A slow piano piece overlaid with sliding guitars, sounding suspiciously like Pink Floyd, fades to a climax as my father is laid gingerly down upon the two fragile-looking trestles under a kind of proscenium arch at the front of the church.
I sit in the front row, on the right-hand side, between my grandmother and mother. Ryan has pride of place on the aisle seat and a few of his unidentified aunts and uncles fill in our pew, wiping restless hands down the thighs of newly-laundered skirts and trousers. My mother fumbles in her pocket for a handkerchief then passes it across me, to my grandmother, as the priest takes his place in front of the coffin.
My dad’s in there. Dad. The man who punted footballs to me across the garden, who taught me chess and bought me books on ghosts, who provided me with green eyes and faithlessness, telescopes and T-shirts.
We stand for a hymn he liked, apparently.
About halfway through How Great Thou Art, I look over my shoulder, through the warbled wrong notes and trembling hymn sheets. There are far more people here than I expected. Maybe the death was mentioned in The Becksmouth Observer. Maybe he was liked.
I’m surprised to see Aaron sitting three pews behind me, in his rainbow leathers. He’s worn his pulling jacket to a funeral.
He appears to be wiping his eyes, and nods to me without shame when he spots me looking over. I stick up my thumb in response. This doesn’t go down too well with the scowling row behind me, or indeed with the detective watching circumspectly from the back row. There’s still no sign of Mariana, but I’m pleased Aaron made it. He’s always believed his alacritous conduct and presence of mind helped save my father’s life – I never had the heart to tell him Daniel’s knife was far from precisely directed – so this must, in a way, feel like coming full circle to him.
A few seats to the left of Aaron, a fair-haired woman in late-middle age, skin sticky with sunscreen, flicks her eyes from mine, then returns them a few seconds later.
My blood runs cold.
Though I can barely remember her face, I’d recognise her if I saw her again. And this woman is too wide, too regally postured. But more people got wind of my father’s death than I assumed would, so there’s a chance, conceivably, that news got to her. Maybe my father continued to keep in touch with her throughout the last decade, despite what I’ve always been told.
Suddenly, after years of indifference, I’m terrified at the thought of what I’d do if we met. Panting, full of hate, remembering to breathe again, I scan the congregation for vestiges of my biology.
What about that woman over there? She’s about the right age, has fairish hair, is looking at me with undisguised concern. And there’s another contender. A middle-aged woman with too much blusher – a disguise? And four rows behind me, half-obscured by a shoulder, one more. Is she the woman who gave me up all those years ago?
I feel a sharp jab in my ribs. It’s my mother. Susan, that is. She glares at me, screws her lips together and insists I face the front. The hymn ends.
For another ten minutes I listen to what kind of a man my father was from the mouths of strangers. Some beak-faced child of the sixties called Jerome, hair wisping from the few places it still grows (the nostrils and ears), focuses on my father’s writing and weed consumption. I’m not convinced these pursuits are totally appropriate, considering their respective futility and illegality, but Jerome’s interminable anecdotes garner a few laughs, and even the priest, after a tale concerning how my father bought three grams of oregano off a Swedish prostitute, raises eyes to heaven.
Jerome resumes his seat and, after we’ve listened to the Simon and Garfunkel track my father specifically requested, Ryan stands for his turn. The church falls silent.
My brother looks ten years older in his suit, acquits himself without obvious nerves. He recounts a few childhood memories from the time just before I left Becksmouth, when the man we’re saying goodbye to was allowed greater access to Ryan’s life. My brother’s voice cracks when he talks about the rounds of golf they played, the Champions League football matches watched, but regains his composure to the wholesale adoration and pride of the gathering. Although a steel glove pulls and wrenches at my insides, at the proof that so much attention was lavished on Ryan, that he was fathered, I’m proud of him too. It can’t be easy up there.
At the creak of a door, I find myself spinning round.
A woman hovers at the back of the church, thin, anxious, her black twinset revealing bare arms. She peers around the room with guilty, brazen eyes, then half-hides behind a marble pillar.
I stand. Our eyes meet across the heads of the congregation.
When the detective rises and advances towards her, she hurries from the church into the sunlight, stilettos clicking on the flagstones.
Ryan’s stopped speaking and every face turns to mine. I hear someone ask their partner who I am. They murmur that they haven’t a clue.
My mother hisses, ‘What the hell are you doing, Lucas? Get down!’
I sit, javelined by the fury in my brother’s eyes and force myself to pay attention to the scenery throughout the rest of his eulogy: a golden Jesus, eye-rolling his patented pain; a stained-glass window depicting Jonah being retched from the mouth of a whale. If I close my eyes, I can see a small boy on another boy’s shoulders, pissing in the font. And over there, where Ryan now stands, just before the chancel, my mother kneels to pray for her father’s swift recovery after the heart attack that turned his hair white.
There are those all over the world who, when cursed with awareness of their impending death, once the doctor utters the dreaded words, will become a believer, will sink to their knees. Just under the surface of most of us lurks veneration for the invisible, the improbable. But not me. Religion, the wholesale worship of the accidental, of nature, of beautiful but random patterns, has always struck me as a terrible bore, not to mention a chore. Attending church to sing praise for our ability to breathe always felt like writing a thank you note for the present you never asked to be given.
There are other ways of coping. I think of my eleven-year-old self, blessed with the extraterrestrial logic of youth, and my ludicrous, macabre theory on cheating the reaper by jumping from my bed at the last minute. Much like my father, my more recent attempts to hide from mortality involved consuming to excess, living purely for a nihilistic moment. And my colleagues and I are no better: playing God as we dial for eternal life with the tungsten wheels of our microscopes.
The sudden but ironclad belief that it’s my fault assaults me, that my father fell into the abyss and I, as a scientist, as a son, wasn’t there to save him.
Ryan finishes his tribute and leaves the front. There’s a breach of etiquette as the church erupts with applause and he blushes as he retakes his pew, looking yet another decade older. Or it could be the blood-red summer sun streaming through the stained glass. I wipe at something wet on my cheek and find the remainder of my mother’s concealer on my fingers.
This time, I accompany my father on his short, final, journey.
At the journey’s end, my mother, Clint, Ryan, his girlfriend and I squeeze our way out of the silent hearse. I go straight to the rear end, nominate myself as a pallbearer.
We convey the surprisingly heavy wooden box into the crematorium, a squat, pale stone building, and then through to a predominantly mahogany room not unlike Kirkby Funeral Consultants’ Chapel of Rest. The coffin is placed onto a carpetless oblong, before sprays of fresh flowers and an amethyst curtain. Ryan joins his girlfriend on a pew at the very front of the room. Clint does the same, next to my mother. I sit between these two couples.
A middle-aged man from the crematorium, who bears a startling resemblance to Peter Sellers, enters and expresses his deep sympathy to us. Or, I should say, to Clint. He obviously assumes him, reposed and unruffled, his arm never leaving my mother’s shoulders, to be the leader of the gang. Father Anthony, who’s appeared out of nowhere, stands to one side of the casket and recites several more Thees, Thous and Thys from the Bible, a prayer seemingly asking for the deceased’s absolution. Not long after, Peter Sellers depresses a button on a discreet panel of switches set into a lectern. There’s a sharp hydraulic squeal and the coffin shudders.
In the middle of our row, gripping tight the hands of my mother and brother, I watch the box containing my father lowered towards the cremator.
No fire. No fanfare.
And then, he’s gone.