The Story of You (6 page)

People’s conversations tapered to a murmur and then that awful, sombre silence as they parted to make way for Marion’s last journey.

The plan was, I’d slip in at the back, say a quick ‘Hi’ to Joe at the end of the service, then slip out again, unnoticed. I found a place on the back pew and kept a low profile, leafing through the Order of Service. The first, magical, angelic notes of ‘In Paradisum’ from Fauré’s
Requiem
struck up just as they brought her in. Then, it was unbelievable: the whole place was illuminated by a freak beam of sunlight coming smack-bang from between Jesus’s thighs, on the far right window. It really was like heaven in there – and I wished, not for the first time, that I was a believer. But then perhaps when you work with people who try to recruit disciples in Morrison’s, you start to equate religion with madness.

A cough echoed around the cool caverns of the church. Some kid goes, ‘Daddy, you’re funny,’ just as Marion was lowered onto the trestle. Joe’s dad stood at the feet end, palms pressed together. ‘Well,’ he said, gesturing to the beam of sunlight, ‘she’s here, ladies and gentlemen.’ And everyone laughed and shed a tear at the same time, including me.

The service was lovely. I know people always say that, but I feel I can comment with sincerity, since I’ve been to a few not-so-lovely ones in my time, including my own mother’s. Joe’s dad told funny stories: how Marion was working behind her parents’ shrimp bar on Morecambe front when they met, but that even the ever-present whiff of cockles couldn’t keep him away, such was her luminescent beauty.

Occasionally, during the hymns, I looked over at Joe’s pew. Rory and Simon were grim but dry-eyed, Ethan looked confused as to where we were on the Order of Service, but I decided Ethan was probably fine, in Ethan’s own world. Joe was on the end, crying his eyes out, wiping the snot and the tears on the back of his hand because Joe wouldn’t think to bring such a banal item as a packet of tissues. And although I knew the pain he was feeling, I also thought:
Good for you, Joe
. Him being such an open book was always the thing I loved about him. In fact, when I look back to that time, I can probably remember Joe crying more than me.

It was such a warm day that they’d left the door open, and so if I looked to the left, down the hill on top of which the church teetered, and past the crumbly tombstones, I could see the sea, springing up the glossy, black rocks; the same sea Joe and I had played in as loved-up teenagers, and it comforted me for some reason. Here we were, in this church, half on land, half looking like it might slip away into the sea at any time. This was all so momentary; we were all just passing through, liable to drop off the end of the world at any given time.

Of course, I didn’t philosophize like this at my mum’s funeral. I was far too busy concentrating on the church door and whether my bloody sister was going to walk through it in time. If I’d known that when she did, the real trouble was going to start, I might have concentrated more on thinking about Mum. I guess I’m still a bit angry about that.

A funeral congregation always says so much about the person in the box, I’ve always thought, and there was every walk of life in that church: old and young; your floral-society twin-sets; as well as single mums and ASBOs and hoodies from the work she used to do with the Probation Service.

And me … I wished
I’d
had a chance to thank Marion. For feeding me, and often Niamh, in that year Dad was mainly AWOL; for being my mum, basically, when I didn’t have mine. And when I thought about it like that, I felt really glad I’d come.

Ethan stood up and read a ‘poem’ he’d written, which was all of two lines and said: ‘Mum, I miss you and I love you. I hope you can hear me, from Ethan.’ That was it. Niagara Falls. Just as I was recovering, Joe stepped up to the lectern. He hugged Ethan, then unfolded a piece of A4 paper, his hands trembling. It was all I could do not to go up there and give him a hug.

‘Words can’t really express how much I’m going to miss my mum, or how much I loved her. She was so many things to so many people, but to me, to us, she was just our mum.’

Our eyes met briefly and I smiled at him, encouragingly.

‘I wrote long lists of what she meant to me. I even tried writing a poem, then remembered why I’d put all those terrible love poems in the bin when I was a teenager.’ There was the odd murmur of amusement from the congregation, including me. I still had some of those terrible poems sitting in a box, along with the doodles and sometimes multiple-choice quizzes (he was always very creative with his love letters).
‘
And then I found this,’ continued Joe. ‘I think if you replace “love” with “Mum”, it describes her perfectly.’

He read 1 Corinthians 13:4–8.

