Still, I wonder what she looked like. What school did she go to; do they have pictures in the corridors, of former girls in a row, the class of — what year would she be? — the class of 1998.
So young.
Who could be that young?
All the time I am loading the dishwasher and pulling out the hoover and doing my morning round, the funeral is happening in my head. But I am not going to jump in the car and hack my way across town to Walkinstown. I am not that kind of person. I am not going to panic at the last minute and show up at the cemetery to check the faces at the grave and pick up a few words here and there, about what a fine girl she was, ‘irrepressible’, ‘full of fun’. Bloody right she was full of fun.
Or not. Maybe she was shy, unassuming. Easily impressed. She might have been a quiet kind of girl. A girl who was anxious to please.
No.
I am not going to find this out, or anything else. Because that would be obscene. I am not going to show up like a ghost at the wedding — what’s the opposite of that? — like a flesh and blood wife, at this last dance with the dead.
We had the salmon when he came home. Potatoes. A bit of asparagus.
‘Lovely,’ says my husband. ‘Delicious.’ Then he gets up afterwards and makes himself a sausage sandwich, cold from the fridge. Butter, mayonnaise, the lot.
And I say, ‘Why don’t you stick some lard in there, while you’re at it?’
This is the last real thing I say to him, for a long while. Where’s the gas bill gone when will you be home would you pick up Shauna from her ballet? We could do this for ever. After a few weeks of it, my husband gets a nervous cough: he wonders if it could be lung cancer. His toe is numb, isn’t that a sign of MS? And I just say, ‘Get it checked out.’ Because the girl is dead. So let’s not bother with the fuss and foother of getting back together. Let’s not do all that again. Not this time. This time let us mourn.
I am too proud. I know that. And in my pride I watched him — my fantastic, stupid man — lurch around in his life. And I did not offer him a helping hand.
Where’s the key to the shed when will you be home would you buy a pack of plastic blades for the Flymo?
The girl was with us, all this time. Dead or alive. She was standing at the bus stop on the corner, she was sitting in our living room watching Big Brother, she was being buried, night after night, on the evening news.
I think that milk’s gone off when will you be home I really don’t want the children having TV sets in their rooms.
After a month of this, I looked at my husband and saw that he was old. It did not happen overnight; it happened over thirty nights or so. My husband shaking hands with death. And what else? Thinking about it. Thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be dead, after all. Like she was.
Whenever I woke in the night, he was awake too. Once I heard him crying again; this time in the shower. He thought the noise of the water would cover it. I listened to him snuffling and choking in the spray and I realised it was time to put my pride away. It was time to call him back home.
On Saturday, after the supermarket run, I put on my good coat and my leather gloves. And a hat, even — my funeral hat. And when my husband said, ‘Where are you off to?’ — because God knows I never go anywhere without drawing a map — I said, ‘I’m going to visit a grave.’
I had a beautiful bunch of white lilies, all wrapped up in cellophane. I picked them off the kitchen counter and walked past him — I cradled the lilies against my shoulder and I walked past my husband, who was now old — and I did not look back, as I went out the door.
She did not matter to him, I know that. I know she did not matter. So I went to the cemetery and sought out her grave. I wandered through the headstones until I found her, and I put the lilies on the ground under which she lay, and I told her that she mattered. Then I went home and said to my husband. Then I went home and said to Kevin:
‘Let’s do something for Easter, what do you think. Something nice. Where would you like to go?’
YESTERDAY’S WEATHER
Hazel didn’t want to eat outside — the amount of suncream you had to put on a baby and the way he kept shaking the little hat off his head. Also there were flies, and her sister-in-law Margaret didn’t have a steriliser — why should she? — so Hazel would be boiling bottles and cups and spoons to beat the band. Then John would mooch up to her at the cooker and tell her to calm down — so not only would she have to do all the work, she would also have to apologise for doing all the work when she should be having a good time, sitting outside and watching blue-bottles put their shitty feet on the teat of the baby’s bottle while everyone else got drunk in the sun.
She remembered a man in the hotel foyer, very tall, he handled his baby like a newborn lamb; setting it down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet. And Hazel had, briefly, wanted to be married to him instead.
Now she grabbed a bowl of potato salad with the arm that held the baby and a party pack of crisps with the other, hoofed the sliding door open and stepped over the chrome lip on to the garden step. The baby buried his face in her shoulder and wiped his nose on her T-shirt. He had a summer cold, so Hazel’s navy top was criss-crossed with what looked like slug trails. There was something utterly depressing about being covered in snot. It was just not something she had ever anticipated. She would go and change but the baby would not be put down and John, when she looked for him, was playing rounders with his niece and nephews under the apple trees. He saw her and waved. She put down the bowl and the crisps on the garden table, and shielded the baby’s head against the hard ball.
The baby’s skin, under the downy hair, breathed a sweat so fine it was lost as soon as she lifted her hand. Women don’t even know they miss this until they get it, this smoothness, seeing as men were so abrasive or — what were they like? She tried to remember the comfort of John’s belly with the hair stroked all one way, or the shocking silk of his dick, even, bobbing up under her hand, but he was so lumbering and large, these days, and it was always too long since he had shaved.
‘Grrrr …’ said Margaret, beside her, rummaging a bag of crisps from out of the party pack. This is what happens when you have kids, Hazel thought, you eat all their food — while Margaret’s children, as far as she could see, ate nothing at all. They ate nothing whatsoever. Even so, everyone was fat.
‘Come and eat,’ Margaret shouted down the garden, while Hazel turned the baby away from the sudden noise.
‘Boys! Steffie! Please! Come and eat.’
Her voice was solid in the air, you could almost feel it hitting the side of the baby’s head. But her children ignored her — John too. He had lost his manners since coming home. He pretended his sister did not exist, or only barely existed.
‘How’s the job coming?’ she might say and he’d say, ‘… Fine,’ like, What a stupid question.
It made Hazel panic, slightly. Though he was not like that with her. At least, not yet. And he lavished affection on his sister’s three little children, he threw them up in the air, and he caught them, coming down. Still, Hazel found it hard to get her breath; she felt as though the baby was still inside her, pushing up against her lungs, making everything tight.
But the baby was not inside her. The baby was in her arms.
‘Come and eat!’ shouted Margaret again. ‘Come on!’
Still, no one found it necessary to hear. Hazel would shout herself, but that would definitely make the baby cry. She stood by the white wrought-iron table, set with salads and fizzy orange and cut ham, and she watched this perfect picture of a family at play, while beside her Margaret said, ‘God between me and prawn-flavoured Skips,’ ripping open one of the crinkly packets and diving in.