A Professional Mourner

My name is Chantelle. My clients call me Miss Rodham. I’m at your service, professional mourner for a small fee. I live with four other women, and together we serve the village of Valleyham, tucked neatly in the Peak District.

Last week, a bleak Tuesday, the village teacher, our only teacher, twenty-one miles away from the city where he was born, the grand city we can only dream of - skyscrapers, estates, sprawling shopping centres - died peacefully in his sleep, his hands meeting on his chest, his eyes open, those gleaming blue eyes staring at the ceiling, his eyelids reddened by sleeplessness. In his final hours he called out for the lost love he called Michelle, a woman lost to the city, the reason he left for us. How he came here we don’t know, though someone may have asked. It could be he was traipsing, walking boots and all, and found us by chance, found the only sign to our village (Valleyham, ½ mile) and decided to stay there. No doubt Mrs Flute at the bed and breakfast gave him shelter for a while, and when the previous teacher, Mr Abraham, died, Mr Neville took up the post, having a degree in English Literature from King’s College London.

Often, when we were bored and he had caught our boredom like syphilis, he talked of his past life (that’s how he spoke of it) in which he had met his first and only love, the red-haired seductress with a child from a previous short relationship. Seeing her saddled with a child with little support from her family, he took pity on her, and this pity evolved into love, and he took her out, lavishing her with food and wine, and they settled in his flat with the hopes (maybe one-sided) of raising a family. Then she left without warning, left without a trace, and he left in the same way the next day, finding us here, tucked away in the most beautiful part of the country. Finding our dreary ways comfortable, our tight community exceptional, he stayed. Mr Neville, half-smiling, greeted by Mr Fletcher, the village doctor, with a half-smile and a prompt, ‘Dead now, are we?’ 

There was no need to check him; Mr Neville had complained of feeling weak. Perhaps Mr Fletcher hadn’t expected him to live long, but they say there is strength in weakness; at least that’s what the priest said from the pulpit of the abandoned St. Mary’s Church, cold and barren, its pews caked with layers of dust. According to local legend, and there are many local legends here, local legends that don’t leave the borders, the raised singing voices of past congregations can be heard at night, if one listens closely enough. Once, tipsy, I entered the open door of the church and sat on a back pew, hearing the scuttle of rats or mice, smelling the alluring (to some) smell of age and decay. Alas, I heard no singing that day, though I told Alice, a fellow professional mourner, that I heard the strained voice of a former vicar call on his flock to look the other way, to pray for those who insult and castigate us. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said, ‘if you don’t go too far with it. There are times when you need to stand up for yourself. Why turn the other cheek when someone is setting your house on fire? You beat them with a bat.’

We reached Mr Neville’s house, the four women and I, at quarter past nine, having kept to the side of the road in the heavy fog, and found a young woman around our age (we’re all twenty-seven) standing in the doorway, her arms sulkily folded, her gaze distant. ‘Hello,’ I said, taking the lead for the first time (I had a soft spot for my old teacher; late afternoons of passion in the closed classroom, the desks put together with the hope of comfort, though we were too engrossed (or at least I was) for comfort), offering my hand. Looking at me, she offered a false smile and clasped my hand in hers. ‘The doctor’s just been,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing he can do. Dad’s dead.’ Now there was a newsflash worthy of twenty-four hour news. Why had he kept that secret from me? Pained, I took my hand away and walked around the side of the house to the neatly-ordered garden, watching a grey cat, an intruder, play with a yellow cotton ball. The fog had lifted somewhat and from the end of his garden I could see the old church with its cemetery, the drooping gravestones.

The mad girls, suffering from folie a deux, had died in the graveyard, stretched out beside each other after slitting each other’s throats at the same time in maybe one quick motion. Two bloodied knives were on the floor in the middle of them. In their madness they had died their hair red and wore matching red tracksuits (one with white stripes, the other with black stripes) on their death day, red because blood. That they had chosen to end their life there was no doubt: they had a left a barely eligible letter declaring their intentions, like a declaration of war, saying they had had enough of people conspiring against them, people wanting them to lose their virginity to the dirty men of the village, dirty men who would pay any price for two hours with them. Since the boys their own age disgusted them (indeed, everyone else seemed to disgust them, even me, but they made no mention of me in the letter), they slept with each other on the morning of their death. Still, they made no mention of dying in the cemetery; maybe they thought it would save their parents the bother of moving their bodies far.

