all days you come and tell me this.
Funeral guest lists are unusual affairs: you are as surprised by the attendees as the non-attendees. A throng of my sister’s closest uni mates – all in the first great flush of their early twenties and ostensibly with better shit to be doing than this – were at my dad’s; his lifelong best friend, Don, left the voicemail we left him telling him the news unanswered. At my mum’s funeral, none of her side of the family attended, including her closest cousin, Josie – but clearly she was popular at work because an entire office’s worth of people lined up to shake my hand and tell me what a good laugh she was. Only after death do you see facets of the living you once knew through the eyes of those who knew them away from you: you learn who thinks them kind, who considers them wise, who considers them a best friend. They, all of them, line up to tell you how they were capital-G Good: we are, all of us, washed of sin when we die. When we live we are jagged and complex and fucked up and we oscillate between joy and despair, and all of that is flattened out in death, all of those wrinkles uncrumpled. We go into the ground as saints.
My parents are dead and forms; forms, forms; forms, forms, forms. There is a form to declare death and you have to pay for each printout, which means you have to predict exactly how many corporations and banks and agencies are going to ask for certified proof of death and then pre-emptively pay £12 for them to have it, and we umm and ahh and ask for four (you need two, at most: if you take anything from this, just know that everywhere takes photocopies, and save yourself £24). Then you have to, as in our case where there is no will (while I am here handing out advice: if someone draws you up a will and you go through the hurdle jumping of defining exactly who gets what in a will and how the will should break up, and where everything goes after you die, and all you have to do to verify that will is sign it, exactly once, please sign it exactly once, and do not leave it, unsigned, for two years, on the table next to you among a big pile of post, Mum), jump through the various hoops to invoke probate, a sort of de facto all-of-this-dead-person’s-shit-now-belongs-by-blood-to-you ritual where I had to go to a local family court, get knife searched on the way in, then swear godlessly on a sign of the cross to say that I am the one true heir to a £90,000 terrace near Sheffield, nobody else may make claim on my land. The bank wants to know she’s dead, the electricity company. I stop chasing the £800 left in her building society account because the constant administration of it was too exhausting. The government sends me a letter to tell them they overpaid her pension, i.e. made payment into her account exactly once post-death, and now they would like that money back, now: I tear the paper up and scatter it into the bin. I am warned that people might wheedle out like cockroaches from beneath the family fridge: someone, somewhere, some distant cousin, might try to make a claim on what thin gruel there is left, and to be prepared for it. They mean legally, but I want it in blood: I am angry, so angry, I am ready to meet anyone head on, if anyone even steps to me and tells me they want a penny of what’s mine I will tear at them until they are just a mashed pile of red, I will punch and punch and punch, I need this, I need them to come out, I want so bad somebody to take this out on, I need it.
My parents are dead and one day, three years later, I go back there, to the house, after we’ve sold it. This is a mistake: I’m watching from sort of afar, in case an old neighbour sees and recognises me and we have to do a whole awkward thing, and everything feels juddery, at once familiar and not. The house looks more or less the same – steam rises from the exhaust vent on the boiler we had put in a few years ago; the smoke bush my dad planted 20 years ago still looks somehow both fragile and overgrown in the front garden – but it’s not. It’s late October, cold but not freezing, and, on the doorstep, there’s a pumpkin, carved for Hallowe’en. We never left a pumpkin out, even once. And then suddenly I am overcome with the realisation that this isn’t mine, now; that another family exists in this space, fills every corner of it with their own existence, their own sofa positioning, their laughs echoing on the walls they now own, their voices shouting upstairs for dinnertime, their crap filling the basement. I feel like a ship on the sea with endless deep blue beneath me and nothing holding me up. No anchor, no home. Someone else’s pumpkin makes me lose my entire mind.
My parents are dead and my friends are trying their best. My friend takes an afternoon off work and drives me out to the countryside, out far away from the grey jagged misery of the town, and I wind the windows down and let the warm June air rustle my hair, and I inhale bugs and lungfuls of green, wholesome air, and I put my hand out of the window and wave it through the wind, and then we stop at a pub overlooking green rolling hills, starched yellow almost in the sunlight, and we both sit down with amber ales and he tells me he thinks he has cancer.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
And he sits stiff-backed in double denim and says: ‘In my bowels. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’
And I say Jesus, I say Jesus Fucking Christ. What is with everyone getting cancer?
And he says I know.
And we drive in silence back to the town and we line up more beers in another pub and meet some friends and he tells them he thinks he has cancer (‘In my bowels,’ he says. ‘Blood. Bad blood, that black blood. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’) and he starts crying so much the landlord very quietly asks us to leave the pub, because quote, unquote we are really bringing the vibe down, and then the next pub we go into we are also asked to leave because of the crying thing, too. And at the funeral a week later I ask him if he’s coping okay and he says a cheerful ‘Yep!’ and then proceeds to not ever mention cancer or die over cancer at any point over the next three years, and I figure there is something, about death, there is something that brings out the weird little crevices in all of us.
My parents are dead and it’s a year or so later and everyone thinks that I’m fine including me. I’m cat-sitting for my sister,
