Tom McCarthy - C

The day of the funeral is warm and sunny. The mourners’ tread as they descend the gravel path is muffled, cautious. They gather, all in black, outside the Crypt Park’s gates, beneath the obelisk-topped columns, and make quietened small-talk with each other, glancing nervously around as they try to spot their host, hostess or Serge. After a while, Carrefax strides out of the house and greets them boisterously.

“Wonderful that you could come! There’ll be refreshments afterwards. For now, we should proceed into the park. What? Splendid! Yes, no seating, I’m afraid. Where’s Miss Hubbard?”

As though taking her cue, Miss Hubbard emerges from the schoolrooms with seven or eight pupils in tow. She steers the children through the Crypt Park ’s gates behind Carrefax and the other mourners. Serge meanders in behind them. By the Crypt, the vicar’s waiting. So are Maureen, Frieda and their girls. Frieda and the girls are crying; Maureen’s got a stoic, grim expression on her face. The vicar has a consoling beam on his. He flashes it around, as though trying to attach it to the face of each arriving person. Beside him, mounted on a small wooden podium, is the coffin. It’s made of dark wood, with brass handles; from a small hole in its lid probably imperceptible to anyone but Serge and his father, a small wire spills and dangles down the side. On each side of the trench Carrefax has designed, a workman’s standing between piles of earth, holding a spade: they look like soldiers standing to attention as they line a dignitary’s route. The mechanical set-up has become even more complicated than it was last time Serge saw it: now, a new rail is supported in the air above the rail-lined furrow, cutting across it perpendicularly-a curtain rail, with black drapes pegged to it on hooks. A little metal switch-box is set into one of this rail’s supporting columns. Carrefax steps over to it and clicks the switch on, then off: the box gives a little moan, the rail’s pegs jerk and the drapes, one hanging on each side of the trench, hems bunched up on the ground, twitch briefly, then lie still again.

“Splendid!” says Carrefax. “All set to go. We’ll start with-”

He’s interrupted by a general rustling as all heads turn away from him towards the Crypt Park ’s gates. His wife is making a late entry between these, with a train of women. She’s holding something in front of her, cradling it in upturned hands. The train is moving in formation, like a set of rugby forwards: advancing in rows, arms locked together. Their faces are neutral and impassive, like statues’ faces. With long dresses covering their feet, they seem to glide above the lawn, as though mounted on their own rails made of air, invisible in the long grass. The other mourners watch their slow approach in silence; Carrefax, the vicar, Miss Hubbard and the Day School pupils watch them too. They glide towards the main group slowly but ineluctably, as though bearing down on them. Then, just as it seems they’re all going to collide with the posts beside the trench, they stop, as one body, a few yards from the coffin-all of them apart from Mrs. Carrefax, who proceeds onwards to the coffin and, placing on its lid the shroud that she’s been carrying in her arms, unfolds it until it covers the whole thing. It shows, in red and green silk on a white silk background, an insect feeding on a flower.

Carrefax nods to the vicar, who coughs, then starts to speak:

“Friends,” he beams, “we come here not in despair but in gratitude: for the gift of these past seventeen years…”

A sob breaks loose from the main crowd of mourners. The vicar’s beam grows more pronounced and aggressive as he continues:

“… in gratitude also that the soul of Sophie Annabel Carrefax has been reclaimed-redeemed, as one redeems a ticket or an object given out on loan-and done so, I’m quite certain, with great joy, by he who crafted it in the first place. When we consider-”

“Him,” says Carrefax.

“I’m sorry?” asks the vicar.

“By him who crafted,” Carrefax corrects him.

“Him who crafted it, indeed,” the vicar says. He foists his beam about again before continuing: “When we consider that we all are here on loan, then we might come to see that those the earlier gathered back are perhaps those most valued. Think of the cherished objects you yourselves might once have lent…”

Serge stops listening after a few sentences. He can still hear the vicar’s words, of course, but they’re just sounds. His pick-up’s set beneath them, lower. He looks down, and sees among the grass a beetle pushing an earth-clump several times its size. The beetle’s trying to move this forwards, but the clump rolls back onto the beetle every time the latter shoves the former up the little incline in its path. Is it a Balkan beetle, Serge wonders? A bloody-nosed one? He looks at the flower and insect embossed on the coffin’s drape. The drape’s thin, and it fits the coffin loosely; sunlight, after passing through its fabric, bounces back up off the coffin’s copper handles to travel back up through it from the inside, making its white silk luminescent and its insect and flower dark, like silhouettes; they seem almost to move across the fabric’s surface, as though animated. The sunlight’s also spilling across the large earth-piles by the trench, blurring their edges; it looks as though tiny clumps have broken loose and are slightly levitating. The steel rails in the trench glint blue and silver. They seem to hum, like railway lines hum when a train’s approaching in the distance, just before you hear the train itself…

The sensation of humming, real or imagined, grows: Serge can sense vibrations spreading round the lawn. He feels them moving from the ground into his feet and up his legs, then onwards to his groin. They animate his own flesh, start it levitating. He can’t help it. He crosses his hands in front of his crotch and looks about him: everyone else is looking at the vicar, or the coffin-not at him. The vicar’s still beaming aggressively, talking of heaven. Looking around him, trousers bulging, Serge is filled with a sudden and certain awareness that there is no such place: there’s the coffin and the Crypt, the lawn, these conker trees above them, this fresh-smelling earth. One of the workmen’s scratching his nose. A fly’s buzzing around the vicar’s head. The vicar tries to ignore it, but it brushes his face, tickling his lips and making him half-blow, half-spit his next few words out. If the fly hatched on Arcady Field, it will have come from sheep-dung. Serge pictures minute dung-flecks being deposited on this man’s mouth, the even tinier bacteria inside them turning inwards from his lips, swimming against his phlegm through crashing rocks of teeth, past lashing tongue and gurgling epiglottis down towards his stomach…

The vicar’s words tail off. Serge’s father marshals the Day School pupils into place and they perform their recitation:

The spacious firmament on high,

With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame

Their great original proclaim…

Their pronunciation’s more distorted than it usually is in Pageants: they’ve had less time to rehearse, and are more nervous. “Spacious” and “spangled” are drawn out forever; “proclaim” becomes “co-caime.” The sky is blue and shining though: this much is true. Serge raises his head from the ground towards it. Birds are far away, which means high pressure: he should get good reception tonight. Another sob comes from one of Frieda’s girls; another mourner sniffles. The Day School pupils, voices dull, monotonous and out of synch, intone the second verse, describing evening shades, the moon and all the planets, which

Confirm the tidings as they roll,

And spread the truth from pole to pole…