Flash saw Jake first. He looked very different from their last meeting. Black jacket. Black trousers. Shiny shirt. He could have come straight from his job as bouncer on the door at one of those glitzy clubs. He and Rabbit had both opted for low-key. Clean jeans. Hawaiian shirts. Decent trainers. They looked like the token surfers.
The chapel was already full so they had to stand amongst the latecomers. The funeral was being held in a sort of auditorium at the back of a funeral director’s business. The flower-splattered coffin was on a raised bit in front of an altar. The only other thing was a lectern, waiting for someone to come forward and take charge.
It was surprising how many of the old crowd had turned up. There was Buzz McGee, the dux of their year. He and Jamie had hung out together at primary school. The parting of the ways happened at sixth form, when Jamie had found his niche with the Goths. There were a number of guys from the first fifteen. All so different now. Flash had last seen them in blazers, shirt and tie, all aged 17, all waiting to bust out of the school hall on that final day of school.
Nicky Henderson. Everyone thought he would make the All Blacks, but the Auckland B team was as far as he got. Rabbit said he was too soft, but then Rabbit said that about most people. Then there had been the much publicised car crash that had put paid to his rugby career. Flash remembered reading how about a year ago, after some big post-game bash in the city, he had driven the complimentary Falcon straight through the front of the BNZ at a T-junction. The papers had done a big write up. The cops thought at first that it had been an attempted ram raid. Dragged him off to the pen. By the time everything was sorted out he was greeted by a press welcoming party.
Bryce Martin. The captain. He looked ultra-respectable. Done law, they said. Now there he was, girlfriend in tow, or wifey, an extra 15 kilos clinging to his hips and arse. Flash had never liked him. He was a good player and a good captain but he had been a suck up. Not many people knew that. He still remembered walking into the changing rooms and overhearing him and Donkey talking about Jake. How he was a psycho, couldn’t trust him. It wasn’t even what they said so much, it was the way they said it. That special tone of voice, the one that signalled intimacy … showing some sort of in-crowd arrangement which explained why he had been made captain in the first place.
The Te Pania twins looked freaky, that was for sure. He always thought they would go different directions. It was like the denial of the fact that they looked so identical. Geronimo had been the defiant one. He held the record for the number of suspensions at school. Was notorious for that, and the fact that on returning, he invariably said to the teacher who had canned him, ‘Thanks. I needed that.’ And Cheyenne. Man, what a contrast. Young Maori Achiever prize. A Bursary. Cups for this and that. Always trying to bail his brother out. To stop him from being booted. Flash remembered them on the first day in the third form. How neat and tidy they looked. (Just like Jake, plucked from some South Auckland Intermediate and given a scholarship.) The understanding was that all three would repay the school on the rugby field. Cheyenne and Geronimo. Such cool names. Quickly clipped back to Chey and Ronnie. Now they were both huge and Ronnie had this partial moko that said nothing but gang.
Rabbit had made them late, so they were forced to stand at the back of the chapel. It gave Flash a good view though. He was able to spot most of the old crowd. In their new scrubbed-up guises.
After a while the preacher got up and moved towards the pulpit. A thin man in a saggy suit, he stared out into the body of the chapel, as though trying to make eye contact with everyone there. Then he launched into a sermon that was delivered in this flat, fake-respectful tone that you could tell he had trucked out so many times before. He talked about Jamie’s talents, his love of science, his musical interests, his close and loving family. It was a formula. One that covered all the bases but reduced the person he was talking about to a featureless product. It was a fill-the-spaces exercise.
Flash turned away. He couldn’t stand fakes. As if it was that easy to gift wrap ‘the departed’. To make him sound like the perfect son, brother, friend. It was all the things Mr Preacher Man didn’t say, didn’t know, that made Jamie real.
Flash’s gaze wandered the auditorium again. Caught on this sizeable nest of spiky, black-haired dudes. They must have been Jamie’s latest set of friends. There were other people from school too, whom he recognised, though he couldn’t remember their names.