‘“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”’

He was doing so well until the last line, when he broke down. ‘“Love never ends …”’

And I cried again then, too: for Joe, Marion, my own mum, absent parties, it didn’t matter. Crying was just a nice release.

I waited for the congregation, plus any undesirables from schooldays who might be lurking, to leave. Then I went to find Joe. He was standing near the gate, talking to an old woman in a floppy velvet hat.

‘Then it was 1980 and I think your mum only had Rory … no, wait … maybe she had Simon, too.’

Joe spotted me and stretched his hand over the lady’s shoulder so that our fingers touched. ‘Sorry, excuse me, Betty. Here she is!’
I couldn’t help but notice how his face lit up.’

‘Hi, look, I’m not stopping,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to say, beautiful service for a beautiful lady – and your reading, Joe, it made me cry.’

‘Oh, I think Ethan stole the show.’

‘They were both gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Your mum would have been really proud.’

The old lady started off on one again
…
‘No, I’ve just remembered, Simon was about five months old …’ and I took the opportunity to study Joe’s face. I’d last seen him three years ago, in the pub on one of the rare Christmases I’d spent in Kilterdale, and been surprised to feel a stab of jealously at the fact he was with Kate, his girlfriend at the time. That he’d even moved in with her. He’d aged since then (but then, grief does that to you). The dark circles he was always prone to around his eyes were more pronounced, and when he smiled, which was often, there were quite deep lines running from his eyes to his hairline, which when I studied him closer, was peppered with a few grey hairs. But older suited him; as though he’d always been older, his face just waiting to catch up. Every time our eyes met, I saw that behind his eyes was the same person I’d known.

The woman took a breath. I really had to go.

‘Joe, I’ll call you, okay?’ I said, squeezing his hand. ‘I don’t want to interrupt,’ but he squeezed mine tighter.

‘But you’re not interrupting.’ His eyes were pleading with me. ‘Come on, don’t go yet. Please? This is Betty.’

Betty looked pretty cheesed off I’d waded in and ruined her flow.

‘Betty used to be a lollipop lady, and knew us all from the very first week Mum and Dad moved to Kilterdale. She used to cross us over to primary school, didn’t you, Bet? Hand me bootleg sweeties from her pocket.’

‘He was a bloody nuisance,’ she said, and Joe and I laughed. ‘A few penny sweets and he was high as a kite.’

Joe had been diagnosed as hyperactive when he was little, and was never allowed sweets or stuff like Kia-Ora. By the time I met him, at sixteen, he was still bouncing off the walls most of the time, but I’d always loved that about him – his energy.

I said, ‘He didn’t improve with age.’

‘How do you know?’ said Joe. ‘You haven’t spent any time with me for sixteen years.’ He was looking at me, quite intently. I couldn’t help think that comment was loaded. ‘Anyway, this is Robyn.’ He said, eventually.

‘Robyn, eh?’ said Betty. ‘That’s a funny name for such a bonny girl. Is she the lucky lady?’

‘No, no …’ Joe said. ‘There is no lucky lady at the moment, Bet.’

So he was no longer with Kate?

‘Robyn’s a friend. A very old, good friend.’ His gaze was intense enough for it to make me look away.

‘She’s a l’il corker, too. Look at all that lovely thick hair,’ Betty said.

‘Now you’re making me blush, Betty,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I still blush,’ said Bet, ‘and I’m eighty-six!’

Betty eventually gave Joe her condolences and shuffled off. I really did have to be getting back to Dad and Denise’s, even though an evening with them – Dad watching
Gardener’s World
, Denise bringing him endless, elaborate snacks, didn’t exactly fill me with glee. I opened my mouth to say as much when, from out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thickset bald bloke making his way over. He had one child by the hand and was pushing a twin buggy – with twins in it – with the other. Stopping, he slapped an arm around Joe. ‘Hey, Sawyer!’ It was only when he was right up close that I realized it was Voz. ‘You did really well, mate. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up there and do that.’

‘Cheers, Voz,’ said Joe, giving Voz a manly back-slapping hug in return. ‘That means a lot.’

‘All right, Vozzy?’ I said. I was adopting my old matey, blasé school tones, when really I was shocked. I hadn’t seen Voz for years – since that day Joe nearly drowned at the Black Horse Quarry. Who was this beefcake before me? What had happened to runty Voz?

‘All right, Kingy. How are you?’ For some reason, I was touched that he’d used my nickname. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You have!’ I said. Joe sniggered. ‘I mean … you look like you’ve been busy.’

