Page 31 of The Tapes

TWENTY-FIVE

Weddings are usually split, with different sides of the ceremony for guests of the bride and groom. I don’t think funerals are supposed to be like that but, somehow, Dad’s is.

My brother has monopolised one side of the hall, along with people who knew our dad when he was married the first time.

The divide is unquestionably slightly older but there’s also something less subtle.

The suits are better tailored, the dresses nicer.

Other than the front row, there’s no set seating, yet that’s how people have placed themselves anyway.

It’s not a huge crowd but there are around forty people across the two sides of the crematorium’s main room.

Most are people I directly invited, though a handful likely saw the notice in the paper or on Facebook.

I tug at my dress, which is uncomfortable across the shoulders. I can’t remember buying it and am not sure why I picked it. Despite the funeral plans, I’d somehow forgotten myself when it came to the actual event.

‘Are you all right?’ Faith asks. She’s demure and beautiful; and it’s impossible not to sense a role reversal as she continually checks in on me.

I tell her I am and she asks if it’s all right to go and talk to Shannon.

It is, of course, so she drifts to the side where she instantly huddles with her friend.

I’m left near the back of the hall welcoming the latecomers, listening to the drab, flat background music that Dad would have hated.

He was never one for these mawkish moments.

It’s not that he’d hunt out happier alternatives, simply that he’d pretend such gloom wasn’t happening.

The room is everything he wasn’t: inoffensively offensive with its bland beige.

A woman comes in who seems to know me. She says all the right things: sorry to hear what happened, hopes I’m all right, love to Faith…

all that. I have no idea who she is as she trots across to Peter’s side of the room and says hello to someone there.

Dad once told me he’d reached the age where he only ever got invited to two things: funerals or prostate exams. ‘Dunno which one I prefer,’ he added.

I think of that now until I realise someone’s at my side. I’ve not seen Nicola since the lunch with her mother. After that, she told her father she was worried about me, although I sort of expected it.

Her mum is at her side, wearing a slinky black dress as if she’s off to a Halloween ball. ‘Such a shame you had to rush away from lunch the other day,’ she says, making it sound an awful lot like it wasn’t a shame.

‘How was the wine?’ I ask, almost laughing as she reels slightly.

She quickly slips into a smile. ‘Lovely, of course. We’ll have to do something again soon: the girls all together.

’ It’s all fake, all surface. ‘While I’m here, I thought I should apologise for if I came across as rude the other day,’ she adds.

The classic non-apology apology. Sorry if you were offended and all that.

‘It’s no problem,’ I reply, even though it was .

‘Lovely,’ she replies, before turning to Nicola and widening her eyes, making it very clear for whom the apology was given. ‘I suppose I’ll take my seat,’ she adds – before trotting off to join her husband.

Nicola waits for her mum to go and then turns to me, where we share a second of acknowledgement. We both know what’s just happened. ‘How are you holding up?’ she asks.

I nod to the woman that recently entered, who is now slotting herself onto a chair three rows from the front.

‘Do you know who that is?’ I ask.

Nicola angles forward and then back. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Me either. She knew me though.’

Nicola leans towards me a fraction. ‘Might be a gatecrasher here for the free food. I can get Dad to kick her out.’

I laugh as Nicola touches my side. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘I think so.’

‘You said you’d been thinking about your mum…?’

I sigh, not sure I want to talk about this now. ‘Maybe I’m just that age,’ I say. ‘You get to forty-odd and people start dying.’

There’s a moment when it feels like Nicola might be about to make a joke, though she stops herself. I almost tell her to go for it. I’d prefer that to the pitied looks coming from others.

It’s not the time and definitely not the place, though I don’t know whether Nicola will be hanging around after the ceremony. ‘Do you remember when we were at the cinema a couple of years ago?’ I ask.

It’s out of the blue, so Nicola’s ‘Huh?’ is understandable.

‘You, me, Shannon and Faith were there,’ I say, thinking it was probably the last time we did something with all four of us together. ‘When there was that shooting.’

Her eyes widen in recognition but she’s still baffled as to why I’m asking about this now. ‘Course I do.’

‘Did you actually see the person get shot?’ I ask.

She looks surprised. ‘I was with you.’

I try to remember. The gunshot was before the movie started and Nicola had definitely nicked outside for a smoke at some point. I don’t know whether she was in or out when it happened.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Nicola asks, as she touches my arm.

‘There’s something weird about that day,’ I add.

‘I looked it up before I came here. Somebody was stabbed outside the cinema. The guy who did it was about to come inside – but he was shot in the arse as he was going through the doors. The bang meant everyone’s eyes were on him, and everyone realised he was carrying a knife.

Someone got him on the floor and someone else called 999.

So whoever shot him, it worked – it stopped him.

The guy with the knife has been in a secure unit ever since – but nobody ever found out who shot him. ’

Nicola frowns. Maybe she knows this, maybe not.

When we left the cinema two-and-a-bit hours later, there was police tape and blood on the ground.

We’d missed the lot because they hadn’t stopped any of the movies.

It was one of those moments we weren’t a part of, and yet it always felt as if we were.

What would have happened had the knifeman made it further into the cinema?

What if Faith had left the auditorium to go for a wee and the man with the knife had been right there? Who shot him?

‘The pistol the girls found at the back of yours is that gun,’ I say.

