Like Dreams or Drainpipes: The Funeral

Jo Castle

of life’s occasional pitfalls, deep as they are, and the search for where lost things go

The procession started at two o’clock. The morning was silent as taxidermy.

The night before this one had been spent staring from the window in a womb of tangled covers, staring at the moon hanging dolefully in the sky. She had turned half of her face away from me as if I was going to demand an explanation out of her that she couldn’t quite give. I found I missed her when the dawn arrived and the earth buzzed with noises and smells and light again, almost as much as I missed my parents.

Mother hadn’t been a shock. It wasn’t long after I was born, as she’d opted for having me over not having cancer. She hadn’t waited. Father, however, had.

The breakfast table was just a lonely furnishing today. I sat there as convention dictated; my stomach remained silent. I stared across at the voids filling the other chairs wishing for anything. Nanna was in another room making phone calls.

Books will have you believe that it always rains or snows on funerals- like somehow the clouds above are sad too, and empty out their harvests onto our planet below in an act of self-flagellating altruism. This didn’t happen. It had always seemed like Father brought the sun up on his own, since I was known to sleep for hours on end without a rousing- and without him there, who would open those curtains? Who would pull that mighty ball of gold from its refuge in the hills so that breakfast could be had and teeth could be brushed and clothes could be worn? It had turned out that the sun was totally selfsufficient and had brought its best today. By the time we got to the church where the events of the day would unfold it was at the top of its form.

I would have preferred rain; clement weather put everyone in such an insufferable mood. On days like this you shouldn’t have had to politely converse with adults. Days like today were for games with other children. Churches were not; I couldn’t see a single person my size. It was as if I had entered a dream.

Such a strange feeling had only occurred once before in a past exploration of our reasonably large house upon finding my mother’s old dressing-room. This had been a good dream, though. My mother until then had only been something abstract that other children had and I didn’t, the same way I had money and they didn’t. Pearl necklaces dripped out of trays, powder compacts hovered suggestively open, watercolour paintings leaned against the walls. She had seemed so big, so warm- so alive, in that nest of all that gleamed and smiled.

Nothing in this church could sweeten this dream of Father the same way. There was a vase of lilies at the front, but this didn’t make sense. Our house had azaleas, anemones, things beginning with ‘a’ that taught me the alphabet. I wasn’t sure which dead man this whole thing had been set up to mourn, but it didn’t seem to be my father. Everyone in black, too- Father never wore black, never bought black clothes for me. Mother favoured white nightdresses, too. I saw him sometimes, holding their silk against his face.

We stood to sing hymns, but I couldn’t keep up. He never listened to these kinds of songs at home, so I wasn’t sure what the point was. At home in the library he’d have all manner of things on the gramophone- mad, jaunty things where he’d pick me up and swing me around the room, narrowly grazing shelves and vases. Occasionally there’d be quieter songs, orchestral ones, big compositions that seemed small in the same room as Father. And once in a blue moon, there’d be a very slow song playing, but it would not be quiet: he’d course round the room alone in an imaginary waltz, holding an imaginary woman.

We went out to the cemetery afterwards, where his grave waited at the top of the hill next to Mother’s. I was responsible with gravity, and never challenged the boundaries of the contract we had. The darkness that lurked at the bottom of the hole had a curious call to it, though, one that made my legs tremble as though against all natural laws I could lose control and fly in an arc over the people surrounding me and fall in forever. My feet were better at anchorage than my wandering mind, however, and kept me on the grass.

The coffin was so harmless removed from the church. It didn’t look quite so foreboding under the great wide grin of the afternoon sky. It looked like any normal box, albeit heavier than usual. It could’ve been a clothes trunk, a toy chest.