I wonder when I’ll acquire a funeral skillset—when I’ll be able to put the right weight into a handshake, or set my lower lip to solemnity. I watch my parents work the crowd and marvel at their mastery. They seem at ease with proceedings, comfortable in their own skin. Not only is my father unhindered by the ceremony of a suit, but he looks dignified—graceful even.
A crowd of us smoke by the bell tower. Conversation is light, but the mood could stand to be heavier. Laura is wearing a black pantsuit. Her hair is up in a bun. The austere outfit accentuates her blotchy complexion, shorn of its usual foundation.
I hope she might say something nice about my suit: compliment the cut, or tell me I look like a Beatle. I think of us slow dancing at the formal, her leaning in and whispering, You don’t half scrub up well. I blushed so hard that I had to look away. Kev was two-stepping on the conference room carpet, his bucket hand clamped to the small of Emily’s back. He wore a big gormless grin and everything was all right in his world.
We find his parents in the foyer. My hand falls into Beverly’s and I hear myself say I’m sorry. I try my solemn lip and get an upward nod in return. I’m not sure she recognises me—her son’s oldest friend. I suppose she might have been sedated. We move along the line, shaking hands and apologising for Kev being dead. When we reach Emily, she throws herself at Laura and bawls with abandon. I slide past and offer my sympathies to some distant aunt and uncle.
A sharp gale sweeps through the narthex. The congregation hurry to the pews. In the scrum, I’m separated from the others and find myself wedged between two elderly pensioners. They mumble to themselves in quiet prayer—their thorny fingers threading through the decades.
The chancel is decked out with red flowers and football regalia. A slow projector shows an assortment of photos. I watch as the images blossom onto the backdrop and hope that I might appear. But as soon as I do—a grainy scan of me and Kev in matching kits—I instantly wish I was invisible. In the torturous few seconds that I’m emblazoned onto the white screen, it seems as if the whole church has turned to stare at me. Eventually, the photo dissolves into another—Kev and Emily beside the fireplace, about to leave for the formal. The album cycles back to the start. One of the pensioners heaves a sigh.
The coffin comes. The chapel swells with a cocktail of grief: sharp sheets, dull throbs, bewildered teenage test tone. A young priest tries to conduct the chaos. His Tipp timbre is smooth and brown, his eyes are ablaze with zeal. He puts his palms together and invites us to celebrate the life of Kevin Fusco.
Laura leaves in a funeral car, while the rest of us go back to Sam’s. He hands out shots of whiskey and we pretend to have acquired the taste.
I sit at the piano and look for the middle C. My hand trips down the sharps and flats like a drunk in a silent film. I start to play Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, but Paul shoots me a stern look and I quietly close the fallboard.
‘Where’s Laura?’ He asks, perching on the end of the stool.
‘Went to the grave,’ I say.
‘I thought it was only for family?’
‘She thought that Emily might need her.’
He takes a nip from his cup and nods. I wish that he’d leave me alone.
Sam produces sparklers that his sister bought for Halloween. We light two and chase each other around the backyard. Paul says we’re acting like kids. I hang my head and notice a scorch mark on my shirt. Sam feels terrible. He fetches me a can from the fridge. We stand in the backyard and sip, as the dregs of the day sink behind a grey stone wall.
Laura’s hair is still in a bun, her chin is still set to solemnity. She seems unsurprised to find me on her gravel drive, can-drunk at one in the afternoon. She hurries me into the kitchen and seats me at the breakfast bar. The family spaniel, Clinton, makes a fuss at my feet. I ask her how the grave was.
‘She tried to throw herself on the coffin, Tone. Kept screaming about how it was all her fault—how she was to blame for the state he was in.’ She pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales. ‘Do you want some ice cream?’
With a bowl of raspberry ripple in front of me, I try to steer the conversation toward more innocuous subjects: university, part-time jobs, the likely longevity of Crunk.
‘Everything is tainted,’ she says. ‘These shiny new lives—they all seem so frivolous.’
I slather my ice cream with sauce. Clinton puts his head between my knees and begs. ‘Paul was asking where you were,’ I say, causing Laura to roll her eyes. ‘It’s always me he asks. It’s like, he goes out of his way to bring you up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he still holds a candle for you.’
‘Honestly, Tony? At a time like this?’
My spoon scrapes against the ceramic. Clinton curls into a quarter circle. Laura takes the bowls and sets them in the Belfast sink. Still with her back to me, she crosses the kitchen and glides down the dimly lit hall.
I wait a while before I follow.
An email goes out during reading week. The department seeks volunteers to help with an archiving project. I spend a month of Tuesdays on some subterranean floor of the library, scanning microfiche for a Record Office jobsworth. The fiche is from a long-defunct gazette. Every slide needs to be scanned, printed and punched before being set into a red leather binder.
At first, I stop to read the articles: smiling faces at the mayor’s charity luncheon, hyperbolic copy about a Scoop the Poop drive. I lose myself in classifieds and public notices: brown Capris and CB radios, help wanted, companions sought, deaths, weddings and fetes.
Before long, I tire of the humanity. I stop looking at what I’m scrolling through and lock into a robotic, industrious rhythm. I move so fast through the slides that the printer doesn’t have time to rest. It fires off ream after ream of crisp A4 like a miniature offset press.