Do you love him? I thought, leaning on the old stone wall, my breathing coming too quickly. Did you love him, the only lover you had? True, I had pretty much forced myself on him, staying behind after everyone had left to offer sweet nothings, compliments that meant nothing to him but everything to me. And he had fallen for me, the lonely Mr Neville, sole scholar, rapacious reader, greedy in love, too, his hands grasping here and there, grabbing a breast, my stomach, my thighs. Almost every day for six months I praised his looks, forgetting his foibles, and let him take me, spread on my back, more helpless under his weight than I assumed. He wouldn’t want you here, I thought, wiping my eyes with the back of my soft hands. Distracted by the intricacy of the veins on the same hand, I didn’t hear the others weeping collectively in his bedroom, weeping with the window open. What did they weep for? Forced weeping like forced wailings. So why didn’t they wail for him? Ah, the wails would come later, at the funeral, a funeral attended by everyone in the village as all funerals were. You don’t know what you have till it’s gone, but you know what you love from the start. Annoyed, I slapped the side of my face (whether this caused a red mark or not I can’t say) and walked back to the front of the house.

Sitting on the doorstep, the woman covered her ears and rocked slowly back and forth. ‘He died peacefully,’ I said. ‘That’s all you can ask for.’ I stopped myself from saying I’d witnessed people die in agony, for I hadn’t witnessed anyone die, not even my own father. Nor did I say that she looked like him. No, Mr Neville (first name John) had a sharp, pointed nose, thin, almost non-existent lips, no hair, average ears. Only his blue eyes stood out. Perhaps those eyes were the pinpoint of my love, if that makes sense. The focus of my love. Oh yes, once we had made love standing up, not six inches away from the back wall, visible from the window had Mr Neville forgotten to close the blinds. I imagined the punishment of those deeds. It goes without saying that Mr Neville would have been sacked and told to leave Valleyham, and I’d … there isn’t a precedent for this. I could have been giving daily detentions for a year or outright expelled. My parents, in their disturbed amazement, would have disowned me. But it isn’t worth thinking about now because he’s dead, and our secret died with him. Relieved, I sat against the wall and watched my mother, wrapped warm in a long sheepskin coat, a gift from her sister, pass by on the main road leading in and out of the village, a bundle of groceries in her hand. Had she heard the news? I wanted to snatch the paper bag, empty the contents and breathe into it. Instead, I took several deep stomach breaths, eyes half-open, and closed my mind to the weeping.

‘Why aren’t you with them?’ the woman asked, keeping her head down. There were strands of grey hair that had yet to stand out in her natural blonde hair. ‘Are you sick?’

‘That’s one way of putting it. Tired is more the case. Dog-tired’. To back my lie, I yawned. ‘They don’t need me; they’ll need me at the funeral. Have you started thinking about that?’ Course not, I thought. ‘Let her mourn first. She’ll be mourning at the funeral, too. Isn’t that what funerals are about?’ Silence. I thought about the morning Jessica and I, sitting atop a hill, had witnessed a heated, heavy argument between a man and a woman, urban-dwellers, wearing raincoats and shorts. The man was at least a foot taller and, annoyed by something she had said, grabbed the woman by the throat. Jessica rose, ready to help the woman. I had remained where I was, too entertained to move. I must have felt the same way the audience of a gladiator bout must have felt. It was more like a tragic play than real-life. Jessica, seeing that I hadn’t stood and lacking the courage to confront the man alone, sat back down. In the end the man took his hands away from the woman and walked eastwards. The woman walked westwards. Sometimes I still wonder what happened to them; did they make it up to each other? Another time, alone, sitting in almost the same place on that high hill that hardly anyone ascends, a hill I’ve never descended, I watched two women make love. So this is how those twins made love, I thought. Perhaps the twins were naked, too. Later, the two lovers, brunettes, walked down Valleyham’s main road. I plucked a rose and handed it to one of them before blowing a kiss and running away. Where are they now? 

Inside the house, the weeping stopped; soon the body would be removed and arrangements for the funeral made. I expected the woman beside me to object, but her objections would be pointless. ‘How long are you staying for?’ I asked. ‘There’s a spare room in my parents’ house.’

‘What a strange place,’ she said, looking this way and that. ‘It took me ages to get here after I got the phone call.’ Smiling, she said, ‘I’m surprised you have any phones here. Or electricity. What a place. Why did he move here?’

Telling her Mr Neville’s story uplifted me, casting the weight of guilt away like a brick that had been blocking a toilet. She stayed motionless throughout, even when my fellow mourners left the house, her hands tucked between her legs. Afterwards I rose and returned to my shared house at the end of Cobert Street, one of five streets in the village. She didn’t follow.

Greasy chicken legs, sausage rolls, bacon and mayonnaise sandwiches, strawberries in cream, scotch eggs, breadsticks, a block of mature cheese, pigs in blankets. Taking my usual place at the table, I arranged my knife and fork so that my knife was to the left of me and my fork to the right, and stabbed a bacon and mayonnaise sandwich. I had already been asked what we had talked about, and had successfully avoided the question by going to the toilet, sitting on the closed toilet seat with memories of Mr Neville fading from my mind. Of course, the old man will forever have a place in my mind as my only lover. Noticing a nodding dog ornament sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I leaned over and turned the taps on to drain away the shampoo and shower gel remains that had accumulated at the end of the tub.

