The Bottle of Tears

by Nick Alexander

  Mrs Michael had produced a plate of her famed fairy cakes that day. It seems incongruous, thinking about it now, to have offered around a plate of pretty fairy cakes at a moment like that, but Mrs Michael always seemed to have a freshly cooked batch of cakes to hand, and the day Ed fell was no exception. Thinking back on it now, Penny realises that they had probably been baked as a Christmas treat.

  Anyway, Penny had sat eating hers, picking the silver balls from the icing and one by one crunching them between her teeth, while Marge (who refused the offer of a cake) sat and cried, and Vicky, still white as a sheet, stared silently at hers.

  Eventually – for it seemed like forever, time passed slowly that day – Mr Michael came back. ‘There,’ he said softly. ‘All spick and span.’ And that had been enough to set Marge off again. She’d wept for another half an hour.

  ‘We should go,’ she said when she had calmed down enough to speak. ‘Thanks. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mrs Michael asked, wringing her hands. ‘You can stay as long as you need. You can stay the night if you want.’

  ‘No,’ Marge insisted. ‘No, the girls will sleep better in their own beds. And it’s like getting back on a ’orse, isn’t it? If we don’t go back now . . .’ And so they returned to their own house, which suddenly smelt of bleach.

  Leaving Vicky staring strangely up the staircase, Penny stepped back into the lounge, where the tree reminded her that it was still Christmas. Some of the gifts were Ed’s and she remembers wondering whether they would get to open them for him or whether they would have to wait for his return to see the contents.

  The doctor had arrived just then and had taken Marge to the dining room, where he spoke so softly that they couldn’t hear what he said. There was a lot of whispering in the weeks to come; there were many secret conversations. The doctor had given Marge an injection to calm her down, but it had made her incredibly sleepy instead.

  ‘Look after your sister,’ she’d instructed Vicky sharply. ‘I’m off for a cat nap.’ But it would be no cat nap. She would sleep solidly until the next day.

  Once her mother was gone, Penny had crossed the room to the tree, where she sat cross-legged. As she squeezed the packages one by one, she expected Vicky to tell her off, but she’d just watched silently, her expression glazed.

  When she had finished squeezing all of the smaller packages, she lifted the largest box of all. ‘Is this Ed’s train thing?’ she asked.

  Vicky nodded in reply.

  ‘Will we open it for him?’ Penny asked. ‘Or take it to the hospital?’

  Vicky frowned then.

  ‘I think we should take it there.’

  ‘He’s gone, Sis,’ Vicky whispered.

  ‘I know,’ Penny replied. ‘But when they’ve stitched him, he might need it or something.’

  Andy, the little ginger boy at playgroup, had fallen from the climbing frame just two months before. He, too, had been wheeled off on a stretcher. But other than a few angry stitch marks across his forehead, he was fine now.

  ‘He’s dead, Penny,’ Vicky explained. ‘He’s gone to heaven.’

  Penny frowned then, as she attempted to concentrate on thinking about this new concept. She stared at the pretty holly packaging on Ed’s gift and tried to work out what Vicky was telling her. ‘Isn’t he coming back ever?’ she asked, tears starting to form.

  Vicky shook her head very slowly.

  ‘Is it my fault?’ Penny asked. ‘Is it because I didn’t get Cecil?’

  Again Vicky shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, Cecil would have made everything worse.’

  Penny had wondered then, as she wonders now, just what her sister had meant by that. For how could anyone’s presence have made anything worse that day?

  She had been too young to understand what was happening. She’d been too young to fully understand what death meant. But Victoria had understood.

  Despite her elder sister’s reassurance, Penny continued to feel responsible or, at the very least, partly responsible, for Ed’s death. For who could say for sure that the presence of a calmer, more cool-headed adult than her mother mightn’t have saved Ed’s life as he lay there, as his lifeblood pooled away from him on to the tiled hall floor?

  In fact, Penny realises, she still feels guilty about not having done as she was told.

  Nowadays, being an adult, she can, of course, reason with herself. The logical part of her brain can inform the emotional part that there is nothing Cecil could have done.

