The Ballad of Ronan McCoy

Chapter 1

I see death nearly every day. Mr Feeney always told me that winter was the worst time, he said that’s when most people die. My granny died in January; she was ninety-two.

Young people too.

‘Young men,’ tutted Mr Feeney one frosty morning as he wheeled a body bag past me on a gurney, ‘young men in the winter.’

There was a young man who lived at the other end of our estate; his body was found in a lake one November.

Suicide. But somebody, I can’t remember who, said it might not have been suicide.

Sometimes I wish we just knew the truth about things and that people would be more honest. I think it’s important to be honest because things are hard enough as a teenager without worrying if people are lying to you or not.

I think if you’re lying to everyone all the time it’s almost like you’re trying to be lots of different people living lots of different lives.

I don’t think it counts as lying but I used to make up stories about why I couldn’t do things with friends on weekends because I didn’t want them to know that I worked at a funeral home.

It wasn’t long until they stopped inviting me altogether and then I didn’t have any friends at all except one: Ronan.

Ronan and me never spent time together outside school, I don’t know why, that’s just the way we were, but that didn’t change the fact that he was absolutely my best friend.

It was August and I hadn’t seen him since June when school broke for the summer holidays.

It would be September before I saw him again.

I was thinking about him one Saturday afternoon as I was cleaning the front windscreen of the hearse in the yard because a song came on the radio that Ronan always sang, ‘Drops of Jupiter’, and it made me smile.

The smile must have dropped off my face in an instant though because Kevin Sherry, a boy from my school, was standing in the yard staring at me.

We weren’t friends but not exactly enemies either.

I think he just thought I was weird. But when he saw me sitting in the front of a hearse outside Feeney’s Funeral Home that Saturday afternoon he must have thought I was even weirder.

I’d never seen him look the way he did then because in school he was so confident and cocky, surrounded by his group of football teammates and usually holding hands with his girlfriend, Leanne.

I’d definitely never seen him look sad before.

He seemed so small. He had the same look a lot of people have when they come to the funeral home, but his expression morphed into a mix of confusion and a strange anger when he saw me; I was a boy from his school sitting in the front of a hearse surrounded by browning petals with my hand frozen to the cloth on the window as the radio continued to play Ronan’s favourite song.

We locked eyes.

It was my secret that I worked at Feeney’s every weekend and during the holidays.

I didn’t want anyone at school to know. I didn’t want to scare everyone away from me or for them to think that I was even weirder than they already thought.

They’d think that because I spent so much time close to death that it would somehow bring them close to it too if they were near me, even though I never worked the funerals or touched a dead body, I only washed the cars.

Kevin’s granda had died that morning and I think the last thing Kevin wanted was for someone from his school seeing him the way none of us had ever seen him look before.

He wasn’t the captain of the football team that Saturday afternoon, he was scared standing there with his mum.

She was in tears behind him with her hand on his shoulder.

Maybe he’d been crying too. I sat looking at him through the windscreen of the hearse that his granda would eventually travel in.

He didn’t say anything to me. He only shook his head with a snap as if to warn me not to breathe a word, to keep my mouth shut, as if to silently agree that I didn’t see him, he was never there.

His mum made brief eye contact with me and then leaned down to guide Kevin by the arm; he shook her hand away with his elbow and she stepped back.

With one last glare at me Kevin turned and strode away with his mum following slowly behind towards the front door of the funeral home where arrangements would be made with Mr Feeney.

I sat for a while on the front seat. My hand, still on the window, fell and landed on my lap.

I felt confused about the way Kevin had looked at me.

Even if I was someone he barely spoke to in school and even if I was the last person he expected to see that day, the sad thing was that I became the last person he wanted to see every day since.

It was sad because, two days after I saw Kevin, I had that hearse absolutely gleaming for his granda.