Page 56 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Parties were not Mort’s preferred way to spend his time.

They were associated with drink-driving incidents, roof-diving accidents, and bathtub drownings, and there was always the risk of a freak encounter that sent someone stumbling through a glass coffee table.

To their death . And then there was the whole social side of things, which was almost as terrifying as facing the increased possibility of one’s demise.

Besides, Mort liked Angela and Tink, who were delightful fixtures around Mirage-by-the-Sea, Angela judiciously checking in with the town’s business owners on a weekly basis to see who might be willing to buy, sell or rent their current property (real estate was a tough gig), and Tink with her letterpress setup, which had a rattle and grime to it that appealed to Mort’s sensibilities.

And most importantly, Lily was going to be there.

For weeks she’d been talking about the magnificent printing-press-themed shindig she’d been planning – they’d had several conversations through their joint grille about whether a game called I Shot the Serif would be too obscure, and just what should go into a Gutenberg cocktail.

Best of all, since it was a birthday party and not a wedding, it was presumably safe from the switcheroo.

And besides, Mort rather wanted to discuss the events of a few nights earlier, which in the whirlwind of subsequent deaths and marriages neither of them had had a chance to comment upon properly.

Lily had hinted at wanting a future with him that night, and she’d been quite happy playing the role of Mrs Claus at the Christmas in July wedding, but today she’d been strangely quiet, which worried him.

Lily wasn’t the quiet type. She embodied extraversion.

She was the epitome of the bubbly blonde, whereas when Mort came to bubbles, well, he put the ‘tension’ in surface tension.

Lily hadn’t even responded when Mort had called through the grille to inform her that the tamale lady was out on the promenade.

The shutters (when had she put in shutters?) on her upstairs apartment had been slammed shut, which thankfully put to rest the fleeting idea Mort had had about serenading her from his balcony.

(It was for the best.) And the doors to the wedding boutique were firmly shut.

Lily never closed her doors during the day – she wanted her space to be as welcoming as possible to anyone who might be passing by.

It wasn’t even necessarily that she wanted to host their weddings.

She genuinely loved chatting to people. In the few months she’d lived in Mirage-by-the-Sea, she’d made more friends than Mort had managed to make during his whole life.

Had she realised she’d made a terrible mistake in sleeping with Mort? Had she looked at the dwindling hourglass of her lease and realised that it wasn’t worth getting involved in something that came with a built-in time limit? Or was something else at play?

All of this was running through Mort’s head as he arrived at Angela and Tink’s place, which was one-third of a storybook cottage that had been transformed from a house into apartments around the time that Airbnb had gone public.

And which had been transformed again by Lily’s very maximalist eye.

Screen-printed signs swung gently from the olive trees in the front yard.

Bobbing foil balloons reminded people to ‘Remind their Ps and Qs’.

And the soundtrack … was that the Editors?

‘Mort! Mort’s at a social gathering!’ cried Angela, pointing with a beer.

A cluster of locals, vaguely familiar vacationers and total strangers descended upon him in precisely the way Mort tried to avoid. He was a wheat stalk during a locust plague.

‘Happy birthday, Tink,’ said Mort, thrusting the pre-need he’d thoughtfully printed out on colourful stationery in her direction.

He’d even tied it off with a bow, which truly went above and beyond.

And on Reba’s extensive online shop (which a tipsy Reba had shown him at length while Lily had been running about trying to rescue Venus’s disastrous hippie wedding) he’d found an excellent, extremely colourful greeting card that summed up the occasion perfectly: Congratulations: you lived to die some other year.

Tink, emotive in a dress patterned with punctuation marks, raised an eyebrow. ‘Nice card. Usually people just give my own cards to me, but look at you. Breaking out of the circular economy trap.’

‘It’s one of Reba’s. I couldn’t pass it up.’

Tink flipped over the card, thumbing the Dyer on the Mountain brand logo – a mashup of Grateful Dead elements tweaked just enough to avoid a copyright suit. ‘Ah, Reba. She’s got the hippie market sewn up, but I’m chasing her.’