Nicola was seemingly about to say something else, though stops herself. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The guy with the knife at the cinema was shot by someone. Nobody knew who – and they still don’t – but the gun used was the one Faith and Shannon found the other day.’

Nicola is open-mouthed. ‘How do you know?’

‘The police came round this morning.’

Nicola’s ‘What…?’ is an understatement. She’s quiet because a new couple hurry up the stairs and stop to say hello to me.

I vaguely recognise them as neighbours who live a couple of doors down from the house I’m in the process of selling.

We go through the usual hellos and sorries, before they take a seat on what’s turned into my side.

‘I don’t think I understand,’ Nicola says. ‘The shooting was two years ago. More. How did it get to the back of my house?’

She has a point – but, unless her dad told her, she doesn’t know all of it. Mum’s fingerprints are on that gun and, by the time it was shot, she had been disappeared for a little over a decade. Did she really pull the trigger that day? Was she somehow a guardian angel, watching over Faith and me?

It feels impossible and yet.

I turn from Nicola and scan the room, wondering if Mum has somehow snuck in. Perhaps she’s one of those I don’t recognise. Not someone like Mary the estate agent, but a person who’s reinvented herself over the last thirteen years. Weight lost or gained, different hair.

Or maybe the Earring Killer is in the room. Mum claims to have known who it was, so perhaps they’re living in plain sight.

Everything feels possible and I find myself suspecting everyone.

Harriet is in the corner on my brother’s side of the room, head bowed underneath a large hat.

She catches my eye, then turns away. I invited my father’s mistress, but no need for any of us to celebrate it.

Allie Rowett is sitting on the opposite side, in the back row, a dark veil covering her face.

She kept quiet when her husband assaulted me and the apology feels a little late now.

Nicola’s parents are sitting directly in front of her but I can’t make eye contact with Kieron.

I wonder whether he mentioned Mum’s cassette to any of his former colleagues, or if he truly believes it’s my attention-seeking voice on those tapes.

From nowhere, a man in a suit appears at our side. Nicola’s husband, Ethan, looks nervously between us. ‘How are you holding up?’ he asks, talking to me. It’s the same question on a loop.

‘As well as can be expected. Thank you for coming.’

‘It’s not a problem. Did Nic tell you I can’t hang around for the wake? I’m really sorry but I’ve got some appointments I couldn’t cancel.’

I tell him it’s fine and I appreciate the effort anyway. He smiles between us and then heads off to sit next to Nicola’s father.

Nicola watches him go. It feels as if she wants to complain about his job again, though it’s not that. ‘How can it be the same gun?’ she whispers. My friend is closer now and I can hear the uncertainty in her voice. Just like her father, she thinks I’m losing it.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The police told me.’

‘Why’d they tell you? The gun was at mine.’

I realise she doesn’t know about Mum’s fingerprints. I haven’t told her and I suppose neither the police nor her father have. I could tell her.

I shouldn’t have started this conversation.

‘I suppose they put my name on the file,’ I say. ‘Or Faith’s. She called it in but she’s underage.’

I don’t know why I don’t tell her. It doesn’t feel right, somehow.

Nicola starts to say something then stops herself. ‘There are sometimes hikers in the trees,’ she says, although it doesn’t sound convincing. She quickly adds: ‘Isn’t it weird the police spoke to you, not me?’

I can’t answer that, not without saying Mum’s fingerprints were on the gun. The more I’ve said over the past few days, the more trouble I’ve caused.

Except it’s awkward. I’m still scanning the crowd, looking for my mother. She shot that gun two years ago, more than a decade after she disappeared. She knows who the Earring Killer is and has been hiding all this time.

‘Eve…’

Nicola touches my shoulder again and, when I turn to her, I feel the dribble from my nose. She finds a tissue and slips it to me as I dab the red. It’s been a long time since I had a nosebleed and Nicola’s attentive stare is filled with worry.

‘You should sit,’ she says.

I don’t argue and at least I’m out of the conversation I started.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to maintain the veneer of being in control.

I turn my back, trying to clean myself up, though when I look back to the front, I realise Nicola’s father has been watching.

He already thinks I faked that tape, suspects I might be drinking again, now this.

Luckily, things are starting to move. The director emerges from a side room and gives a wave. I follow him to the front taking Faith with me, and then it’s real.

Peter reads a poem that our father would have hated, and then Faith has a Bible reading that was suggested by the funeral director.

It doesn’t feel like Dad but then it was hard to come up with things he’d have actually liked for his send-off.

There are two hymns he would’ve probably recognised, and then a final address from the director who says something about the dead living on in how we choose to remember them.

It isn’t a great funeral, certainly nothing memorable, although I know that’s all on me. Peter said he’d agree with whatever I wanted – and I more or less let the funeral director choose everything. Neither Peter nor I wanted to make these decisions, so perhaps we’re more alike than we admit.

I made my peace the first time I saw him with that waxy skin after the embalmer was done.

Music plays and people stand as my father’s body passes behind the sheet at the back.

Faith leans in to ask what happens next and I can’t answer.

I think she knows anyway. He’ll be burned and then we’ll get the ashes in a box.

That’s it.

One parent dead; the other who knows where.

The sheet closes and the gentle murmurs start as people head for the exit. I remain in my seat, clutching my daughter’s hand, sensing the wash of loneliness that I’m not sure will ever be fixed.