The Funeral

(for PW)

Outside the crematorium, at midday, the boy stands with his delicate shoulders hunched against the cold and watches the mourners arrive. They come slowly at first, and then in droves, until he is entirely unsure as to how many people might soon be huddled in front of the chapel doors, waiting nervously to go inside.

Until now he had been okay. He’d organised the wreaths, the cars, the short notice contract with the vicar. He had stood squarely, stalwartly, beside his best friend’s mother when she directed dark, tired eyes down to where her boy – whose cheeks had suffered an overdose of synthetic colour – lay stretched out in an open casket.

As the rain starts to fall, it begins: a creeping, unsettled nausea in the pit of his stomach, accompanied by a suffocating tightness across the chest. It comes on quickly and without permission – a circling, inescapable, writhing sickness.

The boy, unable to call upon the full experience of his twenty-four years, claws desperately to regain focus. Somewhere deep within there exists a powerful truth certain to save him. It swims like nervousness in his veins, ready and willing to assure the conscious mind that everything is alright (that this is all in your head) but like the answer to a tricky crossword clue it stays hidden.

The wind picks up and in its biting embrace he is able to steady himself for a moment. He stares out at the car park to where a small group of people have gathered. He recognises one or two of the faces - many of which belong to alumni of Manchester Metropolitan University - and quickly realises that the girl closest to him, a professional looking individual wearing a dark smile, is the girl he had lost his virginity to.

Her name is Arienette, and seeing her again produces in him a sensation similar to fever. They have not been in the same place for more than three years. The boy did not expect, after speaking with her on the telephone two days after Alex had died, to feel so strangely affected when she arrived.

He watches her, a vision of lost familiarity, as she raises a small black umbrella against the rain and politely offers it out over the others. She is attractive in a dark green dress and black shoes. Only her hair colour has changed. What was once naturally brown is now a deep red, worn stylishly an inch or so below the shoulders. A sudden tremulous desire stirs at the sight of flesh he had once known so well. He recalls the tiny hall of residence flat they had shared, its filthy frame set in concrete, stacked high above several others just like it. Apparitions of burnt out tee-lights watered down to nothing and transformed into make-shift ashtrays flood his memory.

Nostalgically, he recreates the room in his mind: Arienette’s discarded underwear at the foot of the bed; pillow cases stained black with make-up; scores of unwashed wine glasses and empty cigarette packets scattered across the floor, the writing desk, the nightstand.

It was there they had shaken the hips of their relationship and fumbled excitedly to make contact during the early hours of the morning, when it was still dark outside and the world seemed hours away. Such recollections are soothing, and the frightened trembling spreading upwards in his legs eases a little. He digs his heels into the ground to stop the world from spiralling away.

Six years on, he thinks, and this is where two former lovers are to meet again. Here, amongst well-tended and long-forgotten gravestones; between the gentle, ritualistic handshakes and tearstained commiserations of Alex’s dearly beloved.

He wonders if she has brought with her a boyfriend, or perhaps even a fiancée. They are, after all, almost twenty five, and despite the boy’s own distaste for ceremony there seems to be something paralysing about hurtling towards a quarter century of existence that unveils an unexpected conformity in people. The University Classes, for the most part, make no exception.

To the less than casual observer she appears to be strictly in the company of old friends. Beside her is Connor, a philosophy graduate both he and Alex had disliked at first, and grown close to only after a series of booze and narcotic fuelled evenings. Most of these had started as intelligent argument over film, music and literature, and ended in debilitating morning light comedowns several hours later, when Billy Bragg sang them to sleep from the record player.

Watching the foursome in this way – safe in the knowledge they cannot see him – inspires a strange contentment in the boy. Funerals, he figures, have an awful knack for bringing people together again; for formulating in one place, ever so briefly, a unique lineage of personalities specific to the one person no longer around to witness it.