Once in a while, the jobsworth will stand over my terminal and watch me while I work. He tells me that the project is a futile undertaking. He says that his colleagues are already in the process of digitising the archives and soon everything will be available on ‘the cloud.’
I take a smoke break on the hour, every hour. I stand beneath the library’s awning and seethe about the jobsworths of the world: how they’re trying to cram all of human endeavour onto a single computer chip, how they’d happily turn agony and ecstasy into binary and bits.
I wonder how many thousands of souls have appeared in the gazette. I imagine that seeing their name in that dire rag was the highlight of their existence. It occurs to me that the vast majority of lives are lived mere inches from the soil they sprouted from. In the end, they’re subsumed back into the compost and everything they saw— the long epochs and black swan events, the reflective glow of celebrity and vicarious thrill of other’s triumphs—was nothing more than light for them to bend towards.
Sometimes, I call Sam and vent about my musings. Sometimes, I call Laura and count the rings until her voicemail. Sometimes, I step out from under the awning and cross the road to the Union bar. I drink until my throat glows, then stumble home singing that I’ll find a brighter day. I wake in the attic room full of regret; the wet of my breath gathered at the foot of the skylight.
A month passes, the archiving project comes to an end. Another volunteer scans the final page, punches it and sets it at the back of a binder. An email is sent to advise the faculty that the anthology is available to view in Special Collections. The volunteers are thanked, but none of us by name.
My black suit hangs from the wardrobe door, a singe-free shirt gleams between the lapels. My mother swoops into the room and pulls the curtains.
‘Put that on,’ she snaps. ‘We’ll be late.’
‘Is there no tea? I’m only in the door.’
‘There’ll be sandwiches at Beverly’s. Do you know what you’re going to talk about?’
Father Duffy doesn’t allow eulogies from parishioners, so Kev’s family have planned speeches at the house. I’ve racked my brain all week, dredging up hazy concrete, natty balls blasted into garage doors. I’ve thought about Saturday afternoons spent smoking dope in the abandoned flats, summer nights building bonfires in the ruins of the old folks’ home.
Nothing Kev had done meant anything—none of it had an arc or a coherent narrative. Nothing tied a knot in his short and pointless life. These aimless events and experiences might come to mean something in the long, drawn-out existence I seem bound to live, but what use were they to Kev in his paltry nineteen years? What might a gathered crowd learn from a standard-issue child and derivative adolescence?
‘I don’t think I’m up to it,’ I say. ‘It’s just too much right now.’
My mother’s expression softens. She flattens her lip and rubs the ball of my shoulder. ‘Not to worry, love.’
Beverly looks hollowed out. Her eyes have burrowed deep into their sockets and her skin seems sallow beneath the church light. Kev’s father lays a hand on her back and whispers something in her ear. When I see this, my chin begins to wobble. I lift my head and look at the steeple’s crisscross beams. At evenly-spaced intervals, mosaics depict the Stations of the Cross. At the very tip of the spire, flanked by cobwebs and almost indiscernible, Jesus is laid into the tomb of Joseph.
Laura sits on the other side of the nave — a respectful spectator in the nosebleeds. Her stiff bun is back, as well as the solemn chin. We haven’t spoken since the funeral. She won’t answer my calls and she’s stopped replying to texts. I suppose that things are over between us.
The mass ends, we go in peace. The congregation walk the icy streets in silence, then huddle for warmth in the Fuscos’ living room. Cups and saucers are passed around, followed by cans of beer and whiskey. The adults mumble about the lovely service.
The mantle above the fireplace heaves with photos. My eyes are drawn to one of Kev and Emily on the night of the formal. I was across town when it was taken—forcing small talk with Laura’s insufferable parents. I cheer at the thought of never having to see them again.
Laura and Emily enter through the hall. I quickly duck into the kitchen. My father is standing by the counter, eating vol-au-vents straight from an aluminium tray.
‘Here,’ I say, handing him a paper plate. ‘Before mum catches you.’
He thanks me in his low tone—the dour alter ego he reserves for sombre occasions. We stand with our backs to the spread and share the sort of heavy silence that only occurs between father and son.
Emily moves to the settee when the speeches begin. I watch her from the kitchen, slowly sipping Chardonnay and staring into space. She wore the same vacant expression when I called on her after my last exam. We hurried up to the box room and locked the door. She put on Rubber Soul. I remember thinking how choked and close Michelle sounded—how the descending guitar runs made me feel a little seasick. As Kev’s uncle lands a well-rehearsed anecdote, I think of her narrow shoulders propped against the headboard. I think of the slow rise and fall of her chest; the patch of condensation gathered at the foot of her window.
There’s a flurry of activity in the hall. Kev’s brother tells everyone to follow him into the garden. He’s holding what looks to be a stack of parchment paper. Pulling at the centre, he unfurls an orb about the size of a beachball.
‘Sky lanterns,’ someone hisses. ‘They’re going to light one for every year he was alive.’
The Fusco family lay the lanterns on the lawn and light them one by one. The flames bathe the garden in hot, soft light. Gradually, the orbs begin to lift from the ground. The breeze spreads them out as they climb towards the night, each one plotting its own slow course into the dark.
Ryan Wiles’ stories have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman and Crossways Magazine. He was runner-up in the Wild Atlantic Words Competition and has been longlisted for the Write By The Sea Competition, the Creative Writing Ink Competition and the Cúirt New Writing Prize. He attended the Stinging Fly Summer School for Fiction and is currently working on a novel.