Sunflowers in February Read online

  The procession rolls its way slowly through my village like a jet-black snake with a yellow corsage until it turns in to the crematorium. The jungle drums of social media and phone calls have obviously done their job well, as the snake slithers to a halt at the crematorium, next to a man-made field of sunflowers. Loads of kids from our school are gathered outside, each holding a yellow bloom. Some are real, some are plastic and some are paper or printed pictures stuck onto cardboard. There are teachers and parents of school friends, and relatives, and friends of relatives, all holding their yellow offerings.

  And there is Nathan.

  I stand with him while I’m unloaded from the back of the hearse, and invisibly link my arm through his. ‘It would have been eight weeks and six days, Nathan.’ I look up at him, but of course his eyes are fixed over the top of my head and on my coffin.

  A boy nearby nudges someone next to him and whispers. ‘It’s a good job it’s not her funeral; they’d need a fucking big coffin and an Australian bush fire for her cremation.’ He’s pointing at Fat Lucy, who hangs her head, pretending not to hear, while they titter at her expense. I’m not without blame. I don’t think I ever defended Lucy when the kids taunted her for her love of food and mocked her for the flush of crippling embarrassment that crept up her cheeks, highlighting her awkwardness in a deep shade of pink. I had unwittingly allowed the bullying that gave her such a miserable life. Now, however, I just see a young girl who holds a sunflower that she made herself. It is beautiful, crafted out of thin coloured paper in a 3D effect. This is a girl who has made an effort and carries her sunflower with tears in her eyes because someone has died too soon.

  I am the one who should hang my head in shame. I wrap my arms round her and whisper in her ear. ‘You are a beautiful person.’ Lucy touches her hair and looks around her, as if she felt me brush against her.

  I’m surprised at how big the crematorium chapel is and people are filling it. I’m very flattered. My form teacher kindly pushes Nathan towards the front and herds everyone else towards the back until there is a line of yellow at the back of the room.

  My strange and wonderful recycled coffin, coloured a pretty forest green, with painted sunflowers round its edge and real ones on top, is placed in front of everyone. My family make their way to the first row, the seats that I’m sure everyone else is glad that, on this occasion, they don’t have. There is a large photograph of me plus a lot of rustling, coughing and intermittent sobbing into tissues from everybody, and I look around at them all with what is probably an inappropriately big smile. ‘Wow … this is awesome …! This all about me!’ Then the smile slips from my face. ‘It was over so quickly.’

  I want my life back. I’m not ready. I don’t want to go today. I want a future.

  Everything I could be doing rather than attending my own funeral plays in front of my eyes. I want to remember what it is like to have a huge plate of salty chips, or a squidgy cake, a cold ice cream … some hot chocolate. I want to go out with my friends, to party and laugh and dance. I want to go home and tell my parents I love them. I wish, more than anything, I had appreciated every single little bit of it.

  If only I had the chance to die knowing that I had really lived. Maybe then it wouldn’t be so bad.

  ‘Let me go home,’ I plead out loud, raising my eyes up to an unreachable God.

  The chapel music stops, the sound of it floating away like bubbles into the high beamed ceiling and the heavy weight of bereavement gathers in its place. I had failed to appreciate the full impact of my recycled coffin until now, and I’m sure Mum and Dad are feeling the same, as after a short speech by the minister everyone is invited to pin any messages they may have to it. Everyone starts coming forward in an orderly line, each pinning a message or photo or flower to my coffin, and gradually it becomes covered with a collage of colour and text. I frantically try to read each one as it’s pinned.

  Someone’s phone goes off and it must be someone from school because ‘You’ve got a fucking message’ is clearly heard coming from a pocket, followed by supressed laughter and a teacher whispering very loudly, ‘Everyone turn your phones off now!’

  I laugh too in my silent world. If I’d been alive, I would have laughed aloud.

  Beth has the photo of me and her that she’d been looking at in her room with a letter printed with tiny and neat handwriting; she kisses it and pins it to the side of the coffin. Ben has cut out the design of my favourite Lady Gaga T-shirt and pins it to the top, and Nathan pins a corsage of lilies that he’d promised to give me for our school prom.

