How to Harden

A story post about the first and most memorable funeral I ever attended.

I don’t know what I find more difficult to come to terms with.

The fact that my beloved 83 year old Great Auntie Edie has been murdered with an axe.

Or the fact it was my 15 year old cousin who did it. A girl 6 months younger than myself.

But today, is the day of the funeral and I vow to gather myself together, gain composure.

It’s the first funeral I will have ever have attended, and in a macabre way I daren’t admit to a single soul, it excites me, intrigues me. 

As well as wanting to pay my respects - because I genuinely loved my Auntie - I also have a morbid curiosity about funerals. The ceremony and etiquette of them. The ritual of being quiet, wearing black. The way I’ve never before been allowed to attend one.

I’ve been asking my mum what they are like in preparation.

Will someone read something?

“Usually they read something from the bible”

What happens to the body?

“They pull a curtain across at the end, and it’s only a coffin you see anyway”

Her answers are brief and so the idea of a funeral retains its mystery, a top-hatting goth jewellery box of jet and smoky quartz, chain and clasp.

And yes, I admit, there is another reason I want to go.  Perhaps the reason.

Somewhere, at the bottom of my helter skelter heart, lying dazed and smarting on a bristling mat is an urge to see him again. An urge I suppress because I know it’s unwise, will lead to trouble. It always does.

He always does.

My dad.

I’ve not seen him for over a year and I’ve been told he will be present.

“But how can he be there? He’s in jail”

I’d asked.

“They let you out sometimes, if it’s someone you were close to”

Mum had explained.

Oh. Oh…..

I should know how long it’s been, shouldn’t I? Yet, I don’t.  Even before he was jailed for this latest crime, an armed robbery with sawn-off shot gun that bagged him 16 years, he’d always been unreliable, a faulty torch in the night. And somewhere along the line, you stop letting these failing lights guide you, don’t you? Their beam fades to dim. As a teenager struggling to find yourself, there is no use for flaky flickers, you search for only the best lit roads, the unwavering lanterns and cats eyes, the lighthouses on rocks.

My father had idolised Edie. In many ways she’d been more of a mother than his own. Family lore had it that whilst his twin had been fussed over, he had been largely ignored. Edie had stepped in to pick up the vacant role, scooping him up to bestow upon him the love he lacked. With no children of her own, they had met a need in the other, locking as fitting jigsaw pieces.

The prison had agreed that because the two of them had shared such a close relationship he would be granted the request of attending.

And now the day was here.

“I ’ate funerals. Awful things. Don’t know why YOU want to go. A young girl like YOU!”

Mum says, as though they were the preserve of the old.

“But they might want to see him, Linda….it’s their dad after all….”

Says my grandma, ever the softening force.

“And I liked her, Aunty Edie”

I pipe up.

“And ……YOU liked her!”

I add, because it was true, my mum had liked her. Everyone had.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to see ’im, would I? That’s the last thing I’d bleedin’ want. Would give me bloody nightmares. My nerves are already in shreds…”

Nothing will change her mind and it’s clear that if we want to go, my 14 year old brother and I must go alone.

I psych myself up. My ideas of funerals are, like so much of adult life, based on soap operas, chiefly Alexis from Dynasty because she, has attended many.  I consider her black widow persona, her steely air of ‘don’t fuck with me’.  My glam metaller’s wardrobe lends itself well to the occasion, I muse. I pair my completely inappropriate leather and lace ensemble with a pair of dark sunglasses Ms Carringon-Colby would be proud of.

Well, you know, if she shopped at Etam……

We enter the church and wait.

Two years younger than me, my brother’s youth sits a liquid centre beside my ebony acid drop. He is vulnerable, naive. I must get into character as big sister, be tough, protect, paint my slightly cracking front with more lashings of varnish.

