Jigs & Reels: Stories

by Joanne Harris

  Dernière make-up favours statement colours, and the deceased opted for a metallic violet by Urban Decay, with accessories by Moriarty. Behind the casket came the PR girl, with the bewildered old couple in tow. Security let them through with reluctance, and I wasn’t surprised – there’s a dress code to these events, for God’s sake – and between you and me, both of them could have done with a little wardrobe advice. That make-up, for instance – who wears waterproof mascara to a funeral nowadays? And although a few tears can be quite now on these occasions, nose-blowing is completely out – fluids are really so inappropriate. I saw the official photographer pose them for a casket shot, though I could have told them it would never be used. People read about these events for the glamour and the gossip, not to see pictures of geriatric funeral-chasers looking glum. And they were casting a shadow on the whole party, too; I could see guests edging politely away from them as they approached, and even the people from elite introduction agency Crème-de-la-Crem (Putting the Fun back into Funerals) kept their distance. Rather tasteless, I thought, for them to be there at all.

  ‘From the North, my dear – Yorkshire or Derbyshire or somewhere like that—’

  ‘God, what a bore. I wonder what brings them here; I mean, they’re not exactly the party type—’

  ‘I suppose it’s for the service; after all, she was their daughter.’

  ‘Darling! How morbid! Quick, quick, another cocktail!’

  I gave the old couple a wide berth, and spent a pleasant five minutes exchanging beauty tips with Cardamom Burrows and her friend Coriander Hague, as Amber from K.O. watched with envy. The Northern couple loitered vaguely on the edges of the group for a time, then drifted away, refusing canapés and drinks. No one seemed eager to talk to them.

  Goodie bags were given out to all guests, containing samples of the new Eulogy super-streaky mascara, mini-bottles of Moët Black Label, Penhaligon’s new-season fragrance Gather Ye Lilacs, and a fabulous silver coffin-motif key ring from Asprey & Garrard, all in a funky limited-edition tote . . .

  At last the individual shots seemed to be over, and the room was now getting very crowded. It was rather hot, too, and I was glad of the open windows and the ceiling-fans. In a few minutes, I knew, it would be time for the ceremony and the speeches – between you and me, the dullest part of the event, but it’s popular with the readers, and with these parties there are always celebrity mourners to give a bit of life to an otherwise lacklustre occasion. I could see Madonna in one corner – note to self: burka chic, with ironic minidress – talking to Elton John over the heads of several dozen Armaniclad bodyguards; Tom Parker-Bowles and A.A. Gill (I wondered what he was doing there, then remembered his new column, ‘Death Warmed Up’, on funeral catering), rubbing shoulders with Hugh Grant and Sophie Dahl.

  My notebook was filling up rapidly. I had stopped writing in complete sentences, cursing the fashion that decreed wet notes in favour of electronic ones (the handwriting accessories are so stylish, though), but I promised myself I would write everything up properly on my PC that very night.

  Graham Norton: lurex and cashmere from Fake London. Julie Burchill with Tony Parsons (?) – surely some mistake?? Juicy playgirl Apricot Sykes. Society’s answer to Johnny Depp – Viscount Wimbourne, Speccy Von Strunckel, Zadie Smith . . .

  For a while I amused myself counting the guests that Sis had dated. Everyone was having a marvellous time – by now the casket had been transported to the viewing area (tastefully shrouded in dévoré velvet), and the bands were both in full swing. There was a moment of surprise as the lights dimmed and silence fell, but when this was revealed to be a solo ‘unplugged’ performance of Cage’s 4:33, wittily performed by Brat’s Johnny Nuisance, the entire audience burst into spontaneous applause.

  It was the signal for the eulogies to start. Expectantly, we moved to the sides of the room as the huge podium swung into place. Celebrity speakers at these events are closely guarded secrets, and even I had no idea who was going to take the podium. There were so many celebrities here that any choice was bound to be a spectacular one. It depended on what image the deceased chose to project: intellectual angst (Salman Rushdie, Jeremy Paxman, Stephen Fry); funky (Graham Norton); dominatrix (Madonna); girlie (Stella, Jodie, Kate); breeding (Kitty, Piggy, India, Pakistan). This, in any case, was the magic moment. Frocks, tears, unguarded secrets . . . anything might happen, anything might be revealed. Last year Elspeth Trivial-Pursuing ended up on the front page of Goodbye! after breaking down completely and thanking everyone from God to her neighbour’s budgie for helping her survive the death of her dog, Figgis; and porn legend Jim Grossly astonished and amused by performing his own post-mortem eulogy via video link, and arriving at the crematorium in a huge Porsche Condom.

