You are going back to the old country and nothing will have changed and everything will have changed.
You won’t surprise anyone when you say
No’.
To the offers to come with you. Your partner, son, closest friend all volunteer. But they are everything to you, and to crash this life you have built into the one you have left could be a fatality. A smashed up backside of a car on a hard shoulder, an unrecognisable number plate but maybe that’s an S or a 2, glass scattered like beads off a cheap necklace, a tyre rolled but undented, a perfect Oh like a gasping mouth. Surprise.
You want to say No to the funeral but this is the second one you’ve been expected to attend. You used your best excuses for the first invite. The first was the heatwave of June 2028- even hotter than the heatwave of 2027 - when there was a wedding you didn’t attend. There was rumour the bride and groom were in trouble before they reached the altar, an affair or a baby had blown their vows before the vows happened. You can’t recall which. Stories from the old country, the old family, they blur with the haziness of the past. Or the heat.
When you get to the Motherland they will talk about the weather. They have always talked about the weather. Blowy today, cold today, will this rain ever stop? The weather is small talk and you hate the talk about it. Now they will talk about the weather. Lambs are dying. Farming is dying. We are dying. The weather is big talk and you’ve been begging them for years to talk about it. Now they will talk about it.
You will want to tell them it is too late.
Instead you’ll nod. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’ You will say.
See? Nothing will have changed and everything will have changed.
Aunt Mary will be there, first to greet you. It isn’t a smile but her lips will part as a reward that you have fulfilled this expectation. Aunt Mary is the eldest of the sisters but the only one left alive. Her mourning blacks are well worn but you couldn’t tell, they’re immaculate. That one that never married cares most about how she looks. There’s no moustache on Aunt Mary. When you ask Aunt Mary about her peers she will sneer disapprovingly “the drink took them” whilst raising a glass to her lipsticked mouth.
There will be a Mass eventually. Aunt Mary will speak as she always does, a predictable passage from the Bible. Her voice will stay steady; it is important to her that it does. Your sister will speak too. Not to you any more, but at the stand. She might look harried, her voice wavery. She will not look like you, any more. She will not say anything personal, just from the Book, that you once read together. You will wonder if she will read at your funeral, or attend, or have reason enough not to come. But before all this is the Wake.
The evening will be in the Old House. When the frost has settled between you and your cousins, you’ll sit in the gazebo outside in the unfathomably warm evening, taking what’s left of the booze, except the ones back in AA. They drink water and say they are marvellous. There will be two cousins missing. The one that hasn’t come, and the one that everyone hates. You will wonder who these might be, this year.
Last time it was you that wasn’t there, and Connor who everyone hated. Connor wasn’t a proper cousin now, just a son of a friend of the family. Connor had become a director - of all things! - and the cousins thought he was above himself, fancied himself, the most heinous of crimes. Last time Connor was left confused in the stifling heat of widows indoors whilst the cousins basked outside. He was very aware of his non-invitation to the gazebo, less about what prompted it. This time Connor will be front and centre, Connor has done so well, we are so proud, everyone loves Connor. You will accidentally sit next to Connor on the cheap outdoor chairs, and the cousins will queue up to proffer love and respect for this star.
Connor’s last film won awards. Nobody can remember what exactly, but everyone is delighted.
You will watch Connor as the cousins try to tempt him into a game of who do you hate. Connor left so long ago he doesn’t remember this is like a cat dropping mice at their owner’s feet as a display of affection. Though recently you read this interpretation is not scientifically accurate. If someone knows a better way to show allegiance they should tell the cousins. Scientific inaccuracy often irritates you. Connor will not know what to do with this anyway. He will feel uncomfortable, his green eyes shifty. You will wonder if he is taking it in for his next film, a satire, a comedy. You will wonder if he will end up back with the widows at this rate.
Connor will want to talk to you. About climate change. Big weather, not small. A decade ago this is all you wanted, those important, essential, difficult conversations. What to do and how to do it. He will turn to you as that third cousin’s wife - her from Galway - approaches, her all smiles, you all sighs. He will look desperate, like the two of you can make a difference, the science and the art.
This year it will be Liam everyone hates. You will find out it was Liam who cheated, after he got married in the 2027 heatwave wedding you didn’t go to. You will find out it was an affair not a baby - though actually also a baby - but the affair was the first problem. Ooh La La. You will be told this by your favourite nephew, who doesn’t know he’s gay yet but you trust will get into the big city soon enough; he’s a savvy lad. You’ll be glad you still like him, the others you feel nonchalant about. This one you’d like to survive as long as possible.
