Hell Hath No Fury
Bailer, Eddie Died 8th October 2022
I hope it’s hot down there.
I stare at the page in front of me. There it is, this tiny boxed obituary, sandwiched between Dark, Albert (Greatly missed) and Winston, Peggy (With the Lord). I rub my eyes with balled fists and stub out my cigarette in the ashtray by my elbow. Then I read it again.
I hope it’s hot down there.
Below that, in type so tiny you could almost miss it, reads: Saturday, October 15th St Elias 11a.m.
I hope it’s hot down there.
Something in those six short words chills me and I quickly fold the newspaper. Tony has always told me it is ghoulish to read the obituaries. He calls them the death notices, and he doesn’t use the word ghoulish, he says it is ‘macabre’. That is the kind of word he likes to use, to remind me that he is an educated man.
“Mum?”
Tony is eating one of my pork pies. His wife has him on one of those diets now, because they’re trying for a baby. He’s meant to be off meat and butter and pasta and something else, is it wheat? Yet here he is, leaning against the sink, flakes of pastry on his jumper.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, love.”
“Have you ever thought that one day it’ll be your name in that paper? ‘Isabel Mason, mother’.”
“I hope there’s more to me than that, Tony.”
“Don’t worry,” he tells me cheerfully, “I’ll make something up. Have you got any cheese?”
I don’t. I can’t eat the stuff, I never have. It gives me indigestion. Tony knows this of course, but it hadn’t stopped him and his wife buying me a cheeseboard last Christmas. It was presented on a piece of slate, nine different cheeses all shrink wrapped, a miniature box of crackers. I had smiled and said thank you because I am nothing if not well mannered. His wife had given me a short, tight smile and told me I was welcome. She hadn’t taken her coat off the whole time they had been here.
“We can’t stay long,” she’d said, as soon as they’d walked into the house. I’d made them carrot and cucumber sticks because of the diet, as if they were toddlers.
* * *
My own husband has been gone nineteen years. Divorced, not deceased although he may as well be for all the good he is. He lives in Florida now, with a woman he met on the internet. They play golf together in pastel colours; mint green, salmon pink, lavender. I’ve seen photos of him beneath palm trees beside swimming pools of a violent aqua blue.
“Look at all those chemicals in that water.” I’d say to Tony, peering over my glasses, “You’d lose a leg swimming in that muck.”
“Come on mum. You could at least pretend to be happy for him.”
“You’d grow an extra head.” I snap the computer shut. Tony sighs. He has his father’s thinning hairline and brackets about the mouth. They are so alike, it’s as if my DNA just gave up in the womb.
So here I am on the morning of the fifteenth getting dressed for the funeral of a man I have not met, who I do not know. Eddie Bailer, the man in the paper. I am wearing black, no hat, no gloves. I have a special outfit for funerals now, I seem to attend more and more each year. It’s my age you see. I used to wear a white shirt beneath a black blazer until at Kimmy Monroe’s wake someone thought I was the waitress and kept ordering drinks from me all afternoon. Now I just wear plain black.
I haven’t told Tony I am going because he might have stopped me. I don’t mean physically. It’s just that my boy has a way of wearing me down, talking and talking until the best thing to do is sit down and switch off my hearing aid.
Let me tell you something about getting old – it hurts. On bad days I creak like a galleon. Powdery bones and liver spotted flesh. When I see the names of my friends in the obituaries I draw a circle around them with a red ink pen I keep especially for the occasion. Jennings, Gregory (Not dead, just sleeping) had been a good friend to me and I had been sorry to see his name appear there. I shall miss his laugh. Townsend, Frederick (A gentleman, a scholar) the notice had read and I had thought that he hadn’t been much of a gentleman that night in ’45 at the Ice Ball, when I’d been wearing my lilac petticoat and his eyes had crawled over me like searchlights. I’d felt the same when I saw Parlour, Doris (Much loved and missed by family) which was funny because it was the family who had put her in the casket in the first place, and later they would take each other to court over the inheritance.
My mother was exactly the same, bent over the notices in our local paper, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the tabletop. She would shout out to my father, like Bingo. “Archie’s gone, that’s a shame. Do we know Felix Caldew? Is that one of Greta’s boys? Says here influenza.” Sipping her tea, rolling a cigarette, sighing. She would show me the page, one knuckled finger tapping against the type.
“See this, Bella? It’s what’s left of you when you die. Words. If you’re lucky.”
