The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock Read online

  ‘There’s a man here to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Mr Muir?’

  ‘He apologises for being early.’

  ‘Of course.’ Except I still had half the bar to go.

  ‘And next time, buy one for me,’ Mum said, and tapped the corner of her mouth to indicate the unseemly Mars bar residue on mine. I wrapped the rest of the chocolate in a paper towel, put it in my pocket and snapped myself into professional mode.

  Mr Muir’s wife had died suddenly from a heart attack at her local gym. She was only sixty-five. Fit but stressed, by all accounts, due to a high-pressure job as a lawyer and a family history of heart disease. The poor woman had the figure of a forty-year-old but the heart of an obese eighty-year-old. I met him in reception, shook his hand and ushered him into my office.

  ‘Can we get you a tea or coffee, Mr Muir?’ I said.

  ‘It’s Richard. You don’t need to be formal with me. And for God’s sake, don’t call my wife “the deceased”, if you were going to. She’s Shirley. Dead or not dead.’

  ‘Of course, Richard,’ I said, according to page three of Father’s Folder of Systematic Funeral Protocol, whereby you do whatever the client wants within the official parameters of the industry and the law.

  ‘I’ll have tea,’ he added.

  I called Jean to request two teas and a plate of biscuits. I especially liked the macadamia shortbread she had ‘splashed out’ on the other day. I smiled at Richard and wished, despite the man’s cough, that I could give him a hug. But page two of the Folder insisted you never give a man or woman you didn’t know a hug or kiss or any personal affection. Classic Andrew Clock. Yet I wondered if there were times when a hug wouldn’t have gone amiss and that, contrary to my father’s views, it would be greatly appreciated. As I was assessing whether Richard was a hug-loving man, he slapped a handwritten list on my desk.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided on refreshments.’ He pushed the piece of paper towards me. ‘But what I can’t decide on is the photo for the service handout. Personally, I like this one of her when we first met. It’s grainy and in black and white but that’s the woman I’m married to. She’s not changed. Not really.’ He hoicked and sniffed. Perhaps he wasn’t the hugging type. ‘Then I thought it could be this one, taken a week after she retired when we went on a trip to Italy. She came alive when we travelled. Such a free spirit. Or then there’s this one. It’s more recent. How most people will remember her, I suppose.’ He fanned them out on the table before me, the sides of his mouth drooping.

  ‘Why don’t you have all three?’ I suggested. Richard scratched his beard; I watched his brain whirr and click. ‘I know it’s difficult making decisions at a time like this. That’s why it’s best to take the decision out of the decision.’ (That was my line, not Dad’s, and while it may have sounded like real-estate jargon, the phrase always pleased me and I wished I had thought of it in time for it to appear in the Folder.) Occasionally I would veer off-Folder to stamp my own mark on things; it was nothing too outrageous but, still, I didn’t let Mum know in case she disapproved.

  ‘Why choose one if you like them all?’ I continued. ‘We could place them together on the front page or your favourite on the front and the other two inside. In fact, you can have as many as you like. Have you got any more?’

  Richard nodded, his face as gloomy as a Monday morning. I opened the top drawer of my desk and took out a folder of service handouts. ‘You see, there’s no end of options.’ I smiled because a smile always lifts a mood, even if only a fraction.

  Richard fiddled with the booklets but didn’t look like he was studying them at all. ‘How do you do this, day in, day out?’ he said. ‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’

  ‘It may not be for everyone but it’s very satisfying. My job – our job,’ I said, gesturing to Jean, who had arrived with the refreshments, ‘is to try and make it easier for those who are left behind, to ease the . . . shitty-ness.’

  ‘But grief? Every day. I bet no one comes in happy. Or if they did, they wouldn’t let on.’

  ‘We don’t judge how others grieve,’ I said. But, of course, we sometimes did. How could you not when a customer blusters in with haste, dismissive of our sympathy, as if behind the serious facade there was a celebration going on and an eagerness to get to the solicitor.