  But as we watched in breathless anticipation, it was the Northern couple that stepped up to the platform, still hand-in-hand, she clutching her shabby old M&S handbag (too old even to qualify as vintage), he wearing his Sunday suit and funeral tie, and I felt a dreadful sense of déjà vu. This was just how it had been when my grandmother died: the same suit, the same old handbag, the same expressions of baffled grief over the sherry and sausage rolls.

  They were going to speak, I realized in horror and growing rage; they might even say a prayer, not knowing that in fashion terms such things were as dead as the pashmina or the Fantasy Tan. I felt my face grow hot with humiliation. Trust them to spoil it; trust them to make a scene when everything was going so well and remind us that in spite of our affectations we were here with Death, the original casket-chaser. I couldn’t bear it. The old Northern woman was looking at me, her eyes netted in wrinkles, her mouth turned down – no Botox for her – in a painful little grimace of distress which would have looked great on Gwyneth or Halle, but which on her looked too real, too raw, like a bedsore or some other unsightly affliction you’d never see in the movies.

  ‘You might be wondering why we’re here,’ she said in that toneless voice of hers. ‘But we’re her parents, after all, and we didn’t think we needed an invitation to our own daughter’s funeral.’

  Not much of a speech, I thought; usually they begin with the thank-yous, trying to keep it to two minutes whilst dropping as many famous names as possible.

  ‘I wouldn’t have done it this way meself,’ she went on, looking round the room with a slightly pained expression, ‘but this is our Maggie’s day, after all, and it’s only right that all her friends be here to send her off.’

  Send her off! It was downright embarrassing. I wanted to scream, to shout at them to stop it, that they were spoiling everything, but I was still aware of the old woman’s eyes on me (what was she staring at, for God’s sake?) and I couldn’t move, I could hardly breathe under the weight of that sad, regretful gaze. I closed my eyes, feeling sick.

  ‘Well, I’m not one for speeches,’ went on the old woman, her voice cracking a little. ‘I don’t want to keep any of you from having a good time. But what I do want to say is—’ she broke off for a moment, and the sound engineer looked at his stopwatch – ‘what I’m trying to say is that our Maggie – our Maggie—’

  Funeral etiquette dictates that no one should move during the eulogies. It’s partly for the sake of the cameras sweeping the audience, partly out of respect for the sound engineers; but oh God, I needed a drink. I picked up a cocktail from a nearby table and downed half of it in one, feeling the sickness recede a little. I could tell that some of the guests were confused by the name of Maggie – no one had called her by that clunky, unfashionable name in years – but the Press seemed happy enough, lurking at the edges of the crowd, filling up on nibbles and drinks, and Amber from K.O., with her unerring instinct for trouble, was grinning at me on the sly.

  ‘What my wife’s trying to say,’ said the old man in his slow, deliberate way, ‘is that Maggie was our daughter. We didn’t see much of her – being busy as she was with her career and the rest – but we loved her all the same, as we love both our girls. We’d have done anything
for them, anything—’ God, why doesn’t he just shut up? I asked myself – ‘and we allus did our best. But it’s hard sometimes, trying to keep up. We never held it against her when she didn’t come to see us, or when she didn’t call, or was too busy to answer the phone. We were proud of our Maggie, and we still are. I remember once—’

  At this point, mercifully, we reached the two-minute line and the mike cut out. I felt a dim relief that we had been spared the Northern man’s reminiscences of Auntie Madge or Uncle Joe – or, infinitely worse, of little Aggie and the dressing-up box, and how she and her Sis were just like peas in a pod, just like twins, the darlings, like two little angel figurines. I opened my notebook again and wrote furiously: Speeches v. disappointing. Note to self – extended Generations Gap piece (?) Keep it light, e.g.: ‘The Handbaggers’ or ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Mother’. But when I glanced up, they were both still looking at me, she with one hand extended, he with that hangdog look I’d always hated, as if there was something I could give them, or something they could give to me.