To his right, people stir. A sea of black ties, pallid faces and uncertain expressions stand rigorously to attention, their bodies stiff and respectful, as the funeral cars appear in the distance and climb solemnly up the gravel hill. Arienette, Connor, David and Paul – all of whom are huddled closely beneath the umbrella – take this as their cue and start towards the chapel. Thin black smoke spirals from the chimney and dissolves into nothingness a few metres above the roof.

It had been the boy’s intention to slip away for just a few minutes, to momentarily escape the clammy palms and grieving eyes of others. He realises upon examining his watch, however, that time – rather contradictorily – has gotten away from him. He rushes through the car park, anxious and angry at the same time, cursing himself aloud for not being more organised. He had declined an offer to be seated in the second car as it accompanied the hearse to its final destination. Instead, he’d arrived early at the crematorium to speak with vicar, ensure the music was in order, and to set up a modest collection of photographs at the chapel’s entrance.

Each A5 black and white print, ghastly and beautiful at the same time, would serve well, he thought, as an individual puzzle piece in a larger scale eulogy.

‘Arienette!’ He calls, when he is close enough not to draw attention from anyone except his four former acquaintances. The girl turns on her heels and, upon recognition of the stranger’s voice, moves swiftly back across the cobbles.

‘Jack,’ she whispers, drawing the boy into her arms. They embrace, and when they pull apart he notices that Connor, David and Paul have hung back a little. It is a needless show of circumstantial respect but he finds himself grateful for it nonetheless. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

The boy wonders how many times he has heard these words spill out of people’s mouths this week, then imagines the countless number of other human beings in the world falling victim to similar statements at this moment, the tongues of the speakers swelling and slurring as they search for originality but fail to find it.

‘I know,’ he replies, and then: ‘He always was a selfish bastard. Now he’s really gone and put the boot in.’ Arienette laughs politely. ‘We should make our way over. The cars are about to arrive.’

He edges forward with a vigorous trembling in his limbs. He longs to be anywhere else, to be alone again, but there is nowhere to go and no place that will return him to normality. Connor, a man of relative confidence, is the first of the three men to step forward. He grasps the boy’s palm with one hand and places the other sympathetically on his back.

‘There are no words,’ he says, tenderly, and after similar exchanges with David and Paul, they press on together. To behold the congregation is to set one’s sights on an eclectic mix of tribute payers: the eldest members of the crowd regal in black dress; and the younger factions – at the request of the family – dressed in clothes more suited to a Saturday night out.

They come to a stop at the back of a loosely formed line. Those who have perhaps already tuned in to the low rumble of motor engines are quiet and still. Others continue speaking in hushed whispers, for the most part grave, punctuated occasionally by a stifled laugh or expression of humour.

The boy had been drinking the day Alex died. He remembers this as the procession – like a prophet of doom – arrives at the chapel doors.

‘He’d have fucking loved this,’ Connor whispers, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a regretful smile at the corners of his mouth. ‘Everyone lined up and waiting for him.’

The boy wants to laugh - for everyone to laugh in unison and break this miserable spell - but the blood is beginning to feel hot inside him, and his heartbeat feels irregular.

Not now, he begs himself. Not here.

A bitter, resentful weight of dignified expectation sits heavily on his chest. There is nothing he can do to stop the increasingly shallow breaths, the dizziness, the swelling throat. Panic climbs like nausea in his belly, and the more he struggles against it the worse it becomes. Connor, and behind him, Arienette, are oblivious to his slow silent horror. He knows he ought to be waiting by the car, ready to receive the coffin with an adult’s strength and grace, and this, he decides, is his salvation. He moves rapidly through the people, offering apologies to those he disrupts. The world is hazy and grey when he reaches the vehicle but he knows innately that he has made it, and as Alex’s mother steps out of the car, her eyes stained red with tears, the boy’s vision clears and – as if by intervention – equilibrium is restored.

* * * *

At the wake, the boy finds a dry spot beneath the smoking shelter and lights a cigarette, inhaling for the first time that day a guilty lungful of smoke. Alex’s mother, Maria, an unquestioning lifelong smoker who sees no link between the cancers advertised on the front of her cigarette packet and the disease that killed her son, settles beside him, a tormented agony stretched across her face.

