Page 28 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Coriana nodded. ‘I do like the prospect of hitting things with a mallet. I make a mean schnitzel.’
Hercules, apparently not a fan of mallets, trotted over to Lily, sitting on her foot and whining. She picked him up and gave him a snuggle – after all, even the less aesthetic members of the canine persuasion deserved snuggles. As she did, her ears picked up the faint strains of the ‘Wedding March’ being played. Perhapsthat’swhat Hercules was responding to.
Butshehadn’t put on the ‘Wedding March’. Her record player was still crooning Elvis at half-speed. And she’d disconnected her doorbell after it had started blasting Metallica’s ‘Fade to Black’ on repeat. So where was it coming from?
Then she realised. There. From the grate above her desk, the one that connected to the funeral home.
WasMortplaying the ‘Wedding March’? And on a … was that a xylophone?
‘Everything all right, babe?’ said Coriana.
‘I just … need to grab something from next door. Thank you for the interview. Did you get everything you need?’
‘And then some.’ Coriana picked up Hercules, who wasrainbowed with damp paint splodges. ‘Is there a doggie day spa around?’
‘Keep heading down the promenade, and you’ll see it next to The Hot Pot. It’s called the Barkingham.’
Coriana hustled out the door with the tiny dog, then paused. ‘Babe, one more question: is it normal for a dead person to be carried out of a funeral home on a chair by a crowd of clapping revellers?’
Oh shit,thought Lily. Her old nemesis musical chairs had struck again.
Danse Macabre
Mort
Mort was at a loss. The funeral guests werenotcomporting themselves in a way appropriate for people in mourning. First, there’d been a hubbub because the deceased’s sister-in-law had shown up wearing the same outfit as the deceased, which apparently made her a narcissist. Then, someone had taken over the funeral marimba with an upbeat rendition of ‘Here Comes the Bride’.
And now, instead of heading out towards the back of the funeral home where the hearse awaited, poor Moira Fagan was being hoisted down to the cemetery on a chair.
‘Can we please bring Mrs Fagan back in?’ he called politely. Even though what he wanted to say waswhat the fuck! What is wrong with you!
‘Who wants to swap fish for chicken?’ brayed a woman who definitely had someone of the equine variety somewhere in her family tree. ‘Fish for chicken?’
At some point, the funeral had become a catered event well beyond the club sandwiches and devilled eggs that Mort was used to vacuuming out from the carpet or peeling off the ceiling. (Chucking sandwiches at ceiling rosettes was a universal kid-at-a-funeral thing.) A series of round tables had been rolled in anddecked with lacy tablecloths. There was even a seating chart and tiny seating cards printed, perhaps not entirely sensitively, with a cheerful header that read ‘Moira Fagan, survived by …’ followed by the name of the guest in a rolling cursive typeface.
Not only that, but there were funeral favours.Funeral favours!Bags of sugared almonds shaped like skulls. Lily’s wedding doodads had truly infected his business.
And what was that clicking noise? Mort pulled back a velvet curtain to reveal … a photo booth. Where had that come from? Who had shouldered this giant contraption in here without him noticing?
Mort grabbed the photos that poured out from the side of the machine, feeling slightly worried that there might well be a corpse in them. Wait,wasthat a corpse? He squinted at the overexposed photos, which showed an impressively wrinkled individual draped in a feather boa and flamingo sunglasses.
Mort’s stomach wrenched. This whole thing was flying extremely close to the sun of losing his funeral director licence, which he’d studied hard for. Was this interference with a corpse? Was there even a law for what was going on in here? For there to be a law meant that something like this had happened before, which … surely not.
Momentarily, the short curtain on the photo booth slunk aside, revealing a tiny old woman who’d been bent in half by the combination of age and gravity. Thankfully she seemed very much alive.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she creaked, in a timbre that suggested the family might have done well to pay for a two-for-one deal.
‘You look just like …’ And she did. She looked exactly like the woman that Mort himself had embalmed, dressed, and made up for her final day above ground.
‘I’m Moira’s twin sister,’ said the tiny woman, unlooping the feather boa and tossing it to a middle-aged guy at the front of the photo booth line that had gathered. ‘Mirella. And thank you. For putting the fun back in funerals.’
‘But I didn’t. I would never,’ Mort stammered, extricating himself from the frivolities and hurrying back towards the foyer. Fun? Funerals? All right, so there was some convenient wordplay there, but that was where the overlap ended.
Besides, this was not at all the brand mission that Gramps had fleshed out with that flashy advertising exec after winning a branding grant from the city a few years back. But was it so wrong? That people were celebrating a life instead of weeping on each other’s shoulders and rending their clothing graveside?
Yes, thought Mort, watching out the front window as someone in head-to-toe black, including a veil, took a selfie with the poodle statues, an injury that was made all the worse by the rabbit ears they were propping up behind one of the poodles. Yes it was.
And worst of all, here came Lily, cheery, bright, rainbow-clad Lily, traipsing up the walkway, skirts swishing and bangles clanging. She even paused to take a photo for the veil-clad mourner, who had for some reason grabbed a bucket from Jorge the gardener and was now standing awkwardly astride one of the poodles. The shame. The indignity. (All right, all right, the hilarity, thought Mort gruffly.)
