Page 68 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
Stribley whistled. ‘A week? No, no, a month when I lived on a boat in Thailand.’
That tracked, thought Mort, who still hadn’t shaken the pong of Stribley’s feet. But maybe you had to have an absence of olfactory sensitivity to work as a plumber.
Orson was aghast. ‘You didn’t even jump in the ocean?’
‘Too many jellyfish.’
Orson shifted his chair away.
‘I’ve always wanted to touch a jellyfish,’ admitted Duggo. ‘But I’m scared of being electrocuted.’ He gave Sausage a solid pat instead.
‘I don’t recommend electrocution,’ agreed Orson. ‘I worked on telegraph poles for a while before I switched to installing TVs.’ He pointed out a burn on his inner wrist. ‘Got a right zap during a storm. My whole life lit up in front of me. Well, I thought it was my life – it was my hair. That’s when I went grey. And the smell! Like bacon frying.’
This was a good start, thought Mort. Gory, and not particularly on topic, but the men were talking. They’d got past the grunting stage. That seemed positive.
‘I’ll go, I’ll go,’ said Orson, brandishing his card. ‘I’ve got a good one.Have you ever streaked?’
‘Streaked, like past tense of … strike?’ Orson was still stuck on the lightning topic.
‘Like running naked through a sports game,’ said Duggo, helpfully.
‘Oh, I have!’ Stribley’s eyes lit up. ‘It was chess, though – does that count?’
‘I think that counts extra,’ said Mort, chuckling. Perhaps the switcheroo had hit the chess scene at some point as well.
‘Ooh, me next,’ said Stribley ‘Ready?If you had a gang, what would you call it?’
‘That is good one,’ agreed Duggo. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in a gang. But a nice one.’
‘This could be a gang,’ said Orson thoughtfully. ‘The Grief Guys.’
‘I quite like that,’ said Stribley. ‘Has a ring. What do we do, though?’
‘We channel our grief productively,’ said Duggo. ‘Through public works and stuff.’
Mort leaned back in his chair. This was all going … surprisingly well. Lily was a genius. Well, her card game was a genius. He’d have to email the inventor and let them know that they’d single-handedly helped form a gang. (A nice one.)
Mort’s phone buzzed in his pocket, quite insistently. And then again. Oh shit. It was Aunt Dot from Rerunning Up That Hill. He’d forgotten all aboutBarbarella!
‘I hate to cut this short,’ said Mort, slapping his thighs in the universal sign ofwell, it’s getting late, ‘but I need to get to the cinema. The piano calls.’
Stribley scooped the remnants of a diamond of baklava fromhis cup with a spoon and devoured the squelchy mess. ‘Can we … come too?’
Mort glanced around at the wrinkled, hopeful faces of the men he’d spent the past few hours chatting with. Why not? They’d bonded so well over their grief and stories and bottomless appetite for coffee and cookies and flat champagne. And besides, the walk to the cinema was good exercise.
‘Get your cardigans, Grief Guys,’ he said. ‘We’re heading up the hill.’
Barn to be Wild
Lily
Lily tapped her pink cowboy boots together and took a deep breath. The cowboys’ wedding was going to be perfect. Nothing weird was going to happen. There would be no corpses, no maggot-infested cakes, no rending of clothing. Amos and Bernard were funny and delightful and deserved a wedding that reflected that. It wasn’t their fault that Veronica still hadn’t pinned down a date to stop by and hopefully reverse the switcheroo. (Veronica apparently had odd priorities.)
‘Switcheroo, if you mess up this wedding, I’m taking it as a hate crime,’ Lily whispered to her black-and-white ceiling, which she’d managed to partially cover with colourful cloth draping, hoping that her visitors were so enamoured of the bonbonniere table that they simply wouldn’t look up. Ugh, was that black splodge on the far wall further encroaching upon her side of the building? Pulling up her stepladder, she grabbed a pot of yellow paint and a paintbrush, and swiped over it with a quick approximation of a daisy.
All right, now she was ready. Well, once she donned her pink cowboy hat. Perfect: Dolly would be proud.
She texted a picture of said hat to Mom, who responded with a blurry thumbs-up selfie.I believe in you, Lils. Make AuntyKaren regret her inferior offspring! Also, which candle would go best in the bathroom?