  By the time everyone returns to their seats, my coffin looks like a huge colourful patchwork present, with a sunny yellow bouquet on top. It is a bright, cheery and desperately sad reminder of who I once was, and no one can hear me say ‘Thank you.’

  *

  Something very odd is going on.

  Wispy plumes of grey are swirling slowly behind Dad’s right shoulder. There’s another behind one of my uncles and another behind a friend’s mum. My head teacher has one next to her and a few more are swirling slowly next to some of the kids from school, their tendrils coiling softly, undetected by them. I check the grates in the floor; it’s a crematorium, so you never know, but it isn’t smoke, just wisps … like clouds in a summer sky, changing shape with the breeze.

  Are they people like me? Trapped forever, clinging to the people they love? Or maybe they are people who have moved on but are drawn back when a new death reminds the living of who they have lost … other spiritual pinballs like me.

  The man who is conducting my ceremony is talking to everyone about how great I was, but right now all I care about is these strange wisps. I wander past each row of seats looking at them, until I get to One Shoe Sue, who not only has two of the smoky things by her, but she turns her head ever so slightly as I reach her side. She’s the mother of one of the boys in my class, but everyone at school calls her One Shoe Sue, on account of the fact she has an artificial leg. ‘She’s here,’ Sue whispers to Ted, her husband.

  ‘I know,’ he whispers back loudly. ‘She’s in there,’ and he points to my coffin with a silly smile on his face.

  ‘No,’ she hisses. ‘She’s here. I can feel her.’

  Does she really believe that? Can she really sense me? Or did she just say that because, let’s face it, as a medium at a funeral it’s a pretty safe-bet thing to say? I take a couple of steps, and Sue turns her head again as I pass. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask right into her ear, but she doesn’t answer. I wave my hand in front of her face but she doesn’t blink.

  ‘It’s all right, love, you can leave,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll wait until it’s finished, if it’s all right with you,’ Ted jokes, but Sue scowls at him.

  ‘Not you … Lily! Don’t be afraid, dear,’ she whispers. So, she can’t see or hear me but she knows I am here. She’s the one person who really believes I might still be around, and she’s telling me that it’s all right to go.

  But unless the cremation process forces me to leave, I don’t know how to go, and she hasn’t factored in that I don’t want to go.

  Dad gets up and faces everyone, so I leave One Shoe Sue and her kind offer, and make my way back towards to the front as he begins to talk about me.

  ‘… and the sunflower always turns its face to the sun to get the maximum light from each and every day, and when it finally dips its head at the end of its life, it drops hundreds of seeds so that next season it will be able spread its beauty further.’ Dad clears his throat and I invisibly lay my head on his shoulder. ‘I believe Lily was happy in her life …’

  ‘Yep,’ I chip in.

  ‘… and that her sunny nature has touched all the people in the crematorium today –’ he pauses while several kind people nod – ‘so please take the seeds she is leaving behind and make the most of your own lives.’

  It’s a lovely speech, but I don’t feel very sunny right now. I feel jealous that all these people have the chance to ‘make the
most of their own lives’. They can walk right out of here in a few minutes and carry on doing their own thing. The smoke swirling around Dad curls its way towards me and I don’t know if I’m imagining it but it looks like a hand that is beckoning. But I don’t know what it is beckoning me to. There is nothing actually there apart from a mist.

  I don’t like it, so instead I choose to ignore it, focusing instead on Ben who takes over from Dad.

  Ben clears his throat, eyes scanning the room and resting briefly on the faces of people we know. ‘Lily is my sister,’ he begins, again speaking in the present tense, and I love him so much for doing that. ‘I have known Lily for longer than I have known any other person in the world, and because of that I feel I am qualified to say that she was always a complete pain in the arse.’ There is a rustle and a titter amongst everyone who is there and I gasp in mock surprise, taking an invisible swipe at him. ‘Today … today, is my only moment to get payback without fear of retaliation.’ He clicks a little button in his hand and a picture of me comes up on the screen sitting on a potty. ‘She will hate this,’ he says, and he is so right. ‘And she will hate this …’ he says as the room fills with grateful laughter as another picture appears of me throwing a screaming tantrum at our second birthday party, while Ben looks angelic beside me. ‘And this, and this,’ he continues as more incriminating pictures appear, including one of me picking my nose. ‘I’m pretty sure she’s hitting me right now,’ he laughs. And he is right.

