1
I see death nearly every day. Mr Feeney always told me that winter was the worst time, he said that’s when most people die. My granny died in January; she was ninety-two.
Young people too.
‘Young men,’ tutted Mr Feeney one frosty morning as he wheeled a body bag past me on a gurney, ‘young men in the winter.’
There was a young man who lived at the other end of our estate; his body was found in a lake one November. Suicide. But somebody, I can’t remember who, said it might not have been suicide. Sometimes I wish we just knew the truth about things and that people would be more honest. I think it’s important to be honest because things are hard enough as a teenager without worrying if people are lying to you or not. I think if you’re lying to everyone all the time it’s almost like you’re trying to be lots of different people living lots of different lives.
I don’t think it counts as lying but I used to make up stories about why I couldn’t do things with friends on weekends because I didn’t want them to know that I worked at a funeralhome. It wasn’t long until they stopped inviting me altogether and then I didn’t have any friends at all except one: Ronan.
Ronan and me never spent time together outside school, I don’t know why, that’s just the way we were, but that didn’t change the fact that he was absolutely my best friend. It was August and I hadn’t seen him since June when school broke for the summer holidays. It would be September before I saw him again.
I was thinking about him one Saturday afternoon as I was cleaning the front windscreen of the hearse in the yard because a song came on the radio that Ronan always sang, ‘Drops of Jupiter’, and it made me smile.
The smile must have dropped off my face in an instant though because Kevin Sherry, a boy from my school, was standing in the yard staring at me. We weren’t friends but not exactly enemies either. I think he just thought I was weird. But when he saw me sitting in the front of a hearse outside Feeney’s Funeral Home that Saturday afternoon he must have thought I was even weirder. I’d never seen him look the way he did then because in school he was so confident and cocky, surrounded by his group of football teammates and usually holding hands with his girlfriend, Leanne. I’d definitely never seen him look sad before. He seemed so small. He had the same look a lot of people have when they come to the funeral home, but his expression morphed into a mix of confusion and a strange anger when he saw me; I was a boy from his school sitting in the front of a hearse surrounded by browning petals with my hand frozen to the cloth on the window as the radio continued to play Ronan’s favourite song.
We locked eyes.
It was my secret that I worked at Feeney’s every weekend and during the holidays. I didn’t want anyone at school to know. I didn’t want to scare everyone away from me or for themto think that I was even weirder than they already thought. They’d think that because I spent so much time close to death that it would somehow bring them close to it too if they were near me, even though I never worked the funerals or touched a dead body, I only washed the cars.
Kevin’s granda had died that morning and I think the last thing Kevin wanted was for someone from his school seeing him the way none of us had ever seen him look before. He wasn’t the captain of the football team that Saturday afternoon, he was scared standing there with his mum. She was in tears behind him with her hand on his shoulder. Maybe he’d been crying too. I sat looking at him through the windscreen of the hearse that his granda would eventually travel in. He didn’t say anything to me. He only shook his head with a snap as if to warn me not to breathe a word, to keep my mouth shut, as if to silently agree that I didn’t see him, he was never there. His mum made brief eye contact with me and then leaned down to guide Kevin by the arm; he shook her hand away with his elbow and she stepped back. With one last glare at me Kevin turned and strode away with his mum following slowly behind towards the front door of the funeral home where arrangements would be made with Mr Feeney.
I sat for a while on the front seat. My hand, still on the window, fell and landed on my lap. I felt confused about the way Kevin had looked at me. Even if I was someone he barely spoke to in school and even if I was the last person heexpectedto see that day, the sad thing was that I became the last person hewantedto see every day since. It was sad because, two days after I saw Kevin, I had that hearse absolutely gleaming for his granda.
2
In winter, the frozen ground makes tough work for the grave diggers. When my granny died it was one of the coldest Januaries there had ever been. After the funeral my mum gave the grave diggers a twenty-pound note for their trouble.
I was glad it was summer because when I wash the funeral cars in winter the cold air cracks and splits the skin on my knuckles with thin lines of red that sometimes trickle blood. It was always in the winter that my hands looked like old people’s hands. But after three winters of working at Feeney’s Funeral Home I was used to it.
My mum would catch sight of my hands during dinner, the cracks and the little red spots of dried blood across my knuckles. She’d tell me to stay at the table while Dad washed the dishes and she’d rub Vaseline into my hands. She’d do the same at night, sitting on the edge of my bed just before sleep. But she hadn’t done that in a long time.
