Black

Black

B RIDIE, DRESSED IN

black, waits for the Uber to take her from the train station to the funeral. Such a modern thing to summon a driver from the sky, for the oldest practice in the world of saying goodbye to the dead.

It feels as though time has stopped. It is a play, her mother used to tell her. Whenever you are afraid, tell yourself that you are in a play and you are an actress who knows her lines by heart. Her mother never once set foot on a stage, but she could have. She had a sunniness to her, and despite her plump figure, she drew you in. She could have been an actress, if there had been time.

Adil S. drives his pristine car in complete silence. No radio, no chatter. Even the engine of the car is barely making a noise. Bridie keeps her hands folded in her lap. ‘The Birdlet’, written by Alexander Pushkin in 1888 and then rewritten by Eddie Winston in 1968, sits within her black bag. For all the years she kept it in a frame in the conservatory, Alistair never wondered about it, he never asked. She had to use a butter knife to prise the clips from the back of the glass frame this

morning to return his words to her. So that she might return his words to him.

And it is only now that Eddie Winston is dead that she realizes she has always, always, counted on them meeting again. Has always presumed that there would be more. And how absurd to think that he might live so long. To think that she

might live so long. The impossibility of them both being alive is not lost on her now that she is realizing how foolish she has been in the year since Alistair’s death not to seek him out quicker. Not to run down the streets of Birmingham calling out his name.

The streets of Birmingham slide past the window and she does not call out, ‘Eddie Winston.’ The car smells faintly of leather and a too sweet fruity air freshener, and the combination of all the left and right turns and the smell and sitting in the back has made a wave of nausea rise up in Bridie’s throat. She squints at the phone on Adil’s dashboard but the text telling her the remaining time of their drive is far too small for her to read.

Bridie is relieved when the grey church spire appears through the windscreen. Adil’s car is so clean, he would likely not have thanked her for vomiting in it.

Outside the church, they have gathered. Eddie’s family. She knows the obituary by heart now: Eddie’s son and his husband, Eddie’s daughter and her three children. They are probably adults themselves, the children. She wonders if they will look like him. She doesn’t have a photograph of Eddie, because why would she? There was a departmental staff picture taken in ’61, but Eddie isn’t in it. Alistair is, face screwed up into the sun, standing at the bottom of the bleachers and

holding the sign – the star of the show. She couldn’t forget Eddie though. Some things are fading in her memory but not those eyes.

Adil pulls up and, seeing that it is a funeral, he says very quietly to her, ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ He offers her help getting out of the car, but she assures him that she’s slow but steady.

There are a few people at Eddie’s funeral in bright colours. A shock of red dress on a blonde woman, a bright green suit on a man with a shining bald head, an orange scarf draped over the shoulders of a woman with silver hair. It is as though they are defying the sombre and frightening show of death that is expected and saying, Eddie was fun, his funeral should be also

. But the rest are in black, and Bridie joins the infestation of beetles scuttling towards the church.

She sits at the back. At the first pew she comes to. She barely knew him. She loved him for most of her life. Both of these things are true. And both of them compete with exactly how close to the coffin she should be, as though being closer to the coffin proves one’s importance to the deceased. The front row for the performance.

She finds she can’t look at it. At the box where Eddie is lying, so she looks out at the congregation, at the women with black hats, the teenagers looking gangly and awkward in borrowed suits, at the couples holding hands, and she thinks, He had a nice life.

Look at all these people who loved him who want to say goodbye. Some people are already dabbing tissues to their eyes, and the thing hasn’t even begun. On the other side of the church, a few rows ahead, a young

woman with pink hair is wearing an Alice band with a black net across her face. She looks very chic. For a moment, the man beside her morphs himself into Eddie Winston – all old and crinkly, but the same bright eyes, same slight frame, the same smiling face even when he is not smiling. Bridie blinks once, twice, and the man leans to talk to the girl with the pink hair. His granddaughter, she must be. Bridie looks away. Her eyes are miraging Eddie where he is not. Where he cannot be. He is in the box. She must remember that. There cannot be two Eddie Winstons at this funeral.

The vicar appears before the congregation, looking sombre. He, too, could be an Eddie Winston from this far away. But if there can’t be two Eddie Winstons at the funeral, there certainly can’t be three.

After Alistair died, Bridie saw him everywhere, his sharp shoulders ahead of her in the queue at the supermarket, his wispy white hair on a man sitting on a park bench. It is the same now – grief overpowering all her senses. Her heart pulling too tightly on her eye strings. The eyes are the puppet of the heart; they can make a plain person beautiful so long as they are loved.

The vicar manages to call for quiet without speaking a word. An affable-looking man with glasses and slightly too tall for his robe. He’s the kind of vicar Bridie would have liked, if she still went to church.

‘Let us pray,’ he begins. ‘Let us talk to God before we talk to each other.’ Nobody joins Bridie on her pew right at the back of the church. And she finds within a few words of the Lord’s Prayer that she is crying. And she did not think to bring tissues.

To be told of Eddie’s life will be a gift. An answer to all the questions she has answered in her own mind with various different options. Sometimes, she answered the question as to his marriage with him being married twice, sometimes thrice. Sometimes he was alone, and sometimes he was happy about that. Sometimes he missed her, sometimes he forgot all about her. But now she is hearing of his life. The answers to the questions come. They make it neither easier nor harder. He is gone and that is all there is.

When the six family members are shouldering Eddie with some difficulty, Bridie whispers, ‘Goodbye, Eddie.’ She wishes funerals would allow for the gathered to actually say goodbye all at once and, within that goodbye, all the luck and love for the journey he is about to take.

Bridie had intended to leave Eddie’s final words to her, Pushkin’s poem, nestled unseen between the flowers of his graveside, but she cannot bear to see him lowered into the ground, committed to the dark, damp earth. So she places the Birdlet poem, kept sacred all these years, in his messy, guilty, energetic writing, on the pew. And she begins the long journey home.