Sunflowers in February Read online

  Dad’s jaw drops a little and his face begins to flush as an uncomfortable silence creates a gulf between them.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I mutter from my position beside him.

  The young journalist swallows loudly, the saliva making a slight gurgle in his throat.

  Dad’s voice begins answering this question, like the low rumble of thunder before a massive storm. ‘How does that make us feel …? How does that make us FEEL? Have you ever done multiple choice?’ Dad asks him, actually waiting for an answer, while the poor journalist nods feebly in return. ‘Because I’m not sure what the answer is. Is it … a? Relieved … because teenagers are so expensive, or is it b? Concerned … because someone has got a nasty dent in their car … or c? Totally fucking DEVASTATED! How do you think we’re feeling, you moron?’ he shouts, as the door slams in the poor guy’s face. Then Dad lifts the flap of the letter box up and shouts ‘Dickhead!’ through it.

  How to make friends and influence people, Dad.

  I give him the thumbs up for standing up to these invasive, pathetic story-mongers, then Ben appears and pats him on the back. ‘Impressive, Dad,’ he says with a grin, then he too gives him the thumbs up.

  Sitting in my bedroom and holding my hairbrush in her hands, my mother loosens the dark hair that is wrapped round it, a part of me still.

  I want to hug her. I want to tell her I was sorry for leaving our closeness behind in my childhood. For sighing every time she told me to do my homework or tidy my room. She spent my and Ben’s whole life shaping us into the confident teenagers we’d become. In addition, she’d spent every day making our food, washing and ironing our clothes or hunting in her purse to give us extra money when we asked for it. She had shown she loved us by basically being our bank, our waiter and our cleaner.

  I’d been so preoccupied with growing up that I can’t remember showing her exactly how much I loved her and, too late, I so want to now.

  She lifts the hairbrush to her face and, with her other hand strokes the trailing hair across her cheek and lips, so slowly. My smell must still be on my pillow because, placing the brush carefully down, she picks up my pillow and pushes her face into it, breathing deeply.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, surprising me, with words made no less painful by the softness of the feathers and down.

  The words of her apology are muffled.

  ‘What on earth are you sorry for, Mum?’ I ask.

  ‘I should never have told you not to ring me if you spent all your money,’ she replies, as if answering me. ‘It’s my fault you walked home … I’m sorry.’ She continues to rest her cheek on my pillow as if it were me.

  ‘Can you forgive me?’ she implores and I answer with my head on her shoulder.

  ‘In a heartbeat, Mum … if I had one … but it wasn’t your fault.’ My words of forgiveness are unheard by her, and my mother’s shame is left to fester.

  A sticky print of lip-shaped strawberry balm still clings to the glass by my bed. Mum replaces the pillow full of lost words on my bed, and kisses the glass and it’s heartbreaking to watch.

  If only I could have just one more day with my mother. One more moment. One more hug.

  Uncle Roger calls up the stairs. ‘Amelia? I’ve just popped in to see if there is anything you need?’ He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, car keys in one hand and a packet of cigarettes in the other.

  Good old Uncle Roger … always here to help.

  Mum wipes the cuff of her sleeve across her face and clears her throat.

  ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ she calls back, checking her appearance in the oval reflection of my dressing-table mirror, blowing her nose with a tissue from a little square box, and putting a smile on her face. Then kissing her fingers, she pushes her kiss into my pillow and leaves the room.

  The coroner’s report has been completed and it confirms that I hadn’t had alcohol or drugs, which obviously I knew but it had to be done for the record, and I hadn’t been raped or attacked. It confirmed I had received a significant trauma to the right side, indicating a collision with a vehicle coming from behind and that I suffered a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula of the right leg. The force of my body hitting the ground resulted in a fatal cervical fracture to the third vertebrae, hence the horrible angle of my head when they found me. An interim death certificate was produced allowing my funeral to be arranged, and an inquest would take place over the next few months.