He giggled. When Voz used to giggle, he used to look like a cute rat; now he looked like a cute fat rat, all his pointy, ratty features concentrated in the middle of a big round face.

‘Yep, this is Paige.’ The chubby blonde child holding his hand stared back gormlessly at us. ‘Paige is eight.’ (
Eight?
What had I produced in the last eight years?) ‘And these little monsters are Tate and Logan.’

Tate and Logan? Bloody hell.

‘That’s my missus, Lindsay, over there.’ He pointed to a pretty, dark-haired girl chatting to Joe’s brother. ‘We’ve got another on the way in January.’

‘Wow, Anthony, are you going for world domination?’ asked Joe. ‘An assembly line of Vozzies keeping the whole of the northwest in wallpaper?’ (Voz’s dad owned the Wojkovich Wallcoverings empire.)

‘You’ve got to get cracking while you can.’ Voz laughed. ‘Any of you got kids yet?’

‘No, no …’ said Joe.

‘Not that you know of, eh, Sawyer?’

‘And what about you, Kingy?’ said Voz, when nobody said anything. ‘I hear you work up on the funny farm?’

‘Yep. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ I smiled.

‘So are you like a shrink? A psychiatrist?’ Voz asked.

‘Well, no, I can’t prescribe the drugs, but I can administer them.’

‘What, someone leaves you in charge with a
needle
?’ Voz seemed genuinely alarmed by this.

‘Yes, and in people’s own homes. I visit people at home who have mental-health problems.’

‘Can you do something about my missus? She’s got a few mental-health problems.’

‘I tell you what – because it’s you, Voz – I’ll do a two-for-one.’

Voz turned round at the sound of two girls talking loudly. ‘That’s Saul Butler’s wife, isn’t it?’ he said, gesturing to the one with red, bob-length hair. ‘Is Butler not here, Joe?’

I looked quickly to Joe.

‘No, I invited him – his kids all went to one of the playgroups Mum ran.’

So Saul Butler had kids?

‘But he never got back to me, so – you know – his loss.’

Voz grinned at me and for a second he was just little ratty, giggly Voz again, who used to cry actual tears when he laughed. ‘I reckon Butler always fancied you, Robyn. I bet he was well jealous of you, Joe.’

Joe smiled at me. ‘Well, yes, I was a very lucky boy.’

‘I always remember that time up at Black Horse Quarry, when you jumped in. D’you remember?’ Voz said, adding, ‘When you nearly died?’

‘How could I forget?’ said Joe.

‘That was a competition for Butler, that was.’ Voz said, pointing decisively. ‘I’ll never forget his face, standing at the top of that hundred-footer. Absolutely gutted that you had the balls to jump and he didn’t.’

‘Yeah, well, turned out he was the sensible one, didn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘I might well have died if Robbie hadn’t saved me that day.’

‘Och,’ I said, modestly. ‘No …’

One of the twins in the buggy started to cry then, thank God. ‘Right, well, I’d better get these rug rats home,’ said Voz. ‘You take care.’

The moment Voz trundled off with his army of children, Joe’s face collapsed. I remember that effort too.

‘Tired?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ He took my hand. ‘Look, don’t go, Robbie. Come back for the wake.’

Robbie. Nobody but Joe ever called me Robbie.

‘I can’t, Joe. I have to get back to London.’

‘So do I,’ he said.

‘You’re in
London
now?’

‘Well, Manchester, but you
see
,’
he said, pointing, ‘that stopped you. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know I lived in Manchester. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’

‘
Joe
,’
I sighed.
Didn’t he get that I wasn’t just some unfeeling cow but that I was trying to make a polite exit here without having to go into one?

‘Come on, I haven’t seen you for three years. I don’t want to go back on my own and face all those people.’

Then it clicked.

It was a funeral, his mother’s funeral. What was I
doing
?

‘Only plus of being a vicar’s son,’ Joe used to say, ‘is that you get a big house’; and it
was
big compared to the houses most kids who went to our school lived in, but not, I noticed, anywhere near as big as I remembered it from the last time I was in it, years ago. Still, I’d always loved Joe’s house, maybe because it was what ours might have been if Mum and Dad had spent less on socializing and throwing parties, and more on doing the house up (but then, ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Mum used to say. Obviously, she didn’t expect to go quite so soon).