Chapter 1
The minute my father told me he was retiring and handing Masterson Funeral Directors to me, I wanted to run. Run to the edges of this world, to teeter on its sheer cliff tops, to lift my head skyward, to breathe in the air that demanded nothing of me. To let that freedom from expectation reach each extremity, smoothing every crease and frown, unfurling my tightly gripped fists.
I had wanted to run once before but had failed. Obligation, you see. Obligation, Obligation, Obligation. Get the stonemason to carve that word in capitals and in triplicate under my name on my headstone so that everyone understands who Jeanie Masterson really was. What it was that drove her, dampened her, and yes, if I’m honest, delighted her, entangled as I was in a world I both loved and feared, my heart torn between so many who needed me, as I needed them.
* * *
‘Baltimore,’ my father said. They would be retiring to Baltimore. Mum and him, Gráinne and David Masterson, packing their bags and leaving in six months or so. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was Baltimore in the States he was referring to, sounding so exotic as it does. But I knew the place he meant, the coastal village that lay not so far away, at the tip of Ireland’s sixth stubby toe. Three hundred odd kilometres southwest in Cork, away from Kilcross, this midlands town in which we lived our lives. No need for planes and air miles and passports, they would simply drive to where we’d spent our summers when we – myself and Mikey, their children – were small. Mostly it was just a long weekend but sometimes, when Dad could extract himself from the pressures of the funeral director’s, one whole precious week. No sign could be put on our door, you see, to ask politely that people call again when we returned. The dead were not ones for waiting. Although perhaps it could be argued they had all the time in the world. It was Harry, my aunt, our only embalmer back then, who held the fort while we walked the pier and played on sandy beaches and licked our Ninety-Nine’s. I loved Baltimore. We loved Baltimore, and now it would be their new home, leaving me and Niall, my husband, to finally have the house and business all to ourselves.
‘But you’ve only just turned sixty,’ I exclaimed as my parents sat opposite me and Niall, telling us their news. We were in our morning room, one of our two sitting-rooms in the large house we all shared – five bedrooms, six if you included the one Mum had converted into a walk-in wardrobe. She’d wanted to transform another into a sauna, but Dad had put the foot down. ‘No one retires that early.’
‘I don’t know about that, school principals take early retirement,’ Dad offered.
‘But you’re not a principal are you? You’re a man with a business without a generous public service pension.’
‘Ah, but there’s a bit put by and anyway, I have a gifted daughter well capable of keeping us all fed and watered. Not to mention that man beside you, the best embalmer in Ireland.’ He winked at Niall, beaming as if he was his prize bull at the Kilcross Agricultural Show.
‘Harry might have something to say about that,’ I said curtly, before realising how unkind I’d been. ‘Sorry, Niall.’ I reached my hand to touch my husband’s knee. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’
‘It’s OK, I understand.’ He smiled and held on to my hand, not allowing its escape just yet. ‘We all know Harry is brilliant. Taught me everything I know.’
‘And she’s going nowhere,’ Dad added. ‘You couldn’t get rid of that sister of mine if you tried. She’ll be embalming in her nineties if she has anything to do with it.’
‘But you’ve never mentioned retiring before, Dad.’ And neither, in truth, had I ever allowed the thought to enter my head, so dependent had I become on him.
‘We know, darling,’ Mum interjected, ‘but your dad and I just feel we’d like to take advantage of the time we have left. While he can still cast a fishing line and I can finally get to my poetry.’
Mum looked at Dad and they shared a loving smile.
‘Poetry, Mum? I thought you’d given that up after that evening class you took, saying it was all just too difficult and what the hell was wrong with good old rhyming couplets.’
‘My point is, Jeanie, that running the hairdresser’s means I never had the time to give it what it deserved. And besides, the house we used to rent down in Baltimore has come up for sale. If that isn’t kismet, I don’t know what is.’ She smiled to herself, tipping her perfectly manicured nails to the ends of her shoulder-length balayaged hair, delighted with her word choice, as if savouring its taste in her mouth like the melt of chocolate.
‘Thought you didn’t believe in all that kind of “sixth sense” stuff, Mum.’
‘Oh now, Jeanie, not this again. You know well I believe that you and your father can hear the dead. I simply don’t appreciate their constant intrusion in our lives. Your father has earned his break.’
‘But it’s OK to leave me here with them, is that it?’
‘But we thought that’s what you wanted, Jeanie.’ I could see the hurt in her eyes as the ground shifted further beneath her. She clasped a hand to her chest, where it sat as wide as butterfly wings on clover. ‘It’s all you’ve ever talked about, listening to them. Hearing what they have to say, sorting out the issues they’ve brought with them.’
When I was five years old maybe, I wanted to say childishly.
‘And what about Mikey? I asked, distracting her with her favourite subject. ‘Where does he come into all of this?’
Mikey, my older brother by two years. When I was little, when trying to explain him to the world, I used to say he was different; until, at thirteen, he was diagnosed as being on the spectrum – though only just, Mum liked to qualify. Those tests had finally handed me the right vocabulary. Mikey was ‘high functioning’, ‘highly capable’, only not always in the ways we would have liked.
‘We’ve spoken to him and—’
‘You spoke to him before you spoke to me, Mum?’ Mikey was the one we usually protected from things in this family – leaving him until everything was thought through, and every support we could think of was in place.
‘Only in a hypothetical sense.’
‘Oh come on, we all know Mikey is not one for hypothetical. It’s definites or nothing with him.’
‘Well, yes. He was very concerned to know when the move might be and how he was going to get his journal collection down. We spent some time exploring which removal company might be best. He’s such an expert on so many things,’ Mum said proudly.
‘So he’s going with you?’
