by Karen Ross
Then again, my solitary confinement wasn’t entirely bad. I enjoyed breaking the office-hours monotony by going through all the product catalogues and samples that got sent to us in the post. I didn’t usually get to see these – although I have stacks of them now – so it was interesting to discover you could pick up a third-hand hearse for under four grand. Which I seriously considered once I got into the preparations for Happy Endings, although in the end I splashed out on a simple pale blue van with my business name and contact details discreetly on the side and a properly equipped interior from a company that was offering a cheap finance deal. I think it looks uplifting yet still properly respectful.
Happy Endings may be a shoe-string start-up, but if it weren’t for what happened on my final day at work, it probably wouldn’t exist at all. So I shall always be grateful Jason Chung’s mother is a sneak.
Here’s what happened on that last day.
I’d spent most of the morning on the phone, unenthusiastically informing recent clients that by completing a customer satisfaction survey they could win a weekend in Devon. Then, having finished with the post, I moved on to the next batch of papers, and discovered a pile of burial applications in need of processing. They were going to take me at least forty-five minutes – always supposing the Wi-Fi in Siberia wasn’t playing up again – and I was so not in the mood.
It was a quarter to one, fifteen minutes before my lunchbreak was supposed to start, and I was feeling peckish. I’d been trying to stick to the 5:2 diet and this was one of the days when I was not required to starve myself.
I straightened the applications, grabbed my coat and umbrella – the April showers were in full flood – and prepared to make a dash for the deli next to Queen’s Park tube station.
I knew that if Jason saw me leave so early, he’d do that annoying looking-ostentatiously-at-his-Rolex-while-tapping-the-glass thing that was supposed to remind me he’s the boss. Happily, he was nowhere in sight and by the time I got safely beyond the reception desk I was weighing the relative merits of tuna and cucumber on sourdough versus a jumbo salt beef hot wrap. And a chocolate orange cupcake, of course. Or maybe the vegetarian choice: a trio of chocolate orange cupcakes.
There was only the door standing between me and seven hundred calories, and I flung it open, umbrella at the ready. This particular April shower had turned into a full-blown downpour and the raindrops were bouncing off the pavement so hard I could actually hear them.
It must have been the thought of my lunchtime cupcake that made me fail to look where I was going. I stepped onto the street and literally fell over a woman for whom the phrase ‘drowned rat’ could have been invented.
She was sitting – slumped was probably more accurate – in the doorway.
Before I could apologise and ask if she was okay, I realised she was anything but.
And before I could speak the woman grabbed my leg and looked up into my face. She was about my age, dressed in a jacket and skirt that looked as though they’d been left out to drip-dry. Her pretty face was framed by two bedraggled blonde tendrils and her mascara was in ruins.
The pressure on my leg increased. ‘Please,’ the woman sobbed. ‘You have to help me.’
3
‘So two years we are here. My husband Grigor and me. We are sad to leave home but things are better in England …’
Whenever I think about the drowned rat – her name is Anna – which is often, I am grateful I took an early lunchbreak that day. It’s as if fate decided our two paths needed to collide.
Sitting in the deli with her, I had remembered her story right away. ‘Grigor Kovaks,’ I said. ‘I read about it—’ I stopped myself from reciting the details of the horrific accident that had left Anna’s husband in hospital with life-threatening injuries.
‘Yes, Grigor. My lovely Grigor.’ Her smile was so full of love it pierced my heart. ‘We find a flat in Camberwell and Grigor works nights for a bank in Canary Wharf. Security guard. And I am a cleaner. Then three weeks ago, on the Tuesday, Grigor is offered an extra shift, and of course we say yes.’
I listened carefully. It’s so important not to interrupt. Being there for someone at the worst time in their life, letting them tell their own story in their own way, can make it just a tiny bit better.