  But so many mysteries remain.

  Penny is forced to take a week off work. Her boss is very sweet about this, but Penny feels horribly guilty all the same. In a job like hers, you simply can’t take time off without knowing that you’re letting down the most vulnerable of people. But there are so many things to be done when someone dies that there’s really no other option. And as Victoria is demonstrating her expertise in the art of passive resistance – she does not answer her phone and only responds to voicemail or text messages once it’s too late – it all falls to Penny. So she travels up and down to London on the train, collecting copies of death certificates here and delivering them via the Underground to bank managers, solicitors and undertakers there.

  It’s madness, really, that society expects a newly bereaved person to jump through so many hoops. Perhaps, Penny thinks, the whole process has been designed to take one’s mind off the loss. Or perhaps it’s been designed, rather, to hammer home that loss – it can seem so hard sometimes to truly integrate the fact that someone has died.

  Penny is supposed to be an expert on bereavement, of course. It was a part – a large part – of her training. But never having gone through the process herself – or, at least, never when she was old enough to understand it – she’s discovering aspects that she never thought about before. She’s discovering, for example, that the human brain expects permanence. The cup is where you put it. The car is where you parked it (if it hasn’t been towed away). The wine is still in the refrigerator where you left it. It’s only people, the most complex, important, influential, life-changing elements of our lives, who are there and then are shockingly not-there. And it’s surprisingly hard to get one’s brain around that.

  So she wakes up every morning and, just for a second, she doesn’t know that Marge is dead. She forgets and, momentarily, she wants to phone her. She pulls a recipe book from the shelf and sees the recipe that her mother likes so much and thinks that she’ll make it the next time she comes down. Time and time again she has to remind herself that she’s dead, that she’s gone, vanished, that she’ll never be seen again.

  There’s a new awareness of the absolute nature of oblivion, too, an understanding, a sensation, almost, that we’re all heading that way. These are concepts that we all, as adults, understand. We know that we will die. But Penny has never understood it physically before. She has never been aware of the speed and trajectory of her life towards it, she has never felt before, on a cellular level, the inevitability of that gaping, waiting void. Your parents are dead, the universe seems to be telling her. Now you’re next.

  Is Victoria feeling it, too? With her avoiding nine out of ten phone calls, it’s impossible to know.

  The day before the funeral, Victoria answers Penny’s call immediately. Penny takes this as a good omen, a sign that her sister has finally relented.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ Penny says warmly. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ Victoria says, her new stock answer. To hear her speak, she has never felt better. ‘I just got back from my session with Müller.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘Fine. You know I can’t talk about that.’

  ‘OK, then. I . . . I just wanted to talk about tomorrow,’ Penny says nervously.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Victoria repeats flatly.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow. We’re all coming up for the funeral, as you know. It’s at eleven.’

  ‘Yes. I know. I just got Martin’s suit from
the cleaners for him. It’s not his nicest suit, but it’s black.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘Do you want to come here first or something?’ Victoria offers.

  Penny exhales sharply and her eyes tear. Tears and sighs seem never to be far away these days. ‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ she says. ‘I was so scared about having to send her off without my big sister by my side.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ Victoria says. ‘I didn’t say I was coming! I just said you could come here before, if you want. That way, Martin and Bertie can drive over with you.’

  Penny is momentarily speechless. It happens rarely, essentially when her emotions are performing a crunchy gear-change from joy, for example, to anger.

  ‘Hello?’ Victoria says.

  ‘I . . . I’m speechless,’ Penny tells her.

  ‘Huh. I’ve been saying exactly the same thing all week, so I don’t know why.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you,’ Penny says. ‘I just can’t see how that’s possible – letting your son go to his grandmother’s funeral on his own? That’s just . . . well, it’s outrageous, really.’

  ‘He won’t be on his own, will he? He’ll be with his father.’

  ‘God, Mum said you were selfish, and she was right,’ Penny says, wincing even as she says it. It’s not a nice thing to say, and it’s not going to take this conversation anywhere she wants it to go. But it’s too late now. It’s said.

