by Lynda Renham
‘We’re heading for a real Clockwork Orange,’ he would tell Imogen. ‘We’ll be okay here though,’ he would say smugly after reading about the latest crimes.
Henry and Imogen looked after their bodies. Imogen went to Pilates and Henry was fond of tennis. Therefore, it was something of a shock to find he was dead at forty-nine. This just didn’t happen to people like them. It had to be a mistake. But who did one seek out to correct the mistake?
‘Do we go to St Andrew’s Church?’ asked Rita as they exited the tearoom.
Henry scratched his head.
‘I’m not altogether sure. Imogen and I don’t go to church so I can’t imagine …’
‘You don’t?’ said Rita.
Henry couldn’t tell from her tone if she was surprised, relieved or disappointed.
‘We don’t believe in God,’ said Henry in a tone that insinuated anyone who did must be crazy. Any consideration that Rita might didn’t occur to Henry.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So, where will your funeral be then?’
‘The crematorium, I imagine,’ said Henry thoughtfully. ‘The flowers I saw at the grocer’s couldn’t have been for me.’
‘You saw the flowers?’ said Rita, amazed.
‘Imogen works at Blooms the greengrocer’s. They were arranging flowers for Henry’s funeral.’
‘There are lots of Henrys,’ said Rita, thoughtfully.
Rita wondered which one of the assistants at Blooms was Henry’s wife. She only went there occasionally. Mostly she bought her fruit and veg from the store. She got discount so it would have been mad not to. Blooms sold nice organic veg though and sometimes Rita would splash out and get some.
‘Precisely,’ agreed Henry. ‘It could be anyone.’
‘We’ll need the 167 bus,’ said Rita knowledgably.
Henry nodded, impressed, and together they strolled to the bus stop.
‘It will take about fifteen minutes to get to the crematorium,’ she said. ‘I hope we won’t be late for your funeral.’
‘Me too,’ chuckled Henry.
However, the crematorium didn’t have a funeral booked for Henry Booker Frazer or anyone else come to that. A sign on the gates read ‘Crematorium closed today for maintenance work.’ Henry wondered what kind of maintenance went on at a crematorium but didn’t want to think too deeply about it. It was always good to maintain things, he thought. Better that everything runs smoothly.
‘Is there another crematorium?’ Rita asked.
Henry shook his head.
‘Not locally. I suppose we should go to St Andrew’s then, just to be safe. I feel sure it won’t be there, though. What is the time?’
‘Nearly two,’ said Rita, looking at her phone.
‘Thirty minutes,’ said Henry.
‘It will take us ten minutes on the bus,’ said Rita, her brain calculating the journey. ‘We’ll have a ten-minute walk from the bus stop. We have to get the 87 and then change to the 33.’
‘Yes, yes,’ nodded Henry. ‘We shouldn’t delay.’
Although Henry was not at all sure what he was going to do at his funeral. It would be rather futile, he felt, to go racing in, shouting ‘Stop the service, I’m not dead,’ considering no one would hear or see him, apart from Rita. He wondered why Rita had special powers that enabled her to see him. What was it about her that he also found magical and enticing? From the first day that he had tried her wares, he had felt something strange resonate inside him. Once he had been in a museum on the Isle of Wight and he’d felt certain he had discerned her delicious fragrance. It had drifted across the echoic rooms of the museum and he’d become quite desperate in his desire to trace it back to its source, which turned out to be the elderly steward in the next room and Henry had then quickly realised that it smelt nothing like Rita’s perfume at all.
He turned to her now and said, ‘thank you for coming.’
‘That’s alright,’ said Rita. ‘What will you do when we get there?’
‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ said Henry.
Chapter Eleven
Henry supposed the cortege would leave from their semi-detached in Mayberry Terrace.
‘Maybe we should go there,’ he said to Rita.
Rita looked decidedly uncomfortable.
‘Well …’
Henry shook his head. Watching his own funeral cortege leave his home might be a bit close to the knuckle.