The bride can have her second coronation here, alongside the tributes to Connor. She will be incredibly thin, the diet of heartbreak, the girl cousins shall eye her with admiration and hate. You will not be surprised if next year it is her exiled, if reason enough can be scrambled for. Anything will do - she’s that skinny. For now it’s this: she is hotter than Liam, he should have been grateful, nobody can believe it. Etc etc etc.
Everyone who doesn’t live here will say ‘it’s wonderful to be back’.
Everyone who lives here will encore ‘yes, no place like it’.
It will be beautiful, still green on the unforested tops despite those summers, still curved and coloured like Aunt Mary. What you and everyone thinks is they miss it so much when away and now they’re here not one of them wants to stay a second longer. The ones that live here are homesick too, sick of reality and sick for the past. You will be so eager to depart you can already picture speeding down the motorway, in the third lane, risking overtaking that lorry on your left to swerve to miss the tailback. Nobody wants to be delayed getting home to their loved ones.
The chairs you shall sit on are deckchairs, like on the Titanic. The grass beneath you will be brown.
It will be May. There will not have been adequate rainfall. The tears of heartbroken brides and widows are not enough.
When you walk down the hillside to catch a signal to phone home, you will hear footsteps behind you. Maybe you won’t hear them so much as sense them. You’re a woman after all; you live in fear of being followed, of never being alone, or of always being alone. But it’s just Connor.
Connor is shorter than he looks sitting, but he’s handsome now you’re drunk, his achievements are chiselled into his cheekbones, his future the spark in his eyes. Perhaps being outside the gazebo with Connor, down a hillside, is okay.
“I wanted to talk to you, about climate change,” he will say, predictably.
“I know.”
You will say, as if there are no surprises: “It’s too late.”
You will say, smiling, as untenderly as Aunt Mary.
You will sit together at this bog at the bottom which is no longer a bog. It’s dry now. Sometimes it still gets boggy, but that’s when it’s so wet that the houses on the big hill have to put their sandbags out again for the flooding months. The second home foreigners have paid the locals to dry proof when the flooding comes and there’s rumour the locals may or may not do it accordingly. But what do you and Connor know, you don’t live here. You are outsiders, though you can never quite leave.
‘I’m sorry about your Mum,’ Connor says.
You will look at him.
‘Okay, I’m sorry about the death of the entire planet.’ Connor says.
He will finally make you laugh.
You will kiss Connor. Or the drink kisses Connor. The drink is the making of us and the breaking of us. Connor is not your cousin, half the cousins aren’t your cousins, or more, it’s blurry, like a motorway in a heatwave. The kiss will be good, solid, taboo, real, glorious, treacherous. For a moment you will both feel alive.
‘Does that mean you do or you don’t want to talk about climate change?’ He asks, his head tilting so you awkwardly brush chins.
‘I don’t. As I said, it’s too late.’
Even here, in the old country, sometimes you will say what you mean.
After the funeral, before you go home to the life you have now you will take the leftover cake to Aunt Mary, the surviving sister. Your head will be sounding wah wah like the emergency services speeding down the motorway to a crash on the hard shoulder. Your bowels will be contracting like the back seat of a small car bursting through the front ones as it is hit from behind. Your eyes will find it hard to focus, dehydrated eyes in this too early heat like you cannot tell an S from a 2, as if there is nothing in it after all.
Aunt Mary will be sitting in the dark with the curtains drawn so no man she despises can peer in and see she does not look her best. You’ll want to draw the curtains but you won’t. Drawing the curtains means to close and to open, you’ll ponder the ridiculousness of that.
Your Mum was Aunt Mary’s favourite sister, once they started speaking again in 1983. They saw each other every Sunday for dinner, since your dad died. They talked every day on a landline phone. On the few occasions when you spoke with your Mum she’d tell you about Mary, though there wasn’t much to tell. Though once there was, apparently. Once there was an affair that nobody would talk about, and a baby nobody would talk about, and back then there were worse consequences than being outside the gazebo for a funeral.
‘It was a wonderful do,’ she’ll say.
“It was,” you’ll affirm.
‘The weather stayed nice,’ she’ll say.
‘It did,’ you will affirm.
You will be feeling sorry about just about everything as you shut No 46, Aunt Mary’s door.
It will be crushing for Connor to piece together that these are your last words, when he scripts this next year. Crushing like a lorry not turning in time at a small car that speeds in front of it, shovelling from one lane to another, one devastating piece of machinery into a much more devastating one.
Impact, smash, explosion, heat, fire, gone.
About the author
Tabitha lives in Bradford, is a therapist, loves nature, and revolution.
Blog https://theboysarealright.substack.com/
Tabitha has fifteen short stories published and is currently working on a themed collection. Recent pubs: “Dear John” Urban Pigs Press, "The Creation of Adam” Discourse, “Be True to Your Bar” Punk Noir Magazine
Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment