He scrunches his nose and I give up with my ideas.
I feel deflated, sunk, and dead inside if truth be told. I feel like after almost winning a four-year-long game of snakes and ladders that I’ve landed on the penultimate square and slid right back down to number one, back in time, back to the shell of a person I was when I first arrived here.
Most of all, I feel like packing up and running away to start over again, just like I did after the last funeral I attended four years ago, when Ben was too young to care where we were going, but old enough to know not to ask too many questions.
Going to Mabel’s funeral took me right back in time to when my husband had died suddenly. Only at Jude’s funeral, I can’t say I felt the same sorrow as I do for Mabel now. In fact, all I felt then was anger and relief.
3.
‘Will I fix us some stew just like Mabel used to make?’ I suggest now to Ben, hoping and pleading with him for some sort of an answer, or that he might eat something other than toast and tea or rubbish from the biscuit tins left in by well-meaning villagers for the wake. ‘It won’t be quite as nice as Mabel could make it of course, but I’ll do my best?’
Ben shrugs his shoulders, which is good enough to make me pounce off the seat to go and attempt to make Mabel’s Irish Stew, delighted with myself that I’d bought in the ingredients just in case he’d show a spark of enthusiasm for a proper meal, and happy if truth be told, to be doing something that didn’t involve staring into space.
She used to bring us a small pot of stew every Saturday in winter, and Ben would lap it up in one go, sometimes asking for more before he went to bed, and if she had more she would leave it in for him rain, hail, sleet or snow. She’d a knack for making that stew, and even if it was simple and not very fancy, no one could make it taste the way she did.
I throw some cubes of steak into the pan just like sheused to and then stir them around in a dash of oil as they brown. I quickly chop an onion, adding a splash of water, then turn it down to simmer just as she’d taught me to.
‘You’re going to need me to write this recipe down for when I go,’ she’d told me over and over again in a giddy voice. ‘It’s very,verycomplicated.’
I’d burst out laughing at her blatant sarcasm.
‘I’ll remember it, I promise.’ But she’d insisted on scrawling it down on a piece of paper and sticking it to my fridge. The writing has faded since that day, but I vowed I’d never take it down as it summarized her humour so dearly. There were memories of Mabel everywhere in our home, and that’s the way it would always be.
Ben turns the volume up on the TV so high it pierces my ears and I make my way to the living room to tell him off. Grief or no grief, he can’t get away with drowning me out like that, but just as I’m about to say my piece, a car pulls up directly outside Mabel’s house next door and my heart skips a beat.
No one ever visits Mabel’s house; no one except me or Ben of course, and the kind nurses who saw her through her last months as cancer dealt its final blow.
I race to the window, trying my best not to twitch the curtains, but I feel it’s in my rights to know what’s going on. I still have a key to her house, just like she had for mine, but I haven’t been able to step inside it since the day of her burial. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do so again.
‘Who the hell is that?’ I mumble to myself, knowing that Ben isn’t listening nor can he hear me over the din of the TV. The man at Mabel’s house drives a fancy silver Mercedes 4x4, the type of car I’d only ever seen in a car showroom from a distance, and he steps out of his vehicle and then goes to the boot to fetch something. I try desperately to peel my eyes away in fear he might see me watching, but I can’t. And then I recognize his face from the funeral, even though he never did introduce himself formally to me or my son.
He’s tall, broad shouldered, with dark wavy hair. I know him. Well, I knowofhim, I should say.
It’s Aidan Murphy –theAidan Murphy, who Mabel loved to brag about when I’d lend her an ear to do so. Her precious nephew, her only living relative, and the one person who lit up her life even more than Ben or I ever could or would, and he is putting up aFor Salesign in her garden!
‘Come on!’ I call out over the theme tune of some American TV show Ben is now superglued to. ‘You just cannot do that so soon! No way!’
I put on my boots, grab my coat on the way through the hallway, put it over my head to shelter from the snowfall outside, and march as best I can without slipping to the end of the pathway.
‘Excuse me, but why are you doing this so soon?’ I shout at him, recognizing a rise of panic and grief in my voice that I can’t seem to control. ‘Couldn’t you at least have discussed it with me first? Given me some notice or warning?’
‘Excuseme?’ he replies, puzzled. He blinks back snowflakes and wipes his hair out of his eyes as he stands in the blistering cold, positioning the wooden signpost in the snow-covered muddy soil in Mabel’s once impeccable front garden.
‘It’s the week of her funeral, for crying out loud!’ I continue. ‘She’s barely cold in the ground, and you’re advertising for a new occupant already? Didn’t you mean a word you said from the pulpit at her funeral? Are youtotallyhard-hearted, Mr Murphy?’
As I rant and rave, he stares back at me in bewilderment. I want to punch him.
‘Hard-hearted?’ he asks, laughing as he does so.
‘Yes, hard-hearted!’ I reply. ‘This is incredibly hard-hearted of you!’
He squints in my direction as the penny drops as to who I am.
‘So,youmust be the enigmatic Roisin O’Connor?’ he says, nodding now in realization. ‘I heard you were great friends with my aunt, but I’m afraid this is none of your business.’
Enigmatic? What the hell is that supposed to mean? We are face to face now with only a flurry of snow and the picket fence coming between us. Well, that and our obvious difference of opinion as to what should happen to Mabel’s house this week.
‘None of my business?!’ I spit, knowing I’m not giving him a very enigmatic impression now, as I stand, almost frantically in tears. ‘I was her best friend and she was mine!She hadn’t seen you in the flesh in at least five years, and now you rock up, play chief mourner with your glamorous wife, and two days after her funeral you stick a signpost in her garden so you can earn money from her already! How could you be so greedy?How?’
