a final wave, I went to check on Mrs Craig. My regular visits might not make any difference to her day, but they mattered to me.
A gust of icy wind cut through my winter coat as I waited for the temporary traffic lights to change. Amber pools of light from passing cars lit up the non-stop drizzle that fell from the heavy grey clouds. Darkness curled around me. Last week it had been bright sunshine; the row of forlorn daffodils at the roadside were presumably regretting their optimistic decision to pop open. I awkwardly used my elbow to press the button at the crossing. I’d been trapped there that morning on my way to work, forced to ignore two stocky men wearing grubby hi-viz vests who’d hollered to me from the scaffolding opposite. The workmen had long downed tools and gone home.
I’d stayed much later than I’d planned, working on the final prep for Mr Stuart’s big day next week. I hadn’t even realised what time it was. Finally, the traffic stopped and the beeps rang out. I still made sure to turn my head two, three times to check the coast was clear before I put a foot in the road. You couldn’t be too careful. I’d read recently that the number of road deaths had hit a five-year high.
‘Ah, here she is, our saving Grace,’ Raj bellowed as I walked into his shop.
‘Evening,’ I smiled.
‘Oh, wait!’ He held up a chubby hand and reached the other under the counter, which was covered in neat displays of chewing gum, reams of scratch cards and a plastic cabinet containing e-cigarette liquid. He pulled out a pocket-sized notebook and flicked through it.
‘OK, here we go.’ He cleared his throat and lowered his voice slightly. ‘Hello, Grace. How’s life?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘No!’
He made me jump. ‘What?’
He sighed loudly and ran a hand across his sweating brow. ‘Ah, wait. I’ve got it wrong. You’re meant to say how’s life and then I reply with, fine, pause, and how’s death! Geddit?’ He chuckled.
This was Raj’s thing. Since I’d bought the flat upstairs and he’d realised who his neighbour was and what she did for a living, he’d decided to use me as some sort of muse for his fledgling stand-up routine. A way to test out naff jokes and build up his material. It had been going on for years. If you asked him what he did he’d tell you he was a comedian, despite never performing for a paying audience in his life. His proper job was running the Minimart-post-office-deli. Every time a witty, or not so witty, one-liner came to him he’d immediately pull out his joke notebook and jot it down. Often I would ask him when he was going to actually perform this material at a stand-up night, but he’d always insist he wasn’t ready yet. I could understand why he was reluctant.
‘Good one,’ I smiled awkwardly. It was marginally better than when he insisted on saying ‘Good Mourning’ to me, heavily emphasising the mouuuurrning part, then doing a funny thing with his index fingers as if banging an imaginary drum in the air.
‘Oh, I’ve got another too. It came to me when I was helping Rani with the latest stocktake.’ He licked his lips and changed his stance as if standing under an imaginary spotlight. ‘Every year we get sent birthday cards, but how about a deathiversary card? They would really put the fun into funerals.’ He waited for my reaction.
Inside I cringed but, not wanting to hurt his feelings, I forced myself to clap weakly. ‘Ha, yeah, that would be, er, interesting.’
‘It needs a bit extra work that one. Oh, guess what!’
‘What?’
‘No, you need to guess!’
I pretended to look like I was deep in thought, clearly taking too long to come up with a suitable suggestion for this slightly tedious game.
‘Ok, I’ll tell you. You won’t get it anyway. Peter Kay messaged me back!’ He did this funny jazz hands thing and had his mouth so wide open I could see the fillings on his bottom row of teeth.
‘That’s, er, nice. Do I know him?’
‘He’s a famous comedian, Grace. He did that whole thing about garlic bread…’
I was still lost.
‘Never mind. He’s just, like, a big deal on the circuit. And now I guess I am too!’ He paused, the smile faltering slightly at my lukewarm reaction.
‘So how do you know this Peter King?’
‘Kay. I follow him on Twitter.’
I knew he was expecting me to match his levels of excitement.
He paused then scrunched up his face, thinking. ‘Well, he didn’t exactly message me. He liked a tweet. That joke I told you last week, how thinking about burial plots is the last thing you need.’
Twitter had never been my thing. From the looks of his timeline it was just him spamming comedians with some of his material. Also, I knew for a fact that Raj used a younger – and much more handsome – Bollywood actor as his profile picture. He’d shown me one time, when he’d tried to explain about likes and retweets.
‘But hey, when I do go on tour I can now say as liked by Peter Kay!’ He spread his hands across the counter as if presenting a banner.
‘Isn’t that a lie though?’
‘Nah, a bit of celebrity endorsement will do wonders for my career. Trust me.’
‘But won’t this Peter Kay find out?’
Raj shook his head. ‘He’s a busy man, Grace. Far too busy to be worrying about the likes of me. Well, for the moment at least!’ He chuckled. ‘Anyway, what can I get for you? The usual?’ He had thankfully put his joke book away.
I didn’t mind that he found my job such an amusing source of entertainment. I was used to people’s extreme reactions when they found out what I did. Being a funeral arranger is either a serious conversation starter or an awkward conversation killer. It was also one reason why I wouldn’t play the dating game, despite Ms Norris’s kind encouragement. The one and only time that I’d reluctantly agreed to go for a coffee date, just to get my mum off my back, it had ended in complete disaster. It was bad enough that it wasn’t Henry sitting across the table from me. Instead it was a slightly anaemic man named Ian whose eyebrows were so well groomed I struggled to lower my eyes to the rest of his face. When I did, it wasn’t worth it.
I’d been dreading him asking me, ‘So, what do you do?’
Explaining that I work with death on a daily basis is hard for others to get their heads around. I’m sure other people don’t go on dates and discuss the last funeral they went to, but Ian felt he needed to tell me, in detail, all about his grandad, Ron, who’d died in July 2007. I could almost taste the egg vol-au-vents served at his wake. Not exactly pillow talk. I shuddered as Ian and his overpreened eyebrows swam in my head.
‘Yes, thanks, just these.’
I watched Raj place a pint of milk and a small granary loaf into the Bag for Life I always
