Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Page 3
Who the fuck is this dude
* * *
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My parents are dead, or at least my dad is, and my mum and I don’t really talk much anymore, but whenever I see her, she demands I play Scrabble with her, because she is very good at Scrabble and enjoys beating me at it a lot. I do not have the exact statistics at hand, but her unbeaten run at Scrabble goes back at least fifteen years, because my mum is the kind of Scrabble dickhead who plays “XI” in the corner on a triple word score like three moves from the end, conjuring forty-eight points out of thin air, and also a lot of the times we played I was a literal child, but whatever. The point is I am twenty-one now and have a degree and I have won by twelve points and this information has shocked her to the core. “No,” she says, touching each tile, counting and recounting, the entire board, top to bottom. “No, it’s not possible.” And she looks up at me across the table—
—and i remember that the only other game we have ever played together was the night my dad died, when we just stayed up in silence playing cards, until the cold part of the night turned something blue then gray then red as the sun came up in the morning, and she said “well,” and “i guess we best get on with it,” and she rang work to tell them she wouldn’t be in today, and rang school to say i wouldn’t be coming in today and didn’t know when i would be in ever again (it would be six weeks until i went back there)—
—and goes, “You cheated. You must have cheated.” And the torch is passed between the generations. And I am the family champion of Scrabble now.
* * *
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My parents are dead, and I am trying to buy a beer basket online. A beer basket is a beautifully packaged wicker basket with beer in it. Ribbons, that sort of thing. An outer cellophane shell. Inside, to cushion the beers, is that sort of cardboard shred that hamsters have in their cages sometimes. It is a nice gift. I am buying it for my neighbor because he found my mum’s lifeless body on the floor of her bedroom and had to call an ambulance about it.
Mum had cancer, so we sort of knew this was coming, just not when. There are two kinds of death of your parents: ones you know about and ones you don’t. I have to tell you some information about this that is going to make me sound extremely like I believe in horoscopes now. Makes me sound like I have some Real Opinions about Chi. Like I have written a letter to the government before about the medicinal power of weed. This is what I am going to sound like right now:
Both times, when I got the call that my parents were dead, I already knew.
When we got the call about my dad, I was fifteen and asleep, and the phone rang about midnight, 1 a.m., and a phone ringing at 1 a.m. is literally never good news, so I sort of swam awake and watched the yellow light of the hallway hum and blur, and heard distantly the sort of wobbling sound of my mum’s voice through many walls and a stairwell, and even though he wasn’t sick or anything I just knew, clunk of dread in the ol’ bottom of the stomach, and then my mum came and sat on the edge of my bed and said, “It’s your dad, Joe—” (my family call me Joe and I hate it). “It’s your dad, Joe, he’s gone.” And I just. I dunno. I cried so much I yelled.
And then when my mum died ten years later, again I remember such clear weird little details of it: I was out drinking the night before and woke up in the most drunk sleep pose ever (entirely facedown, face entirely enveloped by the pillow, and surrounded by a tacky pool of my own saliva, and honestly, sleeping for six hours in that position, I don’t know how I’m not the dead one) and the first thing I did was look at my phone because I am a millennial and I remember it being early, even for me—in the 6 a.m. hour, still, an hour I am incredibly unfamiliar with—and I had three missed calls from my sister and so I knew already what that means, and I called her quickly—still facedown, somehow, I did not turn over for this phone call—and she said, “Yeah, it’s your mum, she’s—” And a little pause. “She’s gone, mate,” and I remember saying “Okay” and crying exactly one tear—such a pathological number of tears, it was out of my left eye and I remember it dropping with a soft thump onto the pillow beneath me—and then, “What can I do.”
