Katy Colins - How to Say Goodbye

This was Raj’s thing. Since I’d bought the flat upstairs and he’d realised who his neighbour was and what she did for a living, he’d decided to use me as some sort of muse for his fledgling stand-up routine. A way to test out naff jokes and build up his material. It had been going on for years. If you asked him what he did he’d tell you he was a comedian, despite never performing for a paying audience in his life. His proper job was running the Minimart-post-office-deli. Every time a witty, or not so witty, one-liner came to him he’d immediately pull out his joke notebook and jot it down. Often I would ask him when he was going to actually perform this material at a stand-up night, but he’d always insist he wasn’t ready yet. I could understand why he was reluctant.

‘Good one,’ I smiled awkwardly. It was marginally better than when he insisted on saying ‘Good Mourning’ to me, heavily emphasising the mouuuurrning part, then doing a funny thing with his index fingers as if banging an imaginary drum in the air.

‘Oh, I’ve got another too. It came to me when I was helping Rani with the latest stocktake.’ He licked his lips and changed his stance as if standing under an imaginary spotlight. ‘Every year we get sent birthday cards, but how about a deathiversary card? They would really put the fun into funerals.’ He waited for my reaction.

Inside I cringed but, not wanting to hurt his feelings, I forced myself to clap weakly. ‘Ha, yeah, that would be, er, interesting.’

‘It needs a bit extra work that one. Oh, guess what!’

‘What?’

‘No, you need to guess!’

I pretended to look like I was deep in thought, clearly taking too long to come up with a suitable suggestion for this slightly tedious game.

‘Ok, I’ll tell you. You won’t get it anyway. Peter Kay messaged me back!’ He did this funny jazz hands thing and had his mouth so wide open I could see the fillings on his bottom row of teeth.

‘That’s, er, nice. Do I know him?’

‘He’s a famous comedian, Grace. He did that whole thing about garlic bread…’

I was still lost.

‘Never mind. He’s just, like, a big deal on the circuit. And now I guess I am too!’ He paused, the smile faltering slightly at my lukewarm reaction.

‘So how do you know this Peter King?’

‘Kay. I follow him on Twitter.’

I knew he was expecting me to match his levels of excitement.

He paused then scrunched up his face, thinking. ‘Well, he didn’t exactly message me. He liked a tweet. That joke I told you last week, how thinking about burial plots is the last thing you need.’

Twitter had never been my thing. From the looks of his timeline it was just him spamming comedians with some of his material. Also, I knew for a fact that Raj used a younger – and much more handsome – Bollywood actor as his profile picture. He’d shown me one time, when he’d tried to explain about likes and retweets.

‘But hey, when I do go on tour I can now say as liked by Peter Kay !’ He spread his hands across the counter as if presenting a banner.

‘Isn’t that a lie though?’

‘Nah, a bit of celebrity endorsement will do wonders for my career. Trust me.’

‘But won’t this Peter Kay find out?’

Raj shook his head. ‘He’s a busy man, Grace. Far too busy to be worrying about the likes of me. Well, for the moment at least!’ He chuckled. ‘Anyway, what can I get for you? The usual?’ He had thankfully put his joke book away.

I didn’t mind that he found my job such an amusing source of entertainment. I was used to people’s extreme reactions when they found out what I did. Being a funeral arranger is either a serious conversation starter or an awkward conversation killer. It was also one reason why I wouldn’t play the dating game, despite Ms Norris’s kind encouragement. The one and only time that I’d reluctantly agreed to go for a coffee date, just to get my mum off my back, it had ended in complete disaster. It was bad enough that it wasn’t Henry sitting across the table from me. Instead it was a slightly anaemic man named Ian whose eyebrows were so well groomed I struggled to lower my eyes to the rest of his face. When I did, it wasn’t worth it.

I’d been dreading him asking me, ‘So, what do you do?’

Explaining that I work with death on a daily basis is hard for others to get their heads around. I’m sure other people don’t go on dates and discuss the last funeral they went to, but Ian felt he needed to tell me, in detail, all about his grandad, Ron, who’d died in July 2007. I could almost taste the egg vol-au-vents served at his wake. Not exactly pillow talk. I shuddered as Ian and his overpreened eyebrows swam in my head.

‘Yes, thanks, just these.’

I watched Raj place a pint of milk and a small granary loaf into the Bag for Life I always carried.

*

Back in my flat, my coat neatly hanging on the coat stand that Mum had bought me as a moving-in present – slightly excessive to have a whole stand for just me but it passed my practicability test so it stayed. I took my notebook out of my bag and sat down at my small kitchen table to see what I needed to tick off that weekend. It was one of those compact space-saver ones with sides that could flip up if I needed to create room for more people. I wasn’t even sure it worked but it was nice to have the option.

– Check smoke alarms and change battery if required

– Sanitise sponges

– Clean inside the microwave (I made my own all-purpose cleaner using a plant spray bottle, baking soda and water)

– Wash the skirting boards

See! I didn’t have time to be larking about and bungee jumping or whatever silly things Ms Norris expected me to do. I filled my free time adequately, and before I knew it Monday would roll around again. I was very good at keeping on top of clutter in my flat, something that I was extremely proud of. Last year, Linda, my not-so-secret secret Santa, had bought me a book on cleaning that apparently everyone was reading – for what reason I have no idea. I’d flicked through it so as not to offend her, and made some exclamations on the ‘useful tips’ inside, but Linda had never been to my house, so could hardly know that I didn’t need this. Linda’s book had ended up in the charity shop bag.

Before starting anything else, I had something I needed to do. I flipped open my laptop. As I waited for the page to load I thought back to the first time I’d done this, which in turn reminded me of the first time I saw a dead body. It was during my extensive training. The female corpse was lying under a white sheet in a sterile room, with glazed eyes and a gaping mouth. She looked so… well, dead. We weren’t told her name, just that the woman had died of lung cancer in her early eighties. Routine. I vowed then to find out as much about the people in my care as I could. That woman lying stiffly on the cold steel table had a name, an identity and a back story. This desire to discover more about my clients became the motivation behind my quest to provide the perfect funerals for them, and my secret weapon had arrived in the form of Facebook.

I had been working with the family of a nineteen-year-old, Mollie Stevenson, who’d died after being hit by a car whilst crossing the road. Like many nineteen-year-olds she had been obsessed with social media, and her family proudly told me that her Facebook account had been memorialised by one of her friends. Intrigued, I’d created a Facebook profile, never having had much need for one before, and had then searched for this memorial page after work one night. It was like being given an invitation into the private life of this bubbly, happy and sociable teenage girl.

Her whole world was available for anyone to see. There were recent statuses at pop concerts, nights out and pictures of hipster meals she’d tried; endless snaps and pouting selfies with the same group of friends; numerous check-ins at places around town where she liked to go. I made sure to stay as discreet as possible, only looking and never commenting, amazed at the picture I could build up of someone’s life, even once they were dead.