Everyone gathers. There are some I vaguely recognise, but it’s mostly people I don’t. Their faces are worn grey setts merging as one long cobbled northern street. Like the ‘death edition’ of the Cissie and Ada characters made famous by Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough, they fuss in hankerchief and whisper, pursed lips and exaggerated expression. They form little groups, huddles of family and friends like clumps of separated smarties,  but there is no colour. Just monochrome dreariness occasionally punctuated by a rogue pair of brown brogues or the audacity of an aubergine silk scarf. This is a time before the ‘wear bright colours, celebrate their life’ brigade would come to hijack the long lingering shadow of Victoria with their gaudy carnival ideas.

I do not know where to stand with my brother. We hover like gangly midges over a canal, until finally, someone ushers us along and we hang loosely upon what feels like the end of a ledge, a polished ledge of wood with a service sheet and a prayer book. We thumb the powdery pages like a deck of feathered cards, breathing in the sobering scent of prayer and grief, hymn and faith.

And we wait.

I think about the body,  her 83 year old corpse, once alive with love and mischief, reduced to a grisly map of bruise and wound. Will they have patched her up? What do they do with victims of such savage attacks? I picture a team working on her, like the busy elves in ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ meticulously making miracle of her aged leather, fixing her to look like ‘her old self’. Tending to her carefully, methodically, taking pride in their tasteful vinegar and brown paper triumphs.

Only for this art to be wasted as the body is later burned.

I should say ‘cremated’. I am 16 now after all, and must employ the sympathetic terminology of adults. Euphemisms that exist to transform the steak hulk of the unpalatable into small digestible chunks.

Passed away.

Rainbow Bridge.

The Other Side.

Heaven.

Is there a heaven? I wonder. Is there a God? The person conducting the service seems sure of it. This vicar or priest or whatever he is. But which God allowed this? For a kind, feeble old lady to be brutally attacked in her own home? I cannot see heaven in my rat shade sky, but crave so badly to believe in it. I want assurance she is there, a nestled elderly sugar plum finally at peace in satin cloud bed, God, a comforting blanket of all the best Christmases she ever had, draped upon her resting form.

And then, I notice him enter the church. Flanked by police officers.

My father.

He is visibly older, his solemn face creased and weatherbeaten, his posture uneasy.

The service takes place and I survey him from my safe distance. I study him like the scene of a slowed down movie. Each tilt of the head, shuffle of shoulders. He isn’t wearing handcuffs but the officers play close attention to his every movement.

“He’s a psychopath”

I can hear my mum saying.

“It’s all a show, John…..”

Is it? I study the emotion in his face. He did love my Auntie Edie, that, I’m sure of. Word had it, she’d practically brought him up. But he also loved Donna, his niece, her slayer. How messed up must that be, to have to reconcile those feelings……

As the ceremony concludes, he spots us and his grief stricken face lifts, a smile births as hot white stars on ruddy cloth. There are tears welling in his eyes. He has green eyes like mine, and when we cry, the red that engulfs us makes their emerald appear even more vivid.

Are they real tears?

Or ‘crocodile tears’ as mum would say.

“Turns on the old waterworks like a tap”

“Steven!”

He cries, opening his arms up to my brother who looks so exposed, an eagled mouse as he edges toward him.

My dad’s chest is wide and puffed out, and I recall how as a toddler I used to climb upon that torso like a tree trunk, his sturdy arms becoming branches. “Let’s play apple tree” I’d say, wanting nothing more than to clamber upon him, strengthen my muscles on the robust climbing frame of his body, rest my head upon his ‘boughs’. The boughs that seem unbreakable when you’re two, three, four….

They hug, their embrace a visible vibration of rock and jelly that neither of them seem inclined to retreat from.  I smile to myself, happy for this strange reunion. My brother has found the separation particularly difficult, having no male around the house, just an imposing brood of clucking women.

I try to summon more feeling, myself. To swell my heart as foil helium balloon. For several years I have felt such anger and resentment towards this man. For completely destabilising our home life, upsetting my grandma, the way my mum has had to deal with other people’s judgement. The looks she receives that range from “YOU must know what he’s up to!” to the piggy eyed peers of pity. I recall the afternoon her best friend had collected me from school. Unexpectedly. Unusually. My confusion at seeing her in the school carpark.