  Basically the tyre caught my lower leg and the knock from the car caused me to catapult into the ditch awkwardly, breaking my neck on impact with the ground. I would have been dead in an instant.

  Uncle Roger, in his self-imposed role of Chief Dead Person’s Family Coordinator, announces round the kitchen table what he thinks should happen now.

  ‘I think a burial is the best thing,’ he says, nodding slightly as if he is most definitely right. ‘We will have somewhere to visit,’ he adds, as if he thinks I might be hanging around a creepy cemetery for all eternity waiting for guests to grace me with their presence. My parents nod their approval, to Uncle Roger rather than each other, as if he is the chairperson of this meeting.

  ‘What, no discussion?’ I ask, looking at them all. ‘There are options you know.’

  Uncle Roger makes a fat bullet point in a little red notebook that probably should have the title ‘WHAT TO DO ABOUT LILY’ on the front, then writes the word ‘burial’ next to it.

  ‘Hang on.’ I look round at them all. ‘I don’t want bugs and worms using me as part of their circle of life. I don’t want to be eaten until I’m nothing but a skeleton.’ I feel a kind of burst of energy inside me at the unfairness of having no say in what will happen to me. What if being buried will somehow trap me underground forever in this limbo state, decomposing in a grave, unearthed hundreds of years later in favour of a modern housing development? The idea makes me shiver with the horror of it. Perhaps a cremation will somehow ‘release me’, allowing me to go wherever it is that you’re supposed to go for all eternity. That sounds like a much better idea … if deciding to be cremated while you’re conscious of it could be considered a better idea.

  Uncle Roger makes another fat bullet point, then taps the pen against his lips. ‘Where shall we have the wake?’

  ‘I don’t want to be buried,’ I say, annoyed. ‘Go back to the previous bullet point; it didn’t have a unanimous vote!’

  This meeting is about me; yet I’m the only one here who isn’t getting a say in what should happen.

  ‘She doesn’t want to be buried.’

  We all look across at Ben. ‘Doesn’t?’ Uncle Roger asks, noticing Ben’s use of the present tense.

  ‘Doesn’t,’ Ben repeats. ‘You wouldn’t understand … It’s a twin thing.’

  ‘Yesss, Ben!’ I shriek, jumping up and down amongst them all, inappropriately excited, considering the event. ‘Yes!’

  A flush blooms across Ben’s jaw, which is always his version of a neon sign advertising how angry or upset he is. I can imagine what is going on inside his head. I am a twin. I was a twin. I used to have a twin. I am now one half of a whole.

  We’re not broken, Ben. You can still do it.

  Uncle Roger answers with an unacceptable hint of annoyance creeping into his tone. ‘But … we will need somewhere to go to talk to Lily, after –’

  Ben interrupts angrily. ‘You think she’s going to answer? You think she’s going to be sitting on her gravestone waiting for visiting hours …? She will want to be cremated.’ Ben pronounces each word carefully with a small gap between each one to ensure Uncle Roger doesn’t miss the point.

  ‘Way to go, Ben!’ I shout and make to high-five him, but he doesn’t high-five back. He just leaves me awkwardly hanging.

  ‘And …’ Oh, he’s on a roll now. ‘… she will want to have something dramatic done with her ashes.’

  ‘Oh, you’re good, Ben,’ I tell him, then immediately question how I could get so enthusiastic about my body being dramatically scattered
in a million little pieces of burnt-out flakes.

  Uncle Roger loses his invisible balance on his invisible podium, tapping the pen on the table agitatedly, looking between Mum and Dad for support.

  ‘Cremation!’ confirms Dad, peering over at the notebook and pointing at the word ‘burial’, indicating he should scrub out the first point on his notebook and change it. How I’m going to be ‘dispatched’ has just become a messy scribble followed by a new first bullet point … ‘cremation’.

  Ben flicks his phone into life and plugs his headset into one ear as if his work here is done.

  We can still do it, Ben. We are still twins.

  Nathan’s mum had a really bad week.

