As I approached the office door of Camborne and Sons, my stomach stirred again, and I took a small, quiet burp to myself and stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts. I knew that approaching thirty meant hangovers could now stretch into days, but I had a feeling this was less from the alcohol and more my body rejecting my moral failings. The fact I hadn’t managed a proper number two in several days was also, in its own way, mildly concerning.
I glanced at my phone. I usually ignored notifications, but four missed calls from Uncle Phil stood out. That wasn’t good. Perhaps he just wanted an instant answer to the job offer? Or maybe he’d discovered what had happened to Justin and was phoning to interrogate me, before trying the police when I didn’t pick up.
Summoning every ounce of Ruth moxie (or spunk as Uncle Phil would call it) I had, I pushed open the door. I barely had a moment to even let my eyes adjust to the overbearing fluorescent lights before Uncle Phil clocked me from across the office floor. He moved towards me faster than I thought his wiry, sexagenarian frame would allow. It’s true, Pilates really was working a treat for him.
‘Ruth, I need you,’ he said, slapping both his hands around my arms, his tone unusually intense. ‘Why weren’t you answering your phone?’
‘Uh… sorry,’ I managed to say, my shoulders jolting upwards and feeling a little flabbergasted by the sudden urgency from the permanently chilled, jovial man I knew so well, wondering what on earth had caused such a massive change in his persona.
‘Sophie’s called in sick, Eddie was late, and I need someone to help on the doors with the 10.30 Open Casket at RodboroughHall. But there’s a mile’s worth of roadworks, so we’ve got to go. Now.’
‘Sure,’ I said, though I was so taken back by his frantic energy that I felt like I couldn’t really say anything but yes. I was about to ask him what exactly I was meant to be doing but Uncle Phil had already scurried off, vanishing into the cavernous depths of his office like a mole in some hysterical fury.
Uncle Phil always insisted on four people – two on the coffin, two on the doors – and he very rarely deviated from that. I knew this funeral mattered to him, and there was no way he was letting Eddie or Clive near the entrance again, not after one of them tried to chat up a middle-aged widow at a service a few years back.
‘Find your smarties!’ he called from around the corner. That was his term for smart undertaker clothes. ‘And let’s get Justin sent off. They’ve paid us a lot of money for this, so it needs to go amazingly.’
The mention of Justin was enough to give my tummy another long, hard twist. Justin. Also known as the heartless man, who was now 70 per cent kitchen roll, and potentially the most absorbent human being in history.
I snatched up my – don’t laugh – smarties, and darted into the loo to change.
I had barely finished tying my Windsor knot when I heard Uncle Phil already rapping sharply on the toilet door.
‘Come on, Ruth, we need to go!’
Hurriedly throwing on my waistcoat and buttoning it up, I half sprinted towards the hearse already waiting with the engine rumbling in the loading bay. Uncle Phil had left the passenger door open, presumably for expediency, and was gesturing for me to get in like a commander pushing paratroopers off the plane door in Operation Market Garden. Meanwhile, the dunce brigade, otherwise known as Clive and Eddie, were just finishing up securing old Justin’s casket in the back. They looked genuinely panicked, a strange contrast from their usual smug smart-aleck demeanour.
We sped off from the building and practically drifted to jointhe road opposite, and it was as we careened around the already tight corner, made even tighter by Uncle Phil’s frankly erratic driving, that I heard a sharp metalclick, followed by the unmistakable sound of a thick wooden coffin tumbling onto its side in the back of the hearse. Uncle Phil instinctively slammed the brakes so abruptly that the coffin, now flung open, sent its occupant sliding towards the front of the vehicle with a loudthudinto the glass separator.
Shit. Was this how they’d catch me?
A hot ripple of terror flared and pulsed beneath my skin, my throat twitching as another belch begin to gather, or at least I hope it was only a belch.
I’d never moved so quickly; I tumbled out of the passenger seat and leaped into the back of the hearse, desperate to at least try and erase any trace of my tampering before Uncle Phil had even managed to unbuckle his seat belt. Clive and Eddie had already stopped their car and were charging over to assist.
Thank the Lord. From my quick assessment, it looked like the body was still intact; together we eased Justin back into the coffin and hauled it upright as a few passers-by stopped to wonder what exactly was happening. As a funeral director, you try not to buy too much into the whole superstitious angle or you would never be able to get anything done, but this felt very much like what some people would call an omen.
Despite Uncle Phil’s slightly manic urgency and his frantic incoherent mutterings about the incompetence of Clive and Eddie the whole drive there, we made surprisingly good time getting to practically crumbling Rodborough Hall. It wasn’t one of the nicer places we worked at, but we knew it well as a good-value venue: varnished wooden floors, high sash windows, and that little serving hatch connected to the kitchen. It was a community hall, really, a one-size-fits-all venue for any local need; you could still smell the Malbec from the Women’s Institute going cray cray on Tuesdays.
Clive and Eddie arrived in the other car not long after and carefully helped haul Justin’s coffin onto the gurney before wheeling it into the extraordinarily dull community hall that looked like it hadn’t changed since the Queen’s coronation. While they did that, I busied myself arranging some of the overly pungent flowers his family had chosen at the entrance of the hall: tuberoses and gardenias, terrible, terrible choices in my opinion. They had blooms so strong they left tears in your eyes before you even saw the person you were here to mourn.
I glanced at the flowers spelling out the word ‘DAD’, an obvious bestseller in funeral floristry. However, the other arrangement made me pause and recoil for a moment. I squinted at it, double-checking to make sure I hadn’t misread or somehow accidentally jumbled the letters when I was preparing them.
‘KNOBHEAD.’
I frowned, checked again, and even considered the possibility of some very rare Dutch surname. But no, it was exactly as it appeared. Triple-checking that I wasn’t suddenly losing the plot, I caught Uncle Phil’s eyeline. He still looked frazzled from this morning’s chaos.
‘Uncle Phil, is this right?’ I asked, gesturing toward the rather explicit arrangement. ‘I’m really sure I want to get this right.’
He gave it a glance, then rolled his eyes with a long, drawn-out resigned sigh. ‘I’m afraid so…’ he replied.
I scoffed, the flowers had been placed so intricately, so carefully, to spell out a word that was meant to evoke some kind of sentimental meaning, yet here it conjured the absurd image of someone with a phallus for a cranium.Each to their own, I guess.Could it be a term of endearment, somehow?
As I finally laid out the ‘knobhead’ flowers in the centre of the hall, I saw Eddie and Clive finishing up with preparing the coffin. Clive began rolling the gurney outside, and I crept over for a quick peek. The fact that no one was screaming or flailing their arms in alarm reassured me that things were, probably, still okay. I peered inside and saw Justin’s chest looked fine, no sign of the darkbloodstain on his shirt nor the fact he was currently storing a wholesale supply of kitchen towel in his ribcage. His face retained the serene, neutral expression that Sophie had perfected. No one would even know he was missing a heart, why the heck was I even worrying?
I let out what had to be the quietest burp of relief ever attempted.
‘Nasty way to go,’ Eddie muttered behind me in a grumble.