‘He is so proud of his bicycle,’ Anna continued. ‘Cleans and polishes it like it is a sports car. He needs his bike. The fares on your underground, they are so expensive. Not like in Budapest … After the accident I am living more or less at the hospital. Grigor stays in the coma. He looks asleep and I keep waiting for him to wake up. But nothing. And … last night I agree with the doctors that the machines are turned off. Then later the nurses were so kind but I could not speak to them. I need a little time on my own. So I go to the hospital chapel to pray for my man and when I come back to the ward, Grigor is not there.’ Anna started to cry. Fortunately, the deli was filling up fast, and nobody took any notice of us.
She took a sip of her now cold espresso, composed herself, and continued. ‘And that is when they tell me he has been taken already to the funeral place. Your funeral place.’
Oh God.
Please.
No.
I think I know what’s coming next. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.
A phone call to a ‘friendly’ undertaker during the night.
Money changing hands.
And someone like Anna Kovaks, a woman who’s just lost someone she loves and who has not slept for thirty-six hours, delivered like a lamb to the slaughter into the grubby paws of a business that sees every new client as a cash machine.
If this were BC – Before Chung – it would have been unthinkable. Our standards were always so much higher.
Gently, I encouraged Anna to continue.
‘When I arrive, the man seems very nice. Very full of sympathy.’
Full of something else if you ask me, but I keep my professional face in place.
‘He takes me into his office, and asks me many questions about my Grigor.’ For a moment, Anna’s voice faltered, but then – as is so often the case – she summoned her inner strength. ‘I tell this man, this Mr Chung of yours, how Grigor and I meet when we are both twelve years old. That we grow up together. That we have so many big dreams. And how our life begins when we come to London. And now Grigor has been accepted to do teacher training in September. He is so good at mathematics. They put him on the fast track and he will work at a big school in Beckenham.’
Anna drained her coffee cup, then fumbled in her bag and produced a soggy linen handkerchief. I recognised it at once. Jason orders them by the dozen. ‘Quality handkerchiefs make a statement about our business,’ he informed us at a staff meeting. I happened to agree, but in this case Jason’s largesse meant we were putting up our prices. Again.
Anna continued, ‘Then Mr Chung tells me it is an honour and a privilege that your firm has been chosen to make the arrangements. That is how it works in England. The hospital decides on the funeral place, right?’
A million times wrong.
‘So first of all, he invites me to choose the … the coffin. I pick the one that costs the least. But Mr Chung tells me that as Grigor is going to be a professional man, a teacher, it is a bad choice. He wants me to pick the one made of ma … ma—’
‘Mahogany,’ I supplied.
Anna nodded. ‘And then he tells me about embalming. It needs to be done, right?’
Absolutely not.
‘Mr Chung says I will want Grigor to look his best when relatives come to visit him before the funeral. I tell him that everyone is in Hungary, and he seems very glad. Before I say anything, he picks up the phone and talks about re … re—’
‘Repatriating the body.’
‘Yes. But I can tell from the conversation that this will be much too expensive. I explain we have started saving for the deposit on a flat, but only recently. And that I must do what Grigor wanted for us most. Stay here in London and raise our child to have t
he best chance in life.’ Anna noticed my startled face and softly added, ‘Fourteen weeks. The two weeks before … before the accident … they were the happiest time we ever spent. Now I truly believe that the peanut – that was our name for the baby – is a gift from God. I have to think that. Or …’ Anna was unable to continue.
‘So what did Mr Chung suggest?’ I prompted.
‘He said he would find Grigor a nice home at a cemetery in a part of London called Kilburn. He says it is a very nice district, right?’
Anna has obviously never been there.
‘And there will be many flowers. And car for me to ride in alone. And a stone to remember Grigor that will come all the way from China. I want to ask questions, but your Mr Chung, he talks very fast. He tells me we shall need a double plot so we can be together always. And that it will be a good idea for me to take out a funeral plan for myself at the same time. He makes me very nervous, Mr Chung, because I can tell all this will be very expensive.’