  She phoned in sick on the day Nathan told her the news about Lily, but the trauma, the guilt and the lack of sleep that followed managed to convince everyone that she really was ill. She had watched the news reports on television from behind a cushion or shielded by the duvet, while swallowing down the nausea that threatened to fill her mouth.

  They still hadn’t found the driver … of course … She was right there, hiding, like a cowardly child watching a horror film.

  She looked awful and she felt worse.

  Nathan’s dad was worried about her and how she seemed incapable of supporting their son after the death of his girlfriend. In addition, he was more than a little surprised that, although ill, she had started drinking her way through the entire wine rack.

  It’s the first day back at school after half-term, but Ben hasn’t gone in. Instead we are all at the funeral parlour doing the expensive part of dying.

  The woman who sits in front of them greeted my family serenely in the foyer then showed them smoothly in to her room as if she was on wheels. From behind her polished desk she continues to perform her job with appropriately placed ripples of expression and perfectly placed pitches to her voice as if she’s been to the Bereavement School of Voice.

  I had been able to stay in the family zone, following them to the funeral parlour, as if I was simply on a day out, the irony of my presence undetected by them all, as I learn for the first time ever what actually happens in these places.

  The room has been decorated with the utmost care to not use a colour or ornament that might offend. Flowers in pleasant pastel shades are placed in large vases, not so much to be admired, but to stop the room looking empty of life, and the lady asks a series of questions with a gentle smile, as if death is an inevitable procedure, and not the utterly devastating, heart-crushing event that it obviously is.

  What sort of obituary, if any, did they want for the newspapers? How many cars did they feel they would need? Would they want flowers or monuments? And what sort of coffin would be most fitting? She peers over her glasses while managing to slide brochures and ideas easily in front of them, making the whole process as quick and painless as possible, whist keeping the ever increasing prices as insignificant as she can.

  When they get to discuss the flowers, the inevitable ‘daughter’ and ‘sister’ are suggested, which for some reason seems silly to me. Like I need a floral label in case they forget who’s in the coffin on the big day. Huge hearts made out of white lilies, quite apt … or cheesy, one or the other, are suggested next, but these aren’t what I want either.

  I visualise the blackness of the funeral procession: slowly moving cars, made no less shadowy by the suggested array of blooms twisted into words and shapes, designed to inform the sympathetic faces lining the pavements who the passenger in the wooden box had been.

  I imagine something different. I want sunflowers!

  ‘Sunflowers.’ I whisper their name in this room of desperate choices. Would they remember how much I loved them? I had wanted sunflowers at my wedding. Their big yellow heads nodding happily against cream and lace. My funeral would be the only big occasion I could have now and I wanted those glorious heads, as yellow as a summer’s day, to take the black out of my final goodbye. I notice how the furrow on Ben’s brow deepens.

  ‘Go on, Ben, you can do it.’

  But they move on, and talk about what is going to happen with my ashes, to which no one seems to have an answer, dramatic or otherwise. They all sit with shining eyes, surreptitious fingers pushing back the salty water, trying to make it stay inside their faces. In the end they decide to take me home in a pretty blue urn while they make a decision at a later date.

  ‘Like a kind of funeral doggy bag,’ Ben says to the lady across the desk, shaking off any threatening emotion and smirking at his own joke. I smirk with him.

  The choice of coffins is vast, from the most beautiful heavy expensive wood to the cheapest cardboard, although it would seem that it’s bad form to consider cheap on an occasion like this. The lady describes those ones as ‘individual’ or ‘eco’. Everyone leans forward, their eyes instinctively starting with the top of the range, and she skilfully diverts their gazes to the selections more suitable for cremations.

  ‘Sort of … better for burning?’ Ben chips in again, then shrugs his shoulders when Dad shoots him his best ‘shut up or get out’ look, and Uncle Roger digs him in the ribs.

  The kind lady looks up from the brochures. ‘People often find it easier to relieve the stress with humour,’ she says with a smile, and by doing so unwittingly sucks any residue of humour right out of the room. She continues in her professionally rehearsed and sympathetically melodic tones: ‘There is also a company that makes coffins out of recycled newspapers,’ she adds, almost as an afterthought, and Dad wrinkles his nose at the very thought.