‘A beautiful service,’ people had told her as they emerged, two by two, from the busy chapel, taking her hands in theirs in consolation. How composed she had been, how venerable, accepting each kind word with delicate appreciation. It had struck him then that William Blake was right; that with age comes experience. Maria understands what is expected of her today and, worse, the role she must play, because she had played it twelve years previously when her husband – Alex’s father – had suffered a crippling heart attack and faded painfully away in front of her.

The boy’s preoccupation with this injustice causes him not to see the man – whose face, twelve hours later, will pass feverishly before his eyes – walk straight past him and into the pub. If he had noticed him, he might have felt at once threatened by the stranger’s bulky frame, the army green of his trench coat, and the inconspicuous swastika pin fastened neatly to his collar. The boy and Alex had adopted The Crimson Moon pub as their local in 2002, and inherited with it a series of relationships founded on alcohol consumption. Still, it was not entirely out of the ordinary – during those hours when doormen were not employed – to stumble across the occasional thug. Most of them had been barred from various neighbouring establishments thanks to closing time punch-ups, or for none-too-crafty cigarettes in toilet cubicles when the rain outside was too heavy to brave .

It might also have inspired a curiosity in the boy, then, to witness the unbalanced wavering of the stranger’s walk, his precisely shaven head, and the aggressive manner in which he demanded – over the course of half an hour – four deep tumblers of whiskey.

But as he stands in silent contemplation, biting agitatedly at his lip, he is oblivious to all but his memory. He is certain now that something is horribly wrong with his health. On the day he received the phone call it had risen in him like rage, taking hold in the gut and surging up through his body in hateful fits of paranoia.

He’s gone, the voice on the end of the line had proclaimed, and in grief her sobs had sounded more like laughter.

It has been a part of the boy since adolescence: the treacherous abandonment of reason and balance, the inability to function. For years it had lain dormant, a woeful disease awaiting liberty, but of late it has realised its true potential.

Panic.

He despises its influence - the way it arrives in the night, like a Wodehousian aunt, to drag him from slumber and spit his jolting, trembling body into a world of lucid terror; a world in which he is painfully aware of his own mortality and convinced that death is imminent. In the daylight he carries the imprint of the attacks with reproachful fear of their reoccurrence, existing as if permanently hung-over but without the promise of recovery.

‘Can I get you a drink, Maria?’ He asks, realising she too has been staring longingly into space.
‘Gin and Tonic, please, Jack,’ she answers, forcing a smile which he feels, in time, will kill her. The emphasis on one another’s names amuses him. They have been doing this quite unashamedly these last few days, as if to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence.

At the bar, the boy passes the skinhead, who is stood defiantly next to the fruit machine, so as to be served by Carl, the manager.

‘On the house this time,’ he says, greeting Jack with a sympathetic, courteous smile.
‘What can I get you?’
‘Pint of Guinness and a G and T, if you would.’

How many patrons Carl, in his thirteen year management of this pub alone, had seen or heard of passing away was anyone’s guess. Like Maria, he had long ago completed his on-the-job training in how to deal with death, proven now by his tone of voice.

‘You know, we’ll miss the cocky little prick around this place,’ he says, scooping ice from a bucket into a tall spirit glass.
‘I know, I know. It seems like forever since he last came in.’
‘Bastard thing came on quickly though, eh? I mean, Jesus… he didn’t make it three months.’

Carl, with the prowess of a good bartender, conducts this entire conversation whilst simultaneously pouring the Guinness, readying the gin and loading pint glasses into the dishwasher. When he is finished he sets the drinks on the bar and deals two good measures of whiskey.

