Page 16 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Mort was at a loss. The funeral guests were not comporting themselves in a way appropriate for people in mourning.

First, there’d been a hubbub because the deceased’s sister-in-law had shown up wearing the same outfit as the deceased, which apparently made her a narcissist. Then, someone had taken over the funeral marimba with an upbeat rendition of ‘Here Comes the Bride’.

And now, instead of heading out towards the back of the funeral home where the hearse awaited, poor Moira Fagan was being hoisted down to the cemetery on a chair.

‘Can we please bring Mrs Fagan back in?’ he called politely. Even though what he wanted to say was what the fuck! What is wrong with you!

‘Who wants to swap fish for chicken?’ brayed a woman who definitely had someone of the equine variety somewhere in her family tree. ‘Fish for chicken?’

At some point, the funeral had become a catered event well beyond the club sandwiches and devilled eggs that Mort was used to vacuuming out from the carpet or peeling off the ceiling.

(Chucking sandwiches at ceiling rosettes was a universal kid-at-a-funeral thing.) A series of round tables had been rolled in and decked with lacy tablecloths.

There was even a seating chart and tiny seating cards printed, perhaps not entirely sensitively, with a cheerful header that read ‘ Moira Fagan, survived by … ’ followed by the name of the guest in a rolling cursive typeface.

Not only that, but there were funeral favours. Funeral favours! Bags of sugared almonds shaped like skulls. Lily’s wedding doodads had truly infected his business.

And what was that clicking noise? Mort pulled back a velvet curtain to reveal … a photo booth. Where had that come from? Who had shouldered this giant contraption in here without him noticing?

Mort grabbed the photos that poured out from the side of the machine, feeling slightly worried that there might well be a corpse in them. Wait, was that a corpse? He squinted at the overexposed photos, which showed an impressively wrinkled individual draped in a feather boa and flamingo sunglasses.

Mort’s stomach wrenched. This whole thing was flying extremely close to the sun of losing his funeral director licence, which he’d studied hard for.

Was this interference with a corpse? Was there even a law for what was going on in here?

For there to be a law meant that something like this had happened before, which … surely not.

Momentarily, the short curtain on the photo booth slunk aside, revealing a tiny old woman who’d been bent in half by the combination of age and gravity. Thankfully she seemed very much alive.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she creaked, in a timbre that suggested the family might have done well to pay for a two-for-one deal.

‘You look just like …’ And she did. She looked exactly like the woman that Mort himself had embalmed, dressed, and made up for her final day above ground.

‘I’m Moira’s twin sister,’ said the tiny woman, unlooping the feather boa and tossing it to a middle-aged guy at the front of the photo booth line that had gathered. ‘Mirella. And thank you. For putting the fun back in funerals.’

‘But I didn’t. I would never,’ Mort stammered, extricating himself from the frivolities and hurrying back towards the foyer. Fun? Funerals? All right, so there was some convenient wordplay there, but that was where the overlap ended.

Besides, this was not at all the brand mission that Gramps had fleshed out with that flashy advertising exec after winning a branding grant from the city a few years back.

But was it so wrong? That people were celebrating a life instead of weeping on each other’s shoulders and rending their clothing graveside?

Yes, thought Mort, watching out the front window as someone in head-to-toe black, including a veil, took a selfie with the poodle statues, an injury that was made all the worse by the rabbit ears they were propping up behind one of the poodles. Yes it was.

And worst of all, here came Lily, cheery, bright, rainbow-clad Lily, traipsing up the walkway, skirts swishing and bangles clanging.

She even paused to take a photo for the veil-clad mourner, who had for some reason grabbed a bucket from Jorge the gardener and was now standing awkwardly astride one of the poodles.

The shame. The indignity. (All right, all right, the hilarity, thought Mort gruffly.)

‘Welcome to the festivities,’ said Mort drily as Lily let herself in.

A group of mourners who’d gone to town on the open bar that had been set up on Moira’s coffin (it had been a closed coffin affair, at least) wrapped her in a tipsy hug. Lily, of course, did not seem to mind. She hugged right back, never mind that these were all strangers, and drunk ones at that.

‘I’m just here to get your stamp,’ she said to Mort after she’d extricated herself from the clutches of a woman opining loudly about Moira’s one-of-a-kind fried chicken batter, the recipe for which she’d apparently taken to the grave, bless her heart. ‘And enjoy the party.’

