Perfectly Ordinary People(7)

I should have twigged at the ‘despite everything’, but I must have only been half listening. I told Mum I was going to go out and say ‘Hi’ to Dad, and she said, ‘Go easy on him. He’s more upset than he’s making out.’

I froze in the doorway and looked back at her in puzzlement. ‘Upset about what?’ I asked.

‘Well, about his mother!’ Mum said, her head almost inside the dishwasher. ‘I know they weren’t close, but your mother’s still your mother. You only get one. You’ll find that out one day.’

She straightened then and with a flick of her foot followed by a tap with one knee, deftly closed the dishwasher door. Then she looked at me searchingly before saying, ‘Oh, Jaysus! Billy didn’t tell you, did he?’

Mum explained that Grandma Genny had died. It was lung cancer, she said. She’d been ‘battling it for years’. Which though I’d known she smoked ‘like a fireman’, as we like to say in our family, was also news to me.

Mum crossed the kitchen and caressed my shoulder. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Because you look a bit peaky.’

It was undeniable that I was feeling a bit strange, but for a while I couldn’t work out why. I think, with hindsight, that I was momentarily submerged by a complex set of emotions that would take a few days to unravel.

In the end I managed to sift through them, and worked out that I was feeling:

a) shocked that Dad hadn’t told me my grandmother had died, and

b) guilty that I hadn’t even known she was ill, and

c) ashamed that I hadn’t spoken to her in a decade, let alone given her any support or care during her illness.

But above all, the thing upsetting me was that:

d) I had definitively missed the boat; I’d lost the chance to get to know her forever, and that seemed incredibly sad, and suddenly quite shockingly incomprehensible.

As I explained before, we had a big, busy, bustling family life, so Genny’s absence from our lives had rarely been noticed. But I realised in that moment that I’d had a semi-conscious background plan to get to know her at some point, and the fact that the moment that plan moved into consciousness was the exact moment it became impossible to achieve – because she was gone – left me feeling quite heartbroken.

‘The funeral’s on Wednesday,’ Mum said. ‘Will you be able to come? I know your dad would like you to be there.’

And though it seemed unlikely that the man who’d failed to even inform me of her illness wanted me there at all, I managed to not raise an eyebrow. Instead I nodded and accepted the hug she was offering. ‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll be there. She was my grandmother.’

The funeral took place in Brighton and, though I’d struggle to put my finger on a specific reason, I did find the whole thing pretty strange. Not that I’m an expert on funerals or anything – I’d only ever been to one before that, and that was when I was nine. But everything struck me as inexplicably weird that day – like an uncomfortable dream, or a slightly surrealist play.

Dad must have known it was going to be peculiar, because he told me repeatedly that I didn’t need to be there. But every time he said it, Mum would contradict him, sometimes with actual words but more often than not with a complex glance or a raised eyebrow. The only thing Mum believes in more than ritual is family, and as funerals combine both, I knew she expected us to go.

But I wanted to go, anyway. I wanted to see Grandpa Chris and Aunty Ethel and anyone else who might turn up.

I couldn’t make up for the lost years – I knew that – but I could, I hoped, at least get a glimpse of who my grandmother had been by studying her friendships.

Most of my family drove down to Brighton, each in their own petrol-powered bubble, but partly because I don’t have a car and mainly because I really like trains, that’s how I chose to travel. Eirla offered me a lift in his massive BMW, but the idea of watching the countryside slip silently past seemed so much more attractive than a car full of shouting kids that I resisted. When I saw how frazzled they all looked on arrival, I was glad of the choice I’d made.

The venue was surprisingly pretty. I couldn’t remember much from my friend’s mother’s funeral when I was nine, but I did remember that it had taken place in a horrible modern building. Woodvale’s grassy grounds and church-like architecture came as a bit of a relief.

It was a biggish gathering in the end, thanks largely to the multitudinous nature of Mum’s side of the family. Uncles Tom, Harry and Eirla were present with wives Tracey, Suzie and Pippa. All seven of their offspring, from six years old to twenty-three, came too, all beautifully turned out in sombre suits and black dresses.

Mavaughn had wanted to join us but, other than Mum and Dad’s wedding, no one could remember a single occasion when she might have spent any time with Grandma Genny. As the main reason she wanted to attend was because she had an Irish expectation of what a funeral entailed, and because Dad explained to her that this would be a mopey English kind of a funeral with very little alcohol and no dancing whatsoever, she quickly decided to drop out.

Jake and Abby came, in essence because I lied to Jake, telling him that Dad wanted us all there. I was pretty scared that one was going to backfire on me, but in the end it was the lie that brought them together, so I was left feeling rather proud of myself.