Just Last Night(37)

“It’s not saying there’s an upside. It’s saying we won’t only weep and lament but also remember why it was so good to have had her here,” Ed says.

“Yeah, I agree with that,” Justin says. “We’re celebrating Susie, not celebrating her death. That’s a category error.”

“But ‘In Memory of’ seems more neutral?” I say. “With celebration I worry people will think they’re meant to wear jaunty colors and all that jazz.”

“It feels like ‘In Memory of’ is more for old people,” Ed says. “Not so much for Susie.”

“Nothing about this feels right for Susie,” I say, instantly raw.

“So it’s . . .”

I write, carefully:

A Celebration of the Life of

Susannah Carole Octavia Hart

“She hated her middle names,” I say. “No one was allowed to know them! I can hear her now saying ‘Strike that shit off there, you’re showing me up!’”

“Yeah, I used to call her ‘Cocktavia’ and get hit with her knuckle-duster rings,” Justin says, and I laugh, and for once it’s not just a weak teary laugh. I sense recovery may be buried somewhere in laughter. Partial recovery.

“Her mum loved Carole Lombard,” I say. “You know, married to Clark Gable? I can remember Susie fuming that Carole was not a film star name by the 1980s, it was a ‘can I speak to the manager’ name.”

“Where did Octavia come from?” Ed says and Justin says, “?koda.”

As they guffaw, I think about how there are still things I know about Susie’s origins that they don’t, having had ten years’ jump on them. Octavia was her gran.

We’ve chosen a photograph for the cover of the order of service. The useful thing about our social media era is that profile pictures on Facebook provide a nest-clutch of images you know for sure the user liked, or at least was happy enough with to make public. Susie had very definite ideas about things; she was very certain of her own mind.

We feel reassured that the snap of her on a ferry, blond-brown hair whipping around her face as she grins stoically through rain, complexion rosy in the cold, was as attractive to her as it was to us, if it had been available viewing to everyone on the internet in years gone by. It’s from her late twenties, but she looked no different. There was a younger one at a wedding that we pondered, before deciding it was too “puppyish pre-twenty-five” to those who knew her face well.

They’re quite strange, the calculations you find yourself making. There’s no rule that says the photograph has to closely resemble the person at the point they passed, but it feels as if there is.

If I stare at the picture too long, I go slightly light-headed. She is right there, and yet not here.

“Maybe use the initials for her middle names then, like on official documentation, or your bank card?” Ed says, not entirely serious.

“We can’t call her ‘Susannah C. O. Hart.’ That makes her sound like a 1950s movie studio mogul,” I say.

“Or Irish, to be sure to be sure. Susannah Cee O’Hart, so it is,” Justin says.

“What about Susannah Hart?” I say.

“If you’re giving her the full first name but not the middle name it feels unbalanced, somehow,” Ed says.

“Susie Hart? Too casual?” I say. “It’s how everyone knew her. Except maybe in close family.”

“Yeah, that’s my fear. Her dad also chose the names Susannah Carole Octavia,” Justin says. “I’m not sure it’s OK for us to erase that and go ‘The S Dog, The Susiemeister General’ nicknames on her order of service.”

“Without being either flip or nasty,” Ed says. “How much will Mr. Hart Senior know what’s going on anyway?”

“Hmmmm.” We collectively stare sadly and contemplatively into the foam on our second round of coffees—the one you fancy and know you don’t need, that leaves you too wired.

“I think Susannah Hart,” I say. “That’s her birth certificate name and the name we knew her by. If there’s a benefit to your friends doing your order of service, it’s that they knew your taste in a way your parents didn’t. If we put her full name on there, everyone’s first minute will be spent whispering ‘Carole Octavia lol?’ and we know she’d loathe that.”

“Motion carried,” Justin says. “One point: what if her brother objects?”

“Hmmm, he didn’t seem the type,” Ed says, and we all laugh, and I’m glad we can still clown like we used to. It feels like fortitude.

“. . . Can I raise a practical point if he does,” Ed says. “Finlay’s signed off on us putting together the order of service. If he doesn’t like the names we chose, he’s going to see that at the same time as everyone else, as they’re being handed out at the crematorium. So what’s he gonna do, huh? You’d have to be a psychopath to start finger-jabbing and shouting at a funeral.”

“Oh yeah? You need to meet my mum’s family up north,” Justin says.

“I wouldn’t rule psychopathy out,” I say. “That’s an inactive amygdala if ever I saw one.”

“Wasn’t that just the way he was sitting?” Justin says.