Page 10 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Mort hurried inside the funeral parlour.

Rain rattled through an apparent hole in the roof at a rate akin to a fire hose.

Mort jumped as another clap of thunder shook the building.

Oh joy. Something else to occupy the dwindling resources of his bank account.

As if the bill from the fumigation wasn’t already haunting his dreams like the Ghosts of Termites Past.

As it turned out, the storm itself was the least of Mort’s problems. Something very strange was going on.

The pelting water was dribbling down the walls and pooling on the fleur-de-lis carpets …

but it wasn’t just making them wet. It was bleaching them somehow.

The patterned wallpaper was turning from velvety black to grey to pale pink florals, taking the opposite journey of a kid’s paint palette.

With every flash of lightning and sodden squeak of Mort’s shoes, the parquetry transformed into white marble, and the rugs bloomed from a restrained Turkish pattern into rainbow shag monstrosities.

As the thunder boomed overhead, the black ceiling roses and cornices lightened, becoming yellow with rose highlights, and the gloomy Victorian chandeliers transformed into something plucked straight from a glass flamingo.

And most horrifically of all, the coffin display wall was somehow melding into a set of bunk beds.

No, no it wasn’t. Because that was not logical at all.

Mort clapped his hands over his eyes, then counted to ten. He opened them again, right as the room flashed white with lightning. He blinked, waiting for his vision to clear.

Nope. Everything was still fucked.

Boom!

Jesus Christ, was this a storm or the coming of the Four Horsemen? Four Horsemen who apparently had a thing for redecorating.

Come on, Mort, there has to be a rational explanation for this.

A stroke! He was having a stroke! Thirty-year-olds could have strokes, after all – he’d called Dr Rubenstein’s emergency after-hours that time he’d smelt burnt toast, and she’d grudgingly admitted that a stroke could be a possibility, albeit an unlikely one.

(It had turned out that Gramps had just burnt some toast.)

But no, Mort couldn’t smell toast, and his limbs were all working as they should. Not a stroke then.

Flash! It was like an apocalyptic nightclub in here. Mort closed his eyes again, trying to figure out why the walls (and everything else) were melting.

What else, what else? Could it be ergot hallucinations from his overnight oats?

He’d purchased them from the farmers’ market, and there was a stand there that did raw milk.

Could the same anti-science principles have tainted his breakfast?

But no, his muscles weren’t spasming, and there was no sign of gangrene.

Mort was running low on explanations. But at least the worst of the storm seemed to have passed: the thunder had softened, and the lightning could no longer be described as ‘strobing’.

‘Mort?’ came Lily’s voice from the other side of the ornate grille on the shared wall between their businesses – a grille that was now taking on hints of the pink paint she’d painstakingly lacquered her side with. ‘Did you lace my business cards with LSD or something?’

If only, thought Mort, poking a bouquet that had transformed from funereal white lilies into a tropical explosion of purple passionflowers.

Even the scent of the space had shifted – from the eau de parfum of electric air fresheners carefully designed to cover the aroma of embalming fluid into something softer, more summery.

(All right, so this was an improvement.)

Mort held up one of the passionflowers, hoping that it would start dancing in his hand or share with him the secrets of the universe. Alas, the passionflower seemed static and normal, and his fingers looked as they should, not rendered by AI. So he wasn’t tripping.

‘Mort? Something’s wrong over here. Everything’s drenched … but also backwards .’

Lily’s voice had an edge to it. Even with his business warping around him like a weird fever dream, all Mort wanted to do was whatever it took to file away that edge.

‘I’ll be right there.’

He hurried out, almost tripping over Esmeralda as he leapt off the front step and into a massive puddle. Fuck – not his best black Oxfords. The ones Gramps had tenderly handed down to him along with the keys to the business.

‘Mrow?’

Esmeralda’s mismatched eyes regarded him in amusement as he grabbed at one of the black greyhound statues flanking the door for balance. No, not a black greyhound statue. A white poodle statue.

What was going on? Whatever it was, it was unconscionable. And there was far too much fluffiness and pizzazz involved.

‘Esmeralda!’ Appearing from her doorway beneath the safety of a rainbow umbrella with little bonus rainbow ears on top (rain had breached her awning), Lily clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Your fur !’

Mort frowned. What about Esmeralda’s fur? Was something wrong with her? Was she sick? Had she got into Gramps’s Doomsday Prepper Spam cupboard in the funeral home’s backup pantry again?

