Karen Ross - Five Wakes and a Wedding

As our getaway vehicle sped away, I turned round in time to see my boss’s furious face. His clenched fists were high in the air and he looked almost as though he was doing a rain dance.

In other circumstances I might even have laughed.

That’s what I said that night, when I told Gloria the story of Anna Kovaks. ‘In other circumstances, I might even have laughed. Jason was bouncing up and down on the spot, waving his arms around as if he was putting a curse on me! Or a spell to make everyone believe that the more you love someone, the more you need to spend on their funeral.’

‘So the whole thing was what you might call an R-I-P off?’

Gloria said it as though it were a pun I hadn’t heard before. I scrubbed the cast-iron orange saucepan that went with my dad to the Falklands War (and came safely home again) even harder, removing the final traces of our bolognese supper.

Truth be told, I was a bit irritated. If Gloria hadn’t wanted to know what happened to me at work that day, she probably shouldn’t have asked. On the one hand, we both knew she was only making a rhetorical enquiry before launching into tonight’s instalment of her Disastrous Relationship with Thrice-Wed Fred. But just this once, Fred's latest crimes could surely wait until we’d resolved something more serious.

My entire life.

I’m the first to admit I haven’t exactly cracked the work–life balance thing. It’s almost all work – not least because whenever there’s the faintest whiff of romance in the air, I tend immediately to think about my husband’s funeral. The only place my life is properly rounded is at the hips.

Gloria, to her credit, realised from my tense posture at the sink that despite my light-hearted remark about Jason, his behaviour towards Anna was no laughing matter. The two of us had shared a home long enough for her to know what I was going to say next.

‘So you’re going to resign,’ she pre-empted me.

‘What else can I do?’

‘Let’s back up a moment,’ Gloria said. ‘You did absolutely the right thing, taking Anna to the no-frills funeral services in Putney. Eight hundred and fifty quid as opposed to thousands of pounds she simply didn’t have.’ Gloria rose from the kitchen table and headed for our emergency supplies cupboard.

This was definitely going to be a two-bottles-of-wine Wednesday.

‘I take it Jason will release the body?’ she asked.

An invisible hand grabbed my stomach and twisted. Until then, I’d completely overlooked – repressed, more likely – the fact that the bloke who started up his budget cremations business because he was scandalised by the cost of his own mother’s funeral would need to liaise with my employers if he was going to have Grigor’s body to cremate. I folded a damp tea towel into quarters, gave the glass hob a quick polish, then sat down at our kitchen table and reached gratefully for my fresh glass of wine.

‘Jason won’t have any choice,’ I said. ‘Which means I need to hand in my notice first thing tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m as bad as he is.’

‘What about the others? Surely when you tell them what happened, they’ll help you take Jason to task? Force him to behave properly from now on.’

As if.

Our staff turnover had been horrendous since the business was sold. Apart from a couple of the senior drivers, I’d been there longer than anyone else. Five years.

The newcomers seemed to have bought into Jason’s marketing-speak: monthly sales targets and promises of big bonuses. For all I knew—

No, surely it was impossible that everyone except me was up-selling in the worst possible way?

‘I’m not certain I can count on anyone for support,’ I said. ‘So the only question is, how much do you get on the dole these days?’ I managed to sound a lot less frightened than I felt, as I started to face up to the true cost of my good deed. Ah well, I’d experimented with just about every diet in the universe, so perhaps the Poverty Diet would succeed where the rest had failed.

‘I won’t be out of work for long.’ It was a promise to myself as much as to Gloria, although I was already wondering where my next job was coming from. Independent funeral companies were becoming an endangered species, and my battle charge towards the moral high ground, in flagrant defiance of corporate policy, was unlikely to impress any of the big chains – none of which I had ever wanted to work for anyway.

Gloria broke into my alarming thoughts. ‘Sweetie, I’ve been telling you for three years,’ she said. ‘You pay me too much rent.’

Gloria is – not to put too fine a point on it – rich. Which is to say, Gloria’s dad is an ex-banker whose name was never far from the headlines a few years ago, usually alongside words like ‘disgraced’ and ‘fat cat’. These days, he seems to spend most of his time playing golf and gently taking the piss out of his adored only child for choosing to work at a community law centre. ‘Sins of the fathers are one thing,’ he’d chided last time he visited, ‘but surely you could do good in a more lucrative way? There’s plenty of women eager to pay handsomely for good divorce lawyers.’

This house, the house we live in here in Kentish Town, was Gloria’s eighteenth birthday present. (Imagine that. I thought I was really privileged when Mum and Dad celebrated my coming of age with driving lessons.) And since the community law centre no longer has any budget for staff, my rent money is what Gloria lives off. Topped up by her trust fund, admittedly. Then again, for someone who needn’t work at all if she chose not to, Gloria is pretty damn dedicated to her various causes. It’s one of the things I love about her. However, I wasn’t about to become her latest charity case and I resolved that first thing in the morning I’d start putting out feelers for a new job.

I drained my wine glass. ‘I’m going to go and compose my resignation letter. I’ll send it by email.’

‘First of all,’ Gloria topped me up with a generous glug of Malbec before I could get my glass to the safety of the sink, ‘listen to me a moment.’ I knew what she was going to say, and sure enough … ‘It’s always easier to get a job when you’re already employed.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So why not go marching in there tomorrow and apologise for your momentary lapse in professionalism which interrupted his bereavement consultation, or whatever it is he’s calling it this week …’

‘Intake appointment,’ I muttered.

‘Whatevs. Anyway, my point is that you can stick to your principles without becoming a martyr. Take your salary for a few more weeks, while you get yourself sorted somewhere else. And leave with a good reference.’

I could see the logic in what Gloria was saying. And thinking about it, none of my erstwhile colleagues had gone to work for rival funeral directors. One took a job as a cosmetics consultant at the Westfield Centre, another went travelling, and the third member of what used to be our team said there were no decent jobs out there, just junior positions with zero hours contracts, so he went off to retrain as a hotel manager.

None of that was for me. I couldn’t imagine not doing what I do.

My job is part of who I am.

What was I going to do?

What was I going to do?

I closed my eyes for a few seconds and visualised. It’s a really useful technique I use whenever I need to adjust to change. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself going off to work as … as … all I could see was Siberia, the miserable little back office at work where, less than twelve hours ago, I had been – frankly – a lot happier than I was right then.

So maybe my brain was telling me change was unnecessary. But in my heart I already knew that if I kept drawing my salary, even for a little while, it would be a betrayal of my profession.