‘You eat like a pig,’ Katie said, eating like a pig herself, stuffing a sausage roll in her mouth before chewing. At least I have the courtesy to remove the pastry before eating the sausage, then eating the pastry. ‘You eat like a chicken,’ I said. The image of a chicken, happy and free, had entered my mind a second before I spoke. The other girls barring Katie laughed. I laughed with them. In the next room, the official play room, Andrew, Jessica’s husband, played the violin, souring our mood a little as he always did when he played there. Then again, his violin playing was better than his piano playing, so there was that to be thankful for. I told her what Mr Neville had been doing in the village because she didn’t know. That’s all. Paranoid, I scrutinised them one by one. They didn’t look like they knew our secret, and if one of them knew it, they wouldn’t have kept it to themselves for this long. Just goes to show how unobservant they were; not one of them noticed that I used to stay later than them at school, and not one of them noticed how dishevelled I looked when eventually left school for the day. More fool them, I thought, biting into my sandwich.

A knock at the door. Being closest, I put my plate down and went over to the door. Andrew stopped playing his violin. Anticipating my father (my mother disapproves too much of my profession to visit), I tied my hair back in a bobble and recalled what I usually say: Can’t you see I’m happy here? We celebrate the life of the those who have passed on. You’re older than me and yet you find this a struggle to come to terms with. You’re the only person, as well as mum, who can’t understand it. Except he does understand it. His problem is that he doesn’t want his only daughter working as a mourner. He wants her … what does he want from me?

The woman entered the house before I had chance to stop her, though I’d never have stopped her, and wiped her shoes on the mat. ‘I never knew my dad, and I didn’t want to know him till you told me … till you told me what he’d told you about his life story.’ I nodded. ‘Thanks for telling me. It’s made me appreciate how happy he was here. And it’s sad that he never, you know, knew about me. Mum didn’t know where he went, so -’

‘More like he didn’t know where she went. Your -’

‘What are you trying to imply?’

‘Who told you Mr Neville was dead? Who phoned you? Because he didn’t know about you.’ I swallowed. ‘Unless he was lying. He can’t have been lying; he always got emotional when he spoke about his long-lost love. He came here because she left him.’

‘Ah, he told you half the story, then. Not even that.’ The woman had the audacity to walk further into the house. Didn’t she know that was like walking further into an endless unilluminated cave? Yet further she went until she was at the dinner table, marvelling at the unglamorous food on offer. Then she sat down and said, ‘I want to know more about him.’

Skipping, I waved at a passing man who had recently lost his wife, a man who had asked me to wail the loudest at her funeral (whilst Vide Cor Meum played). It seemed he was the only one who had accepted what the priest said, but hadn’t put any of it into practise, given a new lease of life from the music Father Conte had recommended. Yesterday, just before noon, a worried mother had approached me as I was outside the house, scrubbing the window. ‘One minute of your time, please,’ she’d asked. Won’t take you long to have a look at my Peter. I followed her in the light rain, stirred by the mist (there is a beauty in mist) and followed her into Peter’s bedroom. 

Where do I start with Peter? We liked one another, and I was ashamed I didn’t know he was ill. Nonetheless, like stopped at like; I had, thanks to he who has filled most of this account, had my fill of men. Deluded into thinking he had taken advantage of me at the age of sixteen onwards - we had, I soon realised, taken advantage of each other - I scorned the opposite sex, hating them for the seemingly easy lives they lead, thinking nature was on their side and against us; after all, hadn’t nature, or as the priest like to think, God, planted a womb inside us? No such thing exists in men. Anyway, I sympathised with poor Peter from the start, and knelt by the bed to check his forehead. ‘A high fever. He’s been coughing all night,’ his mother said. ‘Coughing like no-one’s business. Coughing everything up.’

‘Keep coughing,’ I said. ‘It might be good for him. Better out than in. You don’t want his tubes to be blocked.’ A disclaimer: I am no medical expert, but I have seen enough cases of the flu to know that flu isn’t always a death sentence. Self-pity comes into it. I pointed at the open door. ‘Leave me to it. I’ll take some sense into him.’ This worried mother divined, unreasonably, that I had, by affirming my intention to talk some sense into him, branded her overweight and unkempt son, dearest of all to her, a spoiled brat and minor hypochondriac. I don’t know why you look at me like that, I thought. I arrive when they’re dead. Extending my thought, I added that it was too taxing to be expected to help the dying. That job belongs to one of the two nurses in the village, or the village doctor. Surely everyone knows I merely mourn, dance, wail, sing and weep. What miraculous powers do they think I have? 