  ‘Mother, please,’ I murmured.

  But the Northern woman was adamant. ‘Come on, our Aggie. Don’t be shy. It’s what she would have wanted.’

  People were turning to look at me now; my face was aflame. I wanted to scream with frustration – please, please don’t do this, Mother – but all I could do was shrug helplessly and smile, as if I were the victim of an amusing malentendu, whilst on the dévoré-draped podium the Northern couple stared at me in sad surprise, then bewilderment, then finally, understanding and resignation.

  He had shrunk during his two minutes; now he seemed no more than four feet tall, a dwarf of a man in his Sunday suit with his dead daughter at his side, and if anything his wife was smaller, a shrivelled old woman who might die at any moment without ever tasting a liquorice Kir or Beluga blini; a frightened old woman willing to face even the terrors of a Society funeral in the hope of a glimpse of her vanished daughters . . .

  As children, we never quite forgive our loved ones their mortality. At Gran’s funeral there had been sherry and sausage rolls, and we had cried together, Mum and Sis and I, at the unfairness that takes away a relative without warning at the age of fifty-nine; and afterwards we had collected all the leftover food into some Tupperware boxes while Dad and his mates went down the Engineers for a pint, and me and our Maggie played fairy princesses with Gran’s old clothes and an orange lipstick from Auntie Madge, and swore we’d live for ever. But all that was a long time ago: things had moved on, and rightly so. I wasn’t Aggie any more – I was Angela K.: sophisticated, witty, stylish, and above all, poised. Angela K. didn’t do nostalgia, she didn’t cry, she didn’t snivel; she kept it light, kept it witty and ironic and utterly free of fluids.

  ‘Aggie, love, please.’

  ‘Yer Mam and me won’t be here for ever, you know.’

  ‘We’re worried about you. You never call.’

  ‘And you’re getting so skinny – just like your—’

  ‘Sis.’

  It was too much. I could feel it coming like an avalanche, bringing everything down with it. The photographers could see it too, and I felt their lenses turn hungrily towards me, because if there’s anything better than a celebrity speech at a Dernière, it’s a celebrity breakdown, and I was a celebrity of sorts, if only by proxy. It was coming; and my eyes were stinging, my throat squeezed shut and the cry was almost out, almost uttered. There was no stopping it; the only question now was how much damage it would do, and as the tears squirted from my eyes and the snot from my nose I felt it all go with them: my poise, my prospects, my career, my dreams.

  There’s no escaping it, I thought dimly: there are no Immortals. Death was everywhere, Death was undeterred by the black cordon or the security guards; unimpressed by the music or the gossip or the fashionable caterers. He was in us all; he was on the High Street and in the designer showroom; he was an enviable size nought; a rattling good dancer; a playboy; a wit. I cried for the unfairness of it all: for the Immortals; for my sister; for my parents; for myself. Because in the end it’s always for yourself, isn’t it? That’s the truth of it, we cry because we know that we won’t live for ever. We rage against the defective gene that makes us mortal, and we hate the ones we love for passing it on.

  The audience was watching, rapt. All cameras were now on me. Technically speaking, I’d passed the two-minute cut-off point, but this was good, this was great, this was what we’d all secretly come for: that little taste of the raw, the flesh; the bloody sacrifice in the smiling presence of Death, the ultimate party animal.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ I screamed above the noise. ‘I’m not ready!’

  And as the cameras flashed and the band struck up and the voice of the crowd rose to a moan, I heard Amber say quietly in my ear: ‘Go for it, darling. Knock ’em dead.’

  Free Spirit

  I got the idea for this story on a Saturday morning, sitting at a dirty table in a crowded supermarket café. It scared me then, and still does.

  YOU’LL NEVER tie me down. I’m a free spirit; i go wherever the wind takes me. Last night it was Paris, by the banks of the Seine. She’d been sleeping under a bridge; she was sixteen, dog-tired, beautiful. Tinfoil and spent needles littered the floor around her bed. I knew at once that she was the one. Her long river-coloured hair trailed across the greasy bricks; her eyes were closed. She made small introspective sounds as I touched her; her skin mottled; her eyelids flickered. Sometimes she seemed ready to speak, but there was no need for words between us. We were already too close for that. Her fists clenched; she clawed the air; her neck and her pale arms blossomed. She was alight and lovely with fever.