‘Don’t you see it?’ Lily’s eyebrows were high in alarm. Her mascara had run – hopefully from the rain, and not from tears, because Mort couldn’t abide tears. ‘Her patterning. It’s reversed!’

Mort regarded the fluffy cat. Lily was right. Esmeralda’s swishing tail had previously been black, and the patch on her throat had been white. And her eyes – hadn’t it been the left eye that was brown?

‘You think that someone replaced Esmeralda while we weren’t watching?’ Mort glanced around for a damp cat thief, but the promenade was empty other than a guy in a raincoat painting a soggy plein air. ‘But how?’

‘Mort,’ said Lily, trying to keep her lips from moving, ‘I ink-thay at-thay we’re in a eality-ray v-tay ow-shay.’

Maybe Lily was the one having a stroke.

‘Do you smell smoke?’ he asked gently.

‘Of course you don’t know pig Latin,’ she huffed.

She turned slowly, pointing at all the things between the two businesses that had shifted since the worst of the thunderstorm, like she was being graded on a Spot the Differences picture by a particularly stern teacher.

‘I think we’re in a reality TV show. Look at the signs!

The doors! The poodles! The welcome mats!

It’s all topsy-turvy! I think the whole proposal thing was to distract us while someone switched out our businesses. ’

Mort pondered this. It could be a prank, and with a sufficiently large group of people and the right resources, you could potentially swap two businesses within a half-hour period.

HGTV hosts managed to ruin entire homes in a day, after all.

Not to mention the backyards. (As someone well versed in the practice of digging holes, Mort took a special interest in landscaping.)

‘Perhaps they planted the seeds for it when the funeral home was being fumigated!’ Lily said triumphantly. And a little hysterically, although he couldn’t blame her.

‘But why?’ asked a bewildered Mort, although not without a surreptitious glance around for a hidden camera. ‘I thought that candid camera shows fell out of favour a decade ago.’

Lily considered (but thankfully didn’t ask how Mort knew this). ‘You’re right. Ashton Kutcher does venture capital stuff these days, not gotcha shows.’

‘But if it’s not a stroke, or ergot, or hallucinogenics, or Punk’d , then what?’

Lily’s eyes widened. She jabbed at the drizzly sky with her umbrella. ‘The proposal. The storm. The second Veronica spoke those words – you’re dead to me – everything changed. It’s a curse. A switcheroo. Just like in Vice Versa . Only instead of people switching, our businesses have switched.’

‘Well, that’s just … ludicrous,’ said Mort. Although a switcheroo did sound slightly better than a stroke.

‘Reality can be ludicrous!’ argued Lily. ‘I have a friend who only dates men called Kevin so that she doesn’t have to keep getting tattoos of new names.’

Fair point. Although not necessarily relevant to this specific situation.

Mort drew in a deep breath. ‘All right, so assuming a switcheroo, as you call it, makes any sense at all, how? And why? And why us ? Is there some deep moral the two of us need to understand in order to reverse the switch and go on with our lives? Because I’ll do whatever it takes to turn the poodles back.

Unless it’s correlated with a high risk of death. ’

Lily sighed. ‘Maybe we should do this … inside.’

Mort swallowed, realising just how many times he’d fantasised about her saying those words since he’d met her. But not like this. Not in a strange weather-related crisis that had distinct Opposite Day overtones.

He followed her into Eternal Elegance (Wedding Edition), wiping his feet on the welcome mat, whose message now read Love Dies . Oh dear.

Inside was as he’d expected: weirdly, forebodingly funereal.

The morbid notes of Eternal Elegance (Funeral Edition) had seeped into Lily’s business, infusing its chipper paint job and floral walls with a grimness better suited to Mort’s line of work.

Unless Lily was open to the idea of getting kickbacks from a divorce lawyer. And she didn’t seem the type.

Lily shoved a flower-patterned bucket beneath one of the worst leaks.

‘This is real, right?’ she said, her chin wobbling as she waved at her newly motley shop, which looked as though Dr Frankenstein had had a go at a business merger. ‘You’re seeing it, too?’

Mort wanted to hug her. Instead, he watched the murky water slosh into the bucket. ‘Maybe it’s a mutual delusion.’

‘Well, that can’t be,’ said Lily, wiping her eyes with her free hand. ‘I gave up on delusions after my brief flirtation with trying out life as a brunette in seventh grade.’

Mort couldn’t imagine Lily as anyone other than who she was. ‘But why? You’re perfectly cute as a blonde.’

Dammit, why had he said that? Had the switcheroo upended his sense of propriety?