Page 15 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

‘Noted, just in case this whole wedding planning thing doesn’t work out. At least we’ve figured out a way to disguise the blobs. Do you want me to help you do the same at the funeral parlour?’

Mort shook his head. ‘Not if these are the colours you have on offer. Anyway, the wallpaper texture makes it look … almost deliberate. Although I’m really going to need you to stop dressing up the poodles.’

‘If they return to greyhounds overnight, we have a deal. If not, well, you’ll have bigger things to worry about than some well-dressed poodle statues.’

Lily was trying to make light of the situation, but in reality her stomach was churning.

The goths might be fine with a sprinkling of gloom when it came to their nuptials, but she had a feeling that Venus might not be entirely up for a ‘Surprise! Morbid!’ twist on her wedding.

And a wedding like Venus’s was a make-or-break thing.

‘Hey, you said that you arrived on the funeral home doorstep as a baby,’ mused Lily.

‘Correct.’

‘So Gramps ran the place for, what, thirty years, at least.’

Mort nodded. ‘Fifty or so.’

‘Well, has this whole swapsies thing happened before?’

‘Not that I’ve heard of, but it’s worth asking. He never picks up his phone – he has bad hearing – but I’m visiting him tomorrow.’ Setting down his paintbrush, Mort regarded her with dark eyes. Then, after a beat, he added. ‘Would you like to join me?’

Lily’s heart thumped at the suggestion. If you were fairly proficient in Morse code, you might even be able to say that it thumped out something like, yes, yes, I thought you’d never ask, you hot, scruffy fool.

‘Sure,’ she said coolly, pretending that she hadn’t daubed her own nose with paint in her excitement.

‘I was planning to head that way to do some location scouting for the goth wedding anyway. Um, speaking of dark attire – should there be dozens of people in mourning outfits gathering around the shop?’

Mort glanced at his watch. ‘Shit. Mrs Fagan’s wake. Good luck with that journalist. Remember, if they ask about the decor, just say you’re storing it for me while I figure out my flood insurance.’

‘Babe, this is gorg .’ Coriana sashayed back and forth in front of the shop, her camera clicking as she snapped away at what people in the business loved to call ‘the details’.

She’d brought with her … well, Lily supposed it was a dog, but on the rat-dog spectrum it was definitely closer to the non-canine side.

Lily wished she’d put it in a carrier basket before it got scooped up by a seagull.

‘Although, wow , setting up next to a funeral parlour? Ba-rave . Do you guys have a kickback thing going on? If it’s not working out and they don’t want to go through a highly visible divorce, you can …’

Coriana clicked her tongue and made a throat-slashing gesture.

‘Or poison, if you must,’ added Lily, deciding to assume that Coriana was joking.

‘Poison’s a bit … expected, don’t you think?’

‘Sure. Although I specialise mostly in weddings—’ Lily tried to find common ground ‘—I do love a good true crime podcast.’

(This was a lie. Pop Culture Happy Hour was about as dark as Lily’s listening got.)

‘Between us girls …’ Coriana paused to take a shot of Mort’s poodle statues, which Lily had dressed up in plastic floral leis a mere ten minutes earlier.

‘I had my heart set on the crime beat. But y’know, gotta go where the work is.

Even if that’s writing about weddings when your boyfriend of eighteen months just said he wasn’t the marrying type. ’

‘Oh,’ said Lily. ‘I’m really sorry to hear that. Come in. I have CBD-infused soda.’

She led Coriana inside, hoping that the drink would take the edge off. Although Coriana seemed to be all edges. She was like a human dodecagon.

‘Lying ass,’ scowled Coriana as she popped open the can with a long, frosted nail. ‘He was the marrying type. Just not to me. He’s got two kids now. And a back tyre that keeps getting slashed.’

‘They don’t make tyres like they used to.’

‘Right? You really have to stick the knife in, give it a twist. Anyway. Are we ready? I know we’re going to get some amazing sound bites.

I just feel it, babe. That you’re going to be fab.

Do you have any reverse osmosis water for Hercules?

He has a sensitive belly. Needs those extra 2s in his H 2 0. ’

Lily had dropped chemistry after her junior year, but as far as she knew, this wasn’t how water worked. But she wasn’t about to correct someone who wrote for such an esteemed publication. It even had a print edition!