  ‘Selfish?’ Victoria repeats. ‘Selfish?!’

  ‘Yes. Selfish. You’re showing no regard for me, or for your son, or for your husband, or, for that matter, for your dead mother. It’s all just you, you, you, isn’t it? Mum was right. I should have listened.’

  Victoria snorts. ‘She said this when? Oh, was it when I was filling her fridge? I’ll bet that’s it. Or maybe when I was paying her rent? Was it, perhaps, when I visited every bloody sheltered housing place in London? Was it then? Or was it when she spent every weekend watching Noel bloody Edmonds on our television? And where were you, then, Penny? Huh? Where were you? And you dare to call me selfish? Well, fuck you, Penny. Fuck you!’ The line goes dead.

  ‘OK, we won’t drop by,’ Penny says, her voice taut with emotion.

  She looks up to see Sander standing in the doorway. ‘That didn’t go well, I take it?’ he says.

  Penny shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really.’

  Later that day, Penny phones Martin to try to enlist his support in getting his wife to the funeral.

  ‘I’m doing everything I can, Penny,’ he says. ‘Believe me. It’s like I said before. I really think she’s having some kind of breakdown. But she’ll snap out of it eventually. At least, I’m assuming she will.’

  ‘Only, by the time she does, she will have missed her mother’s funeral,’ Penny tells him.

  ‘That’s true,’ Martin says.

  ‘There are no reruns of this one, Martin.’

  ‘Also true,’ he says. ‘But what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I just think it’s a bit convenient,’ Penny says, another batch of words which have slipped out in spite of her best intentions.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Martin asks, sounding suddenly prickly.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ Penny says. ‘There’s no point anyway.’

  ‘Goodbye, Penny,’ Martin says. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. At eleven.’

  Brilliant, Penny thinks. Now I have his back up as well.

  The next morning, Penny is awake before sunrise. She sits in the lounge nursing a mug of coffee and listens to the creaking house as it sleeps, and to the waves as they crash and wheeze against the pebbles outside, until slowly the horizon brightens, first a deep, sumptuous blue, then purple, then red, and then orange. It’s going to be a beautiful day – a beach day, Penny thinks, not a funeral day.

  Sander comes downstairs at seven. He rests one hand on Penny’s shoulder and looks outside as well. ‘You OK?’ he asks.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Penny says, turning to look up at him. ‘Gosh, you look nice.’ He’s wearing a white shirt and black trousers. The full outfit cost her less than £15 at Primark, but you really couldn’t tell.

  ‘Thanks,’ Sander says. ‘But it feels like school uniform. I seem to have disguised myself as Max.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to see you in a shirt for once,’ Penny says.

  ‘It’s gonna be nice, then,’ Sander comments, nodding at the blue sky beyond the window. ‘Good job I didn’t waste money on that jacket after all.’

  Chloe, unusually, wakes up of her own accord. At eight, she appears in pyjamas, looking as tired as Penny feels. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says. ‘I kept thinking about Gran.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Penny tells her daughter as she strokes her hair from her eyes.

  ‘What time are we leaving?’

  ‘In an hour. So make sure you’re ready, OK?’

  ‘OK. But do I really have to wear that dress? Only I thought . . .’

  ‘You do,’ Penny tells her. ‘We both do. It’s just one day, so . . .’

  Chloe rolls her eyes, but she knows better than to argue today. ‘Can I do my nails, then?’

  ‘You can,’ Penny says. ‘But not black, and not purple, OK?’

  Chloe pulls a face. ‘It’s a funeral, Mum,’ she says. ‘Everything’s supposed to be black.’

  ‘You’re almost right,’ Penny tells her. ‘Everything except make-up.’

  ‘Gran wouldn’t have minded,’ Chloe says. ‘She told me she liked the emo look.’

  ‘That,’ Penny says, actually managing to laugh, ‘I very much doubt.’

  The drive to London is sombre.

  Sander and Max, in matching school uniform, are stony-faced, while Penny is permanently on the edge of tears. Only Chloe, stuck in childish resentment about having to wear a black Primark dress, seems unfazed. But Penny knows that won’t last.