And it turns out one of the major things I can do is buy a “Sorry you had to find my mum dead!” beer basket for the neighbor. I am searching online for somewhere that delivers next-day, and I cannot decide which beer basket seems more appropriate—the £35 version, eight craft beers and one tube of salted snacks, or the £55 version, all that and more? I am torn because obviously finding an actual corpse is probably quite a bad shock, but also I am poor and twenty-five and my parents are dead and now I’m the only one left to provide for me and also I have a funeral to pay for and £55 for some beer and some ribbon is a lot. I spend like fifteen minutes hovering the mouse between the £35 option and the £55 one. What, truly, is the price we put on the act of finding our mother dead in her bedroom on a mild June morning? I sigh and I click. It turns out it is £55.
My parents are dead, and so I can tell you from experience that literally nobody alive knows what songs you want playing at your funeral, so if this is important to you, then put some sort of system in place now, because here’s what happened with my dad—
“What…Does anyone know what music Dad liked?”
“What CDs does he have in his house?”
“He literally has one CD and it’s Eric Clapton’s greatest hits.”
[Extremely tedious half hour while everyone tries to remember out loud a single instance of them seeing my dad enjoy a song]
“I think he liked jazz, so let’s bang some Miles Davis while we lower him into the pit.”
“Cool.”
And with my mum—
“This again. What’s in the CD pile?”
“Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews from Catatonia, ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ CD single.”
“Inappropriate.”
“Jiggerypipery, the self-titled album by Jiggerypipery, who are a local tour band who make what the back of the CD describes as ‘fun bagpipe music.’ ”
“A hard no.”
“And U2, The Joshua Tree, on cassette tape.”
“I do not understand how someone can live sixty-plus years and this is all they have to show for it.”
We ended up playing the soundtrack from the musical Sarafina! for reasons I cannot recall now. For the record, I see my funeral as the only time I can force my friends to sit and endure my music tastes—the AUX cord is always snatched away from me at parties because obscure lyricless drone music does not exactly get the vibe popping, so I literally have to wait until I die to take it—and so I want Ratatat’s “Germany to Germany”/“Spanish Armada”/“Cherry” movement from the first album, “Rome” from their fifth album, then whichever fourteen-minute-long Fuck Buttons song is in my Spotify most-played library when I die. Follow these instructions to the letter or I shall haunt you all forever.
My parents are dead, and suddenly the home I grew up in has shifted, imperceptibly enough to feel alien, to feel like a house, now, rather than a home, to feel like four cold walls and a roof. The fridge doesn’t work. There’s no food in. The cats are not pattering about. My sister, deranged with the repetition of administration and grief, has gone back to London to work. It’s just me, alone here, padding around this place I now own, feeling as if I’m a ghost.
I got trapped in a wardrobe here once. This was when my parents were alive: I remember, actually, it was a rare moment of peace for them, a searingly white-hot day, and I watched them, out of their bedroom window, my face and nose pressed tight against the net curtain, and they were chatting and repotting plants and seemingly both in a good mood, so I left them to it—I was like six at this point, maybe five—and so I turned around and went to play imagination games in the spare room at the back of the house, and ended up clambering into this old wardrobe—my mother, a sort of amateur seamstress, had stuffed it with old plastic ba
gs of rags and fabric ends and half-done pieces of knitting, which were sort of slippery and fun to climb—and then the whole thing started to creak and tip and long story short it collapsed on me, vacuum sealing me entirely to the floor.
Now: A normal child, in this situation, I imagine, would scream. Yell or something. Thump on the wardrobe panels. Beg for a fraction of help. But I think I just accepted that hey, I guess this is how I die, swaddled in dozens of clothes bags, trapped in pitch-blackness beneath a wardrobe. It was about twenty minutes before they came inside and found me, muffled steps up the stairs turning to quick sharp noises of alarm before my dad heaved the wardrobe off me, and I remember both their faces staring down at me, and the light pouring in, a combination of extreme “did my child die” and just bafflement, and my mum just said: “Why didn’t you say anything?” And I replied: “I just didn’t want to be any bother.”
I just remember that story a lot because whenever I try and recall my parents being together in the same room and not mad at each other, that’s all I can ever think of. Me politely resigning myself to living the rest of my life out as a wardrobe boy, RIP, 1987–1992.