After the preacher had finished, the organist played the old Nick Cave song about Death’s smiling face of welcome. One of the Goths sang the lyrics from the front. The guy had black hair, white face, black eyeliner. Swathed in black except for a shimmering image of Ian Curtis glaring from his T-shirt. He stared unblinkingly at the audience, his face showing no emotion.
Flash knew him, too, by sight. He was in one of those culty bands that played at the university. The sort of dances where everyone was so cool they should have worn badges that said ‘fuck off’. It was some voice, though. Low, gravelly, hypnotic. Anyone could tell why they had done well.
After the song it was tribute time.
Jamie’s mother got up first and stood at the lectern crying. She tried to speak but nothing came. After a number of attempts her husband came to her rescue. He said a few words, throat choked with grief, and then they both sat down. The brother and the sister each said something about him. How he had gone his own way. How smart he was. How sad they were. The usual.
Then there was this middle-aged guy. Some sort of family friend. He was the dry-eyed one, put there to give the official view. Fancied himself as a speaker. He stood at the lectern, smoothed out his notes and then waited for dramatic effect.
‘We’ve all got questions, you, me, everyone. Heads so full of questions there’s not much room for anything else. Some of these, we’ll never know the answers to; others, I may be able to answer today.’
He was one of those old rugby dudes, 100 kilos now, goatee beard, shaved head. Looked like he coached the under nines for St Heliers. Flash felt an immediate dislike for him.
‘About how Jamie died? You don’t go there. About who Jamie was? That’s why I’m here…’ He then proceeded to talk about how long he’d known Jamie’s parents, what good people they were, about the med student sister, the golfer brother, about nearly everything except Jamie. It was soon clear that he knew nothing about him.
After this someone walked up who Flash hadn’t thought of for years. It was Brett Delauney. He had been one of those really sharp kids who always had some racket operating. Smart but never did more school work than was required. He remembered him saying once, with a sneer, that 51 per cent in a test, meant one per cent too much effort. Brett and Jamie had teamed up, and in the sixth form, they had topped the school in Chemistry. It didn’t make sense.
Brett stood for a while as if trying to think of a way to start and then launched in.
‘I don’t know most of you people, but I know the guy here in the box. He was a friend of mine.’ He stopped and stared at the coffin for some time, then looked back into the auditorium. ‘When we were kids I envied him because he had a family that seemed to work. Seemed to have it all. He envied me because I had one that didn’t. He thought I could do what I wanted. We were both wrong. Later we both found a place in the black questions that everyone else ignored. I reckon if Jamie had been living a few centuries ago he would have been an alchemist, turning lead into gold. Banging his head against the limits.’
Brett paused for a while. Then he turned to the coffin again. ‘He’s gone now … to where we’ll all go … just sooner than most.’ Then came the raised fist. ‘I salute him.’ He stood there for a moment, looking angry and defiant, then sloped off and sprawled in the front pew.
At this point, Rabbit and Flash walked over and stood next to Bryce Gillan. Everyone else squirmed around in a sort of stunned unease. No-one seemed willing to speak after that. Flash guessed there wasn’t much left to say. The celebrant walked back to the altar to regain control. After a sequence of softly muttered prayers and hymns everyone spilled out onto the footpath. There was a big drive-in bay built to facilitate the easy entrance/exit of the hearse. All the guys who used to be at school together gathered at one end. There was a tense period of cautiously extended hands and then muttered greetings. This was the first time most of them had seen each other for years. Certainly there had been none of that Old Boys stuff. Reunions. Watching the firsts play on Saturday mornings. When they left, they left. That was it.
But now there was something there. A need to gather, as though to take stock. Brett Delauney seemed to put out a general invitation on impulse. Asked them to come around to his apartment after the wake. Have some drinks. He said he needed an hour to organise something and handed out business cards.
Flash and Rabbit waited with the others milling around, trying to connect with each other. Pick up where everything had left off, years before.
It might have been the attraction of a penthouse in the Phoenix Building, or maybe it really was the nostalgia that funerals spawn, but within the hour the collected remnants of Class 7A3 made their way to Brett Delauney’s.