‘Perhaps not,’ he said.
No doubt, the neighbours would come out of their houses to stare. Henry acknowledged that there was something about a funeral that was hard to resist. It hammered home the realisation that life was fragile. Everyone would no doubt breathe a sigh of relief that it was someone else in that coffin and not them. The women would make a decision to quit worrying, and to stop shouting at their husbands and children over things that didn’t matter, because life was too short for all that. For a brief moment, they would appreciate that life was beautiful. They had been the lucky ones and anyway, things like that didn’t happen to them. By dinnertime, more important things would have moved to the forefront of their minds and Henry and the fragility of life would quickly be forgotten. They would continue as they always had, as though Henry had never been. However, for a moment, they would stare in silence at his coffin and think ‘Poor Imogen’.
Of course Imogen would not see them. She would only have eyes for the dark oak coffin that sat in the hearse, telling herself over and over again that inside it lay Henry. It would be impossible for her to accept, thought Henry; that her life would have to continue without him.
Cynthia would lay a reassuring hand on her arm and ease her forward. Cynthia was always good at taking charge.
‘We need to get into the car,’ she would say in that authoritative tone of hers.
Imogen would sniff her mother’s Caleche perfume.
‘It always takes me back to happy times,’ she’d told Henry.
Imogen talked often about all the yesterdays that she felt sure were just sitting and waiting for them.
‘You read too many books,’ Henry would say with a smile.
‘It was so easy to slip into the past,’ Imogen said. You just smelt something familiar and travelled to where that yesterday sat waiting for you. There were so many yesterdays waiting for Imogen, like the hot yesterday in Bognor Regis, where the sweet smell of candy floss had made her mouth water, and the warm, fresh fragrance of Caleche had touched everything. It was comforting and familiar. It was the smell of happiness.
She would step into the funeral car, her body numb. The sudden realisation that she would have to look at the French oak casket all the way to the church would fill her with panic.
‘It’s alright darling,’ her father would say, in his comforting voice.
His mother would sob quietly. She never liked to draw too much attention to herself and Imogen would search through her bag for a tissue. Imogen always thought of others. Henry shivered at the thought of the blackness. Everything around Imogen would be black; the interior of the car; the people in it, all dressed in black, their pale waxy faces standing out in the gloom. The blackness would suffocate her. Imogen had always hated the dark. The pattering of rain on the roof of the car would strangely calm her. She would rest her hand on her mother’s knee and stare ahead, beyond her mother-in-law’s black headscarf, past the oak casket and flowers, finally landing on the entrance gates of the park. She would think of me, thought Henry and tears would rain down her cheeks and fall onto her new black shoes. Henry knew Imogen would buy new shoes. She would want something special. He knew that Imogen would spend hours searching until finally an assistant would come to her aid.
‘Are you looking for something in particular?’ she would ask.
‘Yes,’ Imogen would reply while fighting back tears. ‘Black shoes for my husband’s funeral.’
The silence would be deafening. The assistant would bow her head and struggle to think of the right words. She was a shoe sales person, not a bereavement c
ounsellor. Recently bereaved people should buy funeral shoes online. Then, no one need be embarrassed. Instead of looking at Imogen, the young fresh-faced assistant would drop her eyes to study a pair of blue Sketcher sandals. Imogen would wait for her to say ‘I’m so sorry’ or similar words of condolence. Instead, the assistant would say cheerfully to the blue Sketcher sandals.
‘I know just the thing.’
The funeral would never be mentioned again.
The shoes would, of course, pinch painfully on the day. New shoes always did. They would be crippling her by the time the day was over. She daren’t say anything, because people would look at her and think, ‘At least you can feel your toes. That’s more than poor Henry could do.’ Imogen would stretch her toes in the tight shoes and bring her attention back to the casket. It would be hard to believe Henry was in that. Henry who had always checked his blood pressure, ate smoked mackerel and avoided egg and cheese and swallowed vitamins as if they were smarties, because he wanted to live at least until he was ninety.