‘To the Student,’ he says, and they drink.
‘I’ll take one of those, mate’ the heavy set stranger shouts from across the room, in a thick, barely distinguishable accent born somewhere west of the Wirral.
‘Sorry, my friend, private stash, but we’ve plenty of others up there,’ Carl replies.
‘The same again then, friend,’ he retorts, tipping his glass aggressively. Then, turning to resume his position by the slot machine, he stumbles drunkenly into Jas, the Mechanic - a regular. The remainder of the man’s current drink splashes out of the glass onto his coat.
‘Fuckin’ hell, mate,’ he explodes. ‘Do you not watch where you’re going?’

The sudden loudness is excruciating. Jas, taken aback, is silent.

‘Can you hear me, you Paki bastard?’

The air, if such a thing is possible, is sucked from the room. That word. That fucking word.

‘What did you say to me?’ The Mechanic, by no means a timid man himself, demands.
‘I think you heard me, la’,’ replies the stranger, swaggering in front of him, too close for comfort, the empty spirit glass clasped between his fingers. ‘This isn’t Bombay now, and in England when you spill someone’s drink you offer to buy them another.’
‘Right, you’re out!’ Carl shouts, already half way around the bar. The boy wants to run, and, indeed, would run if it were not for having to pass this brute, this intruder, this breach of the peace. He does not know the man, but he recognises in him a familiar public house confidence - a jerky, overbearing self-assurance owing partly to the military but also to excessive cocaine use – that paints him as unpredictable and dangerous.

By the time Carl reaches them, the skinhead has dropped the empty glass and smashed a beer bottle. Brandishing it proudly, he grabs Jas by the collar of his polo shirt and draws him forcefully into his chest until the bottle is pressed against the Mechanic’s throat.

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ Carl exclaims, coming to a dramatic stop, both hands held up in universal surrender. ‘Take it easy.’
‘Get back or I’ll cut him, I swear to God.’

The boy, drinks still in hand, looks desperately around the barroom. Surely somebody somewhere was equipped to deal with this. But it is Tuesday afternoon, it’s raining, and apart from an elderly couple at the back of the restaurant there is no one. The Mechanic chokes under the man’s arm, his strangled flesh bulging around the tip of the glass.

‘Do you know what this means?’ The skinhead bellows, groping at the pin badge, which is now clearly identifiable as the dark symbol of Nazi tyranny. ‘It means NOT FUCKING WELCOME!’
‘You’ve nothing to gain from hurting him,’ Carl explains, his voice firm. ‘So let him go and get out.’
‘Do you know who the fuck I am?’ The stranger barks. An angry blue vein has appeared above his temple, and it throbs now with cartoon-like vigour. His eyes seem to burst out of their sockets. Sweat glistens on his forehead. ‘I said, do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve never seen you before in my life, son, and if you leave now I’ll never have to again.’

This makes things worse. The skinhead, who had taken up arms so quickly, resumes shouting in the manner of an uneducated, overzealous politician, addressing everyone at once, his teeth bared in a furious grimace.

‘This country has been flooded with these, these terrorists for too long, and its people like you’ – he leers at Carl – ‘that let it happen. Suicide bombers, fuckin’ jihad... For what? A god that doesn’t exist? And people wonder why Britain’s going to the dogs. Even public transport isn’t safe anymore. Multiculturalism…’ He pauses, spits angrily on the floor. ‘Well, thanks but no fuckin’ thanks. From now on its England for the English, and anyone who doesn’t like it can get in line, because there’s a thousand bottles just like this one and a thousand people waiting to use them.’

If there had been any hope of talking the stranger into reason it disappears in the seconds following this last outbreak. An intense desire blazes in the whites of his eyes. His fingers tremble viciously on the bottle so that a series of indentations are produced on the Mechanic’s throat. Lost in the powerful paranoia of his own propaganda, the skinhead crumbles irreversibly into hysteria.

‘Decent white British families passed over time and again while the government hands out houses to anyone who gets off the boat. The dole queues are getting longer everyday as jobs fall into the hands of Polish immigrants. Unless the borders are closed, it’s only a matter of time before blood is spilt.’

His face is flushed and hot, and the force with which he projects his hate-fuelled soliloquy causes saliva to spray from his mouth with every plosive.