As Coriana strolled the shop, Lily surreptitiously poured some tap water into a teacup and set it down on the floor, hoping that the little dog wasn’t actually a water connoisseur with a palate as pronounced as his underbite.

‘Interesting decor. Very don’t-give-a-fuck.’ Coriana squinted at the freshly painted mural. Spooked (understandably) by his own reflection in a mirror propped against the wall, Hercules backed up against the mural, managing to smear himself with Fucking Fuchsia paint.

Good, good. This was going well.

‘And that mirror with the snakes? I love a good Medusa commentary.’

Lily nodded, hoping that Coriana wouldn’t realise that the mirror had been hastily slapped over a poster that post-switcheroo had reconfigured itself to read Better Dead than Wed .

‘These moody colours – it’s so evocative. Very chic, very in. Not like those boho barn weddings from the 2010s, my God , they were so passé.’

‘You’re right!’ Lily was hyperaware of her armpits. Were they damp? Did they smell like fear? She tried to reel herself in. ‘I’m working with a goth couple on a quick-turn wedding. It’s going to be macabre in all the best ways.’

‘Macabre! You know your way to a journalist’s heart.’

‘It’s an exciting ask, because if you look around—’ Lily gestured in a way that encompassed Mirage-by-the-Sea ‘—where we are is the spiritual opposite of macabre.’

‘True. It’s like something out of a particularly charming Wes Anderson movie.

Not the one about the asteroid, though. I thought he overshot there.

’ Coriana snapped a few shots of Lily’s recently appeared ghost chairs.

‘So how did this couple find you? What made you stand apart? There are, after all, thousands of wedding planners in Southern California. And at least a hundred specialising purely in goth weddings.’

Well, you see, Coriana, a magic rainstorm pulled a swapsies on my business and the one next door, so this place is actually far more Gothic than it appears. Especially when I basically covered the walls with colourful pancake makeup – with the help of a funeral director – to hide the evidence.

‘Right time, right place,’ said Lily. ‘Don’t let my rainbow attire fool you – I’m a chameleon.’

‘I see.’ Coriana made a note. Was she using red? Red didn’t seem good. Red reminded Lily of her calculus assignments.

And then came the kicker.

‘No ring, I see.’

Lily glanced down at her left hand, although why exactly, she didn’t know. It wasn’t like she’d expected a ring to have sprouted there without warning. (All right, maybe a little, given the events of the morning.) ‘No ring.’

‘Interesting.’ Coriana leaned forwards, her icy eyes boring into Lily. ‘So, if you’ve never been married, why all this? Why do you want to help people celebrate something that’s passed you by?’

Lily chugged the rest of her own CBD soda, then popped open another. She hadn’t known she was going to be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say passed me by. Maybe I haven’t found the right person yet.’

Coriana’s pen scratched accusatorily. ‘In that case, are you the right person for this kind of work? How can you prepare someone for their special day if you haven’t experienced it yourself?’

‘I mean … you don’t have to have lived something to appreciate it. Mort next door is a funeral planner, and he’s never been dead.’

‘The place with the photogenic poodles?’ Coriana seemed to revel in the concept. ‘Now there’s a man who understands theatre. Maybe you should rope him in, get him involved in some of your upcoming events.’

Lily could only imagine what a Mort-branded wedding would look like. Probably a lot like what she’d returned to a few hours earlier, honestly. Would he wear a tux, though? Or just stick with his usual black suit with the shirtsleeves rolled up as he carried his bride over the threshold …

Lily sipped drink #2, trying to rinse away the very not-safe-for-work image of Mort that had just passed through her mind. It was the phrase ‘roping him in’ that had done it.

‘So, what else is on the horizon for you?’

Lily swallowed, grateful for the opportunity to turn her thoughts away from Mort. Mort, who had nothing at all to do with weddings. In fact, he was the opposite.

‘Um, I have a hippie wedding coming up, for Venus Cargill. A cowboy wedding. And a Christmas in July wedding.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘No Alice in Wonderland weddings yet,’ said Lily, hoping that despite her lowly spinster status she was steering the interview back on track.

‘But I’d love to do one. We could make a photo booth out of the Cheshire cat’s grin.

And a shisha out of the pipe-smoking caterpillar. And of course there’d be croquet.’

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.

Perhaps that’s what Hercules was responding to.

But she hadn’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.

Was Mort playing 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 was rainbowed 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.