A watery sun would break through the clouds and Henry’s dad would say, ‘the sun shines on the righteous’ and, of course, he would be right.
Chapter Twelve
Rita wasn’t looking forward to Henry’s funeral. She hated funerals. It would remind her of her father’s.
That day it had been icy cold; the snow harsh and brutal. The unforgiving wind had cut right through the coats and gloves of the mourners. Rita and her mother had stood at the entrance of the church, their hands and feet like icicles. Rita had forced herself to look at the coffin as it was lifted from the hearse. She’d tried to imagine her father, silent and still, inside the dark stained, perfectly polished box. It had wobbled precariously as the men carried it to the front and for one awful moment Rita had a horrific vision of her father’s mangled body falling onto the cold church floor, his leg rolling grotesquely down the aisle. Her mother’s shaky hand had clutched hers tightly and Rita had winced as the thorns of the rose she had been holding punctured her skin. It was good to feel something. Inside the church, people were lamenting and wailing, as if Jesus himself had died all over again. Hadn’t they known what a monster her father had been? How so unlike Jesus anyone could be? Her mother had sat on the hard pew, her face an impassive mask. Rita had struggled to summon up from somewhere within her a feeling of loss, but nothing came no matter how hard she tried. The congregation had been so kind. Every day someone came with a hot meal or some shopping. People had popped in just to chat and hand out tissues. No one had seemed to notice that the tissues and nicely embroidered handkerchiefs stayed dry. Her mother would thank them politely and she and Rita would later eat the food in silence. Rita had stared ahead when the coffin had been brought into the church. She didn’t want to give it any more attention than it deserved. Her mother’s hand had squeezed hers and she’d felt comforted. Her mother had forgiven her. That was what really mattered.
The service had lasted forever. It seemed everyone wanted to say something about his or her beloved minister. Rita felt anger at their ignorance. So much love and affection poured out for Walter that Rita struggled to hold in the bile that threatened to choke her. The monster in the coffin had come close to defiling her and all people could say were good things about him.
‘Damn,’ cursed Henry, dragging her from her father’s funeral. ‘It’s raining again, and I left my umbrella at the office.’
‘I have one,’ said Rita, pulling it from her bag.
Drops of rain fell onto her head and she thought of her warm waves. She didn’t want to cover them with her hood as that would certainly destroy the waves once and for all. The damp air wasn’t helping either.
Henry deserved better than this, she thought. Someone with a name like Henry Booker Frazer deserved to have the sun shine down on his funeral and not dark heavy clouds and rain showers. She was dreading the 87 bus turning the corner. It would take her closer to Henry’s wife and just supposing she wasn’t fat and frumpy as Rita had imagined and was instead glamorous and slim and knew exactly what to wear and when? Hopefully, like Rita, she would be wearing a dark raincoat. No one ever managed to look good in a raincoat, did they? Except, perhaps, Marilyn Monroe, and Rita very much hoped Henry’s wife didn’t resemble Marilyn Monroe. Once inside the church perhaps she could risk removing her coat. She looked quite presentable in her blue jumper and pencil line skirt.
The 87 bus turned the corner and Rita’s heart sank.
‘Here it is,’ said Henry.
He followed her on and Rita climbed the steps to the upper deck. The seats at the front were empty and Rita hurried to them. It was the best view from the bus. Henry swayed slightly as the bus moved off. Rita grabbed his arm and they wobbled to the front.
‘It’s a good view from here,’ she said beckoning to Henry.
He squeezed beside her and she felt the heat of his thigh against her own. Would people on the bus think them a couple? she thought pleasurably and then remembered that no one else could see Henry. This is all quite surreal, thought Rita. One minute she was living her normal life and the next she was entering this strange world of Henry’s, where nothing seemed to be what it ought to be.