  When they get to Hendon Crematorium, they cross paths with the departing relatives from the previous service, some of whom are red-eyed while others are still weeping. The two parties nod at each other respectfully.

  ‘Who are all those people?’ Chloe asks. She thinks, for a moment, that these are secret friends of her gran.

  ‘The previous batch,’ Max explains. ‘One lot comes in as the last lot goes out. It’s like a production line.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ Chloe says, ‘when you think about it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Penny says. ‘It is weird.’

  Inside the crematorium, the coffin is already in place, as requested. Penny couldn’t be sure there would be enough people to carry a coffin and hadn’t wanted to pay for pall-bearers they didn’t know. Plus, all that coffin-carrying business has always struck her as a little absurd, a bit Laurel and Hardy somehow – little more than an opportunity for horrific, slapstick disaster. And she can see that she was right about the numbers. Despite Sander’s best efforts, only five people are present: an old lady and an overweight man, an elderly chap with a walking stick who Penny thinks she recognises from Vivian Court, and another aged couple already seated at the front.

  On seeing Penny, the overweight man stands and helps the woman to her feet.

  ‘Hello,’ she says when Penny reaches them. ‘I’m Flo. From next door. Do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Penny says. ‘You’re Mrs Michael, who baked all the cakes.’

  ‘And which one are you?’ Mrs Michael asks.

  ‘I’m Penny. The youngest.’

  ‘Ah, good,’ Mrs Michael says. ‘Don’t tell your sister, but you were always my favourite.’

  ‘Hi, Penny,’ the man says, and Penny suddenly realises that this is Peter. Peter, who was seventeen years old the last time she saw him. Peter with the blond mop and the blue eyes – Peter who Victoria had a childhood crush on. It barely seems possible that he can have become this overweight, red-cheeked man. But then Penny thinks about the fact that Peter must be approaching retirement now, and then, terrifyingly, visualises herself throu
gh Peter’s eyes. Yes, she thinks, he’s not the only person to have changed.

  ‘Is Vicky . . . ?’ Peter asks. He blushes an even darker shade of red, and Penny somehow picks up that he’s afraid he has put his foot in it – he’s afraid that Victoria has followed Ed’s premature trajectory to the other side.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Penny says. ‘But she probably can’t make it today.’

  ‘Oh?’ Peter says.

  ‘Oh!’ his mother exclaims. ‘That is a shame.’

  ‘Yes, I was hoping to see her,’ Peter says.

  ‘Well . . .’ Penny replies, casting around for a quick change of subject. ‘Um, this is Chloe, my youngest.’ She gestures to Chloe, who is lurking behind her, to step forward. But Chloe shyly raises one hand and waves instead. ‘And this is Max, my son. And Sander, my husband.’

  As they all shake hands, Penny explains, ‘This is Mrs Michael. She lived next door when I was little. She used to supply us with cakes. And this is her son.’ Internally, she frowns at the fact she has mentioned cake and the overweight Peter in almost the same sentence. She wonders if he noticed.

  ‘Your mother fell asleep in my daffodils once,’ Mrs Michael tells Chloe. ‘She broke all the stems.’

  ‘I was about five,’ Penny says. ‘So I have no memory of that whatsoever. Personally, I think it’s a myth.’

  ‘Victoria will remember,’ Mrs Michael says. ‘You just ask her.’

  ‘So, Victoria’s not coming?’ Peter asks again. ‘What a shame. I was hoping to see her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny says. ‘Yes, so was I.’

  ‘Is there a wake thingy after?’ Peter asks.

  ‘Just a drink,’ Penny explains. ‘In a pub. Chequers. It’s just down the road. You’re welcome to come, if you’d like to.’

  ‘Thanks. That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Mum?’

  Mrs Michael nods. ‘If I’m not too tired by then. I tend to wear out quite quickly these days, dear.’

  Moving forwards, Penny crouches down next to the elderly man with the walking stick. ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘You’re from Vivian Court, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear?’ the man says, tapping on his hearing aid, then, ‘Oh, yes, Vivian Court. That’s right. Are you the other daughter?’