  Richard grunted, contemplated my answer, then said, ‘Alright, put this one on the front.’ He pointed to the black-and-white headshot of Shirley. Her hair in a beehive, her smile coy. ‘And make it big. The other two can go inside. But I want the photos back and please don’t bend the corners.’ He ran a hand over the photographs, as if smoothing out the grief.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She will look as magnificent as she will do in person.’

  ‘When can I see her?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Roger is sprucing her up this afternoon. And if there’s anything you’d like to put in with her . . .?’

  Richard shrugged.

  ‘There’s no obligation.’

  ‘Her personal trainer thinks I should add a small dumb-bell. She loved working out, after all. But then I thought it might add unnecessarily to the weight, for the poor buggers carrying her, and then what about cremation and burning metal . . .?’ Richard’s voice petered out.

  ‘It’s not a bother. We can accommodate any requests. Bring whatever you like tomorrow. Perhaps something lighter, like a sweat towel or some socks? Used or unused, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Sorry I said you had a shit job. It was out of line.’

  I waved the remark away. I didn’t mind. People are never themselves when they get to see me.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ said Richard.

  I was going to shake his hand but decided to give him a slap on the back instead. He seemed more of a slap-on-the-back kind of a guy.

  Generational Pull

  The funeral business runs in our family like other families have a history of baldness, a tendency to gout or a predilection to buck teeth. I wouldn’t call it a predisposition so much as a predetermination, a foregone conclusion, much like death itself. You need a good heart, not a faint one, and an ability to see humour amidst the darkness.

  It all started when my great-grandfather, John Clock, a carpenter, began making coffins and caskets and found a niche for himself in the commercialisation of the funeral business in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. But it was John’s son James who looked beyond the hardware and, with his entrepreneurial eye, established Clock & Son Funeral Home in 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War. The fortuitousness of his timing prompted my great-grandfather to say, ‘With nous like that, the business is destined for greatness.’ Forty-two years later James fell ill with pneumonia and my father took over, and for another twenty-eight years Clock & Son continued to thrive. Then, when my father died twelve years ago, he left me in charge and my mother, Doreen, a financial stake. I have run the business ever since.

  The truth is, I once dreamed of being a newspaper reporter. I fantasised about roving the streets looking for neighbourhood news, interviewing eyewitnesses at crime scenes, getting the scoops and reading my byline in print. I decided I was the perfect candidate: I’d seen death, so it wouldn’t shock me, and my English teacher said I had a flair for writing. But my destiny had other ideas. Even though I got a newspaper round when I was thirteen, I still had to help out in the business. In the school holidays and sometimes after school, I folded brochures, put out the rubbish, bulk-bought teabags and biscuits, and ate afternoon teas of home-made vanilla slices or, as a treat, a shop-bought cream bun, in the small kitchen out the back. When the time came to leave school, Dad signed me up for a series of funeral courses, beginning with the Certificate in Funeral Operations and ending with embalming training. It was assumed I would start working at Clock & Son straight away.

  In many ways I didn’t mind. Surrendering to my fate seemed an easier, risk-free option. It was a vocation I was familiar with that came with inbuilt job security and a boss I already knew. My f
uture was laid out for me like surgical instruments on an embalming table and that warmed my belly like a hot toddy with a generous glug of brandy.

  So, at nineteen, I became a funeral assistant and found I was inherently equipped for the job. I could ease others’ worries better than my own and had astute listening skills from having grown up sibling-free and child-shy. I enjoyed the order of procedure, legal and funereal, and was content to receive instructions, obeying the historical hierarchy within the business whereby my father sat at the top and me at the bottom. My mother, who worked part-time, was somewhere in the middle. Her role, which she embodied as if she had been the business’s inheritor instead of her husband, was customer service and the efficient running of the back end, from beautifying reception to staff management. Our Clock family trio ran as one entity, smoothly, professionally and without a hitch, until Dad died suddenly aged sixty-four when I was twenty-seven.