I’m surprised only that Jason didn’t insist on a horse-drawn hearse accompanied by the skirl of bagpipes and a juvenile chimney sweep.
Anna resumed, ‘In the end I tell Mr Chung that I shall spend all our savings for the flat deposit. Every penny. We have eleven hundred pounds in the Santander account. And you know what?’
Sadly, yes.
Having snatched Grigor’s body from the hospital in order to hold it to ransom in the corporate fridge, Jason Chung had been deeply unimpressed with the size of Anna’s life savings.
‘I knew it was expensive to live in London. But I never imagined it will cost so much to die.’ Anna’s bottom lip wobbled. ‘But Mr Chung says he wants to help me give Grigor the ceremony he deserves, and that he has a solution. I am not to worry because there is a nice organisation that will help me. They are called Doshdotcom. You know them?’
Kill me now.
Jason Chung actually suggested this poor woman, deep in shock on the worst day of her life – someone who was expecting a baby and had no regular income – should take out a payday loan?
I had no idea what to say.
‘By now I am very worried.’ Anna looked me in the eyes. ‘Mr Chung says that in England a cheap funeral costs about eight thousand pounds. That is correct, yes?’
‘No.’ My single word came out as a whisper, because I could barely trust myself to talk at all.
A weak smile. ‘So I do the right thing. When Mr Chung says he will fetch an application form for me to pay for the funeral I run away. I need time to think. But then I fall over outside your shop. And then you come. Like you are running away also. And you fall over me.’
I reached across the table and squeezed Anna’s hand. ‘I’m so glad that happened,’ I said. ‘Mr Chung … Mr Chung hasn’t worked for our firm for very long. Please accept my apology for your … your experience with him. I hope you will allow me to put things right. Here’s what we’re going to do.’
I began by reassuring Anna that she didn’t need to get herself into debt to give Grigor a respectful funeral. She might even be entitled to a government grant to help cover the costs. But then I realised she was no longer listening.
She was staring at Jason Chung. Marching towards us, a trail of plump raindrops scattering in his wake. His suit looked as though it was midway through an intensive wash cycle, and he was angrier than I’d ever seen him.
‘Mrs Kovaks,’ he said. ‘Found you at last. So glad Nina’s been looking after you.’ A meaningful glare in my direction. ‘Let me escort you back to the office, so we can sign those forms and ensure your husband has the dignified funeral he would have wanted. I’ve settled the bill,’ he added. ‘Coffees on me.’
So Jason Chung shepherded us out of the deli as if we were two felons under arrest. We were waiting for a gap in the traffic so we could cross the road when a cab pulled over a few yards in front of us and its passenger got out.
‘Quick!’ I grabbed Anna by the hand and dragged her into the taxi. ‘Just drive straight ahead,’ I ordered the driver. The cab had stopped on double red lines, so he didn’t need to be told twice.
As our getaway vehicle sped away, I turned round in time to see my boss’s furious face. His clenched fists were high in the air and he looked almost as though he was doing a rain dance.
In other circumstances I might even have laughed.
4
That’s what I said that night, when I told Gloria the story of Anna Kovaks. ‘In other circumstances, I might even have laughed. Jason was bouncing up and down on the spot, waving his arms around as if he was putting a curse on me! Or a spell to make everyone believe that the more you love someone, the more you need to spend on their funeral.’
‘So the whole thing was what you might call an R-I-P off?’
Gloria said it as though it were a pun I hadn’t heard before. I scrubbed the cast-iron orange saucepan that went with my dad to the Falklands War (and came safely home again) even harder, removing the final traces of our bolognese supper.
Truth be told, I was a bit irritated. If Gloria hadn’t wanted to know what happened to me at work that day, she probably shouldn’t have asked. On the one hand, we both knew she was only making a rhetorical enquiry before launching into tonight’s instalment of her Disastrous Relationship with Thrice-Wed Fred. But just this once, Fred's latest crimes could surely wait until we’d resolved something more serious.
My entire life.