After Granny died Mum seemed to go into a world of her own. Then when she started back to work just two weeks after the funeral she’d asked to work the night shifts at the nursinghome, which meant she slept all the daylight hours in the spare bed up in the roof space. She used to wake up around lunchtime when she did night shifts and spend most of the afternoon with Dad and me. But after Granny died she slept right up until 7 p.m. so that there was only an hour until she had to leave for the night shift again. Even on her days off she spent most of her time up in the roof space. I think she was sleeping then too because my bedroom is right below and I never heard a creak of movement when I sat on my bed and listened hard, wondering. She was like a ghost in our house that I rarely saw and was a little bit scared of the times I did. That January really was so cold and I needed Mum to see my hands more than ever, but she didn’t eat dinner with us anymore and she didn’t come to see me before bed. I was glad when summer came because I didn’t need to worry about my hands cracking open and I didn’t need someone to take care of them.
I don’t really have an interest in cars, not like the way my old primary school friend Jonathan did; his bedroom was filled with hundreds of toy ones. I loved cleaning them, though. It started with my dad’s green Honda Accord. I’d give it the full works every week, sometimes twice a week, inside and out, all year round. The men down at dad’s workshop asked him how he managed to find time to keep his car so spruce and Dad told them it was all down to me. So it wasn’t long until his workmates asked if I would do their cars too.
The more cars I cleaned, the more word spread about town until Gerry Feeney, Funeral Director, heard about me. He had two hearses, two cars for mourners, his own personal BMW, his wife’s family estate car and there was also his brother Matty’s fleet of six large people-carrier vehicles that could hold up to eight with the seats installed or four wheelchairs if the seats were removed. Matty and his drivers did school runs for children with special needs during the week, but on weekends thevehicles were used for transporting partygoers to nights out. When Mr Feeney offered me the job and said it would keep me busy, he wasn’t joking. It was only a fifteen-minute cycle from my house to the funeral home. No matter the weather I cycled there to clean as many of those vehicles as I could.
Every day I was there, death arrived in some form or another, whether it was a body in a bag on its way to the mortuary at the back of the funeral home to be embalmed, or a family coming to choose a coffin, or on the day of a funeral when the bereaved gathered at the chapel of rest to see their loved one for the last time before the coffin was put into the hearse I’d just cleaned.
I was never involved with the actual funerals so I didn’t really think much about death, except maybe in the times that I got my ‘vivid life moments’. That’s what I call them and I don’t know if anyone else experiences the same kind of thing or not but I’d be going about my day at home, in school or at the funeral home, and everything would be completely normal until I got ambushed by thoughts. They collapsed on me. I don’t even know what the thoughts specifically were. Ask me now and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. All I know is how they made me feel. They swept under me like a cold current in a warm sea. It was like my spine was a long icicle but my chest was a furnace. The thoughts made me feel hopeless and scared for a few breaths before they faded and were gone and I couldn’t bring them up again even if I wanted to. I had no control over those vivid life moments. They used to not happen very often but I’d been getting them more and more during that summer.
There was a barley field miles from where I lived, I’d never been there, I’d only heard about it, but when the summer ended I couldn’t stop seeing it in my dreams.
3
September; the gateway into autumn.
It’s when Mr Feeney stocked up his coffin room for the busy months to come.
It was also the time that I would go through a reverse metamorphosis. All summer I was free, being my own boss in the yard at Feeney’s Funeral Home right up until the end of August when I’d start to feel myself cocooning. The new school term was about to begin and that meant uniforms, orderly lines, rules, timetables, homework. I was awkward in those first weeks back at school, as if my free-form self of the summer had to crust over with a layer of tougher skin. I needed that tougher skin that year more than any other because it was our fifth and final one, which meant exams and the great unknown at the end of it all when we would leave school forever and be out there on our own. But probably it wouldn’t feel so different than normal because even in school surrounded by hundreds of others I always felt alone.
I hadn’t told anyone about that loneliness except for my best friend Ronan. I was always honest with him so he knewa lot of things about me that no one else did. He was the only person in school who knew I worked at Feeney’s Funeral Home and he never told anyone. Ronan and me had been in the same form class since first year. Mrs O’Neill was our form teacher, her main subject was Religious Education. I liked her more than any other teacher in our school. I don’t mean how most boys liked Miss Hackett the Music teacher – boys said all kinds of things about her and her boobs – I mean, I liked Mrs O’Neill because she was a genuinely nice person, like one of those characters from a Roald Dahl book who you wished was your teacher in real life, and I felt lucky that Mrs O’Neill was that kind of teacher for me right from when I saw her on our first day of school.
It was the same with Ronan in a way. On that very first day in our new secondary school Ronan and me were seated beside each other at a double desk at the front of the class. We hadn’t even said ‘hello’ before our year head, Ms Toner, started giving us the ‘welcome to your new school’ speech.
‘Boys and girls,’ she projected (she was also head of the English department and seemed to enjoy the sound of her own voice even if none of us did), ‘welcome to your new school. You will have plenty of questions, I’m sure, but we will have specific question time allotted at the end, so please save any questions until then. Understood?’