  It was quick; that’s the only drawback with these short affairs. In less than twenty-four hours it will be over. But the wind keeps on blowing; a scrap of tinfoil from under our bridge escapes in a draught and is carried up over the Pont-Neuf and over l’Ile de la Cité to descend in a shower of confetti on the steps of a church where a young couple poses, smiling for a photographer.

  Choices, choices. Who will it be? The bride? The groom? More interesting to me are the guests: the teenage boy with a scattering of herpes simplex around his sullen mouth; the grandmother with her caved-in face and hands knotted beneath her white gloves. They are all beautiful to me, all equally worthy of my attention. I leave the choice to the scrap of tinfoil; there’s poetry in that. It spins, whirls. Faces lift to the sky. For a second it brushes the lips of the balding man, a second cousin with a flat, impassive face who stands slightly apart from the others. Him, then. I follow him home.

  His flat is on the Marne-la-Vallée line; small and obsessively clean, the flat of a man who has no friends. There are no beer cans discarded beside the sofa, no dirty dishes stacked in the sink. Instead there are books: scientific manuals, medical dictionaries, anatomical charts. This man gargles with Listerine four times a day and his bathroom cabinet is filled with the paraphernalia of the hardcore hypochondriac.

  Not that I mind; in a way it appeals to me. This is a man who does not understand the nature or the extent of his own desires; beneath his prissy exterior, his obvious fear, I sense his secret longings. Besides, I enjoy a challenge.

  Once again, there is no need for words. He is irrationally afraid of me, and yet he welcomes me with something approaching relief, as if he has been awaiting just this moment. There is a desperation in his resistance which gives spice to our meeting, and when finally the barriers are broken, he responds even more quickly than the girl, who was already weakened by hardship and encroaching pneumonia.

  But I can’t be tied down. Twenty-four hours is all I can give him, and already I sense that our wildly opposite natures are causing problems. He wants intimacy; to stay in bed all day with the television on and cool drinks by the bedside. I’m a social animal; I need contact to survive. I’m already beginning to miss the nightlife, the clubs, the busy heat of Paris. I escape when he is asleep, the moment the cleaning woman comes to look over the fl
at.

  She is all unsuspecting; she peers over him cautiously (it is past twelve) as if to check him for fever. ‘D’you want me to call a doctor?’ she queries; then, when he does not answer, she shrugs and gets on with her work. That’s all I need. I escape unnoticed, the brush of her hand the only contact between us.

  The cleaning woman is old but tough. She lives near Pigalle. It’s my favourite part of Paris; bright, ugly and seething with life. She takes me to the Sacré Coeur, where she prays and I prey, passing from tourist to tourist and running voluptuously over the well-fingered stonework. The air here is hot with incense; from here penitents will wander down the Butte de Montmartre into Pigalle below, where the whores and the rent boys congregate and the strip-clubs are just beginning to get busy.

  I’d like to stay with the cleaning woman, but life’s just too short. There are hundreds – thousands – of others out there waiting for me. I pass quickly from one to another: a nun gathering alms at the door of the basilica collects more than she bargained for; the old gentleman who gives her a hundred-franc note receives an unexpected handful of change; later that night, a lad who swears he is fourteen will meet us both in the dark archway of a closed Métro station, and after that the young lad (who is really nineteen and doing good business) will take me to a club, where I shall mingle freely among the revellers, dipping into drinks, sharing cigarettes, touching flesh and enjoying the warm, damp air.

  They are all equal to me: young, old, healthy or corrupt, male or female. Twenty-four hours is all I can ever give them; but in that time I give them my all. Who next? And where? Will it be a needle, a kiss, a lost coin picked up from the streets and carried home? Will it be a cube of sugar in a crowded café or the gleeful tramping of a fly in a pâtisserie window or the furtive hands of a pervert on the Métro or windblown dust sticking to a child’s lollipop? Whatever it is, I’ll be there. You may not see me; I won’t speak a word. But all the same, you’ll be mine. We’ll be closer than lovers, you and I: tighter than DNA. Nothing will mar the perfect physicality of our relationship: no quarrels, no seduction, no lies. You will give me your self, and I will give you mine, entirely. For a while.