Then there is cause for optimism. As venom pours from the man’s tongue, Carl lashes out, catching him squarely on the chin with a perfect right fist. The man stumbles backwards, letting loose the broken bottle, and raises a dumbstruck hand to his jaw. The Mechanic, suddenly free of his captor, spins 180 degrees, throws an equally impressive punch – which lands just below his right eye – and the stranger goes down. Both men descend, but it is Jas who delivers the final debilitating kick to the man’s ribs. Drawing on his full weight, the Mechanic drops to his knees, forcing them hard into the stranger’s chest so as to deprive him of air and escape.

The boy looks on in hope and horror. With Carl and Jas standing over him the skinhead is suddenly pathetic. His only advantage had been at the sharp edge of the bottle, but now, unarmed and immobile, he is lost.

‘Jack,’ Carl says, without lifting his eyes, and at the sound of his name the boy feels strikingly as though he is coming up from under water. ‘Call the police. The phone’s behind the bar.’

* * * *

At midnight, Connor, David, Paul, Arienette and the boy stagger through the front door of the flat Jack and Alex had shared since University, their moods blissfully lightened by alcohol. By one o clock three more bottles of wine are gone but there remains amongst the five a certain cordial sobriety. To drink so much on any other day of the year would seem foolish and near impossible: today it is a necessary catalyst for coping.

In the spirit of remembrance they gather in the living room, play old punk records, roll cigarettes, share anecdotes, refill each other’s glasses, and hint at a comforting, almost childish spirituality so long ago abandoned in all of them.

‘I tell you what,’ Connor announces, abruptly. ‘If Alex is up there,’ – he gestures apprehensively at the ceiling – ‘they’ve gained a pretty decent size cock!’

The room loses itself in laugher. The boy is awestruck by the way in which the conversation oscillates so wildly. For a while they talk about nothing in particular – the standard subjects of reunited graduates – and then, every twenty minutes or so, the attention returns to the cancer, the funeral, or to recollections of days spent with Alex.

‘How do you know how big it was? David asks.
‘I had a sneaky look when we were in the pub toilets one night,’ Connor admits.
‘No shame in that’, the boy adds. ‘And it wasn’t as if Alex wasn’t proud of it...’
‘So, how was it?’ Arienette wonders, genuinely interested.
‘On a scale of one to ten? Seven.’

Laughter recaptures the room, and the subject matter changes again.

At a quarter to three, David sprawls out on the settee and is asleep in less than a minute, prompting Connor and Paul to top and tail in the spare room. Alex’s room – which has remained untouched since the illness forced him into a hospital bed, partly out of respect and partly in the unprecedented hope of his recovery – stays empty. In the dim light of the lounge, the remaining girl and boy conclude that it would seem intrusive to open up their friend’s former sanctuary as a guestroom. It strikes Jack that there are some tough times ahead, and he knows instantly that when the tenancy comes up he will leave this place and never return. It is a startling notion to consider: he can never go home again.

‘Come, sleep with me,’ Arienette says, leading him upstairs into his own bedroom. There, she stops and says: ‘We don’t have to. I mean, I understand if you can’t.’

But an inevitable desire lights up in him, strengthened by the wine, and by the nostalgic sensation of his body next to hers. They kiss, softly and sweetly at first, and then with a mutual passionate grief that passes darkly from one set of lips to the other. On the bed it is easy: they fall into one another, opening wide the gates of their anguish, ridding their physical selves of anxiety, and the boy admits himself to that Freudian essential self. He moves perversely to the rhythm of his sex, glimpsing in the collision of their bodies an unfamiliar confidence that assures him – for the first time since Alex’s death – that everything is in its right place.

* * * *

The boy wakes suddenly and bolts upright in bed, breathless, his heart racing. A tight pain strangles the muscles in his left arm.

