Rock a Bye
I said I’d get the fucking fags meself. Useless cunt, Theo, nose in a hanky. The hearse was stopped at the lights anyway and the driver was reading the Mirror; I strutted past in me tight black skirt and gave him the finger on the way back, Silk Cut between me lips, thumb to the lighter. I gave Theo the rest of the pack and he used mine to light his. With the smoke making our eyes leak, there was no talking for the rest of the drive.
The cemetery was massive – Wembley, Old Trafford, the Emirates and the Stadium of fucking Light all in one, late September sunlight bouncing off white marble angels with little kiddies’ faces. I wore me Ibiza shades. The grass was dead neat before the stones, like toy lawns, and I pictured dwarves and midgets sitting out, portable tellies balanced on the marble slabs. It was fine weather for a picnic. Theo pushed me to move faster and I shoved back at him. I didn’t want to bang into the back of the coffin or chat to the sweaty priest shuffling alongside with his hands in his pockets. The Elvis-ish wave of his hair and the honky-tonk red face – Nasville, I thought, Father Tennessee. I laughed out loud.
“Jesus, Nat,” hissed Theo, and I scrunched it in – the laughing. Like Shona, if I told her to shut it when she giggled during the soaps or when I was on the phone. She’d snort and go scarlet, hands to her face. Robin, I’d call her – little Robin Red Face, like the bird the cat left on the windowsill last Christmas. She hadn’t laughed then.
The service was dead quick. Everyone shook the held-out hands – more Theo’s than mine, though, and some of them didn’t look at me once. Old colleagues, school-yard mums. Whispering instead, off behind the cars, and around me there was this dip in the sound, like it was me at the bottom of the dug-out hole, not Shona, and they were all leaving me behind. I wanted to shout, it was a fucking accident, a fucking allergy, and I wanted to claw them with muddy fingernails, press the dirt, Shona’s dirt, into their dry-cleaned suits, but Theo had me by the arm and squeezed. It’s all right, Nat, he said with his fingers.
I don’t know. It could’ve happened anywhere – in school or at me ma’s or at Theo’s step-dad’s, but it didn’t. It was in me own house. I’d had me glass of wine and Shona was off to bed, so with Theo on nights, I had another glass and the last box of chocolates left over from Christmas. And then she was up again and wailing, nightmares and bogeymen, so we cuddled on the sofa and shared the last few choccies. She was quiet and tired at first, and then leaned over and puked over the good rug. The screaming. And then it was down on the carpet and not breathing. And I couldn’t find the phone, could I – battery dead in the handset and the mobile not charged, so I had to go next door, and Pam Carson made the call. In her statement she said I was unfit. Theo went round and beat twenty shades of shit outta her fella, but there’s the hearing coming up anyway, and now me own ma won’t come round.
We went to the village hall after the burial for vol-au-vents and cocktail sausages and the crates of fizzy pink wine we’d gotten on offer from Aldi. I stood out in the carpark and smoked through the rest of the packet of Silk Cut. I could see the graveyard wall over the road and I pictured Shona, if she were here, looking for attention, posing that way she did with one hand on her cheek and the other on her hip, lips pushed out like she was smudging lipstick on the stale air in the stuffy hall. I wasn’t crying, because if I cried she’d wash away in the salty flow of it. But the smoke made me breath catch in me throat and I felt dizzy.
Theo came out and put his arm around me. “I got yeh a drink,” he said. “And cheese on a stick.” I closed me eyes. I could see the falling sun roaring orange in brows and reds inside my head, and the heat of the day pushing at me. “Give us a fag,” he said, and we smoked until the noise in me head dropped off like a radio plugged out. Theo hummed me rock-a-bye and there were the tears.
Valerie O’Riordan was the winner of the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize. She’s a graduate of Manchester University’s MA in Creative Writing, and her fiction has been published widely in print and online, most recently in the Bugged anthology and in a Cinnamon Press anthology of microfiction. She’s working on her first novel and blogs at www.not-exactly-true.blogspot.com.