* * *
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My parents are dead, and I’m shopping at Tesco for vol-au-vents. Planning a wake is like planning the most vibeless party in actual existence: all the same motions as planning an actual party (invites, finger foods, the chilling of drinks) but none of the buzz or excitement, extremely low chance of anyone getting laid. In my shopping cart are: a tray cake, feeds fifteen; a number of three-for-two party foods, including cocktail sausages; a light and refreshing mix of store-brand lemonades and colas, as well as a respectful two (two.) boxes of beer. My sister is off in the far reaches of the shop buying lasagna supplies—my mother had this tradition where she would throw a party every Christmas and invite everyone round (and she was the exact type of woman to call such a party a soirée, to give you a bead on my mother), and for whatever reason her showstopper party food was a lasagna—she would make like four or five of these great, heaving lasagnas for people to eat great huge cubes off of slowly oily-going paper plates—and my sister intends to honor that tradition, God Bless Her Soul, by making her own lasagna, which everyone will tell her at the party in a quiet voice, “It’s a very good lasagna, thank you,” but with all the unsaid context being but it’s not Hazel’s lasagna, and I think my sister knows this, deep down. Anyway we are politicizing the lasagna.
The point is that I am tired, so tired, it has been two weeks of admin and grief and sorting and nothingness and it’s still not over yet, and I am taking a brief moment of respite while my sister weighs up ground beef vs. lamb to lean on the cart and stare at the freezer aisle and sigh, and someone says, Joel, they say, Hello, they say, How Are You.
It’s the mum of a girl I did not really know at school (she, the girl, was a good five or six rungs up the attractiveness ladder than me—I was an extremely obese, smooth-faced forty-year-old-mum-of-four-looking kid for most of my adolescence, with a voice that seemingly took five years to break, and school hierarchy is defined by exactly two criteria—who is hot, or at least if not hot then who gets tits or a beard first, and who is hard, and the hard boys get with the tit girls and form these sort of royal alliances, and kids like me get Really Into Videogames and Robot Wars and Metal Music—and so despite sharing a classroom with me for five consecutive school grades she did not, in fact, know who I was) and also a former colleague of my mother’s, which is why she half recognizes me more than I do her. “It’s Jackie,” she says. “I used to work with your mum.”
And her face crumples and she goes: “I heard about the cancer.” And I nod. And then she goes: “How is she doing?” And I realize she does not know that my mother is dead.
And so now I am stranded here with a cart full of wake food and a dilemma. Do I, really, want to do this in the middle of a supermarket freezer aisle section? Do I really want to have to explain what all the food is for, and how and why? We can pretend that I went through this—that I, like a lightning flash, rapidly weighed up the pros and the cons and decided logically on an outcome. We can pretend that happened when it did not. Instead, instinct kicked in and—
“Yeah,” I said. “Not so great.” Technically this was not a lie. And Jackie said, “Oh, well,” and said, “Give her my best.” And I walked away thinking: That was a very strange thing that I just did. That was a very unusual thing to do.
* * *
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My parents are dead, and there is always cake at the funeral. It’s weird eating cake and being sad: at my dad’s, his ex-wife, Annie, had made one of the most astonishing cakes I’d ever eaten, a dense low chocolate cake with a mirror-finish ganache that shone like glass, and I was two slices, maybe three slices in—I was, as aforementioned, an especially large shapeless teenage boy with a sweat problem—when one of my mum’s cousins who I had never met ushered me over to his armchair. And he said, Do you not think you need to lay off the cake? And I thought: Today of all days, dickhead. Today of all days you come and tell me this.
