No one — not even Phyllis Vance — seriously doubted that Dave Rudman had taken his own life: the heavy history of depression, the toxic jungle of his brain chemistry, the loss of both son and career, the opportunity, the scrawled notes in the margins of the newspaper: EMPTY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH, TAKING THE PLUNGE. These were, if not incontrovertible truths, at any rate telling clues in the absence of any others. There were no others — the Turks, their cab, their breakfast at the Little Chef — no one had noticed any of this, while in Clapton, Fatima bore the consequences of the crime: more bruises on arms and legs, Rifak in a raki-sodden, self-piteous heap.
Even so, Phyllis Vance had enough canniness to introduce doubts into the mind of the local coroner, so many doubts that the death certificate laconically recorded the end of Dave's wayward journey through life with a further 'misadventure'.
If it bothered Phyllis that her lover was to be interred in Willingale — so near to and yet so remote from his native city — she showed no sign of it. In death she was more proprietorial of Dave Rudman than she had ever been during his life — she needed him near to her and Steve. Not that she was off-putting when it came to Michelle and Carl — she wanted them at the funeral more than anyone else; there to observe how properly it had all been arranged, and how skilfully she had talked round the priest — a circuit vicar who passed through Willingale once a month like a tardy rural bus service — into committing this recent and most unobservant of his parishioners.
For the fractured Devenish family — who had driven from London respectively silent, stunned and surly in their opulently padded seats — this voyage in their brand-new Volkswagen Touareg was way off road. Michelle, irretrievably lost in her memories of how it all went wrong, lacked even the spirit to argue with Cal when, bedevilled by nerves, he took wrong turning after wrong turning. In the back, immersed in a soundscape injected straight into his brain by a computer, Carl smirked, then winced. He couldn't tell which of them he hated more — his slutty mummy, his unreal real daddy, or the stupid fucking cabbie who'd blown his bollocks off. There were painful blisters full of nicotinic fluid on the insides of Carl's skinny arms, for at night, at the open window of his bedroom, looking out over the light lagoon of the city, he touched the furious tip of a cigarette to his own flesh, desperate to discover if he could feel anything at all any more.
When they finally drew up outside the two churches of Willingale, the September day, which had been brooding all morning, began to arrange itself in the purpling drapery of a coming downpour, unfurling great swags of cumulonimbus on to the shushed land. Stepping down from the high vehicle, Michelle found herself aptly diminished and was able, in all humility, to approach the similarly shrunken figures of Paul and Annette Rudman, who stood by the lychgate with their daughter, Sam, uncertain of what they should do or feel. Michelle tore away the fine embroidered cloth to show them her cropped, ginger head. They ought to … They have a right … I wish they'd under —… Chopped-off intimations of her own shame accompanied her silent obeisance. Cal hung back, while Carl advanced and applied his lips to the strange faces of his former granddad and granny.
It was a measure of the dissipation of the Church's doctrine — its moral authority knocked over as casually as a drunk topples a beer glass — that a suicide's funeral was to be held in the more youthful of these senescent buildings. But then, self-murder and the mildewed hassocks, the musty drapes, the tarnished communion rail, the worm-holy rood screen, the foxed flyleaves of the prayer books — it all sat well together. After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until, speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self-murderers — they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit. 'Dearly beloved,' they intoned — and meant it, because if they expected anyone to pitch up at all, they had to go round to their parishioners' houses and help them on with their underpants.
Clear across the flat lands of Essex the spires stabbed up at the sky, abandoned launch pads from which the soul ships had long since blasted off. Inside them, clad in laughably obsolete uniforms — frilly laboratory coats, army surplices — the priests did kitchen-garden juju with corn dollies and ewers full of sour water. They were marionettes and mime artists, fifth-rate impressionists at the end of the world pier, officiating over a state cult for which the state no longer had any use.
Michelle stood at the back behind a ragtag bunch of mourners who could have comfortably been accommodated in three London cabs. She recognized none of them besides immediate family. Not Anthony Bohm and Jane Bernal, nor Mo from the taxi garage. Faisal was a stranger to her — and Fred Redmond a terrible sight, guilt-stricken almost to the point of expiring. Nonetheless, in her ignorance Michelle realized that this was where I came in. An involuntary hand went to her head, and she felt the impoverished frass of middle-aged hair thin on her scalp. She conjured up the cavernous, suburban Catholic churches of her childhood, where Cath Brodie wept, rent her British Home Stores garments, and even banged her head on the flags. Michelle recalled the lubricious sanctity and smelly mysticism of these venues. At least… at least it was dark in there, while here was bright and desiccated, the priest's hands were as papery as the pages he turned, his voice rustled out: 'We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord …' Phyllis was weeping softly — Annette Rudman looked straight ahead through the battleship-grey legs of a medieval knight imprisoned in a glass slide. Through force of habit her husband checked his watch and made a wager with himself on the length of the sermon.
'When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin … thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man therefore is but vanity.' Michelle Brodie smoothed black silk over her leg. All my life — my adult life — I thought the secret lay in birth … but all along the secret was that we're going to die. In that moment, with the priest starting to say a few uplifting words about a man he'd never known, all the suppleness left Michelle, body and mind slackened, and she exhaled deeply. She felt her age — and she looked it as well.
At the graveside Carl looked anywhere save at that earthy trench. He eyed a little posse of local kids who were lounging in the road on their BMX bikes … fucking chavs. Their baggy jeans rode up over their skinny shanks as they hobby-horsed up and down, scooting fallen beech mast and immature chestnuts with their trainers. Carl felt his top lip — the transparent down of the year before was hardening into stubble. 'Man that is born of woman …' dad that is born of mum '… hath but a short time to live …' is fucking dead you mean! Yet there was a sincerity in these words that not even an adolescent could sneer away, no matter how desultory the hireling's delivery: 'Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven …' Right at hand was a man who was prepared to be a father to Carl, and, intuiting that now was the right time, Cal laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.