  What a bombshell that was. It threw Mum and me into a blender of shock, anguish and grief with the power switch stuck on high. It was a heart attack that claimed him, his voracious appetite for Mum’s butter-laden cooking being his undoing – the snacks of jam-filled doughnuts, custard squares and Friday-night fatty battered fish and chips. What made it even more tragic was how his first heart attack hadn’t prompted culinary changes in the Clock household which may well have saved him.

  When the first one happened, on a Sunday afternoon, I was cleaning my skirting boards with a toothbrush. Mum called me in distress as Dad tensed in his chair, one arm seemingly paralysed and his face contorted as if a just-swallowed peanut had gone down the wrong way.

  ‘Come now, Oliver. Come now,’ she ordered over the phone.

  ‘I’m coming,’ I said, leaving the toothbrush on the floor and grabbing the car keys.

  It was the only time I remember ever seriously exceeding the speed limit and driving dangerously in a suburban setting. Thankfully for Dad that day, the ambulance arrived before me.

  When the second one happened it was seven fifteen in the evening. I was nibbling on peanuts – a dangerous snack at the best of times – when Mum phoned, ordering me back to work.

  ‘Your father’s coming in,’ she said. I thought it was because Dad was going to berate me for something I’d done wrong and waited for her to tell me so. But no. He had died.

  I threw the peanuts I was holding into the sink and told her I’d be right there. I felt calm but in shock, as if I had diverted to my role of funeral assistant and was focused only on the procedures that had to be followed.

  ‘The ambulance will be there tout de suite,’ she said, such was her penchant for French phrases, hoping they gave her the air of a sophisticate. ‘I won’t be far behind.’

  It was only when we left the parlour later that night that she burst into tears when hit with the realisation that she was unable to take Dad home with her. It was only the second time I’d seen Mum cry. Even Dad I’d seen tearier over the years than Mum – usually after a client had left the building, especially if the circumstances surrounding their loved one’s death had been particularly traumatic. Mum might have rubbed his back for a brief moment but then she usually told him to snap out of it. ‘We can’t be having customers seeing you like this,’ she’d say. She was adept at building a doorless igloo around her heart. No one was getting in, least of all herself. Whereas Dad was like a strawberry cream chocolate with a hard exterior and soft inside, Mum was a chocolate toffee – hard all over. But I don’t think she was always this way. I’m sure when I was little and she was younger, there was something more gooey caramel about her.

  While my father had not been a pillar of health, he had been a god-like pillar of the community, with a gravitas that we – and no doubt others – thought gave him an immunity to the assured side effect of living: death. For neither Mum nor I had ever truly considered the business without him. It took days for me to accept that the last time my father was there was not to order me around in his usual blustery way but to roll in quietly and inconspicuously, lifeless and cold on a gurney, and, unexpectedly, to call up deeply embedded feelings I never knew existed. Grief clobbered me on the head with the full force of a cricket ball and made me flounder, as if treading water in the deep, scared to drown in sadness.

  When the tears had dried up and Mum told me to get on with things, I realised what ‘getting on with things’ actually meant. I hadn’t contemplated inheriting the business at twenty-seven. I hadn’t wanted to contemplate inheriting it at all. I gulped panic until I got stomach cramps, became anxious at the thought of having to take the lead and make decisions. I had liked hiding behind my father’s jacket flaps. It felt safe, secure. But stepping into his trousers was an altogether troubling and unsettling proposition and one which I had no time to prepare myself for. The one consolation was that Mum was given a twenty per cent stake in the business and the option to stay on as an employee for as long as she wanted. She did. What also got me through the rising panic was the belief that, on the basis of history, the business would tick and whir as it had done for the past eighty years without too much extra effort on my part. For that was the beauty of the surety of death.

  Yet I also knew – had read about it once in the finance section of the newspaper – that in long-running family businesses it was usually the third generation who cocked it up. They get greedy or overly ambitious. But I wasn’t like that. I believed: why change things when you don’t need to? It’s better keeping things the same than cocking it all up. So that’s what I did: I kept everything exactly as it was.