‘Of course he’s coming with us. He’s hardly staying here. We don’t expect that of you, Jeanie. He’s our son, we want him with us.’ That’s how Mum had always wanted it, her son close by.
‘But not me?’
Mum seemed shocked at such childishness from her daughter of thirty-two, and who could blame her. But in times of panic, it is truly amazing what the brain will let out of your mouth.
‘But you’re married, Jeanie. You live here with Niall.’ She even pointed to him, in case I’d forgotten I had a husband. ‘This is your life, your work. We didn’t think…’ She looked at Dad. ‘David, you can jump in here anytime you like.’
Mum crossed her legs in distress at the direction the conversation had taken.
‘Your mother’s right, Jeanie. This move is obviously about us stepping away but it’s also about giving you the chance to run this business as you want, to be at the helm. Now you get to make all the decisions without having to run a single one by me. There’s a lot to be said for being your own boss.’
‘And what if I don’t want that? What if what I want is exactly what we have now, or maybe it’s something totally different? Maybe it’s hundreds of miles away like you two will be.’ And that, I’d said that.
‘Well, we didn’t think … I mean, is it? Is there something you want that we don’t know about?’
All three heads looked back at me – Mum with her mouth open, Dad with his bunched-fabric forehead, and Niall with his brushstroke of worry that I never intended to cause – waiting for my answer. I stopped short of admitting that I’d always wondered what it would be like to lead a completely different life. But if I finally left now to chase that dream and Dad retired, well, that would be it for the dead, no one left to hear them. I was the last one you see, the last listener of the dead, the line ended with me.
‘Look,’ I said, sidestepping everything, ‘I’m merely saying that you’ve come to me with a fait accompli. Like I don’t have a choice in all of this.’
‘OK, hold on, Jeanie,’ Dad said, holding up his hands defensively, ‘your mum and me only want you to be happy. We thought our news would be a nice surprise.’ He looked around then at the cake he’d bought, with its ‘Congratulations’ icing. On first seeing it when I’d walked into the room, I’d smiled eagerly. Dad had grinned, telling me I’d have to wait until he told me the news. Now he looked at it as though it was the pet dog we were going to have to put down. ‘It’s even your favourite – coffee.’
He turned to Niall for help. ‘You’re happy with all of this, Niall, aren’t you?’
‘I’m…’ Niall started cautiously, glancing at me, a man caught between two sides, not knowing what to say. ‘… delighted for you both. You deserve the break. And I can’t thank you enough for such an opportunity. I suppose it’s just such a big surprise.’
‘Did you know about this, too?’ The question popped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
‘No!’ Niall stared at me in disbelief.
‘My God, Jeanie, would you give the man a break.’ That was Mum.
‘What? You think I’m horrible to my husband now, is that it?’
‘Jeanie, can we all just calm down.’ Dad pushed forward to the edge of his seat and held up his right palm like a traffic guard in an effort to stop any further eruptions. ‘Niall, go out and get us a drink there before we have nervous breakdowns. G&Ts for us and whatever might sedate this one here.’
Dad looked at me while Niall left the room, and then bravely came over to sit by my side.
‘Is it that you think this is some kind of betrayal, Jeanie, is that it? That we’re abandoning you? Because we’re not, love. It is so far from that. We’re like every other couple out there hitting their twilight years, realising we need to slow down a bit. And it’s hard to do that when you live where you work. You and Niall might feel the same way about this place someday too and then, well…’
And then well, you’ll have to sell up, would’ve been the end of that sentence if he’d been plucky enough to finish it, because so far their daughter, much to their disappointment, had given them no grandchildren, and unlike them wouldn’t be passing the business on to anyone.
‘Look, love, we’re sorry, OK? We honestly didn’t think this would upset you so much. We should have sounded you out first, not come with everything signed, sealed and delivered like that. We get that, don’t we, Gráinne?’
‘Yes, of course, darling.’ Mum stretched out her hand to pat my knee. It was enough to make me feel awful about my behaviour and to offer the tiniest of smiles.
It was then Dad decided the time was right to pull his daughter in for a hug.
‘We misjudged it, that’s all. Don’t be too hard on us, OK? We’ll get this sorted. We don’t need to be hightailing it out of here that quickly. We can halt our gallop a little and make sure we do this the right way. How does that all sound?’
I tucked myself in against the chest of the man who had always protected me, pointed me in the right direction whenever I lost my way. My fingers tiptoed over the softness of his woollen suit. Always immaculately turned out, Dad never wore anything but the best. The simple truth was that part of me didn’t want to be on my own with the dead. It meant something that Dad could hear them too, that we were together in this thing that neither of us had asked for but were born with. Because sometimes it wasn’t so easy what the dead asked of us as they lay in their coffins. Even if Dad didn’t talk about it as much as I might have liked, it mattered to have someone who understood both the burden and joy of this gift. And yet, I thought, if my father had managed on his own before I came along, surely I could too. Was it too much to ask to let this man retire in peace without the worry of me?
I managed to whimper a tiny OK as Niall walked through the door with a tray of drinks.
‘Good man, Niall.’
Dad let me go to retake his seat opposite.
‘So Mikey’s really OK about going?’ I asked, a kind of reluctant calm to me, Niall putting a G&T in my hand. ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed.
‘So it seems.’ Dad took his first sip and sighed in appreciation.
‘But he hates change.’
‘Well, not when it means he gets away from the dead, apparently. Cut out of your mother he is.’
Dad smiled at his wife as Niall sat down beside me again, taking intermittent sips of his drink while surreptitiously glancing at me. And in my regret at how I had behaved and my desire to make everything right, to soothe his worry, I turned to smile, to hold again the hand that held mine earlier, to squeeze it, to try to make him, as well as myself, believe that everything was going to be just fine.
Copyright © 2021 by Anne Griffin