The bus pulls up across the road from the church but it is only just eleven so I am not late. I don’t see a hearse, no huddled group of mourners. Just the flaking red paint of the tall doors and the long shadow of the steeple like ink spilled over the pavement. It’s a motley building, studded with lichen and moss, large amoeba-like patches of damp. There used to be a problem with drunks sitting in the churchyard, leaving their litter behind; cigarette ends, cans, plastic bags fluttering in the branches of the yews like orphaned kites. Inside it’s dark and unpleasant smelling, as musty as an old cupboard and I cannot understand why you would choose it as a place for a funeral, for it has no joy. Then I think again I hope it’s hot down there, and I wonder.
The vicar is standing beside the door, a small man, head bent so I can see the pink scalp cresting through his baby fine hair. He smiles at me. He is wearing trainers beneath his vestments, I can just see them poking out. They are jarring, neon green stripes. They make me think he is planning on running away. I cannot blame him.
Inside, the first thing I see is the coffin in the front of the church. I give it a once over, I can’t help it. It’s cheap wood. No flowers on top, no candles. I read somewhere that coffins are being reused, the bodies removed and cremated, the coffin sent back to the funeral parlour for the next cadaver. In Edinburgh there is a cemetery where the dead are piled one atop the other, stacked. Plague victims. There is no room for them all, these poor dead folks.
My mother had been wise to it, the industry of dying.
“Just bury me in a biscuit tin in the garden.” She’d said, squinting against the smoke from the cigarette clamped between her teeth, “bury me and get on with your life.”
Perhaps Tony is right about me. Perhaps I am a little macabre.
I walk to the front of the church. There is one other person in the room and I can see her in the front pew. Narrow shoulders, neat hair. I don’t mean to sit beside her but I can’t seem to help myself. I am struck by her loneliness. She glances at me once, briefly.
“Hullo.”
I nod, sit down. Slowly, of course. I lean on the pew for support and make a low grunting as I find my seat. She is wearing red, a bright luminous red which makes her pale face look like wax. Her perfume is swampy, vegetative. I stare at my hands folded into my lap and ask myself again what I am doing here.
I hope it’s hot down there.
“I don’t think I recognise you.” She is saying, leaning closer rather than raising her voice. She has bitten all of her nails.
“No.”
“How did you know him?”
“Oh, Eddie and I are old friends.”
“Eddie?”
“Yes.”
“He hated being called Eddie. He insisted on Edward. Insisted on it.”
“But the obituary said-“
“I know what it said.”
I steal a glance at her. She is smiling. Tight and nervous, taut elastic. I look at her sideways, from the corner of my eyes. I am good at it now, it is a learned skill. When Tony and his wife come to visit I do the same to her. I catch her rolling her eyes at something I’ve said, or tapping her watch, mouthing come on at Tony when she thinks I’m not looking.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” I say.
Another quick peek like a bird pecking. Her face is thin, full of angles. When she smiles it is pinched and fleeting. Her eyes are dry though, and she is thrumming with a nervous energy as though she can’t wait to get out of here. I have seen that look before, the gladness, the relief that it is over. I saw it in myself, much younger, following the blackening of a livid bruise or a red welt rising inflamed on the skin. I lost a tooth once, spat it out into my cupped palm along with a little blood. My husband had been breathing heavily. I felt the efforts of his exertion all over me, in my joints and the cushions of my flesh. When Tony had been small I had told him daddy and mummy liked to play a game, and that when we did he had to hide under his covers and count slowly to one hundred and I would come and find him, wasn’t it fun? Two years later, on the day I picked up the knife Tony hadn’t gone and hid. He had been standing on the stairs and watching with wide, uncomprehending eyes. I’d left a six inch scar down his daddy’s chest and a gout of blood congealing on the floor. The policeman told me there was a word for women like me. They’d put me in the papers, Wife’s Shocking Attack On Councillor. Much was made of my husband’s largesse within the local community from blood drives to food parcels. The article did not mention how he could break my fingers in complete silence.
I take the woman’s hand. It is heavy like concrete. She does not resist. I squeeze once, just briefly, although she does not squeeze back. She is staring at the coffin sitting on the bier, dry eyed, wordless. I hope it’s hot down there. The light coming through the windows is opaque and milky and the coffin sits and waits and the old stones of the church hum and we are silent and we are fine.
And we are fine.