  Last Date

  I had one more client after Mr Muir – the husband of a local primary school teacher who had once taught me. Mrs Hetherington was revered and loved by both parents and children and I couldn’t have been prouder to be honoured with the task of organising her funeral. Before we even got on to the practicalities, I couldn’t help but reminisce with Mr Hetherington on my classroom time with her. How, on Monday mornings, she would get everyone to draw a picture of their weekend. It didn’t matter what you drew as long as it represented something about how your weekend had been. Or how she would break out into song whenever she wanted the class’s attention. Sometimes, it was singing ‘Happy Birthday’, even if it was no one’s birthday, or she would play an animal noise on her tape recorder and the first person to name the animal would get a sweet. The funniest part was learning that she used to do the same thing with Mr Hetherington, which made us laugh far more loudly than was normally associated with the hushed tones of a funeral home. But it gave me an idea, an idea that made Mr Hetherington slap me on the back, harder than I think he intended to, in delight. ‘Let’s set up an art station,’ I suggested, ‘so the children who come to the service can draw pictures in honour of her, and why don’t we play the song she most liked to sing as the final song?’ Mr Hetherington walked out a happy man, leaving me a happy funeral director.

  But then it wasn’t very busy after Mr Hetherington left. I browsed ties for sale online and tidied the files on my desk until it was time to close up. When I got home, I did what I always did when I walked in the door: I went to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and hitched up my trousers, unable as they were these days to decide whether to sit over or under my stomach. A breeze of icy air brushed my face. I looked at what was on offer. A row of half-empty condiments lined up in height order stared back at me from the top shelf and, from the middle, various opened cheeses, a packet of ham, a tub of rhubarb yoghurt and a jar of olives. An uninspiring yet tasty slice of my life. I shifted the yoghurt to line up symmetrically with its neighbours, grabbed the extra-strong Cheddar and the pickled onions and found a semi-drunk bottle of red wine in the pantry.

  I was about to pour myself a glass when an urge came over me. I don’t know where it came from but I couldn’t help myself. I held the bottle away from me, as if trying to decipher the label without reading glasses, and imagined it was Marie and that this would be our first dance. I sidestepped and circled, my chin high, shoulders s
waying. Who knew what dance I was dancing – a hybrid between a waltz and a tango or some such mash-up – but it didn’t matter because I was dancing with Marie, spinning her around the kitchen floor as if we were contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. She gazed into my eyes and let me take the lead. Oh, Marie, will you be mine?

  Then the island bench got in my way, slamming into my stomach, and I nearly slid across it, like a penguin skidding, belly down, on an icy slope. The move with no name. My knee hit defrost on the below-bench microwave oven and it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be dancing in socks. But I didn’t drop Marie. I gripped her waist as if it were my final act of bravery and gently put her down on the bench top.

  Time for wine.

  The thing was, I had to do it right. Why couldn’t Dad have written a Systematic Guide to Courting? Although, who was I kidding? Dad would have been the last person to ask about the rituals of dating as, according to Mum, it was she who had asked Dad out, having tired of wondering whether ‘the nice young man’ who gave her the eye every Friday night at the local dance hall was going to do so himself. For Dad didn’t do romance. Or, at least, not that I ever noticed. He didn’t discuss it, mention or reveal it. As a young man I learned to navigate the elusive world of romance without any help from my father.

  I took my glass of wine and a plate of cheese, crackers and pickled onions to the kitchen table.

  There had to be a way to broach happiness with Marie again.

  Could I do it when I next visited her shop? As she stood amongst the buckets of blooms, rich foliage and oversized gnarled branches, a forest-green apron tied at her waist, her face framed by a black bob, her welcoming smile large and generous? I glugged a mouthful of wine. Therein lay the problem. Marie rarely appeared unhappy. She was usually joyful, her default setting smiling. I’d have to catch her when her guard was down. When the effort of facade proved too much.