They watched from the window as people rushed for shelter from the heavy downpour. Inconsiderate drivers splashed through puddles, soaking nearby pedestrians who waved their fists in anger. A watery sun struggled to break through the clouds and Rita prayed it would. Henry deserved the sun to shine on him.
‘A church,’ Henry muttered beside her. ‘I don’t understand it.’
Rita turned to look at him. His face was so close that she could see a small pimple on his cheek.
‘Perhaps Imogen had to,’ she consoled him. ‘You know, with the crematorium closed.’
It was a weak excuse. Imogen could easily have changed the day.
‘But I wouldn’t want to be buried,’ Henry said worriedly.
‘I know what you mean,’ she agreed.
Rita sometimes thought about what happened after death. She didn’t fancy being cremated or buried. She wondered who would arrange her funeral and then decided it didn’t really matter. She wouldn’t know anything about it and that consoled her. Hopefully she would be nicely ensconced in a nursing home. That wouldn’t be too bad, she decided. Better than being alone.
Rita’s arm brushed against Henry’s as the bus jolted over a bump in the road. She found herself hoping they might not make it in time to catch the number 33. That they might miss Henry’s funeral and she wouldn’t have to see his wife, because supposing, horror of horrors, she could see Henry too. What would happen then? However, to her dismay, the number 87 made it in plenty of time. She looked at Henry. He seemed so real. Was she mad? Was Henry mad? Was she really seeing Henry or was he just a figment of her imagination? She shrugged and decided she didn’t really care if he was. She was enjoying her time with him and if Henry were indeed dead then she didn’t have to worry about sinning. It wouldn’t count.
The number 33 bus came along. It was neither delayed nor cancelled. Rita was on her way to Henry’s funeral and there was nothing she could do about it.
Chapter Thirteen
Henry stared ahead. The sun had triumphantly broken through the clouds. The heavy downpour had now turned to a light drizzle.
‘That’s it,’ said Rita pointing.
Ahead of them, through a light mist of rain, could be seen a church steeple.
Henry nodded nervously.
He was having doubts now they were here. However, he couldn’t really say anything, not after convincing Rita to come with him.
‘What’s the time?’ he asked.
Rita pulled up the sleeve of her raincoat and checked her watch.
‘Twenty past two,’ she replied.
Henry walked a few steps further and could now clearly see the church steeple. The ringing of the church bells reached his ears. They were ringing for him, he thought. He turned to speak to Rita and realised she was no longer with him. He turned to
see she had stopped and was looking in fascination at the church.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t go any further,’ she said, biting her lip.
Henry had a weird sensation that they were re-enacting a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Henry was on his way to ask the wizard for his life back and Rita … Henry wondered what Rita would request from the Wizard of Oz. He rather thought it would be love. He had sensed Rita wanted love more than anything. Something about her reminded Henry of a sad and lonely puppy he and Imogen nearly adopted once.
‘He’s been through the wringer,’ the woman at the Blue Cross had said. ‘Poor little thing.’
Henry had said it would be a big responsibility keeping a pet and they had decided against it. That was how Rita looked, thought Henry, as though she’s been put through the wringer.
‘But you’ve come all this way,’ he said.
He really didn’t want to enter the church alone. Supposing, just supposing this was his funeral and not some other unknown Henry?
‘Your family will all be there,’ said Rita sadly. ‘No one will know who I am.’
I’ll be the outsider looking in, thought Rita, just like always.
‘I’ve invited you. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I’m entitled to invite whoever I like to my own funeral.’
Rita smiled.
‘You don’t get to invite people to your funeral.’
Henry sighed heavily.
‘Well, people should be allowed to. Anyway, it’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘It’s not my funeral.’
‘No,’ said Rita with a small laugh.
‘It’s some other Henry.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
‘I just need to be sure of that.’
They began to walk slowly towards the church. Henry’s stomach tightened as they grew closer to the entrance. The peal of the church bells seemed to be tolling, ‘Henry is dead. Henry is dead.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said.
