Page 52 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

‘Lyric booklets have been distributed,’ whispered Tink, who was dressed in her usual polka dots, but festive. ‘Is Aunt Jemimah all right? She looks almost … personable.’

‘She’s fine,’ Mort reassured her. ‘Just resting her eyes.’

‘And, action,’ called Lily into her walkie-talkie. The choirmaster gave a nod.

Sleigh bells started shaking; the soloist out front gave a spin of tinsel and string lights. Lily gave Mort the thumbs up.

The choir conductor cued everyone in on their note, then punched the air, rather alarmingly. The choir launched into a dramatic burst of harmony familiar to anyone who has watched a period film battle scene or a beer ad.

‘That’s not … “O, Holy Night”,’ whispered Lily, alarmed. ‘This is far more ominous.’

‘It’s “O Fortuna” from the Carmina Burana ,’ said Mort, who personally thought it was a better choice.

The wedding-goers were looking around awkwardly, trying to figure out whether they’d all somehow shown up to the wrong event. Some flipped through the pages of the Christmas-tree-shaped carol booklets, trying to figure out where exactly in ‘O, Holy Night’ this dramatic interlude came from.

The choir reached fever pitch. Someone had brought in a set of timpani and was bashing the living hell out of it. Fire seemed to spurt from the candles planted in the wreaths hung about the room, and the snowy chandeliers flashed.

‘Is this a switcheroo thing?’ whispered Lily. ‘Or did the choral director just google songs that started with O?’

Mort grimaced. ‘Or worse, there’s a conductor in the crowd the choral director wants to impress, and now is the perfect opportunity.’

Lily groaned. ‘Of course. Dr Gardess – the bald one in the ugly sweater next to the woman dressed like a candy cane.’

Lily scribbled a note and hurried over to Dr Gardess. ‘Excuse me, Dr Gardess? Could you sign this for me? It’s not legally binding. Also, wow that is a fetching sweater. An adornment of pom-poms could be a new collective noun.’

Dr Gardess, nodding along to the choir, scribbled his signature. Then pulled out a cigarette lighter and a wax seal and sealed the note with an elaborate stamp bearing something that looked to Lily’s untrained eye awfully like a masonic symbol. This could explain a lot.

Lily hurried over to the choir director, who turned to her, eyes flickering with the reflection of the candles. His temple thrummed in time with the timpani.

‘Um, sorry to interrupt, but Dr Gardess wanted you to have this.’

She passed the choir director the note, who thumbed it open and read it while flinging his free hand up and down in time with the seemingly endless crescendos of the choir. The walls shook alarmingly.

‘He wants to talk about a residency!’ The choir director’s eyes lit up (not with flames this time). ‘I knew it! My dreams are coming to rest upon the balcony of wonderment!’

‘Um, sure,’ said Lily. ‘Given that’s the case, how about we return to our regular programming?’

The timpani players dropped their sticks and grabbed up some sleigh bells instead. The unmistakable notes to ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ rang out, a cappella.

‘Another wedding saved,’ whispered Lily, as she returned to Mort’s side, ready for the ceremony.

‘Except for the corpse in the decorative fridge box,’ he noted drolly. Still, he was impressed with Lily’s problem-solving skills; nothing, no matter how ridiculous, seemed to faze her. It was hard not to be struck by a woman who could dispose of a body with a smile on her face.

The groom, in a delightfully tailored Elf costume with a gingerbread man boutonniere, took his place in front of the dramatic wedding arch composed of snowy baubles and guttering lanterns, the throughline of which was tied together with tinsel and string lights.

A finger in his ear to confirm that he still had eardrums after the timpani drum break, he kept a close watch on the doors.

‘Hit the smoke machine,’ whispered Lily into her walkie-talkie. The Grief Guys started up the machine, and the floor grew white and misty with the clouding smoke. Cousin Atticus huffed heavily on his inhaler in between reminders to everyone around him that he had a severe case of mild asthma.

‘Ooh, smoke. It’s like being in a pub in the Eighties,’ said Grandma Darla, who’d been a bingo caller back in the day and was apparently nostalgic for a nice cancer-causing ambient smell.

The tinsel-wrapped doors to the venue swung open. The choir, bless them, remained true to the requested programming, and continued to hum Mariah Carey on repeat as Christmas tradition demanded.

A murmur of approval went up as the bride made her entrance on the arm of her father.

She was clad in an off-the-shoulder red velvet number with white fur trim and a fluffy white pillbox hat with string lights wrapped around it.

Ornaments swung from her snowy train, clinking and gleaming as she walked.

‘I found those in Then Again,’ whispered Lily. ‘Tink helped me sew them on.’

Mort, in spite of his inherent lack of festive joy, felt his heart swell (romantically, not dangerously).

The bride looked so joyful and excited as she minced down the aisle on her stepfather’s arm.

Her smile was as high-wattage as the lights in her hat, and tears shimmered in her eyes around the glitter that also shimmered in her eyes.

Maybe there was something to this matrimony business after all.

‘I’m going to have so much glitter to clean up,’ whispered Lily. ‘You’ll be finding it on my corpse when you embalm me. Which is probably your thing.’

‘Wow, sexy. I love it when you talk necrophiliac to me,’ said Mort drily.

Lily winked. ‘Death is but a small inconvenience.’