‘She’ll die eventually,’ said Mort, deadpan. ‘Lily’s done a great job. I love the Kern-it the Frog mascot,’ he said appreciatively, glancing about at the decor, mostly as a way to sneakily look around for Lily. Then, in as nonchalant a tone as he could manage, he added, ‘Is she around?’

Tink made an awful face – for such a pretty person, she was excellent at awful faces. ‘She can’t make it. She’s deathly sick. Deathly.’

Mort’s heart seemed to skip a beat. Deathly? Lily was on her deathbed ? And Mort was here, at a party of all things.

‘It’s bad. She said bubonic. You don’t want to go over there.’

Mort could feel the sweat starting to bead against his suit collar. He pulled out his phone, pretending to read a solemn text message.

‘I wish I could stay, but … death calls.’

‘Ugh, you can’t even stay for the Celebrity Fontheads game?’ Tink brandished a series of paper headbangs with typeface names on them. Wow, Lily really went all in on this stuff. ‘Death is always calling. It’s the worst.’

‘It really is,’ agreed Mort.

‘Who is it this time?’

‘Mrs … Helvetica,’ said Mort evasively.

Tink folded her arms. ‘Helvetica, huh. Is this a bonus murder mystery party element cooked up by the absent Lily?’

‘Happy birthday, Tink. Gotta go.’

Hurrying out the door, Mort grabbed a scooter from the side of the promenade and rode it at top speed back towards Eternal Elegance (Wedding Edition).

Helmet be damned. Safety be damned. If he cracked open his skull or bruised his tailbone, so be it.

What was the point of anything without Lily, delightful, silly, sunshiny Lily in his life?

Mort rounded the familiar curves and twists of the promenade, almost taking out a corgi-toting couple setting up a tripod for the internet likes, and actually taking out a garden bed of ornamental thyme.

Sorry, bees. Well, not really. Pollination was the last thing on Mort’s mind right now.

Oh no, now that brought to mind My Girl , the movie that had traumatised a generation of kids.

Lily was dying . She needed him. She wasn’t just his neighbour.

She was his business partner. His … partner.

His other half. His joy in this bizarre, confused world.

And whatever happened – and goodness, so much had happened – he wanted to laugh through it all with her.

Because that’s what they did. They chuckled over smashed wedding plates and corpse brides and confetti debacles and vow disasters.

Because sometimes it was funny when a bunch of people got it into their heads that shovelling dirt on someone was a good idea.

Or when the photographer insisted on waxy black-and-white photos with a corpse-like vibe.

Or when the photo booth … well … all sorts of things happened in a photo booth.

He dumped the scooter by a planter filled with poppies and pomegranates and hurried up the colourful pathway to Lily’s shop.

The Polaroids of Lily’s most recent clients smiled out at him from the photo board near the bay window.

Mort did a double take. Hang on. Hadn’t there only been four weddings? Who was that fifth couple?

He leaned in, then clocked who it was right away.

It was the two of them, first in the apparently perpetually resident photo booth at the funeral home, and then at Venus’s wedding during the disastrous crow flight.

Mort wondered when Lily had pinned the pictures up – right after they’d been taken?

Or perhaps one of the other times, one of hopefully the many other times, that she’d been thinking of him. Of them.

‘Lily!’ he shouted, fists banging at the stained-glass door like a restrained Stanley Kowalski. ‘Let me in!’

Silence.

Mort tried again, to no avail. He stood back, trying to see whether there was movement upstairs, but the massive mediaeval shutters hid all evidence.

He squinted – was there a light coming out from one of them?

All of the worst possible scenarios ran through Mort’s head like an aeroplane safety film.

Maybe Lily was trapped upstairs. Perhaps she was so sick that she was unable to get out of bed.

Or worse, she’d fallen out of bed and couldn’t get back up.

Then, Mort caught sight of two familiar glowing mismatched eyes. Esmeralda, up on his balcony. Regarding him haughtily, she nimbly leapt from his balcony to Lily’s, then sat there, quite impressed with herself, licking a paw.

Mort sighed.

‘This is what it’s going to take, isn’t it, Esme?’

Mort let himself into the funeral home, trying not to think of the last time Lily had been here. Of her easy laugh. Her astonishing facility for jigsaw puzzles. The lean length of her thigh …