Battling to get someone buried on a Friday the Thirteenth told me why Sister Agatha didn’t believe me. The undertaker threw up his hands in horror at the very thought, but Toby and I, deputed to be the organisers, refused to budge. What other day of the year would do for Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz than a Friday the Thirteenth? In the end the only way we could persuade the undertaker was to agree to have a minister of religion officiate, something we hadn’t thought she’d want. I think the man deemed us a nest of satanists—Kings Cross and all that, you know. Toby and I looked at each other and shrugged. Maybe it would tickle the old girl no end to be buried with the Church of England rites. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, etc. Man that is born of woman—our minister wouldn’t hear of woman that is born of woman. What a strange world we live in. Riddled with what Pappy calls shibboleths.
You never saw a worse day for a funeral. Sydney bunged on a heatwave, so by nine o’clock it was over a hundred degrees, with a gale blowing from the west like a giant fan across the hobs of Hell. There were bushfires all over the Blue Mountains, so the air was brown, reeked of smoke, rained cinders. All of which petrified the minister, who was convinced that the Devil was laying on a grand reception for one of his most important earthly imps. The hearse left the funeral parlour without incident, followed by the mourners in two big black Fords—Pappy, Toby, Jim and Bob, Klaus, Lerner Chusovich and Joe Dwyer from the Piccadilly pub bottle department. And me, of course. Flo didn’t turn up, though we’d notified the Child Welfare. The Mesdames Fugue and Toccata and friends tacked themselves onto the cortege in a huge black Rolls they must have borrowed from a client; when we got to the graveside Norm and Merv were waiting, their police car parked ten yards away between a fallen angel and a rusty iron cross. When the Rolls pulled up, it disgorged Lady Richard on Martin’s arm, stunningly gowned in plain black shantung with a cheeky little black pillbox on his mauve hair, face webbed by a wisp of black net. Perfect! Everybody the old girl would have wanted there was there. Except for Flo.
We buried her in Rookwood, surely the world’s biggest, most neglected graveyard, literal square miles of it plonked in the middle of the Western Suburbs. Overgrown with weeds and long rank grass, dotted with scrubby bush, a few she-okes, gums and stringy-barks between sparse graves whose ruined headstones leaned at all angles except the vertical.
Toby, Klaus, Merv, Norm, Joe and Martin acted as pallbearers, heaved and shoved and grunted and groaned until they got the gigantic coffin onto their shoulders, then staggered under its enormous weight—it had to be lead-lined, of course, after such a long interlude in a morgue drawer—to the newly dug grave, where they lowered it amid “Shits!” and “Jesus Christs!” onto three four-by-twos laid across the cavity. The minister, who hadn’t really seen the coffin until now, stood there gaping while the undertaker had a muttered talk with the grave diggers to make sure they’d followed orders and had excavated a roomy enough final resting place.
The women stood on one side and the men on the other—it was an Australian funeral, after all. Jim stood with the men. Very brave we women looked, me in shocking pink, Pappy in an emerald cheong-sam, Bob in blue eyelet-embroidered organdie, Lady Richard in his shantung number, and the Mesdames dolled up to the nines in skin-tight black satin, black patent stilettos and dense black veils à la the House of Windsor. The men had all managed to find a tie somewhere (Martin’s looked like pea-and-carrot puke), though they’d had the sense to ditch their coats. They did wear black armbands.
How she must have wallowed in it! Just as the minister stood at the head of the grave to commence his obsequies, a hideously hot gust of wind shrieked down like a satanic huff, whipped his skirts up around his face and knocked his glasses off. He nearly landed on the coffin, a plain affair without a flower, let alone a wreath. We had agreed that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz would not appreciate such traditional trappings as flowers, since apparently she had not yet properly Passed Over. The nightly gallops down the hall and booms of laughter had lost their novelty by the time we buried her. Nowanights we sort of rouse a bit, sigh, grin, and go back to sleep.
The six men put the straps under the coffin, lifted it enough for the terrified undertaker to slide the four-by-twos out, then lowered it with more “Shits!” and “Jesus Christs!” into the grave. Once it hit bottom, I stepped forward and dropped the wooden box on top of it. We’d decided that she’d want to have the blue bunny rug, the huge mauve crystal, the marble hand and arm, and the seven cut glass tumblers with her. No one tossed a clod of Rookwood’s dismal soil in; we just walked away and left the rest to the grave diggers, who had been standing by in awe.
“Me bloody back’s gone on me!” Merv whimpered.
“Heavier in death than in life,” Klaus said solemnly.
“Oh, potties! I’ve laddered my stocking!” Lady Richard moaned.
“At least she’s in the shade,” Toby said, pointing to a gum.
“Memorable!” Joe Dwyer said, wiping away tears. “Memorable!”
We all went home and had a party in Toby’s attic.
I wonder who’ll bury Harold? Ask me do I care.