‘Shut it, Santa and Santa’s Little Helper,’ shushed Great-Aunt Adeline, a tad judgementally for a woman whom Mort had learned had had affairs with no fewer than three of the great-uncles and was therefore destined for an evening on table 8, the table for extramarital mischief makers.

(Lily and Mort had eventually decided on a sort of Dante’s Inferno approach to seating arrangements, and had grouped people together according to their particular proclivity for a specific type of awfulness.)

But still, Mort and Lily shushed, Mort clapping his false beard over his mouth in a way that made Lily giggle again.

This invited a fresh round of shushing.

‘We should’ve put her on table 12 with the suspected murderers,’ whispered Lily, hiding herself behind her Christmas-tree-shaped songbook.

Mort bit back a laugh.

The bride had reached the altar now. As she reached for her soon-to-be husband’s hands, the best man stepped forward with a snowdome, which he opened to reveal the rings.

‘Nice touch,’ said Mort approvingly. ‘Almost as good as the goths with their skull.’

The starry-eyed couple stumbled through their vows, which were an odd mishmash of the traditional lines and tortured Christmas metaphors.

‘Do you, Rina Morgan,’ said the celebrant, who was dressed as Olaf from Frozen , ‘take this Elf to be your husband, in naughtiness and niceness, in snow and sunshine, and agree to follow him down the chimney of life?’

‘Ho-ho-ho,’ whispered the bride, barely able to contain her grin.

‘And do you, Emmett Smiley, take this snowy bride to be your wife, from North Pole to South, in cookies and milk, and let her be the Rudolph that guides your way?’

‘Ho-ho-ho,’ assented Emmett.

Mort wasn’t entirely sure these vows were legally binding, but he also wasn’t sure he entirely cared. Lily was right about weddings: they offered as many ways to show your love and joy as there were people in the world.

Olaf’s carrot nose waggled as he said: ‘I now pronounce you Elf and Snowy Wife. You may kiss Mrs Claus.’

The celebrant held up a sprig of mistletoe.

‘You know what to do.’

The newlyweds embraced passionately, and Lily joined in with the chorus of whoops and cheers and ho-ho-hos that rose up from the crowd.

She nudged Mort with her velvet-clad elbow. ‘Go on, you old grump. Don’t pretend you’re not feeling the love.’

Mort was indeed feeling the love. But it was directed elsewhere. Where was that roving sprig of mistletoe when he needed it?

‘Ho-ho-ho,’ he managed, a bit croakily.

The grin Lily shot him felt like a stun gun, and he staggered slightly.

‘There you go. The mark of a man unused to expressing emotion, huh? Bowls you over the first time.’

At the altar, the newly married couple turned to the rows packed with their friends and families. It was time to head to the sleigh-hearse and be transported off to the reception venue.

The choir broke into an a cappella version of WHAM!’s ‘Last Christmas’, which was, as Lily put it, ‘quite the bop’.

Hand in hand, Rina and Emmett made their way back down the aisle, which was Lily’s cue to …

‘Release the confetti!’ she shouted.

Reaching into the red velvet stockings draped over the backs of their seats, the guests threw handfuls of confetti over the happy couple and the bridal party that followed.

But instead of the paper snowflakes and pine needles that Lily had worked so hard to manually holepunch and package, the confetti was a weird, dreary grey that clung to the wedding party’s beautiful outfits like ash from a bushfire.

The bride’s blonde hair was coated grey beneath her snowy pillbox cap, and the makeup that had taken a team of three big-lashed makeup artists several hours to apply had taken on a wan vibe.

She looked less like a sexy snow queen and more like one of those street performers who paint themselves grey and pretend to be a statue.

‘Something’s wrong,’ whispered the mother of the bride, who was outfitted in a tiered green frock ornamented with bows and baubles. ‘It’s meant to be Christmas tinsel. Glittery stars and trees and crushed up candy canes. Not …’

Lily swallowed.

So did Mort. Oh no. Not now. He had an awful feeling she knew what exactly the guests had sprinkled all over the wedding party, and it wasn’t festive spirit.

‘Is that … a bone shard?’ said the maid of honour, who’d just picked something white and sharp from the snowy bobble of her Santa hat. She pulled a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of her velvet dress and squinted at the shard.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like … corpsemas.

The flower girl giggled, holding up a tooth. ‘Mama, look what I got! Santa read my letter!’

Her horrified mother swept in before the flower girl could jam the tooth between the gap in her own gummy smile. ‘Luna! Drop it! Drop it right now!’

She turned on Mort. ‘Santa! How could you!’

‘Ashes!’ screamed Rina, spitting. She scoured at her tongue with her velvety train; ornaments flew all over, shattering on the fake-snow-covered floor. ‘I’ve got ashes in my mouth! IN MY WEDDING HAIR!’

She flung off her pillbox cap, short-circuiting the string lights and sparking a small fire that Mort quickly doused with a few measured stomps.

Lily stepped forward. She grabbed a set of sleigh bells from one of the choir members and shook them frantically. ‘It’s just … day-old snow, everyone. Part of the festive experience. No need to worry.’

Mort was holding a bone shard. ‘Quite a bit to worry about, really. Judging from this, I think the crematorium’s out of order.’

‘The what ?’ bellowed Great-Grandma Zinnia. ‘The ice-cream parlour’s out of order? What kind of Christmas party is it without ice-cream and pudding?’

Lily shoved the photographer forward. ‘Quick, do something!’

The photographer waved their camera around. ‘Everyone, group shot! Say … CONFETTI!’