‘SHE’S NOT UP TO it, Aoife. I’m going to leave her be. She’s just not up to it.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Sinéad. I knew there’d be some drama if I let you pick her up. It will do her good, Sinéad.’
‘No, really, Aoife. She says no.’
‘Well… I don’t expect you to understand this, Sinéad, but take it from me – from a mother – it will do her good to see her child get a proper burial. I mean, is she dressed? I bought her an outfit and everything…’
‘She’s wearing a black blouse and skirt. She’s sitting in there refusing to come. She’s hardly even with it, Aoife, to be honest with you. She’s staring into the fireplace. She’s holding the carer’s hand and staring into the fireplace and she doesn’t want to come and I’m not going to push it. I’m sorry.’
‘I should have asked Eileen to get her.’
*
Aoife hangs up feeling more foolish than angry. She shouldn’t have trusted Sinéad to bring Mammy to the burial. She straightens the black skirt around her hips, quickly, before the undertaker comes back; it twists when she walks. She will have to remember to keep straightening it and never to wear it again. Without Mammy here, the whole thing seems like some morbid fancy.
The undertaker comes back – a thick-set woman with a greedy sort of glee about her. ‘So there won’t be many, is that right?’
‘My mother won’t be coming after all…’
‘Oh.’
‘I think we’ll just meet at the cemetery. The priest said he’d do a few words there…’
It was for Mammy’s sake that they got the white coffin. If they had known she wouldn’t be coming, they would have saved the expense. And why did they get a lining? It’s not as if any of them are going to look at sixty-year old remains. It was a silly extravagance having a lining at all. It was senseless. That’s it though; people will go to any length to get money out of you.
*
It is a very sunny day. Eileen is wearing an extravagant mourning outfit – a pill-box hat with black mesh covering her forehead, and a very flattering knee-length bandage dress. Sinéad hasn’t even bothered to wear black. It is just them, watching two teenagers in overalls lower the coffin in beside Daddy. Aoife stands quietly beside Sinéad. She thinks about taking Sinéad’s hand, squeezing it, but Sinéad has her fingers knitted together. Her face is unreadable. When Aoife lifts the first spade of earth, Eileen howls like a banshee, and puts her head on Sinéad’s shoulder. Sinéad and Eileen each throw in a fist of dirt. Aoife tries to say a prayer.
Afterwards, she suggests that they go to the Shelbourne for lunch. Sinéad orders a whiskey with her soup. Eileen tells the waitress all about the exhumation and the burial and everything, and Aoife knows that when she thinks about it afterwards she will cringe, but for now all she feels is disappointed.