I’m the first to admit I haven’t exactly cracked the work–life balance thing. It’s almost all work – not least because whenever there’s the faintest whiff of romance in the air, I tend immediately to think about my husband’s funeral. The only place my life is properly rounded is at the hips.
Gloria, to her credit, realised from my tense posture at the sink that despite my light-hearted remark about Jason, his behaviour towards Anna was no laughing matter. The two of us had shared a home long enough for her to know what I was going to say next.
‘So you’re going to resign,’ she pre-empted me.
‘What else can I do?’
‘Let’s back up a moment,’ Gloria said. ‘You did absolutely the right thing, taking Anna to the no-frills funeral services in Putney. Eight hundred and fifty quid as opposed to thousands of pounds she simply didn’t have.’ Gloria rose from the kitchen table and headed for our emergency supplies cupboard.
This was definitely going to be a two-bottles-of-wine Wednesday.
‘I take it Jason will release the body?’ she asked.
An invisible hand grabbed my stomach and twisted. Until then, I’d completely overlooked – repressed, more likely – the fact that the bloke who started up his budget cremations business because he was scandalised by the cost of his own mother’s funeral would need to liaise with my employers if he was going to have Grigor’s body to cremate. I folded a damp tea towel into quarters, gave the glass hob a quick polish, then sat down at our kitchen table and reached gratefully for my fresh glass of wine.
‘Jason won’t have any choice,’ I said. ‘Which means I need to hand in my notice first thing tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m as bad as he is.’
‘What about the others? Surely when you tell them what happened, they’ll help you take Jason to task? Force him to behave properly from now on.’
As if.
Our staff turnover had been horrendous since the business was sold. Apart from a couple of the senior drivers, I’d been there longer than anyone else. Five years.
The newcomers seemed to have bought into Jason’s marketing-speak: monthly sales targets and promises of big bonuses. For all I knew—
No, surely it was impossible that everyone except me was up-selling in the worst possible way?
‘I’m not certain I can count on anyone for support,’ I said. ‘So the only question is, how much do you get on the dole these days?’ I managed to sound a lot less frightened than I felt, as I started to face up to the true cost of my good deed. Ah well, I’d experimented with just about every diet in the unive
rse, so perhaps the Poverty Diet would succeed where the rest had failed.
‘I won’t be out of work for long.’ It was a promise to myself as much as to Gloria, although I was already wondering where my next job was coming from. Independent funeral companies were becoming an endangered species, and my battle charge towards the moral high ground, in flagrant defiance of corporate policy, was unlikely to impress any of the big chains – none of which I had ever wanted to work for anyway.
Gloria broke into my alarming thoughts. ‘Sweetie, I’ve been telling you for three years,’ she said. ‘You pay me too much rent.’
Gloria is – not to put too fine a point on it – rich. Which is to say, Gloria’s dad is an ex-banker whose name was never far from the headlines a few years ago, usually alongside words like ‘disgraced’ and ‘fat cat’. These days, he seems to spend most of his time playing golf and gently taking the piss out of his adored only child for choosing to work at a community law centre. ‘Sins of the fathers are one thing,’ he’d chided last time he visited, ‘but surely you could do good in a more lucrative way? There’s plenty of women eager to pay handsomely for good divorce lawyers.’
This house, the house we live in here in Kentish Town, was Gloria’s eighteenth birthday present. (Imagine that. I thought I was really privileged when Mum and Dad celebrated my coming of age with driving lessons.) And since the community law centre no longer has any budget for staff, my rent money is what Gloria lives off. Topped up by her trust fund, admittedly. Then again, for someone who needn’t work at all if she chose not to, Gloria is pretty damn dedicated to her various causes. It’s one of the things I love about her. However, I wasn’t about to become her latest charity case and I resolved that first thing in the morning I’d start putting out feelers for a new job.
I drained my wine glass. ‘I’m going to go and compose my resignation letter. I’ll send it by email.’