  ‘So, Lily, that was payback, but this is how it really was …’ And on the screen, to the soundtrack of me and Ben singing ‘We Are Young’, which we recorded when we were about twelve, is a series of beautiful photographs. Our younger voices reach out across the room while photos of me and Ben, looking so alike, appear one by one from our childhood. We are playing, laughing or hugging in all of them and the final photo is from a family holiday last year, when we were tanned and happy and sitting on the balcony of our hotel, with the setting sun behind us, holding fruit cocktails towards the camera.

  ‘I feel as if she is here –’ he puts his hand over his heart – ‘that she hasn’t gone.’ The last photograph stays on the screen after the recording of our singing has faded and Ben’s last word is nothing but a squeak.

  *

  When it is all over, the Morecambe and Wise version of ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ plays out into the room. Everyone stands and they begin to shuffle out and some hands start tapping against legs in time to the music. ‘Thank you,’ I call out, as everyone I love passes me. ‘Goodbye.’

  My coffin doesn’t trundle off behind the curtains; it stays, with me beside it, until the very last person has left.

  The same boy who laughed at Fat Lucy nudges his mate, saying ‘Girl on Fire’ by Alicia Keys would have been much funnier, but Nathan pushes him and he loses his balance, falling sideways against some seats, which make an awful grating noise along the floor.

  When they are all gathered outside and my coffin finally heads off down the tracks, the misty hand is still beckoning me, but I squeeze my eyes shut until all I am left with is the desperate hope that this crossing-over thing is going to be easy.

  I’m still waiting.

  I open my eyes slowly to find that the wispy fingers have disappeared and I am alone in the chapel with only the sound of voices outside for company chatting with that certain kind of relief that takes over once the worst bit has passed. After some time spent meandering around floral tributes to the dearly departed, they all start heading towards their parked cars and I find I can go with them. That same invisible thread that has linked me to my family pulls me again. Following Ben and my parents, I realise that either my coffin hasn’t made it as far as the fire yet, or I’m never actually going to sit on a big pink cloud in heaven.

  *

  So now I’m at my own wake, unseen, unheard, in the function room of an old pub on the outskirts of town, where a buffet waits for the first hungry person to wonder how soon is too soon to be the first to pile their plate up and tuck in.

  The best thing about being around people who can’t see you is that you get to hear what they really think about you. Thankfully it’s all good. Have I always been this great or have I somehow been elevated in status because I am dead, symbolically placed on some kind of pedestal? People are saying that I was beautiful, funny, kind and loving and a really, really good friend and a fantastic daughter. It is nice to know that I was or am so great. It’s like watching the Lily Richardson Appreciation Show. The irony of death is that you obviously don’t find out what you meant to people until it’s too late.

  Funerals are so totally wasted on the dead!

  Dad shakes hands with Nathan, and Nathan in turn hugs my mum, predictably holding in one hand the first plate of food from the buffet. ‘We’re sorry we didn’t contact you straight away, when it all happened, Nate,’ Mum guiltily confesses. ‘We weren’t thinking straight.’ She looks up at his lovely face and gives him another hug.

  I want to give him a hug too.

  ‘It’s OK, Mrs R,’ he says, and as he looks down at her he adds, ‘I loved her, you know.’

  ‘I know, Nate. We all did … keep in touch … please,’ she urges him as he wanders away towards our friends, a sausage roll already working its way into his mouth.

  ‘I will,’ he mumbles through the pastry.

  ‘I love you still,’ I say, as he walks right past me.

  *

  It isn’t a party exactly, but I want it to be.

  I want to turn up the music and fill up the drinks. I want people to talk about it forever as Lily’s fabulous wake.

