it looks great in here.’
‘Ah, you think?’ Devlin looks gratified. ‘Been a back-breaker this one but I’m pleased with it. Did you know it before?’
‘Er … I knew it but I wasn’t a customer.’
‘Yes, a bit of a drinkers’ pub, as they say? The previous owners had let things get very bleak. Could see it was a diamond in the rough though.’
‘So much so! Wow.’
It’s now lovely enough it makes me feel happier just being here.
‘We’re still a week off opening so we’ve not got the tills up and running, so it’s a free bar. Still, less for you to do.’
I smile and nod even though I am experienced enough at bar keeping to know free bars are an absolute bloodbath, and free bars at wakes, doubly so. Once you remove the need to pay, people are animals. As Mark said, the money is great, and it’s only now I start to figure why this might be. This is a wild lock in with no clear end.
It’s also the first time I’d been near a funeral since my dad’s, twelve years ago.
When I was fifteen or so, my mum pinned the order of service for her cousin Janet, a physiotherapist in Swansea, to the corkboard in the kitchen. It said A Celebration of The Life Of and inside there were photos of Janet in a clown’s outfit at a party, in a kayak, raising a watermelon margarita to a camera lens next to her girlfriend. The dress code was ‘be a rainbow’. Mum sent flowers.
I recall my dad huffing and saying: ‘I don’t like this “celebrating” and holiday snaps and jollification of mortality. Let death be death. It’s sad. It doesn’t need this modernisation where we’re in Hawaiian shirts, trilling KUMBAYA MY LORD, KUMBAYA and cheering them on their way.’
‘Janet chose her own funeral,’ Mum said.
‘Then Janet is being selfish – it wasn’t for her, was it? It’s the very definition of an event where you should only think of other people’s feelings.’
Mum gasped and Dad muttered about going to the shops if anyone wanted anything and left the room.
It was only years later I realised Mum probably didn’t go the funeral because she knew Dad would react like this. Was he really bothered about happy-clappy send-offs? Or was it a way of providing them both with an excuse for their non-attendance, so they didn’t have to spend a weekend in Wales with each other for company? The argument wasn’t about what it was about. Maybe none of their arguments were about what they were about.
It didn’t make Dad’s funeral three years later any easier, knowing that he wouldn’t have approved of gaiety, that he wasn’t religious and said it was ‘the plunge into eternal TV test card nothingness.’ In a strange irony, he hadn’t thought of our feelings.
For his send-off, we had the standard package of inexpensive coffin, MDF with veneer finish, a service at a church that Dad never visited but Mum wanted as it was posher than a crematorium, then a wake in the adjoining hall where young staff in white shirts and dark trousers served hot drinks from catering-sized canisters and vinegary warm wine from boxes.
I can taste the dislocated, bad-dream-like nauseous quality of it as if it happened yesterday. The feeling the universe had taken a sudden mad swerve, a left turn into some grotesque alt-verse that it should be possible to clamber back out of. Mum and Esther had identified the body; I was in my first year at university. An ordinary morning, when Mum heard him crash to the kitchen floor, rushed down and found him prone, lying in a lake of cafetière coffee.
I wanted to walk up to one of the poker-faced, white-gloved men from the undertakers, schooled not to make eye contact, and grab them by the grey lapels. Say: ‘There’s been a terrible mistake. That’s my dad in that coffin. Death happens to other people, I get that, but not to my actual dad, and definitely not yet. I need to discuss something with him urgently, so get him out of there.’
The word loss had a new meaning, or its meaning became clear: a person who loved me, in a completely unique and irreplaceable way, had vanished and took with him our relationship. And it wasn’t only Dad that disappeared, but his perspective, his encouragement, his approval, his opinion of me. There was no one else who could be my dad and I still badly needed one. I was never going to see him again? Ever?
We hadn’t said goodbye.
I return to these memories reluctantly. Then I push them away again. It’s like forcing too many things into a cupboard and using the door to keep them jammed in. Knowing it’s a short-term fix, and that the next time you open it – instant cascade.
Another clue that this wake might be more ‘Cousin Janet’ than ‘my dad’ are the pictures hung like bunting, across the bar. A lantern-jawed, strawberry-blond man in his thirties, larking it up: walking the Peaks, or dressed as a Roman centurion, the yellowy quality of 1990s pub trips, documented when photographs weren’t taken on phones and every man seemed to be in lumberjack shirt and light blue jeans. A sagging banner hangs above them, spelling out: RIP DANNY.
Oh, no. It’s a young person. The out-of-the-way, non-fashionable venue had made me assume otherwise. It stings. Someone who’d lived a long life, was in a care home and whose faculties had possibly gone to mush is one thing. I look at the images a second time, feel my throat tighten. However late this ends and thinly it spins my wages out, I won’t complain.
‘Should I start unboxing the glasses?’
I gesture at the stacks of Paris goblets and a spare wallpaper pasting table, with paper cloth.
‘Yeah that’d be great. You can pour out plenty of the red and white too because they’ll get drunk, of that I can be sure.’ He checks his watch. ‘About half an hour to lift off, they’re still chatting outside the church, it only just finished. Catholics, you know.’ He does a talking hand puppet mime. ‘They like a long ceremony.’
My gaze focuses again on the flowers and I see the words for the first time.
‘… IRN BRU?’ I ask.
Devlin turns to them, turns back. ‘Aha yeah, Dan loved Irn Bru. When we were brainstorming his favourite things it was Irn Bru, poker, booze and boobs and I didn’t think Co-op Funeral Service would agree to the others.’
I laugh, then check myself. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ I say, knowing from direct experience how inadequate those words are.
‘Ah, thanks Georgina, thanks,’ Devlin says, and I notice the charm of working for someone who remembers your name and uses it. It says: I know you are not merely my lackey and have a lively existence outside of this transaction.
‘No age, no age at all, but Danny was never going to make old bones.’
‘Oh …’ I say. ‘I am sorry.’
He shakes his head. ‘My best mate from my first job in a warehouse. Absolutely lovely guy, do anything for you, you know. But a thirsty one. Always on the hoy.’
I sense Devlin’s not easily offended and risk asking:
‘Was it … alcoholism he died from?’
‘Yeah. Well, yes and no. Got so pished he fell down some stairs, brained himself, massive bleed. Doctors said there