“They’re questioning your mum at the police station. Your dad’s done an armed robbery.”

All that, yet still, deep down, in the parts of me I share with no-one else, I keep some good memories of him, in spite of myself. They feel forbidden and no matter how hard I try to crush them, they won’t ever quite dessert me.

He scans me and I brace myself for the same reaction he gave my brother. The “Julie!” The open arms, the Cilla-esque effort, I too, am worthy of.

It does not come.

I’m not sure what to do. He’s the adult here, and as such, I expect him to do the leg work, make the first move. It’s awkward as hell for me. I half smile nervously in my lipstick. My scarlet lips a floating red buoy on a grappling sea.

And then finally, the words come.

The words that will stay with me the rest of my life. Words directed not towards me, but rather to my little brother.

“So, Steven…..who’s this you’ve brought with you?”

I kid you not.

He does not recognise me, his own daughter, his own flesh and blood.

I consider my appearance. Do I really look that different to when he last saw me?

Could I be that transformed by clothes and make up?

Logic must tell him, that a girl accompanying his son, who looks a similar age to his own eldest child has a high chance of being his daughter?

“It’s me”

I say, sheepishly, a tender homegrown cuckoo. He attempts to smooth over his chasm of an oversight, says I have changed ‘so much’, I look different, tries to make light of not knowing who I am.

But how can I ever make my peace with this?

The bad memories flood back.

The time he left me alone in the cinema, aged just three years old watching ‘Pete’s Dragon’. I’d not even known it was a bad thing to do until I’d let slip to my mum and she’d gone crazy at him.

“Did Daddy like the film, Julie?”

“Daddy didn’t watch it, he just came back at the end”

Then there was the time he’d told me we were all going to Disney World because he’d hit lucky at Salford casino, only to back track the next day that we weren’t going after all, because he’d gambled away all the winnings.

I remember the nights I’d hear noise and had ventured downstairs into clouds of cigarette smoke to see a sprawling mass of unrecognisable faces, only to notice mum reluctantly cooking fry ups for ‘your dad’s cronies’ at 2am.

But maybe my worst memory, was the raid in the middle of the night. Eleven year old me stumbling out of bed at 3am, weary eyed in my nightie, wondering why policemen were searching my house, shining their torches, pulling up floor boards. Would they find my diary that lurked under such a floor board? My private journal nobody knew about. Would they learn of my crush on Daniel Healy, the boy with the red BMX who lived up the street….. My racing mind had been preoccupied with saving my own innocent eleven year old secrets.

When you’re a child, you don’t always know what’s normal, do you?

But now, I wasn’t that kid.

I was 16 and I knew that not recognising your own daughter definitely wasn’t right.

And so, I froze. What would Alexis do?

Sharp, mean Alexis with her vinegar tongue who took no shit from any man, unlike my once limp Krystle of a mother. Maybe the reason Alexis had become such a bitch was because she’d been wronged? Hurt?

I channel her aloofness.  Ms Carrington-Colby, chic in her tilted oversized hat that reduced her head to smooth ivory bead, or sometimes at funerals, sporting an elegant pillar box that draped a scant black veil across her, obscuring those telling windows to the soul.

Eyes could give you away after all, could they?

Eyes, with their surprising jets of water that came from nowhere, hot geysers suddenly bursting unannounced from arid faceland.

Finally, he gestures towards me, a pained screw pivoting, desperate to key my veneer, but by now, my heckles are well and truly back up.

I back away, icily.

You had your chance, dad, your last chance,  and you blew it.

We go home. My mum and grandma want to hear about it, who was there, what was said, what he said.

I tell them. And I squirm a bit as they too, swallow the same pill I had done, just hours earlier. A pill perhaps even harder to take when it pertains to your own child or grandchild. Perhaps they wish they’d been there, to break the fall of my fragile teenage heart.

But they weren’t.

And I’m proud of myself. That I’d kept it together. I was fast learning, that lesson we all master at some time during our lifetime.

The unwanted lesson, of how to harden.