Funeral guest lists are unusual affairs: you are as surprised by the attendees as the nonattendees. A throng of my sister’s closest uni mates—all in the first great flush of their early twenties and ostensibly with better shit to be doing than this—were at my dad’s; his lifelong best friend, Don, left the voicemail we left him telling him the news unanswered. At my mum’s funeral, none of her side of the family attended, including her closest cousin, Josie—but clearly she was popular at work because an entire office’s worth of people lined up to shake my hand and tell me what a good laugh she was. Only after death do you see facets of the living you once knew through the eyes of those who knew them away from you: you learn who thinks them kind, who considers them wise, who considers them a best friend. They, all of them, line up to tell you how they were capital-G Good: we are, all of us, washed of sin when we die. When we live we are jagged and complex and fucked up and we oscillate between joy and despair, and all of that is flattened out in death, all of those wrinkles uncrumpled. We go into the ground as saints.
* * *
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My parents are dead, and forms; forms, forms; forms, forms forms. There is a form to declare death and you have to pay for each printout, which means you have to predict exactly how many corporations and banks and agencies are going to ask for certified proof of death and then preemptively pay £12 for them to have it, and we umm and aah and ask for four (you need two, at most: if you take anything from this, just know that everywhere takes photocopies and save yourself £24). Then you have to, as in our case where there is no will (while I am here handing out advice: if someone draws you up a will and you go through the hurdle jumping of defining exactly who gets what in a will and how the will should break up, and where everything goes after you die, and all you have to do to verify that will is sign it exactly once, please sign it exactly once, and do not leave it unsigned, for two years, on the table next to you among a big pile of mail, Mum), jump through the various hoops to invoke probate, a sort of de facto all-of-this-dead-person’s-shit-now-belongs-by-blood-to-you ritual where I had to go to a local family court, get knife searched on the way in, then swear godlessly on a sign of the cross to say that I am the one true heir to a £90,000 terrace near Sheffield, nobody else may make claim on my land. The bank wants to know she’s dead, the electricity company. I stop chasing the £800 left in her building society account because the constant administration of it was too exhausting. The government sends me a letter to tell me they overpaid her pension, i.e., made payment into her account exactly once postdeath, and they would like that money back now: I tear the paper up and scatter it into the bin. I am warned that people might wheedle out like cockroaches from beneath the family fridge: someone, somewhere, some distant cousin, might try to make a claim on what thin gruel there is left, and to be prepared for it. They mean legally, but I want it in blood: I am ang
ry, so angry, I am ready to meet anyone head-on, if anyone even steps to me and tells me they want a penny of what’s mine I will tear at them until they are just a mashed pile of red, I will punch and punch and punch, I need this, I need them to come out, I want so bad somebody to take this out on, I need it.
My parents are dead, and one day, three years later, I go back there, to the house, after we’ve sold it. This is a mistake: I’m watching from sort of afar, in case an old neighbor sees and recognizes me and we have to do a whole awkward thing, and everything feels juddery, at once familiar and not. The house looks more or less the same—steam rises from the exhaust vent on the boiler we had put in a few years ago; the smoke bush my dad planted twenty years ago still looks somehow both fragile and overgrown in the front garden—but it’s not. It’s late October, cold but not freezing, and on the doorstep, there’s a pumpkin, carved for Halloween. We never left a pumpkin out, even once. And then suddenly I am overcome with the realization that this isn’t mine now; that another family exists in this space, fills every corner of it with their own existence, their own sofa positioning, their laughs echoing on the walls they now own, their voices shouting upstairs for dinnertime, their crap filling the basement. I feel like a ship on the sea with endless deep blue beneath me and nothing holding me up. No anchor, no home. Someone else’s pumpkin makes me lose my entire mind.
My parents are dead, and my friends are trying their best. My friend takes an afternoon off work and drives me out to the countryside, out far away from the gray jagged misery of the town, and I wind the windows down and let the warm June air rustle my hair, and I inhale bugs and lungfuls of green, wholesome air, and I put my hand out of the window and wave it through the wind, and then we stop at a pub overlooking green rolling hills, starched yellow almost in the sunlight, and we both sit down with amber ales and he tells me he thinks he has cancer.