Repressed by the stench in the room - bad body odour mixed with farts - I opened the window and sucked in the air. ‘This’ll help him,’ I said without turning. ‘If he gets any worse, call for the doctor.’ Peter’s mother laughed. Peter was too embarrassed to say anything. ‘That’s not why I wanted you,’ she said, falling onto the wooden seat by the roomy king-sized bed. ‘I want you to perform for him.’ 

‘Perform what?’ I accepted the Lambert and Butler cigarette she offered me. We lit up in unison and exhaled our smoke at Peter, who sat up to cough. ‘Just a case of the flu,’ she said, ‘but he needs cheering up.’

Intrigued, Jessica and Katie held the woman against the wall. Rachel and I stood at either side of her, making sure she didn’t flee. Not that she’d have a chance of fleeing with her feet tied together; Rachel was an expert with her hands, able to mould and form as well as destroy. ‘How did you know?’ I asked. Katie, snarling, spreading her purple-painted lips wide, ‘Yeah, how did you know? Mr what’s-his-name didn’t know where his girlfriend went.’

‘His name was Mr Neville,’ I said.

‘Yeah, boring Mr Neville. Everyone used to throw stuff at the b*****d. He used to sit and whimper at his desk.’ Katie kissed the woman on the cheek. ‘So how did you know where he lived? How did you know he was dead?’

Relaxed - appearing relaxed, anyway - the woman breathed onto Katie’s face. ‘He rang me. My dad rang me and said he was going to die. He said he could feel he was going to die. He said he’d be dead by the morning and told me to come as quickly as possible. That’s how I know he was here. I set off at four this morning and now I’m here.’ She looked at each of us as if to say, What now?

Betrayed. Perplexed. Staggered. Sitting by the main road facing the Corn Inn, I decided he had lied to me out of … no, he couldn’t have lied to me out of love, for love leans towards the truth. He must have lied to me through lust, as a means of getting closer to me. Hadn’t I lied to him? After delving into my memory, I couldn’t remember lying to him. Oh yes you did, you flattered him with lies and he accepted them. Mutual lies. We had used each other. I smiled at the idea, perhaps true, that he had invented not knowing where his wife had gone, and hadn’t mentioned his child, out of self-pity, that bottomless well. It was his fault, not anybody else’s (although his wife could have played a part) that he had left, and it was his luck to have found us here. Our luck to have received him, too. ‘Mr Neville,’ I muttered, picking a thorny rose. A dot of blood emerged when I purposefully pricked myself.

///

Tears, real tears, spread down the cheeks of the four women as they stood around the body (similar to the way they stood around the deceased’s daughter), clad in springtime clothing, always springtime clothing - bright, appealing colours incongruent to the black worn by those sitting on the plastic chairs in the field. Hewitt Neville’s naked body lay on the plank of wood. The four professional mourners, celebratory girls, took hands and danced, still wailing, tears falling down their cheeks, their eyes red and puffy.

Three minutes later, one of the mourning women blew a horn; the others copied her in peaceful harmony. The stirring sound eased the audience, and most reminded themselves that they had experienced this before and were bound to experience it again. A few members of the audience felt their chest tighten and their heartbeat quicken at the thought that they could be the next body to be placed on a plank of wood.

If only this happened every day, one of those sitting down thought, his hands by his side, his toes wriggling involuntarily. A shame it happens but twice a year. Not even that; some years passed without a death, yet the mourning women waited, housed in happiness. The past month had been a busy one, and they hadn’t stopped to appreciate how busy it had been. Fortunately they received a humble weekly wage from the village mayor, the only mayor they’d known. When would his time come?

Jane Neville, thirty-four, a comely maiden, sat at the front row. She hadn’t looked at her father since two men carried him out onto the field.

Eighteen minutes passed. Clutching a ball of tissue, Jane Neville didn’t look away as the flames rose, emitting black smoke, the smell of charred human filling her nose. She wished she could smell that smell for the first time again.

The last time, six months ago. The last time we made love. The last day of summer, real summer, I had gone to his house and he had opened the door before I reached it, a look of perverted lust on his face. I had willingly entered and willingly slept with him. Six months later, one hand touching my inflated stomach (more and more inflation expected), I stood outside his house trying to inhale as much smoke as I could.

‘What are you doing?’ Katie asked, putting her trumpet down by the bathroom door. I vomited into the sink (it hadn’t occurred to me to kneel by the toilet) wiped my lips and vomited again. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Katie said. ‘Dad’s a plumber. He’ll do it for free.’ Once more I vomited, once more I wiped my lips and glanced down at the red lipstick mixed with specks of vomit on my hand.