( - heart attack heart attack heart attack heart attack - )

The skinhead’s face, bloated and bruised, taunts him from the dark corners of the bedroom. It is vivid, violent and cold, staring at him without expression, its pallid features hardly human; then, replacing it, the extinct motionless gaze of his best friend. A terrible decomposition has corrupted the eyes; the bridge of the nose is sunken and black. The boy claws at his own face, running trembling fingers through his hair, scratching savagely with sharp teeth at the surface of his tongue, in the fear he might swallow it.

Arienette is still asleep. A part of him wants to wake her - if only to share these deathly visions with someone - but he knows that to drag her from sleep is to burden her further. Instead, he presses his eyes shut and concentrates on breathing calmly.

It takes several minutes to steady the shallow tremors in his chest, and he struggles not to lose himself entirely in the hypochondria of his diseased mind. Eventually he eases his legs out of bed, feels the reassuring cold of the wooden floor beneath his feet. Mindful not to disturb the girl, he slips out from under the covers and moves to the window. The blinds are already drawn up, and it is raining in the dark. Dawn is still two or three hours away.

He pulls on a pair of jeans, and with intense fixation forces his trembling fingers to recover a near empty packet of tobacco from the pockets. It is not a good idea to smoke but he needs something to focus on, something mechanical and precise. Above all things he must not succumb to a full on panic attack. In realising this he begins tapping his right foot in irregular rhythms, another relentless action to occupy the limbs.

With the rolling papers between his fingers his thoughts return to the skinhead from the pub. Cautious not to let his mind reproduce the frightful apparition that stole him from slumber, the boy settles on recalling the manner in which the man had exploded into his life. This trenchcoat thug, this rough beast, had not slouched but roared to life before him, spitting poison from its
wretched lips.

With each second that elapses an inescapable distance is placed between the event itself and the boy’s memory of it, but he feels certain he will not forget the disgraceful nature of its consequences. He is angry, tired and sick of narrow-minded swine sent to fuck with his existence, to infect and to interfere with his life. A radical Leftism shocks his body, swelling wildly in the part of the torso in which he imagines the human soul to dwell.

He raises a hand that shakes with fear and rebellion, lights a cigarette, and nudges the window ajar to listen to the rain. Upstairs lights from two late dwelling houses fall across the back yard, illuminating a multitude of discarded roll-ups on the concrete below. The boy stares blankly into the gloom.

It is not just the skinhead that bothers him. There is something more; something that digs, and burdens, and weighs heavy on his heart. He knows this because it has surfaced several times in the hours since the stranger snapped out his muscular arms and put a broken bottle to Jas’s throat. The dusty bedroom air seems to move around him. His vision grows hazy. He draws deeply from the cigarette and –

That’s when he understands. It isn’t the beer bottle, or the racism, or even the skinhead himself that his mind won’t let alone: it’s the fact that he, the boy, had done nothing to stop what was happening. He had stood dead still as the face of the Mechanic gorged from behind the glass, afraid to make even the slightest gesture lest the stranger turn his wrath in his direction.

He closes his eyes and feels the wind touch lightly on his skin. Every sacred value, every treasured principle, abandoned in an instant. Tonight his politics are damaged, defeated, because he failed to make a stand. And Alex: how he hates his old friend now for deserting him, for no longer being there, just down the hall, sitting reading in the dim light of his bedroom. How he despises the cancer that tore through his able body, stealing first his balance then his senses.

Tears swell in the sockets of the boy’s eyes, too big and too premature to escape. He has been cheated out of friendship, out of kinship, out of time, and all that appears to remain is his own downward struggle to the grave.

Above the dull drumbeat of raindrops on the gutter comes the soft inhale/exhale of Arienette’s breath. She is turned on her side, distant, unattainable. He is a stranger in his own bedroom. In agony, he picks out Bob Dylan from the CD rack, searches up and down the track-list, settles on a song and queues it up.

I ain’t saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

The boy throws the last of the cigarette out of the window and watches the embers burn before collapsing into the corner of the room, where, anticipating dawn and awaiting freedom, he shivers violently until the first of the day’s light appears from behind the rainclouds.