  Ben, it would seem, has somehow managed to drink quite a lot of alcohol, and is now cornering Dad. ‘When will we get Lily’s ashes back?’ He sways slightly on his feet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dad answers, with a flush of annoyance at Ben’s timing, and he turns away to talk to someone else.

  ‘But when do you think?’ Ben persists.

  Dad turns back, with that look he has when he’s reached the limits of his tolerance, and he snaps loudly, ‘I don’t bloody know, Ben … possibly when they’re a bit cooler!’

  Ben is left standing alone, glass in hand and reeling slightly.

  ‘Awkward!’ sings a friend as he steps back into the group.

  ‘I want her back,’ Ben mutters angrily under his breath.

  ‘I never left,’ I say.

  Most of our friends who have come to my wake are gathered together, and I am with them, listening and laughing along with their banter, pretending that I am simply one of them, chatting in a group in a pub. Suddenly a girl called Eve sighs at Ben, like he’s some sort of lame dog. ‘It must be extra difficult for you, Ben, being identical twins and all that.’

  Matthew rolls his eyes at her and the rest of us giggle. ‘Didn’t you do biology at school?’ he asks, but Eve just looks confused.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she whines, pulling a long brown plait over her shoulder and stroking it uncertainly, while we continue to laugh at her. Ben leans in, breathing fumes in her face.

  ‘I don’t think you understand the word “identical”, Eve,’ he slurs. ‘As far as I’m aware … Lily had a vag-i-na –’ as he says the word in clear syllables, he points to her groin – ‘and I –’ he points to his own groin – ‘have … ornaments.’ Eve’s eyes roll downwards to look at his ornaments. ‘Yep.’ He nods his head up and down with a silly grin. ‘I know … they are pretty awesome.’ He winks theatrically at Eve who looks so confused that Ben properly laughs out loud for the first time in nearly two weeks, before he crumples into a nearby chair.

  Nathan’s mum did not come to my funeral.

  Partway through the service I’d been pulled briefly to the corner of King’s Lane, where I saw her standing on the edge of the grass verge, where flowers lay dead or dying amongst freshly placed bouquets. Red, pink, white and yellow cellophane wrappers crackled in the breeze and glistened in the light, holding their beautiful multicoloured offeri
ngs, tied with ribbons and lining the edge of the road. There were bunches pushed into bushes, lying on the grass or tied to trees and there, amongst them all, she placed a pretty terracotta pot planted with yellow roses, looking around her worriedly to make sure no one could see. But I could see.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lily,’ she’d said, before wiping her face with a tissue and dragging some of her badly applied eyeliner across her cheeks.

  Standing next to her, and staring down at the pot, it was all I could do to utter, ‘You think a pathetic flowerpot makes up for my whole life?’

  As the weeks come and go, my family and friends are left with the task of finding a different way of living in a world that carries on regardless.

  The flowers that had lined the school railings have finally been taken down, Beth’s mum has booked two weeks in Portugal for the summer, and after the exams Matthew has invited Ben to Paris for a weekend with his family. I’m pretty jealous about that one. I want to climb the Eiffel Tower too, and drink a huge hot chocolate in a real French cafe, or float down the Seine in an open-topped boat. I’d always wanted Paris to be the first step in my adventures around the world.

  The seed of resentment with its once delicate roots is now taking hold and growing strong.

  Nathan just looks more … sad and empty each time I get pulled to him. But it’s happening less and less, as if he’s closing down or something. I’m scared that that thing is happening, like it did with my gran where I am slipping to the back of his mind, like a forgotten item stored in the attic.

  It’s her fault!

  If he could stop obsessing about the state his undeserving mother is in, he could spend more time thinking about me. I miss him.

  I see Beth more than I see Nathan, when she catches sight of my photo or where I’ve been tagged in photos on social media and it brings my memory flooding back to her. Sometimes she has a different-colour nail varnish on, or her hair is twisted into a different style, or she’s wearing an outfit we bought while we were together. The only thing I feel glad about is that she doesn’t seem to have a new best friend. She hasn’t replaced me yet.