Mort harrumphed. ‘I don’t partake in town treasure maps. Or parties.’

‘All right, all right, to get a better look at the switcheroo and the number it’s done on your place,’ said Lily. She jabbed at her treasure map. ‘And also, you’re listed right here.’

‘No, that’s Eternal Elegance, Wedding Edition,’ lied Mort. He did not give out his stamp to women he barely knew. Even if they were unfairly becoming.

‘Sure, sure.’ Lily rolled her eyes. ‘Wait. Is that a photo booth? At a funeral ?’

‘Sure is.’

‘You sly dog.’

‘It’s a switcheroo thing,’ said Mort. At least he hoped it was, because that was a better option than a mourner deciding, of their own volition, to immortalise Grandma Moira on Polaroid.

‘Have you indulged?’ asked Lily curiously.

‘Absolutely not. I have a reputation to uphold. This is a memorial service, after all. Whatever it might look like.’

Mouth open in mock horror, Lily smacked him lightly across the chest. ‘I’m sorry, but what kind of business owner doesn’t sample their own goods?’

Before Mort could protest – and he did have quite a protest ready – Lily had dragged him into the booth.

The space was cosy and plush, with the sort of satin upholstery you might find in a coffin …

and a series of discarded props that you might find on the person in said coffin.

Mort was, well, mortified. They had to find a way to reverse this switcheroo immediately.

‘Here, this is for you,’ said Lily, draping an elastic bow tie around Mort’s neck. She wrapped a lace cuff around her own, then grabbed a black veil for good measure.

Oh, but she looked good.

All right, so the switcheroo didn’t have to be reversed immediately , immediately. But soon.

The photo booth whirred as it prepared to snap their likenesses. Mort was painfully aware of Lily next to him: the warmth of her leg against his, the lightly floral scent of her shampoo as her hair grazed his neck. And now, the gentlest touch of her breath as she turned to him, her smile broad.

Mort wondered, not for the first time, what it might be like to kiss her.

But neither timing nor confidence was on his side.

‘Say … Rest in Peace!’ Lily called, throwing her arm around Mort as the camera clicked and whirred, clicked and whirred.

And fairly so because, in this moment, Mort had quite possibly died and gone to … well, whatever came after all of this.

It was not as easy as you’d think to find an organ repair guy, although Mort was a little under the weather in the wake of yesterday’s wake.

Thankfully the party had moved elsewhere eventually, and Mort had managed to chase down the missing deceased in time to get her to her plot before the graveside workers clocked off for the day.

Lily had excused herself after someone called Venus had texted her fifteen times in a row about tie-dyed tents, a recusal that Mort – although trying to keep his focus on the funeral he was managing – had somewhat mixed feelings about.

Anyway. Feeling moody about the fact that the switcheroo hadn’t magically resolved itself overnight, Mort sipped a decaf as he reviewed his latest set of organ-related search results, which had pulled up records for a handful of transplant surgeons who had holiday abodes in Mirage-by-the-Sea, followed by a farmers’ market booth specialising in oregano, a clarifying question from Siri about whether he had meant to type in the state of Oregon instead, and then a series of bullet points from an AI about organic chemistry.

Mort huffed in frustration; it wasn’t just that the organ-turned-marimba situation meant that he was going to have to resort to playing Enya on repeat on the temperamental Bluetooth speaker Gramps had hooked up in the viewing room.

It was that the organ was his outlet – it was the closest thing he had to a piano in the funeral parlour, and therefore the closest outlet he had for his anxiety or for when he needed to get his thoughts in order.

‘Still switcherooed over there, huh?’ called Lily through the grille in the wall.

Had she been listening in on his grumbly googling the whole time?

Hopefully she hadn’t heard him get a tad testy with the guy who’d shown up on the front page of Google as an organ donor near me .

It wasn’t Mort’s fault that Siri had assumed the guy replaced musical instruments for free.

‘Clearly,’ said Mort. ‘And you?’

‘Oh no, it’s all sunshine and rainbows over here. There’s so much white that I feel like I’m in an ad for Philadelphia cream cheese.’

Mort straightened in his chair. ‘Are you being serious?’

‘Never. Unfortunately we’re stuck with our weird magical mishmash. But I think I can help you with the organ situation.’

‘You know how to reverse the switcheroo on an organ?’ Mort called. Even his smartphone assistant hadn’t been able to help with that.