  ‘Yesterday’s news?’ he scoffs. ‘Not for my little girl.’

  But his little girl likes the idea. A lot!

  Mum chews on a nail on one hand and twists at the hem of her cardigan with the other. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she mutters, obviously trying to imagine her only daughter being placed in one of these things, no matter how expensive or … individual.

  ‘White,’ Dad and Uncle Roger say together, looking at the page where the lady’s highly manicured hands have opened the brochure to the white and shiny coffin section. Dad’s finger is caressing one of them, as if stroking the photo gently will make it lovelier for me. Mum nods quickly, obviously pleased that someone has made a choice.

  I know they want to put me in the nicest heavenly postal package their limited income can pay for, and I suppose white and shiny is kind of nicely … virginal, which, as it happens, due unfortunately to age and circumstance, is exactly what I am, But I’m not a white coffin kind of girl.

  ‘The recycled one,’ says Ben suddenly. ‘The yesterday’s news one.’ He waits for them all to process the fact that he’s actually serious. ‘It can be whatever colour we like. People can pin notes and pictures to it if they want to, like sending Lily off in a kind of giant pinboard full of messages.’

  I can see their brains working, taking in the vision of a pinboard coffin, imagining how it would look, and thankfully none of them can deny that it is, in fact, a BRILLIANT idea. ‘And she has to have sunflowers … instead of … that crap,’ he says, waving his hand towards the glossy pages, ignoring the surprised looks at his distain of the brochures. ‘She loves them … remember?’ he adds, using the present tense again.

  Mum nods and a tiny sound resembling a laugh sneaks out as if to say, how could she have forgotten?

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘sunflowers … of course.’ And she smiles, spookily in the direction that I’m standing in, and I smile back, noticing that most of her mascara has smudged its way under her eyes where she has constantly wiped them.

  ‘It might not be traditionally funerally, but it will be the sort of thing that Lily would want,’ Ben finishes.

  ‘It’s funereal, Ben,’ I correct him. ‘“Funerally” isn’t a word.’ But I will have my sunflower day after all because my dear inarticulate twin brother can still do that thing we do.

  ‘Can you even get sunflowers in February?’ asks Dad, looking questioningly at the lady.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she tells
him, ‘you can get anything you want these days.’ What she means is you can get anything you want these days, if you pay for it.

  Dad looks out of the window at the bleakness of the February day and I guess he is imagining yellow heads against the grey … ‘I like that,’ he says softly.

  And so my funeral is arranged for the last Friday in February. This is apparently a good week for booking funerals, as normally, according to the lady, there is quite a queue of people waiting to be cremated. It would never have occurred to me that us dead people might have to wait in line, almost like waiting for God’s bus, only this time the fare has cost my parents a few thousand pounds!

  I wonder if this time I’ll make it all the way to the afterlife.

  I’m laid out in the funeral parlour and I can be visited.

  Mum and Dad chose to go, presumably so their last image of me will be better than the one they must be currently left with, of me in that mortuary. I knew Ben wouldn’t go. It would probably mess with his head because of our ‘twin thing’. We don’t need to see; we only need to know.

  Thankfully Mum had decided that I should wear the dress she was going to buy me for the school prom in July. I’m quite obviously not going to go dancing in it now and it’s a real shame because, even dead, I look great in it.

  I’d pointed it out on the same day as the battle of the purple Converse shoes back in January. My hands clenched together with delight when she finally agreed to buy the shoes, saying we could go back to get the dress in February, when she next got paid. She had, as promised bought it with her February pay. Eyes heavy, and with a tight throat she’d smiled bravely at the shop assistant who carefully folded the dress, placing it in an expensive and attractive bag. ‘It’s a lovely colour,’ the assistant had said through vibrantly painted lips with an aggravatingly cheery voice as she handed the bag over. ‘Is it for something special?’