Page 101 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Oh no, the tropical lip balm that Venus had dropped during their first meeting, and which Esmeralda had batted out from behind a chair just that morning. Against all of Lily’s better judgement, she’d tried it – just a fingertip’s worth – because how could you not? Nothing so expensive and so limited edition would ever grace Lily’s makeup cabinet. She’d fully intended to send it off to the world-renowned team at UC Davis so that they could use it to clone whatever now-extinct plants had gone into its production. But now she’d been cursed for her dishonesty.
Hastily seeing Tessa off with a hug and a promise of a personalised wedding mood board, Lily raced back to her shop, slamming the door and turning over the ‘open to love’ sign so that no hapless visitors would come in for cake and a chitchat.
She hurried upstairs, her lip aching from the swelling. Where was her tube of Lysine? She scrabbled around in her dresser for it, hoping to reverse the cruel spell of herpes simplex 1 which, unlike the switcheroo, had absolutely no positives. Aha! Victory. Lily lunged for the tube, uncapping it. But why was it blush red?
Oh no. It had turned into a tube of mortuary makeup.
And now it was too late. In mere moments, the tingle had turned into a swollen lip that had seemed mildly bee-stung, perhaps the result of a generous dose of lip filler or something similarly glam. And then. Andthen. The swelling had pustulated. Was there a worse word – or concept – in the English language than pustulation?
Lily sobbed. Her poor lip had gone through the kind of grislypractical effects transformation you might see in an Eighties horror movie.
And now she was a monster. A freak. She simply could not show her face in public for the foreseeable future, or even the future beyond that, if such a future even existed.
Lily went to close the upstairs Venetian blinds with the fluffy pom-pom tassel, but they’d been switcherooed with dramatic wooden shutters that looked like something stolen from a medieval dungeon by very committed ren faire fans.
Draping a towel over her hideous face, she slammed the shutters closed as though she were the resident of a plague house. Although was there much difference, really? A cold sore was a pustule was a bubo, as far as she was concerned.
She texted Angela.Babe, I’m so sorry. Cold sore. I hope Tink’s birthday is a blast. I’ll have Roddy drop off the stuff for tonight.
Angela texted back a string of sympathetic emojis. She knew the pain. Everyone knew the pain. Basically everyone in the world got cold sores. But no one wanted to admit that they, personally, did.
Lily replied with a fainting gif and then sadly made her way over to what was likely to become her deathbed. What a way to go out. What a way to see the bright spark of her life fizzle into sheer nothingness. Oh, the pathos of it all.
Always the Death of the Party
Mort
Parties were not Mort’s preferred way to spend his time. They were associated with drink-driving incidents, roof-diving accidents, and bathtub drownings, and there was always the risk of a freak encounter that sent someone stumbling through a glass coffee table. To theirdeath. And then there was the whole social side of things, which was almost as terrifying as facing the increased possibility of one’s demise.
But of all the party types in the world (and it was a highly complex taxonomic landscape), birthday parties were ones that Mort could get behind. After all, birthday parties were a celebration of not dying. A whole 365 days – occasionally a whopping 366 – spent moving through life without Death stopping by to give you a jab with his scythe. And that was no mean feat. Mort, who’d seen peanut butter choking deaths, stairway stumble deaths, slipped in the shower deaths and shoelace caught in a bike pedal deaths, just to name a few, knew just how closely the skeletal dude in the black cloak watched the world’s human residents.
Besides, Mort liked Angela and Tink, who were delightful fixtures around Mirage-by-the-Sea, Angela judiciously checking in with the town’s business owners on a weekly basis to see whomight be willing to buy, sell or rent their current property (real estate was a tough gig), and Tink with her letterpress setup, which had a rattle and grime to it that appealed to Mort’s sensibilities.
And most importantly, Lily was going to be there. For weeks she’d been talking about the magnificent printing-press-themed shindig she’d been planning – they’d had several conversations through their joint grille about whether a game called I Shot the Serif would be too obscure, and just what should go into a Gutenberg cocktail. Best of all, since it was a birthday party and not a wedding, it was presumably safe from the switcheroo.
And besides, Mort rather wanted to discuss the events of a few nights earlier, which in the whirlwind of subsequent deaths and marriages neither of them had had a chance to comment upon properly. Lily had hinted at wanting a future with him that night, and she’d been quite happy playing the role of Mrs Claus at the Christmas in July wedding, but today she’d been strangely quiet, which worried him. Lily wasn’t the quiet type. She embodied extraversion. She was the epitome of the bubbly blonde, whereas when Mort came to bubbles, well, he put the ‘tension’ in surface tension.
Lily hadn’t even responded when Mort had called through the grille to inform her that the tamale lady was out on the promenade. The shutters (when had she put in shutters?) on her upstairs apartment had been slammed shut, which thankfully put to rest the fleeting idea Mort had had about serenading her from his balcony. (It was for the best.) And the doors to the wedding boutique were firmly shut. Lily never closed her doors during the day – she wanted her space to be as welcoming as possible to anyone who might be passing by. It wasn’t even necessarily that she wanted to host their weddings.She genuinely loved chatting to people. In the few months she’d lived in Mirage-by-the-Sea, she’d made more friends than Mort had managed to make during his whole life.
Had she realised she’d made a terrible mistake in sleeping with Mort? Had she looked at the dwindling hourglass of her lease and realised that it wasn’t worth getting involved in something that came with a built-in time limit? Or was something else at play?
All of this was running through Mort’s head as he arrived at Angela and Tink’s place, which was one-third of a storybook cottage that had been transformed from a house into apartments around the time that Airbnb had gone public. And which had been transformed again by Lily’s very maximalist eye. Screen-printed signs swung gently from the olive trees in the front yard. Bobbing foil balloons reminded people to ‘Remind their Ps and Qs’. And the soundtrack … was that the Editors?
‘Mort! Mort’s at a social gathering!’ cried Angela, pointing with a beer.
A cluster of locals, vaguely familiar vacationers and total strangers descended upon him in precisely the way Mort tried to avoid. He was a wheat stalk during a locust plague.
‘Happy birthday, Tink,’ said Mort, thrusting the pre-need he’d thoughtfully printed out on colourful stationery in her direction. He’d even tied it off with a bow, which truly went above and beyond. And on Reba’s extensive online shop (which a tipsy Reba had shown him at length while Lily had been running about trying to rescue Venus’s disastrous hippie wedding) he’d found an excellent, extremely colourful greeting card that summed up the occasion perfectly:Congratulations: you lived to die some other year.
Tink, emotive in a dress patterned with punctuation marks, raised an eyebrow. ‘Nice card. Usually people just give myown cards to me, but look at you. Breaking out of the circular economy trap.’
‘It’s one of Reba’s. I couldn’t pass it up.’
Tink flipped over the card, thumbing the Dyer on the Mountain brand logo – a mashup of Grateful Dead elements tweaked just enough to avoid a copyright suit. ‘Ah, Reba. She’s got the hippie market sewn up, but I’m chasing her.’
‘She’ll die eventually,’ said Mort, deadpan. ‘Lily’s done a great job. I love the Kern-it the Frog mascot,’ he said appreciatively, glancing about at the decor, mostly as a way to sneakily look around for Lily. Then, in as nonchalant a tone as he could manage, he added, ‘Is she around?’
Tink made an awful face – for such a pretty person, she was excellent at awful faces. ‘She can’t make it. She’s deathly sick. Deathly.’
